Posts by James M. Dorsey.:
- Southeast Asia has benefitted from the fact that it does not have the equivalent of Saudi Arabia, an arch-conservative absolute monarchy with regional hegemonic ambitions whose ruling family will not shy away from anything to ensure its survival;
- Southeast Asia further had the advantage that it is not wracked by regional rivalries like those between Saudi Arabia and Iran or Iran and Turkey and is not populated by countries whose ambition is to dominate others. Equally important is that no country in Southeast Asia had the kind of revolutionary ambition that Iran, Egypt, Libya or Algeria had at given times in their more recent history;
- Differences between Southeast Asian nations are not fought on the battlefield and Southeast Asians do not employ militant and violent proxies to influence events in other countries. With other words, there is no equivalent in Southeast Asia to Hezbollah, Hamas or the Iraqi Popular Mobilization Units nor is there a pattern of support by any one Southeast Asian nation for restless ethnic or religious in another country in the region such as Saudi support for restless Iranian Arabs in Khuzestan or Baluchis in Iran’s Sistan and Baluchistan province.
- Khaybar, a date-growing valley and oasis with natural wells, that was home to a Jewish community and served as a stop on the incense trade route from Yemen to Syria and Lebanon. Although its 1,400-year-old cemetery is void of headstones, locals recall its Jewish history.
- Khaybar Fortress, the 1,400-year-old Fortress of the Jews perched on a hill overlooking the oasis that was conquered by the Prophet Mohamed. His nephew and son-in-law, Ali, unlocked the gate of the fortress, letting the Prophet’s army enter and conquer it.
- The Palace of the Jewish Tribe’s Head, also located in Khaybar, that was home to the Jewish tribe of Marhab famous for its gold and jewellery trade.
- Tayma known as fortified Jewish city where travellers stopped at the oasis to visit the Al-Naslaa Rock Formation, one of the most photogenic petroglyphs, or rock art, depicting the life and times of ancient communities.
- Bir Haddaj, a large well at the centre of Tayma that dates back to at least to the middle of the 6th century BCE. The well is mentioned in the Book of Isaiah as the place where the descendants of Ishmael’s son, Tema, lived: “Unto him that is thirsty bring ye water! The inhabitants of the land of Tema did meet the fugitive with his bread.”
Tackling Iran: Trump fuels the fire
February 3rd, 2017
By James M. Dorsey.
Source: IBTimes
The Trump administration risks fuelling sectarianism across the Muslim world and exacerbating multiple conflicts that are ripping the Middle East and North Africa apart by singling out Iran rather than tackling root causes.
Iran moved into President Donald J. Trump’s firing line when his national security advisor, Michael Flynn, an anti-Iran hawk, put the Islamic republic “on notice” for testing a ballistic missile. The test was likely a provocative probing of US policy towards Iran, one of seven countries whose nationals are temporarily banned from travel to the United States. Mr. Trump has repeatedly denounced the nuclear agreement concluded by the United States and other world powers with Iran as a bad deal.
It remains unclear what Mr. Flynn’s notification entails. A resolution circulated in the House of Representatives before Mr. Trump’s inauguration would authorize US military action against Iran if the president believes it is necessary to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Most analysts, including supporters of Mr. Trump, believe that Iran has largely honoured the international agreement curbing the Islamic republic’s nuclear program, making an immediate military response to the missile test unlikely.
Gulf states alongside Israel have moreover urged Mr. Trump to adopt a tough approach towards what they see as belligerent Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Arab countries and support for terrorism, but to stop short of annulling the agreement. Mr. Trump is expected to move away from his campaign pledges to tear up the agreement, but with Mr. Flynn’s warning appears to be adopting the advice of US allies.
A Saudi read out of a phone conversation last weekend between King Salman and Mr. Trump said the two leaders agreed to counter “those who seek to undermine security and stability in the region and interfere in the affairs of other states.” The White House said the they also had a meeting of the minds on the “importance of rigorously enforcing” the nuclear deal.
The consensus notwithstanding, Mr. Trump’s travel ban, despite including Iran, puts King Salman in a bind, as he balances the kingdom’s foreign policy objectives with its self-proclaimed leadership of the Muslim world. Saudi Arabia has so far refrained from commenting on the ban despite pressure from some of its allies to do so.
Saudi Arabia’s predicament and it’s welcoming of the rise of Mr. Trump in the expectation that he will fight some of the kingdom’s battles creates the opportunity for the new president to put disruption to constructive use.
It could allow Mr. Trump to tackle not only Iran but also Saudi Arabia on a fundamental issue that drives volatility, sectarianism and political violence in the Muslim world in general and Iranian and Saudi policies specifically: the rise of supremacist, intolerant, anti-pluralistic ultra-conservatism.
Supporters of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani have already hinted at the opportunity. “Iran has every interest in reducing tension with Saudi Arabia at a time when the Trump presidency in the United States is creating new uncertainties,” said an editorial in the pro-Rouhani Entekhab daily.
The opportunity that arises is not limited to Iran and Saudi Arabia. Leaving aside the ethics of banning travel on the basis of religion or nationality, Mr. Trump’s ban as well as his intention to focus US counter-terrorism exclusively on Islam rather than on all forms of political extremism, including far-right supremacism, would also allow him to pressure other countries where divisive ultra-conservatism has been allowed to fester.
That is evident in efforts by the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia to stay out of Mr. Trump’s firing line by refraining from criticizing the ban. Both Malaysia and Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, have witnessed the rise of ultra-conservative intolerance towards non-Muslim and Muslim minorities such as Shiites and Ahmadis, a sect widely viewed by conservative followers of the faith as heretics, that are informed by Saudi-backed puritan interpretations of Islam
There is little to suggest that Mr. Trump recognizes the opportunity. A failure to exploit the opportunity and exclusively target Iran is however likely to backfire, embolden Saudi policies that create problems rather than offer solutions, and fuel sectarian and other cycles of violence.
While Iran has refrained from promoting a supremacist world view of its own, there is little doubt that it implements its ultra-conservatism with the application of medieval, punitive measures of Islamic law, including amputation and stoning. It has also reshaped the politics as well as the very integrity of Arab countries like Lebanon where it supports Shiite militia Hezbollah, Syria that has been torn apart by a vicious civil war, the creation of Shiite militias in Iraq, and Yemen where Iran has come to the aid of the Houthis. The problem is that so have Saudi Arabia and its allies or in other words: there are no nice guys in this fight.
A four-decade long, $100 billion global Saudi effort to box in, if not undermine, a post-1979 revolution Iranian system of government that it sees as an existential threat to the autocratic rule of the Al Saud family by funding ultra-conservative political and religious groups has contributed to the rise of supremacism, intolerance and anti-pluralism across the Muslim world and created potential breeding grounds of extremism.
The rise of ultra-conservatism has fuelled sectarianism and violence against Shiites and Ahmadis; hardened attitudes towards women and alternative lifestyles; and curbed fundamental freedoms under the guise of blasphemy.
Iranian interference in the affairs of other countries stems as much from long-fading revolutionary zeal in the wake of the 1979 revolution as it constitutes a response to the Saudi-led Sunni campaign that involved not only support for non-violent, ultra-conservative groups, but also the funding of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s devastating eight-year long war against Iran in the 1980s as well as virulently anti-Shiite and anti-Ahmadi forces in Pakistan that are responsible for the deaths of thousands, and militant groups in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa.
At the bottom line, Iran and Saudi Arabia have long been locked into a struggle for dominance in the Muslim world that has fuelled violence, created breeding grounds for extremism, and brought the Middle East and North Africa to the edge of an abyss. Tackling symptoms or only specific players rather than root causes threatens to fuel the fire rather than extinguish it.
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Pakistani crackdown: One hand works to neutralize the other
February 1st, 2017By James M. Dorsey.
Pakistan has put one of the world’s most wanted men under house arrest in a half-hearted crackdown on a militant group with close ties to the military and intelligence in a bid to persuade President Donald J. Trump from adding the country to those whose citizens were last week banned from travelling to the United States.
Pakistani media reports and analysts said the move against Hafez Muhammad Saeed, a leader of the banned group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and its alleged front, Jamaat-ud-Din (JuD), came after US officials days before the inauguration of Mr. Trump gave Pakistan until January 31 to respond to complaints by the Bangkok-based Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering (APG) about various JuD financial transactions.
Mr. Saeed is believed to be among others responsible for the 2008 attacks on 12 targets in Mumbai, including the Taj Mahal Hotel, a train station, a café and a Jewish centre. Some 164 people were killed and more than 300 wounded. The US government has a bounty of $10 million on Mr. Saeed for information leading to his capture.
Writing in The News, Pakistani investigative reporter Azaz Syed said US officials had told Pakistan’s ambassador in a meeting on January 11 that “if the objections raised in the report were not addressed, the US may put Pakistan in the blacklist of the countries in the International Cooperative Review Group (ICRG).”
Apparently pre-warned that action may be taken against him, Mr. Saeed suggested during a press conference in Islamabad three days later that JuD may start operating under a new name, a practice frequently adopted by militant groups with government acquiescence. Mr. Saeed hinted that the new name would be Tehreek-e-Azadi-e-Kashmir (Kashmir Freedom Movement).
Mr. Syed, in a telephone interview alongside other analysts, said the move against Mr. Saeed, several other JuD leaders, and the group itself, were cosmetic. The symbolism was evident in the fact that Mr. Saeed was confined to his home in Lahore that was declared a sub-jail rather than carted off to prison.
The symbolism was also reflected in public displays such as the removal of JuD flags from streets and the hoisting of Pakistani flags at the group’s 81-hectar headquarters in Muridke, a city of two and three-storey pillboxes famous for its fruits and vegetables 22 kilometres north of Lahore. The International Crisis Group has reported that the complex which contains an ultra-conservative religious school and housing for 3,000 students and staff was built in 1998 with Saudi funding.
Mr. Saeed has had long standing links to Saudi Arabia and the kingdom-backed Ahle-Hadith movement, a group whose ultra-conservative religious views are most closely aligned with Saudi-supported forms of Wahhabism and Salafis. A graduate of an Ahle-Hadith madrassa and King Saud University in Riyadh, Mr. Saeed, backed by Saudi money founded Islamic schools in which potential jihadis not only studied Islam but also acquired computer and communication skills.
Mr. Saeed was appointed in the 1980s by General Mohammad Zia-ul-Haq as a member of the Council of Islamic Ideology, an advisory body of clerics and scholars established to assist the Pakistani government in bringing laws in line with the Qur’an and the example of the Prophet Mohammed. He has long left that post.
Mr. Saeed reportedly met while studying in Saudi Arabia with Saudi scholars involved in the jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was those scholars who launched him in his career as a militant. Abdullah Azam, the Palestinian scholar who taught in Saudi Arabia, before founding the precursor to Al Qaeda is believed to have been one of LeT’s original inspirations.
Analysts and journalists compared the moves against Mr. Saeed and JuD to an announcement in October by the State Bank of Pakistan that it had frozen the accounts of more than 2,000 people associated with political violence. Major groups like JuD, Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HuM), who mainly focus on Kashmir were not included in the list.
“Nothing has changed,” one analyst said.
The degree of official protection Mr. Saeed and his group have enjoyed over the years has long been an issue of concern to the United States.
US Assistant Secretary of State Esther Brimmer noted in a cable in 2009 in the wake of the Mumbai attacks published by Wikileaks that JuD “is still operating in multiple locations in Pakistan, and that the group continues to openly raise funds. It is unclear what, if any, steps the GOP (Government of Pakistan) has taken to freeze JUD’s assets or otherwise implement UN 1267 sanctions, which include an asset freeze, travel ban, and arms embargo.”
An earlier cable warned that charities connected to Let and JeM that had been funded by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates had increased the local population’s dependence on extremist groups and undermined the influence of moderate Sufi religious leaders.
Mr. Saaed was in recent years a familiar figure in the news and in the public eye. He attended in December alongside other prominent militants such as HuM founder Fazlur Khalil Rehman a solidarity rally in the Pakistani Kashmir capital of Muzaffarabad.
Mr. Rehman is a specially designated terrorist on the US Treasury Department’s list who counts a Saudi among his wives. He operates a madrassah guarded by AK-47 toting guards on the outskirts of Islamabad. Mr. Rehman, a signatory of Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa declaring the International Front Against Jews and Crusaders, has leveraged his close ties to the Pakistani world of militancy, his advocacy of armed struggle in Kashmir and his well-established connections to the Pakistani military and intelligence to position himself as a go-between.
Mr. Saeed was accorded VIP treatment two weeks after the Muzaffarabad rally on board a state-owned Pakistan International Airways flight to the Baloch capital of Quetta where he gave a news conference together with Shahzain Bugti, the government-backed grandson of killed Baloch tribal leader Nawab Akbar Bugti.
Months earlier, Mr. Saeed headed a pro-Kashmir Azadi or Freedom caravan of buses, trucks, and cars from Lahore to Islamabad that stretched for kilometres along the Grand Trunk road that connects the two cities. The caravan swelled as it travelled the 270-kilometre-long road under the slogan: “The cure to India is nothing but jihad,” participants shouted.
In another twist of irony, Pakistan’s National Counter Terrorism Authority has tasked an institute run by a former JuD official who left the group because of a labour dispute rather than ideological differences with research on reform of madrassas, the religious schools many of which are suspected of being breeding grounds for political violence. The issue may be one of only appearance given that the institute’s researchers make a serious impression in interviews. It nonetheless raises questions.
Cracking down on JuD may solve Pakistan’s most immediate potential issue with the United States. It does however little to tackle the fundamental problem represented by JuD: a belief in key branches of the state that militant groups can serve a geopolitical purpose without endangering the fabric of society, a fabric that has already been infused by ultra-conservative strands of Islam many of which are akin to Saudi Arabia’s puritan interpretation of Islam.
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The Muslim world: Liberals pay the price for Trump and Saudi-supported illiberalism
January 30th, 2017
By James Dorsey.
By James M. Dorsey
US president Donald J. Trump’s fuelling of Islamophobia with his newly imposed travel ban as well as his war on the mainstream media feed an increasing trend towards supremacism and intolerance as well as restrictions on freedom of expression, media and religion across the Muslim world.
In doing so, the president’s moves complicate rather than fortify efforts to counter political violence by giving credence to ultra-conservative and jihadist narratives of war being waged by the West on Islam. The moves strengthen forces that propagate supremacist interpretations of the faith that are intolerant of non-Muslims and alternative Islamic worldviews.
The ultra-conservative alliance buoyed by Mr. Trump’s policies includes Saudi-backed ultra-conservative ideologies and governments that are beneficiaries of Saudi largess and opportunistically play politics with religion as well as anti-Saudi jihadists.
Saudi largesseis part of a massively funded, decades long soft power play by the kingdom designed to box in Iran by globally promoting an ultra-conservative, supremacist, intolerant strand of Islam. Mr. Trump and Saudi King Salman discussed on Sunday the need to counter “Iran’s destabilizing regional activities.” A Saudi readout of the call said the two men had identical views on the fight against terrorism.
Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism as well as Iranian support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and sectarian groups elsewhere in the Middle East has fuelled widespread sectarianism, intolerance towards Muslim and non-Muslim minorities, and conservative rejection of alternative lifestyles and basic freedoms. The trend sparks a turn towards ultra-conservative piety among the discontented and elites alike in various Sunni Muslim majority countries.
Moreover, Mr. Trump’s effort to create an alternative reality and the advice to the media of his far-right, strategic advisor, Steve Bannon, to “shut up,” beyond feeding the narrative of a Western war on Islam, reinforces efforts by the Saudis and others to restrict unfettered debate, particularly about sensitive religious issues, a cornerstone of any attempt to counter radicalism.
As a result, Mr. Trump is lending, perhaps unwittingly, greater credence to increasingly influential long-standing notions propagated by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim governments as well as militant jihadist and non-jihadist groups that seek to criminalize blasphemy.
The fallout is evident in Saudi Arabia as well as elsewhere in the Muslim world. The kingdom imposes severe penalties on those that question its narrow interpretation of Islam. Secular bloggers in Bangladesh risk being hacked to death while jihadists slaughter those they think have deviated from the true path. The governor of the Indonesian capital Jakarta, a Christian of Chinese descent, has been charged with blasphemy for allegedly misquoting the Qur’an. Malaysia has banned distribution of Shiite texts.
