the arab tomorrow - muslim brotherhood

48 Wi l s o n Q ua r t e r ly ■ Wi n t e r 2 01 0

T H E W I L S O N Q U A R T E R LY

The Arab TomorrowThe Arab world today is ruled by contradiction. Turmoiland stagnation prevail, as colossal wealth and hyper-modern cities collide with mass illiteracy and rage-filledimams. In this new diversity may lie disaster, or themakings of a better Arab future.

B Y D AV I D B . O T TAWAY

October 6, 1981, was meant to be a day of

celebration in Egypt. It marked the anniversary ofEgypt’s grandest moment of victory in three Arab-Israeli conflicts, when the country’s underdog armythrust across the Suez Canal in the opening days ofthe 1973 Yom Kippur War and sent Israeli troopsreeling in retreat. On a cool, cloudless morning, theCairo stadium was packed with Egyptian familiesthat had come to see the military strut its hardware.On the reviewing stand, President Anwar el-Sadat,the war’s architect, watched with satisfaction as menand machines paraded before him. I was nearby, anewly arrived foreign correspondent.

Suddenly, one of the army trucks halted directly infront of the reviewing stand just as six Mirage jetsroared overhead in an acrobatic performance, paint-ing the sky with long trails of red, yellow, purple,and green smoke. Sadat stood up, apparently prepar-

ing to exchange salutes with yet another con-tingent of Egyptian troops. He made himselfa perfect target for four Islamist assassinswho jumped from the truck, stormed thepodium, and riddled his body with bullets.

As the killers continued for what seemedan eternity to spray the stand with theirdeadly fire, I considered for an instantwhether to hit the ground and risk beingtrampled to death by panicked spectators or remainafoot and risk taking a stray bullet. Instinct told meto stay on my feet, and my sense of journalistic dutyimpelled me to go find out whether Sadat was alive ordead.

I wove my way through the fleeing crowd andmanaged to reach the podium. It was pandemonium.Wild-eyed Egyptian security men were running everywhich way, trying to apprehend the assassins andattend to the scores of foreign and local dignitariespresent, seven of whom lay dead or dying. The utterchaos allowed me to get close enough to witnessanother unforgettable scene: Vice President Hosni

David B. Ottaway, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center,worked for The Washington Post from 1971 to 2006, including four yearsin Cairo as the Post’s chief Middle East correspondent. His most recentbook is The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar bin Sultan and America’sTangled Relationship With Saudi Arabia (2008).

Wi n t e r 2 01 0 ■ Wi l s o n Q ua r t e r ly 49

Mubarak emerging from beneath a pile of chairssecurity men had thrown helter-skelter over him forprotection. He was brushing dirt off his peaked mil-itary cap, which had been pierced by a bullet.

Mubarak, lucky to be alive, pulled himself togetheradmirably that day to take over leadership of theshaken Nile River nation. But Egypt and the rest ofthe Arab world would never be the same. For cen-turies, Egypt had prided itself on being the center ofthat world. Seat of a 5,000-year-old civilization thatat times had thought of itself as umm idduniya,“mother of the world, ” it was the most populous andeconomically and militarily powerful Arab state, a

center of culture and learning that supplied physi-cians, imams, and technical experts to other Arabnations. Under Sadat and his predecessor, the pan-Arab hero Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70), Egypt hadreasserted its primacy as the Arabs broke free of colo-nial rule after World War II and entered an era ofsoaring hopes. Sadat had even begun some pioneer-ing reforms—allowing opposition political parties,implementing market-oriented economic changes—

The beautiful vista from Old Cairo to the distant skyline of the modern citypromises a great deal but delivers much less. Many Egyptians have beendisappointed by the stagnant modernity of the past few decades.


The Arab Tomorrow

that might have rippled through the Arab world hadhe lived. Though many reviled him for signing apeace treaty with Israel in 1979, Egypt remained themost dynamic force in Arab affairs.

Mubarak’s accession would bring an abrupt end toEgypt’s preeminence. Cautious and unimaginative,the former air force commander has never in his 29-year reign come close to filling the shoes of his pred-ecessors. Afflicted by health problems, he will turn 82in May and is not expected to reign much longer.Cairo is awash with speculation about who will

replace him. Its discontented intelligentsia is debat-ing intensely whether Egypt any longer has thewherewithal, or vision, to shape Arab policies towardan immovable Israel, a belligerent Iran, fractiousPalestinians, or an imposing America, much lessgrapple with the Islamist challenge to seculargovernments.

During the Mubarak years, other voices and cen-ters have arisen, particularly on the western shores ofthe Persian Gulf. There, monarchies once thoughtquaint relics of Arab history—including Qatar, Oman,and the United Arab Emirates—have taken on newlife. The accumulation of massive oil wealth in thehands of kings and emirs amid soaring demand andprices over the past few decades has given birth to afar more diverse and multipolar Arab world. It hasmade possible innovations in domestic and foreignpolicy and supplied vast sums for the building ofglittering, hypermodern “global cities” that lure West-ern and Asian money, business, and tourists awayfrom Cairo.

As the Mubarak era nears its end, Egyptians arenot alone in wondering whether a new and moredynamic leader will restore the nation to its centralrole and take the lead in giving the Arabs a strongerand more united voice in global affairs. Whether anyEgyptian leader, or for that matter any Arab leader,

can rise to lead this fragmented world will be a cen-tral issue in the years ahead. Another is whether Arabunity is any longer a desirable goal.

A rabs have long shared an unusually strongsense of common identity and destiny. TheArab states, unlike those of Western Europe,

Africa, Asia, or Latin America, are bound together bya common language and shared religion. They havea border-transcending culture rooted in 1,400 years

of Islam, with its mem-ory of the powerfulcaliphates based in Dam-ascus and Baghdad. Withthe exception of SaudiArabia, which escapedthe European yoke, theyalso share a history of fer-

vent anticolonial struggle against France and Britainthat began with the crumbling of the OttomanEmpire during World War I. The Ottomans had ruledthe Arabs for nearly 500 years, deftly dividing themwhile governing with a relatively light hand. TheArab Revolt (1916–18) against the Ottoman Turks, ledby the emir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, andabetted by Britain’s legendary Lawrence of Arabia,ignited the dream of a reunified Arab nation.

