The year 1979 was a tectonic one for the politics of the Arabian Peninsula. The area’s two largest immediate neighbors, Iran and Iraq, both saw notable political developments: In Iran, this was the Islamic Revolution, which toppled the strongly pro-American rule of the Shah, while in Iraq, it was Saddam Hussein’s seizure of power in a coup. Further afield, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel. At the end of 1979, Saudi Arabia had its biggest internal shock ever, when hundreds of Salafi/Wahhabi extremists took over the Grand Mosque complex in Mecca, announced the birth of a new, non-monarchist fundamentalist order in the region and managed to keep control of the mosque for several days. (This latter event, little remembered today in the West, would have long-lasting consequences. It led Saudi Arabia’s eponymous ruling family, al-Saud, to enact a new policy of trying to export domestic supporters of Wahhabism to pursue their zealous callings anywhere else but in the Kingdom. Many of those Saudi nationals who were encouraged to leave went speedily to Afghanistan where they joined the anti-Soviet struggle and laid the basis for what would later become al-Qaeda.)
It is fitting that this anthology starts with a broad survey of the political history of the Gulf/Peninsula area that was written in early 1980 by Fred Halliday. His piece surveys the political currents that criss-crossed the area in the 21 years between 1958, when anti-monarchist revolutions rocked both Egypt and Iraq, and 1979. It provides considerable useful background that can help readers understand the dynamics of the Peninsula today.
The next selection is a description that long-time MERIP Executive Director Jim Paul pulled together in 1980, using many non-English sources, of the seizure of the Grand Mosque and how it was finally ended. Paul’s piece stood for many years as the best account of the mosque takeover published anywhere in English. It underscores the fragile nature of the compact that the al-Saud political rulers have always had—indeed, continue to have—with the Wahhabi networks that form a seemingly essential, though often uneasy, pillar of their rule.
The year 1980 also was momentous for the Peninsula, for in September that year Saddam Hussein launched a large-scale invasion of Iran with the aim of toppling the Islamic Republic. He may have thought that with his large army, copious financial support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states and the implicit support of Washington for his venture, he could speedily succeed. But in 1985, Middle East Report’s long-time editor, Joe Stork, wrote the survey of recent developments in the Gulf region that is the third of our selections here, Saddam’s army was still badly bogged down in Iran. (It was not until August 1988 that the two states finally ended the war.) With great prescience, Stork’s piece also tracks some new steps the US military was taking to establish a presence in the Gulf—a follow-on to the British Royal Navy, which had left its last bases there in 1971.
The editors of Middle East Report wrote in early 1985:
The contemporary opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula have their origins in two processes of radicalization in Middle Eastern politics. The first was the rise of radical nationalists, Nasserists and Baathists, and of communist parties in the 1950s and 1960s, and the second is the spread of the radical Islamic groups in the latter part of the 1970s. The political organizations now engaged in opposition politics in the peninsula spring essentially from these two competing trends.
Since 1985, the supporters of radical political Islam have come increasingly to outnumber those of the radical (secular) nationalism. These three articles from Middle East Report help us understand how this came about.
Map 1: States, Capital Cities, and Borders in the Arabian Peninsula. (2015)
Produced by the Spatial Analysis Lab, University of Richmond
The political situation in the region surrounding the Gulf appears to be re-entering a period of considerable turmoil. The most evident manifestations are the revolution in Iran, the break between Egypt and the majority of Arab states in the Gulf following Camp David, and the outbreak of anti-government violence in Saudi Arabia. There are other developments of a more local character which spring from causes specific to the countries in question—the uncertain “stop-go” policies of the rulers of Kuwait and Bahrain toward elected parliaments, the persistent divisions within the UAE, the reemergence of unrest in north Oman, conflicts within the Saudi ruling family. The old focus of Peninsula politics, North Yemen, has once more become a center of regional conflict. On the margins of the region, developments in Ethiopia and in Afghanistan have confirmed the sense of many of the Gulf’s rulers that hostile forces are gaining strength just over the horizon.
Separate from these events is a more diffuse set of issues relating to the pattern of social and economic development in the oil-producing states and the related problem of the links between the Gulf and the oil-importing industrialized countries. While oil revenues continue to rise, the post-1973 boom in the Gulf has slowed down. New social tensions, created by the oil-based changes and by the shortsightedness of the Gulf rulers themselves, are becoming more prominent inside these states at the very moment that the international economic environment on which the Gulf relies is becoming even less favorable. The major oil-importing countries are going through a protracted recession: Stagnation and inflation have eroded the terms of trade of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries and cut back the attractiveness for the oil states of investment in the industrialized world.
[…] This nexus of strategic and local socioeconomic problems underlies and reinforces the more immediate, more strictly political tensions evident in the states surrounding the Gulf.
[…]
The relative separation of the Gulf from events in Egypt and the Mashreq [the Arab east] throughout most of this century occurred in spite of the fact that both areas shared a common moment of historical formation. The collapse in World War I of two of the three main regional powers—Russia and Turkey—led to the establishment of the contemporary state system. In the Ottoman territories of the Mashreq new state entities appeared through colonial delimitation—Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Egypt had already been occupied by Britain in 1882, yet here too the war had a decisive political impact, leading to the emergence of the first nationalist movement of a mass character….
