A History of the Middle East (61 page)

As if following a manual, the new generation of leaders snuffed out the yearnings for change as soon as they felt secure. Shaikh Hamad of Bahrain banned ‘sectarian’ (that is, Shiite opposition) websites and appointed himself king. King Abdullah of Jordan and Bashar of Syria restocked the prisons with fault-finding MPs, academics and journalists who dared voice concerns at corruption. The hosts of Syrian democracy forums – little more than evening discussion groups – were sentenced to prison for organizing secret societies. And King Mohammed appointed a new vizier with as
great a zest for baton-beating human rights activists as Basri. It was not clear whether the return to rule by repression was the result of conviction, or because the new generation felt too fresh to challenge the old guard. But ultimately, the young leaders were all deterred from reforming the system that had installed them in power. All five sons continue to confuse royal coffers with public budgets, treat the judiciary as an arm of the executive, and make it illegal for journalists, let alone an electorate, to hold them to account. Some even suggested that the sons might be worse than their fathers. At least their fathers had had to struggle for their crowns, it was observed. The sons received theirs on a silver platter, having done little to merit the title.

The shift from one generation to another is still in mid-flow. The succession looks particularly uncertain in Saudi Arabia where the hereditary line passes not from father to son, but through a succession of thirty-six brothers in varying degrees of senility. In 1995, the tenth-in-line, Crown Prince Abdullah, took over after a stroke paralysed his epicurean half-brother, King Fahd. Abdullah revived popular support for the al-Saud monarchy with his pious image and an uncharacteristic streak of anti-American populism, but as he turned eighty in 2002 his rule seemed hardly a recipe for longevity.

Ironically the one country to buck the dynastic trend was Iran, the country most implacably opposed to US hegemony. Ayatollah Khomeini’s legitimacy rested in his theology of
velayat al-faqih
, or rule by the expert in
fiqh
, or Islamic law; but his designated successor, his loyal president, Ali Khamenei, was regarded by many of his clerical contemporaries as lacking the necessary religious qualifications for the post. Following Khomeini’s death in June 1989, the reformist parliamentary bloc proposed electing a successor, before acceding to a compromise which amended the 1979 constitution and stripped Iran’s Supreme Leader of powers hitherto akin to a Jacobean divine right of kings. ‘The Leader is equal to the rest of the people in the country in the eyes of the law,’ read the amended constitution. ‘He is not infallible, must accept his resignation, and
be accountable.’ The clause was designed to pave the way for the transfer of power from clerical exponents of Islamic law, who were accountable only to God, to parliamentary representatives, accountable to the people.

In some ways, the debate revived the rift between the
vox populi
that toppled the shah and the mullahs who hijacked his throne. Over the following decade the parliamentarians scored some noticeable successes over the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his Council of Guardians. In the general elections of May 2001, the youth vote catapulted the reformist president, Mohammed Khatami, back to a second term in office with 80 per cent of the vote. But while the hardliners held only 20 per cent of parliamentary seats, they still controlled 80 per cent of the levers of power. Clerical appointees ran the judiciary, the army, radio and television, the key business conglomerations, and the Hizbollahi God-squads who saw themselves as the armed guardians of the Islamic Revolution. In an ongoing backlash, many newspapers – one of the few conduits open to the reformers – were closed, and writers and journalists imprisoned en masse. ‘You may put the people in chains,’ wrote one of them, Musani Kadivar, after serving a jail sentence, ‘but you cannot kill freedom.’

***

The other spoonful of American medicine President Bush had promised the region in his 1991 victory speech to Congress was ‘economic freedom’. With the dismantling of the Soviet Union’s command economy, the possibilities for the spread of the free market to the non-capitalist world seemed unfettered. Yet again, however, Middle East leaders proved reluctant apprentices, judging that globalization and the transfer of control over finance, goods, people and information to the market might threaten their absolute rule. Governments paid lip-service to the initiatives of global financial institutions like the World Bank, but more often than not did their utmost to limit their impact. Instead of perestroika what the Middle East got was a regional variant of crony capitalism. Privatization, where it happened at all, became a byword for the
handover of profitable state industries to the rulers’ family or chums. Across the Gulf, the opening of all but the smallest business normally required princely support, a euphemism for payment of a commission to or partnership with a member of the royal family. In monarchies and republics alike, members of the ruling family used their influence to win the largest contracts, and blur the boundaries between the leader’s private purse and the state treasury. Gulf rulers all proved unwilling to surrender their privileged access to oil income, and though few know the exact sum, by the turn of the millennium the Saudi state was reported to be paying the ballpark figure of $14 billion a year to subsidize its 30,000-strong royal household.

