IRAQ: Intellectuals hail reopening of Baghdad's Mutanabi Street

The windows on the buildings just off Mutanabi Street in Baghdad are still shattered, remnants of a devastating car bomb that exploded in the city's cultural and intellectual core last year, killing 30 people and injuring dozens of others.

Turn the corner, though, into the storied street of booksellers and that bomb seems like a distant memory. Prime Minister Nouri Maliki re-opened the reconstructed street last week, welcoming Iraqis back and vowing that the will of the people is stronger than terrorism.

"The return back of life on Mutanabi Street is the return back of life of the Iraqi culture," bookseller Salam Mohammed Abud said Friday, as scores of people roamed the streets. "For any intellectual, any educated man, Mutanabi Street is considered part of his education."

EGYPT: Poet sees a storm coming

Iman Bakry has a fortuneteller's voice, husky and cracked. It coaxes you into her colloquial poems, which once were about romance but have since shifted to a cutting critique of President Hosni Mubarak's government and an Egypt plagued by self-doubt, repression, corruption and a dangerous divide between rich and poor.

"I see a storm coming," begins a stanza in one of her poems.

Bakry is a media-savvy wordsmith who has risen to national prominence through television appearances and public readings. Her politically barbed verse articulates the frustrations and false dreams that have embittered a cynical public and laced the air with hints of rebellion. Opposition forces are often silenced and intimidated by the authoritarian government, but Bakry senses the anger welling.

"The explosion is already happening," she said in an interview in her Cairo apartment. "There's demonstrations, political activism, labor strikes, protests over clean water and bread shortages. All this signals the collapse of the whole society. We are walking to hell, toward a very dark future."

Read the rest of the story in today Los Angeles Times.

--Jeffrey Fleishman in Cairo

Photo: Iman Bakry in her Cairo apartment. Credit: Asmaa Waguih

EGYPT: New book captures a nation's angst

Thanks to content that hits a sensitive nerve with a highly disenchanted society, the book “Egypt Is Not My Mother, But My Stepmom” has been breaking sales records across the country.

The book is a collection of satirical pieces that tackle a plethora of Egypt's social and political ills, including corruption, political despotism, backwardness and human rights violations, questioning the validity of the sense of belonging to the country. The first edition came out in January 2008; in less than a year, the book went into a ninth printing, garnering an unprecedented success in a county with a slim readership.

"How would you expect people to have a sense of belonging toward a country where they cannot find food, clothing or shelter?" author Osama Gharib told the L.A. Times.

Gharib, a columnist with the independent daily al-Masry al-Youm, does not provide his readers with conventionally sophisticated analyses. On the contrary, his book, which relies on colloquial Arabic in many parts, has derived its popularity from being a ruthless mockery of Egyptian realties.

JORDAN: Poet arrested for insulting Islam

A Jordanian poet who published a collection of his works has found himself in hot water. He's been accused of apostasy, a crime that could carry the death penalty in some parts of the Islamic world.

Islam Samhan, 27, was arrested by authorities today. He could be sentenced to up to three years in prison. The specific charge?  Harming Islam by incorporating Koranic imagery into his love poems.

According to The National, the Abu Dhabi daily, Samhan's work, "Slim Shadows," caught the attention of Jordanian clerics, including Jordan's Grand Mufti Noah Alqdah Samas, who called him an enemy of religion for comparing his loneliness to that of the prophet Youssef in the Koran.

Suddenly, Samhan's nightmare began. His book was banned and he began receiving death threats.

IRAQ: Female bomber cartoon stirs anger

The weekly newspaper that calls itself Al Esbuyia, or Iraq Weekly, offers a regular diet of sports, culture, features and sarcasm to readers, and one of its key features is the cartoon that accompanies each new issue. Most of the cartoons poke fun at the hardships endured by regular Iraqis, but some Iraqi lawmakers found the one published Sept. 14 to be not very amusing.

