Across the Persian Gulf, a cry against theocracy
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed is attempting to do top-down what at least some of the Iranian protesters are trying to do bottom-up
What is happening in Iran right now is classic politics of the Information Age. A local protest in north-eastern city of Mashhad — presumably triggered by conservatives attempting to exploit economic dissatisfaction — rapidly spread to other cities, turning into a nationwide demonstration against Islamic rule. Whatever happens next, it is nothing short of remarkable that
Iranians have taken to the streets chanting, among others, “Death to the dictator”, “We don’t want a mullah nation!” and “We are of Aryan race, we don’t worship Arabs”. Almost 40 years after the ayatollahs seized power and turned a Western-oriented Iran into a theocracy, it seems that many Iranians are tired of it all and want a regime change.
Whether or not they’ll get it we do not know at this stage. What we do know is that the protests are occurring in a highly networked society — more than half of Iran’s population of 80 million people has a smartphone. They are occurring in a non-liberal democracy where half the population is under the age of 27, and perhaps more than a third of that demographic is jobless. In comparison, there were only one million smartphones in Iran in 2009, when people came out in large numbers to protest a rigged election. Unlike then, the current protests are thus far leaderless and lack coherence in terms of their political demands.
As Zeynep Tufekci writes in her book Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, “the internet allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organisational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.” Ms Tufekci argues that the strength of such movements to effect change lies in their ability to change the narrative, to disrupt the status quo and to impact electoral/institutional structures. The protesting Iranians thus have a long way to go: It is yet unclear if “Down with the ayatollahs!” will be embraced by enough Iranians, uncertain as to whether the protests will survive long enough to disrupt the status quo and unlikely that they will politically coalesce to enough to overthrow the Islamic republic.
The Arab Spring failed. New authoritarian regimes or violent instability have replaced the old authoritarian regimes that it toppled. That was before governments had figured out how to deal with networked protests. In this column five years ago, I had identified three features of networked protests: That it is easy to mobilise large numbers of people, that they do not depend on middle-level leaders and that people can mobilise faster than their government’s ability to counter-mobilise. While all these remain true, governments have since acquired more sophisticated capabilities for access denial, censorship, misinformation and promoting counter-narratives. The odds against a successful popular revolution are much greater today.
Even so, it does look like the Iranians have joined the Saudis in wanting to turn away from the direction they set on in 1979. For, across the Persian Gulf, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has tossed up the Saudi royal family and, according to Thomas Friedman, wants to “bring Saudi Islam back to its more open and modern orientation” that prevailed before the fateful year.
In April 1979, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini established the Islamic Republic in Iran, ousting the Shah (Mohammad Reza Pahlavi) and staking claim to be the vanguard of the Islamic world. In November of that year, Juhayman al- Otaybi, a Saudi zealot, gathered hundreds of followers and occupied the Grand Mosque of Mecca. The Saudi authorities had to launch a military operation, with foreign assistance, to evict the zealots. To preserve its hold on power the Saudi monarchy embraced Islamic fundamentalism, imposing a severely conservative interpretation of the religion on its own people, and exporting its hard-line interpretations worldwide.
Now, nearly forty years later, the Saudi crown prince is attempting to do top-down what at least some of the Iranian protesters are trying to do bottom-up. They will each have to prevail over their theocratic establishments that control the coercive machinery of the state, and stand to be the biggest losers in any reform. It is not going to be easy for the Arab prince and the Persian people.
Normally, national interests do not change much with a change in government. So the foreign policy of Saudi kings Fahd to Abdullah and Iranian presidents Khatami to Ahmadinejad to Rouhani was more or less the same. However, if the change is not merely in government, but in the fundamental political order, the international behaviour is likely to change. If Crown Prince Mohammed and the Iranian people succeed in overturning the Islamist order in their countries, we can expect changes in their foreign policies. Already, some protesters in Iran are chanting “Let go of Syria, think about us” and “I give my life for Iran, not Gaza, not Lebanon”. It’s unclear to what extent the Saudi crown prince faces similar popular demands to wind down support for extremist proxies abroad.
We should hope that the yearnings to peel away from religious fundamentalism and theocracy are genuine in both countries. It is in India’s interests that they succeed, to whatever extent possible. A number of countries in the region take big and small cues from the two countries, and any change in the principals is likely to have wider international ripples.
I asked my colleague Pranay Kotasthane what to make of these developments. “In the most disruptive case,” he said, “We should be prepared not just for two new governments but for two new States.” In any case, I added, we should do business with whoever is in power.