The electronic media regulator in Pakistan took two television shows of the air last year during Ramadan for discussing the country’s draconic blasphemy laws as well as the persecution of Ahmadis, a Muslim sect widely viewed as heretics. Writing in Dawn newspaper, Pakistani researcher Nazish Brohi warned that “the issue of blasphemy is destroying whatever strands of pluralism remain.”
The Saudi-backed effort to influence laws governing blasphemy and freedom of expression and religion in individual countries, has culminated in a campaign by Saudi Arabia other Muslim nations have long sought to criminalize blasphemy in international law.
In the process, the effort has become part of the kingdom’s response to rising anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia in the wake of attacks organized or inspired by the Islamic State in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and the United States as well as mounting criticism of Saudi Arabia’s austere interpretation of Islam and massive violations of human rights.
The success of Saudi-inspired ultra-conservatism that feeds on like-minded worldviews such as Deobandism in South Asia and the opportunism of politicians and government is evident in the degree to which its core pillars of intolerance have become part of the fabric of key branches of government and the state in various Muslim nations.
The recent disappearance of five Pakistani social media activists, including a Singapore-based Pakistani IT worker on a visit home, is a case in point. The five, despite government denials, were widely believed to have been abducted with at least the connivance elements of the state. The abductions were the latest blasphemy-related incidents to rock Pakistan in recent years.
The abductions’ relationship to elements of government was seemingly confirmed when two of the five phoned home in recent days to say that they were in good health and that the police could be contacted for more details. One of the five, activist, poet and university lecturer Salman Haider, was released a day later with no details about where and by whom he had been held. “The disappearances themselves were not unusual – the net has been widening for a while and unreported, hushed-up incidents tend to lead to more. The disappeared who return become the silenced,” quipped prominent Pakistani columnist Cyril Almeida in an op-ed in Dawn.
Al Jazeera reported that Ahmed Raza Naseer, one of the activists, was sitting with his brother at their shop in a small village just outside the central Pakistani town of Nankana Sahib, when a nondescript man holding a mobile phone to his ear walked in. He spent some time looking at their wares – mobile phones – before asking the brothers their names. After they answered, he asked which of them used a particular mobile phone number. When Ahmed replied that he did, he was told to stand up. The 27-year-old struggled to his feet – he has had polio in his right leg since he was a boy. “The man tells him to take his phone and come and sit in the car outside, where a sahab (important man] is sitting who wants to ask you some questions,” his younger brother Tahir, who was ordered to stay inside, told Al Jazeera. That was the last time his family saw Ahmed.
Ahmed and the four others have since been accused by TV show hosts with close ties to intelligence and the military, pro-military and intelligence activists, and ultra-conservative Islamic scholars of having committed blasphemy.
Abdullah Cheema, an activist who identified himself as a member of a banned group, Hizb-ut-Tahrir, spokesperson for a group calling itself Civil Society of Pakistan, and an associate of Pakistan Defence, a pro-military and intelligence Facebook page that with 7.5 million followers advertises itself as an “authoritative platform for Pakistan Military and international defense,” associated the disappeared with another Facebook page, Bhensa, that he asserted had published blasphemous materials.
A group calling itself the Elite Cyber Force of Pakistan has since taken control of the page, saying that “all blasphemous and offensive material has been removed.” Civil Society of Pakistan chairman Muhammed Tahir filed blasphemy charges against the five after they had been abducted.
Citing Pakistan Defence as the source of the blasphemy charges, Mr. Cheema was supported on Neo News by Orya Maqbool Jan, a former government official, conservative talk show host, Urdu-language columnist, and director of United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) projects for children’s’ rights and women’s development. “These (Facebook) pages … are extremely insulting to the Prophet, the Quran, Allah and Islam. They have made a joke out of this… Speaking in support of such criminals is a crime in itself,” Mr. Cheema said on Mr. Jan’s show.
Speaking to The Pakistan Daily, Mr. Cheema asserted that “we firmly believe in freedom of expression but these blasphemous pages did not intend to initiate intellectual dialogues but deliberately posted hate and abuse against the prophet Muhammad.” His words were echoed by Muslim scholar Khadim Hussain Rizvi, wearing a black turban that identifies him as a descendant of the Prophet, in a sermon uploaded on You Tube on which he cited from a Qur’an lying in front of him.
“The bloggers’ disappearance is its own issue. They should definitely be produced, but no one should try and hide their crimes, and their crimes are so heinous that no one should … say that they suffered injustice,” added Aamir Liaquat, one of Pakistan’s most well-known talk show hosts.
Pakistan’s media regulator, in a display of apparent contradictory trends within the Pakistan government, has since banned Mr. Liaqat on charges of “hate speech” and “incitement to violence.”
The regulator’s action, however, constitutes a needle in a hay stack in a world in which the likes of Mr. Trump and far-right European politicians fuel Islamophobia to the benefit of Saudi-backed ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam as well as their anti-Saudi jihadist offshoots. Even if silenced, the activists who were abducted bear witness to a vicious circle that aggravates rather than solves problems both in the West and across the Muslim world.
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Think that 2016 was a tough year for Saudi Arabia? Wait till you see 2017
January 10th, 2017By James M. Dorsey.
2016 was not a good year for Saudi Arabia. Sharply lower oil prices sparked a domestic financial crisis that is forcing the country to restructure its economy. Saud Arabia’s bitter struggle with Iran for regional hegemony has embroiled it in wars and political conflicts it has been unable to win, leaving it no alternative but to admit failure or compromise. If 2016 was bad, 2017 threatens to be worse.
Saudi Arabia closed out 2016 with a ceasefire in Syria and prospects for peace talks orchestrated by Russia and Turkey that significantly weakened Saudi-backed rebel groups and strengthened Iran’s key Middle East ally, Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Saudi Arabia’s only hope of influencing events in Syria is if either the rebels, jihadists who are not part of the ceasefire, or Mr. Al-Assad sabotage it for their own reasons. But even then, the fall of Aleppo, the rebel’s last major urban holdout, threatens to reduce the anti-Assad resistance to a largely rural insurgency.
Adding insult to injury, Saudi Arabia, unable to block a candidate from becoming president of Lebanon who was supported by Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia that helped Mr. Al-Assad regain the upper hand in the Syrian civil war, was forced to strike a deal. It tacitly agreed to the appointment of Michel Aoun, a close Hezbollah ally, and quickly invited him to visit the kingdom early in the new year.
Mr. Aoun, as part of the deal, appointed Saad Hariri, the son of Rafik Hariri, the prime minister and Lebanese-Saudi businessman who was murdered in 2005 allegedly by Hezbollah operatives, as his head of government. Mr. Hariri, whose family conglomerate in the kingdom was hit badly by the financial crisis and needed to be bailed out, is beholden to the Saudi government. The deal ended a more than two-year long standoff between Iranian and Saudi-backed forces that left the presidency vacant.
Sensitive to any challenge to its custodianship of Islam’s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia’s role is in the spotlight as it negotiates modalities with some 80 countries for the 2017 haj. Saudi Arabia and Iran failed to reach an agreement for the 2016 pilgrimage, leaving the Islamic republic without a quote for pilgrims and the kingdom’s management of the haj challenged.
An almost two-year long military campaign in Yemen, that was supposed to be cakewalk has turned into a quagmire for the kingdom. Saudi Arabia is looking for a face-saving exit strategy from a neighbour that its military has devastated without removing its enemies, the Iranian-backed Houthis and former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, from power in much of the country, including the capital Sana’a. The campaign has sparked widespread anti-Saudi sentiment among significant numbers of Yemenis.
The campaign has moreover cast a shadow over the capabilities of a country that ranks as the world’s second largest importer of military equipment. The United States late last year halted the sale of air-dropped and precision-guided munitions until it has better trained Saudi forces in their targeting and use of the weapons. The Saudi air force’s repeated targeting by design or default of civilian targets in Yemen in which large numbers of innocent people were killed has opened the kingdom to assertions of war crimes.
Saudi Arabia’s inability to claim either political or military benefit from the Yemen war threatens to put on the line the credibility of Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Sultan, the powerful son of King Salman, who is also in charge of turning the kingdom’s economy around. Many believe that King Salman is grooming Prince Mohammed as his successor despite objections from factions within the Al Saud family.
Similarly, Saudi Arabia’s use of its political and financial muscle to bring Egyptian-general-turned president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to power in a military coup in 2013 and stabilize Egypt’s deteriorating economy has failed to achieve a return. Instead, Saudi Arabia and the Arab world’s most populous nation are at loggerheads over Iran, Syria and various other issues.
Saudi Arabia suspended in October a $23 billion agreement to supply Egypt with 700,000 tons of petroleum products every month after Egypt supported a Russian resolution on Syria in the United Nations Security Council. The sanctions and cooling of relations have done little to make Mr. Al-Sisi more empathetic to Saudi concerns.
Finally, on the foreign police and defence front, this month’s inauguration of Donald J. Trump could prove to be a mixed bag that may aggravate Saudi Arabia’s problems. Mr. Trump has suggested that he may back away from US support for anti-Assad rebels in Syria and focus in cooperation with Moscow on defeating the Islamic State. That effectively would strengthen the free hand Iran, Russia and Mr. Al-Assad already have in Syria.
The President-elect has also hinted that he may scrap the international community’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Saudi Arabia has called on Mr. Trump not to cancel the agreement but to hold Iran to the fire over its support for proxies in Arab countries. A cancellation of the agreement could force Saudi Arabia into a nuclear arms race with Iran.
Mr. Trump’s suggestions that he may be more sympathetic to Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank threatens to put the kingdom on the spot at a time that it has found common ground with Israel in seeking to halt Iranian regional advances. Mr. Trump’s pledge to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and his nominee as ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, who describes Jerusalem as the “eternal capital of the Jewish state” could further strain already trouble relations with the United States. Possible widespread protests against relocation of the embassy could move Arab states, including Saudi Arabia, to break off diplomatic relations with the United States and/or take other retaliatory steps.
Saudi Arabia is betting that Mr. Trump, the president, will rely on the experience of Mr. Trump, the businessman, to cut deals. The president-elect, however, has suggested that he could stop oil imports from the kingdom in his bid to make the United Sates energy independent. At one point, during the election campaign, he also blamed Saudi Arabia for the 9/11 attacks.
Uncertainty in its relationship with the US could not come at a worse moment for the kingdom. The Saudi government, beyond its foreign policy and military setbacks, has begun to unilaterally rewrite the social contract that underwrites it. The rewriting constitutes the end of a bargain involving a cradle-to-grave welfare system in exchange for surrender of political rights and adherence to Wahhabi social mores.
Cutbacks on subsidies, increased utility prices, reduced spending on education and social services, and streamlining of the bureaucracy in a country in which the state employs two thirds of the citizenry is a tricky business. It’s even trickier in an environment in which the country’s basic power structure, a power sharing agreement between the ruling Al Saud family and the country’s religious establishment, is being challenged by the demands of economic and social change and increasing international association of Wahhabism with Islamic militancy.
King Salman and Prince Mohammed have a full plate for 2017. For them and the Al Sauds the core issue is survival. With no credible alternative to the Al Sauds and the Middle East and North Africa’s recent experience of popular protest producing civil wars, jihadism and increased repression, Saudis are unlikely to revolt. They will however demand a greater say and greater accountability, concepts the government has so far countered with increased suppression and authoritarianism.
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Towards a New World Order in Eurasia? The Role of Russia and China
December 26th, 2016
By James M Dorsey.
Synopsis
A new Russian-led, China-backed Eurasia-centred world order may be in the making against the backdrop of alleged Russian cyber warfare against the US and Europe. Analysts see a pattern in Russian moves that could serve China’s interests should US president-elect Donald Trump adopt a more confrontational approach towards Beijing.
Commentary
SUGGESTIONS THAT Russian President Vladimir Putin is bent on creating a new Russia-led and China-backed Eurasia-centred world order by undermining Western democratic institutions may be a crackpot conspiracy theory. Yet that may not be so far-fetched against the backdrop of US allegations of Russia’s waging cyber warfare against the US, German intelligence sounding the alarm bell, East European leaders having their fears confirmed and Moscow and Beijing reaching out to Western supporters of the idea.
Whether conspiracy theory or not, western intelligence agencies and many analysts see a pattern in Russian moves that would serve Chinese interests, particularly if US president-elect Donald J Trump adopts a more confrontational approach towards Beijing. The analysts believe that the sum total of Russian activity amounts to an attempt to undermine trust in democratic structures and manipulate elections.
Turkish Approach to Eurasia
Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly subscribed to conspiracy theories alleging Western backing for the failed coup attempt in July against his government and a mysterious international financial cabal seeking to undermine the Turkish economy. In response, Erdogan has applied for Turkish membership in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that groups Central Asian states with China and Russia.
Bent on enhancing his personal power, Erdogan is not about to fully rupture relations with the West but is happy to play both ends against the middle by publicly aligning himself with concepts of Russian-backed Eurasianists.
A left-wing secularist, Dogu Perincek, who spent six years in prison for allegedly being part of a military-led cabal to stage a military coup, was long a fringe voice calling on Erdogan to break ties with the West and align himself with Russia and China. Perincek’s worldview — one that envisions an alliance between Russia, China and Turkey that would replace the US-led international order — is gaining currency in Ankara, Moscow and Beijing, according to a prominent Turkish intellectual, Mustafa Akyol and other well-known pundits.
The rise of Perincek’s Homeland Party, dubbed the Russian lobby by Akyol in an article in Al-Monitor, comes on the back of its ability to backchannel a reconciliation with Russia following a rupture in relations and a crippling Russian economic boycott in the wake of Turkey’s downing in 2015 of a Russian warplane.
Perincek, together with deputy Homeland leader Ismail Hakki Pekin, a former head of Turkish military intelligence with extensive contacts in Moscow including Putin’s foreign policy advisor Alexander Dugin, mediated the reconciliation with Erdogan’s tacit approval. They were supported by Turkish businessmen close to the president who were severely affected by the boycott, and ultra-nationalist Eurasianist military officers.
Making Inroads
Several factors have worked in favour of the Eurasianist idea. The first is the increasingly strained relations between Turkey and the West over the latter’s perceived lack of support following this summer’s failed military attempt to topple Erdogan. The second is a Western refusal to crack down on the Hizmet movement led by exiled imam Fethullah Gulen, who Turkey holds responsible for the unsuccessful coup. The third is Western criticism of Erdogan’s wholesale crackdown on his critics. Differences over Syria have intensified the pro-Eurasianist thinking.
Erdogan’s purported alignment with the Eurasianists fits neatly into an apparently larger Russian effort to fuel populist and right wing sentiment in the West and interfere in the affairs of former Soviet states. Together with China, whose One Belt, One Road initiative seeks to tie Eurasia together through infrastructure and trade, Russia seeks to reach out to Western intellectuals and politicians whose views stroke with Moscow’s ambition.
Outgoing US President Barack Obama has blamed Putin personally for hacking into Democratic Party computers to undermine Hilary Clinton’s presidential bid. A New York Times investigation concluded that Russian cyberwar had played a key role in defeating Democratic candidates in local races for the House of Representatives.
Germany’s head of foreign intelligence Bruno Kahl warned last month that Russia might try to undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel in upcoming elections. “We have evidence that cyber attacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty. The perpetrators are interested in delegitimising the democratic process as such, regardless of who that ends up helping. We have indications that (the attacks) comes from the Russian region,” Kahl told German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
Russian Funding
German media reported earlier this year that the Russian embassy in Berlin had co-funded a security policy seminar hosted by the Alternative for Germany party that is riding a populist wave with its anti-immigrant and anti-European Union positions. In France, National Front leader Marine Le Pen, a frontrunner in presidential elections, stands accused of being beholden to Moscow because of a US$10.2 million Russian loan to her party.
Speaking to the Financial Times, Czech Foreign Minister Lubomir Zaoralek warned that Russia was pursuing a “divide and conquer” policy in Europe by trying to boost Eurosceptic populists. Officials of former Soviet states say their long-standing warnings of subversive Russian activity were ignored by the Obama administration.
To be sure the US and the West too have a long history of waging disinformation and destabilisation campaigns. As a result this may be a case of the pot calling the kettle black, yet one wrong doesn’t justify another.
