From Ijtihad to Wilayah el Faqih: The Evolving of Shi'i Legal Authority into Political Power

Excerpts from Abbas Amanat's

 "Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shiism"

Chapter 8

From Ijtihad to Wilayah el Faqih: The Evolving of Shi'i Legal Authority into Political Power

Introduction

Hashim Aghajari was sentenced to death by the Islamic Revolutionary Court in November 2002 for questioning the practice of blind 'emulation' or Taqlid of the mujtahids. The Iranian court accused him of blasphemy, because he was denying the authority of the jurist or Welayat el Faqih - the very founding of the Islamic Republic.

The threat of Aghajari went beyond the practice of tabloid but the legitimacy of the concept itself. For the ruling elite of Iran, the welayat al faqih is the prime source of their political legitimacy, which can be traced back to Ayatollah Khomeini who first published on this subject in the 1960's.

Aghajari's speech commemorated Ali Shariati, the renowned revolutionary reformist,, invoking his nation of Islamic Protestantism as a way to 'liberate' Islam from the whimpers of traditionalism. Like Shariati, Aghajari tried to come up with a historical understanding of Shi'i heritage that was grounded in the Quran and hadith that also dealt with modern topics from human rights to economic democracy. He also criticized the Shi'i establishment for its culture of condescension, especially the ijtihad.

Such critique of the abiding authority of ijtihad and the maria''-i tabloid inevitably brings to light the much debated issue of legal authority in Shi'i Islam and the institutionalization of ijtihad. 

The Usuli Interpretation of Judicial Authority

As early as the 10th century the Twelver Shia jurists recognized that in the occultation (ghayba) of the 12th imam, the state is by default inherently unjust and therefore illegitimate. Only the return of the Imam could legislate a justice and legitimate rule. The same rationale also barred in theory any legitimate collaboration between the jurist and the state. Every government was in theory seen as inherently oppressive. This allowed the flourishing of Shi'i study of hadith and the early development of jurisprudence (fiqh) focusing gone civil and contractual law as well as devotional acts and obligation.

The quietest tendency among Shi'i jurists encouraged compliance and even collaboration with the 'unjust' rulers especially if and when the state was accommodating the Shi'is. This de facto acceptance of the temporal power was in full agreement with the ancient Persian notion of the 'sisterhood' or religious and state institutions, an interdependency perceived to be essential for the endurance of both sets of institutions and the stability the social order.

By the 14th century, Shi'i jurists developed an elaborate legal system of private law based on ijtihad, the exercise of logical reasoning by utilizing the sources of the law to form qualified legal opinions within a specific timeframe. The exercise of ijtihad led to the development of an elaborate methodology of jurisprudence, the science of the usual al fiqh. Some of the best legal minds articulated complex linguistic debates on legal semantics and phenomenological discussion the authority of text. However, they failed to discuss mujtahids qualifications, hierarchy and madrasa curriculum.

The establishment of the Safavid State in 1501 to 1736 which declared Shiism as the official state religion did not substantially alter the mujtahids resistance to institution development - and this in spite of the state's active sponsorship of the clerical establishment and heavy-handed patronage of teaching circles. Immigrant jurists from the Arab Shi'i communities of Jabal 'Amil, Qatif and Bahrain in northern Arabian and Najaf in southern Iraq were incorporated into the judiciary of the Safavid empire. These mujtahids and their Persian counterparts considered the Safavid shahs as legitimate definers of the faith and the empire as the guarded Shi'i domain. For the ulama community, it was therefore permissible to assume judicial office, as the majority did, collect alms and the share of the Imam. Interestingly, the jurists failed to solidify a system of independence from the state. Their reluctance to better define the boundaries of ijtihad was in part because the Safavid rulers successfully recruit the mujtahids as state functionaries. The Office of Shaykh al Islam was held by a high ranking jurist, but was not understood to be a legal supervision over the entire judicial community. In the 17th century, the Safavids patronized the Akhbair school, which rejected ijtihad.

The debate between the Usuli and Akhbari schools in the late 17th century and 18th centuries weakened the development of usual al fiqh as a discretionary methodology in favor of the wholesale validity of all the hadith. The Akhbari school held that all reports from diverse Shi'i hadith sources are valid with little respect for their historical authenticity. Akhbari resistance to independent reasoning was congruent with the Safavid state's aversion to allow the emergence of an independent mujtahid-dominated judiciary.

After the collapse of the Safavid empire in 1722 and the ensuing political instability, the Usuli school re-emerged as the predominant legal school, a position it retained during later 18th and throughout the nineteenth century. In contrast to most scholars of rival Akhbari camp, Usuli jurists practiced ijtihad by employing analogical deduction (qiyas) in order to infer opinions form the text of the Quran and the hadith. The analogical method was no doubt a far more effective strategy than Akhbarism in dealing with the judicial issues of Shi'i society at a time when the mujtahids often found themselves as leaders of their communities. In the early decades of the 19th century, they made progress in laying the foundations of a clerical establishment that has continued up to the present with little interruption. They monopolized the madrasas and the pulpit of the mosques and collected endowments (Awqaf) and religious taxes. The latter included the portion for the Imam (shame i imam), paid by the pious followers to the mujtahids who received it as legitimate deputies of the Hidden Imam.

They developed amicable relations with the early rulers of the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925), an arrangement that was mutually beneficial to both sides and which therefore led to the apogee of Usuli ijtihad.

The growth of religious circles first in Najaf, where the Akhbari school was soundly defeated, and later in Iranian cities, was supported by a large student body with a closely knit network of teacher-pupil patronage. Impressive numbers of legal works were produced both on the specifics of the law and on the methodology of the usual el fish, with implicit emphasis on the role of the mujtahids not only as legal scholars but as judges and social mediators. The growth of congregations in mosques also strengthened jurists ties with other social groups in search of legal support, most noticeably the merchants of the bazaar who backed the mujtahids and financed their teaching activities.

Despite their growing strength and success in developing a semi-indepdenent legal network, the jurists of the Qajar period did not seek to reconstruct ijtihad and its application to public law. Even during instances of turfs with the state over Westernizing policies, they continued to honor the dichotomy of the religious law (sharia) as it concerned jurists, verses the customary penal law such as punishing criminals, etc. Most laws varied from region to region and town to town. They ran parallel to with Sharia law but operated in a more fluid environment and were seldom documented.

Neither side under the Qajar period, jurists or state courts, defined the boundaries of sharia and surf through codification. The usul il fiqh remained essentially concerned with its theoretical debates on the fine points of legal methodology. Voluminous works, commentaries, and glosses on commentaries were reproduced by Usuli scholars on intricate details of semantics. Yet the jurists simply did not see the need for a centralized corporate identity or for disturbing the delicate balance with the state upon which they continuously negotiated their power. The state, in turn, preferred ambiguity, whereby through consent and coercion it hoped to persuade the jurists to comply with its otherwise waning power and prestige. By the end of the century, while the mujtahids were more than ever present in the public space, they were intellectually stagnant within the world of the madrasa. Even such traditional fields as math and philosophy were no longer part of the jurists' general education.

The messianic Babi movement in the middle decades of the century questioned the very legitimacy of the clerical community, its theoretical premises, educational methods and legal practices. The Babi religion, later Baha'i Faith, denied the long held position of the jurists that they collectively represent the Imam of the Age in Occultation. As the Babi movement grew in popularity not only to seek leadership in the new 'Imam of the Age' but declared the end of the historical cycle of Islamic shari'a by ushering in a new cycle of prophetic manifestation.