But the victors of World War I had different ideas.The League of Nations put the vanquished OttomanEmpire’s provinces in present-day Iraq, Syria,Lebanon, and Palestine under French and Britishmandates, giving fresh impetus to the Arab awaken-ing. During World War II the European rulers cyni-cally encouraged hopes for independence, intent onpreventing the Arabs from siding with Hitler’s Ger-many. With the war’s end in sight, Egypt and SaudiArabia, then the region’s only independent countries,joined with four other Arab lands to raise the bannerof the League of Arab States, a new association ded-icated to ending European rule.

The Arabs’ sense of common cause was jolted to anew level of intensity in 1947, when the UnitedNations approved the establishment of a Jewish statein Palestine. The ensuing war over its creation led towhat Arabs call the naqba, or disaster, meaning the

CAIRO IS AWASH with speculation about

who will replace the aging Hosni Mubarak.


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loss of Arab lands to the Israelis and the flight ofhundreds of thousands of Palestinians to neighboringArab states. The struggle against Israel replaced theanticolonial effort as the Arabs’ defining mission,keeping them bonded together like no other peoples.Starting with the first Arab-Israeli war, in 1948, theirfailure to obtain a state for the Palestinians has alsokept alive a sense of shared guilt and injustice at thehands of the West.

There were momentsof great hope for Arabunity, illusory as it provedto be. Riding to power inan army coup in 1952,Nasser quickly becamethe undisputed Saut el-Arab, or Voice of theArabs, his views broad-cast far and wide througha powerful Cairo-basedradio station of the samename. With his rabble-rousing speeches, Nasseroffered a vision of anArab world transformedfrom a colonial jigsawpuzzle of artificiallydefined states into onebig umma, a singleMuslim communitystretching from Moroc-co on the Atlantic toOman at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.

Nasser preached pan-Arabism and Arab national-ism to rally the masses against the two Cold Warsuperpowers and Israel. Initially, his record wasimpressive. He electrified the Arab world in 1956 byboldly nationalizing the Suez Canal, then in the handsof a British-run company. And, with indispensablebacking from President Dwight D. Eisenhower, hefaced down France, Britain, and Israel when theyinvaded to take back the canal. Nasser also took thefirst step toward formal Arab unity by convincingSyria two years later to join Egypt in a “United ArabRepublic” (though the union was short-lived). Andwith consummate diplomatic cunning, he succeeded

in catapulting Egypt to the head of the Non-AlignedMovement, whose members sought to maintain theirindependence from the two Cold War blocs, anddeftly extracted billions of dollars in arms from theSoviet Union and $800 million in wheat and otherfoodstuffs from the United States.

Nasser’s star dimmed considerably, however, afterhis army’s crushing defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, a disaster that led him to dramatically offer

his resignation to the Egyptian people. The war endedwith Israel in possession of Egypt’s vast Sinai Desertas well as Syria’s Golan Heights and Jordan’s WestBank and East Jerusalem. Weeping Cairenesnonetheless poured into the streets to insist thatNasser remain their leader. But the grand old Voiceof the Arabs never recovered his prestige before aheart attack killed him in 1970.

Sadat emerged from Nasser’s shadow offering adifferent style of leadership, one equally bold andimaginative though far more contested by other Arabcapitals. He scuttled Nasser’s socialism by launchingthe infitah, an “open-door” policy aimed at liberaliz-ing the economy, and he forged a new political order

At the 1981 military parade in which he would fall to assassins’ bullets, Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat(right) reviews the passing troops with Vice President Hosni Mubarak at his side.


The Arab Tomorrow

AlgeriaBahrainComorosDjiboutiEgyptIraqJordanKuwaitLebanonLibyaMauritania MoroccoOmanPalestineQatarSaudi ArabiaSomaliaSudanSyriaTunisiaUAEYemen

Population(millions)

33.90.80.60.8

80.129.5

5.92.94.26.23.1

31.22.74.01.1

24.78.7

40.420.510.14.4

22.3

GDP per capita(dollars)

Oil reserves(BBL)

Illiteracyrate

Political rights(Most free=1Least free=7)

6535665457656

N/A67777765

Women’s rights(Most free=25Least free=5)

13.1

12.9

11.4

11.67.2

11.9

The Arab World

SOURCES: United Nations Development Program (population, GDP, and illiteracy);U.S. Energy Information Administration (oil reserves); Freedom House (political and women’s rights). UNDP data are from 2007; all other data from 2009.

Members of the Arab League are shaded;Comoros Islands not shown.

Morocco

Mauritania

Algeria

Tunisia

Libya Egypt

Sudan

Djibouti

Somalia

Yemen

OmanUAE

Qatar

Kuwait

Saudi Arabia

IraqIran Afghanistan

Pakistan

Syria

Israel

Lebanon

Jordan

Bahrain

3,99621,421

714997

1,729N/A

2,76942,1025,9449,475

8472,434

14,0311,160

64,19315,800

N/A1,1991,8983,425

38,4361,006

12.20.12456

00

3.7115

0.001104

043.66

0.10.00075

5.5N/A

15.21266.71

05

2.50.425

97.83

24.611.2

24.9N/A

33.625.9

8.95.5

10.413.244.244.415.66.26.915

N/A39.116.922.3

1041.1

Pal.


The Arab Tomorrow

by ending single-party rule and allowing new partiesto form. He survived an Israeli counterattack in the1973 Yom Kippur War that nearly wiped out his army,and then decided on his own to make peace withIsrael, regaining the Sinai for Egypt. After his icon-oclastic trip to Jerusalem in 1977, Sadat pushedthrough a bilateral peace agreement with Israel thattook effect two years later, provoking the Arab League(as the League of Arab States was now known) tooust Egypt, effectively ending its leadership of theArab world. But Sadatstood firm. As eventswould prove, even hisassassination at the handsof Islamist militantswho were vehementlyopposed to peace withIsrael could not reversehis feat. Sadat had single-handedly changed thecourse of Middle East history.

