Coffee: How a drink for Arab mystics went global

BBC News – Coffee and qahwa: How a drink for Arab mystics went global.

BBC News

By John McHugo Author

The Arab world has given birth to many thinkers and many inventions – among them the three-course meal, alcohol and coffee. The best coffee bean is still known as Arabica, but it’s come a long way from the Muslim mystics who treasured it centuries ago, to the chains that line our high streets.

Think coffee, and you probably think of an Italian espresso, a French cafe au lait, or an American double grande latte with cinnamon.

Perhaps you learned at school that the USA became a nation of coffee drinkers because of the excise duty King George placed on tea? Today ubiquitous chains like Starbucks, Cafe Nero and Costa grace every international airport, and follow the now much humbler Nescafe as symbols of globalisation.

Coffee is produced in hot climates like Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam and Indonesia, and you could be forgiven if you thought it is a product from the New World like tobacco and chocolate. After all, all three became popular in Europe at more or less the same time, in the 16th and 17th Centuries.

In fact, coffee comes from the highland areas of the countries at the southern end of the Red Sea – Yemen and Ethiopia.

Although a beverage made from the wild coffee plant seems to have been first drunk by a legendary shepherd on the Ethiopian plateau, the earliest cultivation of coffee was in Yemen and Yemenis gave it the Arabic name qahwa, from which our words coffee and cafe both derive.

Qahwa originally meant wine, and Sufi mystics in Yemen used coffee as an aid to concentration and even spiritual intoxication when they chanted the name of God.

Three courses, and alcohol

• The Arabs invented the concept of the three-course meal, with soup followed by fish or meat, then fruit and nuts – the habit was brought across to Moorish Spain in the 9th Century from Iraq
• Alcohol was first distilled in the Arab world in c800AD by Jabir Ibn Hayyan from Kufa in Iraq, and our word “alcohol” derives from the Arabic “al kuhul”… many Arab countries, like Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Morocco, make wines and beers, even though Islam does not permit the drinking of alcohol

By 1414, it was known in Mecca and in the early 1500s was spreading to Egypt from the Yemeni port of Mocha. It was still associated with Sufis, and a cluster of coffee houses grew up in Cairo around the religious university of the Azhar. They also opened in Syria, especially in the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, and then in Istanbul, the capital of the vast Ottoman Turkish Empire, in 1554.

In Mecca, Cairo and Istanbul attempts were made to ban it by religious authorities. Learned shaykhs discussed whether the effects of coffee were similar to those of alcohol, and some remarked that passing round the coffee pot had something in common with the circulation of a pitcher of wine, a drink forbidden in Islam.

Coffee houses were a new institution in which men met together to talk, listen to poets and play games like chess and backgammon. They became a focus for intellectual life and could be seen as an implicit rival to the mosque as a meeting place.

Some scholars opined that the coffee house was “even worse than the wine room”, and the authorities noted how these places could easily become dens of sedition. However, all attempts at banning coffee failed, even though the death penalty was used during the reign of Murad IV (1623-40). The religious scholars eventually came to a sensible consensus that coffee was, in principle, permissible.

Coffee spread to Europe by two routes – from the Ottoman Empire, and by sea from the original coffee port of Mocha.

Both the English and Dutch East India Companies were major purchasers at Mocha in the early 17th Century, and their cargoes were brought home via the Cape of Good Hope or exported to India and beyond. They seem, however, to have only taken a fraction of Yemeni coffee production – as the rest went north to the rest of the Middle East.

“The coffee which is native to the Gulf is bitter and sometimes flavoured with cardamom or other spices”

Coffee also arrived in Europe through trade across the Mediterranean and was carried by the Turkish armies as they marched up the Danube. As in the Middle East, the coffee house became a place for men to talk, read, share their opinions on the issues of the day and play games.

Another similarity was that they could harbour gatherings for subversive elements. Charles II denounced them in 1675 as “places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers”.

A century later Procope, the famous Parisian coffee house, had such habitues as Marat, Danton and Robespierre who conspired together there during the Revolution.

At first, coffee had been viewed with suspicion in Europe as a Muslim drink, but around 1600 Pope Clement VIII is reported to have so enjoyed a cup that he said it would be wrong to permit Muslims to monopolise it, and that it should therefore be baptised.