For their part Moscow and Beijing have been reaching out to Western intellectuals and journalists who have been charting Eurasianist advances. Prominent Turkish journalist Murat Yelkin warned recently that Perincek’s group was exploiting its “close access to Erdogan” to promote an “elaborate plan” that would rupture Turkey’s relations with the EU. This it would do by reintroducing the death penalty, something the Turkish leader has advocated, and reversing restrictive EU regulations adopted by Turkey.
None of this amounts to incontrovertible evidence of a Russian-Chinese plot. The West however risks ignoring at its peril what could be a pattern rather than a string of unrelated incidents that foreshadows a new world order that ranges across the Eurasian mega continent.
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Trump’s Middle East: Back to the Future
December 15th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
President-elect Donald J. Trump’s clearest indication yet of his policy approach towards the Middle East and North Africa was tucked into a recent thank-you speech in Cincinnati. It is a transaction-based return to support of autocracy that is likely to tie him into knots and reinforce drivers of militancy and political violence.
Commentary
IN A little-noticed thank you speech in Cincinnati, a stop on his tour of battleground states that secured his electoral victory, President-elect Donald J. Trump recently vowed to break with past United States efforts to “topple regimes and overthrow governments” in the Middle East and North Africa. Trump was likely referring to costly US military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq that toppled the Taliban and Saddam Hussein but failed to produce stable regimes while giving half-hearted US support for democracy and the strengthening of civil society.
“Our goal is stability not chaos… We will partner with any nation that is willing to join us in the effort to defeat ISIS and radical Islamic terrorism… In our dealings with other countries, we will seek shared interest wherever possible and pursue a new era of peace, understanding and goodwill,” Trump said. In effect, the president-elect was reiterating long standing US policy without the lip service past US presidents paid to US values such as democracy, human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of religion.
Traumatic Consequences
It was a policy that backfired with traumatic consequences for the US. President George W. Bush, in a rare recognition of the pitfalls of decades of US policy in the Middle East and North Africa, acknowledged within weeks of the 9/11 attacks that support for autocratic regimes that squashed all expressions of dissent had created the feeding ground for jihadist groups focused on striking at Western targets.
That was no more true then than it is today with significantly stepped-up repression across the Middle East fuelling civil strife, humanitarian catastrophes, and the swelling the ranks of militant and jihadist groups.
If anything, Trump’s seemingly status quo-based, transactional approach to the Middle East and North Africa risks exacerbating the drivers of violence and militancy in the region and threatens to enmesh his administration in a labyrinth of contradictory pressures.
One lesson that emerges from post-World War Two North Africa and the Middle East is that the region will go to any length to ensure that it is a focus of attention. US administrations come to office with lofty goals and ambitions, only to see their agenda driven by acts on the ground in the region. The Trump administration is unlikely to fare any better.
Multiple pitfalls
The pitfalls are multiple, as follows:
• Syria: Backed by Russia and Iran, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad may be gaining the upper hand in the country’s brutal six-year war, but that is likely to prove a pyrrhic victory. The likelihood of Syria returning territorially and politically to the pre-war status quo ante is nil. Al-Assad’s Alawites like Syrian Kurds will not see their safety and security guaranteed by a Syrian state dominated by remnants of the old-regime.
Al-Assad, with a long list of scores to settle, moreover will be damaged goods for whom the knives will be out once the guns fall silent. And that silence will at best be temporary with foreign forces covertly and overtly continuing to intervene. Not to mention the fallout of an angry, disillusioned generation that has known nothing but brutality, violence and despair and has nothing to lose.
• Russia: A partnership with Russia may initially reshape Syria but will be troubled by radically different views of Iran. While Russia backs Iran, Trump has promised to take a harder line towards the Islamic republic even if he stops short of terminating the nuclear agreement concluded by the Obama administration and the international community.
• Islamic State: Bringing Russia on board in a concerted allied effort to destroy IS will contribute to depriving the jihadist group of its territorial base in Iraq and Syria but will do little to help put the two countries back together as nation states. Nor will it address underlying drivers of jihadist violence fuelled by disenfranchisement, marginalisation, repression, regimes that fail to deliver economic and social goods, and the unilateral re-writing of social contracts.
• Egypt: Blinded by a focus on the fight against jihadism, support for general-turned-president Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, one of the country’s most repressive rulers, could prove to be an example of the pitfalls of uncritical backing of autocracy as dissatisfaction mounts with failed economic and social policies.
• Israel and Palestine: A policy that is less critical of Israeli policy towards the West Bank and Gaza and that moves away from support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state will complicate relations with the Arab and Muslim world. It will also further undermine the pro-peace faction led by President Mahmoud Abbas and strengthen Islamist groups such as Hamas.
Quintessential Approach
In many ways, Trump represents a quintessential approach towards foreign policy expressed by a US diplomat 40 years ago as he defended autonomy agreed at the time by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as the response to Palestinian aspirations. Questioned about the viability of the concept, the diplomat said with no consideration of the consequences and cost of failure: “We Americans are very pragmatic. We keep on trying. If one thing doesn’t work, we try something else.”
To be sure, Trump has yet to articulate a cohesive Middle East policy. The president-elect has nonetheless promised “a new foreign policy that finally learns from the mistakes of the past.”
In many ways, Trump’s statements hold out the promise of harking back to a policy that was first seriously dented by the 9/11 attacks and ultimately punctured by the popular Arab revolts of 2011 and their aftermath.
Trump’s foreign policy and national security line-up raises the spectre of an approach to the Middle East and North Africa that will further stir the region’s demons and set the scene for an administration policy that is driven by events on the ground rather than a cohesive, thought-out strategy.
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Reformist Saudi prince bounces up against flawed education system and ingrained social mores
November 9th, 2016By James M. Dorsey.
An unpublished survey of aspirations of young Saudi men suggests that garnering enthusiasm for Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud’s vision of the kingdom’s social and economic future, let alone a buy in, is likely to meet resistance without a hitherto lacking effort to win support. This would help accelerate Saudi Arabia Business Visa for foreigners willing to visit the country.
Obstacles to get broad-based acceptance of social changes involved in Vision 2030, the prince’s masterplan for the future published in April, are rooted in the cloaking of ultra-conservative tribal mores in Islamic legitimization by the kingdom’s religious scholars. They also stem from a flawed education system that fails to impart critical thinking and analytical skills.
“People were not interested in political change or reform. They wanted social change but they pull back when they realize this has consequences for their sisters. Their analytical ability and critical thinking is limited,… If you look at Twitter, people don’t know how to argue. They don’t have the patience for discussion. They live in a bubble… If people would do what they talk about on Twitter, angels would shake their hands. They talk about an ideal world…but reality is totally different,” said Saudi scholar Abdul Al Lily, author of a recent book on rules that govern Saudi culture. Mr. Al Lily surveyed 100 Saudi men all of who were approximately 20 years old.
Saudi Arabia has one of the world’s highest Twitter penetrations and features ultra-conservative religious scholars with millions of followers. Twitter constitutes a relatively less controlled arena in a country in which all physical and virtual public space is tightly controlled. Saudi Arabia this month announced efforts on the Internet “to protect the social and economic system of the country… (and) the society from any violations on the security and mental levels.”
Saudi Arabia’s Shura or Advisory Council, in another setback to potential reform, this month rejected initiating a review of the kingdom’s ban on women’s driving.
Some 50 percent of those surveyed by Mr. Al Lily said they wanted to have fun, go on a date, enjoy mixed gender parties, dress freely, and be able to drive fast, Mr. Al Lily said. He said issues of political violence, racism, international interests or the dragged out Saudi war in neighbouring Yemen did not figure in their answers.
The young men’s aspirations challenged the core culture of a country that enforces strict gender segregation and dress codes and struggles with concepts of fun. Ultra-conservatives and militant Islamists see fun as a potential threat to political and social control. That is particularly true with regard to youth who in the words sociologists Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera have “a greater tendency for experimentation, adventurism, idealism, drive for autonomy, mobility, and change.”
Bayat noted separately that “whereas the elderly poor can afford simple, traditional, and contained diversions, the globalized and affluent youth tend to embrace more spontaneous, erotically charged, and commodified pleasures. This might help explain why globalizing youngsters more than others cause fear and fury among Islamist (and non-Islamist) anti-fun adversaries, especially when much of what these youths practice is informed by Western technologies of fun and is framed in terms of Western cultural import… In other words, at stake is not necessarily the disruption of the moral order, as often claimed, but rather the undermining of the hegemony, the regime of power on which certain strands of moral and political authority rest.”
It is these fundamental attitudes, that Prince Mohammed, in a bid to upgrade Saudi autocracy and bring it into the 21st century, is seeking to tweak.” We are well aware that the cultural and entertainment opportunities currently available do not reflect the rising aspirations of our citizens and residents, nor are they in harmony with our prosperous economy. It is why we will support the efforts of regions, governorates, non-profit and private sectors to organize cultural events,” Vision 2030 said.
Prince Mohammed may have been jumping the gun when he recently greeted journalist and author Karen Elliott House with the words “Welcome to the new Saudi Arabia” as they watched the LED-lit bodies of New York dancers gyrating on a Riyadh arena stage to deafening hip-hop music. Some 1,300 Saudis of all ages—robed men and abaya-covered women sat side by side whooping their approval.
Mr. Al Lily’s interviewees however pulled back when confronted with the notion that liberties they wanted would also apply to their womenfolk. “People ended up not doing anything when confronted with the idea that someone might want to go on a date with their sister. They pulled back when they realized the consequences,” Mr. Al Lily said.
A recent Saudi television cultural show mocked the attitude of young Saudi men demanding greater freedoms. It portrayed two young men who told their wife and sister that they were going to Mecca although they had bought airline tickets to Cairo for a few days of fun. When the two women detected their menfolk’s deception, they decided to follow them. Sitting in a nightclub in Cairo, the two men poked fun at two women who entered fully covered from top to bottom. “They must be Saudis. How did their brothers let them travel?” said one of the men to the other, not realizing that they were looking at their sister and wife.
Mr. Al Lily argues that to succeed, Prince Mohammed will have to sell Vision 2030 to the youth of a country in which Under-21s account for an estimated 60 percent of the population. Few of those interviewed by Mr. Ali as well as many of his academic colleagues had read the document.
“The issue is how Saudis perceive change,” Mr. Al Lily said. He likened Vision 2030 to the wind in a Saudi proverb that says: “If there is a door that might bring wind, close the door.”
Saudi attitudes towards change are in Mr. Al Lily’s view stand-offish. “People don’t believe in change… The government doesn’t have a plan to sell Vision 2030. In addition, it has at least partially been drafted by foreigners. All of this is important. Implementing it will not be easy,” Mr. Al Lily said.
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Taking on militants: A fight for the soul of Pakistan
November 3rd, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Two high-level meetings in recent months involving senior military commanders and intelligence officials and/or top-level government representatives spotlight Pakistan’s difficulty in coming to grips with domestic and regional political violence resulting from decades of support of militant Islamist and jihadist groups for foreign policy and ideological reasons. Overcoming those difficulties could determine Pakistan’s future, the nature of its society and its place in the world.
The first of those meeting was a gathering in August of Pakistani military commanders in the wake of a massive bombing in Quetta that killed some 70 people and wiped out a generation of lawyers in the province of Baluchistan. The commanders concluded that the attack constituted a sinister foreign-inspired plot that aimed to thwart their effort to root out political violence. Their analysis stroked with their selective military campaign aimed at confronting specific groups like the Pakistani Taliban and the Sunni-Muslim Lashkar-e-Jhangvi rather than any organization that engages in political violence and/or targets minorities.
The commanders’ approach failed to acknowledge the real lesson of Quetta: decades of Pakistani military and intelligence support underwritten by funding from Saudi Arabia for sectarian and ultra-conservative groups and religious schools in Pakistan that has divided the country almost irreversibly. Generations of religious students have their critical faculties stymied by rote learning and curricula dominated by memorization of exclusionary beliefs and prejudice resulting in bigotry and misogyny woven into the fabric of Pakistani society.
“The enemy within is not a fringe… Large sections of society sympathize with these groups. They fund them, directly and indirectly. They provide them recruits. They reject the Constitution and the system. They don’t just live in the ‘bad lands’ but could be our neighbours. The forces have not only to operate in areas in the periphery, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, but have also to operate in the cities where hundreds, perhaps thousands form sleeper cells, awaiting orders or planning to strike,” said Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider in a recent commentary.
Top Pakistani political leaders echoed Mr. Haider’s sentiment in a second meeting in October that gathered the country’s civilian and military leadership around the table. Reporting in Dawn, Pakistan’s foremost English-language newspaper, on differences between the civilian and military components of the state, united politicians and officers in their denials of differences and prompted a government investigation into what it alleged was a false and inaccurate story.
Dawn, standing by the accuracy of its story, reported that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and other government ministers had warned their military and intelligence counterparts that key elements of the country’s two-year old national action plan to eradicate political violence and sectarianism, including enforcing bans on designated groups, reforming madrassas, and empowering the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) had not been implemented. The 20-point plan was adopted after militants had attacked a military school in Peshawar in December 2014, killing 141 people, including 132 students.
In a blunt statement during the meeting, Foreign Minister Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry charged, according to Dawn, that Pakistan risked international isolation if it failed to crack down on militant groups, including Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba; and the Haqqani network – all designated as terrorist groups by the United Nations. Mr. Chaudhry noted that Pakistan’s closest ally, China, with its massive $46 billion investment in Pakistani infrastructure, continued to block UN sanctioning of Jaish-i-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar, but was increasingly questioning the wisdom of doing so.
The State Bank of Pakistan announced barely two weeks after the meeting announced that it was freezing the accounts of more than 2,000 people associated with political violence, including the leaders of anti-Shiite and anti-Ahmadi groups supported by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s military and intelligence agency. Not mentioned in the bank’s list of targeted people were those associated with groups such as Jamat-ud-Dawa (JuD), Jaish-e-Mohammad (JeM), and Hizbul Mujahideen (HuM), whose main focus is Kashmir.
The absence of those groups signalled the military and intelligence’s ability to safeguard the fundamentals of their strategic support of militant groups and the inability of the civilian government to impose its will. The government moreover is divided with some ministers being more supportive of links to militants. And even if there were a unified will to crack down on militants, the bank’s measure would at best be a drop in a bucket. Most of the funds available to militant groups are either not in bank deposits or, if they are, not in accounts belonging to the groups’ leaders.
In many ways, Mr. Sharif’s effort to force the military and intelligence’s hand has a sense of déjà vu. A similar attempt by Mr. Sharif when he was prime minister in the late 1990s ended with his overthrow in a coup, initial imprisonment and ultimate exile for a decade. Mr. Sharif in cohorts with his loyal intelligence chief, Lieutenant General Khawaja Ziauddin, tried to convince Taliban leader Mullah Omar to handover Osama Bin Laden and stop Saudi-backed anti-Shiite militants of Sipah-e-Sabaha from attacking the minority in Pakistan from Afghan territory without consulting the military.
In response, Chief of Staff General Mohammed Aziz Khan and Islamist politician Fazl ur Rahman held separate talks with Omar in which they made clear to the Taliban leader who controlled the Pakistani levers of power and persuaded him to ignore Mr, Sharif’s request. Mr. Sharif’s effort was one reason for the 1999 military coup that led to his initial imprisonment and subsequent decade-long exile.
Leaders of Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat, the latest guise of Sipah after it was nominally banned, in a rare set of lengthy interviews prior to the bank’s announcement, had little compunction about detailing their close ties to Pakistani state institutions and Saudi Arabia. They were also happy to discuss the fact that both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia were pushing them to repackage their sectarian policies in a public relations effort rather than a fundamental shift that would steer Pakistan towards a more tolerant, inclusive society.
“The Saudis sent huge amounts often through Pakistani tycoons who had a long-standing presence in Saudi Arabia as well as operations in the UK and Canada and maintained close relations with the Al Saud family and the Saudi business community. One of them gave 100 million rupees a year. We had so much money, it didn’t matter what things cost,” said a co-founder of Sipah.
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat leader Ahmad Ludhyvani, a meticulously dressed Muslim scholar whose accounts are among those blocked, speaking in his headquarters protected by Pakistani security forces in the city of Jhang, noted that Sipah as the group is still commonly referred to and Saudi Arabia both opposed Shiite Muslim proselytization even if Sipah served Pakistani rather than Saudi national interests.