In response to the Babi challenge, the jurist community closed ranks and came closer to full collaboration with the state. in no other area did the jurists need the Babi call for fundamental reform, though in the longer term the clerical community did produce a new form of communal leadership. The status of the marja' was first recognized in Shaykh Murtaza Ansari (1799-1864) in the late 1850's, and coincided with the growth of clandestine Babi anticlerical subversion. Ansari's emergence as the 'supreme exemplar' no doubt mirrored the public desire for a clerical leadership committed to higher standards of morality and social justice. Ansari came to represent these values for a growing constituency of seminarians in the madrasas and among the lay followers.

The idea of Marja'iyat continued into the second half of the century and through the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911)

From Marja'iyat to Wilayat el Faqih

Only the latter part of the 20th century witnessed the gradual shift back to a centralized marjaiyat under Ayatollah Husayn Burjurdi (1875-1962). He should be viewed as the first to hold united leadership not only in the management of the Qom seminaries, the collection of religious taxes and distribution, and orchestrating a rigorous anti-Bahai' campaign but a certain degree of legal authority over the clerical community that resulted from these measures. It goes without saying that the 'emergence' of this from f centralized marja'iyat was a belated response to the state's intrusion into the  judiciary - the rise of Pahlavi secular autocracy from the mid-1920's and the growth of modern educational institutions; the abolition of the mujtahids' civil courts and their replacement with a state-controlled judiciary, state regulation of the use of charitable endowments; and other measures meant to undermine the ulama's social status. 

The growth of secularized middle classes and the popularity of a variety of religious and ideological challenges, from Bahai's, Marxists, secularizes, religious modernists and Islamic radicals of various sorts persuaded the demoralized and shrunken clerical community to reorganized the madrassa and solidify their network at the national level. They gradually moved away from the long tradition of state-ulema alliance that was founded on the ancient principle of preserving social equilibrium through guarded collaboration. In due course the new marjaiyat reconstituted its base not only in the bazaar community, where it was traditionally strong, but among a new class of urban poor. They offered a pool for clerical recruitment and an enthusiastic mosque congregation.

Reconsideration of Shi'i legal thought and the study of fiqh did not change and focused on devotional acts (ibadat) and contracts (uqud). The striking persistence of legal 'archaism' among Shi'i jurists can be explained in part by the inherent conservation the legal curriculum and in part by isolation from society's secular discourse. Ship teaching circles in Najaf and Qom made almost no attempt to address new issues of public claw or offer modern reading of old legal texts. The institution of informal teacher-pupil patronage continued in the hawza of Qom.

A number of marjia's that emerged after the death of Bourujerdi in 1962, including Ayatollah Khomeini, were no doubt more organized in their teaching, but no attempt to revisit the nature of marja'iyat surfaced despite the coherent network of an ecclesiastical hierarchy emerged  throughout Iran, southern Iraq and Lebanon.

The Marj'a relied heavily on the constituency's financial and moral backing, which Murtaza Mutahhari (1920-1979), a prominent follower of Ayatollah Khomeini, pointed out in the 1960's. A conference as organized by religious modernists on the theme of marja'iya between Mahdi Bazargan and Mutahhari, to urge the maria's touring some order into the notoriously chaotic world of Shi'i clerical leadership.

The greater politicization of the clerical community, and especially the clerical clique around Khomeini from the mid-1960's, responded positively to this call. Among the maria's of Qom and Najaf, Khomeini represented the most radical political position. His open anti-Pahlavi platform caused as much trouble for him as it gained him popularity, especially among the lower and middle rank ulema disillusioned with other maria's and the collaboration with the shah's regime.

For Khomeini and his supporters, modernity came to the clerical establishment via political radicalization rather than revising the Shi'i legal system. Even prominent students of Khomeini like Husayn Ali Muntaziri and Murteza Mutahhari seldom called for a reconsideration of Islamic legal tradition teaching methods. For them, legal reform equalled succumbing to an alien secular modernity. those who did attempt in the Pahlavi period to reinterpret Shi'i theology, like Muhammad Hasan Shariati' Sangilagi and Ali Akbar Hakamizada, were marginalized or soundly defeated by the jurists of Qom.

In the tense environment of confrontation between the Shah and the secret police, this message of political dissent was better transmitted to the layman by recalling the Shi'i narratives of defiance and self-sacrifice, as in the commemoration of the martyrdom of Ali and Husayn. Even Mutahhari, the most promising intellectual product of Qom in the 1970's preferred to delve into Western philosophy or Islamic reformism and revolutionary rhetoric rather than adopt a novel approach in fish and usual.

In a climate of state-driven secular modernity versus the ulemas legal redundancy, Khomeini's gradual shift in the late 1960's towards the doctrine of juridicial sovereignty was a solution the prolonged problem of unregulated leadership. He borrowed from sunni notion of Islamic government long debated by the likes of Mohammad Rashid Rida and Abul Alaa Mawdudi, in order to lay the groundwork for the Welayat el Faqih.

Khomeini said that issues related to society and political affairs inf act occupy the greatest portion of Islamic teachings in the Qur'an compared to a very small section dedicated to ritual acts. This was in direct contrast to the traditional understanding of the role of the jurists as legal experts who were solely concerned with the pragmatic aspects of Sharia and was thus received as such by the conservative jurists of Najaf and Qom.

With the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution, the imam honorific was promoted by Khomeini's students and supporters to denote not only his superior authority over the Pahlavi monarchy but founder of the Islamic Republic, a certain semi-prophetic sanctity was also attached to the title, which was largely the work of propagandists in the revolutionary press and reminiscent of the recurring messianic tradition deeply embedded in Iranian shiism.

The Guardian Jurist only answers to God and is appointed by a Council of the Experts (majlis i khubragan), a select body high-ranking ulama. The authoritarian nature of wilayat el faqih is no doubt indebted to the persistent culture of autocracy which the revolution denounced in theory but perpetuated in practice. It also reflected the Shi'i judicial community's failure to rethink the precepts of Shi'i law and their applicability to pluralist values. The doctrine of the Welayat al Faqih was informed above all by a Shi'i legal mindset and despite the practices of ijtihad and marja'iyat that operated on some form of populism, was essentially alien to modern notions of plurality.

The Shi'i establishment now more than ever appears as an equivalent of a state-sponsered church with its ecclesiastical hierarchy. Many of the younger generation now feel they have been left out by a clerical establishment that resorts to doctrinal repression to preserve its privileges and monopolies.

A whole body of literature has appeared since the revolution on the Welayat al Faqih ranging from Muhsin Kadivar to Muhammad Taqi Misbah-Yazdi who denote the undetermined parameters of the office of the Guardian Jurist in the Islamic Republic. In two of his works, Muhsin Kadivar examines wilayat within its conceptual and historical bounds and offers a framework of inquiry that relies on the Quran and shii hadith to define wilayat i shar'i as a theocratic office irreconcilable with democratic values and essentially against the modern idea of of social contact. Misbah Yazdi, on the other hand, argued that the Guardian Jurist is solely designated by the Mahdi rather than by the people and that his command is obligatory for all and that nobody has the right to participate in decision making for the affairs of the state. The Guardian Jurist consults with other experts but is not obligated to comply with their opinions. Misbah, therefore, is more extreme on his interpretation of wilayat than even Khomeini who recognized a need for parliament as a legislative body and the constitutional right of the people to elect the Guardian Jurist through the Council of Experts. But like Kadivar, Yazdi recognizes the fundamental contradiction of the foundation of the Islamic state.