Austrian coffee drinking is said to have received a big boost when the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 was broken, and the European victors captured huge coffee supplies from the vanquished.

Perhaps that is why, to this day, coffee is served in Vienna with a glass of water – just like the tiny cups of powerful Turkish coffee with its heavy sediment in Istanbul, Damascus or Cairo. Is this just a coincidence, or a long forgotten cultural borrowing?

Viennese cafes serve it with a glass of water

The beverage we call “Turkish coffee” is actually a partial misnomer, as Turkey is just one of the countries where it is drunk. In Greece they call it “Greek coffee”, although Egyptians, Lebanese, Syrians, Palestinians, Jordanians and others do not seem to care overmuch about the name.

10 borrowed Arabic words

• The word cheque comes from the Arabic word saqq, and reflects the sophistication of finance in Arab countries in the early middle ages
• The word algorithm is derived from the name of Abū Abdallah Muḥammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi whose name (al-Khwarizmi) is, in Latin, Algoritmi
• Cipher comes from Arabic sifr, meaning “zero, naught, nothing”
• The word for cotton derives from the Arabic qutn
• Ghoul is an Arabic word for “a desert demon which can appear in different forms and shapes; an ogre or cannibal”
• The English magazine is a word borrowed from the Arabic makhzan, meaning “storehouse”
• Nadir has its origin in Arabic nazir, indicating “opposite, facing, parallel”
• Tamarind refers to Arabic tamr hindi, literally meaning “Indian date”
• The word safari has its root in the Arabic word safar, which means “journey”
• Tariff comes from Arabic ta’rif, which means “notification” or “definition”

But there are other coffee drinking traditions in the Arab world. The coffee which is native to the Gulf is bitter and sometimes flavoured with cardamom or other spices.

It is often served a decent interval after a guest has arrived – to serve it too soon might be an impolite suggestion of haste – and then once again before departure.

It often comes just before or after a small glass cup of black, sweet tea. The order in which the two beverages are served varies, and seems to have no significance. What is remarkable for a Western visitor is the idea that the two very different drinks should be offered in such quick succession.

Sadly, however, while coffee has gone truly global production has declined in Yemen, the victim of cheap imports and rival crops like the narcotic qat.

In 2011, Yemen exported a mere 2,500 tonnes although there are attempts to revive cultivation of the best coffee in its original home. Today, none of the Arab countries is listed among the world’s significant producers.

John McHugo is author of A Concise History of The Arabs

Related articles

• Brief History of coffee (espresscocoffee.wordpress.com)
• 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Coffee (discovermagazine.com)

Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature

29 March 2011,
Yahya R. Haidar

Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature – you can’t stop them

By Yahya R. Haidar

The little-predicted revolutions in Arab countries which shook the political world to its core have coincided with natural disasters that took their toll on the physical world with equal strength. But, there is an unlikely common denominator between the geographies where the two separate events occurred. The latest UN report on International Corruption ranked at one end of the equilibrium the countries of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen as being the most corrupt, while at the other end New Zealand and Japan where considered to have the cleanest record of national corruption; yet, the two extremely opposed governments were not immune to the unforeseen large-scale challenges that hit them. If natural disasters are difficult to pin down regardless of sophisticated scientific reasoning, the masses are proven to be a force equally unpredictable despite the millions of pages compiled by political think-tanks and strategy experts.

No doubt, the earthquakes and tsunamis that hit Japan are natural occurrences that defied the collective human ability to predict and to respond; but by the same token, there is nothing more natural than the revolutions spanning through the Arab world, which happened despite the hegemonic and almost supernatural climate of fear imposed by Arab dictators on their people with the aid of their western backers. These revolutions have been natural at all levels; in their lack of any form of ideological affiliation, and more importantly their emphasis on the principle of all human rights – the right to be genuinely free.

Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature, you can’t stop them. Indeed, neither can you predict them. No one could believe that Bouazizi burning himself in protest against the confiscation of his vegetable stall would instigate a mass uprising that would end 23 years of U.S. backed dictatorship in Tunisia. Neither the forty-day Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the war on Lebanon with all their atrocities, nor the U.S. invasion of Iraq, could signal mass protests the scale of which anywhere near what is afoot today. It is indeed a cause of perplexity to any inquiring mind. The masses carrying such formidable waves of change found no better slogan than the one that says ‘if the people want to live, destiny must surely respond’ In the midst of bewilderment, this stanza from a poem by the late Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi, became immediately the most fitting chant to the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. But, if the common meaning of ‘destiny’ implies a power which tak es its own course irrespective of human will, the logic of mass uprisings have proven that when destiny responds to human will, it becomes identical with it; they together become an unstoppable force.

A new political status quo has been effected and the U.S. and EU states are struggling to ‘live with it’, and by living with it they mean to attune to the new scale of power and restore the ‘critical balance’ that maintains their political and strategic doctrines. But, by doing so they don’t seem to have understood the meaning of the new revolutions. The message of these revolutions is a call to see the world as it is, which might not parallel the dreamy western conception of it. By maintaining their political ideologies, the west fails to get the essential implication of the Arab revolutions. And just as the Japanese government and people are trying to co-exist with the natural course of the physical world, the west must know to live in harmony with the natural course of the political world, where the human will to be genuinely free will always prevail over preconceived political doctrines of domination and control.

Popular uprisings are like the forces of nature | Scoop News.

************* Yahya R. Haidar is a freelance journalist and researcher in religious studies

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• Robert Fisk: ‘The Arab awakening began not in Tunisia this year, but in Lebanon in 2005′ (independent.co.uk)
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• Revolutions: What went wrong in the west? – Aljazeera.net (news.google.com)

The price of food is at the heart of this wave of revolutions

No one saw the uprisings coming, but their deeper cause isn’t hard to fathom

By Peter Popham

Revolution is breaking out all over. As Gaddafi marshals his thugs and mercenaries for a last-ditch fight in Tripoli, several died as protests grew more serious in Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah tried to bribe his people into docility by splashing out $35bn on housing, social services and education. Across the water in Bahrain the release of political prisoners failed to staunch the uprising. In Iran, President Ahmadinejad crowed about chaos in the Arab world, but said nothing about the seething anger in his own backyard; in Yemen, the opposition gathers strength daily.

And it’s not just the Middle East. This is an African crisis: Tunisia, where it started, is an African country, and last week in Senegal, a desperate army veteran died after setting fire to himself in front of the presidential palace, emulating Mohamed Bouazizi, the market trader whose self-immolation sparked the revolution in Tunisia. Meanwhile, the spirit of revolt has already leapt like a forest fire to half a dozen other ill-governed African nations, with serious disturbances reported in Mauritania, Gabon, Cameroon and Zimbabwe.

Nowhere is immune: dozens of activists in China are in detention or under other forms of surveillance, and the LinkedIn network was shut down as authorities seek to stamp out Middle East-style protests there. In what is arguably the most repressive state on the planet, North Korea, the army was called out and five died in the northern city of Sinuiju after violent protests erupted there and in two other cities. The generals who rule Burma under a trashy façade of constitutional government were keeping a close eye on the Middle East, ready to lock up Aung San Suu Kyi again at the first sign of copycat disturbances.

Nowhere is immune to this wave of rebellion because globalisation is a fact; all the world’s markets are intricately interlinked, and woe in one place quickly translates into fury in another. Twenty years ago, things were more manageable. When grain production collapsed in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and what had been one of the world’s greatest grain exporters became a net importer, the resulting surges of anger brought down the whole Communist system within a couple of years – but stopped there. Today there are no such firebreaks, and thanks to digital communications, events happen much faster.

Why are all these revolutions happening now? Plenty of answers have been offered: the emergence of huge urban populations with college degrees but no prospect of work; the accumulation of decades of resentment at rulers who are “authoritarian familial kleptocracies delivering little to their people”, as Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation put it; the subversive role of Facebook and Twitter, fatally undermining the state’s systems of thought control.

Absent from this list – to the combined bewilderment and relief of the US and Europe – are the factors that were universally supposed to be driving populist politics in the Middle East: Islamic fundamentalism coupled with anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. As one Egyptian pointed out after the fall of Mubarak, at no point during weeks of passionate revolt did either the Israeli or the US embassies become a target of the crowd’s fury, even though both are within easy reach of Tahrir Square. “Not so much as a Coke can was thrown over the wall,” he said.