In the Gulf and Peninsula, the war had equally important consequences. In Iraq the British installed the Hashemite monarch Feisal [I] in 1920. In North Yemen a new independent and unified state emerged under the control of the Hamid ad-Din imams. In Arabia in the aftermath of the war the Saudi family unified the Arabian deserts into a single state for the first time in centuries. In Iran, World War I swept away the remnants of the Qajar dynasty, providing the vacuum in which Reza Khan seized power in 1921. In 1926 he established the new Pahlavi dynasty.
Within eight years of the end of World War I, therefore, new royal families had come into power in the four most populous states of the region: Between them the Saudi, Hamid ad-Din, Hashemite and Pahlavi regimes formed the basis for a stable and conservative regional system, running from Khorasan in the northeast to Bab al-Mandab in the southwest. Britain, the dominant military power in the Gulf, held formal colonial power only in the small coastal sheikhdoms of the Peninsula, and in Iraq up to 1932. The new regimes, backed by imperialist power, bore the main burdens of political consolidation.
[…]
In the Arab Gulf region there was, through the 1950s, no decolonization struggle or sustained political opposition. The Palestine issue did not play as significant a role here as elsewhere. There were nationalist demonstrations in favor of Egypt in 1956 in Aden, Kuwait and Bahrain, and failed uprisings in North Yemen (1948) and Oman (1957–59), but these oppositions were contained. The regimes under strong British influence were in no position to wage a challenge, even Iraq, which had been formally independent since 1932. Moreover, Arab oil represented a far smaller percentage of world output then, and the oil that was blocked from reaching Europe by the closure of the Suez Canal in 1956–57 was easily compensated for by increased Venezuelan output. The regimes themselves were alarmed by the nationalism advocated by [Egyptian president] Nasser; opposition political groups favoring one or another brand of Arab nationalism had only begun to develop. Compared to either the Mashreq or the Maghreb, the Gulf was politically isolated, anesthetized to the effects of the Palestine question and the rise of Arab nationalism. Here the dissolution of the post-1918 system was to come later. Yet when it did come it happened in a remarkably synchronic form, as can be seen by studying six key components of the regional system.
The breakdown in the Gulf region began in the late 1950s, leading to a decade and a half of turmoil that ended in the mid-1970s when a new Gulf order emerged. It is possible to chart how the early isolation of the Gulf from the rest of Arab politics was gradually broken down, and how the new order that structured the Gulf’s role in the Middle East generally was being built out of the dissolution of the old.
The first major breach in the Gulf’s stability came with the July 1958 revolution in Iraq. This initiated a period of protracted governmental instability in Baghdad, with four successive military regimes and several other coup attempts. Baghdad antagonized the major oil companies by nationalizing 99 percent of the Iraq Petroleum Company’s concession area in 1961. The dispute with the Kurds erupted militarily from 1961 to 1970 and again in 1974–75. Finally, relations between Iraq and its neighbors worsened to the point that throughout the 1960s Iraq presented itself as, and was seen as being, a threat to Western interests in the Gulf.
[…]
The second major breach of the region’s isolation was the North Yemeni revolution of September 1962. In the eight-year civil war which followed, Egypt and Saudi Arabia backed the two opposing sides. It contributed to the start of a guerrilla movement in British-ruled South Yemen in 1963 and, in 1967, the establishment of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). After making gains in South Yemen, the guerrilla movement spread to the Dhofar province of the Sultanate of Oman in 1965. The war in North Yemen, fought by Saudi Arabia and Egypt at one remove, polarized Arab politics. Through the Egyptian intervention in North Yemen, Arab nationalism had a major impact on the Arabian Peninsula for the first time. Yet it was here that the conservative leadership in the Gulf was able to fight back and use the Egyptian failure in North Yemen to build the future Cairo-Riyadh alliance. After the Israeli defeat of Egypt in 1967, King Feisal [of Saudi Arabia] forced Egypt to pull out of North Yemen in return for financial aid that Egypt so desperately required. Egypt henceforth ceased to support opposition movements in the Arabian Peninsula, and from Nasser’s death in 1970 until 1978 the Cairo-Riyadh axis was the most influential in the Arab world.
The consequences of 1967 were equally important in the Peninsula itself, in differing ways. In North Yemen the war dragged on for another three years, until a conservative coalition involving representatives of both sides was established in 1970. Although an independent republic in name, the newly formed Yemen Arab Republic was from then on effectively under the political and economic domination of Saudi Arabia. In South Yemen the guerrillas of the National Liberation Front were provoked by 1967 to turn against Egypt and began, amid immense economic problems, the most consistent socialist transformation of any country in the Arab world.
The counterrevolutionary character of the Gulf has been most evident in Oman. Many agree that 1973 was the watershed year. In the aftermath of the rise in oil prices, Iran dispatched several thousand counterinsurgency troops to attack the guerrilla-held areas of Dhofar. The People’s Front for the Liberation of Oman fought bravely against the thousands of well-armed troops sent to crush them, but it was compelled by the end of 1975 to abandon the liberated territories it had held since the late 1960s. It was forced to resort to underground political work; the few military forces remaining in the mountains posed no serious threat to the establishment of counterrevolutionary control. The occupation of the Dhofari mountains by the combined Omani and Iranian forces in 1975 put an end at least temporarily to the 13 years of armed conflict between revolutionary and conservative forces that had begun in North Yemen in 1962.
