by Robin Wright
“Change is a future notion,” reflected Marwan Muasher, the former Jordanian foreign minister. “The trick is putting it in the present.”
In 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani of Qatar—the little emirate jutting off Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf—became the first of a younger generation of Gulf princes to assume power. He did it by overthrowing his father, the region’s most autocratic leader in what was then the Middle East’s most closed society. To the consternation of neighboring sheikhdoms, Sheikh Hamad then invited Israel to open a commercial office in Doha, the United States to headquarter Central Command in Qatar, and American and European universities, including Cornell and Georgetown, to open up Qatari branches. He also launched al Jazeera, the first all-news Arab satellite channel. All were bold, controversial moves. Yet Qatar’s emir is still pacing the spread of political participation.
“We have no intention of waving some magic wand and changing our entire culture and society overnight,” Sheikh Hamad told me.
“To hurry change would only invite the social instability we seek to avoid, so we have chosen a middle course for change. Compared to radical changes in other nations since the end of the Cold War, our changes might appear small, but they are well-planned. We must be careful to change at a pace that meets the needs and desires of our people, as well as our traditional culture steeped in thousands of years of Arab and Islamic history.”
Qatar has held three municipal elections since 1999, conducted a referendum for the first constitution in 2003, and scheduled the first elections for a new national legislature in 2007. Women are able to vote and run for office.
Yet Qatar’s new legislature will have thirty elected seats with fifteen more appointed by the emir—still giving the palace effective veto power. The emir’s rule is still absolute.
“The Arab world is developing. Nothing can stop what is happening. But for now, the trend is toward participatory despotism,” said Harvard-educated Paul Salem, head of the Beirut branch of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and son of a former Lebanese foreign minister.
“Most of the Arab states are making that shift, and it’s important. That’s how it started in the West: The king allowed a parliament and eventually parliament got stronger. After that, the dynamic will be slow liberalization within authoritarian systems that accept and integrate, to varying degrees, the principle of participation in parliament, in local government, in open discussion of the budget, and with emerging press freedoms, nongovernment organizations, more political parties, and more human rights groups.
“It will happen,” Salem said, “but with much grinding of the wheels and sluggishness and tension.”
And tokenism. Elections engineered to produce token participation are preempting real democracy in several states.
In 2006, the seven sheikhdoms in the United Arab Emirates—the most opulent and liberal society on the Arabian Peninsula, complete with bikini beaches and restaurants serving alcohol and pork—held their first election. More than 400 candidates ran, including sixty-five women. The process, however, was a political charade. Only 6,595 people, all handpicked by the government out of 300,000 citizens over the age of eighteen, were allowed to vote. The stakes—twenty seats on a new Federal National Council—were also a token. Another twenty seats were appointed by the ruling tribal royal families. And the new council had no powers. It was only an advisory body that could be ignored.9 The first elected body was not a credible political entity in the twenty-first century, even as a transition device.
Several Middle East regimes, particularly the eight oil-rich members of OPEC, can literally afford tokenism. The wealth of so-called “rentier” states—which survive off the “rent” of foreign payments from petroleum products—can limit both public leverage and foreign pressure.
Petroleum and democracy do not mix well. “Tyranny has a full tank,” said Marina Ottaway of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.10 And the push for change began just as oil prices soared to unprecedented highs.
Petrodollar wealth can also breed political apathy in traditional societies.
In little Qatar, which has the world’s second-largest gas reserves, the emir worried that people with one of the world’s highest per capita incomes would not be interested in politics. Qatar’s stock market is instead the national obsession.
“To get people to accept a constitution or the idea of voting took us time. Some people didn’t see it as important,” Sheikh Hamad told me in Doha, the construction-crazed capital, in 2006. “Our society is tribal. It means that tribes select their eldest as their leader, and they just listen to his order and his wisdom. People are still comfortable with that system. They don’t see any reason to work in politics.”
The election turnout for the 2003 municipal election was 32 percent. In 2007, it was 51 percent. Only a minority of citizens, however, was registered to vote for either election.
As change does play out, the emerging governments will also be weaker and far from full democracies for a long, long time to come. New leaders will remain vulnerable.
“America is different from everywhere else. It was full-born in a constitution. The rest of the world had to work toward a constitution,” Paul Salem said. “Remember that when you make calculations about the Middle East.”
The disastrous miscalculations in Iraq will further slow and complicate the process. The American intervention was, in the end, often counterproductive to the cause of democracy in the region. It disillusioned many about both the costs and benefits.
All the factors contributing to change will also make the region susceptible to greater turmoil and divisions during the transitions. The stimulants pose hazards.
Among them, a major engine of change is youth. The Middle East—including North Africa, the Levant, and the Persian Gulf—has witnessed a sevenfold explosion in population over only three generations, from 60 million in the 1930s to 415 million by 2006.11 The majority today are young. In some countries, up to seventy percent are under age thirty. They are hungry for change. As they come of working age, economists contend that they offer the potential for the kind of economic growth witnessed with the Asian Tigers. Many of the young are willing to act politically, too. And numbers are on their side.
