Mideast Blog 12 July, 2016

More Liberal Islam. Death Threats Began.

For most of his adult life, Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi worked among the bearded enforcers of Saudi Arabia. He was a dedicated employee of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice – known abroad as the religious police – serving with the front-line troops protecting the Islamic kingdom from Westernization, secularism and anything but the most conservative Islamic practices.

Some of that resembled ordinary police work: busting drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that bans alcohol. But the men of “the Commission,” as Saudis call it, spent most of their time maintaining the puritanical public norms that set Saudi Arabia apart not only from the West, but from most of the Muslim world.

A key offense was ikhtilat, or unauthorized mixing between men and women. The kingdom’s clerics warn that it could lead to fornication, adultery, broken homes, children born of unmarried couples and full-blown societal collapse.

Read more.

Mideast Blog 28 June, 2016

Crossing Through Europe’s Firewall

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We transited through five Greek islands –Rhodes, Symi, Nisyros, Kos and Kalymnos — as we sailed westward across the Aegean Sea, collecting more asylum seekers at every stop. Exhausted men and women passed out in the narrow corridors, while others hand washed their clothes, and those who could not sleep gazed at the colorful clothes hung out to dry on the deck, fluttering in unison with Greek flags.

The group which first started out with Somar, his sisters and cousins expanded over time to include Somar’s fellow village friends, and at this point we were hanging out with strangers.

We finally arrived at Piraeus port, and against the cacophony of crashing waves people congratulated one another on finally making it to Europe. They then debated the ‘service memo’ system, which was enforced to allow Balkan states to track the movement (and hence the protection) of asylum seekers as they progressed further West. But due to lack of information, the young men didn’t appreciate the initiative. Instead, they heralded serious warnings about the risks of registering early on prior to reaching one’s chosen state of asylum. Their mistrust of the Dublin Regulation led them to a fear of being held in the Balkan States against their will.

The Shadow Doctors

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On a recent Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants’ dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain’s leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. “Hi David,” it began. “This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria.” Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach.

The image had been sent by a young medical worker in Aleppo. He had removed several bullets from the patient’s small intestine, but he wasn’t sure what to do about the wound in the throat. For the past hour, the man had been slowly dying on the operating table while the medical worker awaited instructions.

“Sorry, didn’t see your message till now,” Nott typed under the table. “Is the neurology ok?” It was: a bullet had pierced the trachea and the esophagus, but it hadn’t damaged the spinal cord. Nott told the medical worker to insert a plastic tube into the bullet hole, to provide an even supply of air. Then, he instructed, sew up the digestive tract with a strong suture, and, “to buttress the repair,” partly detach one of the neck muscles and use it to cover the wound.