Unfaithful wives across seas

She gave him shelter while he was at the port. He gave her children, who belonged to her, not him, writes Devdutt Pattanaik. Read on: 

For nearly 2,000 years, Arab traders used the monsoon winds to travel across the sea to India. Along the Western coasts, in Kerala, Karnataka, and Goa, they met people who allowed them to marry their daughters but did not let them take these wives back home. These were matrilineal communities, where the son-in-law lived with the wife in her house. She gave him shelter while he was at the port. He gave her children, who belonged to her, not him.

 

From India, the Arabs took cotton, sugar, and spices to be sold in the Mediterranean. They also took the idea of the placeholder zero, the decimal system, concepts such as infinity and calculus. Indian merchants had invented the remittance system known as Hundi, by which you could deposit money with one banker in one port and collect money from another banker in another port. In the Islamic world, this came to be known as the Hawala system, which enabled merchants to take money across the sea, without fearing pirates. Stories were exchanged too and retold as they were narrated in India: big stories located within bigger stories.

Here is the frame story of Suka Saptati, a Sanskrit collection of 70 erotic tales told by a parrot to a bored merchant’s wife.

Illustration/Devdutt Pattanaik

The merchant was going on a long voyage across the sea and feared his young and beautiful wife would be unfaithful. So he begged his old friend, a parrot, to stop his wife from breaking the marriage laws. Every evening, the bored wife would want to step out of the house and find a lover for herself, the parrot would tell her an entertaining erotic story until she fell asleep. In this way, it told her 70 stories, until the merchant returned from his voyage, carrying gifts and love for his bored wife.

Now, here is a similar frame story from the Arabian Nights, involving a king who doubts the faithfulness of wives. 

The king found out that his wife was unfaithful. So he decided he would marry a virgin every evening, enjoy the night with her and kill her at dawn. That way he would not give his wife the chance to be unfaithful. Finally, he married an intelligent girl who figured out a way to protect herself. At night, when the king lay in her arms, she would tell him a story but never complete it the same night, forcing the king to keep her alive the next day till he heard the end of the story. But when night came, the intelligent girl, now the queen, would end one story and start several more, so delightful that in order to know the ending of those stories, the king would spare her for another night. Thus, a thousand and one nights were spent listening to stories, by the end of which the king learned to trust and love his wife. 

Both stories capture the anxiety of sea-faring merchants wondering if their wives back home had other lovers. Maybe this is why Hindu merchants stopped crossing the sea. Those who did lost their caste. Travelling was outsourced to Arabs who controlled the Indian Ocean until the arrival of the Portuguese 500 years ago.

(Source: Mid Day)

Hyderabad’s distinct Chaush community has roots in Yemen

 The Chaush, a diasporic group that has roots in the Hadramawt region of Yemen, came to Hyderabad to work as soldiers in the Nizam’s military, in private militias or as tax collectors.

At a time when Muslims in India are constantly asked to display their nationalism and explain their choices of food, love and profession, it is important to remember that identity is not a monolith. It is historically constructed and multidimensional. Neither can it be restricted by visa and passport regimes on printed paper, nor can it be defined by legal definitions of nationalism and citizenship. It is lived everyday as memories and connections between multiple local, regional and universal contexts.

The Chaush, a distinct diasporic group in Hyderabad that has roots in the Hadramawt region of Yemen, exemplify the possibilities of inhabiting translocal identities, as this essay shows. Chaush is an Ottoman Turkish word that denotes a junior military rank indicating the predominance of soldiers and mercenaries in the early Hadrami migration to Hyderabad centuries ago, from Hadramawt valley or wadi in South Yemen. The scholars and traders of the wadi are subjects of legends and it occupies an important place in early Islamic history. Hadrami Arabs were instrumental in the spread of Islam in the Indian Ocean through complex networks of kinship and economic relationships along its port cities. Through centuries, Hadramis have travelled as religious scholars, traders and mercenaries. Their presence is still written across the Indian Ocean from Comoros Islands to Kerala to Singapore and Indonesia.

Most Hadrami Arabs came to Hyderabad to work as soldiers in the Nizam’s military, irregular forces, in private militias or as jamadars/tax collectors. They also occupied high ranking military positions as officers in the Hyderabad Army. For example, General El Edroos, a Hadrami, was the Commander-in-Chief of the Hyderabad forces when they surrendered to the Indian forces in 1948.

But, as scholars have noted, Arab mercenaries were already a part of the multiple armies, especially Maratha armies, across the Deccan before the British and the Mughal empires started competing for dominance. For example, the Gaikwad Maharaja of Baroda employed many Arab soldiers, including Ja‘far al-Kathiri, whose successors later came to work for the Nizam of Hyderabad and financed the Al Kathiri Sultanate in Hadramawt with the profits they earned in Hyderabad. Another prominent Hadrami family is the Al Quaiti family, a part of Hyderabad’s nobility, which established the important Al Quaiti Sultanate in Hadramawt.

In Hyderabad city, Barkas and Chandrayangutta are both predominantly Chaush neighbourhoods. Names of shops, hospitals and schools in these areas announce this community’s claim on this space. Restaurants serving Mandi and Kahwa (cuisine unique to the community) line all main streets. Chaush men can be identified by their sartorial choices. They wear geometrically patterned lungis or wraps under kurtas. These wraps are available in shops in Barkas, Lad Bazaar and Shehran. These are popularly referred to as sarung, a word that has etymological roots in Indo-Malay and is now a part of the Arabic language. These are popular items that are bought as gifts by relatives or family when they visit Hyderabad from abroad. It is common knowledge among the Chaush that these sarungs are produced in Malaysia and Indonesia, then supplied to the Gulf, from where they are marketed elsewhere.

The garment also allows one to locate the Hadrami diaspora in the larger matrix of global capitalist production and supply chains. During the late colonial period, Hadramis in South East Asia, especially Indonesia, acted as intermediaries in the cloth business. The local batik industry there still remains a site from where the sarung cloth is produced. Similarly, the open ‘Arab style’ sandals have become very popular amongst the Chaush community in the last three decades. These are produced in South East Asia and then supplied from Dubai to Yemen and elsewhere in the Indian Ocean region.