Of course, that does not mean that allies of al-Qa’ida will not seek to exploit the growing chaos in Libya in particular, striving to turn it into a new Somalia-sur-Med. Nor does it guarantee that any of the other revolts will produce stable democracies. Because the real cause of these revolutions, beyond all the chatter about social networks, is a problem that is liable to get worse in coming years rather than better, and that is largely beyond the power of anyone to contain or control.

The first warnings of what was to come appeared in the form of a briefing paper on the website of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation in December. “Recent bouts of extreme price volatility in global agricultural markets,” it said, “portend rising and more frequent threats to world food security. There is emerging consensus that the global food system is becoming more vulnerable and susceptible to episodes of extreme price volatility. As markets are increasingly integrated in the world economy, shocks in the international arena can now transpire and propagate to domestic markets much quicker than before.”

The “shocks” all occurred a long way from Cairo and Tunis. They included fires in Russia last autumn which wiped out hundreds of thousands of acres of grain; heavy rains in Canada, destroying the wheat crop there; hot, dry weather in Argentina which destroyed the soybean crop; the Australian floods which ruined the wheat harvest. The Middle East accounts for one-third of worldwide wheat imports. The combined effect of these far-flung agricultural problems was to bump up the food price index by 32 per cent in the second half of 2010.

The FAO likens “extreme price volatility” to great natural disasters – major earthquakes, tsunamis, catastrophic cyclones. “Historically, bouts of such extreme volatility… have been rare,” they say. “To draw the analogy with natural disasters, they typically have a low possibility of occurrence but bring with them extremely high risks and potential costs to society.”

A similar chain of unconnected farming catastrophes in early 2008 led to a similar outbreak of “extreme price volatility” around the world which provoked food riots in more than 40 countries, from Haiti to Bangladesh, including Mexico, Uzbekistan and Eritrea but also involving several countries caught up in the present round of uprisings, including Egypt, Yemen, Morocco, Mauritania, Senegal and Zimbabwe. All were among the 80 countries around the world that combine low incomes with food deficits – the need to import food, bringing exposure to wildly fluctuating world market prices. In these poor countries, food purchases can consume 70 per cent of income. The result, when prices of flour and grains shoot up by 30 per cent, is extreme distress – the sort of distress that sends people out into the streets in fury.

Abdolreza Abbassian, FAO’s chief economist saw – in his dry, cautious, academic manner – the present turmoil coming. “It’s getting a little bit uncomfortable,” he said back in December. “A lot of countries, especially the poorer ones, have to rely so much on world markets. They have to import food at much higher prices. Whether or not this will lead to domestic problems, turmoil, demonstrations, riots, the kind of things we saw in 2008, it is not possible to predict.”

For the poor of the Middle East, the price shocks at the start of this year were like experiencing a second killer earthquake in three years – but unlike with an earthquake, there was someone you could blame. So angry were the food price protesters in Tunisia that, after Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself, President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali declared a state of emergency and promised to reduce the price of food. But it was too little, too late: by mid-January he was gone.

Tunisia’s turmoil, warned The Washington Post as the toppled president flew off into exile, “has economists worried that we may be seeing the beginning of a second wave of global food riots”. As we know now, it turned out somewhat differently. Food riots in 2008, revolutions in 2011 – what, where, who is next?

The price of food is at the heart of this wave of revolutions – Africa, World – The Independent.

Related Articles

• VIDEO: Tunisia revolution: One month on (bbc.co.uk)
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Algeria protests: Police arrest hundreds inspired by Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak downfall

Thousands of riot police arrested hundreds of demonstrators in the Algerian capital today as they tried to stop a banned pro-democracy rally a day after Egypt‘s authoritarian leader was toppled.

Armed police blocked off streets in Algiers and set up security barricades at strategic points along the march route and outside the city to try to stop busloads of demonstrators from reaching the capital.

Armed police were also posted near newspaper headquarters.

Organisers of the march estimated some 10,000 people had flooded Algiers, where they skirmished with riot police attempting to block off streets and disperse the crowd.