It shows a Muslim woman clad in a burka holding a burning bomb fuse in her raised left hand, a la the Statue of Liberty, who stands beside her. The drawing reflects the growing number of female suicide bombers in Iraq, but members of Iraq's parliament denounced it as an insult to Iraqi Muslim women and voted Sunday to sue the newspaper for defamation.

It's too early to say where, if anywhere, the lawsuit will go. For months, Iraqi lawmakers haven't been able to pass pressing legislation to hold provincial elections or share the nation's oil wealth, so the chances of them getting organized enough to push through a lawsuit like this seem remote.

But the action itself is another sign of the Iraqi government's prickly relationship with the media, which were hobbled for decades under Saddam Hussein. His ouster ushered in press freedom, sort of. Iraqi journalists and media company employees get gunned down, kidnapped, threatened and roughed up with alarming frequency. They also get detained and held, sometimes for months, by U.S. forces.

ISRAEL: Laying Darwish to Rest

They came in the thousands to say goodbye--not just Fatah Party political hacks  and aging leftists, but a cross-generational gathering of Palestinians that showed the reach of Mahmoud Darwish 's appeal.

Palestine's unofficial Poet Laureate received what amounted to an unofficial state funeral. The 67-year old poet, who died in Houston from complications following heart surgery, was buried Wednesday in Ramallah.

"It was a great loss to us," said Shirina Rantisi, a 19-year old college sophomore who ,like many, wore a -shirt bearing Darwish's face. "Everyone loves him."

The sheer diversity of Darwish's reach was on display in the crowds that accompanied his procession and waited in the sun outside his burial plot on a hill overlooking Ramallah's Palace of Culture.

Rantisi said she and many others in the crowd didn't necessarily follow Darwish's poetry, but respected him as an icon of the Palestinian struggle.

"It's the symbolism, she said, comparing Darwish to Che Guevara.

-- Ashraf Khalil in Ramallah

Photo credit: Ashraf Khalil

LEBANON: A writer with many facets

Rabih Alameddine loves to tell stories, all sorts of them. Stories about intimate sexual experiences,  about twisted family gatherings and even ancient ones about an Arabian prince who failed to have a son.

And just like his diverse and multifaceted stories, this Lebanese American fiction and essay writer juggles various identities that he hates to label.

Alameddine, 48, is an openly gay writer, but that's not how he'd like to be categorized. He quickly adds that he also happens to be a writer with a hairy chest, and that he loves to play soccer. 

Born in Jordan in an upper-middle-class Lebanese family, he was raised between Kuwait and Lebanon. He went to the United Kingdom then to the United States after the civil war broke out in 1975, shifting his career from engineering to painting and writing along the way.

Today, Alameddine lives between San Francisco and Beirut, where he was recently promoting his new novel, "The Hakawati," or "The Storyteller."

Alameddine, also wrote the novels "Koolaids," and "I, the Divine," sat down for an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles Times: Your new book follows an old tradition in Arabic literature. Yet, what you present is a modern vision of the Arabian nights that seems more subversive and more overt. What is the book really about?

Rabih Alameddine: I am fascinated about how families start, where they come from.... In a large measure, the book is the stories I tell myself about myself. Those include personal stories.... Some are true, others are not true. But they are also stories that I tell about my family, how I fit among my family and my friends. There are stories that I tell also about my culture whether in the U.S. or Lebanon. It is the meeting of these stories that define a person, relationships and who we are as people. And that’s what I am interested in.

EGYPT: Sex and a feminist novelist

The apartment door bears no man's name, which is unusual in Cairo, but it's a fitting snub at convention for feminist author Sahar El-Mougy, who lives and writes outside society's strictures. Her independent lifestyle -- women here are whispered about and prayed for if they live alone -- defies the patriarchal order beyond her flat and inspires emancipation on the pages of her novels and short stories.