For a Chaush, the distinction between Arab and Hadrami identity is blurred – Arab being a meta-identity that subsumes the Hadrami identity. However, Hyderabadi Hadramis primarily associate themselves with the creolised Chaush identity and as Syed/Mashiekh/Qabail – social stratification systems of Hadramawt. Therefore, Chaush identity is truly translocal – diasporic yet stratified on traditional lines. It is regional – Arab and Hadrami at the same time. Most importantly, Chaush identity is also universal – most are members of Shafi’i Maddhab (Sunni sect) yet in Hyderabad it is not uncommon for various Sunni sects to pray together.

Modern Yemeni and Indian nation-states complicate the Chaush identity because the homogenising narratives of these postcolonial nation-states affirm ideas of fixed borders and reified identities. However, for the Chaush, the links with Hadramawt as a geographic entity or a socio-political imaginary allows for demarcation of boundaries of their identity. Yet, state-centric definitions of ‘host society’ and ‘home country’ are too limited to capture or understand these meanings.

Hadrami naming patterns can be witnessed across Chandrayangutta and Barkas

The word watan comes closest to the idea of a homeland for the Chaush.  Watan does not mean a nation-state, but it is an interplay of translocal geographies of origin/s, that is, regions, cities or villages. For the Chaush, members born in Hadramawt or watan are called Wilayati (literally foreign born; a person born in Hadramawt ‘the homeland’ is still a foreigner to the creole) and those born outside the homeland (diasporic) are called Muwalladin (foreign born creole/of mixed parentage, hence non-pure), denying the possibility of authentic or the stress to retain a ‘pure’ core or a ‘syncretic’ present – in practices, customs, traditions or language. Hadramis born in India are called Mawlluwd-e-Hind. Chaush means both Wilayati as well as Muwallad. A Chaush never belongs.

The movement of the muwalladin as a historic diaspora also gets reflected in the current trends of migrating to the Gulf within the Chaush community in Hyderabad. Post police action, most Chaush found themselves stripped of their normative privileges and status, and ended up participating in the informal sectors of the postcolonial Indian State. 

Today, the community finds it difficult to compete with those who have more social capital in terms of access and education. Almost all Chaush households have one or more members working in the Gulf. Economic migration to the Gulf began in the 1960s, however, it intensified in the 1970s with relaxed passport and visa regimes.

Migrating to the Gulf is preferable to working in Hyderabad for most Chaush, not only because it offers better economic opportunities, but also because there is a relative ease with the idea of moving within the Indian Ocean area. Therefore, given the high demand for labour in the Gulf markets and the established networks that this community has, it is easier to transcend the disadvantages it faces at ‘home’ by migrating. Interestingly, many Chaush women – young and old – who have not been to newer malls and markets in Hyderabad, know street names and malls in Dubai and Jeddah.

The Chaush identity defies notions of authenticity. This diaspora affirms that a ‘lived everyday’ is located in between historically contingent local/s and universal. For them translocal mobility is normal. It opens up questions regarding different ideas of assimilation and integration that have prevailed in the non-west, specifically in the Indian Ocean region. And offers new frames for understanding concepts like homeland, host society, and notions of belonging.

The point above cannot be emphasised enough in a time when within India, many intellectuals – public and otherwise – are trying to ‘defend’ Indian Muslims by pitting a limited local syncretic South Asian Islam against the universal barbaric global Islam. This practice is not only intellectually dangerous for it presents a part of Indian Muslims identity as its whole, but also because it is laced with the remains of orientalised ideas of Islam. The idea that universal Islam is the other of the modern world has been witnessed in multiple guises since enlightenment – sometimes as racism, sometimes as development and sometimes as a defence of human rights. The work of South Asianists, which implicitly borrows from this dichotomy of a bad revivalist global Muslim versus a Good Indian syncretic Muslim, only reinforced Islamophobic tropes and suspicions against an already vulnerable population. Hence, the Indian Ocean region, Deccan and Hyderabad offer a methodological possibility for us to develop a more inclusive approach to identity formation.

Author: Khatija Khader completed her PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University and currently teaches at the Centre for International Relations, Islamic University for Science and Technology (IUST) in Kashmir. Views expressed are the author’s own.

(Source: TNM)

When Lawrence of Arabia came visiting

 In the early 1920s, Lawrence of Arabia took time off in Kerala at Trichur. The author digs up some interesting details of his visit

For most of us who have seen David Lean’s classic Lawrence of Arabia, Thomas Edward Lawrence, immortalised by Peter O’Toole, is the dashing British leader dressed in white and gold Arab robes. But the real Lawrence was not exactly the heroic character of the 1962 film. He was certainly one of the most colourful figures of the First World War, but Lawrence was also controversial with strange fetishes on whom studies continue even today, on whom reams are still being written.

The house in Thrissur where T E Lawrence stayed in 1920-21. Photo: K.K. Mustafah   | Photo Credit: K. K. MUSTAFAH 

The Kerala journey

Libraries across the world house comprehensive research and archival materials on Lawrence and much of his story is well known. What is not known and what the shelves in the libraries may not tell you is the record of a personal journey Lawrence undertook to Kerala sometime in 1920-21.

This trip was immediately after the War. Lawrence who played a leading role as adviser to Emir Feisal during the Arab revolt against Turkish rule (1916–1918) was clearly torn between his British and Arab sympathies. He suffered a huge setback, a stinging humiliation that plunged him into a phase of depression. To recover from this he accepted an invitation from K. Govinda Menon (Conservator of Forests, Cochin State), his classmate at Oxford, to travel to Trichur.

“He stayed for 21 days in Trichur for an elaborate Ayurveda treatment which was supervised by the famous Thaikkattu Moos. He went on his mandatory evening walks, ate home-made food and left a cheerful man. This must have been Lawrence’s only visit to India,” says V. N. Venugopal, grandson of Govinda Menon and the inheritor of those memories, rare photographs and an autographed book. They remain the only surviving link between ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and Kerala.

