[LINK] “Syria: Inventing a Religious War”

Facebook’s Conrad linked to Toby Matthiesen‘s post at the New York Review of Books blog about how Shi’ite international support for the Syrian government is a consequence of very specific choices made by the Syrian government to acquire Islamic credibility for the Alawite sect whose members dominated the Syrian elite, and international allies.

Since late May, pictures of Hezbollah militants standing amid the ruins of al-Qusayr, the former Syrian rebel stronghold, have offered dramatic evidence of the extent to which foreign Shia fighters are shifting the course of the Syrian war. To many observers, the Lebanese militia’s entry into the conflict has shown definitively that it has been a sectarian war from the outset. According to this view, Syria’s Alawite sect, to which the Assad clan and its security forces belong, is “quasi Shiite,” a fact which accounts for the government’s alliances to Iran and Hezbollah; while Syrian rebel forces are overwhelmingly dominated by the country’s aggrieved Sunni majority, now backed by the Sunni governments of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, along with various foreign Sunni jihadis.

But Bashar al-Assad is head of an ostensibly secular Baathist regime and many Shia think that Alawites are heretics. Why exactly is Hezbollah getting involved, and is this conflict really rooted in religion? The answer to both these questions may lie in a suburb of Damascus called Sayyida Zainab, the site of an important Shia shrine and since the 1970s a haven for foreign Shia activists and migrants in Syria. Today, Hezbollah forces, along with Iraqi Shia fighters, defend the suburb. Though the story of Sayyida Zainab is little known in the West, it may help explain why what began as a peaceful uprising against secular authoritarian rule in 2011 has increasingly become a war between Shia and Sunni that has engulfed much of the surrounding region.

Sayyida Zainab—located some six miles to the southeast of central Damascus—is named after the daughter of the first Shia Imam, Ali Ibn Abi Talib. While Zainab is allegedly buried there (Sunnis believe she is buried in the large Sayyida Zainab mosque in Cairo), the site is less important in the Shia tradition than the shrines in Iraq and Iran. In fact Sayyida Zainab only became a site of mass pilgrimage in the 1980s and 1990s, when a large shrine was built around the tomb with Iranian support.

By the time I did fieldwork there in 2008, however, the suburb of around 150,000 people had become a meeting ground for Shia from around the world. During the summer months, the foreign Shia population would reach tens of thousands, with up to one million pilgrims visiting Sayyida Zainab every year. There were clerics and students from the Gulf, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Africa, and South-East Asia, among other places. Publishers of cultural and religious magazines from Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula were having late-night discussions in the bookshops opposite the shrine. Young religious students were sitting in the Hawza Zainabiyya, a large center for Shia religious study there, or in one of the other smaller religious schools reading and discussing with their mentors. Iranian pilgrims could pay with Iranian currency, their thousand-tuman notes with the iconic picture of Khomeini bundled in the hands of the street vendors.

It was a world apart from the coffee houses and government buildings of central Damascus, where the old rhetoric of secular Arab nationalism still dominated, and at the time, I found it difficult to fathom the government’s reasons for allowing a suburb full of foreign religious students and clerics to flourish. Most Syrians I met had never been to Sayyida Zainab, and whenever I told people I was going there, they advised me not to go, complaining about the Iranians and Iraqis living there and arguing that it didn’t belong to the Syria they knew. Only after the Syrian uprising began in 2011 did it become clear to me that Sayyida Zainab was a crucial part of the alliance with Iran and Arab Shia militias that has until now allowed the Assad regime to keep the upper hand in the civil war.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• Charlie Stross mourns fellow and recently passed Scottish writer Iain (M.) Banks.
• Crooked Timber, Lawyers, Guns and Money, and New APPS all take a look at the disgusting self-justifying behaviour of philosopher Colin McGinn towards a female grad student of his.
• Daniel Drezner wonders about the extent to which ideology will become important in upcoming seasons of Game of Thrones.
• Language Hat wonders if Dutch spelling reforms have cut off contemporary speakers of Dutch from easy access to Dutch literature predating the mid-19th century.
• Marginal Revolution wonders if European Union Internet privacy and security regulations will make things worse for American firms.
• Personal Reflections’ Jim Belshaw writes about the continuing mystique of the monarchy in Australia.
• Registan’s Reid Standish talks about the marginal improvements in law and order in Kyrgyzstan.
• Strange Maps’ Frank Jacobs talks about the recent map reimagining the countries of the world on a reunified Pangaea as a rhetorical ploy.
• Understanding Society’s Daniel Little charts the ways in which life for Chinese has improved over the past four decades, asnd the ways in which things are still lacking.
• Window on Eurasia quotes from alarmists worrying about the “de-Russification” of Tatarstan, demographically and otherwise.

