William Safire on the word Kifaya in his On Language column in the NY Times Magazine:
The word means ”enough.” The Arabic verbal root is kafa, ”to be satisfied.” In Hans Wehr’s Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, it has the senses of ‘’sufficient amount” and ”that which suffices for performing a duty.” Munther Younes, coordinator [...]

Despite my best efforts, I didn’t see a single demonstrator yesterday. All the same, what I did see I took as a show of strength for the Muslim Brotherhood. The security measures taken to prevent the demonstration were fairly unprecedented. As has been mentioned here, they closed off Tahrir Square, and all the streets leading [...]

I forgot to mention it yesterday being so busy, but while a really ultimately small protest was quashed heavily in Egypt, there was this huge — especially considering the size of the country — protest for constitutional reform in Bahrain on Friday. Chan’ad Bahraini as always has the goods:
In a massive show of force [...]

The demo I wrote about earlier didn’t take place exactly as planned, as people who posted comments pointed out. No demonstrators ever got to parliament, because, well, parliament was surrounded for blocks by several thousand troops from Central Security, the riot police. Not only that, but this morning the security services arrested about 50 Muslim [...]

Stephen Grey reports from Beirut:
IN an underground car park in the centre of Beirut, a bald man emerged from his Mercedes, surrounded by a phalanx of armed bodyguards.
As deputy leader of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, Musa Abu Marzouk is a potential target for assassination by Israel. Yet there to greet him last week was [...]

Guess who wanted to sell nuclear technology to Iran back in the 1970s?
Lacking direct evidence, Bush administration officials argue that Iran’s nuclear program must be a cover for bomb-making. Vice President Cheney recently said, “They’re already sitting on an awful lot of oil and gas. Nobody can figure why they need nuclear as well [...]

Maybe I’m a cynic, but this just looks cheesy and opportunistic.

Abu Aardvark explains why Jim Hoagland is going after Jordan’s King Abdullah. Disgraceful. There are so many better reasons to go after Abdullah.

Ahmed Zaki, the veteran Egyptian actor who played roles such as former presidents Nasser and Sadat, passed away today after a long battle with cancer. The Egyptian press had been on death watch for the past few weeks, including some rather tasteless coverage of his agony.
Zaki’s last film, Maali Al Wazir (His Excellency the Minister), [...]

There will be a Muslim Brotherhood demonstration outside parliament in about an hour (at 1pm.) It should be one of the first one in ages, but the question will be whether the Brothers come out in strength or just send a token representation. There have been a number of demos outside parliament in the past [...]

Tipped off by friend and Egyptian journalist Magdy Samaan, who writes for Masr Al Youm, I went to Bab Sharqeya–the Cairo neighborhood that elected Ayman Nour to parliament and where he holds weekly rallies–to see how it is festooned in pro-Mubarak, anti-Nour posters. Member of the NDP and of various local councils (and the other [...]

Read Syria Exposed. Another very funny, very weird Syrian blog. (Another one I mentioned recently is Amarji.)

Abu Aardvark mentioned in a recent post that a “popular Islamic party” might see the light in Egypt, and noted that he hadn’t seen much on it so far. I was hoping to post about this earlier, but things being as busy as they are, I am doing so only now.
The basic story, as Al [...]

… never fails to entertain:
“The Israelis are idiots and the Palestinians as well,” Kadhafi said Wednesday in the speech at the closing session of the two-day summit in Algiers which is usually reserved for a reading of the final resolutions.
“The Jews are dying by the dozen because they are in the West Bank and the [...]

Juan Cole links to an update on the AIPAC investigation. He says:
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee spy case is heating up again. The FBI clearly believes that AIPAC is at the center of an important political conspiracy, but may not be able to make the whole case in the legal system.
Whatever the outcome [...]

Rather embarrassing mistake:
Professor Juan Cole thinks:”An outspoken but generally anti-Shiite Bahrain blog by a Sunni is Mahmood’s Den”
So I’m anti-shi’ite, and I’m a Sunni!
Apart from both statement being completely wrong (I’m not just a Shi’ite, but am a Sayyed and an Alawi (both parents are Sayyeds and can trace their lineage as descendants [...]

The third and final thing that stood our for me in the Rice interview (transcript) was about the expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Here the gap between official discourse and the real policy is widening:
Rice denied reports from Israeli officials — and some U.S. officials — that the Bush administration had struck [...]

The second item of note in the WaPo Rice interview (transcript) is on Syria’s future, which is being debated in Washington with exiled opposition figures that are giving me a bizarre sense of deja vu. More on this below, but first the Rice quote:
Q: One last question and that is on Syria. I gather President [...]

I just read the very interesting interview (transcript) the Washington Post did with Condoleeza Rice. There are three issues I want to highlight in it, but I’ll post each separately. The first is about Egypt. For about a quarter century, the primary objective of the Mubarak regime and its most important claim to both international [...]

A couple of social scientists at Harvard have put the received wisdom to the test and found that only a small proportion of Pakistani children receive a full-time education in religious schools