A History of the Middle East (70 page)

But to get there, Dubai borrowed at fantastic rates, and in November 2009, in the midst of the global downturn, one of Dubai’s state companies, Dubai World, defaulted on its debts. Dubai’s inability to bail out the company, coupled with the emir’s earlier assurances he would meet its obligations, raised questions about the solvency of the emirate as a whole. Foreign investors carped at the contrast between the transparency of global financial institutions and the secrecy of Gulf economies, noting that in the build-up to the crisis, the UAE had drafted a draconian press law that imposed steep fines for publication of information ‘harmful to the economy’. Rents crashed by half, and only after Dubai’s public humiliation did Abu Dhabi bail out its brasher neighbour.

Political development in other Gulf states lagged similarly far behind the meteoric modernization of their infrastructure and the evolution of tribal sheikhs into boardroom executives. Across the Gulf, ruling families retained absolute power. For the most part, succession was surprisingly smooth. Only in Kuwait – with its more open legislature – was the process messier. Following the death of Jaber al-Sabah in January 2006, Kuwait’s parliament deposed his anointed successor, Crown Prince Saad al-Sabah, apparently because he was too poorly to read his inaugural speech. Presented as a rare display of Arab constitutional monarchy, rivalry between two Sabah branches – the Salims and the Jabirs – fuelled the parliamentary strife. Amid growing dissent at the appointment of numerous Jabirs, some of dubious quality, to senior cabinet positions, parliament grew increasingly feisty. In May 2009, voters elected four women to the legislature, a first in the Gulf, and subsequently forced the prime minister, the emir’s nephew, to submit to a vote of confidence.

Further south, the Gulf’s new generation of leaders backtracked on earlier promises of sweeping reforms. Qatar’s Emir Hamad bin Khalifa al Thani, who had taken power in a palace coup in 1995, repeatedly postponed elections to the country’s Consultative Council in contravention of the country’s constitution. Hamad Bin Isa al Khalifa of Bahrain won rapturous support by promising to restore the parliament his father had dismissed in 1975, releasing all political prisoners and declaring an amnesty for exiles. In return, in a referendum in 2001, Bahrainis voted to crown him king. But the constitution he presented a year later made criticism of the ruler an offence, guaranteed the continued appointment of his relatives to senior cabinet posts, and by blurring the distinction between his and the public’s purse, turned the island from a state into an estate. Shias retained their second-class status: elections were gerrymandered to ensure that parliament kept its Sunni majority; most Shias were barred from the security services; and in a further slight, the government proposed naturalizing foreign Sunnis and paying stipends to poor Shias who converted to Sunnism, in an attempt to rejig the island’s confessional composition.

Succeeding to the throne following the death of his half-brother Fahd in 2005, Abdullah bin Abdelaziz continued to inch Saudi Arabia, the region’s most conservative state, towards liberalization. Hand-in-hand with a security crackdown on
jihadi
groups, he reined in the Wahhabi establishment, already on the defensive after al-Qaeda’s attacks inside and outside the kingdom, and expanded the Ulama Council, the executive body which vetted administrative decrees, to include other Sunni – though not Shia – law schools. He dismissed hardline judges and the head of the Commission of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, or morality police, who barred firemen from rescuing girls from their burning boarding school in Mecca because they were immodestly clad in their nightgowns. Fifteen died, provoking outrage. He unveiled a programme to rehabilitate 4,000 ‘deviant’ clerics, and in a further challenge to Wahhabi tenets, convened an inter-faith conference in Spain in 2008, inviting Jews and Hindus to the podium. Defying clerical backbiting, he appointed
the kingdom’s first female minister; made a former head of intelligence rather than a cleric his education minister; and launched the kingdom’s first co-ed university, the King Abdullah Science and Technology University, or KAUST. Women could drive on campus and take off their veils.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the increasing royal questioning of Wahhabi tenets, some leading preachers began reassessing their creeds. Men and women, some with their faces bared, met in the town of Burayda, the heartland of Arabia’s puritanical Islam, to discuss Islamic reform and reversing the Wahhabi
fatwa
that classed Shia as apostates. ‘We have to develop a modern, tolerant and inclusive interpretation of faith,’ said Muhsen al-Awaji, a participant. Former firebrands, including Salman al-Awda, delivered a withering attack on bin Laden, for perverting Islam’s mission of peace. Some called for a government accountable to the people and backed elections. Following a series of petitions, Abdullah announced municipal elections, the kingdom’s first, and promised, that within twenty years the kingdom would be a democracy.