The year 1975 marked a watershed in Saudi Arabia when in March King Feisal was assassinated, and when the effects of the increased oil revenues were manifested in the Five-Year Plan commenced that year. Feisal himself came to power under the uncertain conditions of the early 1960s, when the republican coups in Baghdad and Sana‘a had removed two of the Saudi family’s fellow monarchies in the area. Under pressures from the US and from concerned members of the dynasty, the incumbent King Saud was displaced and Feisal installed. Under his guidance, Saudi Arabia underwent a number of changes designed to consolidate the existing political system: Slavery was formally abolished, a more modern army was built up, education was cautiously expanded, a budget was instituted, and some of the more conspicuously wasteful royal family expenditure was cut.
Feisal was in some respects a transitional character. Domestically he was loath to share power with other than a very few members of his family. In foreign policy it was Islam rather than any supposed “Arab dimension” that dominated his thinking. […] Regionally, Feisal maintained a stubborn and hostile attitude toward several neighbors for outmoded dynastic reasons, such as refusing to recognize the UAE when it was formalized in 1971.
Feisal’s death at a time of more general change put an end to the transitional period represented by his reign. A new, more decentralized family team came to power, under the joint leadership of King Khalid and Prince Fahd. The new development plan, ten times larger than the previous one, introduced far more widespread economic changes, and in foreign policy the anomalies of Feisal’s period were soon removed. Within a year of his death, working diplomatic relations were established with the UAE and the PDRY. The Islamic emphasis of Saudi pronouncements was toned down in favor of a more specifically “Arab” orientation.
[…]
Iran was closely involved in bringing to an end another process that had begun in the early 1960s and came to an end around 1975: British decolonization. The first colony in the region which Britain left in this period was Kuwait, in 1961. South Yemen followed in 1967, and in 1971 Britain gave up its last formal colonies in the Gulf, handing independence to Bahrain, Qatar and the seven sheikhdoms of the UAE. Yet Britain remained apparently as strong as ever in Oman, never an official colony. No flags were lowered and raised, but Britain in effect ceased to be the dominant power in the Sultanate in 1975. There was an increase in Omani participation in government and trade following the accession of Sultan Qaboos to power in 1970. Iran, rather than Britain, was now the most powerful outside military influence. Britain retained military bases in the area up to March 1977 and after that provided military assistance, as it did to the other states in the Gulf it had once ruled.
Oman exemplifies two aspects of this decolonization process that affected the character of the overall change in the Gulf. While the British maintained close ties with these independent states, other states came in part to play Britain’s regional role. The US acquired a stronger military and political position than it previously had, while at an intermediate level it fostered the “twin pillar” policy of promoting Iran and Saudi Arabia to responsibility for security in the area. Saudi Arabia, whose armed forces were insignificant, had the main financial power, which it used in the Gulf and the region generally. Iran had little money to spare but had the military resources to patrol the waters of the Gulf, to send troops to Oman, and to guarantee the Kuwaitis in the event of any Iraqi menace.
[…]
The system that evolved to replace the colonial one goes a considerable way to explaining the curious history of the Gulf Security Pact. Advocated by the Shah in the mid-1970s, this project was given varying degrees of support by the other Gulf states, Iraq excepted. The justification that it was needed to unite the region against “outside interference” was rather mysterious, since there seemed to be no obvious threat against which the Gulf had to unite and there was already a massive US presence there to the tune of thousands of military personnel and many tens of billions of dollars’ worth of military hardware. It was also unclear why the other states could not have signed a pact over Baghdad’s objections. In fact, the rhetoric about “outside” (i.e., Soviet) influence was designed to divert attention from the reality of this US military deployment, and from the fact that the main threats were internal, from the populations of these countries themselves, or came from regional powers, as evidenced by Iran’s seizure of the Gulf islands in 1971.
[…]
In the corporate board rooms, government cabinet meetings, and academic seminars of the Western world, the formation of OPEC in 1960 was considered something of a joke, and certainly not important, for almost a decade. OPEC was intended to protect oil producers’ revenues, yet the price of oil did not rise until 1970–71, when the oil states were able to redress the balance of power that had prevailed up to that time. The quintupling of prices between 1970 and 1974 and the rise in OPEC revenues from $5.2 billion to $75 billion in those years was a momentous and generally unanticipated revenge for the inertia of the previous decade. It provoked alarm in the advanced capitalist countries and naive hopes in the developing world. In 1974 there was speculation about a US military invasion of the Middle East, about a collapse of the world financial system and about a rapid and successful economic transformation of the Middle East.
[…]
The problems surrounding oil after the 1973 events involved not so much dramatic changes in the existing structure or multiplications of the price for oil, but issues such as industrialization and agricultural development, direct access by the producers to the markets of the advanced capitalist countries, thereby bypassing the major oil companies, and problems of unity within OPEC as the conflicts between those with surplus revenues (Saudi Arabia) and those with revenue shortages (Iran and Algeria) became sharper. The prominence which these issues acquired indicated that a new chapter in the politics of oil had begun, that the conflicts of the future would reflect but not repeat the changes of the 1971–73 period.
[…]
The capacity of Iran and the Arab Gulf states to play a larger role in the region was not merely a function of their relative economic strength or the needs of the confrontation states. It rested upon the re-stabilization of the Gulf itself in the mid-1970s and the support of the US. Because the Saudi, Iraqi and Iranian regimes had been able to consolidate themselves and quell their opponents nearer home, they were in a position to pursue an active foreign policy. The price of the intervention by Iran and the conservative Arab states outside the Gulf was paid by the local opposition forces, particularly by those in Oman and North Yemen.