 

Not-so-thin blue line: Riot policemen surround protesters during the demonstration. Estimates put the numbers of police at 30,000 – three times the number of protesters

 

Held: Riot police detain protesters

News reports suggested security forces outnumbered demonstrators. The Algerian daily La Liberte said some 30,000 riot police had been deployed in the capital.

Ali Yahia Abdenour, a human rights activist, said more than 400 people – including women and foreign journalists – have been arrested.

Abdenour, who heads the Algerian League for the Defense of Human Rights, said some 28,000 security forces were deployed in Algiers to block the march.

Protesters chanted slogans including ‘No to the police state’ and ‘Bouteflika out,’ a reference to President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who has been in power since 1999.

Under the country’s long-standing state of emergency, protests are banned in Algiers, but the government’s repeated warnings for people to stay out of the streets apparently fell on deaf ears.

The march comes at a sensitive time in Algeria – just a day after the uprising in Egypt that forced Hosni Mubarak to abandon the presidency after 30 years. It also comes on the heels of a ‘people’s revolution’ in neighbouring Tunisia that pushed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile on January 14.

Some observers have predicted Algeria could be the next Arab country hit by the wave of popular protests.

 

Stranglehold: Plainclothes policemen detain a protester during the demonstration in Algiers

 

March: Riot police clash with protesters as about 50 people shouted ‘No to the police state’ and ‘[President] Bouteflika out’

The democratic domino-effect has electrified the Arab world and led many to ask which country could see uprisings in a region where a mix of authoritarian rule and popular anger are the norm.

Organised by the Coordination for Democratic Change in Algeria, an umbrella group of human rights activists, unionists, lawyers and others, Saturday’s march was aimed at pressing for reforms includig greater democratic freedoms, a change of government, and more jobs – although didn’t include any specific call by organisers to oust Bouteflika.

Widespread unrest in Algeria could have implications for the world economy. Although unemployment is high and poverty is endemic,  it is a major oil and gas exporter, but many analysts say an Egypt-style revolt is unlikely because the government can use its energy wealth to placate most grievances.

‘We are ready for the march,’ said Mohsen Belabes, a spokesman for the small RCD opposition party which is one of the organisers of the protest.

‘It’s going to be a great day for democracy in Algeria.’

A heavy police presence is routine in Algeria to counter the threat of attacks by al Qaeda insurgents, but more than the usual numbers were already in place hours before the start of the protest.

 

Chanting: Demonstrators chant slogans in the Algerian capital – surrounded by hundreds of police determined to stamp out any attempt to stage an Egypt-style revolt

 

Intent: The march was aimed at pressing for reforms to push Algeria toward democracy

At May 1 Square, the starting point for the planned march not far from the city’s Mediterranean port, at least 15 police vans, jeeps and buses were lined up.

A similar number were in a nearby side-street outside the city’s Mustapha hospital.

At several road junctions, the police had parked small military-style armoured vehicles which are rarely seen in the city, while more than a mile from the centre officers in body armour were standing outside a fuel station.

 

March: Despite the demands for greater democratic freedoms, there has been no specific call by organisers of the protest march to oust President Abdelaziz Bouteflika

Other Arab countries have also felt the ripples from the revolts in Egypt and Tunisia. Jordan’s King Abdullah replaced his prime minister after protests and in Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised opponents he would not seek a new term.

Protest organisers in Algeria – who say they draw some of their inspiration from events in Egypt and Tunisia – say police may turn people away before they can reach the march in the capital, or parallel protests planned for other cities.

‘Algerians must be allowed to express themselves freely and hold peaceful protests in Algiers and elsewhere,’ human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement.

‘We urge the Algerian authorities not to respond to these demands by using excessive force.’

Many Algerians fear any prospect of conflict after years of a brutal insurgency by Islamic extremists that has left an estimated 200,000 dead.

There is no specific call by organisers of the protest march to oust President Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

However, a markedly anti-government sentiment was in the air. Under the headline “Mubarak pushed from power,” a cartoon in La Liberte showed the score Egypt-1, Algeria-0 and a fan waving an Algerian flag saying ‘we’ve got to tie the score’.

With scattered strikes and clashes, including five days of rioting in early January, the atmosphere in Algiers has been tense.

