Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Meet the Kim Jong Un of the Persian Gulf

The authoritarian trend toward personalist regimes


The Washington Post

Link

Nowadays it seems that every authoritarian ruler wants to be Kim Jong Un.
To be clear, no one wants to be the ruler of the barren wasteland that is North Korea. But it sure seems like authoritarian rulers across the world want the cult of personality and unfettered control over the levers of power that Kim has exercised for years. In the past few years many authoritarian rulers and wannabe authoritarian rulers have adapted parts of Kim’s playbook to their countries. Take President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey:
In China, Xi Jinping just completed a party congress designed to elevate him to Mao-like levels of power and adoration.  In Russia, Vladimir Putin has been building up a cult of personality for some time now, complete with feats of hockey strength and everything. President Trump is an elected leader. but the last week has illuminated just how much he wishes he was a despot unshackled by the rule of law. Authoritarian regimes are no longer institutionalizing their control; they are personalizing it. Everyone wants to be the Kim of their country.
Which brings us to Saudi Arabia.  Two years ago, it looked like the royal family was trying to institutionalize its line of succession. The past 48 hours suggest something very different. My Post colleague Kareen Fahim sums it up in his latest story:
They seemed untouchable. The head of a huge construction conglomerate. A prince who led Saudi Arabia’s elite national guard. A billionaire investor who was one of the richest people in the world.
But in one breathtaking stroke, the men were detained by the Saudi authorities in a purge that began Saturday night and swept up some of the most powerful and recognizable names in the country, including members of the Saudi royal family, cabinet ministers, titans of media and industry, and former officials. The detainees included Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a wealthy investor who owns major stakes in such companies as Twitter and Citigroup, according to an associate of his family.
On Sunday, Saudi officials cast the arrests as the first shot in a battle against the country’s notorious and deeply rooted corruption, and as part of a broader effort by the country’s young and ambitious crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to refresh the stagnating Saudi state.
For others, though, the detentions seemed more like the continuation of a process that had been accelerating over the past two years: the ruthless consolidation of power by the crown prince before his father, King Salman, dies or abdicates the throne. That process — which included eliminating critics and rivals, but also elite figures who presided over independent power centers — amounted to a radical restructuring of the Saudi order, analysts said.
The anti-corruption drive is a classic move from the personalist handbook, one that Xi, Putin and Erdogan have all used as an excuse to consolidate power. Salman has been unafraid to take on other power centers within the kingdom, including religious conservatives.
It is certainly possible that Mohammed bin Salman, or MbS, really does want to weed out corruption as part of implementing the ambitious Saudi Vision 2030 program. This is Vali Nasr’s interpretation of events:
Given how Iran turned out after the shah fell, that analogy is not at all comforting. Indeed, as the Financial Times’s David Gardner notes, crackdowns and arrests of high-profile Saudi princes do little to improve business certainty:
Including such a well-known figure in this clampdown [Prince Alwaleed bin Talal] will raise questions about the investment climate in Saudi Arabia, as Prince Mohammed pursues his much-trumpeted Vision 2030. This reform program aims to wean the kingdom off fast-depleting hydrocarbon revenue with income from private investment and the creation of what he hopes will become the world’s biggest sovereign wealth fund, built around the planned part-privatisation of Saudi Aramco, the state oil company. The goals of MbS, as the crown prince is known, include quadrupling non-oil revenue by 2020 from just over $40bn in 2015, before nearly doubling it again by 2030.
Skeptics question if such targets are deliverable, dependent as they are on ending the social contract between the House of Saud and its subjects that trades cradle-to-grave welfare for political quiescence.
My Post colleague David Ignatius notes the parallels between MbS, Xi and Trump:
While accompanied by the rhetoric of reform, this weekend’s purge resembles the approach of authoritarian regimes such as China. President Xi Jinping has used a similar anti-corruption theme to replace a generation of party and military leaders and to alter the collective leadership style adopted by recent Chinese rulers.
MBS is emboldened by strong support from President Trump and his inner circle, who see him as a kindred disrupter of the status quo — at once a wealthy tycoon and a populist insurgent. It was probably no accident that last month, Jared Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, made a personal visit to Riyadh. The two princes are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.
The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts would ordinarily be worried that Kushner, the MbS doppelganger in the White House, may start getting ideas. Indeed, the very fact that there exists a plausible parallel between MbS and Kushner is disturbing.
 Play Video 1:58
Saudi Arabia detains princes, ministers
Authorities in Saudi Arabia on Nov. 4 arrested royal family members and ministers as well as Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, a billionaire owning stakes in major companies.(Reuters)
Fortunately for America, Kushner cannot even fill out a form properly, much less organize anything more grandiose. And Trump exercises power far less effectively than, say, Robert Mueller. When Trump told U.S. armed service members in Japan that “no one — no dictator, no regime, and no nation — should underestimate, ever, American resolve,” I doubt that Kim Jong Un took him very seriously. I doubt that the authoritarians more loyal to the Trump regime, such as MbS, even noticed the rhetoric.

