Tunisia still faces many dangers ahead. It has produced more ISIS terrorists than any other country, and it has also experienced terror attacks at home. Yet its story suggests a way forward in laying the groundwork for democratic openings in the Middle East and elsewhere: Find constituencies with deep roots in the society and the breadth to reach outside of urban areas. The lesson is that democracy is strongest when its base is widest. Tunisia’s fate—like that of any young democracy—still hangs in the balance. But little by little it is building a stable future and providing a path ahead that others may follow.
Arab Monarchies: Will They Reform?
The countries most affected by the 2011 unrest in the Middle East share a common trait. Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Yemen were all founded as Arab “republics” in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, while the unrest seemed to spread from one “republic” to the next, it appeared to skip over the region’s monarchies, with the exception of the small Kingdom of Bahrain. In one sense, this is not surprising. The “republics” were never really republics, after all, and it is not as if their populations didn’t notice. Arab monarchies do not rule with regard to formal democratic procedures, but they do by and large enjoy some legitimacy. The republics, on the other hand, have long experienced a fatal gap between what they claim to be and what they really are, and in 2011, fear broke down and their people finally called them out on it. They no longer wanted a “president for life,” they said. They wanted their “republics” to live up to their name.
Although the Arab monarchies, especially those in the Gulf, have so far withstood calls for political reform, they do not have time to rest comfortably. Louder demands for change will eventually come their way too. The question is, Will they be ready? The challenge for them today is to prepare for that day now.
Education Reform: A Substitute for Political Rights?
The monarchs have for the most part tried to modernize their societies through progress in areas other than politics. They remain repressive of political dissent, as evidenced most brutally in Saudi Arabia by the harsh punishments for even minor bloggers. Yet, in addition to the freedom gap, the Arab Human Development Report noted that the Arab world risked being left behind due to shortcomings in two other important areas: education and women’s empowerment. These two areas have become increasingly linked in the changes taking place in the region. Education reform has emerged as a safe way to address gender issues—at least for now.
Ironically, the monarchs’ wives have led some of these efforts, despite the patriarchal nature of the societies. In Qatar, Sheikha Mozah is an outspoken advocate for this cause, creating partnerships with American universities like Texas A&M. She travels across the world speaking about the subject. The widow of the founder of the United Arab Emirates (and the mother of the ruling bin Zayed brothers) has not only educated her daughters but pushed for opportunities for women across the country.
Sheikha Fatima of the United Arab Emirates wears an abaya and a silk mask that covers all but her eyes and will not see men outside of her family. And so it was very good to be a female secretary of state. She always made time for me, gathering her daughters, daughters-in-law, and other women for a conversation over tea. I would listen intently as they traded stories about the region and the circumstances of various leaders. You see, there was a wives’ network that stretched from Cairo to the Gulf, and it was an amazing source of insight into the complex relationships dictating the direction of politics in the region.
The UAE has relentlessly pursued the cause of women’s education. Emirati women play a wide role in the economy and society. They serve in appointed positions in politics, diplomacy, and the judiciary. And they are educated in fine universities. I have taught several of them in my undergraduate and MBA classes at Stanford. According to the government, women make up more than 60 percent of the students enrolled in higher education and more than 70 percent of total graduates. The ruling families of the Emirates with their small indigenous populations see economic development and women’s empowerment as inextricably linked.
In Saudi Arabia, the most conservative of the monarchies, the advocacy for education reform is most closely associated with the late king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud. I saw this firsthand during my many visits with him. One met the king very late at night—no earlier than 11 p.m. After intensive discussions of the long political agenda in the region—Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and the Palestinians—Abdullah would ask if we could take a little break. By this time it was already one o’clock and I knew that we would spend at least another hour or so together.
After the brief pause, he always seemed more relaxed. We were essentially alone—with only my interpreter, Gemal Helal, whom the Arabs trusted completely, and sometimes Adel al-Jubeir, the king’s closest aide. The conversation would turn quickly to the broader philosophical challenges facing the kingdom. Abdullah was fascinated by American education and would ask questions, usually prefacing them with, “You teach in a university.”
Abdullah had a very nuanced understanding of the educational landscape in his country. He explained that Saudi students had once gone abroad in large numbers, studying in the United Kingdom and the United States. His foreign minister and nephew, the late Saud al-Faisal, was an example. Educated at Princeton, he was at ease in any cultural setting. The next generation, forty-somethings, Abdullah noted, largely stayed home. They didn’t speak foreign languages and they took a curriculum at King Fahd University that was heavily weighted toward religious studies. “They have no useful skills,” he said. That’s quite an admission from a deeply pious man, I thought to myself.
Abdullah told me that Saudi Arabia could not afford to lose another generation and had insisted on sending students abroad. But after 9/11, the number of Saudis studying in the United States dropped precipitously. Several of the suicide hijackers had gone to college in the West. This made intelligence agencies—and especially the Congress—wary of foreign students. And many Saudis were afraid to come. They were not alone in facing barriers to university study in the United States. Stricter screening and cumbersome tracking rules caused a plunge in American exchange student programs across the world.