Since Sadat’s demise, the Arab world has struggledto find its ideological bearings. The old secular left-ist ideologies of Arab nationalism, Arab socialism,and pan-Arabism are rarely mentioned anymore.Their last two standard-bearers, Hafez al-Assad ofSyria and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, proved unequal tothe task of leading the Arab world and were discred-ited, along with the “isms” they represented. Assad,who ruled for 29 years, was able to extend his influ-ence no farther than neighboring Lebanon. Husseincame to power in 1979 and was an internationalpariah after 1990, when he invaded Kuwait, a brotherArab country.

T ime has made a mockery of Arab aspirationsto unity as well. The 21 countries of the ArabLeague (plus the Palestinians), embracing

350 million people, have come to live in a state of end-less squabbling and continuing fragmentation. Evensmaller wannabe regional blocs, such as the six Arabmonarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council (SaudiArabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United ArabEmirates, and Oman) and the four Mediterraneancountries of the Maghreb (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria,

and Libya), have made precious little headway towardunity.

Instead, the Arab world has been plagued by civilwars (Sudan, Lebanon, and Somalia), militantIslamist insurgencies (Algeria, Iraq, and Somalia),and sectarian strife between Sunni and Shiite Mus-lims (Iraq, Lebanon, and Bahrain), as well as anintramural struggle for the hearts and minds of SunniArabs pitting extremists against mainstream ele-ments over the very meaning of Islam (Saudi Arabia,

Egypt, and Algeria). Terrorism, embodied by AlQaeda, has become a scourge, survival a 24/7preoccupation.

Central to the region’s turmoil is the wideningrift between Sunnis, who account for nearly 90 per-cent of the Arab population, and Shia, who form tinyminorities in most Arab countries but constitute amajority in Iraq and Bahrain and probably a nearmajority in Lebanon. The Sunni-Shia conflict isalmost as old as Islam, rooted in unforgotten bloodybattles over who was the rightful heir of the ProphetMuhammad. It was given new life by the Iranianrevolution of 1979, which produced a Shiite theocracydetermined to expand the political and religiousinfluence of this non-Arab power deep into theSunni-dominated Arab world. More recently, Iran’sefforts to develop a nuclear capacity, perhaps includ-ing nuclear weapons, has further heightened ten-sions. Leaders of the Arab countries—most of whomare Sunni, with the notable exception of Iraq’s primeminister, Nuri al-Malaki, a Shia—are acutely awarethat Iran is both Shiite and Persian.

The challenge from Iran helped stoke Sunni fun-damentalism and put Islam front and center in thepolitical discourse and daily lives of Arabs. And 1979,the year that saw the birth of theocracy in Iran, also

THE DREAM OF ARAB unity has given

way to civil wars, Islamist insurgencies, and

Sunni-Shia strife.


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brought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and therise of an anti-Soviet jihad that intensified and spreadthe new religious fervor across the Arab world. Thou-sands of Arab would-be holy warriors signed up forthe anticommunist cause in Afghanistan, thenreturned home to revolt against corrupt and repres-sive rule in their own countries. Islamic political par-

ties preaching a return to the letter of the Qur’anand sharia law have now surpassed secular parties asthe most dynamic forces in Arab political life.Mosques have become cauldrons of political activism.Preachers such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the fiery Egypt-ian Sunni cleric who broadcasts from Qatar, andGrand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq’s supreme Shiiteauthority, exercise far more sway than any politician.In Egypt, the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhoodhas taken over as the main opposition political party,and other like-minded Islamist groups now occupy acentral role in the politics of many Arab states.

T he U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 alsoplayed a major role in keeping Islamic mili-tancy alive and well and sharpening Sunni-

Shiite animosities. The overthrow of Saddam Husseinmeant an end to Sunni rule in Iraq as the Bushadministration, in the name of democracy, usheredthe Shia into power for the first time in the country’scontemporary history. By the thousands, Iraqi Sun-nis joined an insurgency against the new govern-ment, while others found their way to Al Qaeda,which deliberately sought to incite a Sunni-Shiiteconfrontation by bombing Shiite neighborhoods andholy sites.

The tidal wave of political Islam has rocked theArab world’s mostly autocratic rulers, sweeping away

any reform impulses they may have had and leavingthem concerned almost exclusively with their ownday-to-day survival. To these leaders, most ideas forchange or reform now look like foolish high-riskgambits, all the more so since some of the prime pro-moters of change have been Western outsiders. Theresulting stasis has contributed to a remarkable lack

of turnover in leadership.In his 29-year reign,Mubarak has employedan increasingly unpopu-lar state of emergency tocrush his opponents andextinguish hopes for mul-tiparty democracy inEgypt. Muammar al-Qaddafi, until recently an

international outcast because of Libya’s terroristactivities, celebrated the 40th year of his reign lastSeptember. Sudanese president Omer Hassan AhmedAl Bashir, wanted on war crimes charges by the Inter-national Criminal Court, came to power 20 yearsago. In Oman, Qaboos bin Said deposed his father in1970 and has remained sultan ever since. Ali Abdul-lah Saleh has been the leader of Yemen for 31 years,and Zine el-Abidinia Ben Ali has led Tunisia for 22.

The staying power of these autocrats pales next to thelongevity of the royal houses of the Persian Gulf. The rul-ing families of Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain have reignedfor centuries, including a long spell under “protectorates”imposed by the British. The Saudi royal family, in a landthat escaped colonial domination, has ruled on and offfor more than 250 years. But the record for Arablongevity lies in a land far beyond the gulf, in Morocco,where Mohammed VI reigns as the 18th king in adynasty that came to power in 1666.

Secular Arab leaders have been working hard toestablish their own family dynasties. As he had arranged,Hafez al-Assad of Syria was succeeded upon his death in2000 by his 35-year-old son, Bashar, a British-trainedophthalmologist who had previously shown little inter-est in politics. Both Mubarak and Qaddafi have beengrooming their sons to take over from them, as hasPresident Saleh in Yemen.