One does wonder about the long-term effect of this consolidation of power within authoritarian states. Kim, Xi, Putin, and now MbS have successfully purged all of their enemies. They have also raised doubts about how their countries will fare after they exit the political stage. This is problematic for Xi and Putin, who are getting on in years. Kim and Mohammed bin Salman, however, are in their early 30s. Their short-term consolidation could last a long time.
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Emad Hajjaj's Cartoon

مغامرة بن سلمان !
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ضيف وحكاية - أمير سعودي: "نحن مملكة ظلم واستبداد"

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Monday, November 6, 2017

The night of the long knives in Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia had always been ruled by multiple fiefdoms of senior princes but Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman is truly making it now his own playground

 Madawi Al-Rasheed

 Link
The night of 4 November could truly be the Night of the Long Knives in Saudi Arabia.
The night started with the sacking Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, son of deceased King Abdullah and head of Saudi National Guard, a tribal force created to protect the royal family and key oil areas in the kingdom.
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Controlling Saudi coercion machinery

Since its consolidation in the 1960s, with the help of Britain, the Saudi National Guard (SANG) shed its past as a tribal militia, created out of the ikhwan fighters who launched Jihad on Saudis in the early years of the kingdom, to become a modern para-military force, balancing the army and other security forces.
At the time, the regime preferred to have multiple coercive forces led by several princes for fear of army coups along those that dominated Egypt, Syria and Iraq in the 1950s and 1960s. After foiling several coup attempts by army officers in the late 1960s, the regime under king Faisal decided that several military forces serve security better than a single unified and strong army.  
SANG became King Abdullah's power base and fiefdom in which patron-client relations with the tribes of Saudi Arabia were maintained. His eldest son Mutaib inherited the position to command SANG during his father's time as king but with Muhammad bin Salman's fierce drive to control all Saudi coercive bodies, including the army, and security forces, SANG was the last unit to be targeted. 
As no real challenge to Muhammad bin Salman can come from princes with no militia, he was keen to end his senior cousin's control over the last security body that can potentially undermine his rule.
It was surprising that he waited for so long.
Most of the detained princes remained unnamed in the Saudi official announcement but billionaire private investor Prince Walid ibn Talal, owner of Kingdom Holding, was amongst them (REUTERS)