There have been numerous copy-cat suicides, and attempted suicides, in Algeria like the self-immolation attempt by a young man that set off the Tunisian protests in mid-December.

The government says it refused permission for the rally for public order reasons, not because it is trying to stifle dissent.

It says it is working hard to create jobs, build new homes and improve public services.

In an attempt to head off anti-government unrest, the authorities have cut prices for sugar and cooking oil, bought huge quantities of grain to ensure bread supplies and promised to lift a 19-year-old state of emergency in the ‘very near future’.

The protest is not backed by Algeria’s main trade unions, its biggest opposition parties or the radical Islamist groups which were banned in the early 1990s but still retain grassroots influence.

The march ‘is likely to be violent, but unlikely to destabilize the regime,’ said Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy.

Algeria protests: Police arrest hundreds inspired by Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak downfall | Mail Online.

Global Revolution: We ain’t buying the BS

By Gerald Celente
2-1-11

KINGSTON, NY, 1 February 2011 – When the Tunisian government toppled, the mass media and their stable of experts ­ who were blindsided by these events ­ quickly stepped in to proclaim the obvious: that citizens of other Arab nations would be emboldened to challenge autocratic and corrupt governments.
Now Egypt is in the throes of insurrection, and Algeria, Jordan, Morocco and Yemen are already targeted for revolutionary change. The richer and more tightly controlled Kingdoms of the Middle East will not be immune to challenges from their citizenry to break the chains of royal rule.
But, as I had forecast in the Trends Journal, it is not solely the Middle East that is destined to experience episodes of violent upheaval. What is transpiring in the Arab world will spread throughout many European states.  While the call to arms will be spoken in different tongues, the underlying causes will be the same.
In December 2010 (before Tunisia made the headlines) we issued a Trend Alert® titled, “Off With Their Heads!” in which we predicted a “long war between the people and the ruling classes.” We noted that, “Anyone questioning the intensity of the people’s seething anger is either out of touch or in denial.”
It wasn’t Arab anger that led us to that forecast ­ it was the student and worker revolts spilling into the streets of Europe. The imposition of draconian austerity measures ­ higher taxes, tuition hikes, lost benefits, curtailed services, public sector job cuts ­ had young and old raging against a rigged system that paved the way for the privileged and punished the proles.
Though millions marched through the streets of Athens, Brussels, Dublin, Lisbon, London and Madrid, when the protests ended, the governments were barely shaken, let alone toppled. Unlike the autocratic Arab regimes, where the tight grip of repression could only be broken by violence, in the “democratic” West the illusion of representation and placating government promises mitigated the violence.
Both the press and politicians assumed the protests would run their course, people would accept their fate, and, like it or not, suffer the consequences.  The protests, however, have not run their course. The economic toll of austerity and unemployment continues to ravage the lower and middle classes. As we wrote in the Winter 2011 Trends Journal, “It will only be a matter of time before a series of final straw events breaks the public’s back, setting off uncontrollable uprisings, coups (bloodless and/or military), riots and revolts throughout the financially battered world.”
Trend Forecast: The unintended consequences of the regime changes in North Africa and the Middle East, and the uprisings we forecast that will roil Europe will be as fully dramatic as their intended consequences: the overthrow of governments. The calls by Presidents, Prime Ministers, cabinet officials and foreign policy experts for “orderly transition of power” are nothing more than diplomatic doublespeak and pure windbaggery. There is no such thing as a clean and simple revolution.
As we will see in Egypt, military coups will be disguised as regime changes. Already the public is being conditioned to view the Egyptian military as beloved liberators. But in fact they are simply another arm of the autocratic government, no more familiar with democratic ideals than the dictator they replace … who had himself been drawn from the ranks of the military.
The world leaders and world media are not recognizing the Egyptian uprising for what it is: a prelude to a series of civil wars that will lead to regional wars, that will lead to the first “Great War” of the 21st century.

(See “The History of The Future: Trends 2012: The Great War,” Trends Journal, Spring 2010)
To schedule an interview with Gerald Celente, Trends Journal publisher, please contact: Zeke West, Media Relations, zwest@trendsresearch.com 845 331.3500 ext. 1
©MMXI The Trends Research Institute®