Yet as governments are increasingly unable to provide education, employment, and housing, today’s frustrated youth are also looking for fast answers. Regionwide, roughly one in three young people is unemployed.12 The highest youth unemployment rate in the world also provides an exploitable flashpoint to build sympathy or support for extremist movements.
“Tens of millions of educated but underemployed, unemployed, restive and frustrated young men and women have given unnatural birth to thousands of active terrorists and anarchists, targeting our own and foreign lands,” wrote my colleague and friend Rami Khouri, a columnist for Lebanon’s Daily Star and head of the American University of Beirut’s think tank.13
The many arms of information technology and the media have also had a huge impact, again to good and bad effect. The Internet, even with government censorship or restrictions, provides access to the outside world as never before. In some countries, up to seventy percent of the young were using the Internet on a weekly basis in 2006, surveys show.14 The cell phone text message has become the medium to organize antigovernment rallies. And satellite television has revolutionized a region where all media were state-controlled not so long ago.
After decades with only one or two heavily censored television channels, the first Arab satellite news station debuted in 1996, providing access for the first time to news not controlled by local governments in a language most in the region could understand. By 2007, dozens of unregulated satellite stations beamed in via rooftop satellite dishes began making people far more aware—of what is really happening in their own countries, of change happening in other parts of the world, and of international standards for political life.
“Arab media is in the midst of a highly dynamic
transition, fuelled by the emergence of low-cost and accessible satellite broadcast technology,” a report by the United States Institute of Peace concluded in 2005.
It is the satellite channels that show the greatest potential for ushering in political change in the region…. No matter how hard they try, regimes can no longer control the information environment…. The fact that Arab governments call in to television [talk] programs to defend their human rights record indicates some advancement.15
But technology’s wizardry also allows Osama bin Laden and his affiliates to distribute worldwide their diatribes, threats, and beheadings on satellite television, while terrorist groups tap into the resources and riches of the Internet. Propaganda has a new tool with unprecedented reach.
For now, Middle East societies are caught in an awkward stage in transition. In 2003, the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation launched Star Academy, a mixture of American Idol and Big Brother that brings together Arab youth from all over the region to compete for a singing contract. An affiliate station tracks the competitors all day, every day, as they sing, dance, play, interact, cook, and sleep. Conservative clerics quickly condemned the show. Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz al Sheikh, the kingdom’s highest religious authority, issued an edict calling the show an open invitation to sin. He warned Muslims to avoid it. Nevertheless, it became wildly popular.
Finally, greater exposure to ideas in the outside world has helped inform and change public attitudes in the Middle East. Some of the most popular books in the region are written by or about Western politicians, philosophers, and political analysts. The osmosis of globalization has spurred a rich new discourse on democracy and how to adapt it to their own cultures.
Yet exposure has also alienated those fearing foreign encroachment—again. Many of the most ardent Iranian revolutionaries were educated in the United States; one group was often referred to as the “Berkeley mafia” because they all attended the University of California. In the very worst case, Mohammed Atta, who masterminded the terrorist spectaculars against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, spent almost a decade in Europe.
Change and its agents will produce some troubling consequences. Many in the region will question whether the short-term dangers are worth the eventual benefits—and the price paid along the way.
The Middle East is not really one place, so change will have many faces.
The region today is arguably more stereotyped than any other part of the world. But the peoples, histories, religions, political systems, and economies actually differ widely among countries, even within them. It is the world’s only bloc spread across two continents.
“Democracy,” said Paul Salem, “will be a country-by-country phenomenon.”
The Middle East includes the tribal societies of the Arabian Peninsula, from where Islam and the Arabs originated. It includes the cosmopolitan cities of new Beirut and old Damascus. It includes Palestinians who have lived more than a half century in squalid refugee camps as well as Gulf princes who own multiple palaces because of oil found under the desert sands. It includes the desert-dwelling Berbers and Bedouin nomads who roam with their camel-hair tents across the Sahara, the Sinai, and the vast expanses of Arabia. And it includes Kurds, who are the world’s largest minority without a state. Although they are not Arabs, they have significant numbers in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
Political starting points vary just as deeply. Saudi Arabia has strict Sunni religious rule, while Iran is a Shiite-dominated Islamic republic with a constitution that draws on European law. Syria and Libya are secular states based on socialist ideologies. Kuwait, Jordan, and Morocco are still ruled by traditional monarchies.
The range of freedoms is reflected in the region’s fashions: In Arabia, the national dress for men is the traditional loose-fitting white thobe, which looks like a shirt that extends to the ankles; for women in public, it is a shapeless black cloak with four layers of black veils. In contrast, Lebanese men can wear tight Speedo briefs on mixed-gender beaches, while many women favor whatever fashion is the sassiest, flashiest, or skimpiest.
Economically, the peoples of the Middle East also have vastly different resources as tools for a transition. The region includes the earth’s richest nations, like glitzy Qatar, the tiny thumb off Saudi Arabia’s eastern coast that sits atop the world’s largest field of natural gas and has a per-capita income of $38,000. On the other extreme is exotic but densely populated Yemen on Saudi Arabia’s southern border, where the per capita income is a mere $500.