The younger generation of Iranians like Aghajari's speech are frustrated with the monopoly of power, heavy-handed treatment of dissident voices and the obscurantist legal outlook of the clergy, are implicitly critical of the very existence of the Guardian Jurist. Their disappointment went further following the setbacks by the former President Muhammad Khatami and his supporters.

Excerpts from Apocalyptical Islam and Iranian Shi'ism by Abbas Amanat

Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi'ism

by Abbas Amanat

Introduction

Shiism in Iran has always embraced diverse, even contesting, religious experiences. It has given birth to messianic aspirations and numerous apocalyptical movements, of which the most significant is the Safavid movement, the genesis of today's Shi'i Iran. It has also produced a conservative body of scrupulous jurists with an enduring legal legecy that is at the core of today's clerical establishment. Iran has been a fertile ground for the growth and survival of Shi'ism almost from its beginning and has given it state support at least since the 16th century in the face of Sunni hostility. It was, and still is, an essential core of Iranian identity and a dominant feature in the shaping of Iranian history.

Chronology of Shi'i Development in Iran

 To provide a framework for the historical development of Shi'ism in Iran, we may identify at least seven overlapping historical episodes.

1. From proto-Shi'i trends of the time of the Shi'i imams in the 8th and 9th centuries to the Shi'i legal and hadith scholarship. (9th-11th centuries)

2. The movements of dissent inspired by Zaydi and Isma'ili brands of Shi'ism against the caliphate and Sunni establishment. (9th-13th centuries)

3. The Sufi-Shi'i trends of the post-Mongol period. (14-16th centuries)

4. The speculative endeavors of the philosophical schools of Isfahan and Shiraz. (17th century) represented by the likes of Sadr al Din Shirazi and its resonances throughout the (18th and 19th centuries)

5. The hadith and legal scholastic studies represented by such influential theologians and jurists as And al Ali Karaki, Mullah Muhammad Baqir Mhjlisis and Sayyid Muhamad Baqir Bihbahani, the founder of the Usuli School that endured in Najaf, Isfahan and Qom (16th-19th centuries)

6. The Messianic aspirations that began with the Shaykhi school, culminating in the Babi Movement (and leading to the emergence of the Baha'i Faith as an alternative religion that consciously differentiated itself form Islam. (19th century)

7. Modern developments in clerical and communal Shi'ism and the politicization of Iranian Islam that culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath, the establishment of the Islamic Republic. (20th century)

Ideology

Shi'ism accommodated a wide range of ideas and practices across dispersed communities. To some observers, diversity meant that Shi'ism often served as an ideological blanket to cover heterogenous trends of dissent in Islam. It is more realistic to think of it as variations on a theme: a core idea and many diverse expressions.

The core idea was devotion to the House of the Prophet. The story of the Imams, their sacred leadership of the community and their usurped right as successor to the Prophet are a part of this legacy. We may identify four modes of expression that illustrate this:

1. The most prevalent and widespread is called the commemorative Shi'ism, revolving mainly around the image of Husayn and the mourning rite associated with his Martyrdom in 680. Commemorating the martyrdom of a fallen hero is not without precedent in pre-Islamic Iran. The mourning for the murder of Iraj - the primordial representation of Iran - is seminal to the Shahnama. More distinct is the martyrdom of the prince Siyabush in the Shahnama, who falls victim to a sinister plot.

2. Somewhat independent of Husayn's martyrdom narrative is the veneration of Ali, the First Shi'i imam, as the champion of justice, affection and self-sacrifice.

3. Naming Ali as the ultimate patron saint was often invoked by the rulers of the Safavid era and later to stress not only duty and virtue but also legitimacy and the notion of 'governance' and 'guardianship'. (wile)

4. Along with the notion of governance was also the idea of the 'friendship' of Ali as a patron saint, a belief long treasured by the Shi'i-Sufi orders such as the Ni'matullahis and their sub-branches and by the grassroots Khaksar mendicant dervishes.

Memories of Husayn and Ali were crucial for messianic manifestations in Shi'ism. The Mahdi (the guided one) in Shi'ism is not only from the House of the Prophet and a progeny of Ali, but more importantly, is the riser who avenues all that went wrong in Shi'i scare history and all the sufferings that Ali, Fatima, Husayn and their supporters sustained. He restores their rightful place in history for the apocalyptic scenario in Shi'ism is essentially reconstruct don the narrative of Karbala. This is remarkable because it generates hopes beyond vengeance, potentially conceiving a new order beyond Islam.

The "Bookish Quality" of Shi'i Islamic Jurisprudence

Shiism produced an enduring scholastic interpretation and promoted the collection of the traditions of the Prophets and eleven imams along with he text of the Quran and limited use logic to build up an elaborative legal system that since the 17th century tended to discipline Shi'i individual and communal lives in Iran. (more so than in places like Lebanon or Iraq)

With varying degrees of success, the jurist class dominated the madras, the production of legal texts, the religious courts and most charitable endowments but also the control of mosques. This advantage gave them enormous social prestige and even political edge though issue was never fully resolved on structural issues of leadership and hierarchy.

Yet throughout the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, Shi'i jurisprudence became increasingly petrified and in terms of applicability largely irrelevant in the early 20th century. Mainstream jurisprudence refused to allow room for any form of modernity. In the 1930's, modernizers such as Shari'at Sangelagi were soundly repudiated, and even he incorporation of aspects of Shi'i jurisprudence into Iranian civil code and penal codes in the early Pahlavi era was frowned upon or ignored by the high-ranking jurists of Qom and Najaf.

In the 1960's and 1970's, such modernist critics as Ali Shari'ati (1933-1977) were shunned by the jurist establishment as blasphemous, if not heretical. His cirque of Shi'i jurists preoccupied with indicate but useless details of rituals and outmoded legal methods hardly accounted to a  shift in legal parading.

One important motive for this defensive attitude toward social change no doubt was the jurists' inherent isolation in the madras environment and their reluctance to be engaged with the public beyond the sheer necessities arrogated to the quads and muftis in the sunni world. The rise of the Usuli school in the 19th century was an attempt to break through the juristic isolation. Yet in reality Usulism failed to nurture legal innovation and explore new avenues of dealing with the needs of Iranian society. The bookish quality of the Islamic law, Shi'i and Sunni alike, despite its impressive theoretical foundation, hardly ever facilitated a serious rethinking of the old legal framework and principles. The bookish nature of the study of law is evident in a huge number of commentaries produced since the late Safavid period and in the whole scholastic production in the madrasa.

The failure to come up with effective answers to the modern legal, moral and rational dilemmas of Iranian society persuaded 30th century radical to seek the high rode of opposition to the state and blame the Pahlavi regime not only as a totalitarian instrument of modernity but primarily as an enemy of the faith.

Post 20th Century Reformers

Clerical opposition to the legitimacy of the Pahlavi state has little ground in historical reality. In purely theoretical terms, Shi'ism rejected the legitimacy of any form of state before the advent of the Mahdi, the belief that all temporal powers are considered unjust. Yet throughout the history of clerical  Twelver Shiism we hardly detect serious evidence of the active rejection of the upholders of temporal power and even less evidence of the theoretical substitution of temporal authority. Before Ayatollah Khomeini's doctrine of the Welayat el Faqih in the 1970's, no Shi'i jurist of any importance (minus one incident in the Safavid which mostly was juridicial) ever proposed the creation of the jurist political governance.

