Muslims press candidates at Walthamstow election meeting

Local hustings in the Walthamstow constituency have been lively affairs, but none perhaps as interesting as the Grove Road mosque meeting on Friday evening April 30. After all, this is a constituency with the third largest Muslim community in London, where Muslims are a major component of the estimated one third of the borough who are non-white. The packed audience largely consisted, unsurprisingly, of male Asians, and a few of their wives seated the other side of the aisle.

Among the four "honoured" guests was, to my surprise, Jonathan Steele, the former foreign correspondent of "The Guardian", who was presumably there to add gravitas. Of the candidates of the three main parties, the only woman was Stella Creasy, the Labour candidate, who, notably, had her head uncovered. The rather genial Walthamstow Council of Mosques leader introduced proceedings, or rather introduced Mr Steele (at some, almost obsequious, length). Why the mosque leader wasn't the one chairing a meeting aimed at the local Muslim community, can only be guessed at.

In the manner of the televised Leaders' debates, the questions had been approved in advance, and were mostly safe and sensible, albeit reflecting the understandable specific concerns of the local Muslim community. Creasy, a former local mayor, and the favourite to win what should be a firm Labour seat, and her main challenger, the Lib-Dem parliamentary candidate and local councillor Farid Ahmad, clashed over specifics concerning their individual and/or party records on issues like outlawing religious discrimination and health care. In the manner for which his campaign has become somewhat renowned, Ahmed made unsubstantiated accusations against Creasy and her party and showed a disturbing lack of familiarity with his own party's stance in the Lords on legislation tackling religious hatred. However it was when the meeting turned to foreign policy that things really came alive and audience members began to voice their opinions in an unscripted fashion. The three candidates adopted a mostly faithful rendition of their national parties' approach to Middle East matters - there were no questions about China and Russia. Andy Hemsted, a rather tired retread of a 1980s Tory Essex Boy caricature, found himself in fairly deep water as his rather unsophisticated take on terror and nukes made him sound a tad too close to Israel for this audience's particular delectation.

Overall, Creasy stole the show, in part because she was quicker on her feet than the other contenders, but also because she has plainly been working this particular community who warmed to her reminders of her past community work. Ahmed, whose campaign has sometimes cynically courted the vote of fellow Muslims against Labour on religious grounds, was not as well received as might have been expected. I left the meeting feeling that perhaps Labour's 7,000 majority, which was slashed from 15,000 in the 2005 "Iraq" poll, will in fact hold up pretty well.

Saudi debates

Riyadh, Friday 29 February 2010.
I have been in KSA nearly a week in which time I have dipped in and out of the Jeddah Economic Conference, a kind of big ticket stadium event for the Mid-East business analysis crowd, and then almost traversed Arabia to reach the capital Riyadh where I have been seeking interlocutors for my latest research project. My departure from Jeddah was premature; I later discovered that one or two of the people I really wanted to see here in Riyadh were actually at the conference. In addition, it’s an attractive city with a partly accessible shoreline a thousand plus miles from the Gulf, and that’s not a bad feeling sometimes.

Today I took the superfast lifts to get more than 100 floors up the Kingdom tower in Riyadh and stood on the SkyBridge (the tallest vantage point in KSA) and surveyed the city. I had walked there in the 35 degree winter heat (natch) and looked more than a little shabby as I arrived in the Mamlika Mall desperate to purchase my ticket. It was prayer time of course, although it was interesting (albeit not for the first time) to watch shopkeepers from right across Asia hurrying to briefly shut down these outlets in one of Riyadh’s many temples of mammon as the muezzin called (some of) the faithful to pray.

Thus far the trip has brought me closer to some of the debates raging around the Kingdom, but not that close. Everything is of course spun to suit the self interested or associated party that is being represented. So I am aware that the advancement of legal reform in the face of religious resistance and the flowering of civil society is in fact happening while at the same time domestic and foreign policy is in the hand of a tiny number of senior figures who in many instances don’t agree and don’t consult with each other. Hard to see how the latter adds up to anything other than the chance for some symbolic actions through dismissal and appointment rather than a major series of political shifts. In this vein the recent removal of two troublesome priests is seen by some here as an indication that the top man could push things further, not least on the planned shake up of the judiciary that in theory could water down existing clerical control in favour of a more structured management approach with proper specialised training not least in the much needed area of commercial law. If you can sack such big guns without merely a whimper, goes the argument, then major reform that allows more reform-minded clerics to manage the process is plausible. Maybe, but how far and with what impact, argue others. Being so personality-led, the issue seems to boil down to what can be achieved at the very top before mortality kicks in. Economic cities may not have progressed sufficiently to have a legacy but, goes one argument, rights-orientated legal judgements by the reconstructed supreme appeals court can create precedents.