Surveying the Arab world in the troubled after-math of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, President

THE THREAT POSED by political Islam

has swept away the last reform impulses of

most Arab rulers.


The Arab Tomorrow

George W. Bush saw the dead hand of autocracy as akey cause of the Arab world’s stagnation, and he evenconceded that the United States had helped keepMubarak and other Arab autocrats in power. Bushproposed a radical cure. His “forward strategy offreedom” would bring democracy to the Arabs. “Aslong as the Middle East remains a place where free-dom does not flourish,” he declared in 2003, “it willremain a place of stagnation, resentment, and vio-lence ready for export.” No longer would the UnitedStates accept the Arab status quo. Bush called specif-ically on America’s chief Arab allies, Egypt and SaudiArabia, to “show the way toward democracy in theMiddle East.”

Mubarak and Abdullah (still crown prince at thetime) denounced the American diktat, insisting thateach country must determine its own path to reform.Yet Arab leaders did respond to Bush’s call, and theyproved master manipulators of democracy. They held

elections, loosened press censorship, and allowed abit more space for dissident voices on the Internet.And they quickly learned how to diffuse, divide, andcheckmate even this feeble opposition.

Mubarak simultaneously rigged election laws tomake himself president for life and allowed the birthof a semifree opposition press. Algerian presidentAbdelaziz Bouteflika permitted many political par-ties and 76 independent national daily newspapersto flourish even as he altered the constitution toperpetuate his rule. Qatar’s al-Thani ruling familydropped plans for an elected parliament butlaunched the al-Jazeera satellite television channel,which has revolutionized Arab news coverage withits critical reports, lively debates, and airing of theradical views of Islamists as well as secularoppositionists.

Arab leaders skillfully used elections to illustratethe dangers democracy might end up posing to U.S.

Martyr’s Day in Beirut last November brought a show of force by Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant organization in Lebanon.The group has becomea polarizing force in the Arab world, opposed by rulers who fear Iran’s growing influence in the region but supported by a number of others.


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interests—exactly contrary to what President Bushhad predicted. Saudi Arabia held municipal elec-tions in early 2005, and Egypt elected a new parlia-ment late that same year. The results: The most con-servative, anti-Western Wahhabi candidates sweptthe Saudi contests, and the fundamentalist MuslimBrotherhood became the main opposition group inthe Egyptian parliament. Finally, after the militantlyanti-Israeli Hamas won a large majority in the 2006elections for a new Palestinian parliament, Bush qui-etly shelved his “freedom agenda.” So far, PresidentBarack Obama has carefully avoided making democ-racy promotion a signature cause of his administra-tion. Indeed, he has been vigorously chastised byhuman rights advocates, Republican and Democratalike, for abandoning the U.S. mission to spreaddemocracy in the Arab world.

The experience of the past few years has left abad taste in the mouths of many of democracy’s mostfervent Arab supporters. After Bouteflika won a thirdfive-year term in 2009, Algerian news commentatorMahmoud Belhimer opined that the electoral processthere and elsewhere in the Arab world served “merelyto perpetuate the permanent monopoly of the rulingelite on power, thus denying the vast majority of soci-ety the right to participation in public affairs.”

To further cement their monopoly, Arab leadershave seized upon the threat of Al Qaeda terrorism topromote their civilian and military intelligenceservices—the mukhabarat—to the forefront of polit-ical life. The heads of these agencies have become sopowerful that they often play the role of kingmaker,or simply become candidates for the top job them-selves. After fighting an Islamist insurgency through-out the 1990s, the intelligence service in Algeria isnow the mainstay of the regime and the decisive fac-tor in choosing presidents. In Saudi Arabia, thedomestic civilian security chief, Minister of the Inte-rior Nayef bin Abdulaziz, has emerged as a possiblesuccessor to King Abdullah after leading a successfulcrackdown on Al Qaeda terrorists. Mubarak hasmade his ubiquitous mukhabarat, with its two mil-lion agents and its jails filled with Islamist and sec-ular dissidents, the backbone of his regime as well.The head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Ser-vices, Omar Suleiman, has become the leading can-

didate to succeed Mubarak should his son Gamalfalter.

The argument that a “freedom deficit” lies at thecore of the Arab world’s woes was not inventedby President Bush. It was earlier advanced by

a group of independent Arab scholars who in 2002began producing a regular series, the Arab HumanDevelopment Reports, for the United Nations. “Thewave of democracy that transformed governance inmost of Latin America and East Asia in the 1980s andEastern Europe and much of Central Asia in the late1980s and early 1990s has barely reached the Arabstates,” they wrote.

The group has systematically probed the causes of theArab failure to keep up with the rest of the world in areasranging from education to the advancement of women.Sixty-five million Arab adults, mainly women, remainilliterate; less than 1 percent of Arab adults use theInternet, and only 1.2 percent have computers. No Arabuniversity has any standing in world rankings. Arabregimes’ miserable failure to meet the challenges ofglobalization has led to high rates of unemploymentand poverty. In 2002, one in every five Arabs was livingon less than $2 a day. The report blamed the Arabworld’s stagnating economies, particularly in non–oil-producing countries, on many leaders’ fixation with “dis-credited statist, inward-looking development models.”

In 2008, the average unemployment rate still stoodat a disturbing 15 percent in North Africa and 12 percentin the rest of the Arab world, according to the Interna-tional Labor Organization. Among the young it washigher—17 percent in Egypt and 25 percent in Algeria.In these and other Arab states, high food prices, poorhousing, and a lack of jobs constantly threaten to ignitesocial explosions and give Islamist groups a popularcause to ride.

In Egypt, the specter of bread riots haunts thepolitical elite decades after Sadat’s attempt to cutsubsidies in 1977 sparked nationwide street protestsand forced him to call out the army. Eight hundredpeople died in the ensuing clashes, and Islamic mil-itants took advantage of the disorder to sack dozensof alcohol-serving nightclubs along the tourist routeto Cairo’s pyramids. Sadat quickly reversed himself.


