Dr. Maher Hathout Criticizes Bigotry of South Carolina Board of Education Member

by Pat and Samir Twair

South Carolina state board of education member Dr. Henry Jordan stirred up a nationwide hornets' nest when he publicly cast aspersions on the Buddhist and Muslim religions in America. The Columbia, SC surgeon, who failed to win the Republican nomination in his state's race for the lieutenant governorship, used inflammatory language at a May 13 board of education meeting as he dismissed anyone who might object to a display of the Ten Commandments in public schools. "Screw the Buddhists and kill the Muslims," he retorted to the possibility that Buddhist and Muslim groups might not like exhibits that excluded their faiths. Furthermore, Jordan told the secretary, "put that in the minutes."

When word spread of Jordan's taped comments, they were released under the Freedom of Information Act and protest press conferences were called May 22 in Washington, DC and Los Angeles by the Interfaith Alliance and Muslim Public Affairs Council.

Speaking at the Islamic Center of Southern California, Dr. Maher Hathout stated: "It is unacceptable for a member of any board of education to speak vulgarly with a message of poison and hate. We want this man fired. The governor of South Carolina said he should be forgiven in true Christian spirit. Maybe Dr. Jordan can be forgiven, but he should still be fired. We are not seeking vengeance; this man simply does not qualify to be on a board of education."

Carol Lehvi, director of the American Jewish Congress in Los Angeles, commented: "Words are powerful. Words are dangerous. We have every right to answer and tell Dr. Jordan you are foolish, you have committed a serious breach of ethics."

Jordan just couldn't seem to stop putting his foot in his mouth as he tried to justify his words by telling reporters: "We can't teach basic Christianity even from a historical standpoit, but they can teach about Muslims and Buddhists. They can teach any kind of cult. Buddhism is a cult. So is Islam. I'm getting a little tired of it."

So, too, did Dr. Havanpala Ratanasara, president of the American Buddhist Congress, seem tired as he spoke at the L.A. conference. "Buddhism is one of the major world religions, This Dr. Jordan does not know world history when he says Christianity is the only true religion. It is dangerous to have such people who are so ignorant of world religions on a school board."

Dr. Hathout closed the session by warning that such bigoted statements are accelerating. "To say it must be my way or screw you is unacceptable."

It is unlikely Jordan will be removed from the board, since he was appointed to a four-year term just last month. The governor can remove him from the 17-member board only if he is convicted of misconduct.

Sudanese Feminist in Residence at UCLA

Fatima Ahmed M. Ibrihim began fighting for women's rights in Sudan in the 1950s. She has been imprisoned and exiled, but she never has given up the struggle. During the 1996-97 academic year she has been in residence at UCLA as a Rockefeller Fellow. On May 9 she discussed in a campus lecture her lifelong campaign to improve the lives of women everywhere. Prof. Sandra Hale introduced her as "the most important politician in Sudan's history." A leader of the Sudanese Women's Union for 40 years, Ibrihim became the first woman deputy in the Sudanese parliament in 1965.

Pointing to a large poster of a much younger Ibrihim in profile, she commented to the packed audience, "Amnesty International made this poster. They were forever getting me out of prison."

Ibrihim stressed it isn't just Third World women who are discriminated against. "In the United States, women are paid 68 percent of what men earn for the same job and they work far more hours. In the West, women have full freedom sexually, but incidents of rape are high. Child sexual abuse is so rampant it had to be addressed at a conference in Belgium a few months ago. Western women's nude or scantily clothed bodies are degraded in commercials to sell things. Few Western women hold political office because politics are a means to power and power leads to wealth."

She repeatedly emphasized that Islam is not responsible for female discrimination, political regimes are. "Real democracy is based on social justice and protection of human rights," she continued, "yet in so-called Western democracies, there is class and race discrimination."

Harking back to her early activism, Ibrihim said she tried to reach housewives through a grassroots movement with branches even in southern Sudan. "It was a sensitive issue to organize women. We always approached the village chief or imam and got permission to set up an informal group."

In 1953, she began publishing A Woman's Voice, a feminist journal. "We started our campaign for women's right to vote," she told her audience. "We remained independent of political parties, but our enemies insisted our women's union was Communist. In 1958, two years after independence, there was a coup d'état and political parties were banned. That's when we went underground."

In 1964, with women in the front lines of the Sudanese revolution, they achieved the right to vote. Ibrihim looks upon the years 1965 to 1969 as a golden age in which her countrywomen enjoyed full equality and ran for political office, as she did, and won.

