The new Arabs: U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, Iowa City, Iowa, October 17, 2017

- [Sue Dulek] ICFRC has host volunteer programs such as this to address topics of international interest for many years. We thank members, volunteers and interns for making these programs possible since Carver Hawkeye opened in 1983. Maybe we beat Michigan that year, I'm not sure. I want to acknowledge our University and community sponsors, University of Iowa's International Programs, the University of Iowa's Honors Program, the University of Iowa Center for Public Policy and the Stanley UI Foundation support organization for their very important financial support. I also want to thank today's special sponsors Jim and Pat Ephgrave and the U of I Religious Studies Department, thank you also to City Channel Four for professionally recording our program for Cable Cast on City Channel Four. Our format today is the usual one. Following our speaker's presentation at about one o'clock, we will have a 15 minute Q and A from written questions from the audience members, please write those on the index cards found on your tables and the interns will pick them up. I also want to note that Professor Cole's latest book, The New Arabs is available for sale at the registration table, please silence cell phones and any other electronic device. If you have to leave early, I please ask that you do so without disturbing others and as quietly as possible. So at this time, it's my pleasure to announce Achmed Sawaya who will introduce our speaker. - [Achmed Sawaya] Good afternoon everybody. I am very pleased to introduce Juan Cole, Richard P Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Professor Cole received his BA in history and literature of Religions from Northwestern University, he subsequently received an MA in arabic study from American University in Cairo and his PhD is Islamic Studies from UCLA. Professor Cole speaks Arabic, skilled in Persian, Urdu and reads Turkish, he has deep knowledge of the languages and cultures of the Middle East. And the deferring theological traditions of Islam have made him an authority on the region. He has been a frequent guest on numerous television programs and he has commented extensively on Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Egypt, Iraq, the politics of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and the Iranian domestic struggles and foreign affairs. Professor Cole has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in his tour of the context. He is the author of Engaging the Muslim World and Napoleon's Egypt, his most recent book, The New Arabs, how the millennial generation is changing the Middle East will be the focus of his remarks today. Please welcome Professor Cole. - [Juan R. I. Cole] Thank you Achmed for the warm introduction. Thank you all for having me here. It's a repeat performance so I seem not to have crashed and burned the last time. Let me just make sure that everybody can hear me. You're sure, I teach students and some of them sit way in the back of the class. One time when we were coming up on an exam, they said Professor Cole, could you cut us some slack 'Cause you were mumbling, we couldn't quite hear you. I said well why were you sitting all the way back there then, so audiences are not always straight with you. But anyway, good, everybody says they can hear me. I'll take you at your word. I want to talk to day about a subject that's been consuming me in the last few years which is the millennials in the Arab world in particular. The young people born in the 1980s, 90s and 00s, a new generation who are distinctive. They are digital natives and they give interviews. They complain their parents don't understand them because parents are not digital natives. And they, this engagement with the internet has made it possible for them to form new kinds of friendships and alliances and this one young person in Egypt who had fair English and I said did you live in England or the United States for a while. And the young man said no, I just watched the movies and in Dubai they subtitle the English movies in Arabic so he would read the subtitles and listen to what was being said and he learned pretty good English this way. And it's not something that could have been done so easily in 1980s so the Arab world is young. It's not peculiar in being young. There are lots of places in the world that are young. India is young, but it is much younger than Europe with regard to median age. Because Egypt is 23, Tunisia 31. The Tunisians are a little long in the tooth. Libya's 28, Syria, 24, not sure you can make an exact correlation with how young they are to how much trouble there's been the last seven years. But there seems to be some correlation. And I remember in the 60s when we had the counter culture, the American median age had gone down to 25. And it's now I think 32 or something. We're much older than we used to be. So if it weren't for our immigrants, it would be even higher. And I'll talk about that this evening. So these young people are not just an age cohort. There have been social scientists like the French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu who has dismissed age as a useful category for social science. He thought well you have young fishermen and young retail workers and young farmers and what difference does it make that they're young? They're not the same kind of people. They don't make their living in the same way. And there's, it's a fair critique. On the other hand, because of the internet, I think certain forms of youth culture