“Some things are natural. It’s like when two Pakistanis meet abroad or someone from Jhang meets another person from Jhang in Karachi. It’s natural to be closest to the people with whom we have similarities… We are the biggest anti-Shia movement in Pakistan. We don’t see Saudi Arabia interfering in Pakistan,” Ludhyvani said over a lunch of chicken, vegetables and rice.
The soft-spoken politician defended his group’s efforts in Parliament to get a law passed that would uphold the dignity of the Prophet Mohammed and his companions. The law would effectively serve as a stepping stone for institutionalization of anti-Shiite sentiment much like a Saudi-inspired Pakistani constitutional amendment in 1974 that declared Ahmadis non-Muslim. As a result, all applicants for a Pakistani passport are forced to sign an anti-Ahmadi oath.
Sipah officials said a Pakistani cleric resident in Makkah who heads the international arm of Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN), a militant anti-Ahmadi Pakistan-based group, closely affiliated with Sipah, acts as a major fundraiser for the group.
Sipah put Pakistani and Saudi support on public display when it last year hosted a dinner in Islamabad’s prestigious Marriot Hotel for Abdallah Ben Abdel Mohsen Al-Turki, a former Saudi religious affairs minister and general secretary of the Muslim World League, a major Saudi vehicle for the funding of ultra-conservative and militant groups. Hundreds of guests, including Pakistani ministers and religious leaders designated as terrorists by the United States attended the event at the expense of the Saudi embassy in the Pakistani capital.
The corrosive impact of such support for groups preaching intolerance and sectarian hatred is mirrored in recent controversy over the Council of Islamic Ideology, whose offices are ironically located on Islamabad’s Ataturk Avenue, that was created to ensure that Pakistani legislation complies with Islamic Law. The Council has condemned co-education in a country whose non-religious public education system fails to impose mandatory school attendance and produces uncritical minds similar to those emerging from thousands of madrasahs run by ultra-conservatives and those advocating jihadist thinking.
The Council declared in 2014 that a man did not need his wife’s consent to marry a second, third or fourth wife and that DNA of a rape victim did not constitute conclusive evidence. This year, it defended the right of a husband to “lightly beat” his wife. It also forced the withdrawal of a proposal to ban child marriages, declaring the draft bill un-Islamic and blasphemous.
Continued official acquiescence and open support for intolerance, misogyny and sectarianism calls into question the sincerity of government and military efforts to curb without exception intolerance and political violence. The result is a country whose social fabric and tradition of tolerance is being fundamentally altered in ways that could take a generation to reverse.
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Fighting Militants in Pakistan: Who Is In Charge?
November 2nd, 2016By James M Dorsey.
Synopsis
A lethal attack on a Pakistani police academy in Quetta, the provincial capital of Baluchistan, highlights the country’s power struggle over policy towards militant Saudi-backed Islamist groups nurtured by the Pakistan military and intelligence service. It also spotlights China’s willingness to accommodate Pakistani ambivalence towards militants.
Commentary
THE OCTOBER attack on a police academy in Quetta that killed 61 cadets and wounded some 170 others, the worst such incident since an assault in December 2014 on a military school in Peshawar, has exacerbated tensions between the government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the military, and the country’s intelligence service, the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).
The attack occurred barely two months after a bombing virtually wiped out Baluchistan’s legal elite and less than two weeks after senior government officials, including Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, clashed with military commanders and intelligence leaders over counterterrorism policy. Sharif and his ministers warned their military and intelligence counterparts that Pakistan risked international isolation if it failed to implement a national counterterrorism action plan adopted in the wake of the attack in Peshawar two years ago. The civilians’ warning included the fact that the military and intelligence service’s selective crackdown on militants puts US$46 billion in Chinese infrastructure investments at risk.
Crucial Chinese Link
Pakistan constitutes a crucial link in China’s One Belt, One Road initiative designed to link the Eurasian land mass through infrastructure, transportation and telecommunications. The Baluch port of Gwadar is key to the maritime and land links China is trying to create that would give it geopolitical advantage, theoretically more secure routes for the import of badly needed resources and export of Chinese goods, and help Beijing develop economically the strategic but restive north-western Chinese province of Xinjiang.
Baluchistan is also crucial because it borders on Iran and constitutes a potential battleground for proxies of Saudi Arabia and Iran in their bitter struggle for regional hegemony. This province is also historically a key territorial conduit for the opposing forces in Afghanistan and their respective insurgency campaigns.
In a blunt statement during the meeting of civilian and military leaders leaked to Dawn newspaper, Foreign Secretary Aizaz Chaudhry noted that Pakistan’s closest ally, China continued to block, at the request of the Pakistani military and the ISI, sanctioning by the United Nations of Masood Azhar, a leader of UN-designated Jaish-e-Mohammad, but Beijing was increasingly questioning the wisdom of doing so. Jaish-e-Mohammed has long served as a proxy in Pakistan’s dispute with India over Kashmir.
Azhar was arrested in the aftermath of the Peshawar attack but released in April 2016. Azhar was long held in Indian prison on charges of kidnapping foreigners in Kashmir but was freed in 1999 in exchange for passengers of a hijacked Indian Airlines flight. Jaish-e-Mohammed was responsible for a 2001 attack on the Indian parliament among other incidents. The group was however conspicuously absent from a list of groups, issued earlier this month by the State Bank of Pakistan, whose accounts were frozen as part of the government’s selective crackdown on militants.
Payback Time
Among those accounts was Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the group the government blames for the latest attack in Quetta. A Lashkar spokesman told The Wall Street Journal that the group had aided the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility. Analysts doubt whether the freezing of accounts will have much effect. They note that most of the funds available to militant groups are either not in bank deposits or, if they are, not in accounts belonging to the groups’ leaders.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is an offshoot of Sipah-e-Sabaha, a Saudi and Pakistani-backed Sunni supremacist, anti-Shiite group. Like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sipah-e-Sabaha is banned but is allowed to operate under a different name, Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat. In interviews, Sipah-e-Sabaha leaders said the military and intelligence was advising them in the framework of the national action plan to tone down their inflammatory anti-Shiite language but to maintain their basic policy.
Ahle Sunnat Wal Jamaat leader Ahmad Ludhyvani, a meticulously dressed Muslim scholar whose accounts are among those blocked, speaking in his headquarters in the city of Jhang, amid protection by Pakistani security forces, noted that Sipah, as the group is still commonly referred to, and Saudi Arabia both opposed Shiite Muslim proselytisation even if Sipah served Pakistani rather than Saudi national interests.
“Some things are natural. It’s like when two Pakistanis meet abroad or someone from Jhang meets another person from Jhang in Karachi. It’s natural to be closest to the people with whom we have similarities… We are the biggest anti-Shiite movement in Pakistan. We don’t see Saudi Arabia interfering in Pakistan,” Ludhyvani said to the author of this Commentary over a lunch of chicken, vegetables and rice.
The freezing of accounts is the latest incentive for Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to strike out. Much of the group’s leadership has been killed in what the government called encounters with security forces and independent analysts assert were executions.
Between A Rock and A Hard Place
The latest Quetta attack was likely also designed to exacerbate the differences between Pakistan’s government and its military and intelligence as well as within Sipah itself between those who favour following the government’s advice to tone down its anti-Shiite language and more militant factions.
The violence in Quetta puts Pakistan’s military and intelligence as well as Saudi Arabia between a rock and hard place. The Pakistani military sees militants as a key part of its anti-India policy while Saudi Arabia finds them useful in its struggle with Iran. Those interests are now bouncing up against both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia’s need to ensure that Chinese interests are not threatened by their various shadow wars as well as their need to distance themselves from assertions of involvement in political violence.
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Under Pressure, Egyptian President Promises Change
October 30th, 2016By James M. Dorsey.
Faced with a drop in popularity, intermittent protests against rising prices, and calls for a mass anti-government demonstration, Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi, is seeking to appease the country’s youth, soccer fans and activists with promises of change.
Mr. Al-Sisi’s efforts that include a one-time lifting of a ban on spectators attending soccer matches and promises of revisions of Egypt’s draconic anti-protest law as well as a review of the cases of youth detained without trial and monthly meetings with young people to follow up on resolutions of a national youth conference held earlier this month have however provoked sharp criticism even before they got off the ground.
An Egyptian poll reported this month that Mr. Al-Sisi’s popularity had dropped 14 percent.
Writing in Al Masry Al Youm newspaper, journalist Omar Hadi rejected Mr. Al-Sisi’s addressing youth as his sons and daughters, insisting that the country’s youth were citizens with duties and rights. As the government-organized conference opened, a highlight in Mr. Al-Sisi’s declaration of 2016 as the year of the youth, Twitter lit up with youth organizing their own virtual gathering.
Mr. Hadi’s rejection and the counter-conference constituted far more than rejection of Mr. Al-Sisi’s brutal repression of dissent and widespread disillusion with the president’s promise of a bright future of social and economic opportunity.
Against the backdrop of severe economic deterioration since Mr. Al-Sisi came to power in a military coup three years ago and the prospect of severe austerity as part of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bail-out program, Mr. Hadi and the counter conference’s rejection of being sons and daughters amounted to a rejection of neo-patriarchism, the fundament of Arab autocratic rule.
A phrase coined by American-Palestinian scholar Hisham Sharabi, neo-patriarchism involves projection of the autocratic leader as a father figure. Autocratic Arab society, according to Mr. Sharabi, was built on the dominance of the father, a patriarch around which the national as well as the nuclear family were organized. Between ruler and ruled as between father and child maintain vertical relations. In both settings, the paternal will is absolute, mediated in society as well as the family by a forced consensus based on ritual and coercion. At the top of the pyramid, resides the country’s leader as the father of all fathers.
The virtual conference raised the very issues the official conference that included sessions on topic such as ‘the relation between public freedom and political engagement of youth’ and ‘the study of the causes of violence in football stadiums and the methods of retaining spectators’ sought to control.
Under the hashtag #Where_Have_All_the_Young_Ones_Gone? #الشباب_فين, it focused on the detention of tens of thousands, the disappearance of scores of others, lack of basic freedoms, and the continued closure of stadiums to a soccer-crazy public. A later hashtag, ‘why we should have another revolution,’ leapfrogged to the number one trend on Egyptian social media.
“If Sisi held the #National_Youth_Conference in Prison, there would have been a larger attendance than Sharm El-Sheikh,” the resort town in the Sinai, quipped tweeterNaga7_Jan25, an avatar that refers to the date in 2011 on which mass protests erupted in which militant, street battle-hardened soccer fans played a key role that led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in office.
“Where else are they going to be? They are either going to be buried in the ground, or imprisoned above ground or thrown off the grounds completely,” added Adel Emaldelden.
Mr. Al-Sisi told the official conference that “the government, in coordination with the relevant state parties, will study the suggestions and proposals to amend the protest law … and include them in the set of proposed legislation to be presented to parliament during the current session.”
It was not only youth that Mr. Al-Sisi appeared to having difficulty in convincing. Egyptian businessmen warned that raids on sugar factories and traders accused of hoarding the commodity amid a severe shortage would undermine confidence of foreign investors at a time that they are crucial in helping Egypt dig itself out of its economic hole.
With the Egyptian armed forces opening outlets and military trucks roaming the country selling cheap groceries to compensate for shortages and rising prices, Mr. Al-Sisi, has promised to reduce the enormous stake of the armed forces in the economy in the next three years.
Mr. Al-Sisi suffered a further setback when Saudi Arabia announced it was stopping oil shipments to Egypt. Mr. Al-Sisi has irritated the kingdom by refusing despite massive Saudi financial support to support Saudi Arabian policy towards Iran, Syria and Yemen.
As part of Mr. Al-Sisi’s fledgling efforts that also included various failed attempts in the past to either repress or co-opt soccer fans, the government announced that 75,000 spectators would be allowed to attend a 2018 World Cup qualifier on November 13 in Alexandria’s Borg El-Arab Stadium.
The announcement followed the admission of 70,000 people to a match between storied Cairo club Al Zamalek SC, whose militant Ultras White Knights (UWK) fans, have a long history of anti-government protest, and South Africa’s Mamelodi Sundowns FC.
While far smaller numbers have until now been granted entry to stadiums where international matches were being played, pitches have been closed to the public for much of the past five years for all domestic premier league games.
The closure was designed to prevent stadiums from again emerging as platforms for the venting of pent-up anger and frustration.
That anger and frustration has been boiling at the surface in recent weeks with a new group, the Ghalaba Movement or Movement of the Marginalised, calling for mass protests on November 11 against subsidy cuts, rising prices and increasing shortages of basic goods.
Interior Minister Magdy Abdel Ghaffar, Mr. Al-Sisi’s promises notwithstanding, has warned that Egypt’s widely despised security forces would not permit “a repeat of previous attempts at sabotage and social unrest in Egypt.” In a statement on Facebook, Mr. Abdel Ghaffar said that security measures were being tightened to “protect citizens and establishments.”
Nevertheless, the publication in Egypt’s tightly controlled media of several incidents of individual protest has prompted speculation that some within the military were sending their former top commander a message that he needs to get a grip on discontent that could spiral out of hand.
The incidents included an Egyptian taxi driver, in an act like the one that sparked the popular revolt in Tunisia almost six years ago and the subsequent uprising elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa, set himself alight earlier this month to protest rising prices and deteriorating living conditions.
An Egyptian television station broadcast an outburst by a tuk tuk driver who vented his fury at Egypt’s economic plight. The video clip garnered some 10 million hits on the television station’s website before it was taken down as well as on social media where it remains accessible.
Large numbers in the Suez Canal city of Port Said, the scene in 2012 of the worst, politically-loaded incident in Egyptian sporting history in which 72 militant fans were killed, took to the streets earlier this month to protest the rising cost of housing.
It remains an open question whether mushrooming discontent that is spilling into the open amounts to the makings of renewed mass protests. Many Egyptians look at the horrendous state of post-2011 popular revolt countries wracked by wars and violence such as Libya, Yemen and Syria and don’t want to see their country travel that road. Nonetheless, economic hardship and repression appear to be reaching a point at which an increasing number of Egyptians are no longer willing to remain silent.
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Blasphemy case highlights devastating impact of Saudi ultra-conservatism on Pakistani society
October 14th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
This week’s decision by Pakistan’s Supreme Court to delay ruling on an appeal in the country’s most notorious blasphemy case and the thousands of security personnel deployed in its capital, Islamabad, in anticipation of a verdict, lay bare the degree to which Saudi supported ultra-conservative worldviews abetted by successive Pakistani governments have changed the very nature of Pakistani society.
At stake in the court case is more than only the life of Asia Bibi, a Pakistani Christian mother of five who has been on death row since 2010 when she was convicted of insulting the prophet Mohammed in a bad-tempered argument with Muslim women.
The court has yet to set a new date for the appeal, but ultimately its decision on Ms. Bibi’s fate will serve as an indication of Pakistan’s willingness and ability to reverse more than four decades of Saudi-backed policies, including support for militant Islamist and jihadist groups that have woven ultra-conservative worldviews into the fabric of Pakistani society and key institutions of the state.
In an ironic twist, Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif with his close ties to Saudi Arabia is groping with a dilemma similar to that of the kingdom: how to roll back associations with puritan, intolerant, non-pluralistic interpretations of Islam that hinder domestic economic and social progress and threaten to isolate his country internationally.
It’s a tall order for both countries. Saudi Arabia’s ruling Al Saud family founded the modern day kingdom by forging a power sharing agreement with ultra-conservative followers of 18th century preacher Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Al Sauds constitute the only Gulf rulers who cloak their rule in religious legitimacy granted by the country’s ultra-conservative religious establishment. Losing that legitimacy could endanger their survival.
Successive Pakistani governments benefitted and abetted almost half a century of massive Saudi funding of ultra-conservative thinking in a bid to enhance Saudi soft power and counter more nationalist, revolutionary and liberal worldviews. Pakistani and Saudi interests long jelled in the support of militant Islamist and jihadist groups that targeted Muslim minorities viewed as heretics by ultra-conservatives, confronted with US backing Soviet occupation forces in Afghanistan, nurtured the rise of the Taliban, and served Pakistan in confronting India in its dispute over Kashmir.