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Selling for the equivalent of a penny, the flat,round baladi bread is the staple of poor Egyptiansand literally keeps the social peace. In March 2008,when there was a sudden shortage of bread, an anx-ious Mubarak called upon the army to use its ownflour supplies to bake baladis. But Egyptians forcedto stand in endless lines clashed with police, andboth the Muslim Brotherhood and secular oppositionparties took to the streets to show their solidarityand denounce the government.

A lgeria harbors an even greater potential forsocial unrest and Islamic agitation. Becauseof their long and successful liberation strug-

gle against France (1954–62), Algerians are morelikely than most Arabs to believe in revolts anddemonstrations as means of changing the status quo.Riots in Algiers over bad living conditions nearlybrought down the military government in 1988 afterthe outburst grew into a national protest movementthat Islamic militants were able to take over. Themilitary then fought a bloody, dirty war against dis-affected Islamists throughout the 1990s. It hasremained ever since in fear of another Islamist upris-ing. Last January, security forces rushed to halt amarch by tens of thousands of Islamists from thesuburbs into downtown Algiers. The crowds hadtaken to the streets to show their solidarity with theradical Palestinian faction, Hamas, then battling

In Algeria, bad housing conditions sparked several days of protests in the capital city of Algiers last October, and police clashed violently with dem-onstrators. For Arab rulers, the possibility that even minor public disruptions will snowball into regime-ending cataclysms is a constant worry.


The Arab Tomorrow

Israeli forces that had invaded its stronghold in theGaza Strip.

This nervousness about the Arab Street prevails invirtually every capital in the Arab world—except,surprisingly, among the Persian Gulf monarchies,regimes one might expect to be the most worried. But

the monarchies are blessed with small populationsand enormous wealth. Their special circumstancescall into doubt whether they can serve as a model forthe rest of the Arab world. But this is what they areaspiring to do, starting with a renovation of theirbackward education systems.

The gulf states have begun pouring billions ofdollars into new universities and inviting Americanand other Western universities to set up localbranches. There are new American-run or -supportedinstitutions in Kuwait (two), Qatar (three), Oman(three), Bahrain (one), and the United Arab Emi-rates (nine). In Qatar, the government has set asideland in the capital, Doha, to build an entire “Educa-tion City” to attract foreign universities.

Last September, the first 400 students, including20 Saudi women, arrived at Saudi Arabia’s KingAbdullah University of Science and Technology(KAUST), a state-of-the-art coeducational graduateresearch institute endowed with $10 billion from theking’s personal coffers. Located along the Red Seashore 50 miles north of Jidda, KAUST represents abold gamble by Abdullah to promote social changeover the heated objections of his own backward-looking Wahhabi clerical establishment. Taboos ofSaudi society have been thrown out the window:Women not only take classes together with men, theyare allowed to drive on the campus and do not haveto veil their faces. One senior cleric roundlydenounced such practices as “a great sin and a greatevil.” Abdullah responded by firing him from thekingdom’s highest religious council, after making

clear his intent to have KAUST serve as a “beacon oftolerance” for all Saudi society.

Saudi Arabia is the one new Arab powerhouse tohave emerged as a player on the international scene.Its status as the world’s central oil bank—it has thelargest reserves (267 billion barrels) and production

capacity (12.5 millionbarrels a day)—and hold-er of massive dollar re-serves ($395 billion inmid-2009) puts it in aunique position amongthe Arab states. The king-dom is the only Arab

country in the Group of 20, the organization of theworld’s major economic powers. In that role, to thedispleasure of some other oil-producing nations, ithas so far remained a firm supporter of the dollar’srole as the world’s reserve currency.

In many ways, the Saudi king stands out as anotable exception to the criticism that old ageand longevity in power have ossified Arab lead-

ership. Now 86, Abdullah has proven unexpectedlyenergetic and innovative. As crown prince in 2003, helaunched a formal “National Dialogue” that forcedleaders of the feuding Sunni, Shiite, and smallerMuslim sects to discuss their differences. He thenconvoked Saudis from all walks of life to discuss hot-button social and religious issues. After taking thethrone in 2005, Abdullah fired some of the mostreactionary clerics running the religious establish-ment, sidelined others in the government, and pro-moted reformers to replace them. He has also crackeddown on the excesses of the Taliban-like Wahhabireligious police, and launched a nationwide cam-paign to reeducate Wahhabi clerics away fromextremism.

Conscious that his country’s reputation was dam-aged by the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 wereSaudi citizens, Abdullah has reached out to the West.In 2008, he addressed a Saudi-promoted “culture ofpeace” conference at the UN General Assembly, thefirst time in half a century a Saudi king had appearedbefore the world body.

NERVOUSNESS ABOUT the Arab Street

prevails in virtually every Arab capital.


The Arab Tomorrow

When Algerian president Abde-laziz Bouteflika won a third five-yearterm last April with a reported 90percent of the vote, Algerians reactedwith sullen disdain. It was just thelatest in a string of crooked electionsin Algeria and other countries thathave tarnished democracy’s reputa-tion in much of the Arab world. Nowmany Islamist parties in several Arabcountries are reconsidering their com-mitment to electoral politics.

I arrived in Algiers shortly after theelection to find the country’s Islamistparties in turmoil. Many of their natu-ral supporters had boycotted the elec-tion, and their leaders were underintense pressure to quit the electoralprocess. One group, adherents to SaudiArabia’s fundamentalist Wahhabism,had decided to do just that and with-draw into their own isolated com-munes. Criticism of electoral politicswas also being heard among Islamists inJordan, Kuwait, Morocco, and Egypt.

I was struck by how much Algeria’spolitical landscape had changed sinceI lived there in the first few years afterit won independence from France in1962. Back then, Algeria was a hotbedof European communists and Trot-skyites bent on launching a socialistrevolution. After a military coup in1965, the country slowly morphed intoa breeding ground for Muslim mili-tants just as determined to establish anIslamic republic.