can now be created and promulgated that go beyond just one's class background and so these young people networked, wasn't just on the internet, many of them walked neighborhoods and they did the kind of things that political activists here in the United States do all the time. But what was remarkable was that they were faced with a situation where they had a lot of sclerotic leaders who had been there most of their lives and weren't stepping down any time soon and moreover were preparing their children to take over. Now that's not so unusual in a monarchy where that's what you would expect is the children would take over but these were republics so my professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, great human rights activist in Egypt got into trouble. He coined a word, he said monarchpublicanism. Gomolokiya So these are regimes where the sons were going to succeed their fathers and it happened in Syria. But it was expected to happen in Egypt and Yemen and Libia, the ruler of Tunisia, Benali did not have a Son but he had a very powerful son in law and probably he was being groomed. So it didn't happen. All of that series of children who were in the wings waiting to take over, they're not going to take over. Some of them are in jail, some of them are in exile. And why, because the youth put their feet down. They said we're not going to be inherited like so many sticks of furniture, this is a Republic. And while I think a lot of western observers thought that these youth revolutions were mainly about democracy and finally the Arabs would become like Eisenhower Americans, that's probably not what was in their minds. They wanted jobs, they wanted a different kind of economy. They were worried about corruption. But they minded most of all that they were increasingly as Republics being ruled by families. If you make a revolution, there's always a possibility of a counter revolution. And that's largely what happened in most of the countries where the government was overthrown where the President for life was gotten rid of and his children were no longer in line, nevertheless, the elite cracked down. And I have one Egyptian friend who's an activist who said that it was like if you have a disease that can be cured by an injection but they don't give you quite enough and then the disease comes back twice as bad. So that's what happened to us in Egypt. So general field Marshall Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made a coo in 2013 in Egypt alleging that it was actually in alliance with the youth movement against the Muslim brotherhood which had come to power in the elections. But then once he got rid of the Muslim brotherhood, he turned on the youth, the long knives came out. And they put them in jail and cracked down on them. And now Egypt is very calm, very calm, way too calm. And Bashar al-Assad in Syria very cleverly and sinisterly pulled up tanks and fired into peaceful crowds who were protesting and killed the youth. And they then had a choice of giving up or picking up a gun and fighting back. And of course they were angry because their siblings and friends had been killed in this way merely for protesting so al-Assad turned the Syrian revolution into a civil war. And then in a civil war, it's not the moderate nice people who come to the fore. If you're George Patton said nobody ever wins a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making the other poor bastard die for his country. And it's the bastards that come out in these situations. So increasingly the people who wanted liberal democracy on the French model in Syria ended up being refugees in Europe and who was still on the battlefield were these seedy gorillas and you needed money, you needed guns. And where would you get them was from the Gulf. And then the Gulf said well we could give you some money but you don't seem to have a beard, you don't pray regularly, you don't have the discourse of Al Qaeda. And so gradually the rebels returned from being people who wanted civil liberties in Syria to being Al Qaeda and then ISIL arose and al-Assad was really happy about this. Never attacked ISIL very much, very happy to have it there. Because he could go to Paris and say oh, ISIL seems to be blowing you up these days. Don't you need somebody to stand between you and them? And I volunteer so al-Assad won in this way polarizing, deliberately polarizing the public was one of the techniques and then in Yemen, the deposed President Ali Abdullah Saleh behind the scenes made an alliance with a tribal group of Yemeni Shiites who felt badly used and came back to power on their backs. So all of these youth revolutions were crushed by the 60 somethings except for Tunisia and I'll talk about that in a little bit. The international situation also was against them. The Middle East is a place where petroleum interests speak with a loud voice and one of the millennials was on the other side, Mohammad Bin Salman who's probably the defacto ruler of Saudi Arabia as, I think he's 32 and he gave money to the Egyptian Officer Core to crush the youth movement. The Saudis, they're an absolute monarchy, probably more powerful than Louie quatorze who said supposedly the state is I. L'état c'est moi He probably didn't say that but might as well have. But it is true of Mohammad Bin Salman and his father, King Salman, the state is them, is they. And so a lot of oil money from the Gulf went into conservatism, neoconservatism and crushing these populous movements, well, the youth of the contemporary Arab world have been polled and I think a lot of Americans would be