In doing so, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan unleashed a genie that no longer can be put back in a bottle. It has pervaded Pakistani society and branches of government in ways that could take a generation to reverse.
The timing of the delay of the court ruling may have been coincidental but it came days after the Sharif government took a first step in seeking to change course.
Pakistan’s civilian, military and intelligence leaders had gathered three days earlier for an emergency meeting in which Sharif and his ministers warned that key elements of the country’s two-year old national action plan to eradicate political violence and sectarianism, including enforcing bans on designated groups, reforming madrassas, and empowering the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) had not been implemented. The 20-point plan was adopted after militants had attacked a military school in Peshawar in December 2014, killing 141 people, including 132 students.
In a blunt statement during the meeting, Foreign Minister Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry charged that Pakistan risked international isolation if it failed to crack down on militant groups, including Jaish-e-Mohammed, Lashkar-e-Taiba; and the Haqqani network – all designated as terrorist groups by the United Nations. Mr. Chaudhry noted that Pakistan’s closest ally, China, with its massive $46 billion investment in Pakistani infrastructure, continued to block UN sanctioning of Jaish-i-Mohammed leader Masood Azhar, but was increasingly questioning the wisdom of doing so.
The court delayed its ruling after one of the judges recused himself because of his involvement in legal proceedings related to the 2011 assassination of former Punjab governor Salman Taseer by Mumtaz Qadri, a former elite police force commando. Taseer was a vocal opponent of Pakistan’s draconic blasphemy laws and supported Ms. Bibi.
Mr. Qadri became a hero despite being sentenced to death. Tens of thousands of people poured into the streets of Islamabad to honour him after he was executed earlier this year. Authorities feared that a court ruling in favour of Ms. Bibi would spark mass protests. The delay in the court ruling simply postpones a potential confrontation.
It is a confrontation that was long coming. Pakistan’s blasphemy law fits decades-long Saudi use of its political clout and financial muscle to promote anti-blasphemy laws and curtailing of freedom of expression and the media beyond its borders.
The Saudi effort benefitted in the post 9/11 era from a global trend in democracies and autocracies alike to curb free speech. “The issue of blasphemy is destroying whatever strands of pluralism remain,” warned Pakistani researcher Nazish Brohi.
Notions of blasphemy propagated by the Saudi Arabia have led the kingdom to execute those that refuse to publicly subscribe to its narrow interpretation of Islam. In Bangladesh, secular bloggers risk being hacked to death while jihadists slaughter those they think have insulted their faith in an effort to stymie all debate. Pakistan’s electronic media regulator this year took two television shows off the air during Ramadan for discussing the country’s blasphemy laws as well as the persecution of Ahmadis, a Muslim sect viewed by ultra-conservatives as non-Muslim.
A proposal in recent years by Saudi Arabia and other Muslim nations to criminalize blasphemy in international law legitimizes curbs on free speech and growing Muslim intolerance towards any open discussion of their faith. The proposal was the culmination of years in which the kingdom pressured countries to criminalize blasphemy and any criticism of the Prophet Mohammed.
Increasingly, the pressure constituted the kingdom’s response to mounting anti-Muslim sentiment and Islamophobia in the wake of attacks by the Islamic State in European and Middle Eastern nations, including Paris, Ankara and Beirut, and the October 2015 downing of a Russian airliner, and mounting criticism of Saudi Arabia’s austere interpretation of Islam and massive violations of human rights.
The criminalization of blasphemy and the notion of mob justice resembles campaigns on Western university campuses for the right not to be offended. Both propagate restrictions on free speech and arbitrary policing of what can and cannot be said.
In a lengthy article in a Nigerian newspaper, Murtada Muhammad Gusau, chief imam of two mosques in Nigeria’s Okene Kogi State debunked the Saudi-inspired crackdown on alleged blasphemists citing multiple verses from the Qur’an that advocate patience and tolerance and reject the killing of those that curse or berate the Prophet Mohammed.
Saudi anti-blasphemy activism and efforts to curb press freedom date back to 1980 when the government wielded a financial carrot and the stick of a possible rupture in diplomatic relations in an unsuccessful bid to prevent the airing on British television of Death of a Princess, the true story of a Saudi princess and the son of a general who were publicly executed for committing adultery.
Saudi Arabia forced Britain to recall its then ambassador, James Craig, in protest against what it called “the British Government’s negative attitude toward the screening of the shameful film.” In addition, the kingdom imposed limitations on visas extended to executives of British companies while US construction companies were asked not to subcontract British firms.
Saudi Arabia further banned British Airways from flying its Concorde from London to Singapore through the kingdom’s air space. The ban together with a similar one by Lebanon forced BA to chart a longer route for the supersonic flight, which wiped out its profit margin.
Scholars Thomas White and Gladys Ganley argued that “the film was perceived by Saudis as a violation of privacy since it represented a first look behind a closely drawn curtain into Islamic law as applied in Saudi Arabia, into Saudi culture, and, perhaps most devastating, into the behaviour of members of the ruling regime… Much of Saudi criticism of the film was directed towards what was called its portrayal of Islam as a harsh, insensitive religion, since the princess was depicted as having been summarily executed without a confession or a trial. The severity of punishment and the speed with which the princess was executed put doubts in the minds of viewers as to the fairness of Koranic justice.”
Concepts of justice as well as of freedom of expression are at the core of Asia Bibi’s case. So is the question of the kind of state and society Pakistan should be. It is an issue both Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are grappling with as they realize that what long was a politically convenient strategy in their various geopolitical struggles is becoming a political and international liability. The problem for both is that reversing course is easier said than done and involves travelling down a volatile, perilous road.
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Fighting for the Soul of Islam: A Battle of the Paymasters
September 30th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
A gathering of prominent Sunni Muslim leaders in the Chechen capital of Grozny that appeared to have effectively excommunicated Saudi-backed ultra-conservatism potentially opens not only a theological but also a geopolitical rift in the Muslim world. The conference, sponsored and attended by some of Saudi Arabia’s closest allies, suggests that Saudi funding of ultra-conservative worldviews may be meeting its match in more liberal interpretations of Islam backed by the United Arab Emirates and Russia.
Commentary
CHECHEN STRONGMAN Ramzan Kadyrov, an Islamist with close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, recently convened some of Islam’s most prominent leaders to determine the theologically and politically explosive question of who is a Sunni Muslim. Professing to be a Sufi, a more mystical interpretation of Islam, Kadyrov lacks the religious credentials beyond his native Chechnya where he was recently re-elected with 98 percent of the vote.
Kadyrov’s ability to bring together an illustrious group of Muslim scholars highlights successful behind-the-scenes manoeuvring by the United Arab Emirates to counter Salafism despite the UAE’s close collaboration with Saudi Arabia as a member of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and in the war in Yemen. It also shines a light on Russian efforts to cultivate Muslim religious leaders.
A Frontal Assault
Participating in the Grozny conference were, among others, the imam of the Al-Azhar Grand Mosque in Cairo, Ahmed El- Tayeb; Egyptian Grand Mufti Shawki Allam; former Egyptian Grand Mufti and Sufi authority Ali Gomaa, a strident supporter of Egyptian general-turned-president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi; Al Sisi’s religious affairs advisor, Usama al-Azhari; the mufti of Damascus Abdul Fattah al-Bizm, a close confidante of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; and influential Yemeni cleric Habib Ali Jifri, head of the Abu Dhabi-based Islamic Tabah Foundation who has close ties to UAE Crown Prince Mohammed ibn Zayed al-Nahyan.
In a frontal assault on Saudi-backed ultra-conservative movements such as Wahhabism, Salafism and Deobandism, the conference charged that the label Sunni had been hijacked by heretics whose deviant practices distorted Islam. In defining Sunni Islam, the conference explicitly excluded Wahhabism, the Saudi state’s adopted version of Islam, as well as Salafism and Deobandism from its definition. The assault is all the more significant given that Saudi Arabia has over the last four decades invested tens of billions of dollars into promoting globally ultra-conservative interpretations of Islam.
The conference suggests that the UAE, together with Russia, is succeeding in countering the Saudi effort that has enabled ultra-conservatism to make significant inroads into Muslim communities across the globe. The heavy Egyptian presence suggests further that the UAE, which together with Saudi Arabia is Egypt’s foremost financier, has effectively driven a wedge between the kingdom and the Arab world’s most populous state.
It also serves as evidence that Russian efforts to woo mainstream Muslim as well as Islamist leaders have begun to pay off despite Moscow’s support of the Assad regime in Syria. In a political fete, Russia managed to gather four years ago leaders of a host of Islamist stripes, including Saudi-backed Salafists, Muslim Brothers and Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah at one table. Russian officials have stressed that conservative Russian Orthodox values are similar if not identical to puritan Islamic ones.
Deep-seated Aversion
The Grozny conference was co-organised by the Tabah Foundation, the sponsor of the Senior Scholars Council, a group that aims to recapture Islamic discourse that many non-Salafis assert has been hijacked by Saudi largesse. The Council was also created to counter the Doha-based International Union of Muslim Scholars, headed by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, widely viewed as a spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
UAE backing for anti-Salafi initiatives and opposition to the Brotherhood, even though it does not adhere to Salafi ideology, is rooted in Prince Mohammed’s deep-seated aversion to political Islam. The crown prince is credited with having persuaded the late Saudi King Abdullah to ban the Brotherhood as a terrorist organisation.
Prince Mohammed has been troubled by suggestions that King Salman since acceding to the throne may be less strident in his opposition to the Brotherhood. Mohammed also differs with King Salman’s son, Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, on the conduct of the war in Yemen and tacit cooperation on the ground in Yemen with groups associated with Al Qaeda.
The participation in Grozny of Egypt’s Sheikh El-Tayeb suggests that substantial Saudi funding of large numbers of Al Azhar’s scholars as well as the kingdom’s multi-billion dollar backing of Al Sisi since his toppling in a military coup in 2013 of Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected leader, has not bought the kingdom the kind of religious and political loyalty it expected.
Our Brothers?
A prominent Islamic legal scholar, who rejected a nomination for Saudi Arabia’s prestigious King Faisal International Prize, recalls El-Tayeb effusively thanking the kingdom during panels in recent years for its numerous donations to Al Azhar. Al Azhar scholars were said to have competed “frantically” for sabbaticals in the kingdom that could last anywhere from one to 20 years, paid substantially better, and raised a scholar’s status.
“Many of my friends and family praise Abdul Wahab in their writing,” the scholar said referring to Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhab, the 18th century religious leader whose puritan interpretation of Islam became the basis for the power sharing agreement between the ruling Al Saud family and the country’s religious establishment. “They shrug their shoulders when I ask them privately if they are serious… When I asked El-Tayeb why Al Azhar was not seeing changes and avoidance of dogma, he said: ‘my hands are tied.’
To illustrate Saudi inroads, the scholar recalled being present when several years ago Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, a former grand mufti and predecessor of El-Tayeb as imam of the Al Azhar mosque, was interviewed about Saudi funding. “What’s wrong with that?” the scholar recalls Tantawy as saying. Irritated by the question, he pulled a check for US$100,000 from a drawer and slapped it against his forehead. “Alhamdulillah (Praise be to God), they are our brothers,” the scholar quoted Tantawy as saying.
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Book launch Lost in Transition: Comparative Political Transitions in Southeast Asia and the Middle East
September 3rd, 2016
By James Dorsey.
Political transitions are processes, not momentary events. They can take a quarter of century if not more.
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte is as much an expression of a global trend driven by economic, political and geopolitical uncertainty and security and safety fears that produces lack of confidence in the system and existing leadership as are Donal Trump, the 2011 Arab popular revolts; the rise of the far right in Europe; tensions between concepts of freedom, privacy and security; and the wind in the sails of democratically elected, illiberal leaders such as Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Benyamin Netanyahu in Israel and Narendra Modi in India.
Nonetheless, there are specific reasons why the transition process has moved forward in Southeast Asia despite the military coup in Thailand and the corruption and governance issues that Malaysia is confronting whereas the process in the Middle East is far more torturous, volatile and violent. Three of those reasons stand out:
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Just published:
Order at: Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa
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Geopolitics aside, there are some fundamental lessons to be learnt from the Southeast Asian experience:
First and foremost, there is no successful transition without the participation of at least a significant faction of the military that sees the preservation of its vested interests in change rather than maintenance of the status quo. In Myanmar, the military took the lead, in Indonesia and the Philippines, a faction of the military reached out to civil society groups. And it was that alliance that pushed the process of toppling an autocrat forward.
No military or faction of a military in the Middle East and North Africa saw or sees the preservation of its interests best served by a transition from autocratic or military rule to a more liberal, more democratic civilian rule. On the contrary, autocrats and militaries in the Middle East and North Africa have worked out a number of models to sustain autocratic rule that gives militaries a vested interest in the status quo.
Protesters in Egypt in 2011 chanted the military and the people are one when the military refused to step in to crush the revolt. The transition in Egypt however was initially one from autocratic rule in which the military and the security forces were the dominant players to outright military rule by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. A brief democratic transition was brutally ended with a military coup that was backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The explanation for the differences in attitude between Southeast Asian militaries and militaries in the Middle East and North Africa lies for a large part in differences in the relationship between autocrats and militaries. It also lies in different approaches to the two regions by international donors, particularly the United States, towards the militaries and civil society.
Western donors worked with Southeast Asian militaries on issues such as civil-military relations and human rights. They also were able to give relatively unfettered support to civil society groups. The result was greater differentiated thinking within Southeast Asian militaries and the existence of a civil society that was able to rise to the occasion. In a study of civil military relations in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)) concluded that there was ample opportunity for serious work on civil military relations in the Philippines. Despite at times rocky relations with former President Suharto in Indonesia, the US also had programs on civil military relations for the Indonesian military.
The study constituted a rare US look at the potential for similar programs in the Middle East and North Africa. Its conclusion for that region was radically different. The study said flat out that the Middle East and North Africa was not ripe for concepts of civil-military relations. The conclusion was in line with US policy that saw autocracy rather than transition as the guarantor of regional stability. As a result, the United States allowed Middle Eastern and North African autocrats like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to decide which civil society groups could receive US support and which ones could not. Hardly, a recipe for development of a robust and independent civil society.
The alliance between the military and civil society in Southeast Asia produced one other key ingredient for relative success: the ability of the street to better evaluate when best to surrender the protest site and move from contentious to more conventional politics and the ability to manage post-revolt expectations.
Civil society was effectively locked out of the transition process once Mubarak resigned on the 11th of February 2011. Its power was significantly diminished with the evacuation of Tahrir Square even if mass protests continued for another nine months with an ever rising number of casualties. The military coup two years later was made possible of course by the missteps of Mohammed Morsi, a Muslim Brother and Egypt’s first and only democratically elected president.
It was however also made possible by dashed social and economic expectations that the revolt would produce immediate and tangible social and economic benefits strengthened by a manipulative military and security service.
None of these Southeast Asian lessons provide quick fixes for the multiple crises in the Middle East. What it does however demonstrate is that even if popular revolts are often in and of themselves spontaneous events, the run-up to watershed protests are as much a process as is the post-revolt transition. In sum, the Middle East and North Africa has much to learn from the Southeast Asian experience even if Southeast Asia’s path was in some ways easier because it did not have to contend with some of the Middle East and North Africa’s complicating factors.
Thank you.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a recently published book with the same title, and also just published Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored withDr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario
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Remarks by Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario at the Asian Research Institute on 30 August 2016
In November 2015 when we submitted the final manuscript, the overall tone of the book was upbeat for Southeast Asia. Except for Thailand, the countries in Southeast Asia, particularly Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Philippines, seemed poised to complete their democratic transition, rebuild institutions founded on the principles of democratic governance, and enshrine the principles and practices of open participatory systems. The one bright light in the Middle East/North Africa is Tunisia whose Quartet for Democracy had just won a Nobel Peace Prize for its role in the democratic transition.
In the past two months, since the Philippine electorate gave a whopping mandate to Rodrigo Duterte, some 2000 Filipinos have died, mostly on allegations of drug use/abuse, none of them having had the opportunity to seek redress through the judicial system. Rule of law seems to have been usurped by executioners-on-motorcycles. He has gone to war with a female Senator who wants to investigate extrajudicial killings, as well as the female Supreme Court chief justice with whom he is also in a war of words over warrantless arrests. He is threatening to pull out of the UN.