Among the effective weapons in the hands of both the high-ranking mujtahids and the lower ranks of preachers who are often in competition with their senior colleagues, were the exploitation of the easily excitable masses of followers and students of the madrasa, the provocation of sectarian and urban divisions between the Ni'matis and Haydaris, the Shaykhis and he Mutisharri'a, repeated anti-Sufi, anti-mionirity and anti-heresy campaigns, crusades against European infidels and in the Pahlavi are a ban on the public presence of women. This eventually depicted the nature of the shi'i clerical establishment as opposed to anything unfamiliar and new that appeared to threaten the inner core of the community of followers upon which was built their power and influence.

The latest modality that characterizes Shiism in Iran is the modern claim to political power and the radical means of achieving power through ideological revolution.

Since the Islamic Revolution some Iranian laity and clergy have engaged in a discourse of modernity that aims to build on the revolutionary legacy of the past to redefine the pertinence of Islam and Shi'ism and their place in a context of Iranian society and culture as well as in the Muslim world and even globally. Informed by philosophy and their more than history or social realities, this post revolutionary discourse displays exciting signs of vitality that in many respects are rooted in the Shi'i dynamics of the past.

A current of Islamic neb-modernism spearheaded by the Abdolkarim Soroush is but one example. An articulate student of philosophy, who since the outset of the Revolution gradually moved to what may be called an Islamic dissident camp, who has been advocating a certain elasticity in Islam as a religious construct which evolved over time as a force that shape dMuslim societies and cultures but that also is shaped by them. His epistemological distinction between religious truth and the evolving human understanding of this truth is nevertheless significant and refreshing development. Informed by the Popperian "critical rationalism" over the past three decades Soroush's quest for flexibility in Islamic thought and practice has led him to a greater recognition of the need for toleration, acceptance of change, and the inevitability of religious progression in time. Albeit though theistical prism of the 13th century Rumi, he came to recognize that conservative interpretation of the shari'a has reached an existential dead end from which it can not escape unless the realities of modernity are acknowledged.

Dissenting Reformists among the clergy include Mohsen Kadivar, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, Hasan Yousefi Eshkevari and Muhammad Khatami also offered alternative readings to doctrinal positions of the Islamic Republic, readings which led to their harassment, arrest and imprisonment.

Mohsin Kadivar, who has critical of the Islamic Republic's absolutist interpretation of the doctrine of Welayat el Faqihand its fundamental contrast to the precedence in Shi'i past. He also highlighted the Islamic judicial impasse in human rights and women. Dealing with these sensitive yet inescapable choices, Kadviar aims at a new interpretation of Islam without denying the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.

Mujtahid Shabestari, another clerical thinker, resorts to an epistemological discourse somewhat similar to the Sufi and Sufi-Shi'i mystical readings of Islam. He calls for recognizing th elimitiation s of religious knowledge and scriptural instruction and their inapplicability to the material, and more specifically scientific and technologic sphere of human existence.

Hussein Nasr, an influential scholar of Islamic philosophy and an uneasy liaison between Shi'i madrasa learning and Pahlavi secularism, was the firs tot after an accessible reading of Iran's rich tradition of Islamic philosophy.

The ongoing debates between reformists and conservatives are nonetheless elitist in nature, often confined to religious intellectuals and their cliques. It thus may prove to be less relevant to the future direction of the Islamic Republic, and even less important to the future of Iranian Shi'ism.

Favorite Excerpts from "Orientalism" 25th Anniversary Edition by E.W.S

Selected Excerpts from the 25th Anniversary Edition of "Orientalism" 

by Edward W. Said 

published in May 2003 in New York. 

As I continue my research and select candidates to interview for our ambitious project, a 12-part documentary series on the Modern History of Iran, I must refresh my consciousness and framework along the discourse of Edward Said's ground-breaking critical study embedded in the pages of his acclaimed work, "Orientalism".  Even as someone who identifies as Arab, I acknowledge fully that I am in no way immune from approaching the unknown with patronizing lenses. The "Orient" is just as mysterious to me as any Westerner, and I intend to arrive towards an understanding coated generously with humanism as Edward Said in his brilliance compels us to do. I want to share some of my favorite excerpts from this brilliant and crucial piece of scholarship.

 

There is a difference between knowledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war.

* 

There is after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of coexistence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion. 

* 

It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history than an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials (they've been called chicken hawks, since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. 

* 

The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse. 

* 

...were Iraq to have been the world's largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction. 

* 

So the very same directorate of paid professional scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa, came the American advisors to the Pentagon and the White House, using the same cliches, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justification for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) in this case as in the earlier ones. 

...there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires...

* 

One specifically American contribution to the discourse of empire is the specialized jargon of policy expertise. 

* 

Combative and woefully ignorant policy experts, whose world experience is limited to the Beltway, grind out books on "terrorism" and liberalism, or about Islamic fundamentalism and American foreign policy, or about the end of history, all of it vying for attention and influence quite without regard for truthfulness or reflection or real knowledge.

*

Twenty-five years after its publication, Orientalism once again raises the question of whether modern imperialism ever ended...

* 

We allow justly that the Holocaust has permanently altered the consciousness of our time: Why do we not accord the same epistemological mutation to what imperialism has done, and what Orientalism continues to do?

* 

I have called what I try to do "humanism", a word I continue to use stubbornly despite the scornful dismissal of the term by sophisticated post-modern critics. 

* 

By humanism...I attempt to be able to use one's mind historically and rationally for the purposes of reflective understanding and genuine disclosure. 

* 

Our role (as humanists) is to widen the field of discussion, not to set limits in accord with the prevailing authority. 

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The paramount thing is that the struggle for equality in Palestine/Israel should be directed toward a humane goal, that is, coexistence, and not further suppression and denial. 

* 

Positive knowledge of languages and history was necessary, but it was never enough...

* 

Rather than alienation and hostility to another time and another different culture, philology as applied to Weltliterature involved a profound humanistic spirit deployed with generosity and, if I may use the word, hospitality. Thus the interpreter's mind actively makes a place in it for a foreign Other. 

* 

After the war, Auerbach notes mournfully, the standardization of ideas, and greater and greater specialization of knowledge, gradually narrowed the opportunities for the kind of investigative and everlastingly inquiring kind of philological work that he had represented...

Instead of reading in the real sense of the word, our students today are often distracted by fragmented knowledge available on the internet and in the mass media. 

* 

Worse yet, education is threatened by nationalist and religious orthodoxies often disseminated by the mass media as they focus a-historically and sensationally on the distant electronic wars...that in fact obscure the terrible suffering and destruction produced by modern 'clean' warfare. 

* 

Reflection, debate, rational argument, moral principle based on a secular notion that human beings must create their own history have been replaced by abstract ideas that celebrate American or Western exceptionalism, denigrate the relevance of context, and regard other cultures with derisive contempt. 

* 

But what has really been lost is a sense of the density and interdependence of human life, which can neither be reduced to a formula nor be brushed aside as irrelevant. 

* 

In the Arab and Muslim countries the situation is scarcely better...the region has slipped into an easy anti-Americanism that shows little understanding of what the United States is really like as a society.