In every meeting with the president, foreign leaders would complain about this. I will never forget one encounter with the prime minister of Singapore. He asked each member of his delegation, “Where did you go to school?” Every one of them had attended an American university. “Mr. President,” the prime minister said, “you are shooting yourselves in the foot. Educating these people in the United States is more valuable than anything else that you do.” The president was moved, and I took responsibility for trying to get the numbers back to the pre-9/11 level. By 2007 we achieved that goal, including in the Middle East.
Still, Abdullah did not want to depend solely on foreign institutions to train future generations. And so he launched a plan to build a world-class university in the kingdom. King Abdullah University of Science and Technology was established with a $10 billion endowment. “It will be like Stanford,” he said, perhaps flattering me a bit. “Strong in science, medicine, and technology.” I knew the king well enough to ask the next question. “Will women attend, Your Majesty?” I asked. Abdullah laughed. “Of course.” I didn’t want to ask if they would have to sit in separate classrooms. But if I had, I would have been pleased to learn they do not. Today in Saudi Arabia, more women graduate from college every year than men.19 Saudi women are entering the workforce in greater numbers, with female employment rising 48 percent between 2010 and 2015.20
Still, conversations with the late king about women’s rights were always a bit contradictory. On one occasion he told me flatly that women would vote in ten years. That was 2005, and in 2015 the franchise—such as it was—was extended to female citizens. Abdullah went to great lengths to receive delegations of women, something that his predecessors had not done. Although women were not allowed to vote or run for a seat when the first elections were held for municipal councils
, they won those rights in 2011, and exercised them for the first time in 2015. Saudi women went to polling booths just as Saudi men did (but at different locations), and by the next day, twenty Saudi women had won seats on the municipal councils.
On the other hand, Abdullah just didn’t see why the prohibition on women driving was an issue. He once explained that it wasn’t really safe to drive in Saudi cities. The logic of that answer escaped me, but I didn’t push. And, of course, despite some of the changes, women remain second-class citizens in the kingdom—dependent on a male guardian’s permission to marry, apply for a passport, travel abroad, pursue certain jobs, and carry out other basic life activities. Every day, they face social pressures and public dangers if they stray from the strict rule of the hated religious police.
Still, one senses that the monarchs are searching for a way to get ahead of the demands for reform. In a few cases, there is even some movement on the political front.
The UAE has created a parliament-like majlis that advises the government on matters of policy. Half of its forty members are indirectly elected through an electoral college and the other half are appointed by the government. The majlis does not have the kinds of powers we traditionally associate with a parliament. But compared to the situation before its establishment in 2006, steps like these mark progress.
Morocco and Jordan have young monarchs who are relatively popular. In fits and starts, they have reformed the civil service, strengthened rule of law, and ceded some power to prime ministers. Morocco has now held several relatively free elections in which a moderate Islamist party has performed well. That party has even gone on to do a reasonably good job in government, hoping to get reelected the next time.
The al-Sabah family in Kuwait has also engaged in reforms. The Kuwaiti parliament functions as a check on the government in real ways. Comprising fifty members who run in elections, it serves as a national stage for debate, where the government’s policies face regular scrutiny and criticism. It can be dismissed at any time, and there are no political parties, but different groups are represented by different blocs, with one bloc for liberals, another for Sunnis, another for Shia, and so on. Parliamentarians cannot initiate legislation, but they play an important role in overseeing ministerial appointments, in effect giving the people a voice in deciding who serves in some of the highest offices. Kuwaiti women were granted the right to vote and run for office in 2005, and the first female candidates were elected to parliament in 2009.
I was in Kuwait shortly after the first elections in which women were allowed to run, and I talked with several female candidates who had failed to win. They were crushed. I did my best to lift their spirits, reflecting on the long road to democracy. “Women didn’t get the right to vote in the United States until 1920,” I said. “And now I’m secretary of state.” They were inconsolable, though. They didn’t give up and ran in larger numbers in the next cycle. This time, they campaigned and pushed their message with men—reminding them that they too had mothers and sisters and daughters. Four won.
A week or so later after my visit, I opened a package at the State Department. It was a T-shirt that I had been presented in Kuwait—a gift from those who had met with me. “Half a democracy is no democracy at all” was emblazoned in white and light blue. I turned to Brian Gunderson, my chief of staff. “Truer words have never been spoken,” I said.
For the most part, the monarchs are trying to address the three gaps that the Arab Human Development Report identified—on freedom, knowledge, and women’s empowerment—as if they were separable. But they cannot likely be solved fully in isolation from one another. They are intertwined. Yet progress on any one of them brings the Middle Eastern monarchies closer to building a favorable institutional landscape. These are unlikely to ever become constitutional monarchies of the kind that helped ease the transition to democracy in Spain.21 But the role of these leaders is shifting, albeit very slowly. Continuity is not a bad thing if it is paired with a willingness to change.
In this regard, the biggest question is one of how these societies will balance religious beliefs and individual liberty. In many of them, particularly Saudi Arabia, religious reactionaries are a power in their own right. The bargain struck years ago between the Saudi monarch and the clerics is an impediment to change. At the time, “We’ll leave religion to you and you leave politics to us” must have seemed reasonable. Shaken by the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Saudis took a shortcut to stability. In exchange for peaceful coexistence with the Wahhabis, followers of a puritanical strain of Islam, the kingdom ceded moral authority to the clerics. They, in turn, came to infiltrate larger and larger domains—including the export of their radical ideas abroad under the Saudi flag.
For years, the Gulf monarchies thought that the radicals would target only foreigners. They tolerated them and looked the other way, buying their loyalty with state funding. During one visit to Saudi Arabia, Steve Hadley and I were taken on a tour of the king’s extraordinary aquarium. As we walked through the glass tunnel, fish swimming all around us, Steve and I both noticed that there were not just tropical fish but also sharks. “How do you keep the sharks from eating the fish?” he asked. “Oh, if you feed the sharks enough, they don’t bother the fish,” our guide answered. Steve whispered to me, “That’s what they thought about al-Qaeda.”
Indeed, the Frankenstein of the Wahhabis—al-Qaeda and its kin—turned on those who had fed them. The bombing of residential compounds in Riyadh in 2003 was a turning point. Gulf rulers, particularly in Saudi Arabia, have tried to rein the clerics in, closing mosques and schools known for radicalism. But it is difficult to root out such entrenched influence. The society remains deeply conservative and, in many cases, at odds with the demands of modern governance.
Just consider this: Saudi Arabia wants to decrease its dependence on oil and modernize the economy. The young deputy crown prince Mohammad bin Salman has launched a plan—Vision 2030—to transform the economic landscape in the country. The plan aims to increase the share of non-oil revenue in public finances by 70 percent, reduce subsidies for water and electricity prices to zero by 2020, increase female participation in the workforce, and limit the growth of new jobs in the civil service. Another goal is to increase tourism beyond that associated with the hajj. The Saudis hope to attract more foreign businesses and the people who come with them. But life in Saudi Arabia can be grim, given the social restrictions. So they have proposed to create large gated communities—almost the size of cities—where foreigners, and maybe some Saudis, can pretty much do as they please. This odd compromise may be the best that they can do for the moment. But in the long run, the relationship between religion, politics, and society will have to be addressed more forthrightly.
The monarchs are not alone, though, in needing to find a way to reconcile religion and politics. The region has seen two extremes: the complete marriage of Islam and the state and, on the other hand, enforced secularism. Neither has worked very well.
Secularism as practiced in Egypt and Turkey led to the disenfranchisement of large segments of the population, particularly rural people. This was a boon to groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and at the root of the success of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP party. Religion and politics don’t mix easily—but the exclusion of religious people from politics doesn’t work either.
The Europeans fought wars for two centuries in order to finally expel religious authorities from the political space. The American Founding Fathers had a different answer, insisting that religious freedom could be guaranteed only through the separation of church and state. Neither of these roads seems particularly likely in the Middle East. But the region desperately needs an answer to the challenge. Institutions that recognize the rights of the individual citizen to make choices in this most personal of realms—religious belief—would be a good start.
Today’s Middle East is going in the wrong direction in this regard. Religious minorities, particularly Christians, are literally being driven f
rom the region because governments cannot or will not protect them. This has been especially true in Iraq and Syria, but it is also a regional phenomenon, affecting Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, and others. Secularists in Turkey hold their breath to see how far the reach of religious conservatives will spread after the coup attempt against Erdoğan in 2016. Religious people in Egypt wait anxiously to see whether all Islamists, no matter how moderate, will be branded Muslim Brotherhood and excluded from the political square. It is a gross understatement to note that the region has found no way to address the question of proper balance between religion and politics.
The uncomfortable question in the Middle East is whether Islam and democracy’s protections for individual liberty can coexist. Some would say that Islam’s claim to govern every aspect of an adherent’s life makes societies vulnerable to totalitarian-like impulses. Certainly, the Muslim Brotherhood’s brief reign in Egypt or Hamas’s reign in the Gaza Strip would support this view. On the other hand, Islamists in Tunisia have found a way to work with others who are not like-minded and Iraq’s parliament houses both religious and secular politicians. Further afield, India and indeed the United States show that Islam and democracy are not irreconcilable. Even Indonesia, younger in its democratic journey, has largely succeeded in containing extremism and embracing a multi-religious future, although not without difficulty.
This suggests that if there is to be a future for a democratic version of political Islam, it rests in the institutional context in which it operates. In other words, there is nothing inherently undemocratic about Islam as a faith—but individual citizens have to be able to make choices about how deeply religion will influence their lives. Essentially, it cannot be the business of the state to dictate this matter of conscience.
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