Similarly, In a very recent cabinet reshuffle in Indonesia, former General Wiranto who “is among senior officers indicted by UN prosecutors over gross human rights abuses during the 24-year occupation of East Timor” as quoted in the Straits Times of 27 July 2016, (http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/indonesia-names-controversial-ex-general-as-security-minister), was appointed to the sensitive post of security minister. “Activists have called it a step backwards for human rights,” quoting again from The Straits Times.
This, then, raises the question about Southeast Asia: are we seeing a democratic rollback? In the book’s introduction, we referred to two authors who asked the same questions. Erik Paul’s book Obstacles to Democratization concluded that the ASEAN nation-states are a “passing phenomenon” caught up in superpower contests mainly between the US and China, and citizens are swallowed up and gobbled up by the forces of global capitalism, international financial institutions, and geopolitical players who compete militarily in their struggle for global hegemony.”
Mely Anthony-Caballero, in her edited book Political Change, Democratic Transition, and Security in Southeast Asia, echoed the same disappointment over the failure of democratic consolidation in Southeast Asia after the euphoria of the first wave of democratization in the 1980s that began in the Philippines. Several country case studies in Caballero’s book point towards the entrenchment of patronage politics, the lack of attitudinal requirements among the citizenry to embrace democratic ethos, and the preference for stability and material prosperity rather than the mess and the noise of rambunctious participatory politics.
Thailand remains the foremost example for an authoritarian resurgence in this century, not once, but twice, when military coups in 2006 and 2014 effectively ended the legitimately-elected governments of Thaksin Shinawatra and Yingluck Shinawatra respectively.
Surely, these gripes and grievances are not without merit, but the scenarios are not altogether grim.
Civil society remains a vibrant pro-democracy force in Cambodia, Indonesia, Myanmar and the Philippines, where civil society and public participation have been enshrined in their respective constitutions. A very active and robust human rights community in Cambodia undertakes a variety of rights-related campaigns, ranging from land grabs to anti-trafficking. In Myanmar, 180 CSOs signed a petition o parliament to reject four proposed bills by a Buddhist organization called the Association for the protection of Race and Religion. Civil society activists view these bills as potentially “inciting hatred, discrimination, conflict and tension.”
Malaysia’s Bersih (literally means clean) continues to be at the forefront of collective mobilization for a variety of social causes despite the Internal Security Act of 1960. As Prime Minister Najib Razak fights for regime survival, the wide entanglement with CSOs in this particular instance is a display of Southeast Asia’s ability for political engagement, regardless of formal restrictions and limitations.
But the most striking feature of Southeast Asia’s transition is the decline of mass atrocities, what Alex Bellamy terms “the other Asian miracle.” It is a region that, in the last four decades, has enjoyed a more “peaceful present,” leaving behind a violent past. Unlike the Iraq or Syria, there are no overt conflicts within and among nation states, nor are there border disputes that would pit nation states against each other. Sovereignty claims are, by and large, respected even after the “invasion” of Sabah in 2013 by the forces of Sultan Jamalul Kiram III, one of the claimants from the Sulu Sultanate in the southern Philippines to Sabah in Malaysia. According to The Economist, the invasion, as amphibious assaults go, was “admittedly tame.”
The Greater Mekong Sub region, a predominantly economic sub-regional program encompassing five Southeast Asian countries, once the backyard of intense conflict and violence now hosts The East–West Corridor, a massive infrastructure program that consists of a road, railway, and energy network has established “connectivity” among the five countries and has stimulated trade among them. The battlefields of the 1960s and 1970s has been transformed into a vibrant competitive marketplace, with formal and informal institutions to mediate and facilitate interregional relationships.
It is a truism today that the so-called “peace dividend” in Southeast Asia has converted past warriors into entrepreneurs and consumers, and where current generations engage in the competition for market share rather than the struggle for military supremacy and territorial conquest.
It is perhaps these features of the other Asian miracle that constitute the starkest contrast between Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
One primary lesson from this comparative study is that civil society is indispensable in building the necessary “political constituency for democracy. New democracies are beleaguered by old regime forces. Civil society participation is even more necessary during such period to prevent the forces of authoritarianism from subverting gains and preserve newly-opened hence fragile spaces of civic life. Newly-installed democratic regimes, on the other hand, should be even more reliant on their partnership with civil society organizations during these precarious transition periods.
And then a second valuable lesson. In the morning-after situation when the protest sites have been emptied, the activists need to heed the call of the “politics of the boardroom” where several hundred decision-makers rather than millions of street protesters undertake the tasks of creating, allocating, and distributing public goods and services. These require joining the executive branch of the government particularly its messy tangle of bureaucratic offices and agencies. Hold-overs from the old regime are bound to interact with the new appointees.
The ability to seek common ground and to prevent bureaucracy from being held hostage by competing forces so that ordinary citizens can rely on continuous and uninterrupted services is a task that requires different leadership skills. In addition, new entrants need to learn very quickly the mechanics of managing large organizations, steering them towards the accomplishment of concrete goals, and marshalling the human and other material resources to fulfil socio-economic objectives.
No matter the political or ideological colour, or one’s confessional affiliation, garbage needs to be collected, revenues raised, water and electricity services provided. Former activists in Indonesia and the Philippines have joined and pursued long-term careers in governments. They run and manage ministries and public commissions on national budgets, education, anti-poverty and human rights; they attend legislative hearings and negotiate with donors; they create committees to decide on projects; and they work with the media and academics to ensure that the message of government services reaches the public. The same is happening in Myanmar today. Joining government is not a straightforward process. The path of transition is littered with uneasy compromises.
Professor Randy David at the University of the Philippines who was one of the original “people power warriors” in 1986, wrote an op-ed in the Philippine Daily Inquirer on 28 August. In Ulaanbaatar he exchanged views among fellow activists and intellectuals on democratic transitions. He wrote of his own pessimism regarding the Philippines before he left for Ulaanbaatar. But while there, in dialogue with fellow people power activists from Fiji, Nepal, Mongolia, and Myanmar, he wrote:
“The Ulaanbaatar forum left me with more questions than answers. But I came away from the discussions feeling renewed and hopeful. For once I understood what the sociologist Niklas Luhmann meant when he referred to democracy as “an evolutionary achievement of society.” A nation must grow into democracy. Unlike us Filipinos, the Mongolians who spent centuries defending their land against their powerful neighbours know only too well how long it will take them still to complete their own democratic transition.”
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Turkey’s Travails: Purges Worsen Ankara’s Democracy Deficit
September 1st, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
The Turkish government’s sweeping crackdown across the public services in the wake of a failed military coup in July has highlighted a deep-rooted flaw in Turkish democracy: the politicisation of Turkey’s bureaucracy and judiciary.
Commentary
TURKISH PRESIDENT Recep Tayyip Erdogan holds Fethullah Gulen, the self-exiled conservative, leader of Hizmet, one of the world’s biggest Islamic movements, responsible for last month’s attempt to overthrow his democratically elected government. Erdogan asserts that Gulen’s followers infiltrated the military, police, judiciary, bureaucracy and education system as well as the media. In response, he has arrested tens of thousands and fired a similar number of military and police officers, judiciary personnel, teachers and professors, and bureaucrats accused of being Gulen sympathisers.
Erdogan’s claim is not without reason even if elements of the deep state, a cabal of ultra-nationalist politicians, officers and bureaucrats with links to organised crime, may have participated in the failed plot. Gulen’s strategy, best described as a version of German student leader Rudi Dutschke’s march through the institutions, amounted to a gradual takeover of the state. To support his strategy, Gulen, a frail and dour septuagenarian, preached obedience to the state and recognition of the rule of law while at the same time inserting his followers into key institutions and educating a next generation in his ideological mould.
Looking the Other Way
Yet, Gulen’s strategy was one that Erdogan as prime minister in the first decade of the 21st century wholeheartedly endorsed. It served Erdogan’s purpose given that his Justice and Development Party (AKP) had no support base within the state apparatus when it first swept to power in 2002.
Gulen supported Erdogan’s electoral campaign in an alliance aimed at ensuring the rise of an Islamist government that would use Turkey’s European Union accession process to bring the military under civilian control. Longstanding guardians of the militant secularism of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire, the military constituted the main obstacle to greater public religiosity.
As a result, Erdogan looked the other way as Gulen’s followers moved into the judiciary where they constructed a legal case based partly on falsified documents against hundreds of military officers as well as journalists who were thrown behind bars. Similarly, the EU and the United States remained silent about the politicisation of branches of the state as long as Turkey was moving towards fulfilment of requirements for EU membership, one of which was civilian control of the armed forces.
While Erdogan believes he has good reason to crack down on Gulen’s followers, there is little doubt that he has chosen not to separate the wheat from the chaff. Seemingly caught up in the president’s massive purge are thousands who may have been critics but not Gulenists. Similarly, large numbers may have agreed with Gulenist criticism of Erdogan’s policies but not been part of what is a power rather than an ideological struggle between the two Islamists.
A Population Exchange
Erdogan’s replacement of those purged is in principle no different from what the president accuses Gulen of: the populating of the bureaucracy, judiciary and armed organs of the state with loyalists whose allegiance is as much to the party or organisation and its leader as it is to the country. Erdogan’s wholesale population replacements serves to strengthen his power, further Turkey’s march towards illiberalism, and exacerbate problems resulting from a politicised bureaucracy and judiciary stripped of its independence.
Those who move up the ranks to fill the tens of thousands of vacancies are likely to follow the government line rather than risk their predecessor’s fate. Turkish schools and universities will certainly produce less critical minds as many academics who escaped the purge seek employment overseas. The muzzling of the press and broadcast media further ensures that the government’s message dominates.
Over time, loss of confidence in the judiciary’s competence and the rule of law is but one likely consequence. The rise of less experienced personnel to fill the vast number of suddenly vacant jobs and delays in the processing of applications and judicial proceedings is certain to fuel frustration. In many ways, the judiciary’s ability to put up a case for the extradition of Gulen from the United States to Turkey that will stand up in a US court will serve as an indicator of the damage it has suffered as a result of manipulation by both the imam and Erdogan.
Left with Yes-sayers
Politicisation further reduces hopes for a return to peace talks with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), that came to a grinding halt with the resumption of hostilities in July 2015. Turkey needs an understanding with its own Kurdish community that accounts for up to 20 percent of the country’s population as Kurds in neighbouring, war-torn Syria assert themselves in a country that is unlikely to be restored to its pre-war borders. In doing so, the Syrian Kurds are following in the footsteps of their Iraqi brethren who have been autonomous for the past 25 years.
Erdogan’s failure to institutionalise independence of the bureaucracy and the judiciary is likely to come to haunt him as he pursues policies that have failed to produce solutions, first and foremost for Turkey’s Kurdish problem. Much like Pakistan’s employment of jihadists to counter its regional rivals has backfired, so has Turkey’s turning a blind eye to the Islamic State (IS) as part of its battle against the Kurds.
Already a popular politician, who has won election after election for the past 14 years, Erdogan is riding high on a wave of nationalism and national unity in the wake of the failed coup. Nonetheless continued politicisation and the silencing and exodus of critical minds leaves him ultimately with yes-sayers at a time that he needs creative thinkers more than ever to help solve a Kurdish issue that is taking on regional dimensions, curb mounting domestic political violence, and shield Turkey from the fallout of the disintegration of its neighbours as nation states.
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With mosques under surveillance, IS turns to soccer for recruitment
August 18th, 2016
James M. Dorsey.
Abu Otaiba, the nom du guerre of a self-taught imam and Islamic State (IS) recruiter in Jordan, uses soccer to attract recruits.
“We take them to farms, or private homes. There we discuss and we organize soccer games to bring them closer to us,” Abu Otaiba told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview.
Abu Otaiba said he was recruiting outside of mosques because they “are filled with intelligence officials.” Mosques serve him these days as a venue to identify potential recruits whom he approaches elsewhere.
A similar development is evident in Jordanian universities where sports clubs and dormitories have become favoured IS hunting grounds because they so far don’t figure prominently on Jordanian intelligence’s radar.
IS’ use of soccer reflects anthropologist Scott Atran’s observation that suicide bombers often emerge from groups with an action-oriented activity. It also is symptomatic of jihadists’ convoluted relationship to a sport that they on the one hand view as an invention of infidels designed to distract the faithful from their religious obligations and on the other hand see as a useful tool to draw in new recruits.
Attitudes towards soccer are complicated by the fact that many jihadist and militant Islamist leaders are either former players or soccer fans. Islamic State caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was a fervent soccer player while in US prison in Iraq where he earned the nickname Maradona after Argentinian superstar Diego Maradona.
Osama Bin Laden was believed to be an Arsenal FC fan who had his own mini-World Cup during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Teams formed by foreign fighters based on nationality played against one another in downtime. While in exile in Sudan, Mr. Bin Laden had two squads that trained three times a week and play on Fridays after midday prayers.
Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah manages clubs in Lebanon while Hamas’ Ismail Haniyeh, a former player has organized tournaments in Gaza.
An online review conducted in 2014 by Vocativ of jihadist and militant Islamist Facebook pages showed that their owners often were soccer fans. However, jihadist empathy for the sport does not stop them from targeting local games in a geography stretching from Iraq to Nigeria as well as big ticket European and World Cup matches whose live broadcasts hold out the promise of a worldwide audience.
A IS suicide bomber blew himself up in March in a soccer stadium south of the Iraqi capital, killing 29 people and wounding 60. The bomber chose a match in a small stadium in the city of Iskanderiya, 30 miles from Baghdad. The London-based Quilliam Foundation reported at about the same time that boys in IS military training were instructed to kick decapitated heads as soccer balls.
Crowds in IS’ Syrian capital of Raqqa were forced in July to attend the public execution of four players of the city’s disbanded Al Shabab SC soccer team — Osama Abu Kuwait, Ihsan Al Shuwaikh, Nehad Al Hussein and Ahmed Ahawakh — on charges that they had been spies for the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian Kurdish militia that is in the frontline of confronting IS on the ground in Syria.
Yet, with IS under increased military pressure in Syria and Iraq, the group, desperate to project a degree of normalcy in areas it still controls, appears to be turning to sports and soccer in particular. Breaking with its past muddled banning of soccer despite its use of the sport as a recruiting tool, IS has urged boys in various towns including Raqqa in Syria and Mosul and Tal Afar in Iraq to participate in what it dubbed the Jihad Olympics.
Boys, despite a ban on soccer jerseys and the execution of 13 kids in early 2015 for watching an Asian Cup match on television, play soccer or tug of war during the events and are awarded sweets and balloons if their team is victorious. The boys’ families are invited to watch the games.
IS appears to have been struggling with the notion of using soccer as a way of placating its population and projecting normalcy for some time. The group authorized the showing of the FC Barcelona and Real Madrid derby a week after the attacks in November 2015 in Paris that targeted a major soccer match among others, but at kick-off rescinded the permission and closed down cafes and venues broadcasting the match because of a minute’s silence at the beginning of the game in the Madrid stadium in honour of the victims of the attacks in the French capital.
A precursor to IS’ Jihad Olympics was an exemption of children from the ban on soccer as well as video clips showing fighters in a town square kicking a ball with kids. Confusion within the group about its policy towards soccer is reflected in the fact that age limits for the exemption vary from town to town. In Manbij, a town near Aleppo recently conquered by US-backed militias, children older than 12 were forbidden to play the game while in Raqqa and Deir-ez-Zor in eastern Syria the age limit is believed to be 15.
Similarly, foreign fighters have been allowed to own decoders for sports channels and watch matches in the privacy of their homes.
“IS policy towards soccer is driven by opportunism and impulse. The group fundamentally despises the game, yet can’t deny that it is popular in its ranks and in territory it governs,” said a former Raqqa resident.
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Political Violence and Sectarianism in Pakistan
August 12th, 2016
By James M. Dorsey.
Synopsis
Pakistan’s generals blame their country’s cycle of political violence, including a recent bombing in the Baluch capital of Quetta, on groups in Afghanistan. The focus on external enemies complicates efforts to reduce political violence, ease inter-communal strains, and facilitate easing of tensions with Pakistan’s neighbours.