That came very close to happeningafter Islamists won parliamentary elec-tions in 1991, but the military againstepped in. The result was a decade-

long Islamist insurgency and civil warthat cost 150,000 lives and left Islamicradicalism in bad repute. (Diehardextremists still fight on in the moun-tains 60 miles east of Algiers, whereattacks on police and army patrols werereported almost every day during myvisit in June.) But the Islamization ofthe country continued apace. Today,many women wear the veil; the oncedominant French-language mediahave increasingly given way to Arabiccompetitors.

Still, I found a deep malaiseamong many Islamists. In the mid-1990s, the Algerian military invitedthem to participate in elections as partof a strategy to neutralize them, and itworked. In 1995, a faction that todaycalls itself the Movement of the Soci-ety for Peace scored a second-placefinish in the presidential election, andseveral MSP leaders were invited tobecome ministers in the new govern-ment. Fifteen years later, the MSP isstill part of the coalition that supportsBouteflika, but it has very little toshow for its loyalty, and its ties to theautocratic president have hurt its rep-utation. Its popularity has plum-meted. Because the MSP ran as partof a multiparty bloc, it is impossible toknow how many votes it won in April,but one indicator of the religious par-ties’ overall strength is the tally of thesole independent Islamist party in therace: just 176,000 votes.

The latest election has roiled eventhe MSP. One MSP faction split off toform a new party pledged to greatermilitancy. Another decided to chal-

lenge MSP leader Bouguerra Soltanifrom within. Both groups believe theparty is losing its popularity and vital-ity by being part of the government.Soltani himself resigned from Boute-flika’s cabinet, though two other MSPministers stayed.

I spoke to Soltani at his party’sheadquarters, where he vehementlydefended the strategy of participation.His main objective, he said, remainedthe same—to convince the military that“it is possible to work with Islamists”and entrust them with important min-istries. But even MSP vice presidentAbderrazak Maki disagreed. He saidthe party should quit the government,concentrate on rebuilding its popularsupport, and press its agenda for astricter adherence to Islamic normsfrom the outside.

The discontent has spread to othercountries where Islamist parties havebeen willing to give multiparty democ-racy a chance. In Egypt, the MuslimBrotherhood, which became the mainopposition group in the 2005 parlia-mentary elections, is now debatingwhether to participate in elections laterthis year. One option for disillusionedIslamists is simply to drop out of thepublic realm, as Algeria’s Wahhabisdid. Some may choose to join the jihadagainst the growing U.S. military pres-ence in Afghanistan. But anotheroption is to revert to undergroundresistance, a prospect that does notaugur well for the Arab experimentwith authoritarian democracy.

—David B. Ottaway

The Islamists’ Dilemma


The Arab Tomorrow

More remarkably, Abdullah engineered the bold-est Arab initiative to resolve the Palestinian-Israelideadlock since Sadat flew to Jerusalem. In retro-spect, it seems something of a miracle that he suc-ceeded in getting the entire 22-member Arab Leagueto adopt his initiative at its Beirut summit in 2002.The plan offered peace, security guarantees, and nor-malization of relations with Israel in return for anIsraeli withdrawal from Arab territories occupied inthe 1967 war. Not so long ago, Arab leaders wouldhave objected to even an implicit recognition of Israel.Unfortunately, Abdullah’s initiative elicited noresponse from either Tel Aviv or Washington.

For all his efforts, Abdullah has not been able torally the Arab Street or, apart from the Beirut sum-mit, other Arab leaders. Saudi financial largesse haslost its purchasing power in other Arab capitals, andSaudi diplomacy now has limits even in the kingdom’sbackyard on the Arabian Peninsula. The spread ofmassive oil wealth since the sharp increase in globaloil prices began in the late 1990s has made it possi-ble for even the tiny emirates to defy the mightySaudi kingdom.

The limits of Saudi influence became painfullyapparent when the Saudis, alarmed by the rise of aShia-led government in Baghdad after the fall of Sad-dam Hussein, joined with Egypt and Jordan in aneffort to rally other Sunni Arab leaders against thespread of Iranian influence. By then, Tehran hadalready made inroads into Lebanon by supporting theShiite faction, Hezbollah, and into Palestinian poli-tics by backing Hamas. Jordan’s King Abdullahwarned of an emerging “Shiite crescent” stretchingfrom Iran to Lebanon and the Palestinian territo-ries. In Egypt, authorities uncovered a network ofsecret Hezbollah cells, and last year in Yemen the gov-

ernment accused the Iranians of fomenting rebel-lion among members of a local Shiite sect.

But the anti-Iranian campaign served more todivide than to unite the Arab world. Last January,after Israeli troops invaded the Gaza Strip in a bid todestroy Hamas, Qatar defied Saudi Arabia’s kingAbdullah and President Mubarak by calling for anemergency Arab summit to show support for the rad-ical Iranian-backed group. Fourteen of the ArabLeague’s members sent representatives, while SaudiArabia and Egypt, the league’s wealthiest and mostpopulous members, respectively, could only join oth-ers in a boycott.

The powerhouse of theArabian Peninsula cannotimpose its will even on itstiny neighbors in the GulfCooperation Council. TheGCC brought together sixmonarchies—kingdoms,emirates, and a sultanate—in 1981 to deal with thechallenge from Iran’s mili-

tant Shiite clerics, who were bent on exporting theirrevolution across the Persian Gulf. It established a col-lective defense force in 1986 under Saudi command,but the so-called Peninsula Shield never amounted tomore than a nucleus of at most 9,000 soldiers. Pentagonefforts over the years to encourage GCC members to inte-grate their air, land, and sea defenses have had limitedresults.

Why this failure of collective self-defense evenamong a subgroup of similar Arab countries con-fronted by a common threat? One constant of GCCpolitics is fear of Saudi hegemony. The United ArabEmirates and Qatar both have had territorial feudswith the Saudis, and there have been numerous eco-nomic squabbles. When Bahrain infuriated theSaudis by signing a bilateral free-trade agreementwith the United States in 2004, for example, thekingdom retaliated by temporarily cutting offBahrain’s portion of the output from an oil field theyshare.