The relationship with the US, the other essential precondition of this new regional influence, involved a political-military alliance and a broader coincidence of interests in promoting capitalist relations in the region. Although the US had privileged relations with both Saudi Arabia and Iran since the mid-1940s, it acquired a new significance in the 1970s as a result of both the British withdrawal and the purchase of US military equipment with increased oil revenues. Beyond the much publicized military dimension, this growth in US influence also involved the construction of a new system at the political and economic levels, one particularly evident in the US role in Saudi development projects.
[…]
The present set of problems has affected the Gulf states in their relations with the Western world, in their relations with other Arab states and in their internal political situations. In the case of each country, one can discern both the maturing of problems from the earlier reorganization and boom, and the much greater interrelatedness between events in the Gulf and events elsewhere in the Middle East.
The Iranian revolution was in the long run a product of the policies pursued by the Shah’s regime over the previous 25 years, and of the manner in which the country’s oil revenues were being spent. Among the immediate causes can be counted the Shah’s policies that increased the level of active political opposition, as well as dealing the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini back in the game: Anti-inflation measures angered the bazaar merchants, and the more strident official political tone indicated a new element of uncertainty at the top. The Iranian revolution involved a very marked nationalist rejection of Iran’s foreign policy alignment, of the way in which Western culture was being introduced into Iran, and of the Shah’s links with countries such as Israel. But it also received a certain impulsion from the downturn in the Iranian economy which occurred in 1977, brought about in part by the recession in world markets.
The political situation within the Arab states themselves has also been noticeably unsettled. Kuwait lost military protection against possible Iraqi annexation and faces new Shi’a dissent and pressures for a return to elections. In Bahrain, where some of the Shi’a population has evinced sympathy for Khomeini, the al-Khalifa family must be wondering if they too will be cast as Yazids (devils) in the manner of the Shah. In the Emirates the fall of the Shah has upset the previous balance between Dubai and Abu Dhabi by depriving the former’s ruler, Sheikh Rashid, of his Iranian patron. In Oman the removal of Iranian troops, and even more so of Iranian military guarantees in the event of substantial conflict in the future, have deprived the Sultan of his main prop at a time when some dissent is becoming evident as a result of his wasteful spending policies.
[…]
The situation in both parts of Yemen has escaped from the controls which, in the mid-1970s, Saudi policies seemed to have imposed. The Saudi attempt to entice South Yemen with financial aid after the establishment of diplomatic relations in March 1976 did not succeed: Relations between the two countries deteriorated in late 1977 under the double impact of events in the Horn of Africa and the assassination of North Yemeni president Ibrahim al-Hamdi by people believed to have been sympathetic to Saudi Arabia. Although the South Yemenis paid a price for the cessation of Saudi aid, the focus of conflict was in North Yemen, where the killing of al-Hamdi initiated a new round of unrest within the army and some parts of the countryside. This led to the June 1978 crisis in which the presidents of both parts of Yemen were killed, and to the February 1979 war between the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY). The March 1979 unity agreement between the two states is, like its 1972 predecessor, little more than an agreement not to wage war against each other. There is no indication that the instability in North Yemen has ceased. Once again the conflict in North Yemen, the most populous state in the Peninsula and one with probably greater influence on Saudi Arabia than any other, has become an active component in the politics of the Arabian Peninsula.
[…]
Ironically, by creating rather brittle political systems, these rulers may be storing up greater dangers for themselves in the future. The Shah has already paid the price. In Oman the Sultan has for a time fought off the rebels in Dhofar, but in the nine years since coming to power his economic record has been lamentable, and the indications are that political opposition is growing in the north of Oman, distinct from that in Dhofar. The Emirates have, after eight years of independence, failed to establish a central army or a central bank, and the wasteful competition on prestige projects such as multiple airports in close proximity makes a mockery of regional development. In Bahrain and Kuwait the limited experiences of elected assemblies were terminated under Saudi pressure in the mid-1970s, and despite their show of outward calm, it is known that the Saudi rulers, like their associates in the smaller Gulf states, are more than disturbed by events in Iran and by the possibility of continuing political turmoil there.
The uncertainty of the Gulf rulers is related to the new round of difficulties encountered in their relations with the major industrialized countries, which are undergoing a recession not caused by the oil price hikes but conveniently blamed on OPEC. Faced with the recession, and with growing public disagreement among themselves, the industrialized countries are bound to be less tolerant of the actions of the OPEC states than was previously the case, especially if Saudi Arabia and the Gulf producers oppose US policy in the sphere of Arab-Israeli relations. In the end, the Saudis and the other Gulf rulers, dependent for military and economic support on the US, will allow their fear of “communism” to prevail over their distaste for Israel.
[…]
On November 20, 1979, the first day of Islam’s fifteenth century, 50,000 pilgrims in the Great Mosque of Mecca had just finished the first prayer as dawn was breaking. The blare of a loudspeaker jarred the stillness, as a voice began reciting the Qur’an. Soon the same voice began to denounce the Saudi regime, and announced the arrival of a Mahdi (savior) to cleanse a corrupt Arabia.
The faithful sat thunderstruck. Hundreds, perhaps a thousand of the Mahdi’s followers, including some women and children, emerged from the midst of the crowd to take charge. Equipped with walkie-talkies, machine guns and automatic rifles, they bolted shut the main doors and took up positions of defense. Some stood guard on the seven minarets. Others positioned themselves along the parapets and upper windows of the huge structure.
When the Saudi authorities became aware of what was happening, they rushed army units as well as police and National Guard to the scene. By mid-morning, the mosque was surrounded. The troops tried to advance, but could make little headway against fierce fire from the insurgents within.
The extent of the insurrection was threatening. News came from Medina of an attempt to seize the Prophet’s Mosque there, and there were reports of disturbances elsewhere in the Kingdom. The ruling family was ill-prepared. Crown Prince Fahd was in Tunis for an Arab summit meeting. Prince Abdallah, head of the National Guard responsible for protecting the royal family and the oil fields, was in Morocco. Ailing King Khalid ordered his brothers Prince Sultan and Prince Nayef, the ministers of defense and interior, to take charge. They hurried from Riyadh to Mecca to direct the military operations.
Uncertain about the extent or the source of the insurrection, the princes immediately contacted key foreign allies, ordered Mecca sealed off, and cut all communications within the Kingdom. In all the main cities, troops cleared and patrolled the streets.
The princes faced several dilemmas. The Great Mosque, a special responsibility of the Saud family, should not be damaged. It was still filled with pilgrims—some perhaps from important families—who should not be harmed. It is a privileged sanctuary under the laws of Islam, in principle beyond the reach of Saudi state security forces. King Khalid called upon the leading interpreters of Islamic law in the Kingdom, the council of the ulama [religious scholars]. After some deliberation, the ulama sanctioned state intervention and the use of violence to protect the holy place.
The Great Mosque proved a difficult target. Because of the sanctity of the building and the pilgrims inside, heavy weapons could not be used in a frontal attack. Yet against light arms the structure was uniquely defensible. Its maze of pilloried galleries, tiny rooms, porticoes, windows, staircases and grilled stonework provided ideal cover for the insurgents, who continued to hold high vantage points atop the seven towering minarets.
When the forces of the regime tried to come in with helicopters they were driven off by machine-gun fire from the ground. During the morning of November 21, gunfire crackled around the mosque as Saudi army troops tried to work their way inside. Additional troops and armor were airlifted into Mecca. The mosque was surrounded by thousands of troops, a fleet of armored personnel carriers, armored cars and other assault forces. But in spite of growing troop strength, the besiegers were unable to advance. Saudi troops were poorly coordinated. Officers argued over tactics and who was to blame. The soldiers and guardsmen fought with little of the commitment of their adversaries.
Although some Saudi forces were now able to enter the mosque, fire from the insurgents kept them pinned down. Casualties on both sides were heavy as the fighting continued. On November 22, Prince Abdallah returned from Morocco to join in coordinating the siege. The armed forces advanced very slowly. The insurgents still controlled much of the mosque from behind barricades on the ground floor and from positions on the terraces and minarets.
On November 23, a five-man French anti-terrorist squad arrived with a planeload of special explosives and gas. Battles that day dislodged the insurgents from the upper stories of the mosque and drove them to the ground floor. After another two days of fighting, the remaining insurgents retreated into the basement, a labyrinth of more than 200 rooms and passages, where the battle raged on. As the fighting continued, word came on November 29 of violent Shi’i demonstrations in the oil-producing province. Twenty-thousand National Guard troops were used to quell those disturbances, while preparations were made for the final assault on the mosque insurgents.
The final attack was launched on the night of December 3, after nearly two weeks of fighting. Although the insurgents’ military leader had been captured and the proclaimed Mahdi himself killed, the battle lasted all night. More than 100 on both sides were killed and many more wounded. Of the original force of insurgents, only 170 survived.
A month later, in early January 1980, the chief of staff of the Saudi armed forces, the air force and land forces commanders, and the governor of Mecca (a brother of the king) were replaced in an extensive military and administrative shakeup. Sixty-three of the insurgents were publicly executed on January 6 in the central squares of several Saudi cities. The insurrection was over, but many questions remained. Who were the rebels? Where had they secured their arms and military training? What was the political significance of their daring, if suicidal, act?
The chief organizer and military leader of the group was Juhaiman ibn Saif al-Otaiba, a former member of the National Guard who had received some US military training. The Otaiba tribe had many grievances against the Saudi ruling family, and Juhaiman was able to bring a number of his kinspeople into the insurrection. His brother-in-law, Mohammad bin Abdullah al-Quraishi, a theological student at the Islamic University in Mecca, was the proclaimed Mahdi.
The main path of recruitment, however, was not tribal but religious. Religiously oriented youth, mainly theology students disoriented and enraged by the social changes taking place in the Kingdom, joined up. A few were foreigners of like persuasion. The regime has hinted that the insurgents were supported from the outside—Democratic [South] Yemen, Israel, Egypt, the Soviet Union, even the US. But they apparently got their support from within Saudi Arabia, from dissidents in the military and the religious hierarchy, and even perhaps from some members of the royal family.
Like the Shah, the Saudi rulers prepared the way for a religious opposition by systematically eliminating all modern, secular opposition forces. But unlike the Shah, who laid claim to a modernist, secular ideology, the Saudi regime claims to base itself on Islamic fundamentalism. The character of the opposition is therefore ironic, especially at a time when Saudi-financed fundamentalist groups have become increasingly active throughout the Muslim world, threatening regimes and political movements opposed by the Saudis.
But the Saudi regime has always contended with the uncertain allegiance of Islamic fundamentalists. In the late 1920s, Ibn Saud had to wipe out his own fanatical shock troops, the Ikhwan, with the help of British air power. As the modern, oil-based transformation has proceeded, the contradiction between the regime and its ideological base has grown steadily more acute. The ulama and tribal leaders, the major guardians of fundamentalism, are opposed to the centralization of power by the ruling family and the state. Their social position is further weakened by the growing influence of the bourgeoisie, the technocrats and the foreign advisers. They have become logical leaders of opposition movements that can draw support from the mass of displaced Bedouins and small peasants. The insurgents, in their pamphlets, show the rage and confusion of this backward-looking alliance. Identifying themselves as students of the shari’a (Islamic law), they speak of their disgust to see their professors “bought by a corrupt regime with money and promises of promotion.” One of their tracts claims that the Grand Mufti himself was sympathetic to their cause, reproaching them only for “concentrating their attacks on the Saudi regime when all Islamic regimes are corrupt.” Their pamphlets also confirm the existence of several other fundamentalist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, who they criticize for being “led by foreigners, Indians or Pakistanis.”
“Where are we?” asks Juhaiman in one of his writings. He answers:
They slander us from all quarters and tell lies about us…. We are Muslims who wanted to learn the Law and quickly understood that it couldn’t be done in these schools, colleges, and universities…where no one dares say a bad word about the government….We have broken with the opportunists and other bureaucrats who serve the government…. We know that one day we will be strong enough to name among us a Mahdi, to take refuge at his command in the Great Mosque of Mecca, where we will proclaim the beginning of a new Islamic state.
Juhaiman and his group did not seize the Great Mosque in the manner of a modern insurrectionary movement but with a fantastic dream of restoring a purified order to Arabia. They even apparently thought that the earth would open to engulf the army of unbelievers come to dislodge them. As such, their rebellion was bound to fail. But it has left its political mark nonetheless. It has reminded both the shaken regime and its worried allies that the House of Saud has less and less room for maneuver between disaffected traditionalist elements and the emerging modern forces.
Author’s Note: This article is based on a careful review of the many and varied accounts of the Mecca events in major US and European newspapers and journals. Our assessment of the significance of these events is indebted to our correspondence with Ghassan Salameh.
All of the small Arab states of the Persian Gulf are now well into their second decade as independent political entities. Bahrain, Qatar and the seven principalities making up the UAE became independent in 1971. Kuwait’s independence goes back another decade. Oman, though never a colony, traces its present regime to the British-induced palace coup of 1970. Whether because of or in spite of the startling explosion of wealth in the 1970s, because of or in spite of the fall of the Shah and the war between Iran and Iraq, they have survived as states and their regimes have displayed unanticipated continuity. The turbulence of the 1970s roared around them, as around the eye of a storm. The UAE stayed united while Pahlavi Iran, the “guardian of the Gulf,” collapsed in a revolutionary paroxysm. None of the smaller states have experienced as serious a political tremor as Saudi Arabia did in November 1979, with the takeover of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. But neither were the small states insulated from the turmoil. Sabotage and demonstrations in Kuwait and Bahrain, ruling circle paralysis in the UAE and deportations of tens of thousands of “alien” workers up and down the Gulf have been regular features of the new age. It is not clear that survival of these states has been accompanied by any substantial degree of internal political consolidation, and the new strains and stresses of economic uncertainty, coupled with the emergence of social forces nurtured in the profligate environment of the 1970s, leave the political future of the Gulf surrounded by question marks.
The circumstances of the Gulf states in the mid-1980s are different in several respects from the preceding era. In the first place, they are operating in a phase of economic contraction. One thing not achieved in the wash of petrodollars was much diversification of their economic base, and today these economies are more tied than ever to the fortunes of the international oil market. From 1980 to 1983, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (the smaller states plus Saudi Arabia) saw their oil revenues drop by half, from $145 billion to $72 billion. Along with the constraints on trade and political uncertainties imposed by the Gulf war [Iran-Iraq War], this has helped to “shake out” some of the more speculative accumulation ventures. Numerous firms have gone bankrupt or simply disappeared. Recent months have seen a series of mergers among banks and investment houses in Kuwait, Abu Dhabi and Dubai as a result of “non-performing” loans and bad investments, consolidations that involve substantial government bailouts. The collapse of the unofficial stock market nearly three years ago still reverberates in Kuwait today. This incident may have cost the Kuwaiti treasury the equivalent of a year’s oil revenues. Share values on the official Kuwaiti stock market and real estate values—two prominent investment havens—have dropped by half over the last couple of years, and many Kuwaiti experts feel they have not yet descended to levels representing true values. In Bahrain, commercial rents have dropped from over $26 per square foot to $8 or $9, and business people there are counting, perhaps unrealistically, on the soon-to-be completed causeway with Saudi Arabia to produce a new real estate boom. Throughout the Gulf, it seems, the money machines are not working like they used to.
Secondly, political chills have accompanied the cooling off of the economy. The Iranian revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq have further eroded the relative insulation of the Gulf states from the political currents traversing the region. Initially all the Gulf states quietly but unambiguously supported Iraq in the military conflict. They diverted tens of billions of dollars in “loans” to Saddam Hussein’s war treasury. Kuwait was Iraq’s chief port for shipments of war materiel, foodstuffs and other critical imports. Bahrain and Oman rashly offered their territories as staging points for Iraqi warplanes before Iranian threats and Saudi and American intercession dissuaded them. Iranian recovery on the battlefield, especially in 1982, prompted a panicky, barely disguised neutrality. Kuwait and the UAE in particular drew back from closer alignment with Iraq under Gulf Cooperation Council auspices. Kuwait, the most populous of the small Gulf states and the one with the most sophisticated economy, was also the most vulnerable geographically to both combatants. The UAE, and Dubai in particular, has important trading ties with Iran that proved useful to Tehran as well and encouraged the UAE to see itself as a potential mediator in the conflict. Bahrain, with its oppressed Shi’i majority, was particularly susceptible among the Gulf states to the revolutionary appeal of the Islamic Republic, and there was frequent agitation and street clashes in the 1979–81 period, culminating in the December 1981 arrest of some 73 young militants, on charges of plotting the violent overthrow of the Khalifa regime.
A third feature of the present period is the emergence of a new regional political system centered on the Gulf Cooperation Council. The formation of the GCC was motivated both by economic and security concerns. The member states of the GCC share traditional family regimes, based on tribal affiliations later cemented under British colonial domain, and have no history of sustained decolonization struggles. They have a combined population today of approximately 13 million, of whom 5 million are immigrant workers. This unique demographic structure is even more startling if Saudi Arabia is left out of the calculations: The small Gulf states have a population of 4.1 million, of whom 59 percent are foreign laborers. The largest numbers of these are Palestinian, Egyptian, Pakistani and Indian.
The growth of these immigrant communities may have peaked as the construction boom in the Gulf has leveled off, but their numbers and proportion are not likely to diminish appreciably, as the need for workers in every other sector continues. The governments have used the GCC framework to coordinate policies on immigration and to establish a common passport and naturalization system. They have built up their police and security apparatuses and exploited the vulnerability of the foreign workers to deportation. The last few years have been characterized by periodic purges of foreign workers. In June 1982, for instance, the UAE arrested and deported 2,000 persons without proper papers, and Kuwait expelled more than 25,000 that November. Kuwait has expelled thousands more in the two years since, especially after a series of Iranian-inspired bombings in December 1983. The last several years have been ones of great insecurity for foreigners.
The idea of a Gulf collectivity had been haphazardly advanced by Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia ever since the period of British withdrawal (1968–71). But there was no enthusiasm among the smaller states for any framework whose main effect would be to advance Iranian or Iraqi hegemony in the Gulf. In 1975, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE and Qatar set up the Arab Industries Organization, a joint effort to establish Arab-run armaments factories in Egypt, but this project was canceled in reaction to Camp David. Saudi Arabia continued to promote a political framework in which it would play the dominant role. Gulf tours by Saudi King Khalid in March 1976 and Interior Minister Prince Nayif in October 1976 led to a very low-profile agreement to share intelligence and internal security information. In the economic domain, the Gulf Organization for Industrial Consultancy was formed, with Iraq as a member, in November 1976, and the idea of a Gulf common market was proposed a year later. The military and security aspects of cooperation took on greater urgency following the Iranian revolution, and Iraq began to participate in the intelligence-sharing process. Saudi Arabia took the lead in establishing bilateral security pacts with the small Gulf states, and set up security committees with Pakistan and Jordan, two states whose troops play key advisory and mercenary roles in the armed forces of all the Gulf states. The GCC was formally inaugurated at a first summit meeting on May 26, 1981. A “mini-common market” agreement went into effect in March 1983. Politically, the GCC has emerged as a bloc within OPEC and within the Arab League. It has superseded the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) in trade negotiations with the European Common Market, for instance.
A fourth feature of the Gulf in the 1980s is that the US has completed the process of replacing Britain as the paramount outside power. The fall of the Shah removed Iran as the chosen instrument for this transition. Working now through Saudi Arabia and Oman, the US military presence in the region is more pronounced and visible than in the 1970s. In both Saudi Arabia and Oman, the US has mapped out and supervised the construction of an enormous military infrastructure of bases, weapons systems, intelligence networks and joint commands. Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, in a February 1982 visit to Riyadh, urged Saudi Arabia to assume an even more visible security coordination and assistance role in the GCC. Washington’s rationale is that GCC responsibility for internal security functions, and the bilateral agreements for joint intervention among the GCC member states, should minimize the need for direct US military intervention in the event of a coup or insurgency while at the same time maximizing the facilities and weapons inventories available for such intervention should it be required.
A key element here is the sale of American-made Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia. This huge arms deal gave the Saudis the necessary military weight vis-à-vis Iran and Iraq to make credible its military linkages with the smaller states, while it avoided the issues of sovereignty and patriotic credibility that would be attached to any formal US basing structure in the Peninsula. The Saudis have subsequently pushed the other Gulf states to contract for air defense systems that could be tied into the AWACS net. These involve an increased US military advisory role in those states. One of the problems in coordinating the military forces of the Gulf states is the variety of different weapons systems even within individual services, with little compatibility. The AWACS deal is one step toward an increased level of standardization, at least in this area of air defense.
Washington has made a virtue of the political constraints that prevent Saudi Arabia from granting formal US basing rights in its territory, but it has cultivated a more unrestricted relationship with Oman. Following a June 1980 agreement with Sultan Qaboos, the US has spent at least a quarter of a million dollars modernizing bases at Masirah Island, Sib, Thumrait and Khasab and has held a series of joint military exercises—Bright Star, Jade Tiger and Beacon Flash. Sultan Qaboos, increasingly reclusive and autocratic by most accounts, has delegated most important decision-making to a handful of American, British and Arab advisers linked to their respective intelligence services. The role of these foreign advisers, and the perception of widespread corruption within the Sultan’s regime, has even some American officials worried about the longevity of this relationship, but for the present it has provided the US with its most secure military foothold in the Gulf region.
The US also has a formal military presence in Bahrain. Ever since World War II, the US has had a small destroyer-led naval force, called MIDEASTFOR, based at the port of Jufayr. When the British withdrew, the US renegotiated this access with the Khalifa regime. The regime announced immediately after the October War of 1973 that it would terminate the agreement, but a new, more remunerative agreement was concluded in July 1975. More restrictions on the US presence were negotiated in June 1977. Most recently, the US Central Command set up its “forward headquarters element” on the Bahrain-based fleet. According to Lt. Gen. Robert Kingston, head of Central Command, “This element serves as my liaison with our embassies and the nations of the region. It also aids in planning and coordinating joint exercises and performs other duties that benefit my command.” The US also apparently has temporary emergency landing rights at Bahrain’s main airport and similar use of the big Jabal ‘Ali port outside Dubai.
Under the cover of a multilateral indigenous solution to potential external threats, the US has managed to extend its own military arm over the entire Arab side of the Gulf, and the rhetoric of “outside threats” has provided the necessary pretense for that military presence.
But the real threats are internal. The articles in this issue [of Middle East Report] examine structural problems facing Bahrain and Kuwait, the two Gulf states whose economic and political institutions are the most developed and sophisticated, and whose social forces are most advanced. These two states, uniquely in the Gulf, share the experience of limited parliamentary politics. The ruling families in both instances abolished even these very restricted exercises in democracy—Bahrain in 1975, Kuwait in 1976. At least in the Bahraini case, Saudi pressure was a major factor. Kuwait reinstated its parliament in 1981 in an even more restricted format, but the elections in February 1985 and the assertiveness of the nationalist deputies has already astounded political circles in the region. The Kuwaiti minister of justice, a member of the ruling family, was forced to resign on May 5 when the parliament censured him for the laws compensating investors in the unofficial stock market crash: The minister’s 12-year-old son received $3.4 million as an injured “small investor.” The oil and industry minister, another ruling family scion, is now confronting sharp questions concerning the Kuwait Petroleum Company’s acquisition of the US minerals firm Santa Fe International.
Bahrain’s ruling family shows no signs of following its Kuwaiti counterpart in allowing the resumption of open politics. The Bahraini response to popular discontent has been to use Saudi financial contributions to strengthen the state’s repressive apparatus on the one hand and to increase the government payroll on the other. Bahrain’s ruling circles continue to stress Bahrain’s future as a “service station” satellite to the Saudi economy. With the expected completion of the causeway between the island and Saudi Arabia this fall, Saudi military access to and political influence in Bahrain will be even greater.
In the UAE, certain unresolved questions of how this consensual federation can move beyond mere political maintenance may soon come to the fore. Differences between the component princedoms, especially Abu Dhabi and Dubai, had been suppressed in the face of the dangers emanating from Iran and the Gulf war. Now Dubai’s Sheikh Rashid, prime minister of the UAE, is on his deathbed. None of his sons are politically competent to take his place. There are still some dozen border disputes among the emirates, and while no one feud threatens to destroy the union, the cumulative impact of the disputes may leave the ruling families with little leeway to undertake necessary reforms.
With the very partial exception of Kuwait, there has been no maturation of political institutions in the Gulf consonant with the enormous social and economic changes that have occurred over the last two decades. Military and security forces have been lavished with equipment and mercenary troops, but each regime in the GCC has felt compelled to guard against potential coups by minimizing the means of coordination between, for instance, its own air force and land forces. “The most important military balance in most Gulf nations,” Anthony Cordesman observes, “is often the one that prevents their own military forces from seizing power.”
At its fifth and most recent summit, in Kuwait in late November 1984, the GCC announced the formation of a “joint force,” capable of intervening in any threat against a member state. The many conditions and qualifications attached to this “joint force,” after two years of debate and feasibility studies, testified to the still rudimentary state of cooperation among the Gulf regimes. Joint military maneuvers in Saudi Arabia just before the summit were described by diplomats as “haphazard and chaotic.” Under the new plan, there is a small headquarters staff in Saudi Arabia, and each country will designate certain units (totaling, by different estimates, anywhere from 3,000 to 13,000 men) for collective intervention. GCC Secretary-General ‘Abdallah Bishara described its “significance” as “more political and symbolic than military.” Since the bulk of these designated forces are Saudi, the agreement may serve more as a license for Saudi intervention in the smaller states than any real joint effort. Kuwait has taken great pains to argue that this force cannot be used to counter “internal subversion,” when in fact this is its only conceivable utility.
To this point, the ruling clans of the Gulf have preserved their borders and their trappings of sovereignty. They have maneuvered through a number of nasty situations, but none have faced the sort of external or internal challenge that would certify their legitimacy and longevity. Their working classes are disenfranchised, isolated and vulnerable. Privilege and differential access to rentier wealth have moderated potential discontent among their citizenry. Nevertheless, it would be rash to assume that the dangerous combination of war and revolution has exhausted yet its potential on the Arab side of the Gulf.