Unprecedented purge

Since Mohammed bin Salman came to power in 2015, Mutaib was bound to be abruptly removed from office like his other senior cousin Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, who had been sacked and put under house arrest in July. Mohammed bin Salman started an unprecedented purge within the royal household and among the most senior second-generation princes who might potentially threaten his takeover of the kingdom.
He is now de facto ruler and it won't be long before he becomes de jure. This will depend on whether his father voluntarily abdicates or is forced to submit to his young son's will. With Mutaib now sinking into oblivion, Mohammed bin Salman turned his attention to those princes with money, lest their financial empires become handy in future power struggles.
A calculated and premeditated purge at the highest level shattered peace during the early hours of the night
Within hours of a royal decree establishing an anti-corruption committee headed by Mohammed bin Salman, eleven princes together with several ministers were rounded up and detained. A calculated and premeditated purge at the highest level shattered peace during the early hours of the night. 
Most of the detained princes remained unnamed in the Saudi official announcement but billionaire private investor Prince Walid bin Talal, owner of Kingdom Holding, was amongst them. Wealthy princes may use their accumulated wealth to challenge Mohammed's rule, sponsoring dissent abroad, and augmenting critical media coverage of bin Salman's economic and social policies.
In the case of Walid bin Talal, his financial outreach and investment may stand in direct competition with those announced by Mohammed bin Salman's economic Vision 2030. His Rotana media empire with its wide coverage of Saudi news can be turned against the aspiring prince at any time.
Ministers whom Mohammed bin Salman had appointed also lost their jobs under the pretext of fighting corruption. The ministry of economy lost Adil Fakih, its minister who was replaced by Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, who may facilitate further privatisation and Saudisation schemes in accordance with the prince's economic plans. 
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The prince's control

All this was not enough in one night. Panic gripped Riyadh residents as they heard the sound of a massive explosion. It turned out to be a ballistic missiles launched from Yemen and was destined to reach Riyadh airport. The authorities announced that the  missile was intercepted and no casualties followed. 
A three-year old war has failed to lead to the victory that Mohammed bin Salman as minister of defence and crown prince anticipated.
While Saudi air strikes on Yemen were launched in April 2015 under the pretext of protecting Saudi's southern borders, Yemeni missiles are now capable of reaching the heart of the kingdom's capital. The implications of the ballistic missile were lost after the expansive purge at the highest level.
Mohammed bin Salman may now feel secure after removing his rival cousins from office, banning others from travel, and detaining the rest in five-star hotels in Riyadh under heavy security.
However, feeling secure through such high risk moves may not be the ideal situation for a young autocrat, who proved to be intolerant of even silence. He requires everyone to publicly support his plans.
Saudi Arabia had always been ruled by multiple fiefdoms of senior princes but Muhammad bin Salman is truly making it now his own playground
Those who abstain from such banal public support and statements of applause face detention, exactly in the way he put in prison several clerics and professionals for simply remaining silence over his crisis with Qatar.
It is hard to see how a new hyper-modern, economically advanced kingdom is going to emerge out of backstabbing and purges, conducted at the highest level. There is no independent judiciary that can deal with corruption cases, no royal family council that can restrain the erratic young prince, and no credible organised opposition that can undermine the prince’s control over the country.
In this situation, violence looms large over the kingdom, with those capable of committing atrocities coming to occupy a vacuum created by bin Salman's autocratic rule that silences even his own cousins, let alone humble commoners with no power whatsoever to challenge him.
Saudi Arabia had always been ruled by multiple fiefdoms of senior princes but Mohammed bin Salman is truly now making it his own playground.

- Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed is a visiting professor at the Middle East Centre at LSE. She has written extensively about the Arabian Peninsula, Arab migration, globalisation, religious transnationalism and gender. On Twitter: @MadawiDr
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Things that go bump in the night in Riyadh

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Hariri's resignation, the Saudi purge, and the Houthi missile fired at Riyadh are interconnected

 By David Hearst

Link
Saturday night was a busy one for Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. The kingdom’s 32-year old heir to the throne excelled himself. He surpassed the high levels of chaos and human misery he had already achieved as the defence minister who launched the air campaign on Yemen.

First up was the sudden resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri after just one year in office. Hariri made his announcement from Riyadh, which is a curious place to resign the premiership of Lebanon. His speech was hardline anti-Hezbollah and anti-Iran, setting a tone not heard from him in years.

A few days before he gave no indication that he was under the threat of assassination, as he claimed in his speech. He allowed airport workers to take selfies with him, and left Lebanon in a sunny and optimistic mood.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when he left Lebanon, Hariri had no intention of resigning, that he himself did not know that he would resign and that this resignation had been forced on him by the Saudis
Hariri thought he had survived the pressure which had been applied last year on his construction company Saudi Oger, which was facing bankruptcy, and a meeting with Saudi Minister of State for Gulf Affairs Thamer al-Sabhan went well.

Al-Sabhan tweeted that the two agreed on "many things that are of interest”. But the minister’s tone changed rapidly after Hariri’s resignation. He then tweeted: "The hands of treachery and aggression must be amputated,” referring to Hezbollah and Iran.

The well informed but anonymous Saudi commentator, who uses the Twitter handle Mujtahidd, discounted the theory that Hariri felt under threat of assassination from Iran. He said the Lebanese premier was under greater physical threat from the Islamic State group.

Mujtahidd said Hariri emerged from his latest talks with Ali Akbar Velayati, the Iranian supreme leader’s senior international affairs adviser, in good spirits.

“The main reason for summoning him back to Riyadh is to hold him captive with the rest of the detained princes and businessmen to blackmail him and force him to bring back the funds he has abroad, particularly those not linked to Lebanon.”

“The statement he read was written for him. He was not convinced about it, neither in terms of content nor in terms of submitting his resignation from Riyadh. For how is it possible for a political leader to announce his resignation from another country’s capital?” Mujtahidd wrote on Twitter.
Mujtahidd's tweets
Hossein Sheikholeslam, senior advisor to the Iranian foreign minister, appeared to agree with Mujtahidd. He accused US President Donald Trump and the Saudi crown prince of pressurising Hariri into resigning: “Al-Hariri's resignation was done in coordination with Trump and Mohammed bin Salman to foment tension in Lebanon and the region," Sheikholeslam said.

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, reacted calmly to the news on Sunday. He placed the blame for Hariri’s removal on the Saudis, calling the resignation a violation of Lebanese sovereignty and an attack on “Hariri’s dignity”.  He referred to Hariri as “our prime minister,” not, note, our former prime minister.

Put all these statements together, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that when he left Lebanon, Hariri had no intention of resigning, that he himself did not know that he would resign and that this resignation had been forced on him by the Saudis. My information, however, is that he has not been arrested.

The second event was a bump in the night quite literally. It came just hours after Hariri’s bellicose speech.  A long range missile launched by Houthi rebels thousands of kilometres away in Yemen came down somewhere near Riyadh airport in the north of the capital. The missile was allegedly intercepted by Saudi air defence missiles, but there were reports of scenes of panic on the ground.

Until now, the Houthis have usually targeted Jeddah. A long-range missile aimed at the capital was read by the Saudis as a clear message from an Iranian proxy: “You ramp up the pressure on Hezbollah and we will ramp up the pressure on you in Riyadh,” the launchers of the missile seemed to say.

McCarthy reborn

The third event to disturb the peace had been well planned. Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah’s demise had been widely predicted. He was in charge of the kingdom’s third military force, the national guard, and as Mohammed bin Salman had taken control of the ministry of defence and the ministry of interior (after ousting his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef). It was only a matter of time before he would take the scalp of Mutaib and put all three of the kingdom’s armies under his personal control.
The National Guard recruits historically from the kindgom's tribes. On Sunday the bank accounts of the tribal sheikhs involved in the army were frozen and prominent sheikhs have been banned from travel. They were mainly from the Motair and Otaiba tribes who had been loyal to the late King Abdullah. This was done to crack down on dissent.
We did not predict how brutally bin Salman would move against Mutaib. He and his brother Turki were arrested and charged with corruption. His arrest was signalled by websites close to the Royal Court, which printed initials and said the corruption was linked to military sales in his ministry. They created a special hashtag for the occasion which read: “Salman is confronting corruption”.
This committee is McCarthyite in its powers and scope. The first thing to note in the decree which set it up, is that it puts itself above and beyond the law
Al-Arabiya broke the news that first 10 and then 11 princes had been arrested, along with 38 top businessmen and former ministers.

In a style of government which is unique to the kingdom, the decision to carry out this purge appears to have preceded the announcement of the committee formed to make these arrests. This is how the young prince acts, a man who some Middle East experts persist in referring to as a Western-style reformer. He acts with total disregard to habeas corpus, due process and the rule of law. In his eyes, those arrested are guilty before they are proven guilty.
This committee is McCarthyite in its powers and scope. The first thing to note in the decree which set it up, is that it puts itself above and beyond the law. The decree states that the committee (which bin Salman chairs) is “exempt from laws, regulations, instructions, orders and decisions while the committee shall perform the following tasks ... the investigation issuance of arrest warrants, travel ban, disclosure and freezing of accounts and portfolios, tracking of funds, assets, and preventing their remittance or transfer by persons and entities whoever they might be. The committee has the right to take any precautionary measures it sees, until they are referred to the investigating authorities or judicial bodies.”

In other words, the prince can do anything he likes to anyone, seizing their assets in and outside the kingdom. Let’s just remind ourselves of what he now controls. The prince heads all three of Saudi Arabia’s armies; he heads Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company; he heads the committee in charge of all economic affairs which is just about to launch the biggest privatisation the kingdom has seen; and he now controls all of Saudi’s media chains.
If previous moves bin Salman took constituted a power grab, Saturday’s moves were a wealth grab
This was apparent from the list of businessmen arrested. ART, MBC and Rotana Media group dominate the Arab media. These Saudi media corporations account for most of what is put out on air in the Middle East, apart from the news output of Qatari-owned Al Jazeera.
Their respective owners, Saleh Kamel, Walid al-Ibrahim and Prince Waleed bin Talal are behind bars. Presumably too their wealth has been confiscated. Forbes prices bin Talal, chairman of the Kingdom Holding Corporation, at $18bn. He owns sizeable shares in numerous companies, including Newscorp, Citigroup, 21st Century Fox and Twitter. These shares too are under new management. The head of STC, the biggest mobile operator in Saudi, was also arrested.

If previous moves bin Salman took constituted a power grab, Saturday’s moves were a wealth grab.

Quite apart from the political dangers of stripping so many very rich Saudis of their wealth, this is a bizarre way to encourage foreigners to invest in the kingdom. BIn Salman’s actions on Saturday seemed to be designed to scare them all off.

The economy is in recession and foreign reserves are being depleted. Bin Salman has just seized the assets of the kingdom’s biggest businessmen and set up a committee that can seize assets at will at home or abroad. What would stop him doing the same to the assets of foreign investors who fell out with him?
The purge of other top oligarchs like Bakr bin Laden, who headed the top construction company in the country, will also have a knock-on effect in the rest of the economy. The bin Laden group employs thousands of sub-contractors. Purges and business do not mix, as bin Salman will soon find out.

Cracks in royal family

I am told by a reliable source that Prince Waleed bin Talal refused to invest in Neom, the mega city bin Salman announced would be built, and that was the reason why the crown prince removed his cousin. But bin Talal had also clashed with his cousin by calling openly for bin Nayef’s release from house arrest.
All branches of the royal family have been affected by this purge, and others that preceded it
The other point to note is that all branches of the royal family have been affected by this purge, and others that preceded it. Just look at the names of the princes who have been taken out  - bin Talal, bin Fahd, bin Nayef, bin Muqrin. The latter died in a plane crash, apparently trying to flee the country. These names tell you one thing - the cracks in the royal family go far and deep and extend to its very core.
Would all this have happened without another green light from Trump? He tweeted yesterday that he "would very much appreciate Saudi Arabia doing their IPO of Aramco with the New York Stock Exchange, important to the United States!” Trump also called King Salman, congratulating him for everything he did since coming to power. The moves follow Jared Kushner’s third visit to the kingdom this year.  
If it was not apparent to one and all, it surely must be now. The capital of insecurity in the Middle East is Riyadh, and moves by a 32-year old prince to acquire absolute power are capable of destabilising neighbouring countries and removing their prime ministers. Worse, this prince appears to be encouraged by a US president who does not know what he is doing.

Wiser heads in Washington DC, like the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson or the Defence Secretary James Mattis must be tearing their hair out - or what is left of it. It would not surprise me to learn that Tillerson has had enough of trying to put out the fires that his president and his immediate entourage keep on igniting.
- David Hearst is editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye. He was chief foreign leader writer of The Guardian, former Associate Foreign Editor, European Editor, Moscow Bureau Chief, European Correspondent, and Ireland Correspondent. He joined The Guardian from The Scotsman, where he was education correspondent.
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Secular despots - coming soon to an Arab state near you

A GOOD PIECE

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In a November 2 article, the Economist named Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi "the new Arab cosmopolitans' [Reuters]
Link

From a recent article in the all mighty and wise Economist, we learn that a new crop of "secular" Arab despots are seizing on what it calls our "zeitgeist". They are pushing forward with a robust secularising agenda that will outmanoeuvre and bypass their Islamist opposition, appease their boisterous middle-class constituencies, and in the process solidify their iron fist of tyranny while allowing women without a veil to enjoy their shisha in public or any other such happy amenities.
"The region's authoritarians, who once tried to co-opt Islamists," we are told, "now view them as the biggest threat to their rule. By curbing the influence of clerics, they are also weakening checks on their own power. Still, many Arab leaders seem genuinely interested in moulding more secular and tolerant societies, even if their reforms do not extend to the political sphere."
The good tidings the Economist brings to its readers eager to exploit the economic opportunities such secular despotism promises to deliver to Europe and co., echo equally auspicious news that the Guardian had brought to its readers about a week earlier. The newspaper reported that "Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, has vowed to return the country to "moderate Islam" and asked for global support to transform the hardline kingdom into an open society that empowers citizens and lures investors."
In a spirit of good brotherly love among Muslims, the Saudi prince, of course, blames Iran for the turn to the nasty old "radical Islam".   
"What happened in the last 30 years is not Saudi Arabia," the prince declared, "What happened in the region in the last 30 years is not the Middle East. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, people wanted to copy this model in different countries, one of them is Saudi Arabia. We didn't know how to deal with it. And the problem spread all over the world. Now is the time to get rid of it."
WATCH

Can the crown prince change Saudi culture?

This blaming of Iran and Iranians for all the ills of the world is, of course, an old cliche among many Arab princes and emirs and even some scholars too. There are scholars of gender and sexuality in Islam who blame polygamy on Iranians, while some thinkers have blamed Iranians for the rise of homosexuality among the Arabs. 
Left to their own devices Arabs, according to this xenophobic fantasy, would have been happily monogamous, heterosexual, and above all moderate Muslims, bordering with the top choice of being "secular" too. These nasty old "Persians" have been an old plague to these puritanical princes and their learned advisors.  

'Secular despots' and their 'moderate Islam'

Back to earth and among us mortals, however, we see a link between what our Saudi prince calls and considers "moderate Islam" and the "secular tyrants" of whom the Economist reports.  As Madawi Al-Rasheed recently wrote: "The crown prince's understanding of moderate Islam is a project in which dissenting voices are silenced, activists are locked behind bars, and critics are forced into submission." 
What is now being trumpeted as "moderate Islam" is an ideology of submission to the overpowering domination of neoliberal economics without any moral or imaginative resistance. 
Accepting the Zionist theft of Palestine and competing to establish open diplomatic relations with Israel, systematic oppression of civil liberties at home, mobilisation of transnational Arab armies to bomb civilian targets in Yemen, turning ancient and historic cities to wet dreams of predatory capitalism, massive waste of national resources on advanced military equipment are some of the vintage doctrinal dimensions of this "moderate Islam" now being promoted by these "secular despots". 
But under the smokescreen of these "secular despots" and hidden beneath their "moderate Islam," between the degenerate ideologies of fanaticism and ignorance that has informed the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the tribal despotism ruling supreme from one end of the Arab and Muslim world to another, stand tall masses of millions of people whose ancestral faith and political agency are not at the mercy of either Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his gang of murderers or General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi commanding a reactionary junta subverting the Egyptian revolution.  
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Rafia Zakaria
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A fine example of such benevolent dictatorship that the Economist describes is the United Arab Emirates whose leaders have evidently "led the way in relaxing religious and social restrictions. While leading a regional campaign against Islamist movements, Muhammad bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and the UAE's de facto leader, has financed the construction of Western university branches and art galleries." 
What this kind of outdated Orientalism betrays is the simple proposition that the more the world looks like a fictional Europe, the more it is "secular" and "moderate", the more they are to be trusted and welcomed.  Left to their own non-western devices, these Muslims become nasty, brutish, and fanatical. If they cannot become secular and moderate Muslims by themselves, then (damn it, why not) let a tyrant do it for them. 