* 

The gradual disappearance of the extraordinary tradition of Islamic ijtihad has been one of the major cultural disasters of our time, with the result that critical thinking and individual wrestling with the problems of the modern world have simply dropped out of sight. Orthodoxy and dogma rule instead. 

* 

The point I want to conclude with now is to insist that the terrible reductive conflicts that herd people under falsely unifying rubrics like "America", "The West", or "Islam" and invent collective identities for large numbers of individuals who are actually quite diverse, cannot remain as potent as they are, and may be opposed, their murderous effectiveness vastly reduced in influence and mobilizing power. 

* 

Human agency is subject to investigation and analysis, which it is the mission of understanding to apprehend, criticize, influence and judge.

* 

Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that overlap, borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any abridged or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow. But for that kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical inquiry, supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction. 

* 

Humanism is centered upon the agency of human individuality and subjective intuition, rather than on received ideas and approved authority. 

* 

...humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

* 

I would like to believe that Orientalism has had a place in the long and often interrupted road to human freedom. 

Understanding Afghanistan Part 3

Introduction:

Following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, millions of Americans for the first time discovered- or for those more politically attuned rediscovered - the Taliban, the notorious group that was responsible for harboring the man behind the terror attacks on American civilians.

On the flip side, many Muslims in the Middle East and the larger Muslim world seemed to scramble  over a coherent sentiment towards a vague entity they themselves hardly understood.

Nevertheless and expectedly so, the two groups reacted differently. On one side you had the embroiled and revengeful Americans who demonized the Taliban and on the other side you had the stubbornly skeptical but defensive Muslims (in the US and abroad) who always found the US and particularly the CIA to blame for the Taliban's actions.

Both seemed to be misinformed. While the general American public relied too heavily on the limited media coverage of the Taliban, my experience with American Muslims and in Palestine was their automatic dismissal of the 'American profiling of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

As an American Muslim, it became confusing to keep up with two polarized views of the same group of people. What struck me most, however, was that neither side seemed to bother researching or studying the Taliban on an academic level and instead relied on whatever comfortable sources were at their disposal.

It became very frustrating to engage in any kind of conversation on this topic as both sides were adamant that their claims were factual even as they both could only refer to either a 'program' they saw on TV or just repeat what they had heard a friend/family member say.

All of this became especially clear as I spent the last two years reading about the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and the life of Osama bin Laden.

So I would like to offer a summary of some of the works I read on the subject by American and Pakistani journalists who have covered the Taliban and Afghanistan for 20+ years,

The first of these books was Ghost Wars by Steven Col, a former editor of the Washington Post. The second is the NYT Best-seller and pulitzer prize winner, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright. And finally, Ahmad Rashid's Taliban. 

Disclaimer: I believe that a better informed world is a better world. So if you learned just one thing from my contribution to the subject, I have accomplished something.

Ahmad Rashid

Taliban: 
Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia

Part I.
History of the Taliban Movement

The Origins of the Taliban: Kandahar 1994
The founding leaders of the Taliban tend to share one common physical trait: they all display the physical costs of war. Mullah Mohammed Hasan Rehmani has a missing leg and finger tip while Mullah Omar is blind in the right eye. Observers often joke that the Taliban leadership is most likely the most disabled leadership in the world today. But while some many find this amusing or tragic, it in fact gives these leaders legitimacy - they bore the marks of the Mujahedeen, the brave Muslim warriors fighting for their homeland against the Communists and reminder of 20 years of war that has killed more than 1.5 million people.

But what sets these Taliban leaders apart from the other Mujahadeen warriors was that they were from Kandahar, the second largest city in Afghanistan located in the South and populated by Pashtuns. Kandahar was so heavily mined during the war that so many of the rural population fled to Pakistan and even today, the city remains as one of the most heavily mined cities in the world. And once the refugees did return from Pakistan, the residents were forced to grow opium poppies for a livelihood offering a major source of income for the Taliban.

The Pashtuns received the least amount of aid from the CIA, the ISI (Pakistan's intelligence) and the West during the armed struggle against the Soviets. (The ISI viewed the Kandahar Pashtun's with mistrust, something that would dramatically change later)

Because while the aid came predominately from Saudi Arabia and the United States, much of it was transferred through Pakistan and thus, it was up to Pakistan to distribute to the Mujahideen as they wished. Pakistan recognized only seven major Mujahideen groups, none of these groups were led by Pashtuns.

After the Soviet withdrawal, two major ethnic groups supported the new Afghan President Najibullah: the Tajik forces led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and his military commander Ahmad Shah Masud and the Uzbek forces from the north under General Rashid Dostum.

The Pashtuns led by Gulbuddin Hikmetyar refused to be sidelined, and fought to overthrow the government. Hikmetyar tried to rally Pashtuns all over Afghanistan to overthrow the Uzbek/Tajik backed government and in doing so, a civil war erupted.

As the civil war ripped the country apart, warlords all over the country took advantage of the disarray and divided the country into fiefdoms bribing and constantly switching alliances with the major forces. Warlords also seized homes and farms and abused the population at will, even kidnapping girls and boys for sexual pleasure, robbing shop keepers. A new wave of Afghanis fled to Pakistan (even though they had just returned to Afghanistan).

The road to Quetta (Afghanistan) was ridden with checkpoints set up by a powerful mafia of truck transporters, intimidating anyone who was interested in doing any kind of business with Afghanistan - further hurting the Afghan economy.

As all this chaos unfolded, many of the ex-Mujahideen Pashtun who did not join Hikmetyar's Pashtun-led war to overthrow the government began to sit amongst themselves to come up with a solution. This group,  consisted of either students or teachers of madrassas (schools) naturally called themselves students - or in Arabic - Taliban. 


They wanted to purify what they viewed as mujahideen gone astray, a social system gone wrong and a threatened Islamic way of life. Many had been born in refugee camps in Pakistan and educated in Pakistani madrassas. These men hardly lived a normal life and few ever lived in Afghanistan.

But beyond that, little is known about the Taliban or its leadership. Among the most revered in this group was Mullah Omar. Considered one of the most secretive movements in the world, Mullah Omar has never had a photograph taken of him.

For most Afghans, however, it wasn't the biography of Mullah Omar that mattered. It was what he did in the spring of 1994 that made him and the Taliban heroes.

On that incident, a group of people went to Mullah Omar complaining that a warlord had abducted two teenage girls and repeatedly raped them. Mullah Omar sent 30 Taliban members who not only freed the girls but hung the warlord for the entire town to see. They also took away his ammunition and arms.  He is quoted to have remarked, "We were fighting against Muslims who had gone wrong. How could we remain quiet when we could see crimes being committed against women and the poor?"

Two months later, another incident involving a dispute over a boy that was kidnapped to sodomise by two warlords. Mullah Omar came and freed the boy.

Since then, people from villages all over Kandahar came to the Taliban and Mullah Omar to help out in their disputes. (Each time they did this, they collected weapons of the fallen warlords)

Not only did Mullah Omar deliver, but he never asked for a reward or credit for his services.

By 1992 and while this was happening, the Pakistani government (now led by Benazir Bhutto) had a new foreign policy agenda that involved getting a trade route from Pakistan through Afghanistan into the Central Asian Republics. And the ongoing civil war in Afghanistan was a hindrance to this goal. So it was in Pakistan's interest to meddle into Afghanistan's warring factions and bring peace to the region.