The positive consequence of continued state economic control is that the region has been remarkably insulated from turbulent global markets. The negative fallout is that the Middle East attracts a dismal share of not just international but also local investment. Arab financiers preferred to leave their vast financial reserves stashed in Western banks, with Saudi nationals holding an estimated $700 billion in foreign vaults. Where it has been locally invested, there have been striking successes. Within a generation, the Gulf emirates turned their mud huts into skyscrapers, and their harbours for pearl-diving dinghies into ports for tankers. A particularly shrewd and far-sighted government in Dubai successfully converted the city-state into an intercontinental hub for transport and trading between Europe and Asia, and more radically into the region’s cyberspace nexus. But for the most part, innovation continued to be stifled by the authorities’ obsession with losing control. In 1992, Tunisia was second only to South Africa as the promoter of the communications revolution in Africa. But as the country’s opposition groups took refuge in cyberspace, President Ben Ali reined in his e-entrepreneurs, priced the service out of the market, and arrested Tunisians logging on to political sites. Ten years on, the president’s relatives, including his daughter, ran the country’s two internet providers, and Tunisia’s place as a regional market leader had been overtaken by more liberal African states.

Perhaps the lure of self-enrichment and absolute power would have mattered less if Middle Eastern economies had been less dependent on the vagaries of a single commodity, oil. OPEC’s share of production shrank as investors sought regions more receptive to private-sector involvement and less prone to political turbulence. American and Russian oil companies tapped huge reserves in the Caspian basin. Non-OPEC countries, especially Russia, grabbed the chance to challenge Arab oil supremacy and displace OPEC as the key energy supplier to the West. Coupled with the reduction in OPEC’s share of oil production was a gruelling decline in the price of oil, so that by 2002 a barrel of oil was worth less than before the first OPEC oil price hikes of 1973. In 2001 prices, the oil income of the world’s largest producer, Saudi Arabia, had crashed from a peak of $227 billion in 1981 to $35 billion in 1998, before recovering to some $60 billion.

The impact was exacerbated by the Middle East’s mushrooming population. A UN Development Report on the Arab world published in 2002 estimated the population of the twenty-two states of the Arab world to be 280 million people, of whom 38 per cent were under fourteen. The region boasted the highest birth rates in the world and by 2020, it said, there would be 400–450 million Arabs. The surge was not just the result of traditional resistance and religious opposition to family planning. Some states, like Saudi Arabia, regarded a high birth rate as a strategic priority to boost their active populations to the levels of regional rivals, Iran and Iraq. But at such rapid rates, economic growth simply could not keep pace. Income in the region’s lumbering giant, Saudi Arabia, slumped from $19,000 per head in 1981 to $7,000 in 2001 – a stunning reversal triggering huge social strain.

In a desperate attempt to sustain both living standards and the system of patronage, regimes ran up huge budget deficits and landed themselves with vast bureaucracies, often little more than white-elephant employment schemes. Some attempt was made to cut back on profligate arms deals: in the first flush of victory after the liberation of Kuwait, Riyadh awarded US companies a ‘war tribute’
worth $60 billion in contracts, and spent a further $33 billion on US arms, only to scale back drastically in the mid-1990s. The kingdom reacted to a decision from the European Investment Bank pronoun-cing that it could no longer extend loan guarantees to Saudi Arabia, by delaying the delivery of American F-16 fighter jets.