[PHOTO] Against the war in Central Africa, on College Street

I was walking last month off of College Street west of Bathurst when I saw this poster pasted on a utilities pole. This was the first poster I’ve ever seen in Toronto relating to the wars that have ravaged central Africa from the mid-1990s on. While I would fault the poster for not emphasizing the roots and ideological sustenance of the conflict in the region’s political and ethnic conflicts, I don’t disagree with its message about how resource exploitation has literally fueled the different factions.

“Since 1997, more people have died in Central Africa over precious metals found in your phone than died in the Holocaust (6 million). A woman is raped every 70 seconds on average by young soldiers who are used to clear villages near areas that are to be mined. Children are spared only to become slave workers in the mines. Fair Trade would cost only $1 more per device. The news has made no major effort to report the subject. The only person who can help is you. Please let other people know, too. If the majority of people know about this issue, companies will be forced to use Fair Trade instead of rape, murder, deceit and slavery. Find out more at conflictminerals.org or watch the documentary, Blood In the Mobile (bloodinthemobile.org). Good organizations to donate through are fallingwhistles.com and foodgrainsbank.ca.”

There are two footnotes, the first explaining what coltan ore and the metal tantalum are, the second emphasizing that the added cost would be trivial. The graphic at the bottom features the African continent drawn in the fashion of the Apple icon, and the transformation of the word “iPad” into an abbreviation for “innocent People are dying”.

[URBAN NOTE] “In Greenland, an Urban Heat Island Is Growing Fast”

Sarah Goodyear‘s article at The Atlantic Cities about the fast-growing impact of Greenland’s capital city of Nuuk, on the natural and human environments, is fascinating. One thing that Goodyear recounts is that for Greenlanders, their fast-growing city is a liberating thing, an increasingly relatively desirable habitat for Greenlanders that lets them connect with the outside world.

[F]or all our new familiarity with the idea of Greenland as a global climatological force, we don’t often think about it as a place where people live. With only 56,000 souls living on 836,000 square miles, it is the least densely populated country in the world. Most residents are concentrated in a few cities and towns on the island’s western edge. Some 16,000 live in the capital city of Nuuk.

And Nuuk, like cities around the world, is an urban heat island, according to research conducted by Tony Reames, a doctoral student at the University of Kansas School of Public Affairs and Administration.

Reames, whose studies have focused on environmental justice in urban America, began his research as a class project, not sure what he would find. But the almost laboratory-like conditions of Greenland, he discovered, were a perfect place to measure the effect of human urban development on temperature, especially in the dark winter months.

“You don’t have solar influences at all,” says Reames. “It’s a unique situation to observe the human activity impact.”

He looked at data from 2005 to 2011, and found a strong urban heat island effect in the winter months. In 2011, for instance, the urban area of Nuuk registered temperatures on average 0.5 degrees Centigrade warmer than the surrounding area. February temperatures were 1.1 degrees Centigrade higher than in the surrounding areas, an effect that Reames says is attributable to the intense demands of the heating season and to energy-inefficient buildings that radiate much of that heat into the atmosphere.

[LINK] “Indonesians are loving Toronto start-up’s app MavenSay”

Toronto Star technology journalist Radu Mudhar notes the surprising success of Toronto-made app MavenSay in Indonesia, aided by social networks in that country (specifically, prominent Instagram users based in Jakarta).

“Here we are just a group of guys sitting at a startup in Toronto and we woke up one morning realizing that we had this massive spike in Asia,” said Bryan Friedman, one of three of MavenSay’s founders. “We rose to become the No. 1 free iPhone app across all categories in Indonesia. And we sort of sat at the top of the charts for five days, beating out Angry Birds, the Iron Man app, Facebook, Twitter, everyone.”

Friedman, who started the company with his former University of Toronto classmates Mike Wagman and Jesse Dallal, said they were floored when they saw the 15,000 downloads that first day, which continued the following week as well.

MavenSay, built by a seven-person team, had initially focused garnering its users from cities like New York, L.A. and San Francisco. Celebrities, including Samantha and Charlotte Ronson, are sharing their likes. Maple Leaf Joffrey Lupul has recommended the Harbour Sixty Steakhouse, among other things.

Things were going well, said Friedman, but nothing could have prepared them for breakout success half way around the world. Looking back at the data, he chalks it up to some early adopters in Jakarta who had massive Instagram followings. Indonesia is home to an extremely tech savvy culture with high usage of social media platforms. At the end of 2012, Jakarta was the city with the most posted tweets in the world, and was the No. 5 country in the world for Twitter usage.

“We’ve tried to retrace the steps and find the exact person or group of people who started it,” he said. “The night this all started happening we noticed that a couple of these big Instagram users, who had about 16,000 followers each, and one of things you can do is publish your MavenSay profile on Instagram. So they cross-posted their profiles and it just went from there.”

