Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics

Mehran Kamrava

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367193737
• eBook ISBN: 9780429514081
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Storia economica

The Routledge Handbook of Persian Gulf Politics provides a comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Persian Gulf politics, history, economics, and society.

The volume begins its examination of Ottoman rule in the Arabian Peninsula, exploring other dimensions of the region's history up until and after independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Featuring scholars from a range of disciplines, the book demonstrates how the Persian Gulf's current, complex politics is a product of interwoven dynamics rooted in historical developments and memories, profound social, cultural, and economic changes underway since the 1980s and the 1990s, and inter-state and international relations among both regional actors and between them and the rest of the world. The book comprises a total of 36 individual chapters divided into the following six sections:

• Historical Context
• Society and Culture
• Economic Development
• Domestic Politics
• Regional Security Dynamics
• The Persian Gulf and the World

Examining the Persian Gulf's increasing importance in regional politics, diplomacy, economics, and security issues, the volume is a valuable resource for scholars, students, and policy makers interested in political science, history, Gulf studies, and the Middle East.

1

POLITICS IN THE PERSIAN GULF

An overview

Mehran Kamrava

By its very nature, the study of politics is a complicated and often fraught undertaking. In my own experience, I have often found the study of politics to be somewhat similar to peeling an onion. If one were to peel an onion, the first layer reveals itself to be made up of a series of highly intricate, interwoven patterns that combine to make a complex whole. That fine layer, with its intricate design of interwoven patterns, is followed by another, similarly complicated layer, and then another, and another. To me, politics is not that different—a fine layer of complex, interwoven, symbiotically related patterns, followed by successive and equally complex, linked patterns. This book, I believe, comes close to capturing much of that complexity when it comes to the politics of the Persian Gulf.

I have arranged the book according to my own conceptualization of politics, as a domain of study with its own fine and complicated patterns and yet linked with and inseparable from other, equally complex, related fields. If, at the broadest level, politics is the art and science of the exercise of power, then power relationships are by nature bound to go beyond the composition and functions of institutions through which they are exercised. They are just as consequentially influenced by precedents and pre-existing traditions (history), by the actual and symbolic forces that shape relationships among individuals and their communities (society and culture), by the sources of wealth and patterns and consequences of its accumulation and expenditure (economy), and by matters of defense and interactions with other countries (security and international relations). This is not disciplinary malpractice. It is acknowledging that different disciplines are on their edges connected to one another, so that to fully and accurately understand one, its connections and interfaces with other disciplines have also to be understood.

In examining the politics of the Persian Gulf, this book therefore casts a necessarily wide net. It begins with an examination of the rule of the Ottomans in the Arabian Peninsula and explores other dimensions of the region’s history up until independence in 1970. By its very nature, Ottoman rule in the region was weak and diffuse, only minimally disrupting pre-existing patterns of Sheikhly rule and the slow but steady progression of tribes into allied tribal confederacies and eventually the ruling clans and families. Following the Ottomans, the British only solidified what were the beginnings of independent statelets. By the time they had settled on their departure in 1968, slightly distinct national identities had already begun forming. Within a matter of a few years, the newly independent states were to reap the benefits of the first oil boom. Rentierism and, with it, the curse of abundant resources were not that far behind.

Iran and Saudi Arabia had different historical trajectories from the other, much smaller states of the Persian Gulf and from one another. Saudi Arabia was eventually forged out of what had started as an alliance of two men, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703–92) and Muhammad bin Saud (1710–65), in 1744. Eclipsed first by the Ottomans and then temporarily by the rival Al Rashid tribe, and armed with zeal of the Wahhabi movement’s Unitarian ideology, the decedents of Muhammad bin Saud eventually subdued rivals, unified much of the Arabian Peninsula under their rule, and established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Iran’s trajectory was much different, having developed a semblance of a working state under the patrimonial rule of the Qajars (1794–1925), subject first to a Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and then to a military coup that led to the establishment of the authoritarian, modernizing Pahlavi Dynasty (1925–79).

As the Gulf states formed and made their appearance felt in relation to their own societies and other states, they gave rise to popular feelings of nationalism among their peoples. For more than a century, in fact, nationalism has been a constant element of Iranian identity, superimposed on a rich and diverse ethnic mosaic. Under very different circumstances and a result of very different historical processes, nationalism has also become a compelling force in the Arab oil monarchies of the region, manifesting itself either as unbridled self-confidence (Kuwait in the 1980s and Qatar in the 2000s) or outright chauvinism and bellicosity (Saudi Arabia and the UAE starting in the second half of the 2010s). In all cases, from Iraq and Iran down to the UAE and Oman, the state has done what it could to keep nationalist sentiments at fever pitch, all too frequently trying to divert attention from domestic shortcomings by rallying people around the flag and prompting them against real or imagined enemies.

Nationalism, however, has been far from the only defining social and cultural force in the region. While operating in different historical, economic, and political contexts, all Persian Gulf societies are in the midst of profound changes. Traditional gender roles, for example, are being challenged and changed, as much by economic growth and development as by state policies. States, either out of deliberate measures to guarantee their hold on power or less intentionally, alternately enhance or erode the bonds that keep societies together or deepen the cleavages that fray their cohesion and unity. In Iraq’s case, and in Bahrain, the state has been the primary engine of sectarian strife.

Similar to nationalism, all Persian Gulf societies have had to navigate between tradition and modernity and to deal with the causes and consequences of profound social and economic change. Few—in fact, perhaps no—aspects of life have been left untouched as a result of social change. In most places, the look, infrastructure, and spatial distribution of communities across cities have changed beyond recognition. The state, the economy, intensified cultural diffusion, and the societies’ own creativity are doing what they can to add to the speed and depth with which values, assumptions, symbols, identities, and relations are constantly being defined and redefined. The ensuing dislocations contributed to the eruption of a mass-based revolution in Iran. Revolutions of a similar kind are unlikely today in Iran or any of its neighbors, adaptable authoritarians having learnt from the Iranian Shah’s mistakes. But the processes and consequences of the profound changes underway are no less revolutionary.

Nowhere are the changes unfolding in the Persian Gulf more apparent than in the economy. Petrodollars have literally changed the geography of the Persian Gulf, creating islands where none existed before. Cities in the southern littoral states grow into the sea on one side and into the sky on another. The region’s physical landscape is constantly changing. This is not the case in Iran, of course, where sanctions and mismanagement have combined to slow economic growth and development to a snail’s pace. In complete contrast, in the oil monarchies, the speed of development has been at breakneck, and the consequences are nothing less than astounding.

Rent- and resource-based economies that are transposed onto small demographies and authoritarian polities do not always foster the best outcomes. The ability to purchase something does not automatically amount to the capacity and the know-how to build it. In fact, lower efforts involved in accumulating wealth through unearned income because of resource abundance rather than producing and manufacturing sources of wealth can result in a resource curse. In the Persian Gulf, a resource curse has manifested itself in built-in economic inefficiencies, skewed labor markets, and frozen political institutions.

These frozen political institutions have been invariably authoritarian. Authoritarianism became, and has been, the order of politics across the Persian Gulf since the inception of the modern state system, at times somewhat benignly and at times with more repression. Dictatorships come in different forms, and those in the Persian Gulf range from hybrid authoritarian systems in Iraq, Iran, and Kuwait, to relatively benign ones in Qatar and Oman, to less tolerant, more repressive ones in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates. But even in the hybrid systems, where elected institutions serve as safety valves for popular anger, mass frustrations at times spill over into open acts of defiance and protests. This is not a region whose penchant for political instability is about to be reversed any time soon.

Across the Persian Gulf, frequent bouts of political instability have gone hand-in-hand with regional and international tensions. A long and deep history of colonial machinations, competing nationalisms, fragile political legitimacies, geostrategic significance, and resource abundance, and the more recent overlaying of sectarian othering have all combined to make the Persian Gulf region one of the world’s most militarized and war-prone areas. Multiple and overlapping security dilemmas characterize the region’s international relations, and one record-breaking arms sale after another only adds to its vicious cycle of mistrust and militarization.

All of this has occurred at a time when the Persian Gulf region has emerged as the new heart of the Middle East, the regional hub for global finance and commerce, logistics and airline connectivity, medical tourism and international branch campuses, world-class museums, and countless other services. For those of us studying the Middle East, this is all relatively new—Middle East politics having until recently focused almost exclusively on North Africa or the Levant, Iraq, Iran, and perhaps Saudi Arabia. Until the mid-2000s, I myself was unaware of the increasing importance of the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, both in themselves and in relation to the rest of the Middle East. For instance, in the first edition of The Modern Middle East: A Political History since the First World War, I devoted hardly any space to examining the states of the Persian Gulf region beyond exploring the reasons for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. Upon closer examination, however, and after having lived in the region for many years, I have come to discover its critical and growing significance to the Middle East and beyond. It is because of this increasing importance that a handbook of this type is both timely and much needed.

The multidisciplinary logic laid out above has informed the organization of the present volume. The book is divided into six parts, each comprising chapters on the Persian Gulf’s historical context, societies and cultures, domestic politics, economic development, regional security dynamics, and relations with the rest of the world. No matter how comprehensive, no one book could possibly cover all the relevant dimensions of a region’s politics. My hope is that this book, with the depth and breadth of its chapters, will do its share in providing as comprehensive an examination of Persian Gulf politics as possible.

PART I

Historical context

2

THE OTTOMANS IN THE
ARABIAN PENINSULA

Aiza Khan

Introduction

Qalʿat al Qatif, literally “the castle at Qatif,” is one of the most appropriate symbols of the Ottoman impact on the Persian Gulf. The foundations of this castle were laid in the third century by the Sassanid kings. When Qatif became part of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottomans refurbished it and used it a military base in the Gulf. Simultaneously, it was a multipurpose complex of eleven mosques, guest houses, a keep for the sultan, a residential complex, a commercial marketplace, and a civilian-purpose warehouse. The Ottomans lost sovereignty of Qatif to the British in World War I, and the castle fell to ruins by the 1980s with the discovery of oil in the area. The Persian Gulf was a region rich in history and culture, inhabited and governed by a diversity of people from the Neo-Persian Sassanids to the Ottoman Turks to the British. It was impacted, like all other parts of the world, by changes in the global climate, shifts in power, and new discoveries, and the Ottoman presence in the Persian Gulf was part of these contingencies.

During the last few decades of the Ottoman presence in the Gulf, Ottoman rule attracted widespread support among the local populace. The benevolent empire shared a religion with the majority of the populace, which helped them feel represented and understood. Influential figures in the empire that shared this sentiment were apprehensive of the possibility of European colonialism. A prominent scholar of the time, Şehbenderzade Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914), is reported to have said:

The hope of all Muslims everywhere was in the Ottoman Empire and the Caliphate … Should they remain divided, they would be exposed to two danger-conflicting interests and the cooperation of the power against them. Against these dangers, united Islam, enjoying the moral support of 400 million, would not be a force to be taken lightly.¹

He further notes that:

the Muslim elements in the Ottoman Empire were the only ones hoping for the empire’s survival. Their unity was the sole remedy for the empire’s troubles and the only guarantee for its independence. On the other hand, division would be disastrous,²

emphasizing the threat that European colonialism posed to the Arab world, and Arab support for the Empire. Another influential scholar of the time, Celal Nuri (1881–1938), chimed in and insisted that the pan-Islamist ideology of the Ottoman Empire was essential to the unity of the Muslim umma and preservation of its religious sentiment, something that was very important to the Muslim population in the uncertain and turbulent turn of the century.

The Ottoman sultans too were aware of the impending threat of their European rivals and were taking measures to address this threat. Sultan Mahmud II, who ascended to the throne in 1808, was quick to carry out military reforms by introducing formal and institutionalized training for military men in order to adapt to the large empire and to enact effective communication. He also strengthened the centralized power of the empire and reformed the taxing system that formerly irked the non-Muslim subjects in order to earn their loyalty as part of a secularization agenda. Simultaneously, Sultan Mahmud II maintained the trust of his Muslim supporters by upholding a pan-Islamic ideology and preserving the sentiments of the unity of the umma.³

This ideology was upheld by the Ottomans until the end of the empire—the last Ottoman sultan, Abdulhamid II, was a pan-Islamist who was supported by the Arab Provinces of the empire, but was deposed in 1908 by a revolt in the capital instigated by an organization called the Young Turks.⁴ Abdulhamid II believed that endorsing pan-Islamism was his moral duty and his way to gain leverage during a shift in the international balance of power.⁵

Despite the foresight and initiative of the Ottoman sultans to gain the support of both the Muslim majority and the non-Muslim minority in their provinces in the Arab world, and despite the support of the majority of the Muslim populace in the Persian Gulf, the Ottoman Empire came to a violent end due to internal turbulence—it ultimately lost its Arab provinces to its European rivals. This chapter will explore the reasons why the mighty empire collapsed, despite its leaders’ initiative, foresight, and benevolence.

The origins and structure of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire was founded by Othman I, son of Ertoghrul who was a nomadic tribe leader under the Seljuk Empire. Ertoghrul left Othman with so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Politics in the Persian Gulf: an overview
• Part I Historical context
• Part II Society and culture
• Part III Economic development
• Part IV Domestic politics
• Part V Regional security dynamics
• Part VI The Persian Gulf and the world
• Select bibliography
• Index