Some Weekend Reading

 We're starting the three-day Labor Day weekend here in the US, so I'll be signing off till Tuesday unless something big happens. Here are a few interesting links until then:

• Anand Gopal at the Foreign Policy Middle East Channel offers a detailed account of the background of the Tripoli uprising. 

• The always-worth-reading Patrick Seale offers some sage commentary on how the West should approach the revolutionary changes in the Middle East at Middle East Online, called "Remaking the Arab State."

• Ashraf al-Sherif at Al-Masry Al-Youm  on the new thinking among Egypt's once radical Al-Gama‘a al-Islamiyya. 

• The Arabist comments on an Islamist video showing what a secular Egypt would look like. The video, below, is in Arabic, but Issandr translates some of the key ideas at the link. As he notes:

I don't know what's funnier about this video: the hysterically ominous music; the fact that women's rights groups are represented by a grinning blonde drinking a beer; or the way it ends up describing Bizarro Egypt, where up is down, left is right and Islam doesn't dominate every aspect of public life (politicians get in trouble for opening their speeches with "in the name of God."

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