No sooner did Jaafar Numeiri take over in 1969 than women's organizations were banned. Ibrihim's solution was to organize women to join societies. "Then the imams spoke through loudspeakers warning women not to join our societies," she recalled. "So we opened cooperative markets that offered food and drygoods at cheaper prices. The wife of an imam regularly bought from us. After several months, she asked her husband if he felt unholy because for a long time she had been washing his clothes with co-op soap and feeding him with co-op food. When she handed him all the money she had saved, he became a supporter of our co-op."

Ibrihim is working on a book dealing with Islam and women's rights. She lectures at Rabat University in Morocco. Even while in California, she organized branches of the London-based Democratic Front for Peace in Sudan. "Wherever Sudanese live, we are organizing," she said.

Beirut Archaeology Proves Lebanon's Antiquity

If it weren't for Lebanon's destructive 5-year civil war, which has given rise to a massive urban renewal project, it is unlikely the true age and total number of different cultural groups who have dwelled in the city would ever have been ascertained. Prior to the rebuilding of the devastated city center, archeologists never had an opportunity to find out exactly what lay under it.

Firsthand experiences at rescuing Beirut's historical record were discussed April 24 by two American University of Beirut archaeologists speaking at an AUB alumni dinner in Al Amir Restaurant in Los Angeles. Speakers were Sorbonne-educated Dr. Leila Badre of the AUB Museum and Dr. Helga Seeden of the AUB Department of Archaeology.

Actual excavation began in November 1993 by the AUB, Lebanese University and the French Institute of Archaeology. Excavations of Martyr's Square were under the Directorate of Antiquities and UNESCO.

Commented Dr. Seeden: "This was where an archaeological dream and reality met, as three AUB teams began to reveal 5,000 years of urban history. A total of 100 excavation sites were located in the central district, Bourj area and Parliament Square."

Dr. Badre, who was in charge of pre-Islamic sites, explained: "It was my personal interest to discover the oldest Bronze Age city of Beirut. Actually, we knew nothing about 3rd millennium Beirut. It is only from the 14th century B.C. Tell Amarna letters between Pharaoh Akhenaten and the king of Beyruta that we have written mention of the city." She added that beyruta is the plural of beir [well], inferring that ancient Beirut must have been named for its many wells.

She found the answer to her inquiry into the antiquity of Beirut inside a Crusader castle that had been dug to bedrock. Here, the angle of a room from the Canaanite period was identified by pottery sherds dating to 2300 b.c. The second oldest occupation site is a mudbrick city wall dating to the mid-2nd millennium. The fourth habitation level is a 13th to 12th century b.c. Canaanite wall similar to that of Megiddo in Palestine. Dr. Badre pointed out that Phoenician is the name the Greeks gave to the Canaanite inhabitants of the 10th century. The name stuck.

A Phoenician glacis a sloping wall and rampart was unearthed between the port and Martyr's Square. Impressive fortification walls speak for the importance of ancient Beirut, she reasons. Another unsolved mystery is why Phoenician texts do not mention a city named Beirut.

Dr. Seeden, who has excavated prehistoric sites in Busra, Syria, was in charge of Islamic remains in Beirut. "We were looking for water and drainage systems and we discovered they existed in Beirut from Roman times. So while medieval Europe was a backwater, Beirut had marvelous sanitation," she said.

Over her 660 days of excavating, Dr. Seeden and her teams have turned up 8,000 coins, 7 million sherds, 1 million animal bones, oil lamps, cooking vessels, amphora and exquisite mosaics. One of her favorites in the latter category came from a Byzantine dwelling named the "House of Jealousy" for the Greek inscription on its mosaic floor. It read: "Jealousy is the worst of all evils, but it has this good in it; it eats the heart and the eyes of the jealous person."

"What do we do with this cultural heritage?" she asked rhetorically. "If our material was as large as Baalbek, we could leave it in situ.

"Beirutis are not museum-goers," she continued. Wouldn't it be better, she proposed, to have an archeological trail so that on every street corner Beirutis could see their past in the Omari Mosque, the Ottoman serai, the Byzantine souqs?

"The ruins of Beirut can't stand on their own," she stressed. "What can we do? If we were to create a Byzantine village, it would certainly earn back its investment within one year."

Urging that all cultural remains be preserved, Dr. Badre commented: "Preserving only Phoenician ruins does not preserve the history of Lebanon."

Bicentennial of Napoleon's "Expedition" to Egypt Inspires Conference

The approaching bicentennial of Napoleon's incursion into Egypt in the summer of 1798 prompted UCLA's Von Grunenbaum Near East Center to host a two-day international conference at UCLA and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library May 9 and 10. The theme of the opening day's lectures was "Encounters." They included a talk by Prof. Juan R.I. Cole entitled "Mad Sufis and Civic Courtesans: The Republican French Construction of Late 18th Century Egypt."

