by Vali Nasr
The large majority of Turks—especially those on the Islamic side of the aisle—are not just Muslim, but distinctly Sunni in their identity. Just as Turkey’s Sunnis identify with Syria’s Sunnis, Turkey’s Alevis feel solidarity with Syria’s Alawites—although their faiths are not the same and their rituals differ. Alevis, for instance, congregate in cemevis to pray, and the community has so far refused the Turkish government’s entreaties that it too worship in mosques—that is, blend in with Sunnis.18
By some estimates, Alevis make up as much as a quarter of Turkey’s population (Alevis themselves claim the share is much higher), and they include Turkish citizens of both Kurdish and Turkish ethnicity.19 To get a fuller picture of the ethnosectarian identities that exist in today’s Turkey, one should also take into account the additional 3 to 5 percent of the population who are Shias of Azeri lineage, the ethnic cousins of Iranian Azeris and much of the population of independent Azerbaijan. None of this is to suggest that Turkey suffers from acute sectarianism—it does not—but sectarian shadings and undercurrents are present. If the rest of the region blows up into sectarian violence, these could become more prominent and more problematic features of Turkish life. Already Turkey’s role in the Syrian crisis has brought to the fore uncomfortable debates about where Alevis pray. Alevi intellectuals have taken the lead in criticizing the AKP government’s support for the uprising in Syria, and debate over Turkey’s role in the conflict now has a clear sectarian undertone. Deniz Baykal, former leader of the opposition Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has called for constitutional changes that would protect Turkey from “Syrian contamination” by fully recognizing the religious rights of the Alevi sect and reorganizing the State Directorate of Religious Affairs to accommodate Alevis.20 The ruling AKP has rejected such suggestions. Prime Minister Erdogan has shot back, saying, “If we are Muslims then our temple ought to be one and the same” (i.e., no constitutional recognition of Alevi rights).21 At the same time, the government is conscious of the brewing sectarian tension in light of developments in Syria. At a public rally Erdogan brushed aside criticism by his main rival, Kemal Kiliçdaroglu (current leader of CHP), of Turkey’s posture toward Syria, saying that of course as an Alevi, Kiliçdaroglu would have a soft spot for Assad.22
Much has been written about the personal relationship between Erdogan and Assad—they had been known to vacation together—and how that had improved the once-tense relations between Turkey and Syria before the Arab Spring. Such coverage is overblown. The truth of the matter is that neither Erdogan nor anyone in his party has ever thought of Alawites as true Muslims or considered their control of Syria legitimate.
The AKP party’s Sunni base may support greater Turkish involvement in Syria—and that may sit well with Erdogan’s ambition to lead the Sunni world from the Balkans to Central Asia and deep into the Middle East. But fear that deeper involvement in Syria’s troubles could inflame Turkey’s own sectarian tensions has stayed his hand. And so will Turkey’s business interests.
The coming apart of Syria has reactivated Turkey’s Kurdish separatist PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party), which has strong ties with Syria’s Kurds. As Damascus loses control of its Kurdish region and refugees flow into Turkey, the PKK—with the Syrian government’s encouragement—has found more room to operate. The resulting terrorist attacks in Turkey have put the country on edge, raising the specter of a risky Turkish intervention in Syria. What’s more, Iraq’s Kurds are sympathetic to the separatist movement, and their leader Masoud Barzani has provided it support, to Turkey’s annoyance. Relations between Turkey and the Kurdish region of northern Iraq have been warm—this year, after oil giants Chevron, Gazprom, and Total signed oil deals with Barzani, Turkey announced it would build two new pipelines to export the new oil through Turkey. But the PKK is now coming between Erdogan and Barzani.
Similarly, China, which has been doing growing trade with Turkey, is irked at Turkey’s stance on Syria in support of the United States. That has not impacted business between the two countries so far, but it is a dark cloud over the horizon. Syria is putting at risk Turkey’s domestic stability and economic interests, and that is likely to serve as a brake on Erdogan and Davutoglu’s embrace of the Sunni surge in Syria and Iraq.