surprised to how they feel about the world. They see the rise of ISIL or Dash as they call it in the Middle East as one of the most severe problems the region has, this idea that a lot of Americans seem to have and I saw it in politicians and journalists that somehow ISIL was popular in the Middle East is not true. They were a laughing stock for people that were relatively distant from them and they were deeply feared by people who were anywhere near them. And so again threat of terrorism, almost 40% of the youth say that's a very high, a very severe problem but then what's after terrorism in ISIL, unemployment. The Middle East has this shape, I mentioned of being unusually young, what does it mean? You have millions of people in the region coming on the job market every year, turning 18 or 22 if they went to college and looking for a job. And for reasons that are not entirely clear, the Middle East is one of the most disadvantaged regions in the world with regard to foreign direct investment. FDI is a very prominent statistic that's used by the World Bank and FDI in the Middle East is nothing to write home about, it could be. You had a lot of Arab Israeli Wars and then you had other kinds of conflict but then you had those kinds of problems in South America and Southeast Asia and so forth. That doesn't seem to have stopped the foreign investment coming in so we can't entirely explain why this should have been but the Middle East, very low in FDI. And I think that's one of the reasons that job creation is so slow. I think there's also an unusual amount of corruption in the region, although again, Korea ended up being the 12th largest economy in the world, South Korea did. And if you go back before 1989, it was a corrupt military dictatorship so how did it do well when Egypt which probably in 1945, Egypt and South Korea were very similar societies, Egypt fell way behind in many ways so but anyway. These young people are really worried about unemployment. A third of them are worried about civil unrest. I think that must be the third that didn't come out into the streets 'cause they were the ones who were making civil unrest, a rising cost of living, that goes along with being afraid about unemployment. And lack of strong political leadership, lack of Arab unity, lack of democracy, only a little over a quarter think that's the really big problem for them is lack of democracy so they have this very local concerns. Are we secure, are terrorists going to get us? Do we have good governance, are we going to find a job and that sort of thing? The American impression of the Middle East is that it's full of religious fanatics. The impression of America in the Middle East is that America is full of religious fanatics. Neither thing is true. There are religious fanatics in both areas. But the myths about the Middle East are easily dispelled if you look at the opinion polling and actual behavior. I think often people who look at the Middle East from the west misunderstand the kinds of religious practices that people have so we now have all these stereotypes about Muslims, if a man wears a beard, then be careful. Check him for bombs and so forth. And I don't think the beard through history has had that kind of connotation and it doesn't in the contemporary Middle East either. Although in some places, like Egypt, they're adopting western stereotypes so my friends in Egypt who had beards, they've been, some of them have been harassed. Because then people assume the religious fundamentalists. But there is a tendency for some religious people in the Middle East to express themselves with their appearance and so pious women would cover their hair at least. And men sometimes will insist on having a beard. But a lot of that is an expression of conventional religiosity so it doesn't necessarily mean they have a religiosity or that they want a theocracy or that they're terrorists. They might just think it's nice to go to mask every once in a while, people who go regularly to religious places of worship in the United States are not usually coded as dangerous and so a lot of their counter parts in the Middle East also are not. Americans have been telling Gallop, the polling agency since 1945 that 44% of them go to church on Sunday. We social scientists entertain the severest doubts as to whether this polling result is correct. It seems to be that in some instances people tell pollsters what they think their behavior ought to have been rather than what it actually is. There were a couple of sociologists who went to a small town in Georgia and followed people around on Sunday morning to IHOP and so forth and estimated that in that town, maybe 33% were going to church and if that was true in a small town in Georgia, I guarantee you, it's much less in the rest of the country. So but nevertheless we don't think badly of those people. And we even seem to want to exaggerate the degree to which we do that, people go to mask in the Middle East. It's the same thing, they don't think of that as dangerous or as fundamentalists or as political necessarily. But on the other hand, a lot of youth are not happy with the state of Islam and so for instance, both in Palestine and in Morocco polling showed that six in 10 felt that a thorough going reform of Islam is necessary and I can tell you in Palestine and Morocco, they did not mean reform in the direction of extremism. They wanted something that was more modern. And getting up towards 100% in some cases of respondents in eight Arab countries among youth said that movements like ISIS and Al Qaeda are either a complete perversion of Islam or that they're mostly wrong. And they see people's motives. If you ask them well why are somebody ISIL, why is somebody joining al Qaeda? They don't say well because they're pious. They don't say well it's the true Islam. They've already said that's a perversion of Islam. They say it's because they feel oppressed, it's political. They're joining it for the same reason people used to join the Communist party. They would feel like they were not being well treated. It was interesting to see polling in 2016 and 2017 about their attitudes towards the United States. Our international profile, 'cause the pollsters have this language are you favorable or unfavorable towards a country. Unfavorability rating of the United States has increased very substantially, now admittedly, it was never very high in the Arab world where there's a long standing critique of US foreign policy. Most Arab respondents think of the US, they think of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. They think of from their point of view, the US is daily helping the screwing over of the Palestinians and the US has taken a lot of very unpopular stances in the region so that's, there's always a certain amount of negative responses but not everywhere and all the time. The US has favorable responses as well, particularly favorable in the past in places like Morocco and Jordan and so forth but and the Gulf. But the opinion polling shows that something seems to have happened last November that caused it to go way down. So 70% of these young people in 3500 were polled believe that President Trump is anti Muslim. And whereas in 2016 under Obama, 32% said that the US is an enemy. In Spring of 2017, 49% thought the US is something of an enemy or a strong enemy. And in some countries like Egypt and Iraq, Lebanon, it rises above 50% that see the US as an enemy. That's a problem, we have 10,000 troops in Iraq. So they are trying to help the Iraqi government save itself from ISIL and they have largely succeeded by now. I don't know if you've heard, it doesn't seem to be widely being reported in the US press but ISIL has been largely defeated. We didn't get the V day parade. But nevertheless, despite the US help against ISIL and the US troops being put back into Iraq, there are several thousand there, there's a revived Iraqi command and US pilots are flying close air support for Iraqi troops to have over 50% of Iraqis feel like we're the enemy is highly undesirable in this situation. Likewise, in 2016, 63% of young Arabs said they thought the United States was a friend. I think that would come as a shock to a lot of people. Unfortunately it was a fleeting moment. 'Cause 46% now say that we're a friend. Actually, that's not actually so bad given what's going on that nearly half of them still think that we're friends, I'm not sure they're right about that but so let me back up and talk a little bit about how we got to where we are with these youth revolutions that broke out in 2011 and after and why. As you could see from the polling, they're very upset about corruption and for them it's personal. Because when you go looking for a job, maybe you don't get that job if you're not a member of the ruling party or maybe if you're not friends with the circle of the President, you don't get the job. Or maybe there's a business license involved for small entrepreneurs and you can't get the license because you went on Facebook and criticized the ruler. So that's the kind of thing they mean by corruption where people in public office are throwing public resources to private individuals on the basis of private relationships. I know it's hard for an American audience to conceive of such a thing. But there's even more of it over there than there is here. And moreover, a lot of public goods in the Middle East have been being privatized. This theory of the Washington Consensus or Neoliberalism, it's often called, which is that the market is a much better distributor of goods, much more efficient than government policy is. Also had a big impact on the Middle East, not just in the West and a pernicious impact. You can tell I don't actually think the market is a very good distributor of certain kinds of goods. If you were interested that people had read the dialogues of Socrates, not sure the market can get you there. And moreover if you were interested in young people being able to afford to study the dialogues of Socrates, I also don't think the market is mainly going to get you there, the market might decide that they get out of college with $150,000 in debt so this privatization of public goods doesn't in the real world actually work in every instance. There may be areas where it works, maybe some parts of life where the market is a useful way of indexing things But it's not universal and it's certainly not true of water, shouldn't water be a human right? Shouldn't you always be able to get a drink of water whether you could afford it or not? So nevertheless in the Middle East, marketization has preceded a pace and since these had been in the Cold War era often the states Egypt and Iraq and so forth had tilted towards the Soviet Union. They had a really huge public sectors and admittedly probably unduly huge, as much as 50% of the economy would be in public hands but that's all been being sold off. The problems is that the neoliberals when they thought we'll sell off the public companies and things, make them private and make them more efficient, they didn't seem to be thinking in the real world. So I'll give you an example in Egypt there was a state on Steel mill