Nowhere are GCC members’ differences more ondisplay than in their attitudes toward Iran. For SaudiArabia, the Shiite theocracy looms as the main chal-

SAUDI ARABIA, THE powerhouse of the

Arabian peninsula, cannot impose its will

even on its tiny neighbors.


The Arab Tomorrow

lenger to its religious and political influence in theSunni Arab world. The prospect of a nuclear-armedIran has alarmed the Saudis because of their fearsthat Tehran would be able to bully its Arab neighbors.The kingdom has been the most disposed of all theGCC members to support tougher economic sanc-tions, possibly even U.S. military action, to stop Iran’sdrive to join the world’s nuclear club.

Qatar, on the other hand, has maintained an open-door policy and even at times aligned itself withTehran against Riyadh—influenced in part by thefact that it jointly exploits a huge offshore gas fieldwith Iran. To great Saudi displeasure, the Qatarisinvited Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejadto attend the 2007 GCC annual summit, a first for anyIranian leader. Qatar has also sided with Iran’s mili-tant friends in the Arab world, namely Hezbollahand Hamas; it even took over floundering Saudiefforts to mediate among Lebanese factions in 2008

in brokering an accord that gave Hezbollah a decisivevoice in forming a new government, succeeding inBeirut.

Oman has also gone out of its way to remain ongood terms with Tehran, partly because the two coun-tries face each other across the Strait of Hormuz, thepassageway for all oil tankers leaving the PersianGulf. So has the United Arab Emirates, a constellationof seven semiautonomous city-states. The largestemirate, Dubai, is the main transshipment point forIranian exports and imports, still often ferried acrossthe gulf in old-fashioned wooden dhows. This flour-ishing trade continues unabated despite UN eco-nomic sanctions on Iran, not to mention Iran’s con-tinuing military occupation of three islands claimedby the emirates.

How has it been possible for these statelets to forgesuch independent foreign policies? The answer lies intheir massive oil and gas wealth. For example, Qatar,

At the Arab League’s 2002 summit, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia won surprising assent to an Arab-Israeli peace plan, but he couldn’t sell it elsewhere.


The Arab Tomorrow

with an indigenous population of less than 200,000,boasts the world’s third-largest natural gas reserves,after Russia and Iran, and is the world’s largest exporterof liquefied natural gas. It had a gross domestic productof $106 billion in 2008. Egypt, with its 80 million peo-ple, had a GDP of only $158 billion. Even countingQatar’s foreign resident population of slightly more thanone million, its per capita income of $93,204 was twicethat of the United States in 2008, ranking secondworldwide.

The case of the United Arab Emirates is just as strik-ing. With an indigenous population of 1.3 million (outof a total population of 4.3 million), it had a GDP of $270billion in 2008, more than half that of Saudi Arabia,which has 20 times as many nationals. Its sovereigninvestment fund—the Abu Dhabi InvestmentAuthority—was the world’s largest in 2008, with assetsof $627 billion. Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman had simi-larly outsized economies.

Fabulous wealth has made it possible for the gulfministates to do more than just dream impossibledreams. The rulers of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Qatarhave invested hundreds of billions of dollars in glitzy new“global cities” that aspire to become centers for play,business, and finance appealing to Arabs and non-Arabsalike. They host UN conferences and celebrity-studdedevents that trumpet their high hopes. The Doha TribecaFilm Festival in Qatar boasts Robert DeNiro among itsmarquee names. Abu Dhabi’s plans include both a“Louvre Abu Dhabi” and a Guggenheim museumdesigned by world-renowned architect Frank Gehry.

There is an air of unreality about these would-beglobal cities. Doha’s skyline is dotted with cranes, and itsdowntown is an unending series of construction sites andtwisting highway detours. Pakistanis, Indians, SriLankans, Nepalese, Filipinos, and Egyptians have comeby the hundreds of thousands to build a new shining cityon the sands around a barren bay. The quaint old quar-

The Arab future? At Ski Dubai, with its enclosed 400-meter ski slope, the materialistic zeal of the prosperous gulf states assumes crystalline form.


The Arab Tomorrow

ters at the city’s heart are surrounded by towering hotelsand conference centers. Native Qataris seem a vanish-ing species. A visitor could easily pass a week in Dohararely meeting a Qatari or hearing Arabic spoken.

Even before Dubaiessentially defaulted on$60 billion in debt lastNovember, the worldfinancial crisis of 2008–09had brought a halt, or atleast a pause, to the greatDubai dream of a newglobal city. Scores of projects were put on hold and tensof thousands of foreign workers sent home. Oman,too, was hard hit. But the other gulf statelets simplydug deeper into their foreign reserves to ride out thedownturn, while Saudi Arabia, with $400 billion in itspocket, hardly skipped a beat.

If tiny Qatar can defy giant Saudi Arabia, what is thelikelihood that the Arab world will ever produceanother charismatic zaim of the stature of Nasser

or Sadat, or that Egypt will re-emerge as its politicaldynamo? The chances appear exceedingly slim. Egyptmay still have some of the key ingredients forleadership—the mightiest army, the biggest population,and the most central geographic location. But it remainsresource poor and heavily dependent on unreliable rev-enues from abroad—multibillion-dollar grants from theUnited States, European and Arab tourism, and remit-tances from the two million Egyptians who work inother countries.

Not only has the center of Arab wealth moved to thegulf; so, too, has the source of new initiatives and think-ing. Visiting Cairo last April, a New York Times reporterfound its chattering classes demoralized and despairing.A leading television writer, Osama Anwar Okasha,lamented that Egypt had become “a third-class country.”It is “not influential in anything,” he grumbled. Cairo haslost even its role as the soap opera capital of the Arabworld, its state-sponsored offerings trounced in the rat-ings during the critical Ramadan month of fasting bylivelier confections such as Turkey’s Noor, which fol-lows the heart-rending story of a young couple forcedinto a traditional family-arranged marriage. Egyptians

were embarrassed last year by Mubarak’s effort to pro-mote culture minister Farouk Hosny, widely seen asCairo’s Savonarola, as UNESCO’s new director-general.Hosny blamed the failure of his candidacy on a Jewish

conspiracy “cooked up in New York.” As if this were notenough, Egyptians suffered another blow to their selfesteem last November when Algeria eliminated theirsoccer team from World Cup contention. In the ensuingdustup, both countries recalled their ambassadors.