Commentary
PAKISTAN’S MILITARY commanders gathered this week to assess the impact of the massive bombing in Quetta that killed some 70 people and wiped out a generation of lawyers in the province of Baluchistan. They believed there was a sinister foreign-inspired plot that aimed to thwart their effort to root out political violence. The commanders’ analysis strokes with their selective military campaign that targets specific groups like the Pakistani Taliban and the Sunni-Muslim Lashkar-e-Jhangvi.
The commanders failed however to acknowledge the real lesson of Quetta: decades of Pakistani military and intelligence support underwritten by funding from quarters in Saudi Arabia for sectarian and ultra-conservative groups in Pakistan has divided the country almost irreversibly. Generations of religious students have their critical faculties stymied by rote learning and curricula dominated by memorisation of exclusionary beliefs and prejudice resulting in bigotry and misogyny woven into the fabric of Pakistani society.
The Domestic Challenge: Too Much Money
“The enemy within is not a fringe… Large sections of society sympathize with these groups. They fund them, directly and indirectly. They provide them recruits. They reject the Constitution and the system. They don’t just live in the ‘bad lands’ but could be our neighbours. The forces have not only to operate in areas in the periphery, along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, but have also to operate in the cities where hundreds, perhaps thousands form sleeper cells, awaiting orders or planning to strike,” said Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider in a recent commentary.
The military campaign against Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, whose leadership has largely been wiped out in encounters with Pakistani security forces, is a case in point. Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is closely tied to banned anti-Shiite and anti-Ahmadi group Sipah-e-Sabaha, which continues to operate openly with government support under a succession of different names.
Sipah leaders, in a rare set of lengthy interviews, have little compunction about detailing their close ties to Pakistani state institutions and Saudi Arabia. They are also happy to discuss the fact that both Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are pushing them to repackage their sectarian policies in a public relations effort rather than a fundamental shift that would steer Pakistan towards a more tolerant, inclusive society.
“The Saudis sent huge amounts often through Pakistani tycoons who had a long-standing presence in Saudi Arabia as well as operations in the UK and Canada and maintained close relations with the Al Saud family and the Saudi business community. One of them gave 100 million rupees a year. We had so much money, it didn’t matter what things cost,” said a co-founder of Sipah.
“Some Things are Natural”
Sipah leader Ahmad Ludhyvani, a meticulously dressed Muslim scholar, speaking in his headquarters protected by Pakistani security forces in the city of Jhang, noted that Sipah and Saudi Arabia both opposed Shiite Muslim proselytisation even if Sipah served Pakistani rather than Saudi national interests.
“Some things are natural. It’s like when two Pakistanis meet abroad or someone from Jhang meets another person from Jhang in Karachi. It’s natural to be closest to the people with whom we have similarities… We are the biggest anti-Shia movement in Pakistan. We don’t see Saudi Arabia interfering in Pakistan,” Ludhyvani said over a lunch of chicken, vegetables and rice.
The soft-spoken politician defended his group’s efforts in Parliament to get a law passed that would uphold the dignity of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The law would effectively serve as a stepping stone for institutionalisation of anti-Shiite sentiment much like a Saudi-inspired Pakistani constitutional amendment in 1974 that declared Ahmadis non-Muslim. As a result, all applicants for a Pakistani passport are forced to sign an anti-Ahmadi oath.
Showing Off High-level Support
Sipah officials said a Pakistani cleric resident in Makkah who heads the international arm of Aalmi Majlis Tahaffuz Khatm-e-Nubuwwat (AMTKN), a militant anti-Ahmadi Pakistan-based group, closely affiliated with Sipah, acts as a major fundraiser for the group.
Sipah put Pakistani and Saudi support on public display when it last year hosted a dinner in Islamabad’s prestigious Marriot Hotel for Abdallah Ben Abdel Mohsen Al-Turki, a former Saudi religious affairs minister and general secretary of the Muslim World League, a major Saudi vehicle for the funding of ultra-conservative and militant groups. Hundreds of guests, including Pakistani ministers and religious leaders designated as terrorists by the United States attended the event at the expense of the Saudi embassy in the Pakistani capital.
The corrosive impact of such support for groups preaching intolerance and sectarian hatred is demonstrated in another disturbing trend in Pakistan. This is the spike in honour killings that mirrors a jump in lethal attacks on artists, writers and journalists. The aim is to maintain subjugation of women, ensure the dominance of religious rather than secular education, and undermine traditional as well as contemporary popular culture.
It is also mirrored in controversy over the Council of Islamic Ideology, whose offices are ironically located on Islamabad’s Ataturk Avenue, that was created to ensure that Pakistani legislation complies with Islamic Law. The Council has condemned co-education in a country whose non-religious public education system fails to impose mandatory school attendance and produces uncritical minds similar to those emerging from thousands of madrasahs run by ultra-conservatives and those advocating jihadist thinking.
The Council declared in 2014 that a man did not need his wife’s consent to marry a second, third or fourth wife and that DNA of a rape victim did not constitute conclusive evidence. This year, it defended the right of a husband to “lightly beat” his wife. It also forced the withdrawal of a proposal to ban child marriages, declaring the draft bill un-Islamic and blasphemous.
Continued official acquiescence and open support for intolerance, misogyny and sectarianism calls into question the sincerity of government and military efforts to curb without exception intolerance and political violence. The result is a country whose social fabric and tradition of tolerance is being fundamentally altered in ways that could take a generation to reverse
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Is Saudi Arabia Zion?
August 8th, 2016By James M. Dorsey.
Jebel El-Lawz (Mount Moses) Saudi Arabia.
Kamal Salibi, one of the Arab world’s foremost contemporary historians, kicked up a storm when he concluded in a 1985 linguistic exegesis that Judaism’s Zion was not located in Israel but in Saudi Arabia. Israelis, Jews, Saudis, Arabs, Muslims and Palestinians found common ground at the time to denounce Mr. Salibi in stark terms.
Israelis, Jews and evangelists charged that Mr. Salibi’s bombshell book, The Bible Came from Arabia, constituted an attempt to delegitimize the Jewish State and undermine its historic claim to modern day Israel. Israeli historians and rabbis denounced the theory as mythology, science fiction and nonsense.
Saudis, afraid that Israelis might take Mr. Salibi seriously and attempt to colonise the mountains of Sarawat, which the scholar believed was the Jordan valley referred to in the Bible, bulldozed dozens of villages which contained buildings or structures from Biblical antiquity. Abodes were turned into rubble in line with Wahhabi ideology that legitimized destruction of anything that could be construed as idol worship.
The Saudi effort made it more unlikely that archaeology would ever be able to resolve the controversy given that decades of diggings in modern day Israel have yet to yield incontrovertible evidence such as Hebrew inscriptions that unambiguously refer to events, people, or places named in the Old Testament.
Nonetheless, in a twist of irony, Saudi Arabia launched Mr. Salibi on his linguistic exegesis with the government’s publication in 1977 of a comprehensive list of thousands of place names in the kingdom. The list sparked Mr. Salibi’s interest because he had found little material for the early period of a history of Arabia he had just published.
”I was simply searching for place-names of non-Arabic origin in west Arabia, when the evidence that the whole Bible land was here struck me in the face. Nearly all the biblical place-names were concentrated in an area about 600 km long by 200 km wide, comprising what are today Asir and the southern part of the Hijaz,” Mr. Salibi wrote.
The controversy over Mr. Salibi’s assertions has long died down. Lack of contact between Saudi Arabia and Israel which do not maintain diplomatic relations and the fact that the kingdom was and is hardly a tourist destination except for the Muslim pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina ensured that research was all but impossible.
That however may be changing. Saudi Arabia, in an effort to diversify its energy-dependent economy and develop alternative sources of income is preparing to become a tourist destination, boasting its numerous historic sites.
Relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia are changing as both countries find common ground in their hostility towards Iran and need to confront jihadist groups like the Islamic State. A retired Saudi general last month led a delegation of academics and businessmen in a rare, if not first public visit to Israel in a bid to stimulate debate about a 14-year old Saudi plan for Israeli-Arab peace.
The thawing of informal ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia is a far cry away from a situation in which Saudi Arabia will lift its ban on Israelis traveling to the kingdom. Saudi Arabia already in the 1990s rewrote visa regulations that effectively prevented Jews from visiting the kingdom. The Saudi labour ministry included in 2014 Judaism for the first time as an acceptable religion for migrant or foreign workers in the kingdom.
Writing in The Times of Israel two weeks after retired General Anwar Eshki’s visit, journalist Jessica Steinberg noted that a vibrant Jewish community had populated 3,000 years ago areas that today belong to Saudi Arabia and that the cities of Medina, Khaybar and Taymar hosted large numbers of Jews in the 6th and 7th century. Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela, Spain, a medieval Jewish traveller, visited some of those communities during a 12th century trip to what is today Israel. Rabbi Benjamin’s writings offer a demography of the communities he encountered.
A dying generation of elderly Saudis of Yemeni origin who live in towns and cities along Saudi Arabia’s border with Yemen still recall the days prior to the establishment of the State of Israel when Jews were part of their community.
Anticipating a day where Israelis might be able to visit Saudi Arabia, Ms. Steinberg offered a primer of five Jewish sites in the kingdom’s Khaybar valley and ancient city of Taymar that can be accessed virtually:
Holding out the hope for closer ties between Israel and Saudi Arabia, Ms. Steinberg suggested that “the day may be drawing near” when “historical sites pertaining to the ancient Jewish experience” will be accessible.
As a result, Saudi tourism as much in the Middle East that is easily politicized could blow new life into the controversy over Mr. Salibi’s theory years after he passed away. Saudi fears notwithstanding, Israelis like their Saudi counterparts have no desire to rock the boat or even contemplate the theoretical possibility that that their forefathers may have made a mistake. Any argument that Israel might eye Saudi oil reserves is countered by the fact that Israel is becoming an oil producer in its own right.
Beyond the historical and academic value of settling the controversy sparked by Mr. Salibi, his theory offers rich material for the ultimate ‘what if’ book or great novel on the Middle East. Imagining ‘what if’ would unlikely lead to even more conflict in an already tortured region but could well offer new perspectives on how to resolve its multiple conflicts.
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Creating Frankenstein: The Impact of Saudi Export of Ultra-Conservatism in South Asia
August 1st, 2016By James M. Dorsey
Introduction
Continued doubts about the longevity of the Saudi ruling family are fuelled by its Faustian bargain with Wahhabism – a conser vative, intolerant, discriminatory and anti-pluralistic interpretation of Islam.[i]
It is a bargain that has produced one of the largest dedicated public diplomacy campaigns in history. Estimates of Saudi Arabia’s spending on support of ultra-conservative strands of Islam, including Wahhabism, Salafism and Deobandism, across the globe range from $70 to $100 billion. Saudi largesse funded fund mosques, Islamic schools and cultural institutions, and social services as well as the forging of close ties to non-Wahhabi Muslim leaders and intelligence agencies in various Muslim nations. In doing so, Saudi Arabia succeeded in turning s largely local Wahhabi and like-minded ultra-conservative Muslim worldviews into an influential force in Muslim nations and communities across the globe.[ii]
The campaign is not simply a product of the marriage between the Al Sauds and the Wahhabis. It is central to Saudi Arabia’s soft power policy and the Al Sauds’ survival strategy. One reason, albeit not the only one, that the longevity of the Al Sauds is a matter of debate, is the fact that the propagation of Wahhabism is having a backlash in countries across the globe, as well as on Saudi Arabia itself. More than ever before, Wahhabism, and its theological parent, Salafism, are being put under the spotlight due to their theological or ideological similarities with jihadism in general, and the ideology of the Islamic State (IS) group in particular.
Speaking at a conference in Singapore, sociologist Farid Alatas noted that madrassas -often funded by Saudi Arabia or other Salafi and Wahhabi groups – fails to produce graduates trained to think critically. “They have not been exposed to [Muslim] intellectuals like Ibn Khaldoun,” Alatas said “That is the opportunity for Salafis and Wahhabis” in the absence of Muslim scholars who would be capable of debunking their myths he added. Alatas was referring to Abd al-Raḥman ibn Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn Abi Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century historian, who is widely seen as one of the fathers of modern sociology, historiography, demography and economics.
Taking Wahhabism’s influence in Malaysia as an example, Alatas pointed to the uncontested distribution of a sermon by the religious department of the Malaysian state of Selangor, that asserted that women who fail to wear a hijab invite rape and resemble a fish that attracts flies.[iii]
Such attitudes fostered by Saudi funding, as well as Saudi Arabia’s willingness to look the other way when its youth leave the kingdom to join militant groups, undermine Saudi Arabia’s international image and its efforts to create soft power. “It is often alleged that the Saudis export terrorism. They don’t, but what they have done is encourage their own radicals –a natural by-product of Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia’s conservative brand of Islam – to commit their terrorist acts elsewhere. As the radicals leave, so does Saudi money, which funds their violent activities,” said former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia, Christopher R. Hill.[iv] The estimated 2,500 Saudis who have joined IS constitute the group’s second largest national contingent.[v]
The problem for the Al Sauds is not just that their image is under attack and that their legitimacy is wholly dependent on their identification with Wahhabism; it is also that the Al Sauds since the launch of their Islamist campaign, have often been only nominally in control of it. As a result, the Al Sauds have let a genie out of the bottle that now leads an independent life and cannot be put back into the bottle. Wahhabi and Salafi-influenced education systems played into the hands of Arab autocrats, who for decades dreaded an education system that would teach critical thinking and the asking of difficult questions.
Saudi funding of conservative Islamic learning neatly aligned itself in Pakistan, which has an education system shaped by the partition of British India into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan. This emphasis on religious nationalism, where minorities are perceived as being inferior, involved a parochial definition of what it meant to be Muslim in Pakistan.[vi] The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reported that Pakistani public school textbooks – circulated to at least 41 million children -contained derogatory references to religious minorities. The perception of minorities as threats was reinforced with the enhanced Islamisation of textbooks in the decade from 1978 to 1988, in which General Zia ul Haq-ruled Pakistan.[vii]
“In public school classrooms, Hindu children are forced to read lessons about ‘Hindus’ conspiracies toward Muslims’, and Christian children are taught that ‘Christians learned tolerance and kind-heartedness from Muslims.’ This represents a public shaming of religious minority children that begins at a very young age, focusing on their religious and cultural identity and their communities’ past history. A review of the curriculum demonstrates that public school students are being taught that religious minorities, especially Christians and Hindus, are nefarious, violent, and tyrannical by nature. There is a tragic irony in these accusations, because Christians and Hindus in Pakistan face daily persecution, are common victims of crime, and are frequent targets of deadly communal violence, vigilantism, and collective punishment,” USCIRF report concluded.[viii]
“By imposing the harsh, literal interpretation of religion exported and promoted by Saudi Arabia, we have turned Pakistan into a drab, monochromatic landscape where colour, laughter, dancing and music are frowned upon, if not entirely banned. And yet Islam in South Asia was once characterised by a life-enhancing Sufi tradition that is now under threat. More and more, we are following the example set by the Taliban,” added Pakistani writer Irfan Husain.[ix] A Pew Research survey moreover concluded in late 2015 that 78 percent of Pakistanis favoured strict implementation if Islamic law.[x]
Syed Imran Ali Shah whose father was murdered when he was a child, was 16 when in 1999 he was admitted to Mercy Pak School in Peshawar, an educational institution funded by Saudi-backed Mercy International Pakistan. Zahid al-Sheikh, the brother of 9/11 mastermind Khalid al-Sheikh, was one of the charity’s executives in the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, a time when Saudi Arabia joined the United States in financing the Pakistan-based resistance against the Soviets in Afghanistan.[xi] Syed Imran says his radicalization was spurred by one of his teachers all of whom were in his words Wahhabis. The teacher argued the importance of jihad in his sermons.[xii] Jihad never figured in the school’s curriculum but students learned to believe that the beliefs and practices of other sects were heresy. ”We teach students the aqeedah (creed) of every sect and tell them as to how and where that aqeedah is wrong so that we can guide them to the right aqeedah,” said Umer bin Abdul Aziz of the Jaimatul Asar madrassa in Peshawar.[xiii] Based on textual analysis of madrassa texts, scholar Niaz Muhammad warned that “no one should claim that their statements about the madrassa curriculum have nothing to do with sectarianism or other forms of religious militancy.”[xiv]
In a seminar moderated by Jordanian scholar Nadia Oweidat at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., on 3 May 2016, Ahmed Abdellahy, a reformed, former Egyptian jihadist, described being educated in a school system that divided the world into ‘us and them’. ‘Us’ were the Muslims who had been victimised by ‘them’. Abdellahy said he was taught that: ‘they’, the Christians, Westerners and “all the world is against us [Muslims] because we are better than them.” Abdellahy said. He said this was an attitude engraved in generations of children who were expected to accept it at face value. “When I was going to school, the role of the school was to stop you from questioning,” Oweidat added.[xv] The inability of Abdellahy’s school teachers to answer students’ probing questions and a lack of available literature drove him to the Internet, where militant Islamists provided answers.[xvi]
The current backlash of Saudi support for autocracy and funding of the export of Wahhabism and Salafism, coupled with the need to radically reform the kingdom’s economy, means that the Al Sauds and the Wahhabis are nearing a crunch point, one that will not necessarily offer solutions, but in fact could make things worse. It risks sparking ever more militant splits, that will make themselves felt across the Muslim world and in minority Muslim communities elsewhere, in multiple ways.