Knowing that the Pashtuns, out of all the other ethnic groups in Afghanistan, would most likely sympathize with Pakistan since many of them sought refuge in Pakistan during the Soviet-Afghan war. At first, the Pakistani government backed Hikmatyar (a Pashtun fighting to control the Afghan government but not part of the Taliban). But it was becoming clear that Hikmatyar was losing badly, and Pakistan was looking to other Pashtun groups to use as their proxy to help achieve their interests in Afghanistan.

After meeting several Pashtun warlords and after witnessing the victorious wars between the Pashtun warlords and the Taliban - Pakistan decided to back the Taliban. By then, the Taliban had captured dozens of tanks, military vehicles, weapons and helicopters hidden by the other Pashtun warlords. And within weeks and with the loss of less than a dozen men, this unknown and new group had captured Kandahar, the country's second largest city.

The fall of Kandahar to the Taliban gave Pakistan the confidence that they chose the right group to do their bidding. (At the same time, Taliban leaders insisted that they were not Pakistan's puppet and Bhutto denied her government was backing the Taliban).

The Taliban's victory was greeted by the admiration of thousands of Afghan students studying in Baluchistan and Pakistan and came rushing to join the Taliban.

In the next three months, the Taliban were to take control of 12 of Afghanistan's 21 provinces where they disarmed all the warlords on their way in 1994. And as the Taliban marched north to Kabul, local warlords either fled or waved white flags, surrendering to the mysterious but victorious group of former students - the Taliban.


And with each city and town the Taliban reigned over, it implemented the strictest form of Shariah law ever seen in the Muslim world.

God's Invincible Soldiers: Herat 1995
Within three months after capturing Kandahar, the Taliban was able to draw more than 20,000 Afghans and hundreds of Pakistani students to join their ranks - most between the ages of 14-24.

The majority of these boys never lived in Afghanistan prior to their draft to the Taliban. They were orphans of the war and knew nothing but war. Their entire upbringing was bounded by refugee camps, madrassas and war - many who were orphans and grown up without women (mothers, sisters, cousins) and have simply never known or experienced the company of women.

So when the Taliban enforced women to be confined in their homes and never to be seen in public - it was not considered unusual but the standard.

The mullahs taught these new Taliban recruits that their entire existence was for the sake of Islam and that it was everything they were fighting and living for.

As the Taliban continued to advance towards Kabul, Hikmetyar was worried and felt threatened by his fellow but rival Pashtun force as he continued to attack Kabul where thousands of civilians would die as a direct result.

On February 1995, the Taliban captured Hikmetyar's headquarters in Charasyab forcing Hikmetyar to stop attacking Kabul and relocate. Kabul was still officially under President Rabbani and his Tajik backers led by Shah Masud and while Hikmetyar's bombs stopped - another ethnic group, the Hazras, were still attacking the capital not to mention a new threat was just around the corner, the Taliban.

Masud wanted to deal with his enemies one by one and focused on the Hazras first. The Haras were shiites and led by Abdul Ali Mazari. As Masud launched attacks on southern Kabul where the Hazras were advancing, Mazari sought to broker a peace deal with the Taliban. And in the process, the shiite leader was killed by the Taliban (it is disputed whether it was intentional or unintentional but the Hazras claim he was thrown off a helicopter because he tried to seize a rifle while he was being taken to Kandahar as a prisoner). As a result, the Hazras (and their Iranian backers) would forever condemn the Taliban and would lead a bloody ethnic/sectarian divide between the Pashtun and Hazras, sunni vs shia.

In the meantime, Masud launched another attack on the Taliban and this time defeated the Taliban marking the first time the Taliban would lose. The Taliban would suffer more losses following the defeat in Kabul and would eventually lose 4 provinces and their initial control of 12 provinces were reduced to 8.

But losing Kabul meant the Taliban were now going to head West: to Herat.

Herat was controlled by Ismail Khan, a very well-respected and prestigious former Mujahid. Heratis were viewed by the Soviets as the most cultured of all Afghans. Many historians consider Herat to be the cradle of Afghanistan's history and civilization. For centuries it was a crossroads between Turkic and Persian empires and had been home to some of the finest Islamic architectures in the world. But when the Soviets bombed Herat in 1979, they destroyed so much of the city that Ismail Khan remarked, "Herat is the most destroyed and the most heavily mined city in the world today, yet we get no help from anywhere."

Ismail Khan assumed that the Taliban were on their downfall, misreading that their defeats in Kabul meant they were unable to defeat him in Herat. He underestimated the Taliban and did not prepare his army when the Taliban advanced the city.

It took the Taliban a few days to take over Herat, forcing Ismail Khan to flee to Iran.

Kabul was convinced that Pakistan was helping the Taliban when it saw how easily Herat was defeated and attacked the Pakistani Embassy in Kabul wounding the Pakistani Ambassador.

The biggest tragedy for the Heratis, however, was watching their cultural centers and their universities shut down as the Taliban implemented their social bans and Sharia law even more fiercely than it did in Kandahar.

Bolstered by this victory, the Taliban launched another attack on Kabul on October and November of 1995.

Commander of the Faithful: Kabul 1996
Taking on Kabul - the capital - was not going to be easy. In an effort to patch up the disunity amongst the Pashtuns, Mullah Omar summoned Pashtun mullah's from all over Afghanistan to strategize. It was here that Mullah Omar received the title, "Amir el Mumineen" or "Commander of the Faithful" - and the Mullahs pledged their allegiance to him.

The last Afghan to hold such a title was in 1834 - who claimed this title to fight against foreign invaders whereas Mullah Omar was to lead his followers to fight his own people.

But beyond electing their leader, the Taliban did not have a political structure to implement had they taken over the capital of the country and Afghanistan at large. "The Shariah does not allow for political parties or politics," Mullah Omar's aid Mullah Wakil, said. "We want to live a life like the Prophet lived 1,400 years ago...to recreate the time of the Prophet..."

At the same time, the Kabul government still under President Rabbani (backed by Masud) sought for allies among the country's warlords.

In response, Pakistan tried to rally all the major forces trying to fight Masud including Hikmetyar and the Uzbek leader, Dostom, (who switched sides and allied with Hikmetyar) and the Taliban.

The Taliban refused and said it would not work with what they viewed as power hungry Communist infidels. So Pakistan dropped the proposal and only supported the Taliban. Saudia Arabia also backed the Taliban and stepped up arms to the Taliban.

Pakistan backing the Taliban led India, Pakistan's rival, to naturally back the Kabul government. Russia also backed the Kabul government where Iran, angry with the Taliban's murder of the Shiite Hazra leader and it's extremist Sunni/anti-Shiite stance in Herat, also pitched in to back President Rabbani and to resist the Taliban.

Even Washington peeked into the Afghan proxy mess and on April 1996, US Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia went to visit Kabul under the banner of Afghanistan's friend. "I am here to urge the economic opportunities that will be missed, if political stability cannot be stored," he said, referring to American oil giant Unocal that has proposed to build a pipeline in Afghanistan.

Interestingly enough, however, the Clinton Administration sympathized with the Taliban the most out of all the factions merely because of its harsh anti-Iran policy. Nevertheless, officially, the administration did not take any sides and doubted that the Taliban had enough resilience to eventually conquer Afghanistan because by then, Hikmetyar - the leading force against the Kabul government - joined the regime and took up the Prime Minister post he was offered in return.