Venugopal first came to know about Lawrence when he was studying for his Intermediate at Maharaja’s College, Ernakulam. “We had an essay on ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ by Winston Churchill from his book Great Contemporaries. When I read this essay aloud at home my father (P. Narayana Menon) who was listening asked me what I was reading. He showed me a book that was autographed by the same ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and the other memorabilia connected with the man. I was stunned because I was reading about an icon and I come to know that my father knew this man, accompanied him on his evening walks when he came to stay at our ancestral home at Trichur. It was so surreal.”

It was Venugopal’s grandmother (Ammu Amma) who told him a lot about Lawrence’s Trichur visit. “She used to narrate stories graphically. One of them was about Lawrence. About how she and my grandfather travelled by the Boat Mail train from Trichur to Dhanushkodi and took a boat to Colombo to pick up Lawrence. He had reached there and the three of them travelled back to Trichur.”

Trichur was a small village in those days. A few Europeans had settled here, most of them planters. “There were rubber plantations at Pudukkad and Amballur managed by Europeans who used to stay at Trichur. They even had an English Club. So, Lawrence was not looked upon as a stranger here.”

On his return to England, Lawrence sent Govinda Menon an autographed copy of Letters of Lawrence. The book has a photograph of Lawrence with his four brothers and on one of the pages, yellowed by time, has the words, ‘In memory of happy days.’

Later, Lawrence gave up his colonial title, joined the Royal Air Force as a messenger boy and changed his name to T.E. Shaw. It was an effort to disguise his celebrityhood, an attempt at anonymity. Still hounded by the limelight, he planned to retire to his dream home, Clouds Hill, when he died in a motorcycle accident.

Venugopal treasures photographs of his grandfather and Lawrence shot during their Oxford days (1910-1913). “My grandfather was very close to the Lawrence family. He was almost like a member of the family. After Lawrence’s death his mother sent my grandfather the Bible she had probably gifted to her son, and his brother Montague sent him a copy of Lawrence’s seminal work Seven Pillars of Wisdom. They remain my most treasured possessions.”

(Source: The Hindu)

Qatar’s Al Meera removes French products amid growing boycott movement

 Recent tensions between France and the Muslim world has sparked a boycott movement, prompting Qatar’s Al Meera to remove all French products from its stores.

Qatar’s flagship Al Meera supermarket has removed all French products from its shelves after calls for boycott grew louder across the Arab and Muslim world, the corporation announced on Friday.

“We affirm that as a national company, we work according to a vision that is consistent with our faithful religion, our established customs and traditions, in a way that serves our country and our faith, and meets the aspirations of our customers,” Al Meera said in a statement.

pic.twitter.com/dCO9aWD4WX

— Al Meera (@AlMeeraQatar) October 23, 2020

 The move comes amid rising tension between France and the Muslim world after the killing of a teacher who showed his class caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, leading to global uproar.

French authorities responded with a large-scale crackdown on Islamic entities in the country, raiding more than 50 mosques and associations.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron triggered backlash after suggesting Islam is a religion “in crisis” worldwide.

The French magazine at the centre of the cartoon controversy, Charlie Hebdo republished the offensive caricatures of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad and Macron affirmed his country would “not give up cartoons.” He has also refused to condemn the magazine’s decision, vowing measures against what he called “Islamic separatism.”

The decision to republish the images was seen by many as a renewed provocation after several similar incidents. One of the cartoons, which was first published by a Danish newspaper in 2005 and then by Charlie Hebdo a year later, showed Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban.

As a response, Muslims around the world launched a virtual campaign to condemn France’s Islamophobia, calling for a boycott of French products. 

Qatar-based social media users shared a list of prominent French brands and called on residents to avoid purchasing their goods. 

فاشل، عنصري، متطرف، بذيء
جاهل ومغرور . .
إنه الرئيس الفرنسي "مكروه"!#ماكرون_يسيء_للنبي #مقاطعة_البضائع_الفرنسية pic.twitter.com/QPMue4qqbI

— مــريــم آل ثــانــي (@ALThani_M) October 23, 2020

هذه والله المقاطعه الواجبه شرعاً واخلاقاً ووطنيه

وكالعاده لن تجد احد يرد على الخنزير #ماكرون الا اردوغان !
#مقاطعة_البضائع_الفرنسية pic.twitter.com/ahekccVF5h

— كـــويتيــه أصيــــلــه 🇰🇼 (@KUWTIYA) October 22, 2020

Qatar University also took part in the movement by postponing the French Cultural Week event, saying “any violation of Islamic belief and sacred symbols is completely unacceptable, as these offences harm universal human values and the highest moral principles that all contemporary societies affirm.” 

(1/2) عطفًا على مستجدات الأحداث الأخيرة والمتعلقة بالإساءة المتعمدة للإسلام ورموزه، فقد قرَّرت إدارة جامعة قطر تأجيل فعالية الأسبوع الفرنسي الثقافي إلى أجل غير مسمى.

— جامعة قطر (@QatarUniversity) October 23, 2020

Similar action has been seen in Kuwait where supermarkets removed French products from their shelves. 

Nous continuerons, professeur.
Nous continuerons ce combat pour la liberté, ce combat pour défendre la République dont vous êtes devenu le visage. pic.twitter.com/0gRe9WIVjJ

— Emmanuel Macron (@EmmanuelMacron) October 21, 2020

The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the second-largest inter-governmental body after the United Nations, slammed France’s anti-Muslim rhetoric.

“We condemn the constant systematic attack on the feelings of Muslims by insulting the religious symbols represented by the person of the Prophet Muhammad,” an OIC statement read.

The global Muslim body also called the French government to review its discriminatory policies targeting Islam and its disrespect of Muslims around the world. 

(Source: Doha News) 

Behind a Saudi Prince’s rise, two loyal enforcers

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia convened an outdoor banquet this spring for his fellow Arab rulers, seated among the kings, princes and presidents were two friends with few qualifications other than their closeness to the young prince himself: a poet who has become known for orchestrating ferocious social media campaigns, and a former security guard who runs the Saudi sports commission.

The two men had each played pivotal roles in many of the brazen power plays that have marked Prince Mohammed’s sprint to dominance of the kingdom — the ouster of the previous crown prince, the detentions of royals and businessmen in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, the kidnapping of the Lebanese prime minister, and the kingdom’s diplomatic spats with Qatar and Canada. Even Saudi royals have come to fear the prince’s two friends — Saud el-Qahtani, 40, and Turki al-Sheikh, 37 — and the Arab potentates around the table could scarcely object to their presence.

Now the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents has focused attention on their roles as enablers of the crown prince’s impulsiveness and aggression, and Saudi watchers consider the men’s fate a bellwether of the royal court’s direction as it grapples with the international outrage over the killing.

“They are the closest people to the crown prince,” said Kristin Smith Diwan, senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “They are his political enforcers and the face of the brash new ‘Saudi first’ posture at home and abroad, and those opposed to the hypernationalist, thuggish direction in Saudi foreign policy would be happy to see them cut down to size.”

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, right, pictured with Saad Hariri, the prime minister-designate of Lebanon, in Riyadh last month. The Saudis briefly kidnapped Mr. Hariri last year.CreditCreditTasneem Alsultan for The New York Times

Neither man is among the 18 people Saudi Arabia says it has arrested in the course of its investigation into Mr. Khashoggi’s killing.

But the kingdom has already assigned some blame for the killing to Mr. Qahtani, the social-media czar. He lost his title as an adviser to the royal court because he contributed to the vitriolic rhetoric toward the kingdom’s critics that led to Mr. Khashoggi’s death, a Saudi official said. It is unclear which of his many duties Mr. Qahtani has relinquished.

Mr. Sheikh, the sports commissioner, was in New York for medical treatment during the killing, according to Saudis who know him, and has since avoided the spotlight.

Mr. Khashoggi, who was a Saudi insider before fleeing the kingdom last year to live in Virginia and write columns for The Washington Post, had said the two men exemplified what was dangerous about Prince Mohammed.

The crown prince “does not have political advisers except Turki al-Sheikh and Saud al-Qahtani,” Mr. Khashoggi said in private comments published by Newsweek after his death. “They are very thuggish. People fear them. You challenge them, you might end up in prison.”

Mr. Qahtani did not respond to messages seeking comment. Mr. Sheikh did not respond to a request for comment sent to the sports commission.

Both men run portfolios — social media and sports — that resonate with the large population of young Saudis whom Prince Mohammed has courted as his base. Both have sought to fire up the fierce nationalism that the prince has encouraged by pouring money into battles against rivals in stadiums or on the internet.

Although neither portfolio relates to foreign affairs, foreign envoys often seek out the two men because of their influence, said Dennis Horak, the former Canadian ambassador to Riyadh who was expelled in August after other Canadian diplomats called for the release of detained rights activists.

Saudi Arabia’s sports minister, Turki al-Sheikh, right, interrupts a training session of the Saudi national soccer team to talk to players in Moscow in June.CreditAbedin Taherkenareh/EPA, via Shutterstock

Mr. Sheikh was approachable while Mr. Qahtani “had a much fiercer reputation,” Mr. Horak said. The pair, he said, was “not so much good cop-bad cop, more bad cop and lesser-bad cop.”

Like Prince Mohammed, neither was well known before the prince’s father, King Salman, ascended the throne in 2015. Both were educated inside the kingdom with scant experience abroad.

Critics in the kingdom say that they sometimes failed to understand the dynamics of Western politics and culture, like when Mr. Qahtani orchestrated the plastering of billboards and trucks in London with his boss’s photo during the crown prince’s visit there last spring — to the derision of Londoners unaccustomed to foreign personality cults.

But each man had skills the prince treasured.

Mr. Qahtani, who held an undergraduate law degree and wrote poetry, had been recruited to work in the royal court more than a decade ago. He gained a deep understanding of the royal family’s secrets that members and associates of the royal family say he later exploited to help Prince Mohammed plot his rise and eliminate his rivals.

He also appears to have developed an interest in hacking. As early as 2009, someone using credentials associated with Mr. Qahtani was trawling amateur hacking forums to learn about surveillance software, according to images of the posts captured by other forum members.

In 2012, someone using Mr. Qahtani’s government email address solicited services from the Italian spyware company Hacking Team, according emails later released by WikiLeaks. In one email, the writer sought a visit by people with “high technical knowledge” to “explain the solutions you offer and training and costs.”

“Will bear all the costs of the trip from A-Z,” the author of the email added.

Mr. Qahtani has become Prince Mohammed’s chief propagandist. With a Twitter following of 1.36 million users, he solicited names for a blacklist of enemies of the kingdom and then marshaled mass social media attacks against them, commanding followers his critics have called “electronic flies.” His work has earned him the nicknames Lord of the Flies, Mr. Hashtag and “Saudi Arabia’s Steve Bannon.”

Mr. Sheikh was a bodyguard in Prince Mohammed’s security detail who charmed the prince with his sense of humor and intense loyalty, said associates of the royal family who know both men. Roughly the same age, they developed a personal rapport, and the prince rewarded Mr. Sheikh with a seemingly limitless budget to make the kingdom an international contender in tennis, boxing, soccer and other sports. He has welcomed wrestling legend Hulk Hogan to Riyadh and last April, he joked in the ring about keeping for himself the championship belt for the WWE’s Greatest Royal Rumble.

                                        The moment when Turki al-Shaikh handed over
                                         Saudi Arabia and Brown Stroman's Saudi Cup
                                         CreditVideo by كل شي

In an extension of his royally financed campaign to build a sports empire, Mr. Sheikh became the honorary president of one of the most successful and popular soccer teams in Egypt, an honor widely believed to reflect heavy investments of money from the crown prince. But Mr. Sheikh resigned in a dispute with the board after just a few months and instead bankrolled his own rival franchise, Pyramid. He recruited three star Brazilian players and launched a sports channel dedicated to his team, reportedly pouring in as much as $33 million.

But he complained publicly that Egyptian referees, fans and commentators were failing to appreciate his investments, and said he had asked Egypt’s president to intervene. In September, a stadium of Egyptian soccer fans broke out in vulgar chants denouncing Mr. Sheikh and the Saudis, and he responded by abandoning the team.

“Strange attacks from everywhere, and a new story every day,” he wrote on Facebook. “Why the headache?”

Mr. Sheikh also splurged last September on a $4.8 million limited edition Bugatti Chiron sports car, according to a sales contract obtained by The New York Times. The seller, the Emirati businessman Saeed Mohammed Butti Alqubaisi, declined to comment.