But such measures only partially addressed the long-term malaise. Older generations wistfully recall the time when oil gave their governments the financial clout to project their influence beyond their borders. But by the dawn of the twenty-first century, governments were struggling to provide for their own citizens. In most Arab states, a majority of young people was un- or under-employed, and in 2002 unemployment across the Arab world reached 60 million. With almost half the population is under eighteen, unemployment was set to balloon. Even where there were jobs, millions of graduates were priced out of the job market because of the Gulf’s addiction to the cheap labour of Asian
gastarbeiters
(as well as by the natural disinclination of many American and British technicians to train themselves out of lucrative jobs). Creaking cot-to-coffin welfare systems faced severe strain. Seventy years after the discovery of oil, a third of Jeddah’s four million residents had no running water, and across the kingdom power cuts were a regular occurrence. By the mid-1990s economic tensions in Bahrain – the poorest Gulf state and the only one with indigenous beggars – were fuelling an uprising that pitted the island’s Sunni elite against its much poorer Shiite majority.

So far no other Gulf state has had to grapple with the same degree of disturbance, and even the Arab world’s gloomiest economists still bank on the region’s long-term prospects. Middle East states sit atop two-thirds of the world’s bank of oil deposits. And while reserves in the rest of the world will last perhaps a few decades, the Gulf will still be pumping into the twenty-second century. At current rates of growth in the global economy, world demand for OPEC oil is predicted to triple to 60 million barrels a day by 2020.

The problem is that much could change in the interim. Major
discoveries outside OPEC coupled with a dramatic surge in alternative energy, particularly fuel-cell vehicles, could render Middle Eastern oil if not obsolete then secondary at a time when the vast bulk of Arab petroleum remains underground. The impact on regimes almost entirely dependent on oil to lubricate their economies would be massive.

Arabs are desperate for answers as to why, when they were blessed with the product that drives the world’s economy, they so miserably missed out on the global growth of the 1990s. In 1960, the average North African was richer than the average South Korean; forty years on, the South Korean is seven times richer, and the Arab world experienced the world’s lowest growth rate outside sub-Saharan Africa. Arab leaders argue that were it not for terrorism targeted at such vital sectors as tourism (on which one in ten Egyptians rely for an income) their economies would be thriving. But in the minds of many Arabs, economic stagnation is directly linked to political stagnation. Without deft management, the zest for a popular share the region’s political and economic power remains a recipe for instability.

The Growth of Muslim Liberation Theology

For all its symbolism and pious rhetoric, political Islam is less a religious tradition than a twentieth-century popular movement that arose in response to the military humiliations, political depredations and socio-economic discontents of recent history. Its followers were attracted to its politics not because their childhoods had been steeped in Koranic education, but because it proved to be the most potent protest movement around. Unlike nationalism, socialism and liberalism, Islamic activism was the first home-grown ideology in the Arab world. It gained wide currency in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s because it thrived in the one non-governmental institution no Arab regime dares ban: the mosque. Its discourse was couched in the same sacred terminology that the region’s regimes also used to
underpin their legitimacy, and as a consequence was similarly hard to proscribe. And it peddled its message by means of sermons recorded on cassettes that were out of earshot of even the most totalitarian state. For the first time since independence, taxi-drivers could spend the day tuned into dissident voices, not the president’s men.

Like its ideological forerunners, Islamic activism was the creation not of the poor, but of frustrated middle-class students. It first gained a following not in the shanty towns hugging North Africa’s cities, but on the campuses of universities and technical colleges. Arab students volunteered to fight the Afghan
jihad
, Arabic for ‘just struggle’, against the Soviet Union in much the same spirit as their left-wing European counterparts in the 1930s went off to fight the Spanish Civil War. Nor were they normally impoverished. The hijackers who knocked down New York’s World Trade Center were Western-educated high-flyers, and over three-quarters of them came from the Arab world’s wealthiest state, Saudi Arabia. Several of the Palestinian suicide bombers in 2002 were sons of Gazan millionaires. Usama bin Laden, one among scores of Arab-Afghan commanders, belonged to the richest non-royal family in Saudi Arabia. His cohort, a shy doctor named Ayman al-Zawahari, came from a gentrified family of lawyers and diplomats long resident in the upmarket Cairo suburb of Maadi. And their cohorts were almost entirely manned by graduates, among them the sons of former government ministers. This was no peasants’ revolt.