Turkey’s main rival for leadership of the Sunni world is Saudi Arabia. The rivalry is not new. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the Ottoman-appointed governor of the Hejaz (the mountainous Red Sea coastal province of today’s Saudi Arabia where Mecca and Medina are located, and which at the time was the seat of power on the Arabian Peninsula), Sharif Hussein of Mecca (the great-grandfather of King Abdullah II of Jordan), challenged the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul, claiming autonomy for Hejaz and religious authority for himself despite the sultan’s nominal status as caliph of all Muslims. Hussein’s case rested on his claim of blood kinship to the Prophet Muhammad himself (something to which the Ottoman sultans had no pretensions) and his status as “guardian of the two holy places,” meaning Mecca and Medina.
The rivalry reached its symbolic climax in a dispute over who had the authority to declare a jihad either for or against the Allies or the Central Powers during the First World War. In the end, Sharif Hussein threw in his lot with the British, who thought in turn that his fatwa would carry the most weight not only with Arabs but also among the many Muslims of British India and Britain’s African colonies. Given this thumbnail history (readers may be familiar with some of it from well-known sources such as T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom or David Lean and Robert Bolt’s 1962 cinematic masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia), it is not hard to see how neo-Ottoman Turkey’s recent rise has grated on Saudi sensibilities and breathed new life into the old competition between Mecca and Istanbul.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia may cooperate on Syria, but they are vying against each other for influence over Egypt and Iraq. Turkish foreign minister Davutoglu’s idea of an “axis of democracy” running between Ankara and Cairo runs athwart Saudi hopes of embracing Egypt as a means of containing the Arab Spring and the democratic aspirations it released.23 Saudi Arabia looks to Egypt with worried eyes. A chaotic Egypt will present the Saudis with myriad problems, and a democratic Egypt may be no less a thorn in the kingdom’s side. It is hard to imagine that the oil princes relish the prospect of a large Arab country filled with Sunnis just across the Red Sea playing host to Saudi dissidents, holding competitive elections, allowing mass demonstrations, and the rest. Unlike Iran, Egypt cannot be dismissed as a bearer of Persian and Shia deviationism. Saudi Arabia has already had to close its Cairo embassy for a time.24 Saudi rulers can feel at ease only with an authoritarian Egypt.
Turkey is less sectarian in its outlook than Saudi Arabia and has many more areas of common interest with Iran than do the Saudis, and what we may see is not a hard-and-fast Sunni alliance arrayed against Iran, but a degree of cooperation between Ankara and Tehran that would allow Turkey to set itself apart from Saudi Arabia.
An Iranian businessman who plies his trade in Iraqi Kurdistan told me, “All those Turkish businesses that you see doing business in northern Iraq are not really Turkish; many are Iranian or part Iranian.” He said:
The Revolutionary Guards could not do business in Iraq after 2003 because the Americans would not let them. So [the Guards] formed shell companies in Turkey. Those companies are either Revolutionary Guards–owned or they are partnerships between the Guards and Turkish businesses. Together they do business in Iraq. You go to meetings in Istanbul with these Turkish companies to talk about business in Iraq and there are Iranians in the room. The Turks know it, they are all making money; it contributes to the Guards’ budget.
America should favor a prosperous and democratic Turkey rather than a conservative and authoritarian Saudi Arabia assuming the mantle of Sunni leadership. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies will be caught between containing the Shia power centers (Iran, Iraq, Lebanon) and coping with the surging Sunni Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, which ha
ve a populist and antimonarchical bent. In order to have any hope of surviving, these monarchies will have to gravitate toward Islamism and feed Sunni extremism across the region. Here again, Pakistan tells a disturbing premonitory tale. There, the Saudis pumped money in to empower Sunni extremists (and fund a nuclear program) as a way of flanking Shia Iran. If the troubles that Saudi-backed Sunni extremism have brought to Pakistan, its neighbors, and the world at large are any indication, we should hope that Ankara rather than Riyadh emerges as the Muslim world’s Sunni big brother. Turkey too will find itself having to tack in the direction of the Islamism that is sweeping the Arab world. That will not suit Ankara’s global ambitions, and we will have to do what we can to see that Turkey does not veer too far off course in order to align itself with the Arab mood. Neo-Ottomanism can be a positive force only if it avoids marching under the banner of Islamism.