One already visible fallout of the Saudi campaign is greater intolerance towards minorities and increased sectarianism in countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. In Pakistan, for example, a U.S. Foreign Service officer, noted that in Saudi-funded “madrassas, children are denied contact with the outside world and taught sectarian extremism, hatred for non-Muslims, and anti-Western/anti-Pakistan government philosophy.”[xvii]
The recent shooting in the southern Philippines of Sheikh Aaidh al-Qarni, a prominent Saudi Wahhabi cleric whose popularity is evident in his following of 12 million on Twitter, further suggests that the backlash for the kingdom is not just the Saudi government emerging as a target but also the ulema[xviii] – including ulema who are not totally subservient to the Saudi government. Sheikh Aaidh al-Qarni is a product of the fusion between Wahhabism and the Muslim Brotherhood that produced the Sahwa, a Saudi Salafist political reform movement. While Philippine investigators are operating on the assumption that the Islamic State (IS) group was responsible for the shooting, Saudi media were quick to report that Saudi authorities had warned the Philippines days earlier that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards were planning an attack.[xix]
A key to understanding the Saudi funding campaign is the fact that while it all may be financed out of one pot of money, it serves different purposes for different parties. For the Wahhabi ulema, it is about proselytization, about the spreading of Islam; for the Saudi government, it is about gaining soft power. At times the interests of the government and the ulema coincide, and at times they diverge. By the same token, the Saudi campaign on some levels has been an unparalleled success, on others, success is questionable and one could argue that it risks becoming a liability for the government.
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Creating Frankenstein – Saudi Export of Ultra-Conservatism in South Asia
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Who is Fethullalh Gulen? A modernizer or a wolf in sheep’s clothing?
July 20th, 2016
By Jame M. Dorsey.
Believers say he preaches a new, modern form of Islam. Critics charge he is a power hungry wolf in sheep’s clothing preparing to convert secular Turkey into an Islamic republic; a conspirator who has created a state within the state and attempted this weekend to topple democratically elected Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in a failed military coup.
That was not how past Turkish governments or for that matter Mr. Erdogan in his first eight years as prime minister saw Fethullalh Gulen, the leader of one of the world’s largest and wealthiest Islamic movements.
Back in the 1990s, secular prime ministers Tansu Ciller and Mesut Yilmaz and other prominent political leaders viewed Mr. Gulen as their weapon against the pro-Islamic Refah (Welfare) Party, the predecessor of Mr. Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP), that advocated Turkey’s divorce from the West and a return to its Islamic and Ottoman roots.
Mr. Erdogan too initially saw Mr. Gulen as a cherished ally. The two men worked together to force the staunchly secular military in line with one of the European Union’s demands for future Turkish membership to accept civilian control. It fit both men’s goal of lifting French-style laicist restrictions on freedom of religious expression that had long been resisted by the military. Mr. Erdogan had at the time no problem with Mr. Gulen’s followers establishing a power base in the police force and the military.
This weekend’s failed coup suggests that elements of the military still believe in a non-constitutional role of the military. Yet, at the same time, it is to the credit of Messrs. Erdogan and Gulen, that significant parts of the military, the opposition and the public backed Turkey’s democratically elected president and helped foil the coup irrespective of what they thought of his politics and leadership.
Mr. Gulen’s moves into branches of government, a version of German student leader Rudi Dutschke’s march through the institutions, reflected his long-term strategy. Mr. Gulen preaches obedience to the state and recognition of the rule of law while at the same time inserting his followers into key institutions of the state and educating a next generation in his ideological mold.
Indeed, more than half a century after he first became a government employed imam, Mr. Gulen adopted the role. He often dresses in a crumpled sports jacket and slacks, looking the part of a modern religious leader rather than a fervent Turkish nationalist or a militant Islamist. A doleful 75-year-old, he moreover talks the talk, evading language often employed by Turkey’s right-wing nationalists and Islamists.
As a result, Mr. Gulen’s modernist approach appealed to urban conservatives and some more liberal segments of the middle class. His approach contrasted starkly with that of Mr. Erdogan, who targeted the more rural conservatives and the nationalists.
It was indeed Mr. Gulen’s advocacy of tolerance, dialogue and worldly education as well as his endorsement of Turkey’s close ties to Europe that endeared him to the country’s secular leaders of the 1990s and subsequently to Mr. Erdogan.
“We can build confidence and peace in this country if we treat each other with tolerance,” Mr. Gulen said in a first and since then rare interview at the time with a foreign correspondent. “There’s no place for quarreling in this world… By emphasizing our support for education and the media, we can prove that Islam is open to contemporary things,” he added sprinkling his slow and deliberate speech with old Ottoman Turkish words regarded as quaint by modern Turks.
A diabetic with a heart ailment, Mr. Gulen has devoted himself since officially retiring in the early 1990s to writing tracts on Islam. Yet there is little in his writing or the administration of institutions linked to him that points in the direction of theological renewal.
Mr. Gulen among other things takes a conservative view of the role of women and has said that the presence of women makes him uncomfortable. It was something he had felt since he was a young man, he said. Not surprisingly, Mr. Gulen’s movement operates separate schools for boys and girls.
Yet, even Mr. Gulen has evolved. When in the mid-1990s a woman visitor asked directions to a toilet at the Istanbul headquarters of his Zaman newspaper, officials said the multi-story building wasn’t equipped for women visitors. A member of the staff was sent to check whether a men’s room was free. That has changed and women’s toilets were installed long before Mr. Erdogan sent his police in March of this year to take over the paper.
Critics charge that Mr. Gulen professed moderation may not be what he really hopes to achieve. “Fethullah’s main project is the takeover of the state. That is why he was investing in education. They believe the state will just fall into their lap because they will be ready for it, they will have the people in place. That is their long-term plan,” said a prominent liberal Turkish intellectual.
Indeed, Mr. Gulen’s movement, despite the imam’s long-term vision, effectively sought to undermine Mr. Erdogan’s government in late 2013 with charges of corruption against ministers in the then prime minister’s cabinet and members of his family. The charges and alleged evidence to back them up were never tested in a court of law.
Mr. Erdogan made sure of that. For him, the charges were the straw that broke the camel’s back. What had been an increasingly public parting of the ways that started with a soccer match fixing scandal in 2011 turned in late 2013 into open warfare with Mr. Erdogan firing or moving thousands of judiciary personnel and police officers to other jobs, shutting down the investigation, and seeking to destroy Mr. Gulen’s religious, educational and commercial empire.
The fact that the police played a key role in foiling this weekend’s coup attempt bears testimony to the degree to which Mr. Erdogan has succeeded in erasing Mr. Gulen’s influence in the police. This weekend’s dismissal of almost 3,000 judges and the issuance of arrest warrants for 140 of them on allegations of involvement with Mr. Gulen suggests that Mr. Erdogan believes that his efforts to destroy the imam’s infrastructure were more successful in the police than they were in the judiciary.
None of this amounts to evidence of Mr. Erdogan’s assertion that Mr. Gulen engineered this weekend’s coup attempt. Like so much in recent years, Mr. Erdogan has used the alleged threat of a state within a state as well as increasingly authoritarian measures to remove his critics from the media and academia and to attempt to cow the parliamentary opposition to turn Turkey into an a more authoritarian state.
Mr. Erdogan’s increasingly illiberal version of Turkish democracy in which the public is invited to protest on his behalf but not against him makes uttering unsubstantiated allegations relatively easy. Mr. Erdogan will however have to produce hard evidence if he formally goes ahead with a request that the United States extradite Mr. Gulen, who is a green card holder resident in Pennsylvania.
Even if those that staged the failed coup turn out to be followers of Mr. Gulen, Mr. Erdogan would still have to prove that Mr. Gulen was aware and involved in their plans. That may be easier said than done.
Back in 2011, during the soccer match fixing scandal, the first public indication of the growing rift between the two Islamists, Mr. Gulen apologized to one of the involved club executives. The preacher said if his followers were involved in prosecuting soccer executives and players, he was not aware of that. It was a rare suggestion that Mr. Gulen, a by now frail old man, may no longer be in control of the empire he built.
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What happens when Arab autocrats are left to fend for themselves? Turmoil
June 1st, 2016By James M. Dorsey.
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(Remarks made at the Asia Pacific Roundtable, APR @ 30: Cooperation and Contestation in a Changing Regional Landscape)
We have been given the impossible task of telling you in the words of Hollywood director and actor Woody Allen everything about the Middle East that you want to know and never dared to ask and all of that in 15 minutes. So what I am going to do is give you a series of headlines so that we can flesh some of those out in the subsequent discussion. In doing so, I may be a bit provocative but that will hopefully make debate more lively.
Let me start by saying that the rise of Asia shares significant responsibility for the turmoil the Middle East is experiencing. Yes, you heard me correctly. What I mean to say with this is that popular wisdom has it that a war weary, indecisive and weak President Obama’s disengagement from the region lies at the root of nations with Saudi Arabia in the lead adopting more assertive foreign and defensive policies with disastrous consequences in places like Syria and Yemen and the potential to destabilize others in the region.
Yes, there is a degree of US disengagement but not out of weakness but out of strategic reinterpretation of US national interests. That reinterpretation reduces the importance of the Middle East to the United States with some exceptions like Israel and attributes significantly increased significance to Asia. It also involves a realization that support for autocratic regimes that are fighting for survival irrespective of the cost constitutes a failed policy, a policy that has fuelled anti-Americanism and militant interpretations of Islam.
That is particularly true for Saudi Arabia with its decades-long export of Wahhabism and Salafism that has catapulted a puritan, inward looking, intolerant interpretation of Islam into an influential force across the Muslim world. In his interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, Obama noted that the Saudi campaign, the single largest public diplomacy campaign in history, has begun for example to alter the tolerant character of Islam in Indonesia witness the predicament of Ahmadis and Shiites and the conservative turn in public morals that Indonesian society is experiencing.
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Which brings me to my second point, the hostility between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This is a battle for regional hegemony that has been going on at least since the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. It is a battle that fuelled the Saudi campaign to export Wahhabism and Salafism in a bid to counter the revolutionary appeal of Iran and prompted Saudi Arabia to support Saddam Hussein in Iraq’s eight-year long costly war in the 1980s against Iran.
This is a battle for hegemony that Saudi Arabia lost on day one and never stood a chance of winning. Saudi Arabia’s predicament was long alleviated by the fact that hostility towards Iran, think back of the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran, and subsequent international sanctions kept Iran in check for much of the last decades. All of that changed with the nuclear agreement and the lifting of the sanctions.
As a result, Saudi Arabia sees its window of opportunity closing. It explains why Saudi Arabia’s main objection to the nuclear agreement was not so much whether or not it would stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons but the fact that Iran would be returning to the international community less fettered by sanctions. Saudi policy at whatever cost has since been to attempt to strengthen Iranian hardliners in the hope that they would complicate Iran’s return and make it as difficult as possible for Iran to get access to technology and funding needed for the rehabilitation of its economy. Which is why Saudi Arabia refused to agree to oil production cuts that would raise oil prices without Iran being part of the agreement. Iran’s goal is not price stabilization but the regaining of market share lost as a result of the sanctions
Fact of the matter is that Saudi Arabia lacks the intrinsic building blocks to retain its regional leadership status on a level playing field. It lacks the assets that countries like Iran, Turkey and Egypt have irrespective of what state of political and economic disrepair they currently may be experiencing. Those countries have large populations, diversified industrial bases, battle hardened militaries that at least at times have performed, histories of empire and geography. Saudi Arabia has Mecca and money, the latter in lesser amounts given the fall in commodity prices and heightened expenditure. Turkey, Iran and Egypt figure prominently in China’s vision of One Belt, One Road, Saudi Arabia does not.
Saudi policy appears to operate on the principle of Marx’s Verelendungstheorie, it’s got to get worse to get better. And the worse it gets the more likely it will be that the United States will have to reengage and delay its pivot to Asia. Even if that is true, it would not be a return to the status quo ante in which US support for Saudi Arabia was absolute. The nuclear agreement with Iran has made sure of that. Granted, the outcome of the US presidential election could rewrite the landscape.
Saudi efforts to avert the inevitable relies on sectarianism that threatens not only regional but also domestic stability and effects ethnic and sectarian relations elsewhere in the world and particularly in Asia. That is not to say that Iran does not nurture and support forces with sectarian identities in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq. Nor does this deny the fact that Iran opposes monarchical rule, it toppled its own monarch, the first pro-American icon to fall in the region in a popular revolt, and denounces Wahhabism. The question is how Iranian policy would have evolved in the wake of the Iran-Iraq war had Saudi Arabia adopted a more conciliatory approach.
All of this takes place at a time that Middle Eastern autocrats are seeking to reorder the Middle East and North Africa in ways that will ensure their survival. They are doing so in the wake of the 2011 Arab popular revolts that changed the paradigm even if the immediate consequence has been collapse, counterrevolution, and widespread bloodshed; the changing security architecture in the region as a result of the redefinition of US national interest; changing economic imperatives, and the fact that the end of oil is in sight. Most people born in the Gulf today will witness the end of oil in their life time.
There is a lot of discussion of the demise of the early 20th century Sykes Picot agreement having sparked the disintegration of states like Syria and Iraq in the Middle East. I would take issue with that. Middle Eastern nation states are fragile not because their post-colonial borders are artificial but because they were governed for so long by regimes that were not inclusive and did not deliver. Africa, the continent that was perceived to have been populated by fragile states that would collapse in a domino effect if only one state broke apart disproves the theory. Biafra, Eritrea and the Western Sahara did not spark the domino effect.
Saudi Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman who is driving policy in the kingdom is a popular figure. He represents a new generation in a country with a youth bulge. His Vision 2030 constitutes a needed upgrading of autocracy. Leaving aside economic questions about the vision, Mohammed will not be able to turn Saudi Arabia into a diversified, 21st century knowledge economy on the basis of a backward looking interpretation of Islam that harks back to the 7th century. In addition, Wahhabism is becoming an international liability given its undeniable association with jihadist ideology.
Let me conclude by noting two things: Saudi Arabia in the early 20th century was what the Islamic State is today. If the Islamic State survives it will become what Saudi Arabia is today. In many ways, it does not matter whether the Islamic State is destroyed or not. The key to defeating Islamic State-like groups and ideologies is tackling what makes them attractive to multiple audiences. Root causes is the latest buzzword but no government has so far adopted policy changes that truly address those causes.
Second of all, the ruling Al Saud family and the religious establishment are nearing a restructuring of their relationship as the cost of adherence to Wahhabism becomes domestically and internationally too costly. There is no necessarily good result from that process. The key word in arguments between the Islamic State and the kingdom is deviant. With other words, we agree on the base but you, the other, are deviating from it.
The restructuring can entail the religious establishment bending over further to accommodate the regime. That will spark more radical religious opposition and undermine the credibility of religious leaders. The Al Saud’s legitimacy and claim to the right to rule is vested in the religious establishment. Watch this space. The 2011 popular revolts unleashed processes that are still unfolding and will take years to settle down.
While Asia may only have been a player in the kicking off of these processes in terms of American policy calculations, it certainly will not be immune to their fallout.
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