[URBAN NOTE] “We Are Raising $200,000 to Buy and Publish the Rob Ford Crack Tape”

Gawker’s John Cook, the man who broke the story of Rob Ford’s alleged crack tape, announces that Gawker has launched a fundraiser to raise the 200 thousand dollars needed for the purchase of said video.

How Much Do We Need? $200,000. That’s what the owners of the video want. That sounds like a lot of money. The good people at Indiegogo believe that, with the appropriate amount of virality, that goal is achievable.

Christ, That’s a Lot of Money. Yes, it is. But they’ve got the video! And it’s not all about greed, though of course most of it is. The owners of this video fear for their safety, and want enough money to pay for a chance to get out of Toronto and set up in a new town. Their fear is not entirely unwarranted. Rob Ford is a powerful if buffoonish man, and he was wrapped up in a drug scene that purportedly involved many other prominent Toronto figures.

What Will We Get? A crystal clear, well-lit video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine, published on Gawker for the world to see. We will also be throwing in some perks, for specific donation amounts. But the main thing is the video of the mayor of Toronto smoking crack cocaine.

How Does This Work, Exactly? We’re using Indiegogo. We’ve set a target of $200,000, to be reached within 10 days. If we reach the target, we get the money. If we don’t reach the target, you get your money back. If we do reach the target, we will pay the money to the people who have the video. They will give us the video. We will publish the video. You will watch the video.

What If This Whole Thing Goes South? We are mindful that people who hang out with and surreptitiously record crack-smoking mayors may not always be reliable. The people we’ve been dealing with have so far honored every commitment they’ve made. And they have pledged to sell it to us for $200,000 if this Crackstarter works. But if they disappear, or sell it elsewhere, we will donate every penny we receive to a Canadian non-profit that helps people suffering from addiction and its consequences.

The Indiegogo page is here. Large amounts of money are being raised, two thousand dollars over the past hour and change to a total of $34,237 as I type.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• Bad Astronomy’s Phil Plait picks up on the news that the Canadian federal government is only going to fund research that leads directly to economic gain.
• The Burgh Diaspora’s Jim Russell wonders about the ethics of Cuba’s export of trained doctors as contract workers.
• Could a “Nebula Winter” explain Earth’s greatest glaciations? The Dragon’s Tales reports.
• Eastern Approaches reports on the indecisive election in crisis-ridden Bulgaria.
• Geocurrents examines the reasons for Bhutan’s surprisingly high level of development for a Himalayan polity.
• GNXP’s Razib Khan wonders about the ethics of certain kinds of eugenics, arguably already in practice today (pre-natal tests for Down’s syndrome, say).
• Lawyers, Guns and Money reports on the prospects that the disastrous building collapse in a clothing manufacturing plant in Bangladesh might lead to new global standards.
• Strange Maps has fun with the unusual placenames of the Shetland and Orkney islands, off the northeastern coast of Scotland.
• The Volokh Conspiracy notes that a German family claiming asylum in the United States on the grounds that homeschooling is not permitted in Germany has been turned down.
• Window on Eurasia reports on a conspiracy theory in Russia that Siberia is going to be stolen by Muslim guest workers.

[BLOG] Some Thursday links

• Bag News Notes features photographs of the aftermath of the Bangladeshi factory collapse.
• Centauri Dreams takes a look at the electric sail, propulsion method for spaceships currently being tested.
• At The Dragon’s Tales, Will Baird links to a study suggesting that China’s Yangtze river is at least 23 million years old.
• Daniel Drezner doesn’t think that an age of cheap energy globally will necessarily destabilize the world, at least outside of oil exporters, since globalization binds in other ways.
• Eastern Approaches notes the continuing sensitivity of the post-Second World War deportation of the Sudeten Germans from the Czech Republic, as recently emphasized by the Czech president’s defense.
• Geocurrents examines the reasons for the sharp shift in most of India towards below-replacement fertility rates, suggesting that television shows featuring women with small families may be as important a factor as anything else.
• At Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis notes that one of the first victories of organized labour in the United States occurred in 1882 with the implementation of a ban on Chinese immigration. (Canada followed in 1885.)
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Sasha Volokh examines the implications of prisons being reviewed on Yelp.
• Window on Eurasia notes that Ukrainians and Moldovans, not Central Asians, are more likely to be undocumented migrants in Russia. (They’re less visually and culturally distinctive, apparently, and harder to catch.)