So now it was not the Taliban against Hikmetyar and Masud's forces and the Taliban relied on Pakistan and Saudi Arabia more than ever.

The combined foreign aid proved very effective and on September 1996, the Talian captured Kabul and hung the former Afghan President Najibullah (who ruled during the Soviet rule) who was seeking refuge and UN protection in Kabul.

The country and even the world was shocked. The Taliban were virtually unknown just three years ago and were merely a collection of students and teachers and were able to defeat the forces of Masud, one of the most brilliant military commanders known to Afghans.

Within 24 hours of taking Kabul, the Taliban imposed the strict sharia Islamic system that the world had ever witnessed.


Massacre in the North: Mazar-E-Sharif 1997
The Taliban looked to the north, to the Uzbek base led by General Rashid Dostum, to Mazar-E-Sharif where 60% of Afghanistan's agricultural resources lay.

The Uzbeks are known to be the toughest of all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan and in Central Asia and trace their origins to Genghis Khan. Masar also was home to the country's only operating university where 1,800 girls dressed in skirts and high heals attended.

Mazar was also a pilgrimage city where thousands came everyday to pray at Afghanistan's most magnificent mosque where it houses the blue-tiled Tomb of Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad (p).

Dostum was respected all over Afghanistan because his city was not touched by war in 18 years. But there had been some internal rivalry and resentment in the Dostum leadership weakening them against the emerging Taliban forces. Dostum would eventually flee when his second-in-command General Malik Pahlawan called on the Taliban to help him get rid of Dostum.

But as soon as the Taliban entered the city, it was greeted by resistance from the Mazar population as the Taliban attempted to disarm the men. Maliks troops began fighting the Taliban and retook four northern provinces the Taliban had previously captured. In the meantime, Masud recaptured some territory around Kabul.

This two-sided defeat was the worst blow to the Taliban and Mullah Omar called for help. Pakistan responded by shutting down madrasses where 5,000 Pakistani and Afghan volunteers from Pakistan arrived to Taliban's aid.

Iran and Russia continued to fund Masud and called for an anti-Taliban alliance that would include the Hazras, Tajiks and Uzbeks. But this alliance proved unsuccessful as the leaders of these groups proved unwilling to overcome their differences. Additionally, the war shifted to an ethnic war of Pashtun (Taliban) against non-Pashtun (anti-Taliban alliance). The Taliban took the disunity of the anti-Taliban alliance to its advantage and was able to recapture most of its losses.

Eye-witness reports made it clear that vicious ehtnic cleansing was taking place, particularly the use of 'containers', where bodies were placed and thrown in the desert for them to die in the heat and suffocation from lack of oxygen. The ethnic cleansing also led to yet another refugee crisis as residents started to flee their hometowns.

The neighboring Central Asian countries asked Russia to help them and troops were sent near the Afghan border to offer as a buffer from any Taliban spill into their countries.

The Never ending War: Bamiyan 1998-1999
Out of all the major ethnic groups in Afghanistan, one seemed to suffer the worst repercussions of the civil war: The Hazras. Not only are the Hazras the most distinct in appearance, with their strong Mongol features, but they are also Shiite Muslims. And for the latter especially, they have suffered more.

Part II.
Islam and the Taliban

The New-Style Fundamentalism of the Taliban
Secret Society: The Taliban's Political and Military Organization
A Vanished Gender: Women in the Taliban culture
Drugs and the Taliban Economy
The Arab Afghans and Osama bin Laden

Part III.
The New Great Game

Dictators and Oil: The Taliban and Central Asia, Russia, Turkey and Israel
The Battle for Pipelines
Pakistan's Afghan War
Shia vs. Sunni: Iran and Saudi Arabia
The Conclusion of Afghanistan

Do people really prefer low quality news?

My notes on a study complied by Todd l. Belt and Marion R. Just


"The Local News: Is Quality a Choice?"



Many local television news directors fall under the popular assumption that audiences prefer "soft news", which are light human-interest stories that feature simple stories with dramatic visuals (celebrity updates, weather, disaster, crime, etc,) versus public-affairs "hard news" that requires more in-depth intellectual issues (a little more than watching and more 'listening' stories.)

Political scientists have decried the increasingly poor quality of TV news as a disservice to the public and a crisis for political deliberation

But what if that is what the people want?

The significance of local television news is that among American audiences, 59% prefer local t.v news compared to cable news (38%) and national network news (34%). But that number is slipping thanks to the internet and with an increasingly competitive market for a declining market-share. Can local news broadcasters afford to invest in more quality news? Is high effort journalism is too hard or too expensive for the majority of local television stations?

A 5-year study indicates that most local television news offer journalistic quality in some areas such as providing balanced stories with at least two points of view (25%), expert interviews (40%), and 62% of the stories relating information that affects either the overall local community or an important demographic subset of
the community.

Another interesting finding was that early and late news are substantively different, which the study attributes to a different demographic viewership. Earlier news is often more exclusive to local news whereas evening news allocate a bigger slot for sports, etc.

It is not surprising that local TV news is more popular in smaller markets than in large metropolitan areas where potential audiences have more to choose from in terms of news and entertainment. Although stations in larger markets have more resources for covering news, data suggest that there is no positive relationship between greater resources and higher ratings. Additionally, studies found that the more competitive the market, the lower the overall commercial success.

Strikingly, not one of the six models supports the conventional wisdom about the type
of journalism that brings commercial success. In fact, ample evidence points to the reverse of the tabloid and soft news recipe. The data show that quality journalism produces commercial success.

The explanation for many low-ratings at any local T.V station had less to do with topic selection and more to do with story presentation. Another structural factor that could potentially affect news quality is the possibility of “product differentiation”— which is when a station may perceive a soft-news avenue toward ratings success if the other two stations in the market are doing hard news. The studies did not find any support to this assumption.

Now that viewership is declining, news professionals are scrambling for a new model. The principal impediment to quality news production is the focus on short-term ratings results. It is notable that news directors generally have only three to four ratings periods (“books”) to establish a positive track record at a given station. News directors are on a tight leash. When ratings go down, budgets are contracted, often within a budget year.

Whenever budgets get tight, investigative reporting is among the first to get cut. But the study results show journalistic enterprise is one of the factors that leads to larger audiences and, therefore, greater advertising revenue. Certainly, it takes time to build a reputation for enterprise, especially when competing for ratings in a market characterized by habitual viewing patterns and station loyalty.

To conclude, the misconceptions of director's received wisdom, the reliance on short-term ratings results, and the reluctance to provide resources for training reporters are all formidable barriers. The findings in this study suggests that not only is higher quality journalism not doomed, but the reverse is true and that "the payoff is also substantial - perhaps millions of dollars over the course of a year."

Mass Media in Egypt

My Notes on Egyptian Media based on

Mass Media in the Middle East: A Comprehensive Handbook Book by Yahya R. Kamalipour

Egyptian Media: The history of the Egyptian press is the history of Egypt. Every political event and reform had its influence on the press. The press was first introduced in Egypt in 1798 and Mohammed Ali, the Egyptian military leader often credited to being the founder of Egypt, issued the first Egyptian newspaper –Waqi el Masriya.