On regional issues things have looked up in terms of inter-Arab diplomacy, with the KSA working closely with Yemen over the northern revolt that spilled over the Saudi border and unleashed disproportionate fire power from the Kingdom’s de facto military chief. The proportionality doesn’t seem to be bothering the Saudis however. The ceasefire between the Yemen Government and its northern rebels is holding, with KSA backing the GoY to the hilt with major funding while it turns its border policing operation into a regular pork barrel for the Saudi military and its de facto head. Saudi-Syria relations seem to be at their best for 5 years, or more precisely since Damascus had Saudi ally and top Lebanese politician Rafiq Hariri blown up. This firms up the Arab tent with the hope that, being inside, they’ll piss out. Of course, from Syria’s point of view it’s probably a case of having your cake and eating it, as the Iranian tactical alliance isn’t going to come to an end and nobody expects otherwise. On Palestine, the hope is that a solution constrains Iranian asymmetric power, but no Arab state want to lift a finger to help other than to stand behind Egypt which is being limply backed by the US while Israel remains unbound.

Pictures from the recent past

On getting back to my room after the Riyadh Sky Bridge, I absorbed myself in photos of our US road trip last summer. I have never appreciated these pictures quite as much. I cried as I thought of how disconnected I had been for much of that journey and yet how moving I found the mere photographic record of them 5 months later. She looks lovely in so many of the shots I took (partly because she is so pleased that I am actually using my camera) and in one she looks divine. I know that my (rare) emotional engagement is against a background of a lonely Friday in KSA but it was so important to me to connect to the trip and to her, even if I didn’t that much when I was actually on it.

Out of Town Riyadh

Durba Door

Durba Central

Escarpment heading out of Riyadh

Saudi in springtime

Scene from my hotel window, Riyadh

Islamic Games fail over Nationalist names

Arab or Persian? Islamic Games shelved in "Gulf" row
Mon Jan 18, 2010 9:22am EST

By Asma Alsharif
RIYADH (Reuters) - A Saudi-based body organizing the world's second Islamic Solidarity Games has canceled the sports event planned for Iran amid a dispute over whether the Gulf waterway is "Arab" or "Persian."
The Islamic Solidarity Sports Federation, an affiliate of the 57-nation Organization of the Islamic Conference based in Saudi Arabia, said after a meeting on Saturday it decided to scrap the games which had been set for April.
The federation said Iran had taken "unilateral measures concerning logos used on printed material and medals," a statement sent to Reuters on Monday said. Secretary-General Muhammad Qazdar said that was in reference to Iran's planned descriptions of the Gulf.
Designation of the key waterway for global oil and gas supplies has long been a touchy issue among the countries bordering it -- Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Iraq and Iran.
Iran says it is the Persian Gulf, the Arab states say it is Arab. Foreign language descriptions can offend either party if they use one name or the other, or sometimes if they avoid an adjective altogether.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said on Monday the federation should reconsider its decision but insisted the waterway was Persian.
"The logo and naming should be done correctly, based on international norms and regulations and the naming by the United Nations," he told reporters on Monday.
"So basically the board of directors did not have the right to just interfere in such a process... We hope they will reconsider," he added.
The sports federation said a dispute over television rights and Iran's failure to provide information over steps to contain H1N1 flu also contributed to the decision to cancel the event.
The dispute comes amid tensions between Sunni Muslim-led Arab countries and non-Arab, Shi'ite Iran over increased Iranian influence in the region through its allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories.
Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally which sees itself as the leading Sunni state, is trying to rally Arab countries to challenge Iran, who it fears wants to obtain nuclear weapons and win U.S. recognition as the region's leading power.
Saudi Arabia and Iran are also at odds over a Shi'ite revolt in north Yemen. Riyadh has been fighting the rebels since a cross-border raid into Saudi territory in November, while Tehran says the fighting should be brought to an end through talks.
The Islamic Solidarity Games were first held in Saudi Arabia in 2005 with the participation of 55 countries, including Iran. They were delayed from October last year over flu concerns.
(Reporting by Andrew Hammond in Dubai and Asma Alsharif in Riyadh; Writing by Andrew Hammond; Editing by Dominic Evans)