in the 90s and then there was a privately owned steel mill. Privately owned steel mill was owned by a man who became a billionaire Ahmed Ezz and Ezz gravitated towards the circle of Hosni Mubarak and the dictatorship and then was given even more prerequisites and licenses. And then in 2004 when the International Monetary Fund and Washington and Paris all pressured Hosni Mubarak to privatize the state owned steel mill, the son of Mubarak calls up Ahmed Ezz and said we're thinking of privatizing this state owned steel mill. Would you like to buy it? So Ezz said well yeah, I could take it off your hands. That was his only competition and then what did he do? Is he gradually fired everybody there and moved all the assets over to his steel company so now he has a complete monopoly on steel in Egypt and he's best friends with the President and the President's son so any future licenses, any question of importing steel, all that's going to go through him. So that's what privatization looked like in Egypt. I don't think the World Bank had this in mind. And the youth knew it and vlogged about it. And they were very upset and of course, there was also a lot of just mindless repression. I think of mindless repression as a kind of ethos of repression that sometimes becomes adopted by governments like if somebody was plotting to overthrow you, then it may not be a good thing or it may not be ethical but you could understand arresting them. But if in the Middle East, little groups like this one who are interested as citizens in government policy could be harassed, Egypt had a law that you couldn't gather in more than a certain number. Or if you did gather, you had to have government permission and people would go to like restaurants and places which had space to gather and said could we please gather here and talk about issues and the owner would say no, no, the secret police visited me this morning and warned me against that. So even just having a space in the society where you could meet in fair numbers was impossible. And some of the first protests in Egypt, the young people protested horizontally. They would stand by the Nile on the Corniche which is a nice place to walk and so forth and it's straight but they would stand five feet apart from one another and there would be this long line of them because if you had five people who met in public, the police could arrest you if you're all together. So they had to be five feet apart from one another. So they had the horizontal protest. Initially, after a while, they just told the police to jump in a lake and did what they wanted. But then some of this mindless protest, mindless repression I meant to say, turned violent. And young people in the Arab world, young men in particular who are in public were always being harassed by the police. It didn't matter, they, Egypt doesn't have much in the way of ethnicity, they're mostly Suni Arabs. They're about 10% Coptic Christians but you can't tell by looking but if you were young and male and you were on the street, police would be patting you down. They would be taunting you. They would be suggesting you go elsewhere, go home and so forth and because of the high unemployment, some of the youth developed something of a counter culture so there was young men in Alexandria, Khaled Said who had studied in the West a bit but I think he was kind of a college drop out or hadn't decided what he wanted to do in life and there are allegations that he became involved in human rights work and that he got ahold of a video tape 'cause people were using their smart phones to film the police doing horrible things to people. And that the police got wind of this. So they went to an internet cafe and arrested him and brought him down into the allay and then beat him within an inch of his life and then ultimately took the inch away too and killed him. They may not have meant to bash his head in quite so badly but he was dead. So the family had to come and claim the body from the morg and one of the brothers took a picture of the bashed in face surreptitiously and put it up on Facebook. And for one reason or another, this just caught fire among youth in Egypt, Khaled Said was one of them, right? He'd done some college, he'd been in the west. He was a modern kind of person. Maybe it's not clear exactly why the police went after him but it may have been that he was investigating them. And so some smart young people who were internet savvy put up a Facebook page for Khaled Said that ultimately got hundreds of thousands and even millions of likes, it was a very brave thing to do. Because when you like something, your like is there. The police, there were cyber police that were looking into who was being a dissident but a lot of cyber activism grew up around this Khaled Said against police brutality so the Egyptian revolution of 2011 happened on Police day ironically. The youth called the revolution on January 25th which was a day set aside to honor the Egyptian police. And of course, on that day, the police got to stay home. So what better way to honor them than to come out in the thousands in downtown Cairo? But they were able to do that because the police weren't expecting such a big crowd and they weren't around. They were off and but so the Egyptian revolution began as a protest against police brutality and they wanted the interior Minister to step down. In the Middle East, much of the world, the interior Minister doesn't deal with trees very much. That's more like our FBI or Homeland Security or organs that thankfully so far, at least, we don't have, the secret police