When an entertainment program on the Saudi-owned satellite network MBC last year seemed to hint at a rumored affair between Mr. Sheikh and an Egyptian singer, Mr. Sheikh ordered the network to fire the production team, according to industry executives familiar with the case. The show remains off the air.

Electronic billboards in London showing Prince Mohammed in ads with the hashtag #ANewSaudiArabia.CreditChris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

Both men played signal roles in Prince Mohammed’s rise. In June 2017, Mr. Sheikh and Mr. Qahtani were among a handful of Prince Mohammed’s loyalists who forcibly detained the previous crown prince and interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, holding him overnight and threatening him until he agreed to give up his claim to the throne, according to members and associates of the royal family.

In a video made the next day, Mr. Sheikh can be seen hovering behind the ousted prince as he pledges allegiance to Mohammed bin Salman. A social media campaign spread rumors that a cocaine addiction had made the ousted prince unfit to rule, and people close to the royal family said Mr. Qahtani fueled the rumors.

Both men sprang into action again when Saudi Arabia led a blockade of its tiny neighbor Qatar in June 2017, over its support for political Islam. They unleashed insults and promoted hashtags bashing Qatar, and Mr. Qahtani forced MBC to stop airing Turkish soap operas because of Turkey’s support for Qatar, costing the network millions in losses, according to industry executives.

He also persuaded Prince Mohammed to spend more than $100,000 on American television commercials denouncing Qatar, evidently unaware of how few Americans were following the Gulf dispute.

A Qatari-owned network, BeIN Sports, had acquired the exclusive rights to broadcast this year’s World Cup in the Arab world. So Mr. Qahtani helped promote BeoutQ, a bootleg operation beamed from Riyadh-based Arabsat. BeoutQ ripped live events from BeIN’s feed and broadcast the games without paying for rights, spurring international lawsuits. The Saudi government has denied any relationship to the pirate network.

Both men also played key roles again last fall when Crown Prince Mohammed arbitrarily detained hundreds of the kingdom’s richest businessmen and several of his royal cousins in a Ritz-Carlton hotel in what was billed as a crackdown on corruption — just a few weeks after Mr. Sheikh had picked up his $4.8 million Bugatti.

Both men acted as interrogators, demanding that the captives confess to corrupt self-enrichment and pledge to surrender vast sums, according to relatives and close associates of several detainees. Although blindfolded during some interrogations, detainees told relatives that they saw the two men or recognized their voices from broadcast interviews. Others said that through hotel room windows, they saw Mr. Sheikh coming and going surrounded by armed guards.

Several former detainees have reported physical mistreatment during the interrogations, including beatings, electrical shocks and suspension upside down for long periods.

Some have shown their family members lasting scars from the beatings and shocks, and in one case photographs of the bruises and scars have been shared with The New York Times; some of the pictures included the electronic monitoring bracelet that the government has forced released detainees to wear to track their movements. One was forced to make his consent to a forced confession with only a thumb print because he was too incapacitated to write out his signature, according to a relative informed by the detainee.

Although no evidence has emerged that either man directly abused the captives, both questioned detainees who had been abused.

The government of Saudi Arabia has called the allegations of physical abuse “absolutely untrue.”

A few weeks after his release from the Ritz, Prince al-Waleed bin Talal, once the kingdom’s wealthiest investor, made a donation of more than a half-million dollars to a Saudi soccer club, writing on Twitter that he was “responding to the invitation of my brother Turki al-Sheikh.”

Neither Mr. Qahtani nor Mr. Sheikh have commented publicly on the killing of Mr. Khashoggi. But Mr. Qahtani, who lost his title as a royal court adviser, appears to believe his days of serving the prince are not over.

After his dismissal, he tweeted his thanks to the king and crown prince for “this great opportunity to have the honor to serve the homeland.”

“I will remain a loyal servant of my country forever,” he added.

(Source: NYT)

Qataris among most digitally connected citizens in Arab region: Study

A recently released five-year retrospective report examining media use in the Middle East found that Qataris are among the most digitally connected citizens in the Arab Region. In terms of internet penetration, Qatar has one of the highest internet use rates of any country in the world, approaching saturation at 95 percent.

"With the goal of understanding the communication ecosystem in the region better, NU-Q launched the first of five Media Use in the Middle East studies in 2013. Now with this rare longitudinal study moving into its sixth year, we are able to evaluate lessons learned comprehensively and understand the value of both relative stability and media shifts whether incremental or more significant,"said Everette E Dennis, dean and CEO of Northwestern University in Qatar (NU-Q).

The largest analysis of its kind in the region, the Media Use in the Middle East study examines media behavior across established and new platforms in seven countries including Qatar, Lebanon, Jordan, Tunisia.

Extensive research was done on long-term social media patterns, how and where people seek news and entertainment, the connection between cultural traditions of the region, and comparisons among the studied countries. Additionally, perceptions of news bias and attitudes toward free speech and online privacy over time are explored in the retrospective report.

Examples from the report about Qatars unique use of digital media include:

Qataris spend more time online than nationals in other countries in the Arab region an average of 44.5 hours a week. Looking at the data comparatively, this is a substantial increase from 2013 when Qatari nationals reported using the internet an average of 37 hours per week.

While they are spending 60 percent more time online than all other nationals in the surveys, Qataris are less likely to be engaged in several popular online activities, such as playing video games or using Facebook.

An estimated two-thirds of Qatari internet users watch news, comedy and religious/spiritual content online, and now more than half watch sports online. A sharp increase across all fronts in these categories was seen compared to 2013 and make Qataris the first citizenry in this study to watch content more online than on TV. Remarkably, three in 10 Qataris say they never watch TV.

Findings in the report show Qataris time spent online has increased but so has their time spent with family. They now report spending on average 43.2 hours a week with family. Discoveries such as these indicate that Qataris have embraced digital media but in ways that do not conform to several regional, and global, expectations.

"The retrospection report," Dennis said, "has been instrumental in revealing the socio-economic implications of internet and social media use in Qatar compared to the region at large and provides much-needed intelligence, as well as practical data for industry and public policy."