Nations negating their states

Entirely outside the purview of such banal Eurocentric imagination, the fate of nations in the Arab and Muslim world is determined by the internal logic and rhetoric of an entirely different dynamic.
The beautiful struggles of Arabs and Muslims for justice and civil liberties can no longer be divided into the bogus, flawed, and outdated "secular" versus "religious" division or "moderate" versus "radical" Islam. These are US and European think tank mantras categorically irrelevant to the inner working of Muslim moral and historical imagination, of which neither the Economist nor the Saudi prince have a blasted clue. 
European colonialism and American imperialism (both now gathered at the root of the Zionist theft of Palestine) framing the rise and persistence of nativist tyranny, are the chief catalysts of critical thinking in the Arab and Muslim world and thus map out the future of its collective national destinies. Without a simultaneous attention to these historical forces, any fly-by-night concept like "secular despots" or "moderate Islam" is highfalutin hogwash. 
Ours is as much an age of post-Islamism, in the elegant phrasing of Asef Bayat, as it is of post-secularism, as Jurgen Habermas has theorised. The binary of secular/religious was of a European (Christian) vintage and had nothing to do with Islam, Judaism, or any other religion. "Secularism," as Gil Anidjar has persuasively argued, was and remains Western Christianity thinly disguised.  

The inner dynamics of Islam in its encounter with Europeans colonial modernity and the effervescence of Muslim communities in their renewed global and cosmopolitan contexts are mapping out the contours of a vastly different world than the one imagined by the Saudi prince or the prognostications of the Economist. 
Tribal monarchies, fake republics, military juntas, secular tyrants, and the militant fanaticism they have created, branded, and now fight are all made of the same cloth. The fate of 1.6 billion human beings who call and consider themselves, in one way or another, 'Muslim' is not and will never be determined by the juvenal delusions of any Arab prince or "secular tyrant" - nor indeed by their common nemesis in the frightful apparition of ISIL and its ilk. 
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." The Saudi prince must get his clues from the prince of Denmark, stop listening to his American and Israeli advisors and cease wasting his nation's resources on useless billion-dollar projects. 
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Azmi Bishara's Latest Comment


عن موقف الديمقراطي إزاء المحاور

من أهم مآثر الثورات العربية قبل فوضى الثورة المضادة (التي قادها النظام القديم وقوى ظلامية داخل المجتمع أيضا) أنها فزرت القوى السياسية بين الاستبداد ومناهضته. فوقف الديمقراطيون في المعسكر المناهض للاستبداد (وإن فشلوا، أو أفشلوا، في تنفيذ برنامج انتقال ديمقراطي). أما الإنقسام الإقليمي الحالي الذي يشهد تصعيدا خطيرا فتعبير عن صراع بين أنظمة ودول وقوى غير ديموقراطية منتظمة في محاور. التحدي أمام الديمقراطي أن يصمد في رفضه الانضمام إلى أحد المعسكرين في مواجهة الآخر، لأن كلا المعسكرين داعم لاستبدادٍ في خدمته، ورافضٌ لأي نوع من الديمقراطية والإصلاح السياسي والاجتماعي الحقيقي. 
عزمي بشارة
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