and so forth. So they wanted that guy gone and young people told me in Egypt, they said we hadn't imagined that we could actually get rid of the President altogether. It was the interior Minister that we were after. Tunisia also was a catalyst, Tunisia was the first place where a revolution succeeded in chasing the President out of the country. Again, there was a martyr figure who became famous. Mohamed Bouazizi who may actually been named Tarek Bouazizi and got, there was a Facebook mix up who was said to have been a college graduate who couldn't get a job but he wasn't. He was a high graduate who couldn't get a job. And who was selling vegetables and was bothered in the street by the police and he was supporting his family. He felt despair and he went to City Hall and stood in front of it and put a can of gasoline on himself and set a match and set himself on fire. And that set off a whole set of protest mainly in small towns in the south and center of the country away from the capital which then spread towards the capital and ultimately had 200,000 people in the streets of Tunis, the capital and the President is said to have gone to the Chief of Staff of the Army and said you need to put these crowds down the Chief of Staff looked at him and said Mr President, I'm not going to shoot the Tunisian people for you. Well, when your Chief of Staff tells you that, you might as well start the helicopter going right there. So apparently they told him that they would take him to Paris and let things cool off, the people around him. They put him on a plane but then Paris said no, no. We've got 800,000 Tunisians, we don't want any trouble. So they had to call around for some place to land. And the only place that would take him was Saudi Arabia. So he's in Judah now, he had spent his career, Benali, the dictator telling the west he would stand up to Islam for them so the idea of him living in Saudi Arabia is delicious to a lot of Tunisians. And there was a lot of, I'm going to go through this because we're coming to the end of our time. I just wanted to show you some pictures. This is a celebration of a neighborhood in Tunis and it's a youth celebration so you can't hear it but there's rock music in the background. And people are doing graffiti on the streets. And selling their art and so forth. And I thought this picture exemplifies contemporary Tunisia. You have a demand for gay pride and that's very controversial in the Arab world. Right now in Egypt, there's a big crack down on you're not allowed to show the rainbow flag and people are being arrested but it's not the case so much in Tunisia so you have gay pride. And then you have a mask and then you have a celebration of Free Tunisia, democratic Tunisia. So that's where their heads ended up being. The United States, I think was thrown for a loop by all this, in the Bush administration, you had had a demand that the Middle East democratize. And they had told Bush to jump in a lake and they weren't going to do it. And then Obama got elected and he knock yourselves out. Do what you want, I don't care. They said we're going to democratize. So Obama had tried to make up with Bushar Allasad and open an Embassy in Syria and he had good relations with Hosni Mubarak and all of a sudden everything was a big question mark. I think they just kind of tried to ride the tiger. And now we've got a President who is the opposite of Bush. Bush was muscular Wilsonianism, our current President says that Arabs, they need a strong man. He's not a systematic thinker. And so has made statements on several sides of some of these issues but at one point, he seemed to say that it was fine with him Bashar al-Assad stayed in power in Syria and indeed, if the Russians just kind of took it over as there's fear of influence. I'm not sure why he thought he could give away Syria. And then he's been happy with General Sisi in Egypt. And did the sword dance with the Saudi rulers. He kept saying he was afraid of Muslims but then he was there and they all had the swords and they were dancing together so I don't think he really is afraid so but if you had to say what our current policy is it seems to be support the strong men against the youth, thank you very much. - [Sue Dulek] The first question how have women's rights fared? - [Juan R. I. Cole] So with regard to women's rights in the Arab world, I would say that ironically enough and despite the counter revolution and the human rights crack down, women have come out of this with a somewhat improved position in many of these countries. At least on paper, so Morocco is a monarchy. But it's a constitutional monarchy to some extent. And it did experience some youth demonstrations in 2011 that were sufficiently vigorous to put a scare into the government and so the king, a younger man and very well educated designed a new constitution which certainly, again on paper, is a big improvement over the old one with regard to human rights and so forth. But which says that women are equal to men. Likewise in Tunisia, there was a huge debate over the language in the constitution because a right of center religious party for a while got in, the Nada and on the other hand a lot of Tunisians are French educated and very modern kind of people and they wanted the women marched in the streets and the women wanted a provision in the constitution that said women are equal to men and ultimately the women won. Even the more, I wouldn't say fundamentalist but the more religious right party agreed to allow there to be a provision in the constitution for the equality of women and men. Since