The broader Middle East is not even a single geographic unit. The two dozen nations spread from northern Africa to western Asia. They stretch from Morocco on the Atlantic Ocean to Lebanon and Syria on the Mediterranean, from Egypt and Yemen on opposite sides of the Red Sea, to Iraq and Iran at the top of the Persian Gulf and Oman at its mouth. The region spans four time zones and 4,000 miles from east to west.
Languages differ too. Using French and English, I once translated between Moroccans and Saudis who could not understand each other’s Arabic. Most Iranians speak Farsi and haughtily note their Indo-European rather than Arab roots. Kurds have their own language too.
Although the region is associated with Islam, it is rich with religious minorities. One out of every ten Egyptians is a Coptic Christian. About fifteen percent of the Palestinians belong to disparate Christian faiths. The region is also home to Alawites, Armenian Orthodox and Catholics, Baha’i, Chaldeans, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Maronites, and many others.
I once visited a fire temple of the Zoroastrians, who worship light as the symbol of a good and omnipotent God. Iran is the world center for the faith founded six centuries before Christianity. As the symbol of light, fires at the altars of their temples have burned continuously for centuries. Zoroastrian ideas about the devil, hell, a future savior, the struggle between good and evil ending with a day of judgment, the resurrection of the dead, and an afterlife had great impact on all monotheistic faiths, and even Buddhism.
The largest Jewish population in the Middle East outside of Israel is also in Iran, which still has kosher butchers, Jewish schools, synagogues, and a first-rate hospital favored by many of the ayatollahs. In Tehran, I have attended a Hebrew class for children as well as a Catholic service at which wine was served—with government permission, in a country that otherwise outlaws alcohol—as part of communion. Iran’s parliament has five especially reserved (and proportionate) seats for Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.
Because of the region’s diversity, rivalries and backstabbing can become bitter and intense. Middle East nations can also be miserly with each other.
On a 1981 trip to Libya, I covered Yasser Arafat’s quest for financial aid. In a bizarre scene, Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi escorted a fatigues-clad Arafat through the opening of a new People’s Store in Tripoli, showing off French fashions, German toys, Italian appliances, and Japanese electronics. At a rooftop ceremony afterward, the two men prayed, shared dates and goat’s milk, then exchanged gifts. Arafat gave Qaddafi an exquisite antique camel saddle. Qaddafi presented the Palestinian leader, who was still in exile, with a set of Samsonite luggage.
“That’s all he’s likely to get from Qaddafi,” complained one of Arafat’s aides as we watched from the sidelines. “Qaddafi has promised us millions but never delivered a single cent.”
More than two decades later, several Arab governments that had pledged billions to help rebuild Iraq had failed to pay up several years after making their commitments—even though Iraq’s instability was affecting them all.
Opening up political systems may spark further friction, at least in the short term, as the balance of power shifts both within countries and between them. People long excluded will now want their say too. Indeed, whatever the rhetoric, the greatest tension in the region may not be between Arabs and Israelis. Sunnis, who long monopolized power, are particularly apprehensive about the growing leverage of Shiites, Islam’s so-called second sect. In an in
terview in 2004, Jordan’s King Abdullah warned me about the danger of an emerging “Shiite arc,” or crescent, stretching from Iran through Iraq into Syria and Lebanon—the kind of domino theory that once scared the West about communism.16 The phrase set off a firestorm; it is still used to describe the region’s growing sectarian split.
The Middle East has already gone through enormous change.
In the twentieth century, three pivotal events redefined the region. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire, which dominated the Middle East for five centuries, redrew the map and gave birth to modern states after World War I. The creation of Israel in 1948 changed the region’s political dynamics and spawned the world’s longest conflict. And the 1979 Iranian revolution introduced Islam as an alternative political idiom. All three had spillover worldwide.
By coincidence, I first landed in the Middle East on October 6, 1973, arriving in Beirut during the chaotic outbreak of the fourth modern Middle East war. The Arabs had just launched a surprise attack on Israel. “Egyptian troops have crossed the Suez Canal,” an American tourist leaned over and whispered to me.
Oil was then only $3.12 per barrel—yes, barrel, not gallon—and the sheikhdoms of the Arabian Peninsula were considered poor developing countries. In Saudi Arabia, schools for girls had only been around for nine years and a single-channel television service for seven; both had been introduced over serious objections by conservative clergy. The strict Saudi version of Islam did not tolerate the human image in art or literature, much less on the small screen.
Iran was then one of two pillars of United States policy in the region. Some 40,000 Americans—military trainers and government advisers, businessmen, Peace Corps volunteers and tourists—passed through each year. It was spy heaven for the Central Intelligence Agency, which trained and worked closely with its Iranian counterpart. In Tehran in 1973, I stayed at the high-rise Hilton, which had just hosted a pageant of exotic and scantily clad beauties competing for the Miss Iran title.