And yet the Al Sauds too feared that glasnost could cost them power. Critics dismissed the changes as cosmetic. The kingdom continued to ban non-Muslim places of worship, and bar Shia clerks from serving as judges. Even at their most progressive, the Al Sauds revealed an authoritarian streak: a senior cleric who opposed the mixing of sexes in KAUST University as evil was summarily dismissed. In May 2009 local elections were delayed, and reformers calling for an elected Consultative Council arrested. The two prime contenders for succession when – eventually – the monarchy moves from the generation of the sons of Abdel Aziz to his grandsons were both security personnel.

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Central authority looked weakest in Yemen, where old formulae failed to address mounting needs, and transnational movements had made the greatest inroads. Throughout his thirty-year rule, Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Salih had resorted to military and financial means, co-opting one faction or tribe in order to quell another and
bring the long-fragmented state under a semblance of central control. His task however was complicated by dwindling revenues as Yemen’s oil production fell, coupled with a fast increasing population. Unable to maintain his patronage networks, by 2009 he was fighting on multiple fronts against Houthi rebels in the north-west, al-Qaeda bases in the north-east, and secessionists in the south, killing thousands. The grievances were local – in part related to the battle for control of local smuggling routes for arms and other commodities between the Horn of Africa and Saudi Arabia – but all revolved around Salih’s failure to meet the needs of his people. In a bid to replace oil with aid, he enjoined external allies to lend support. Saudi Arabia backed his struggle against the Houthis, and the United States increased military aid and political support in his assault on
jihadi
groups, particularly after a Nigerian trained in Yemen was caught trying to blow up his Christmas Day 2009 flight over Detroit. At the same time Salih’s reliance on outsiders carried inherent risks amongst an intensely proud population. Allegations of US and Saudi logistical support in the bombing of bases where civilians had sought refuge antagonized the population, boosted the ranks of armed opposition, and threatened to further fracture Yemen, turning it into a front line in a simultaneous war on al-Qaeda and Shia revivalism.

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From the outset of its Islamic revolution, the Iranian regime accommodated popular opposition to its theocratic norms with the safety valve of elections. Iranians elected a parliament and president, but only after the Supreme Leader, or
faqih
, and the Council of Guardians he appointed weeded out candidates deemed unsuitable. In theory more of an arbiter than a ruler, in practice Ali Khamenei compensated for his embarrassing deficiency of religious qualifications by assuming even more powers than his predecessor, Khomeini. Increasingly, he acted as a temporal and infallible pope, vetting legislation, judicial decisions, and presidential decisions. He undermined President Khatami, rejected reformist candidates for parliamentary elections in 2004, promoted Iran’s nuclear programme, and determined foreign policy.

He derived his legitimacy from Khomeini’s political theory of the
velayat al-faqih
– the government of the Supreme Jurist. The doctrine – which roughly parallels the divine right of (religious) kings – held that a cleric should rule as regent for the ninth-century Imam, Mohammad al-Mahdi, who Shias believe remains alive but in occultation pending the Day of Judgement. The theory was the cornerstone of the Islamic Republic’s constitution, but it was increasingly contested by a powerful caucus of dissident clerics as well as the newly ascendant Ayatollahs of Iraq, of whom Sistani was the most prominent. The more strident argued instead for a looser relationship, in which the clergy advised not governed the state, akin to the model Sistani promoted in post-Saddam Iraq. A prominent critic, Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who had been Khomeini’s one-time heir apparent, issued
fatwas
which denounced the regime for betraying the Shia notion of just rule and declared Khamenei unworthy of the status of ayatollah. The authorities responded by placing Montazeri under house arrest and in official statements addressed him as ‘Mr’, not ‘Ayatollah’.