women and men are not equal in Tunisian statute law with regard to inheritance and all kinds of things, this is a bonanza for lawyers for the next 100 years. Because there's going to be a lot of law suits and it has to be what this provision of the constitution means had to be adjudicated. But that wasn't there before. Tunisia was better on women's rights than most other Arab countries but to have an explicit statement in the constitution that they're equal was unprecedented. Likewise in Egypt, there are provisions in the constitution for women's rights that are new. And so that's in the countries where you had big youth movements and reform and so forth and I think although I'm saying it's mainly on paper, there are actually real world improvements in women's status as a result of these revolutions. And for one thing, even where you had a counter revolution like in Egypt under Sisi, Sisi knows that 50% of his population are women and they're constituents for him. And he does have to be elected although it's kind of a phony election but he wants that constituency. And so he has come out for certain kinds of women's rights. Implemented punishment for sexual harassment for the first time so it's not necessarily that he's a feminist or that he's a good guy or anything but there are political reasons for which maybe he's talking some of these stances. At the same time, in the countries which didn't have a successful revolution, Syria and Iraq, you had the rise of ISIL which was hyper misogynist and enslaved women and wanted concubines back and really reduced women to the lowest possible status. That experiment is coming to an end now at the point of a gun both in Iraq and in Syria but it was a real shock for Arab women that you could have such a reactionary movement and I think you have to say the women won this one as well. - [Sue Dulek] Why is Egypt quiet, perhaps due to severe repression and torture, is it for some other reason in addition to those two reasons? - [Juan R. I. Cole] Well a lot of the quiet in Egypt is because of severe repression and torture. It's dangerous to put your head up at the moment. Just as it was, maybe even worse than it was in 2009, 2010 before the revolution. The Army and the secret police have come back with a vengeance and they're even more vigilant now that they know what can happen to them if people can get up a successful movement. On the other hand, some of the quiet is because people were traumatized by the events of the revolution and by the uncertainty of it. The Muslim brotherhood came to power through elections in 2012 and Egyptians are not fundamentalists. All the opinion polling shows this. They made one chant in Egypt addressing Muslim brotherhood Parliamentarians, they said. You guys in Parliament who are Muslim brother, Egypt is never going to be like Iran. They didn't want that and so last time I was in Egypt, I was talking to a fairly wide range of people about what had happened and they said we felt under the Muslim brotherhood, we felt like we were in jail. We had this very fundamentalist regime and we didn't know where it might take us, what kind of liberties it might take away from people and of course women were particularly worried because the Muslim brotherhood is very patriarchal so then they said when we had the coo, they didn't call it a coo, July revolution. When we had the July revolution, we felt like we had been let out of jail. So we look at them and we say well gee, you guys have gone under military dictatorship which overthrew an elected government. They say oh no, the elected government was the dictatorship. Now we've got more liberty so not everybody feels this way. But a lot of people do so there's a silent majority I think that no so unhappy to have the army back in control and if you're not a human rights activist and you're just going along with your daily life, then nothing bad is likely to happen to you. So the repression works alongside with this kind of feeling that Egypt dodged a bullet that you could've gotten this hard line fundamentalist government instead. - [Sue Dulek] Can you tell us a little bit about the responses in Iran following Trump's recent desertification? - [Juan R. I. Cole] Well the Iranians have responded to Trump's desertification of the nuclear deal, the President Rouhani has spoken and the foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has spoken, they complained that our current President seems to be extremely erratic. And it's difficult for them to understand exactly what he is going on about. Iran is in fact in compliance with the deal and has been so certified by the International Atomic Energy Agency and people say maybe they're cheating. But I don't think the people who say that know so much about all this and it's not like I'm an expert either but I have followed it just as a lay person. If you create Plutonium, it creates a signature that can be detected and it's not a signature that goes away any time soon, it's not like you can spray air freshener and people can't detect the Plutonium anymore. This happened in Pakistan that the IAEA caught them out with some Plutonium so they are being regularly inspected and the deal allows them to do snap inspections. And no signatures, they're not making anything dangerous. Plus in order to make very much fissile material, you need thousands and thousands of centrifuges but we made them go down to only 6,000. And one of the really easy ways to make a bomb and probably North Korea did this is to have a heavy water breeder reactor, they put those rods to keep the thing from blowing up