The Persian Gulf monarchies’ efforts to surf the new wave are already in full swing. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been aiding Salafi forces in Libya, Syria, and Lebanon. Yet Washington relies heavily on gas-rich Qatar, a tiny emirate that has big regional ambitions and deep pockets to go with them. Occupying a small peninsula that juts off the Arabian coast into the Persian Gulf, Qatar has long-running rivalries with the UAE and especially Saudi Arabia (there have been armed border skirmishes). The ruling al-Thani family provides bases for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and also owns al-Jazeera, the Arab world’s most popular and influential satellite TV channel. This unusual combination of U.S. military muscle and influence over Arab public opinion via the power of television gives Qatar an outsized presence in Arab politics. Al-Jazeera tends to follow the interests of the Sunni regime, showing blood-curdling news footage from Syria to rally Arab public opinion against Assad but remaining largely silent about Shia protests against a Sunni monarch in nearby Bahrain.
Qatar took a leading role in brokering a truce between Lebanon’s bickering factions in 2008, averting open conflict there. More recently, Qatar played a key role in Arab League deliberations over whether to push for intervention in Libya and Syria. That sort of regional engagement is attractive to Washington. Doha, America thinks, has the cash and the desire to move policy. But that is a risky proposition. Should America trust a small country that may have the will to make its voice heard diplomatically but lacks the diplomatic and military capacity to see its favored policies through to completion?
Nor are Qatar’s power plays always in line with U.S. objectives. A small fish that wishes to swim beside a whale may know a few tricks, but does it have the stamina to swim against the tide? In a region awash with anti-Americanism, Qatar has decided to balance its close ties with Washington with hedging on the other side. It was not until al-Jazeera broadcast images of the Arab Spring to the world that Washington found something to like about the network. Over the years, al-Jazeera has consistently criticized American policy—and on many occasions deservedly so. In return, Washington has blocked its broadcast on American cable channels, and it was perhaps a convenient coincidence that in both Iraq and Afghanistan American firepower zeroed in on the al-Jazeera bureaus. The network’s anti-American slant was fine with the al-Thanis and their lieutenants, who pointed to it in order to reject charges that they were U.S. stooges.
Qatari hedging does not end with al-Jazeera, however. The emirate has also lent support to Islamist forces (both the Muslim Brotherhood and, more worryingly, Salafis) in Libya, Egypt, and Syria.25 Qatar Airways announced a deal with Iran to take over a fifth of that country’s domestic airline industry at a time when a lack of spare parts and rising air accidents rooted in American sanctions were causing ordinary Iranians much angst.26
The Persian Gulf monarchies have not made it past the dangers that the Arab Spring represents, and indeed are particularly vulnerable to them. The UAE’s decision to close the offices of the National Democratic Institute (a pro-democracy organization backed by the U.S. government) in March 2012 betrayed an awareness of this. The Persian Gulf’s ruling elites are eager for American military protection, but not for American values.
Saudi Arabia in particular is vulnerable to Arab Spring aftershocks. The House of Saud was quick both to jack up domestic entitlement spending and to urge the region’s other monarchies not to give in to protesters.27 The kingdom’s rulers have pumped billions into the economies of Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, and Yemen. The dole has bought Saudi Arabia some relief—bolstering ruling regimes in Bahrain and Jordan, and strengthening the military’s hand in Egypt while giving Yemen a soft landing after Saleh’s exit.
That has worked for now, but the fundamentals are not in favor of long-run authoritarian stability. As we have seen, the region’s monarchies are now more dependent on oil than at any other time in their history, and soon they may be more dependent on the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf into world markets than their thirsty customers.
Saudi financial support to its fellow monarchs is not a one-time intervention. Absent real reform, Arab economies are going to remain bottomless money pits, and Saudi Arabia cannot afford to keep them all serviced amply enough to maintain its influence on the shape of Arab political life. The Middle East is not Europe, and Saudi Arabia (or even the whole collection of Arab petromonarchies) is not Germany. Certainly Abdullah bin Abdulaziz cuts no Angela Merkel–like figure. The notion that America can expect the Middle East to manage its own financial crises the way Europe does is misplaced and dangerous.