To prop up his rule, Khamenei relied increasingly on the Revolutionary Guard and its vigilante youth organization, the Bassijis, for support. In the June 2005 elections he backed their preferred candidate, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former hardline Tehran mayor, who won on a platform of economic and nationalist populism, becoming the Islamic Republic’s first lay president. In power, he oversaw the expansion of the Revolutionary Guard’s business interests, particularly in the oil and telecommunications sectors, and appointed defence and oil ministers from its ranks. In the name of social equality, he launched an anti-corruption campaign, clipping the economic clout of former president, business magnate and political rival, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose son he arrested for embezzlement.

Presidential elections four years later marked the showdown between the ruling alliance and a mixed bag of Rafsanjani’s aggrieved business partners and senior dissident clerics. Khamenei’s candidate, Ahmadinejad, had strong rural support, and conceivably could have
won without vote-rigging. But when, before the count was even near completion, the authorities announced his re-election by a sweeping margin, the results beggared belief. In cities across Iran an estimated two million protestors, men and women, took to the streets to demand a recount.

Echoing the Sistani-backed rallies in Iraq, the rallies were almost entirely non-violent and at least initially far from anti-clerical. Activists from the seminary schools, or
madrassas
, featured prominently in the front line of protests. Leading clerics, including former President Khatami, preached sermons of encouragement, oftentimes disrupted by Bassijis. State-televised show trials highlighted former regime stalwarts in prison garb, amongst them Khatami’s vice-president, former foreign minister Ibrahim Yazdi, and the son of the Islamic Republic’s first chief justice. In their struggle for religious legitimacy, loyalists and opposition alike staged their protests on religious holidays. The funeral of 87-year-old Montazeri in December 2009 reinvigorated a flagging campaign, after the opposition declared a day of mourning. And both sides used Ashura, the symbolic Shia day of mourning for the massacre of the righteous Imams, Hassan and Hussein, by a dictatorial caliph, to stage massive rival protests.

As the protests persisted, activists escalated their demands, calling not only for Ahmadinejad’s resignation but for the Supreme Leader’s. Cries of ‘Death to the dictator!’ punctured the Ashura protests. Some women danced bareheaded, and activists cried for an Iranian, not Islamic, revolution. Externally, commentators likened the rallies to the vast Ashura protests in 1978 that precipitated the Shah’s flight from Iran thirty-six days later, and hailed them as the most vibrant civil disobedience campaign anywhere in contemporary politics.

On the face of it, that was hyperbole. The Supreme Leader continued to appoint the heads of all state institutions, including the judiciary, state media, the Revolutionary Guard, intelligence agencies, the military and the para-state religious foundations (
bonyads
) which control large chunks of Iran’s non-oil economy. And the government could still bring large crowds on to the streets. The
opposition failed to muster in the numbers that had unseated the Shah, and unlike in 1979 its leadership was divided. Clerics, concerned that a rebellion might throw out the Islamic baby with the bathwater, cautioned against inter-clerical sparring that would play into secularist hands. In his sermon at Tehran University in September 2009, Rafsanjani pointedly appealed to the opposition to call off its protest.

Yet the authorities appeared confused as to how to respond. Initially, they appeared bent on avoiding the vicious cycle that marked the final five months of the Shah’s regime. Riot control techniques included baton charges, impediments to internet and mobile phone use, and rhetoric: Khamenei’s Friday prayer sermon at Tehran University denounced dissenters as instruments of foreign ‘satanic’ powers. But as the protests escalated, the authorities resorted to an increasingly heavy hand. By the end of 2009, 100 people had been killed and over 4,000 detained. Though a tiny fraction of the number of fatalities the Shah took in his attempt to suppress the protests that drove him from power, it nevertheless emphasized the growing gap between the Shia ideals of Islamic rule as defined by Montazeri and Khamenei’s bloodied autocracy, and the mounting parallels between the current leadership and the Shah they helped to overthrow.

Preparing for the Showdown

The unfolding drama in Iran had consequences not only domestically, but for the entire region. Throughout the decade, the Islamic Republic had served as the dynamo that galvanized opposition against the region’s Western-backed security regimes. The irony was that since al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Iran and the United States had largely shared the same enemies. By overthrowing the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and elevating Shiites in Iraq, Washington helped extend Iran’s regional influence east and west. America’s remodelling of the region, based on forcible regional regime change
and transition from despotism to democracy, further gave voice to the region’s (mainly Islamist) dispossessed, whom Iran saw as its natural allies. As late as June 2005, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice addressed students at the American University in Cairo with the words: