The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (17 page)

“Here your ideas can make things change,” says Dr. Omar bin Suleiman, one of a small group of Emirati natives in their thirties to forties who make up Sheikh Mohammed’s kitchen cabinet responsible for managing the daily operations of Dubai Inc. The U.S.-educated bin Suleiman was CEO of Internet City before he was moved over to iron out some of the regulatory problems at the International Financial Center. “One businessman told me he was considering doing business in Lebanon,” says bin Suleiman. “But he saw all these posters with the pictures of all of Lebanon’s different leaders, and wondered, ‘Who do I go to if there’s a problem?’ In Dubai you know who you go to, and the government listens.” In other words, Sheikh Mohammed is the government, a tribal chieftain working on a global stage.

It was Ramadan, and bin Suleiman invited me over to break the fast. He lived in a large villa in a neighborhood that looks like a suburb of Los Angeles, where he got his graduate degree before returning
home to the Emirates. The juices and dates set out on tray tables were the only color in a sparsely decorated living room with only a long white couch with gilded edges and matching chairs. He removed his white head scarf and white skullcap and went to pray. When he returned, the meal began in earnest, several different rice dishes, some with lentils and others with meat, like
mansaf
, which was not served with the head of the lamb resting in the middle of the dish, as it usually is in traditional Bedouin fashion.

The Gulf Arabs do have a real culture, even if the citified Arabs of the Fertile Crescent disparage them as uncouth bumpkins with none of the refinement that the storied Arab metropolises have embodied for over a thousand years. The Bedouin have neither ancient mosques nor great museums for the curious tourist to wander through; their culture is transmitted through poetry, the spoken history of the tribesmen, their heroes and feats of arms passed down to generations in an oral tradition’s vast library of virtues, like loyalty, physical courage, and generosity. And without those virtues and the culture of the tribesman, the Arabs, the Bedouin, who gave rise to Islam, there would be no minarets owning the horizon from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean.

“Dubai is different from Egypt and the rest of the Arab world,” says bin Suleiman. “I was at the duty-free in the airport, and an Egyptian fellah was looking at computers and wanted to know the best one. I asked him, ‘You don’t know how to use computers, do you?’ He said, ‘It’s not for me, but for my kid. Whoever has one will have the best job.’ See,” bin Suleiman concluded, “even the fellah got it.”

Dubai calls those savants who will master the new technologies “knowledge workers.” The emirate had hoped to boost its population to five million knowledge workers within the next decade and become a major international service and sales hub, serving the Middle East as well as Africa and the Asian subcontinent. The big regional and international firms, universities, hospitals, and media outfits—like Microsoft, Apple, Cornell University Medical Center,
Purdue University—that leased space in the free zones saw Dubai as a forward position in a market that until the fall of 2008 showed no signs of weakening anytime soon thanks to India’s and China’s growing need for fossil fuels. But with history as a guide, cracks were showing long before the crisis hit.

The Emiratis saw Dubai much the way the father of modern Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha, understood Egypt: the latter sent delegations to France and Italy to learn the latest in scientific and military advances, while the former lured the West to bring its twenty-first century to the Arabs, but both believed modernity could be had on the cheap. Egypt’s failure to join the modern world over the last two centuries was proof enough that this was a delusion: without the values and worldview that underpin the manufacture of technology, the Arabs will not only come short of catching up to the West but also end up living a schizophrenic existence. The gap between the West and the Orient is not geographical; rather, it is a rift between two worldviews, where the first is an open and free society that cannot help but constantly reevaluate and investigate its own premises, leading it to prize the empiricism and quest for the new that propel technological innovation, while the second is a culture that draws red lines around authority—political, religious, cultural, and even familial—as a matter of habit.

To be sure, Dubai advertised itself as an open Arab society eager to join the world community, but just as the impact of the financial crisis was starting to be felt, the emirate kept an Israeli tennis player from competing in one of the international tournaments that were meant to raise the emirate’s profile. At the same time, Abu Dhabi’s much-publicized International Book Fair banned a novel portraying a fictional Gulf sheikh as a homosexual. The Gulf Arabs were not less ideological than their brothers in the Levant. They were just more adept at straddling two worlds than the rest of the Arabs were.