(Source: The Peninsula)

'This land is just dirt': A rooftop view of Jerusalem

For its Season of Culture, the ancient capital has thrown open its rooftops to encourage residents to see beyond their blinkered boundaries. But the reality is a city where the divides are growing deeper, writes Hannah Ellis-Petersen in the Guardian. Read on:

The rooftops of Jerusalem can be deceptive. From up here, the domes and towers of the hundreds of churches, mosques and synagogues glimmer on the skyline in what seems like peaceful coexistence; the neighbourhoods below come together in a unified sprawl.

But down below, it is a city defined by barriers. They may not be as tangible as the towering security wall that divides Israel and the Palestinian territories a few miles east, but they are just as divisive and inviolable. Living side by side in Jerusalem are communities who exist with no interaction with one another – kept apart by fear, nationalism and religion.

To some extent it has long been thus, and not just between Israelis and Palestinians. There is also segregation along secular and ultra-orthodox lines, and the residual hierarchy between Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews that emerged when Israel was created in 1948. Of the 900,000 residents of Jerusalem, 37% are Palestinians, 32% are ultra-Orthodox Jews and the rest are made up of secular and religious nationalist Jews and the tiny Christian population.

A view of East Jerusalem and the separation barrier, taken from the tower of the Augusta Victoria hospital church

While Israelis typically live in the west and Palestinians in the east of Jerusalem, mixed neighbourhoods do exist. In the winding alleys of the old city and the streets of downtown, the diverse inhabitants peacefully cross paths every day. Yet as rightwing nationalism seeps into the culture, and technology threatens the traditional ultra-orthodox way of life, the fractures of Jerusalem are growing deeper. Today communities live, not entwined, but in isolated parallel.

“Fear has become a fact of life here,” says Pnina Pfeufer. “There are many places in Jerusalem I know nothing about, and I’ve lived here my entire life. And I think that’s true of every person who lives here.”

Pfeufer is looking out over the city from atop the Bikur Cholim hospital, where she is a participant in a new city-wide project to open up rooftops, from west to east Jerusalem, that are usually private or inaccessible to the public. Some are art installations; others are the homes of interesting figures, both Israeli and Palestinian. Initiated by Mekudeshet, the Jerusalem Season of Culture, the project aims to encourage people to look beyond their blinkered boundaries and see their city afresh.

Orthodox Jews pass Israeli Defence Forces soldiers in the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City

Yet nothing in Jerusalem is apolitical. The foundation that runs Mekudeshet is Israeli, opening Palestinians who take part to accusations of normalising the occupation. What’s more, the only rooftops of Palestinians that were made accessible are in the old city; there are none in east Jerusalem.

“In the mind of many Israelis, there is a black hole called East Jerusalem,” says Mekudeshet’s executive director, Naomi Bloch Fortis. “Nobody knows where it is, what it means, where it starts and ends, what its status is. In the national consciousness, East Jerusalem just means fear. We are on a journey to collaborate with Palestinians, to get to know East Jerusalem and remove that fear. But it is a long journey and very delicate, and to use a rooftop in the heart of East Jerusalem, well, we cannot.”

The project traces a line across a divided city via its rooftops. And the stories of the volunteers who have opened their homes to strangers, regardless of ethnicity or creed, speak to a multi-layered Jerusalem, one rarely seen in a conflict-obsessed news cycle: a colourful, fractious and potent city.

We visited six.

The view from Koko Deri’s roof in Musrara in West Jerusalem

The Israeli Black Panther: ‘I smell the scent of destruction’
Koko Deri’s rooftop is a cornucopia. Piles of chairs, teapots, jugs, masks, stools and carpets obscure every surface. On one wall is a vast oil painting of Napoleon and Josephine, adorned with diamante gems and stickers. “I added in the stuff the artist forgot,” Deri says with a wink.

It is a monument to a lifetime of collecting, and a reflection of the colourfully camp personality of a man in his 60s who has lived in the same house his entire life (“not counting my three times when I lived in jail”). Yet in the 1950s and 60s, when he was growing up here, the building was derelict and Deri’s family had no possessions at all: “Not even underwear.”

His parents were among the millions of Moroccan Sephardic Jews who moved to Israel in 1949 for the promise of an abundant life; instead, they found themselves ghettoised. “The European Ashkenazi Jews lived in the comfortable apartments and decided how the country would be run, and they treated us Arab Jews as suspicious, as the other, almost like slaves,” he says. “We lived in this jungle, the 60% of us, and then there were the 40%, the European Ashkenazi Jews that lived in beautiful apartments, who went to good schools, who lived a totally different life, who were just a mile away. That was the segregated reality of Jerusalem – and it was there right from the beginning of this new society.”

Koko Deri on his rooftop in Musrara

This rooftop once looked out over the barbed wire fence of the green line and the Jordanian sniper watchtowers. After the six-day war in 1967, the green line fence came down – and the view of Jerusalem changed radically. Instead of barbed wire and sniper towers, Deri could see for the first time into life in East Jerusalem, and finally crossed paths with Palestinians, “who we realised were not the monsters we had been told”.

It was here that Deri and 10 others formed the Israeli Black Panther movement in 1971, which fought against the prejudice against Sephardic Jews, most of whom had emigrated from Arab countries. It was inspired by its US namesake: “We were the black Jews, you see.”

Their street protests in the early 1970s, which attracted crowds of over 10,000, would often end in clashes with the police, but “it was not only violent”, says Deri. “One of our first actions was in the Ashkenazi neighbourhoods, where they would all get their milk delivered at 3am on their doorstep. We would go round and leave notes on the milk bottles, saying: ‘The milk that you are giving to your cat could feed 10 people in Musrara.’”

Indeed, the Israeli Black Panthers initially felt more closely aligned to the Palestinian cause in their fight for equal rights. Deri went to Paris to meet with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and was invited to the US to meet Malcolm X and Angela Davis. After the Yom Kippur war in 1973, the movement fractured, but the battle lines are still present.

A shot taken from Deri’s rooftop

“Back then, we were fighting about human rights, not religion,” says Deri. “Now, when I look out, I smell the scent of destruction in Jerusalem. This society as we know it in Jerusalem and in Israel has about 20 years left and after that it will implode. And that’s not because of outside enemies, it will be what we have done to ourselves with religion. Even in biblical times, that’s what happened; the settlers are the modern-day zealots. It’s already starting – you can feel it in Jerusalem right now. Today it is a city filled with hate.”