SLO train returns

Bakersfield is synonymous (for me) with country music as imagined by the Rolling Stones (“girl with faraway eyes”) and memorable for both of us the place we consummated our marriage. This time round it appeared to have grown exponentially and as a result finding anything at all in the town, least of all a motel, proved difficult to say the least. Eventually we found the always reliable America’s Best Value Inn and headed off to a pizza parlour. The latter turned out to be a cross between a sports bar and a working class social club: the sort of place that in the UK would probably make me wince but which in the US having a wife and a pleasant disposition (and an enthusiasm for beer and pizza) made effortless. The next day we were in San Louis Obispo (SLO), more our kind of town: surrounded by mountains yet warm most of the year, inland but a short distance from the Californian coast, and possessed of very cool vinyl and book stores virtually next door to each other (Boo Boo Records and Phoenix Books). We stayed in the same motel on California as our last visit. Painted in adobe style, the Los Padres Motel is well located, being a short stroll up from the aforementioned stores and a selection of bars around California and Higuera streets. However its walls are paper thin and an afternoon’s siesta was to be rudely interrupted by the arrival of Randy and Barbara, or whoever, whom we could hear fart, let alone cough or copulate. SLO still proved a winner however, and a new discovery was in fact the oldest record store in town, “Cheap Thrills”, launched in 1971 when its album title appropriation would perhaps have been more obvious. It lives up to its name, and not in the negative, UK, sense, with LPs from $3 and some great and often very clean rarer items. Weighed down with another fix we retired early before hitting Boo Boo the next day which is a cooler store but which has a lot less vinyl. I still managed to score however, finding a (cheap) thrill reminiscent of three decades back as I tested a period copy of Traffic’s “John Barleycorn is Dead” on one of their many decks. Can you imagine being handed a cartridge and invited to cue up a second hand album in an equivalent UK store? The riverside bar and restaurant in Higuera once again proved a winner, as dining outdoors in mid November proved irresistible. We eased off our beer intake by strolling around the mission building to the sound of “Another Brick in the Wall (part 3)” pumping out of a bar and I felt a degree of patriotic fervour well up inside me. On being invited to enjoy a Stella with a drunken Brit in a bar over the road from the restaurant, I felt rather less affinity for my country. Leaving SLO was sad, but before long we were on Route 101 and hugging the Californian coast, reaching Big Sur where we discovered the delights of Gorda, essentially a small motel and collection of cabins/a restaurant and a shop. Our hotel room had a view of the Pacific a few hundred feet away, which helped offset the painful bed and an invasive external light. Up in Ripplewood, the log cabin collective run by Anglo women and worked by Mexicans, the breakfasts are still phenomenal. Priced out of the market we stayed for the first time at Fernwood where we were within walking distance of the bar and restaurant which still excites but the food service was never its strongest point. That day we revisited Pfeiffer-Big Sur, where we had spent hours watching a beached golden sea lion back in 2000 and which has meant so much to us since we first started coming to California in 1997. This time round it didn’t disappoint – rugged rocks and wild waves enhanced the sunset, after we had spent time watching a heron on an afternoon fishing expedition. We spent a couple of nights up the coast in Monterey where we prepared for a repeat whale watching expedition that, despite an attack of nausea, was a welcome escape from land that included a hump back as well as some dolphins. Coming into San Fran for the final leg proved easier than expected, although the city seemed sadly dead even for the time of year. While tourists are fairly thin on the ground in late November, it seems odd to see bars and shops closing up by 9. Tosca’s bar on Market and Columbus has a juke box with mostly opera and walls adorned with depictions from operatic scenes. Its dark red ambience is normally conducive to drinking but this virtually empty bar seemed a little sad, even though we were celebrating with a bottle of local champagne. We got to chatting with a banker about this and that and the time passed pleasantly before we moved on to red wine and steaks at Sears restaurant near our hotel – Grants on Bush in the renowned Nob Hill area (where an all male cabaret and a stimulant shop helps the area to (unwittingly) live up to its name). After such an evening our final full day in the US was a touch subdued, before the 2 days of flying back to the UK. It has however been a wonderful trip, one on which I have learned a lot and wished that I had known a hell of a lot more before I came. The divisions that one superficially witnesses are not just north and south, red and blue, but struck me the most as coastal versus interior: the cosmopolitan over the more traditional. Much of the time, however, we didn’t talk politics with those who for the most part were serving us rather than accompanying us. We enjoyed the hospitality and the polite lack of questioning or the polite disinterest in those with “funny accents”. The US has probably lost some of the lustre for me as the familiarity has grown, even in the limited experience I have of it. However I still want to know more, and to experience more, of this place, and will no doubt be back before that long.