Media City was central in promoting Dubai-style openness. Home to several Arab and international press outfits, with its most
famous tenant the twenty-four-hour news station Al Arabiya, the ostensibly liberal alternative to Al Jazeera, the region’s most notorious satellite network, Media City projected an image of Dubai that represented less the reality of the emirate than its economic program and political strategy.

At one time Cairo was the capital of Arab media, a position that enhanced Egypt’s regional prestige with the sort of “soft power” rivals could only envy. On the strength of Cairo’s advanced recording and film industry, Egyptian became the best known of all Arabic dialects and the region’s de facto lingua franca. Even today some of the most popular Lebanese divas record their songs in Egyptian in order to tap the region’s largest music-buying market. Cairo’s reputation as cultural power broker, trendsetter, and opinion maker endured even as Nasser began to nationalize the press and turn it into a regime bullhorn. Others followed the Egyptian leader’s example until the Arabic-language media essentially consisted of closed local markets from Morocco to Iraq that faced little internal competition and gave the regimes almost absolute control over the flow of information leaving or entering their countries. That slowly began to change as Western networks penetrated the Arab market with the advent of satellite technology, and when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Arabs flipped to CNN International for coverage of a conflict that was taking place in their own backyards. The BBC tried to piggyback on CNN’s success by setting up an Arabic-language satellite network, and when it failed, much of the staff signed on with a start-up operation that began broadcasting from Qatar in 1996 as Al Jazeera.

As globalization cheerleaders see technology as an engine of political reform, many herald the Qatari network as the dawn of a new day in the Middle East. Social progress, they suggest, will invariably follow technological innovation, just as the printing press transformed Europe and the Gutenberg Bible sparked the Reformation. On this view, Al Jazeera is a breakthrough not just for Arab media but for all Arab society, pushing open public space and redrawing red
lines. With all the information that satellite TV makes available to Arab viewers, the regimes now no longer have the last word on what appears in Arab living rooms and coffeehouses. Al Jazeera has made dissent and debate the order of the day, and with the Arabs talking openly for the first time ever, there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.
¹
In other words, the revolution
is
being televised, because television is the revolution.

In reality, there is little in tone or content to distinguish Al Jazeera from the rest of the region’s standard media fare, certainly not the anti-Semitic and anti-American exhortations of the network’s hosts and guests, though it is true that seldom before have viewers had the opportunity to repeat those same clichés themselves during live on-air phone calls. The station’s most popular show is
Sharia and Life
, preaching and advice from the Muslim Brotherhood sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, praised by Western academics for his relatively moderate social message,
²
while ignoring his mainstream, hard-line political positions, like his anti-Shia invective. Even as Al Jazeera may have made the Nasserist model of state-owned media obsolete, it features a popular talk show hosted by a Nasserist retread, Muhammad Hassanein Heykal, who served as the Egyptian president’s onetime confidant, speechwriter, and publicist, and whose message has changed little since the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war. There’s only one thing new about Al Jazeera, aside from its first-rate production values: it showed Arab regimes that while they could no longer manage words and images to control information internally, neither could rival governments. Paradoxically, what the rise of the new media has really done is increase the ability of Arab regimes to project power across the region and interfere in the workings of other Arab states.

Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, overthrew his father in a 1995 palace coup. His first order of business was to figure out how to put Qatar on a regional stage without the huge quantity of energy resources of neighboring Saudi Arabia, or even the port facilities
of Dubai. The latter served as something of a cosmopolitan model for Qatar, which like Dubai has leased space to Western brand names, like the Louvre Museum and the BBC, which bases its East-West dialogue,
The Doha Debates
, in the emirate. More significantly, Qatar has allowed the U.S. military to set up shop there with CENTCOM, which oversees American military planning in the region. Nonetheless, the Qatari emir’s strategy is focused on the Gulf’s principal Sunni power, Saudi Arabia, and his satellite network plays a key role.

In the 1980s, as Arab intellectuals were escaping from high-conflict zones in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories, they found refuge in London, making it a pan-Arab media hub in exile, where newspapers and magazines grew up alongside the first Arab satellite network, the Saudi-owned Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC). In the British capital, aspiring Arab media figures learned that one of the surest ways to finance a project was to use their editorial space to insult a wealthy individual in the hope that the victim would pay for silence or even buy the medium outright. Naturally, Saudi Arabia’s several thousand wealthy and often debauched royals made good targets. On a bigger scale, this became Qatar’s model for Al Jazeera: by incessantly attacking Riyadh, the emir raised his country’s profile by taking on the biggest kid on the block.

In time, political strategy followed insults and threats, and the Qataris lined up alongside the Saudis’ rivals in Iran and their allies in the resistance bloc, including Hezbollah. For instance, in the summer of 2008 Al Jazeera threw a welcome-home party on live TV for Samir Kuntar after the Lebanese national was released from an Israeli prison where he had served twenty-nine years for bashing in the head of a four-year-old girl. This episode and other like-minded broadcasts set off alarm bells throughout Riyadh. It’s not, of course, that Saudi Arabia is kindly disposed toward the Jewish state. But what Riyadh fears more than Israel is the Iranian-led resistance bloc and anything that bolsters its image, like the celebration of Hezbollah heroes on Al Jazeera, for Iran and its allies threaten the Saudi
order of the region. The Saudi position rests not on brute strength but rather on its wealth and its political and religious clout. That makes it, in some sense, a paper strong horse, one whose power is proportional to its ability to shape Arab opinion.

Of the 300 million Arabic speakers in the greater Middle East, roughly 3 percent constitute what is known as the pan-Arab media market—the 10 million Saudi consumers out of the country’s total population of 27 million wealthy enough to purchase what advertisers are paid to sell. There are elites with plenty of disposable income scattered throughout the region, and several states with populations equal to or larger than Saudi Arabia’s—like Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, and Algeria—but no place has the same concentrated wealth, making Saudi Arabia the largest advertising market in the entire Middle East. Controlling access to that market gives Riyadh all the leverage it needs in the making of Arab opinion, much of which, surprising as it may seem, is liberal.

Almost all of the liberal press outlets, or print and electronic media and networks that prominently feature liberals alongside Arab nationalists and Islamists, are funded by Saudi Arabia, even if severe press restrictions compel media moguls to base their holdings outside the kingdom, like in Dubai and the United Kingdom. Members of the royal family own the two most esteemed London-based pan-Arab newspapers,
Al-Hayat
and
Asharq al-Awsat.
The latter is now edited by the Saudi journalist Tariq Alhomayed, who was studying for his graduate degree in Washington, D.C., when he was called upon to replace another liberal Saudi journalist, Abdul Rahman al-Rashed, when he was named to take over Al Arabiya.

As Al Jazeera is part of Qatar’s business plan, Al Arabiya is a loss leader for its parent company, MBC. Having moved from London to Dubai in 2002, MBC makes a profit on its entertainment channels, especially MBC-2, whose earnings are due to its large roster of premier American movies, a fact that suggests U.S. public diplomacy initiatives in the name of “soft power” are a waste of money—the Arabs
already pay top dollar for the privilege of being saturated with our cultural messages, so there is little new we can tell them if they don’t already get it. In a manner of speaking, Al Arabiya is a function of Riyadh’s public diplomacy that was meant to address Americans’ ideas about the Saudis: in the wake of 9/11, and Al Jazeera’s soaring popularity, Al Arabiya started broadcasting in 2003 to deliver what its investors hoped was a more moderate message.

“It seems ironic that the Saudis are behind all the liberal trends,” Rashed told me in his office, a large glass box of a room looking directly onto the bright studio set. The slender, silver-haired journalist is one of the deans of Arab media, his visage familiar to the readers of the regular column he continues to write for
Asharq al-Awsat
even after coming over to Al Arabiya. “If you look at these media, Al Arabiya,
Asharq al-Awsat
, these are the biggest media names in the region, and they’re owned by Saudi companies. These are definitely not fundamentalists. The liberal orientation reflects the private sector, businesspeople.”