The view from Abu Yehia’s roof in the Old City

The repentant jihadist: ‘The angels sit with me on this roof’
As a young Palestinian man, Abu Yehia was “filled with anger and hate”, he says, as he pours lemonade afloat with fresh mint leaves and the call to prayer rings out across the rooftops.

His Muslim Quarter home, which his family has owned for hundreds of years and once served as a bathhouse, is so close to al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City that you’re almost perching on top of the black dome. Like Deri, he too served time in jail for violence and protest – but on the other side of the conflict.

“Thirty years ago, I was part of the Islamic jihad,” he says. He would roam the streets of Jerusalem, blinded by loathing for his Jewish neighbours. “They were my biggest enemy. But I ended up in jail for five years – and there I saw everything. I realised my life was being wasted. My wife divorced me, I lost my house, I didn’t even have my own clothes, I’d lost everything. And I just thought, ‘What was it all for? Why did God send me here, in this cell detained with 10 other people?’ It made me realise the path I had chosen was wrong, that I needed to find another path.”

Abu Yehia: ‘I ended up in jail for five years – and there I realised my life was being wasted’

His rooftop sits at a symbolic crossroads: it overlooks not only al-Aqsa and the Dome of the Rock but is also situated in a holy triangle between the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (one of the holiest sites for Christians) and the western wall (one of the holiest sites for Jews). Here, in the shadow of three of Jerusalem’s most religiously significant monuments, Abu Yehia follows his new path: he invites strangers of all religions to come and share dinner.

“From eating together comes conversation and understanding,” he says. “All three religions are here on this roof. It is a holy place. Sometimes I sit here and I pray to God and I feel that the angels come and sit here with me. Up here it does not matter if you are a Muslim or a Jew: we are all just human beings. Real peace will only come when we remember this. And I’m talking about real peace – not the peace that politicians speak about – and that’s why I open up my house, to bring people together with food.”

He gestures to a vast platter of yellow rice, then to the heavens. “My real place is up there, and there is only one question when you go: what did you do? Were you a terrorist or did you create peace?”

Pnina Pfeufer on the roof of Bikur Cholim hospital

The Orthodox Jewish feminist: ‘The Haredim, they build walls’
All Jerusalemites stay within their communities to some extent, but none more so than the ultra-Orthodox Jewish population: the Haredim. Standing on top of the rooftop of Haredi hospital Bikur Cholim, Pnina Pfeufer looks down at the people bustling below, riding bicycles or pushing prams, recognisable by their distinctive clothing: men in long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats, their faces framed by two ringlets of hair; the women dressed modestly in long skirts, most often wearing headscarves or wigs, with their real hair shaved off.

Pfeufer has lived in this city all her life, but until three years ago she had never set foot in East Jerusalem. She is not unusual. “The Haredim have less and less need to go out of our own neighbourhoods,” she says, “and that creates more separation.”

In Jerusalem, they have practically built their own city within a city. In order to cloister their way of life from the corruption of secular modern society, they have their own schools, shopping malls, sports clubs, parks and hospitals. Smartphones are outlawed in all schools and most homes, as is the internet. (There are sanctions if you use a smartphone without a rabbi’s permission, or if a student is found to have a computer at home.)

Ultra-Orthodox Jews in West Jerusalem

Women in particular face an endless list of restrictions. In 2016, the Israeli Supreme Court had to ban signs instructing women not to use the main street in an ultra-Orthodox neighbourhood, and ultra-Orthodox leaders lobbied to omit women’s faces from adverts on buses. The Haredim also happen to be the fastest-growing population in Jerusalem.

Pfeufer, meanwhile, is the rarest of gems: a feminist who was raised ultra-Orthodox with aspirations for political office. “The things about being ultra-Orthodox is that you’re meant to fit into a box very neatly,” says Pfeufer. “The Haredi community was created 200 years ago in Europe as a counterculture to the reform movement and emancipation, and it still is a counterculture today. The one thing you can say about all Haredi groups is that they build walls.”

Yet, as the world becomes ever more reliant on technology, the Haredim’s entire way of life is under threat. A lucrative market has emerged in Jerusalem creating tech that caters for the ultra-Orthodox, including smartphones with filtering software. “But rejecting technology isn’t working,” says Pfeufer. “The younger generation are accessing the internet, they are using technology. And it’s becoming impossible to live and function in the world. There are Haredi people who one day opened the internet and suddenly, boom, the entire world came at them in their early 20s. That can be very unsettling. For some people, it’s a trigger for leaving the community entirely.”

A Haredi woman in West Jerusalem

Pfeufer is a testament to the fact that not all Haredim live within these confines. More ultra-Orthodox men and women are taking degrees and entering the general workplace. Yet a Haredi woman has yet to take political office, which makes Pfeufer’s ambitions to be elected to the Jerusalem city council highly provocative. Moreover, her politics lean to the left, directly opposing the rightwing nationalist shift in the Haredi community as a whole.

She also began a Haredi feminist group, which has hundreds of members, and fights for women’s access to education and media debate. But she feels the segregation of the city acutely. “More hardcore traditional Haredim see the fact that I’m a woman as more of a threat, and working people who tend to be more rightwing nationalist, more Zionist, see my opinions as more of a threat.” She offers a sad smile.

A view from the roof of the Clal Centre on Jaffa Road

The artist: ‘In the end, this land is just dirt’
The Clal Centre encapsulates the strange contradictions of Jerusalem. Inside, a shop selling Torah scrolls neighbours a lingerie emporium. It is home to Jerusalem’s only sex shop, yet the top floors of the building are occupied and owned by an Evangelical Christian group who sing songs of worship non-stop for days. It’s in a mixed cosmopolitan area, but the rooftop – where artist Sharon Glazberg is hosting a live installation – overlooks ultra-Orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods, including the Prima Palace hotel favoured by the ultra-Orthodox for going on escorted dates.