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• The Burgh Diaspora writes about the linkages between population and economic change.
• Centauri Dreams examines the discovery of stellar parallax and its use to determine the distance to the stars in the 19th century.
• The Dragon’s Tales examines computer models of the settlement of the Americas. The model of migration across Beringia remains intact, while transpacific migration can’t be excluded but can’t be supported by evidence, either.
• Eastern Approaches chronicles the ongoing ferment in Slovenia and the Czech immigrant history in Texas.
• At A Fistful of Euros, Edward Hugh warns that the seemingly inevitable slow-motion economic slide of Spain, trapped in the Eurozone and with an aging workforce, may be echoed more broadly.
• Language Hat comments on the NHL’s Punjabi-language broadcasts.
• Normblog’s Norman Geras assesses the moral implications of factories in Bangladesh in the light of the recent disaster (1, 2). More subtle and useful responses than a reflex action of shutting them down are needed.
• Torontoist details historical patterns of neglect of the site of Fort York.
• The Volokh Conspiracy’s Eugene Volokh notes a court ruling in Israel which allows Jewish women to pray in front of the Western Wall without being arrested.
• Window on Eurasia notes the ruralization of Dagestan’s cities as the local Russian population leaves and rural migrants arrive, and the transition in Chechnya in the past decade towards a centralized and hierarchical culture under Kadyrov.
• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell notes UKIP’s desire to not bother researching and developing policy options on its own but rather borrowing them from established think tanks.

[LINK] Two links on Chechen terrorism, the Boston Marathon bombings, and their globalization

I may blog more later today about Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Chechen brothers suspected of having undertaken the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this week. For now, I’ll just share two links which go towards explaining more of the background of the two brothers, embedded in the post-Soviet Chechen diasporas and online social networks with dubious membership.

First is James Brooke’s Voice of America article “Chechen Brothers Suspected in Boston Bombings Grew up as Refugees”.

Russian TV reported Friday that two ethnic Chechen brothers are suspects in terrorist bombings. But, for Russians, there was a new twist: the bombings were in Boston.

In recent years, ethnic Chechens were charged in bombings of the Moscow metro, a Moscow airport and a train from Moscow. But this time, Russian reporters fleshed out the biographies of two young Chechen men, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suspected of attacks in the United States.

In Dagestan, a traditionally Islamic republic bordering Chechnya, school principal Temirmagomed Davudov said the Tsarnaev family came to Dagestan in 2001 from the Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan. During World War II, Stalin deported most of the population of Chechnya to Central Asia.

Davudov told reporters that the two brothers and their two sisters attended school for one year, in 2001, in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. Then, he said, the family emigrated – apparently first to Turkey, then to the United States.

[. . .]

Andrei Soldatov, a security expert in Moscow, said he was surprised that American security officials failed to pick up on the jihadist music and video clips posted on a public YouTube site maintained for the last year by Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older brother.

Soldatov said of the Chechen singer whose clips Tsarnaev posted: “He is quite radical. His song are mostly about jihad. The second category is clips, or, you might say accounts, of operations carried out in Dagestan.”

The second, Luke Harding’s Guardian report, underlines the exceptional nature of what happened. Chechen terrorism hasn’t happened outside of the former Soviet Union for the past decade, at least. The Chechen conflict has become plugged into global terrorist conflicts.

In their long, violent struggle against the Kremlin, Chechen radicals have hit soft targets before. In 2010, two female suicide bombers from Dagestan blew up the Moscow metro, killing at least 40 people and injuring 100. A year later, another suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport, killing 37 and wounding 180. Other murderous attacks include one on a Beslan school in 2004, where 334 hostages died, most of them children.

But the Boston Marathon bombing, which police suspect was perpetrated by two Chechen brothers, Dzokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, are something altogether new. It is so far unclear how significant is the trail that appears to lead from the simmering ongoing insurgency in the mountains of the North Caucasus to the boulevards and suburban houses of North America.

[. . .]

In recent years, however, the Kremlin and its regional proxies have been battling a different kind of enemy. This new generation of insurgents has an explicitly Islamist goal: seeking to create a radical pan-Caucasian emirate ruled by Islamic law, like Afghanistan under the Taliban. The movement’s leader, Doku Umarov, unveiled this ambitious vision in 2007. He vowed to “liberate” not only Russia’s Muslim north Caucasus but a large chunk of European Russia.

Umarov also suggested that devout Muslims should think internationally.

His comments, later softened, said: “Today in Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Palestine our brothers are fighting. Everyone who attacks Muslims wherever they are, are our enemies, common enemies. Our enemy is not Russia only, but everyone who wages war against Islam and Muslims.”

This call to global jihad may perhaps offer a motive for an attack inside the US. As perhaps were trips back to Caucasus by the two bombing suspects. The new generation of twentysomething rebels is also exploiting a powerful new weapon: the internet. The main Chechen rebel website, kavkazcenter.com, posts reports from the jihadist movement worldwide: from Syria, where Chechen diaspora fighters are battling government forces in Aleppo, from Pakistan, and from Turkey.