in the water and the fissile material builds up on the rods and you can harvest it in a heavy water reactor and it builds up fairly quickly and can get enough of the material to make a small bomb fairly soon if you have a heavy water reactor. Light water reactor, you could theoretically do this but it's not easy and it would take a long time and so forth so they were going to make a heavy water reactor. That was the most suspicious thing in my view that they were going to do in Iran. And as part of this agreement, they moth balled that reactors, they ripped it in, there's no reactor. They have no way of making a bomb. So they've been certified, they're not in violation. And the Europeans, the Chinese, the Russians, none of whom are without a suspicious side to their character, none of them feel as Trump does. And in the desertification which was apparently written by Nikki Haley has full sentences and so forth. It doesn't actually accuse Iran of being in violation of the deal, the provisions of the deal are never mentioned. It says well they're making a ballistic missile, not in the deal, they're support Hezbollah, not in the deal so that desertification decree was complaints about Iran's behavior in every other dimension but the deal. So the Iranians are aware of this. And they have responded in a very adult manner. They said we're in this deal. We've made with the permanent members of the UN Security council as long as Europe adheres to it, we will. So as for Europe, well you know what Angela Merkel thinks and Macron in France just announced that Trump had made a very serious error and that Macron's response is that he thinks he probably is going to go to Tehran in the Spring. - [Sue Dulek] Last question here is can you elaborate, it's obviously a complicated question. But a little on the specifics on the type of reform of Islam sought by those who favor it in the Mid East? - [Juan R. I. Cole] Yeah so the debates on the reform of Islam in the Middle East center a lot of them around how to interpret the tradition and so just to give you an example of the Koran says that if you have a court preceding of some sort and you only have one witness who is a woman and it's against a male perpetrator, that wouldn't be sufficient to convict. You need two women to overrule the word of one man. That's what's in the Koran. So people in the Middle East, just as the United States, a lot of our law comes from the Ten Commandments and some percentage of Americans think that should be our constitution when you ask them in polling. A lot of people in the Middle East, when they're setting up their civil law for their states, they're going to look to the Koran for values and so forth so the question arises, should you need two women to overrule a man in a court preceding? And the modernists would say in the seventh century, it's not like these women had PhDs. They were relatively sheltered people and maybe not people of the world, they weren't the ones who went to the Bazaar and did shopping and interacted with people and gave public speeches so of course, they weren't in a position to testify against a man who maybe traveled widely and was educated and so forth but nowadays things have changed and so you could have a very educated woman who's testifying against a man who is perfectly articulate and able to make her case and ought to be allowed to do so. So do you take historical context into account when you interpret the Koran or the sayings and doings of the prophet? Well these kinds of debates are not foreign to Christianity either, how many women who go to church wear a veil and avoid speaking up when they're there because that's what's in the New Testament, right but Jimmy Carter has given you permission. So I would say some of the youth want a more Jimmy Carter kind of Islam that's able to deal with current issues. And which uses more reason in approaching the text and not just the old joke about the Christian fundamentalists if Jesus is a door, then surely he has a door knob, they don't want that. And that kind of Islam of course is the one that is championed by Saudi Arabia, a very hard lined fundamentalist, literalist kind of Islam and it wouldn't be very important because there are only 20 million Saudis and they're not that influential in people's lives except for the oil money and they can use the oil money to go around and make masks and buy moms and promote their, it would be almost as if American Christianity became hostage to people who lived in the oil states of this country and where a lot of money was involved in the more fundamentalist side of the religion. - [Sue Dulek] There is one more, last very important question and that is where are you speaking tonight and when? - [Juan R. I. Cole] Amed should say, come to the microphone 'Cause they can't hear. - [Achmed Sawaya] Semen Center, 1505, 7:30 tonight. - [Sue Dulek] And that does conclude our program today. So let's give a very well. But before we adjourn, I've got a couple of tasks. One is to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's International Programs, the U of I Honors Program, U of I Center for Public Policy and the Stanley UI Foundation for their generous support and also today's financial sponsors Jim and Pat Ephgrave and the U of I Religious Studies Department And City Channel Four for making our programs available to viewing audiences and Professor Cole, although you've been here before, you now perhaps are the owner now of two of our very coveted Iowa City of Foreign Relations mug. Thank you very much for joining us. And with that, we are adjourned.