Perhaps to the chagrin of French members of the audience, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor historian commented, "For 200 years, it's been termed 'Napoleon's Expedition' to Egypt. That's long enough. It was an invasion." Cole estimated that of the 35,000 French soldiers and civilians who traveled to Egypt in 1798, only 19,000 returned alive.

"Many French troops who assaulted the Nile Valley were revolutionaries, anti-royalists and anti-religious," he stated. By perusing the some 300 memoirs that have survived two centuries, Cole has concluded the French and the Egyptians initially viewed each other as barbaric. The French likened the veil to a horse helmet and the turban to a bird's nest, while the Egyptians were shocked to observe that the French relieved themselves publicly and did not remove their shoes when entering a home.

The French, Cole said, tried to portray themselves as the liberators of the Egyptians from the feudal and self-indulgent Mamluk rulers. Liberty, power and domination were key words in this encounter, Cole said.

"The French saw themselves as liberating the Nile Valley from Mamluk domination, but they overlooked French domination." After the French fleet was burned by the British and Napoleon was forced to remain in Egypt, he overtaxed the Egyptian people to pay for their own occupation, and reacted violently whenever the Egyptians rebelled.

UCLA's Dr. Afaf Marsot, an Egyptian-born historian whose husband is French, concurred, remarking that the Egyptians had used passive resistance to avoid paying taxes to the Mamluks. "The French wouldn't put up with this," she said. "Not only did they squeeze the cities, but they burned the villages which did not pay. Without mentioning the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Dr. Marsot added, "When you conquer a territory, you're not going to treat the occupied like your own people. You want to get taxes out of them."

"It is wrong to think enlightenment came with the French," the Egyptian-born historian continued. "The French didn't introduce the golden age, it was after the French left that the golden age began. In many ways [Egyptian ruler] Mohammed Ali was a tyrant, but he set the foundations for a modern state and started an industrial base."

Posing the question of what the French left behind, she said, "They broke the tie between the native rulers and Mamluks resulting in [the emergence of] Mohammed Ali. The French set up factories to produce gun powder; Mohammed Ali used these factories for his army and that's how the industrial revolution began in Egypt. The French also instituted the idea for a single main tax instead of multiplicity."

In commenting on both papers, UCLA's Geoffrey Symcox put out the question as to why Napoleon personally traveled with his army and with French geologists, surveyors, chemists, botanists, artists, linguists and architects to Egypt. He theorizes it was megalomania on the part of Bonaparte, who had visions of being another Alexander the Great. Napoleon proclaimed he was bringing enlightenment and reason to a backward country and rescuing the cradle of civilization from a population that no longer comprehended it.

Cole opined that Britain and France were vying for control of the world. After 1764, new innovations in firearms meant Europeans could control huge territories such as Bengal. The French had expected to take control of Egypt as the British had taken over India. This seemed possible after the French defeated the Mamluks, who could only make short-range strikes while the French could shoot from long range.

Marsot voiced the opinon that Bonaparte's arrival was a colonial adventure. "Otherwise why did the French marry Egyptian women?" she asked. "They planned to stay, and the Egyptians thought they were abominable when they left their Egyptian wives behind."

Cole proposed a Vietnam analogy: "Perhaps it was the French who invented the liberation discourse for a colonial enterprise, which was the same explanation Dean Rusk used when he said we were saving Vietnam."

Syrian National Day Observed

More than 350 members and friends of the Syrian Arab American Association gathered April 20 at the Bonaventure Hotel to mark the 51st anniversary of Syria's independence. On hand from Washington, DC was Syrian Consul Milad Atiyeh, who discussed the strides Syria has made since April 17, 1946.

SAAA President George Grair commented that "on this occasion that is so very dear to us, it is good to be united as one community."

Indeed, unity was the theme of the evening, with Jordanians, Saudis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Iraqis on hand for the celebration.

In an earlier interview with the Washington Report, Consul Atiyeh reiterated Syria's position that Israel must withdraw from south Lebanon and all of the Golan, as part of carrying out United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242, 338 and 425.

When asked how Damascus assesses the Palestinian-Israeli and Jordanian-Israeli peace treaties, he replied: "Basically, we are not against them, but we want to see where they will lead. So far, the results have not been what the Arab parties were expecting. The Arabs are looking for a just and comprehensive peace. Negotiations stopped after the Qana massacre and when [Likud Prime Minister] Binyamin Netanyahu came to power."

Asked whether he believes Syria will follow the road of capitalism or socialism, he responded with one word: "Neither."