We cannot think with glee of getting off Middle Eastern oil and seeing energy prices drop, but then continue to rely on the Persian Gulf’s oil monarchies to realize our security and diplomatic goals in the region. If oil prices fall sharply, Saudi Arabia runs into big trouble. We might not shed many tears for the Saudi princes and their religious policemen, but can we think that cataclysmic change in the Persian Gulf will somehow not affect us?
Oil experts estimate that risk accounts for at least a fifth of the current price of oil—jittery buyers paying a premium to hedge against future supply cutoffs. Our policy in the region, threatening war with Iran, contributes to that premium. If we were to free ourselves of Middle East worries or somehow find our way to peace with Iran, the biggest losers would be Saudi Arabia and Russia, each of which has an economy that is dangerously dependent on high oil prices.
If the Chinese and Indian economies slow down over the coming decade, the Persian Gulf will face a precipitous drop in the price of oil. If fracking and other new fossil-fuel extraction technologies do around the world what they are doing in America, the resulting fall in energy prices could produce a Persian Gulf that is in deeper economic and social trouble and with fewer prospects for recovery than its larger Arab neighbors in the Levant and North Africa. Saudi Arabia could then be in worse shape than Egypt—it will have a harder political landing, and worse yet, the Saudi economy and labor force would not be in the position to pick up the pieces by attracting foreign investment to manufacture goods for export and integrate happily into the world economy. The Persian Gulf will not be able to do as Southeast Asia did after the financial crisis of 1998.
There is a lot of talk around the Persian Gulf region of “life after oil.” Dubai and Bahrain have experimented with building financial sectors and every emirate is investing in tourism. As yet, however, there is no sustainable model—the non-oil economy still needs oil revenue to survive. The smaller emirates have built sovereign wealth funds that will provide income long into the future. That is a cushion to protect against dropping oil revenues, but only if the population feeding off that income does not grow inordinately. Despite rising oil wealth, Saudi Arabia’s per capita income ($20,000) has not changed since the 1980s.28 If its population keeps growing at the current rate of 2 percent annually—which means that Saudi Arabia’s population will double in fewer decades than it should—then GDP per capita may start to decline.
A larger question is whether a youthful populace living off a sovereign wealth fund will remain satisfied with idleness and lack of
productivity and not turn to political activism. Can the appeal of Xbox always be counted on to exceed the appeal of Tahrir Square? Despite expensive investments the Saudi educational system is not producing skilled labor. Much of the productive work is still done by foreign guest workers while locals hold do-nothing government jobs or occupy themselves with religious activities. Saudi Arabia is awash with holders of doctorates in religious subjects.
There has been a buzz about the new King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), a Saudi version of MIT intended to turn out world-class scientists and engineers who will build the kingdom a highway into the future. Billions have gone into the new venture, luring leading American universities to partner with KAUST. But the project remains a white elephant, disconnected from the rest of the Saudi educational system, the prospects for realizing its goals uncertain as of yet. Like many other megaprojects in the Persian Gulf, the emphasis is on audacity rather than substance. What the region needs is change that is built from the ground up.
Already there are too many frustrated unemployed and underemployed youth in Saudi Arabia, spending too much time watching al-Jazeera and networking on Facebook or Twitter to remain immune to the lure of change on display in Tunisia, Egypt, or Syria. Forty percent of young Saudi men are unemployed—and their ranks will swell in the coming years—and a staggering 40 percent of all Saudis are under the age of fifteen.29 Protests could easily return to the kingdom, and if Bahrain erupts again, then protests could take on a sectarian cast, triggering agitation among Saudi Arabia’s own Shias.
Jacked-up entitlement spending has poured oil on the troubled waters for now, but it cannot correct worrisome long-term trends. If oil prices do not keep pace with the country’s current standards of living, the only alternative would be to whittle down entitlement programs and wean the economy off oil. The Saudi state could not accommodate that change easily if at all.30 It could crack, and if it survives it would be only after becoming more representative.