The decline of Egypt has been an especially bitter pillfor the country’s best and brightest to swallow. The lit-erate are divided over whether the blame lies chiefly withthe peace treaty with Israel, which deprived Egypt of amilitary option and thus weakened its diplomacy withTel Aviv, or with Mubarak. The Egyptian president him-self seems to have supplied the answer, allowing KingAbdullah to eclipse him with his 2002 peace initiativeand failing in his effort to mediate among feuding Pales-tinian factions.

Mubarak’s son and possible successor Gamal hasdeftly promoted his image at home and abroad as areform-minded modernizer, but it seems unlikely thatany leader will be able to restore Egypt to its role as ummidduniya. Some reformers’ hearts fluttered in Decem-ber when Mohamed ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Prizeas head of the International Atomic Energy Agency,declared his interest in running for Egypt’s presidencyin 2011, but he attached conditions the government isunlikely to satisfy.

Washington regularly bemoans the lack of an “Arabpartner” in the peace process, and presses Egypt in par-ticular to do more. Abdullah’s success in pulling Arabrulers together behind a plan illustrates that strongleadership can serve to forge a single Arab voice on eventhe most divisive issues. But the single, clear voice of2002 did little to help achieve a breakthrough in theIsraeli-Palestinian deadlock; nor has Arab unanimity inbacking a multitude of anti-Israel resolutions at the

CAIRO HAS LOST even its role as the

soap opera capital of the Arab world.


The Arab Tomorrow

United Nations accomplished anything. And the ArabLeague’s unanimous support for Sudanese leader Omaral-Bashir, faced with war crime charges by the Interna-tional Criminal Court, has not enhanced the Arab voicein world affairs.

It is no longer clear, either, what the Arab worldstands to gain by an Egypt strutting back to center stage.There is no enticing “Egyptian model” for develop-ment—political or economic. New thinking, visions,and initiatives have come largely from the Persian Gulfstates and their freewheeling, competitive rulers, whileEgypt still seems encumbered by its Pharaonic naturefrom embarking on radical change. On the whole, theArab world has gained in vitality in Egypt’s decline.

That world now stares at two sharply contrastingmodels of its future: the highly materialistic emiratestate obsessed with visions of Western-style moder-nity, and the strict Islamic one fixed on resurrectingthe Qur’an’s dictates espoused by fundamentalistsand Al Qaeda. The struggle between these two mod-els for the hearts and minds of Arabs is intense, par-ticularly among a questioning, restless youth. Thelure of the new, shiny emirate cities remains power-ful, but there is a soulless quality about these placesthat raises questions about their lasting appeal. Onthe other hand, Muslim terrorism unleashed againstother Muslims has done nothing to enhance the callfor an Islamic state.

T here are signs, perhaps false, that the appeal ofmilitant Islam is waning. Support for Islamicparties has dropped in recent elections in Jordan,

Kuwait, Morocco, and Algeria. But this may only reflectthe growing disillusionment with government-riggedelections, as falling voter turnout strongly suggests. In fact,there is a fierce debate under way within the MuslimBrotherhood in Egypt and like-minded Islamist groupselsewhere over whether they should continue to partici-pate in the electoral process. (See box, p. 59.)

Analysts of the Arab world are all too aware thatprediction is a fool’s game. As a journalist covering theregion, I have reported more times than I can count theconfident predictions after the shah fell in 1979 thatthe Arab monarchies were next. Today, those sameregimes are not only alive and well but thriving. Militant

Islam has not swept them away. Predicting the outcomeof the continuing struggle between Arab autocrats, royaland secular, and their Islamist opponents seems equallyperilous today. The Arab future is not limited to a choicebetween autocracy and theocracy. As both Turkey andIndonesia powerfully illustrate, there is nothing inher-ently contradictory between Islam and authentic mul-tiparty democracy. These countries, too, were once ruledby autocrats, and they both have had to figure out the roleof Islam in politics.

Whoever comes to rule Egypt after Mubarak willwalk upon an Arab landscape that has undergonechange that is probably irreversible. Not only is the Arabworld multipolar in wealth and influence; its eastern andwestern flanks are slowly being pulled in opposite direc-tions by different global markets. Centrifugal economicforces are becoming more powerful than centripetalpolitical ones. For the oil- and gas-exporting gulf states,the thriving economies of China, India, and other Asiannations have become a powerful magnet; for theMaghreb countries, the European Union plays that role.Saudi Arabia aspires to become the prime supplier of for-eign oil to gas-guzzling China; Algeria is doubling thecapacity to transport its Sahara gas by underwaterpipelines to energy-starved Italy and Spain.

By and large, the economic prospects for most Arabcountries appear reasonably hopeful. A majority have oilor gas, and even non–oil-producing countries such asJordan and Morocco, and minor producers such asTunisia, have fair to good prospects. Many were on themove economically before the latest world financial cri-sis, and they have not come to a halt because of it. Evenwar-devastated Iraq has struck deals with foreign firmsto nearly triple its current production of 2.5 million bar-rels a day in the next six years.

By contrast, Arab political prospects are deeply trou-bling. Monarchs, once thought headed for history’s dust-bin, are doing surprisingly well at the moment. Bothroyal and secular autocrats are holding their Islamistchallengers at bay thanks to highly manipulative orrepressive security services. However, this prevailingmodel of Arab autocracy, dependent on the mukhabaratand a fabricated popular vote, does not seem a recipe forlasting political stability. Indeed, the Arab political caul-dron contains all the ingredients for explosions in theyears ahead. ■

the arab tomorrow - muslim brotherhood

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