Beginning in 1881, the first law to govern Egyptian press stated that the government had the authority to shut down any publication. When the British came and occupied the country in 1882, the Egyptian press flourished as a response to the occupiers and a growing nationalism. This lasted until World War I in 1914, when martial laws limited freedom of the press, leading to some publications to close. This trend of relaxing press control and imposing restrictions continued on in world war II and the Palestinian-Israeli war until 1950 – the lifting of censorship let to a rapid growth of the radical national press where daring attacks against the government became imminent. In response, the political leadership imposed (and later lifted) censorship several times until in 1960, the government decided to integrate the press into the regime. With the establishment of a new constitution, the role of the media was to fully support the ideology of the state.


After 1976, however, under president Anwar Sadat, in response to an opposition press, Sadat closed down all the opposition papers and several opposition leaders were imprisoned. President Husni Mubarak reversed the law and allowed the opposition to operate in the press again. In addition to the three official newspapers Al Akbhar, Akhbar al Youm and Al-Ahram, there are five major opposition groups, and each one has its own newspaper: Al-Ahrar, Al-Wafd, Al Tagamo, Al-Watani, and Al-Shabab. As of 1993, there are 263 license newspapers.


In Egypt, radio broadcasting can be traced back to 1920. These stations were not very developed and were owned by groups of businessmen. The government began broadcasting in 1934. Group listening to radio was great during the 1950’s especially among the lower class because of the low cost in battery that operated radios. In 1984, a new revolution of radio emerged with the Nile valley Program with an average of 235 hours including a comprehensive program including news, youth programs, Quran recitation and theology, European news, Middle East politics, and Palestine issues.


By accepting an offer by the Radio Corporation of America, the very first television channel broadcasted in Egypt was on July 21, 1960 beginning with Quranic recitation followed by a speech by President Gamal Abdel Nasser. A second channel was introduced in 1961 and color TV in 1976. By 1980, most Egyptians received both first and second channels and in 1983, there were over four million television sets in the country. The fifth channel was added in 1990 and a total time of TV broadcasting reached over 44 hours a day.


While the existing rules give relatively freedom to political and religious parties the right to publish newspapers in Egypt, the press still faces major problems such as state ownership and a large number of national newspapers as well as all of broadcast media is owned by the government.


The Middle East News Agency (MENA) is the predominant news provider in Egypt and is responsible for the dissemination and control of nation news and not surprisingly owned by the government. MENA offers journalism-training courses and maintains contracts with global agencies like Reuters and Agence France-Press.


The stage of the evolution of press-media in Egypt reflects the turbulence and the various landmarks the rulers (and colonizers) of Egypt left behind. Under President Mubarak, the opposition press has witnessed the highest level of freedom since the fall of the monarchy in 1953. This moderate code of liberation can be seen as a starting point for a longer-term perspective on media development in Egypt.

Mass Media in Israel

My Notes on Israeli Media based on

Mass Media in the Middle East: A Comprehensive Handbook Book by Yahya R. Kamalipour

Israeli Media: Israel has a very robust daily press reflecting over 85.5% of the population read newspapers everyday. From its founding in 1948 up to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, Israel’s press – drawn from British media philosophy – was responsible for ‘social harmony and national security’ and subject to an army censorship apparatus. By law, all editorial matter was sent to the censor prior to publication. After the ’73 war, however, the press began to criticize the government and elevated during the Israeli invasion of Lebanese in 1982. By the Palestinian uprising (intifada) in 1987, Israeli journalists felt free to publicly discuss all issues and a growing competition between several of the mainstream dailies further heightened this trend. 

The most popular daily in Israel is Yediot Akhronot (Latest News) contributing to 51.7% of the country’s daily readership. Ma’ariv (Evening) comes in a far second with 14.6% of the readership, and is considered to be more right-wing than the neutral Yediot. Israel’s most erudite and dovish daily, Ha’aretz, holds 5.5% of the market.

Alternative newspapers include the newspaper representing the ulta-Orthodox community (which make up 10% of the population) and consist of synagogue newsletters for religious indoctrination. Aside from religious content, these publications have their own strict standards of what cannot be published including pictures of women and reporting on crime or entertainment.

Israel also has several Arabic-language dailies mostly published in East Jerusalem like Al-Fajr, Al-Shaab, and Al-Quds and in Haifa such as Al-Ittihad. Several of these Palestinian-produced newspapers have been subject to severe censorship in addition to harsh economic problems with several shutting down in recent years.

The Jerusalem Post is the leading English-language daily and attracts 2.5% of readership targeting tourists and diplomatic personnel station in Israel. Originally leaning towards the left of the political spectrum, beginning 1990 under a new ownership, the Post has take a very hawkish stance in the area of national security and the Palestinian issue.

Israel’s radio history began in 1936 with Kol Yisrael (Voice of Israel) over ten years before official statehood. The radio expanded enormously after 1948 and ranks as the fifth largest radio station in the world today. In 1993, Kol Israel consisted of seven channels with channel A broadcasting cultural programs (4.4% listeners), channel B is mostly news and current events along with popular music (28.6%) channel C is for targeted to youth, channel D broadcasts news and entertainment in Arabic (3.4%) and channel E is classical music (3.4%) along with 2 AM channels. Funding comes in the form of annual fee paid by the listening public and commercial advertising.

The most popular station however is the Israeli Army station, Galei Zahal, which boasts 38.3% of listeners. Because of Israel’s security problems, a significant percentage of Israelis are news-junkies, which is reflected in all of Israel’s stations as they prioritize spots for the news regardless of its affiliation. Most stations offer news updates every 30 minutes throughout the day.

Viewed with much skepticism and a medium that corrupted culture, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, refused to allow television in his country. But in 1965, television was finally introduced (Israel Television or ITV) as a form of education and under astringent political pressure. This pressure and fear to allow television to flourish led to the predominant programs imported from the United States and Europe. A second channel wasn’t introduced until mid-1980’s, proving to be popular; it finally turned commercial in 1993. Depending on where Israeli’s live, many were receiving external channels from Egypt, Jordan and the Christian Broadcasting Network’s Middle East network from Cyprus. Cable television is very popular as well with up to 60% of the population subscribed to it.

Israeli media ownership has been simple. All print media is under private ownership while broadcast media is under government monopoly. The 1933 Press Ordinance regulates the printed press while the Broadcast Authority Law of 1965 overlooks broadcast media. Up until 1988, the military regularly censored Israeli press media and was replaced by a self-regulatory body known as the Editors’ Council. The council is a joint body of all the Hebrew dailies (except one) and the Israel Broadcasting Authority that operates under an agreement in which issues concerning national security are brought by the government for discussion in informal briefings and will not be published in the Israeli media.
The restrictions overlooking Israeli media are not nearly as stringent as the regulations and laws imposed on Israel’s Arabic-language press. It was not uncommon for Arabic-language papers to close down temporarily or even forced to go out of business permanently.

Israel has one news agency, ITIM, which distributes and purchases global news in exchange for its local ones. The Israeli Army press spokesman provides information regarding military matters to the local and foreign press. Israeli media, as a rule of thumb, mobilizes to support national efforts and to participate in national events. For example, during massive waves if immigration in the early 1950’s and late 1980’s, special programs on television were aimed at teaching Hebrew to the new immigrants.

Israel is now in the process of a complete media revolution and is expected to bring it in line with most Western democracies. Promising signs include a highly educated citizenry and new communication technologies. The biggest obstacle, however, is it’s exceptionally strict regulation enforcement on Arab media and as long as the political climate and national security continue to fluctuate, the Arabic-language newspapers will continue to be unstable.