Glazberg chose to use its strange neutrality as a place to bring the most contested and holy soil in the city: a vast pile of red earth, dug up from beneath al-Aqsa mosque, the place the Jews call Temple Mount and the Muslims call al-Haram al-Sharif, which contains what she calls “the ashes” of the Jewish temple destroyed in AD70. Glazberg has animated the soil: it moves up and down as if it is alive and breathing.

Sharon Glazberg on the roof of the Clal Centre

“When you isolate things, take them out of their context, you can look at them a little bit differently,” she says of the soil, which she obtained from an archeological project. “And a new perspective on Temple Mount is definitely hard to find in Jerusalem.”

Indeed, it’s a provocative idea in a city that just three months ago was rocked with violent clashes over the holy site, fuelled by the stabbings of Israeli police and the installation of metal detectors at its gates. A couple look at the installation with disbelief and amusement. “This is just the sort of thing that will spark the third intifada,” says one with a wry laugh.

Yet she feels her audience’s harmonious reaction says as much as the violence.

Glazberg’s installation on the Clal Centre rooftop, which features 2.5 cubic metres of earth dug up from under Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif

A footprint in the earth

Seven people aerate the mount’s dirt for seven days

“It’s really beautiful how people come here and treat it completely differently. Yesterday, a Haredi came here and prayed for an hour with closed eyes, so intensely, and when he left he just took a bit of the ashes. And a Christian woman asked if I could leave some of the earth here, because she wanted to come here again. People have left me songs they wrote about Jerusalem, really beautiful things. Someone even played the flute.”

Glazberg laments that few Palestinians have been able to see the work, typical of a liberal Israeli echo chamber. “There has not been enough of a Muslim audience, to my disappointment,” she says. “It is definitely the weak point of the work, of so many things that happen in this city.”

Hyperventilation – an installation by Ayela Landow on the roof of the Clal Centre

Nor has the reaction been uniformly positive. An ultra-Orthodox friend raised objections. “I asked him: ‘We live in a wireless age, why are you placing so much importance on this physical earth?’ And his reply was: ‘Yes, but where does the router sit?’ You see, all the people that fight over this place, they really believe that this earth is the router and from there you get all the best reception for the spirit of God.” She laughs as a wind whips up a layer of the fine red soil into the air.

“To me that’s the problem. Everyone in Jerusalem puts so much on this land, on this soil, which in the end is just dirt.”

Palestinian boys practice parkour on the Galizia roofs, opposite the Dome of the Rock, in the Old City

The parkour gang: ‘The police don’t bother us on the rooftops’
As audiences gather to view an earnest installation involving flags on a rooftop in the Old City, something much more interesting is happening nearby. A group of young Palestinian boys do backflips, jump across the uneven surfaces and vault from dome to dome. On the streets, they get stopped constantly by Israeli police. Up here, the city is theirs.

‘I feel so much more free on the rooftops. The IDF and the police also bother us a lot less’

“We are not as free in a playground as we are on the rooftops, because here people don’t see us. A playground would feel like a trap,” says Mahmoud Shaladi, 13.

Majd Abuattduan, also 13, butts in. “I feel so much more free on the rooftops. The IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] and the police also bother us a lot less on the roofs, though they do still come round here to tell us to stop. Most of us who are doing this sport are trying to keep it healthy and clean – no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking.”

The boys, between the ages of 13 and 17, first saw parkour videos on Facebook, and were given clothes and some tools for practising by a local NGO. Now they come here almost every day.

‘We’re not afraid of the police or the army because everything we do round here, someone will try and stop us anyway’

Even here there are restrictions. “A few of us were arrested because the police told us it was an illegal sport for us to do on the roofs,” says Ahamad Shalodi, 14. “And Israeli families round the neighbourhood are also giving us a hard time. We used to have mattresses around here to practice on, which we used to hide, but they got burned. But we’re not afraid of the police or the army because everything we do round here, someone will try and stop us anyway.”

They look with bemusement at the art that has temporarily taken up residence in the rooftop domain they have long claimed as their own. Soon it will be gone, and they can reclaim their training ground. “I don’t know what those flags are,” says Hamzah Salem, 17, casting only a glance over at the work. “We’ve been seeing it for a few days, but no one has explained it to us. It’s not for us and we’ve been told to move.”

The view from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel in the Old City

The hostel owner: ‘The inequality is getting worse’
October 2015 was the last time Jerusalem was really convulsed by violence. But for Chris Alami, a Palestinian who has lived in the Old City all his life and runs one its most popular youth hostels, it is not religious violence that splinters Jerusalem but economic inequality. The Israeli government is pushing to make its mark on every corner of the city, he says – but it only invests in neighbourhoods without Palestinians.

“The face of the city is changing, architecturally and in terms of infrastructure, but not to benefit us,” says Alami from his hostel roof, where as part of Mekudeshet he is inviting people to sleep overnight for free. “Everyone pays the same exact taxes, but you go to Damascus Gate [in the Muslim Quarter] and you see fewer street cleaners, fewer garbage bins and fewer street lights, but more soldiers.”

He grows angrier. “And it’s even worse in Palestinian neighbourhoods like Silwan. You don’t see paved streets, and there will be just one big garbage bin overflowing with rubbish. That tells the Palestinians who live here: ‘You are not welcome here, we don’t want your streets to be clean, for you to be comfortable.’ And that inequality is getting worse.”

Hannah Ellis-Petersen takes in the view from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel

While the current consensus is that another intifada is unlikely anytime soon, Alami says the tensions of the city are palpable. “I’ve been fined so many times, been prosecuted for things that were so unreasonable, even jailed for one month,” he says. The poverty and police harassment has led him to believe Jerusalem is “a slingshot that is getting stretched and stretched and stretched, and one day soon it’s going to be launched”.

Alami’s family have lived in Jerusalem for more than 700 years, since the times of the Crusades. From his roof, which offers one of the best views over the Old City, he points to the churches, mosques and synagogues that are monuments to regimes past and empires fallen. “Look, nobody here lasted,” Alami says. “Not the Romans, not the Turks, not the Christians, not the Muslims, not the Jews, not the British. No matter how powerful they were, no matter how great they were, no one has lasted in Jerusalem. In the end, Jerusalem has always belonged to Jerusalemites only.”

A final shot from the roof of the Citadel youth hostel

Note: All photographs by David Levene