El-Moguy, 45, is a rising Arab feminist voice, articulating  the conflict between western liberal values and Middle East gender identities. Her two novels and two short-story collections have gained wide acclaim, especially since the recent publication of "Noon," a story that explores the challenges and paradoxes facing independent Egyptian women navigating a nation rooted in traditional customs and a growing strand of conservative Islam.

"These women don't have enough space in society; however, they seem very influential," said El-Mougy, who works as assistant professor of English poetry at Cairo University.  "Their mere presence sets a model for my girls in their 20s who live in a society that suffers from a frightening spread of salafi [Islam]. These women lecture, write and deal with other sectors in the society."

The protagonist in "Noon" is Sarah, a divorced woman in her late 30s who lives alone, hangs out with men and women alike, derives fulfillment from academic research, fights male dominance over her intellect, and more controversially, enjoys extramarital sex. For El-Mougy, Sarah represents a widening class of women struggling to carve out a space for themselves.

EGYPT: Is there a life after Mubarak?

An inflammatory new book has raised the question on the minds of many Egyptians: What will happen when aging President Hosni Mubarak is no longer in power? "The Last Days," by activist Abdel Halim Qandil, is far from an impartial analytical study. It is a scathing dissident's attack on Mubarak's 26-year rule.

"How will the end be? Destiny and time are in a race, and the countdown of Mubarak's regime started long ago. The regime has died clinically and we should be only waiting for its funeral," wrote Qandil. The author does not mince his words or images, criticizing Mubarak as a dictator and using the book's cover to depict the 80-year-old president as a cartoonish figure with a flabby, wrinkled face.

Meanwhile, the book examines the scenarios that await Egypt after the disappearance of the former air force officer who became the lackluster figurehead for the ruling National Democratic Party. "Would the army take over? Or the Muslim Brotherhood? Or Mubarak's son, Gamal? Is a peaceful transfer of power possible?" wonders the author.

ISRAEL: Seeing a threat in U.S. academic

When is a 55-year-old lifelong academic and son of Holocaust survivors a threat to the national security of Israel? When that academic is Norman Finkelstein, a former DePaul University professor and prominent critic of Israeli policy.

Israel's Shin Bet internal security service detained Finkelstein at the airport Friday when he arrived from a recent European speaking tour. After a night of detention and interrogation, Finkelstein was declared a security threat and sent back to Europe. According to his lawyer, Finkelstein is banned from the country for 10 years.

Shin Bet officials told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Finkelstein was deported because  of "suspicions involving hostile elements in Lebanon" -- a reference to Finkelstein meeting recently with leaders of Hezbollah and expressing solidarity with the Lebanese militant group.

EGYPT: Female blogger elicits criticism

The “wanna-b-a-bride” blog has recently elicited a storm of controversy on Babylon and beyond for its unconventional content that mocks Egyptian patriarchal norms.

Since a piece was posted about the blog last month, more than 40 comments carrying divergent views have been sent to the author Ghada Abdel Aal. Some hailed the blog as a daring exposure of an unjust reality while many dismissed it as a sham.

“Ghada  u r really a wonderfull gilr, go ahead allah with u and always remember every sucessfull person has many difficulties & critics and please belive in your  opinion, it's yours :),” Wafaa wrote on Babylon and Beyond

Yet, Abdel Aal’s detractors had a different say on her blog which was turned earlier this year into a book. “To the worst example of unmarried girls. To the person  who only represents herself and sick people, enough dissoluteness. Where are decency and purity?” wondered a respondent. 

IRAN: Book fair bars sex, of any sort

No sex allowed. Not even consensual sex between a wife and husband.

That was the message this year before today's start of the Tehran International Book Fair.

The fair first sounded like a book lover's dream: 200,000 titles  on an enticing variety of topics put on display for those with a voracious appetite for reading.

But fans of steamy romance novels were sorely disappointed.

Here's what Saffar Harandi, Iran's Mnister of Islamic Guidance and Culture, told reporters a few days ago: