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Stories of Democracy: Politics and Society in Contemporary Kuwait
Mary Ann Tétreault
2000
Chapter 9: Stories of Democracy
In the days following the opening of the 1992 National Assembly, I talked with a number of Kuwaitis about the future of parliamentary democracy in their country. Two of them, `Eisa al-Serraf and Hasan al-`Eisa, are secularist democrats. 1 `Eisa al-Serraf is a strong believer in the power of civil society to reform autocratic regimes. Although he was pessimistic in the short term, `Eisa was optimistic overall about Kuwait’s future as a democratic state.
I see this parliament as similar to the 1981 parliament. In this parliament, the liberal opposition is rather weak. In 1996 the people will correct this imbalance as they did in 1985. In 1981 there was only one democrat in the parliament. The others were not liberal. They were just independent and sympathetic with the Islamists. In 1985 the Islamists were reduced to their just representation. . . . When we have a suspension, the committed democrats are the most vocal. They get chopped, harassed, and give the Islamist groups the chance to rise up. . . . As committed democrats we feel pissed. We fight for the restoration of the constitution. We get the beatings. We get the tear gas. And they get the benefits. . . . [But] they are part of the civic groups and influence the regime with continued democratic life. With continued democratic life we can make a difference. In a twist of things, events, they also can have a role in changing people’s minds.
Hasan al `Eisa was far less sanguine because he sees Kuwaiti culture as resistant to the slow forces of democratization that his friend puts so much faith in. Hasan also is profoundly mistrustful of the Islamist trend and the way its brand of politics and its message damage the confidence of the public in democratic institutions and practices. He does not see civil society as inherently liberalizing but rather as capable of altering the balance between democratic and authoritarian forces in either direction, depending on the programs and actions of its various components.
The Islamists will be dangerous in 1996. They are controlling everything on the street. They are allied with the regime. . . . The people of Kuwait are unaware of liberal democracy. They say, “We are Muslim and we should vote for another Muslim. Human rights is not such a big issue. We should enforce Islamic laws.” These people know nothing of the decline in human rights. The government itself is betting with the Ikhwan because the people are ignorant and do not see them as a threat to the future. . . . Liberal democracy is not deeply evolved in this country, in spite of the bullshit that we have been democratic for thirty years.
“Liberal democracy is not deeply evolved in this country.” “We have been democratic for thirty years.” These observations are the bookends bracketing a long shelf of stories about democracy in Kuwait. In between are many volumes of varying lengths and genres, from grand narratives of the evolution of political institutions to romances and adventure stories describing individuals and groups pushing forward their own visions of the good society. Scattered throughout the ups and downs of Kuwait’s grand narrative there are short stories and vignettes that reflect the active engagement of thousands of Kuwaitis in political life.
Plurality in the City-State
I begin my less than firm conclusions about the prospects for democracy in Kuwait with some vignettes; in Kuwait, vignettes are not trivial. The size of the community; its integration via social networks, national news media, and the ubiquitous telephone; and the centrality of politics to everyday life in a city-state all contribute to the dissemination of information about the opinions and actions of individuals in a way that amplifies their political effect. Kuwaiti political myths and popular institutions are based on a fundamental notion of the right of Kuwaiti men, and increasingly Kuwaiti women as well, to participate directly in the public life of the nation. Kuwaitis engage in this arena not simply as candidates or occupants of political offices; many speak to a national audience from other professional points of view such as business or the arts. “Public intellectuals” regularly offer their opinions on a wide variety of issues, persons, and events. The inclusion of so many who are not formally politicians as opinion leaders and role models explains why, even before the amir decreed that women should have formal political rights, they had begun entering this grand national arena in ever larger numbers. Women and men and their multiple overlapping discourses are like a chorus made up of many parts—singing together, though rarely in unison. In Kuwait the legitimacy of the voice that speaks and answers for itself is one of the mythic values underlying cultural support for protected spaces, and constitutional protections for free speech, a free press, and the right to meet together in public.
This myth is challenged by others depicting Kuwait as a mass society divided by sect, education, residence, gender, family, and class. Their stories feature noble/thieving princes, magnanimous/rapacious merchants, ethical/depraved secularists, holy/crazed Islamists, oppressed/uppity women, along with a large cast of city slickers, bedouin bumpkins, and other stock characters. Their message is that listeners should understand the voice as representative of an interest, and interests as inherently in conflict. Such a perspective in the West is associated with the ideology of possessive individualism and the rise of mass politics. 2 The pattern in Kuwait appears to be similar. Mass politics appeals to large numbers of Kuwaiti attentistes to whom the service candidate tells a story of himself as the defender of the interests of constituent victims in need of political protection—a Kuwaiti version of the organized crime that Charles Tilly describes as integral to state formation (see chapter 2). At the same time, some Kuwaitis from virtually every social group aspire to and achieve an individual public identity, thanks to the scale of public life in a city-state and the fast transition to modernity made possible by the country’s oil wealth and the unusually egalitarian formula that guided its distribution in Kuwait as compared to most other oil-exporting countries.
Because of the salience of the individual to politics, the overall trend of any political group is matched in importance by variability within it. The relative weight given to each depends on the ideology and experience of the observer. For example, in the two analyses above, both `Eisa and Hasan talked about Islamism as a political force, but each understands and evaluates its contributions differently. To the democratic populist, Islamist movements are ideologically problematic but, even so, enhance the authority of civil society as a whole. They provide protected, if unreliable, platforms for attacking an autocratic state, and the actions of their individual members contribute to changing people’s minds about political participation—Islamists also engage in political action whose outcomes cannot be controlled. They, like other activists, contribute to democratization by the fact of their engagement and the example it sets, not merely by what they say they are trying to accomplish through their programs.
To the democratic constitutionalist, the individual is less salient as a political force and, consequently, Islamist movements are more threatening. Sunni Islamism in particular advocates discrimination against women and minorities, and Islamists of both sects advocate the imposition of significant, though somewhat different, constraints on everyone’s civil liberties. Even worse, the numeric dominance of neofundamentalists among Kuwaiti Islamists ensures the persistence of attacks on democracy as an alien doctrine that Kuwait should expel from its body politic. Rather than sheltering democratic life, the mosque of the neofundamentalists is another citadel of autocratic authority. 3
However they are judged, Islamists are the pivot of the balance of power between autocrats and constitutionalists in Kuwait today. Islamism’s attacks on civil liberties are real assaults on the rights of women, children, and minorities of every kind. However, this far-from-monolithic movement is rife with competing agendas. The fearsomeness of Kuwaiti Islamism today revolves around its surprising success at imposing gender segregation at postsecondary schools in Kuwait. This victory is interpreted as a reflection of Islamism’s hegemonic power. However, there are few other issues capable of mobilizing most or all of Kuwait’s Islamist political forces on the same side. As the “easy” issues are used up, Islamist cohesion and Islamism’s political base are likely to erode. Neofundamentalist attacks on civil liberties already have begun to edge into danger zones for Islamist leaders, few of whom seem to appreciate the degree to which modernity has penetrated Kuwaiti life. Demands to prohibit mixed-gender public gatherings such as concerts and lectures stimulate backlash among students. Calls to ban books and films are resented by middle-class intellectuals. Proposals to outlaw satellite dishes might even mobilize housewives angry to lose access to their favorite foreign programs. One of the most interesting among such developments in Kuwait is the growing prominence of people whom Haya al-Mughni calls “independent Islamist women” speaking in “new voices of protest.” 4 The fragmentation characteristic of modernity disrupts Islamist plans for social control by diminishing the number of citizens who share their monadic worldview, even from within the Islamist movement itself.
The significant community of interests shared by Islamists and the regime is not the only story here. Islamist leaders also have real conflicts with the government and its policies. One example is the lack of a serious government response to the results of the three-year investigation headed by the IPA’s Ahmad Baqr that had looked into Kuwait’s defense and foreign policy before and after the Iraqi invasion. The committee found strong evidence of corruption in defense procurement and faulted the government for Kuwait’s failure to perform better militarily when Iraq invaded. Despite the discretion of the committee throughout its proceedings, however, the crown prince refused to attend parliamentary sessions when the report was scheduled to be discussed, convincing the chair that the rulers not only oppose reform but feel safe in ignoring the appeals of those who want to clean up corruption in Kuwait. The Salafin are not the only Islamists with a strong anticorruption agenda. Mubarak al-Duwailah of the ICM is among the most energetic critics of wasteful expenditures on defense.
Another little-noted development in Islamist politics in Kuwait is that leaders who do throw in their lot with the government may weaken their popular appeal. Secularists attracted the most vociferous criticism during the 1996 campaign for having sold out the interests of their constituencies, but Islamist Jasim al-`Aoun (IPA) also
had problems with his constituency. People said he betrayed the values of the group. It was very clear. Originally he was Minister of Electricity and Water, but in the cabinet he did not stand up to support the voters. He is pro-government. He goes along with whatever the government wants. He has no strong beliefs of his own. 5
Although Jasim cited reasons of health for deciding not to run in 1996 (he had donated one of his kidneys to his daughter and experienced complications from the surgery), his chances for reelection were poor given his support for utility user fees and his statement opposing the no-confidence motion on Ahmad al-Rub`i. Following the election he continued as a cabinet member and thus as an unelected member of parliament, a sign that his health probably was not the primary motivation for his decision not to run in 1996.
Islamist successes themselves plant seeds that undermine future political victories. For example, the Islamists’ insistence that gender segregation was supported by everyone but the press and a few government ministers, though it was not accurate, was persuasive enough to convince the government to support a modified gender-segregation proposal. When government support ensured its passage, the resulting uproar prompted candidates from across the 1996 political spectrum, from Shi`i Islamists like Husain `Ali al-Qallaf to service candidates like `Abbas al-Khodary, to put themselves forward as advocates of women’s rights, although most Sunni Islamists remained firm in their opposition. Kuwaiti women used the opportunity created by the spotlight on gender politics to bring their demands for political rights to the attention of the members of the future 1996 parliament, and to attract new allies from a public absorbed in the campaign.
In 1996 feminist efforts were more broadly based and differently organized than in 1992, part of the trend in new social movement activism noted elsewhere in Kuwaiti society (see chapter 8). Rather than being associated primarily with formal voluntary associations such as the elite Women’s Cultural and Social Society (WCCS), some demonstrations, including a one-day women’s strike, 6 were organized by an ad hoc group of young working women. Organizers went out to the grass roots, including to women’s tents at campaign diwaniyyas, to explain their positions and ask women and men to wear blue ribbons signifying the wearer’s support for women’s rights. These novel activities capitalized on the salience of the gender issue and attracted political newcomers such as students and middle-class working women to events promoting women’s rights.
The mobilization of interest and support from social groups formerly not very prominent in women’s rights activism in Kuwait continued after the election and contributed to the normalization of the idea that women’s involvement in public life was natural. This shift supported expectations that women’s achievement of full political rights was merely a matter of time. The 1999 election in Qatar in which women not only voted but also stood as candidates was embarrassing to Kuwaitis who thought that their country would be the first on the Arab side of the Gulf to give women political rights. Consequently, the amir’s attempt later that year to give women the right to vote and run for office did not seem particularly radical or ideologically motivated, but rather a reasonable and pragmatic way to deal with a reform that was long overdue.
Middle-class activism in Kuwait as elsewhere tends to be pragmatic and issue-oriented rather than ideological, another mark of new social movements and further evidence of their growing importance in Kuwaiti politics. The greater appeal of this style of activism may partly explain why the old secular political blocs have had limited success in attracting new candidates and voters. Another problem for the old groupings is a negative result of personal politics: an accumulation of personal animosities that reflect on the entire group. Perceptions that the old groups are too doctrinaire and too dominated by individuals whom one might dislike—or simply be tired of—are helping to set the stage for a different approach to Kuwaiti “quasi-party” politics, as well.
A potentially important step was taken following the 1996 election, when twenty Kuwaitis got together to talk about how politics might be done differently. 7 In April 1997 the first announcement that a new political group was on the horizon appeared in local newspapers. 8 According to founding member Shamlan al-`Eisa,
We aspire to greater democratic freedoms, be it at the economic or social level. [Our group] is not against the government . . . or against [already existing] parties. We seek to be independent and attract the silent majority of the people. 9
The new organization, called the Nahdha (Renaissance) Party by the Arab Times and the National Democratic Rally by the Mideast Mirror, includes women among its founding members—Moudhi al-Hmoud, the Kuwait University professor who was one of the two female speakers at the 1992 campaign rally sponsored by Saleh al-Yasin (see chapter 6), is one of them. 10 Before it had even selected a governing board, the group applied for and received a licence to publish a weekly journal. It also attracted the attention of members of parliament, several of whom are reported to have asked to join but were turned down “for the time being.” 11 By June 1997 about two thousand citizens had stated their interest in joining. If there is to be a renaissance in Kuwaiti politics, efforts to organize the center will be a crucial element in bringing it about.
The emergence of the Grouping has created fresh hope in Kuwait that political life can become more institutionalized and geared to policies rather than individuals. It is a political party in the Kuwaiti style, in a country whose constitution bans parties but not informal political groups. . . . It seeks to promote respect for political and intellectual pluralism, give national interests precedence over factional considerations, and champion openness and tolerance. 12
`Abdullah Nibari thinks the “silent majority” that Shamlan al-`Eisa identifies as being attracted to the new group includes those middle-class professionals among Kuwaiti attentistes who want to be involved in politics but have been afraid that public activism would draw them into confrontations with authority. 13 Such a group as he describes is the liberal antithesis of Islamism. It is made up of a collection of persons whose preferred antidote to the autocratic state is a very large private sphere in which they can carry on, unmolested by the state or by religious radicals, those aspects of their lives that they choose to move into that protected space. As such lifestyle liberals enter the public arena, Islamist puritans will encounter strong competition for their voter bases.
Nonviolent political change in Kuwait also depends on changes in the attitudes of members of the ruling family. Some will occur automatically as the older members, with their own lifelong antagonisms toward participatory politics and its irritating gadflies, exit the political scene. Crown Prince Sa`d al-`Abdullah went to England in March 1997 for cancer surgery. His long absence from the parliament during his illness and recovery is probably a major reason why the rulers’ exasperation with the 1996 National Assembly was expressed more frequently as calls to change the cabinet than as threats to dismiss the parliament. Although his stand-in as prime minister, Shaikh Nasir al-Ahmad, is not exactly a democrat, he was significantly more accommodating in his public behavior than Shaikh Sa`d as well as less provocative with regard to playing the “religious card.” As I noted in chapter 8, after Shaikh Sa`d returned, threats to dissolve the parliament resumed. Meanwhile, the cordial reception by the crown prince of the “spiritual leader” of the Palestinian Islamist group HAMAS in May 1998 was perhaps intended to reestablish his authority over another cousin and potential rival, foreign minister Shaikh Sabah al-Ahmad, who resigned in protest but withdrew his resignation two days later at the request of the amir. 14
It is conventional among a number of analysts to explain Kuwaiti ruling family politics as a rivalry for power between the descendents of Mubarak’s two sons, Jabir and Salim. Such an approach seems overly simplified, ignoring as it does how modernity has affected the ruling family itself. Modernity as a worldview alters the ambitions of ruling family members just as it alters the ambitions of merchants and members of the middle class, and reflexivity enlarges the strategic repertoires of all of them. One example can be found in the attempts of younger members of the Sabah to run for parliament. Two declared their interest in 1992 and one in 1996. The 1996 contender, Shaikh Ahmad al-Fahad, then head of Kuwait’s Olympic Committee, said that he wanted to run to shake up the parliamentary routine by introducing a member of the ruling family in the same capacity as other elected members. Insisting that other family members as well as citizens had urged him to run, he cited among the reasons for his action the need for strong leadership and the importance of the government’s enforcing the laws if it wants to preserve its power. 15
These ventures into electoral politics by younger family members were squelched by the amir. He asked them to withdraw their candidacies on the grounds that the constitution establishes the relationship between the rulers and the people, a subtle way of saying not only that the Sabah are a race apart from the rest of the Kuwaitis but also that the amir and his close advisers are the only members of the family who ought to be involved directly in politics.
This euphemistic slap to the ambitious young is not likely to reconcile them to decorative roles as the family grows larger at the same time that the number of powerful positions in the state that the family can continue to monopolize is under pressure to shrink. I have speculated elsewhere that Shaikh `Ali al-Khalifa’s intensely competitive behavior is driven in part by his exclusion from the family’s center of power because he is not a direct descendent of the amir Mubarak. 16 A similar desire for individual status and recognition is revealed by the decisions of young Sabah to engage in public life on the same basis as all but their senior relations enjoy. Even when public expressions of dissent by young Sabah can be interpreted as an extension of the conflicts between the two “entitled” branches of the family, such as the statement issued by Shaikh Nasir al-Sabah al-Ahmad blaming the prime minister for the standoff between the cabinet and the parliament setting off the June 1998 crisis, 17 it also signifies an assertion of the self by a subordinate male family member. This desire by the ambitious and able young to achieve for the self rather than to act as an instrument of a clan also marked the aspirations of Sa`d Ben Tafla al-`Ajmy, who ran for parliament on his own without seeking a primary endorsement from his tribe. Both examples mark modern desires and behaviors and indicate a growing hollowness at the center of traditional tribal social formations.
Modernity enlarges the individual and increases the attractiveness of private life; 18 it also enlarges the public sphere and provides opportunities for new political men to mobilize constituencies. 19 Among the most powerful of these venues are the mass media. 20 New men in the ruling family have superior resources for a relatively independent engagement in public life through newspapers and magazines. `Ali al-Khalifa, as I discussed in chapter 8, is now an owner of a leading Kuwait daily, al-Watan. Another example is al-Zaman, a magazine run by Nasir al-Sabah al-Ahmad. Shortly before the attempt on `Abdullah Nibari’s life, Al-Zaman ran an editorial advocating more decisiveness and innovation in government. Complaining that that “the government had no program or vision . . . and was . . . continuing to run the country as a rentier state,” 21 it concluded by calling for “an effective and lively political administration which possesses vision and decisiveness.” 22 Few in the opposition would disagree with this assessment which, perhaps not surprisingly, echoes closely the statements of the aspiring Sabah parliamentary candidate, Shaikh Ahmad al-Fahad. It also foreshadowed the comments Nasir al-Sabah al-Ahmad made during the parliamentary crisis of 1998 (see above) which emphasized the superiority of representation of the parliament over the cabinet and the constitutional authority of the parliament to question ministers about their actions. 23
To be able to continue to manage Kuwaiti politics in the style of the old imagining depends not only on politicians who follow the norms of traditional life but also on a continued supply of voters who see their electoral role as following the leadership of a patron or family head. The selective enfranchisement of new, mostly badu, voters reflects an appreciation by Kuwaiti rulers of their dependence on citizens who behave like subjects. A young Kuwaiti who lives in the district of Old Jahra’ recounted some childhood memories of post-1981 elections in Kuwait.
They used to go around with pickup trucks and pack bedouins in the back like so many sheep. Then they’d get them to the [polling station] and march them in to vote. Most of them [the badu] didn’t even know what they were doing. They just did what the organizers told them to. 24
The voter-as-subject continues as a potentially decisive presence in Kuwaiti political life as long as there are enfranchisable Kuwaiti residents who live in the old imagining. Three friends accompanied me to the school that served as the Old Jahra’ polling station near the end of election evening in 1996. We two women went into several “precincts,” classrooms built around a central courtyard, to observe the balloting. Meanwhile, the two men meandered around the crowded courtyard, observing negotiations between vote buyers and tribal leaders and watching the subsequent herding of silent men into the various rooms to vote. We did not know who these men were, or whether they were among the newly enfranchised second-category citizens who were voting for the first time in 1996. 25 My assumption in telling this story is that persons who lead traditional lives are more vulnerable to having their votes suborned than those from the modernizing elements of the population. However, this is not a unanimous assumption, and the reality is probably far more complicated than I can show it here.
Vote-buying has nothing to do with illiteracy. There are a lot of old men here [in District 13] but they have principles. In Kaifan, there are `Awazim and `Ajman and hadhar. The city people are a minority so there, hadhar become desirable votes to buy. An associate of the candidate [a potential vote seller] is in the area where he goes to vote. He [a bought voter] comes back into a car and says he voted for [the candidate] and then they pay him. There is only one bad paper. We have calculated [that the candidate buying votes] will give up ten votes [if he has ten cars working the ballot-switch scam in the district]. 26
Demographic trends are shrinking the relative number of illiterate traditional voters as compared to educated modern voters but, as the young campaign worker quoted above has noted, this is not to say that vote buyers find no sellers among the literate or among the modern. However, it does change the process and also the results. In the situation he describes, there is no intermediary such as a tribal patron to negotiate on behalf of his clients. Vote sellers increasingly have to be dealt with on the retail level rather than in the wholesale patterns common to the old imagining. The new pattern is evident even in the outlying areas. “My uncle sold his vote last time [in 1992],” a young woman told me about a relation who lives in District 14. “They paid him KD 1000 and he bought a satellite dish. I think he sold it twice because the first election was canceled and they had to vote again.” At the same time, selling your vote as an independent entrepreneur who is making his own deal brings consequences that must be weighed against the value of the immediate quid pro quo. “An MP who had purchased votes and goes into parliament, those who had sold votes came to him for wasta. He says, `No, I bought your vote, and now we are even.’” 27 Thus the shift to a dependence on expert systems as opposed to patron-client networks undercuts the incentives—or raises the ante—for corrupt practices, and the corruption itself might be corrupted, as vote buyers complained in 1992 (see chapter 6).
The politics of selective enfranchisement forces decision-makers to consider carefully the likely effects that each new group of potential voters may have. Such assessments are not easy because none of these groups is monolithic in its orientation or behavior. Whether a new group is enfranchised depends on assessments of how “controllable” their votes are—from the perspective of the rulers, how much confidence one can have that traditional methods of social control will dictate their actions. And there is a second question: if a particular group of votes is relatively controllable, which among the various political forces is most likely to be in the driver’s seat. Responding to a question at a press conference for foreign reporters covering the 1996 election, political scientist Ghanim al-Najjar explained the situation this way:
The government has a vested interest in knowing who are the voters. When the base opens—adding women will be more than a 100 percent increase—it makes it harder to control. If the government wants women, external pressure will not matter. The issue is whether or not to open democracy. The government calculates on the political base. The government knows and can predict what the base will do. If you add women, this becomes extremely unpredictable and may change the political equation. The government is extremely careful and does not want to open the system too much. Like for second-class citizens: when they realized there were only twenty or twenty-five thousand, it wasn’t so scary. 28
This thoughtful analysis encourages a careful look at the May 1999 amiri decree extending political rights to women. I believe that the amir’s action reflected two partially contradictory impulses. On the one hand, the amir demonstrated that patriarchy can be equitable regarding an important category of human rights, setting himself apart from the democratic parliament which, as an institution, never had shown itself to be hospitable to women’s reasonable political aspirations. 29 On the other hand, the rulers undoubtedly saw practical benefits to themselves from this change. The loudest critics of the amiri decree were Sunni Islamists, who offered a variety of proposals to reduce its scope and impact during the 1999 campaign season. Shi`i Islamists took the other side; consequently, by his decision the amir divides Sunni from Shi`i Islamists and reduces Islamist cohesion. Also, many Kuwaitis—religious and secular and perhaps including the amir and his advisers as well—believe that women are more likely to support traditional values than men, and therefore to support candidates presenting themselves as champions of such values.
From this perspective, women might look to the regime like the “last badu,” the last traditional force whose enfranchisement would strengthen its position. Thus, the amir’s apparently radical departure from Kuwaiti tradition might be just another “between-parliaments adjustment” to the electoral system whose purpose is to shift the balance of domestic political forces away from parliament and toward the ruling family. 30 However, as Hannah Arendt cautioned, political action always has consequences that are unforeseen by its initiators. Like the “desertization” strategy underlying the government’s alteration of the political system prior to the 1981 election, the 1999 “feminization” strategy also produced unexpected results.
Institutions and Rules
The grand narratives of democratization look at constitutions and the development of institutions that mediate political life. The grand narratives of parliamentary life in Kuwait are, as we have seen, bitterly contested, a function of one of the fundamental processes of modernity which is to orient one toward the future—toward a desired future—via a selective appropriation and interpretation of the past. 31 Such narratives tell two interdependent stories: each formal narrative comes with a subtext that signals what the narrative is about. The subtext reflects the dependence of choice and outcome on constraints arising from institutions and rules, and on attempts to legitimate some institutions and rules while delegitimating others. The narrative process itself becomes a manipulation of systems that carries with it a great potential to injure or to build trust. 32
Since the late nineteenth century, the drama of Kuwaiti politics has been played out in a series of attempts by rulers to carve out a space for autonomous action for themselves and countervailing attempts by elites outside the ruling family to limit the public activities in which the rulers can engage without their explicit consent. Kuwaiti rulers strove to elude merchant control by reducing their dependence on merchant financing. They looked for private sources of income, first from their date gardens in Iraq and then from Ottoman and British subventions. The inauguration of the oil era in Kuwait freed the rulers from their remaining financial dependency on merchant wealth, 33 but it did not free them from the merchants’ insistence that rulers held their positions not because of royal entitlement but only insofar as they retained the consent of the governed: in Kuwait, although taxation no longer was practiced, the expectation of representation continued undiminished.
The 1962 constitution can be viewed as an attempt to manage conflicts in interests and expectations between Kuwaiti rulers and prominent citizens by formalizing the relationship of the ruling family to the rest of the nation. In the process, it also created independently legitimated institutions such as the National Assembly, and a set of rules under which differences between the rulers and other Kuwaiti social groups which might be represented in that assembly could be bargained out. Despite the highly favored position of the ruling family under this constitution, rulers continued to long for fewer restraints on their authority. At the same time, the institutionalization of a popular assembly, however limited its formal representation might be, created a permanent legitimate check on the parameters of any narrative told from the ruling family’s perspective. The rulers attempted to achieve a freer hand first by dismissing the parliament, but the parliament’s legitimacy could not be denied and by trying to deny it, the rulers jeopardized their own. When the insistence that parliament be restored grew too strong prudently to ignore, the rulers were forced to move the struggle to preserve and extend their autonomy to one centered on changing the rules of engagement, that is, by changing the rules by which members of the National Assembly were elected and thereby what sort of person—which set of interests—the rulers would have to accommodate. 34
Managing elections depends both on controlling who gets to vote and on controlling the rules for choosing candidates and allocating representatives. As I described in previous chapters, changes in all these rules, including the 1981 redistricting and the selective enfranchisement of increments of mostly tribal voters, altered the internal culture of the parliament and the balance of forces in society as a whole. Merchants, city dwellers, and Shi`a lost representation while nonurban and tribal groups, along with Sunna, gained; secularists lost representation as compared to Islamists. As a result, former concentrations of countervailing political power were both shrunken and fragmented across constituency groups with the result that opposition power, cohesion, and effectiveness were damaged. At the same time, Islamist forces, particularly those I have described as neofundamentalist, gained political power. Both the large tribes and urban secularist political forces developed new strategies to reclaim some of their former power, the most successful of which was the tribal primary. But the splintering of districts made it easier to change the outcome of elections illicitly, by financing additions to candidate slates, manipulating the group dynamic at diwaniyyas, and outright vote-buying in key districts. Consequently, even where political forces managed to reorganize coherently, it still was possible to deny a particular man his seat in parliament through careful planning and judicious spending. Thus, it is clear that rules have significant effects on outcomes, not only through their normal operation but also by how, how easily, and by whom these rules are most likely to be circumvented.
The increasing ease of manipulating electoral outcomes following the 1981 redistricting was clearly evident to the opposition, which asserted such manipulation as lying behind their lost ground. It also suggested using redistricting in the future as a strategy to benefit other groups, such as to bring districts closer to the one-man-one-vote ideal which would increase representation from the outlying areas. Observers from across the political spectrum have been calling for a redrawing of constituencies in the name of reform. 35 Some of the people I talked to about this in 1990 and 1992 wanted to go back to the ten five-member districts of the pre-1981 era, which they felt represented their interests more fairly than the twenty-five two-member districts of today; others wanted to redraw the lines defining the post-1981 two-member districts so that they would be more equally populated.
The present system violates fairness both by reducing interest representation and by violating one-man-one-vote standards. For example, since 1981 direct representation of Shi`i Kuwaitis in the parliament has fallen to half of the already underrepresented proportion of the population they managed to elect prior to the redrawing of districts. At the same time, a review of table 6.1 shows how disparate the populations of the various districts were in 1992, ranging as they did from fewer than nine hundred persons to more than seven thousand. The populations of election districts in 1996 and 1999 were similarly diverse. Direct representation of persons defined by their residence also is highly disproportionate under these rules.
In April 1997 a proposal to create a single election district covering all of Kuwait was submitted by Ghannam al-Jamhour (T, Farwaniya) to the parliamentary committee on Interior and Defense Affairs. Advocates of the proposal said it would “put an end to buying votes during electoral campaigns, put an end to by-elections, and ensure national unity.” 36 The reference to “by-elections” is to tribal primaries, which supporters of the single-constituency plan would like to see ended. The single-district proposal that emerged from the committee six weeks later provided for a two-step process. Each voter could choose up to five candidates from a single list. Any candidate obtaining 15 percent of the total votes cast would be elected automatically. A second round of voting from a list of those who had received at least 7 percent but less than 15 percent of the votes in the first round would be used to fill the remaining seats. 37
Advocates of the single-district plan seek to satisfy a number of goals simultaneously with its adoption, not only to discourage vote-buying and wring out frivolous candidacies but also to eliminate the vexing though technically soluable problem of unequal populations across districts and the far less tractable problems of extra-district voting, the tribal primary, and the troubling implications of its spread to nontribal factions. As I noted above, vote-buying has not gone away with the ebbing of illiteracy; it merely has changed its social character. The small district makes vote-buying of all types more manageable, and it also is more vulnerable than a large one to manipulation of election results by flooding it with frivolous candidates. Both kinds of tampering become more expensive and less effective under a single-district system, not only because of the district’s larger size but also because of its more varied interests and the change in electoral dynamics that would result from putting the entire country into a single constituency. Some kinds of diwaniyya voting also would become less effective, such as the strategy used against Husain al-Qallaf in 1992—see chapters 6 and 7.
A regular redrawing of the present number of twenty-five district boundaries to accommodate population shifts would be technically feasible in Kuwait. However, it would generate its own corrupt practices, just as it has in the United States where the term gerrymandering was coined to describe how election districts were drawn to suit the taste of Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry in the late eighteenth century. Complicating redistricting in Kuwait is the increasing number of persons who claim legal residence in one area and actually live somewhere else. A few do this for political reasons—a Kuwaiti variation of carpetbagging—but most do it because they have moved their residences to districts in the outlying areas. 38 Since liberation, the process of obtaining a new civil identity card has become almost impossibly arduous, and most people with family members in their old neighborhoods do not subject themselves to it. Some also prefer to receive services, such as medical care, from their old city neighborhoods, where facilities are more familiar and less crowded than they are in the newer suburbs. An additional residency problem arose following the Iraqi invasion, which generated internal “refugees.” These are persons whose homes were destroyed, some of whom continue to live in other districts. There is a large tolerance for extra-district registration, 39 and the names of former residents and current refugees are seldom challenged when the lists are published. Following the 1996 election, `Ali al-Baghli challenged the results on the grounds that close to three hundred refugees from Failaka Island had voted in his district. However, the judge dismissed his suit because he had not asked that they be struck from the voter rolls beforehand. The legitimacy of the extended family as a corporate body, along with tolerance for refugees whose current residence is not necessarily a matter of their own choosing, makes a concerted attempt to “regularize” residency requirements in Kuwait problematic.
The tribal primary was criticized by many urban Kuwaitis in 1992 and, as I indicated in chapter 6, also by some in the outlying areas. In this regard, it is significant that the sponsor of the single-district plan is himself a tribal representative from the outlying areas. But there is a new intensity in urban opposition to the tribal primary which arises from its use in 1996 by another kind of “tribe,” religious sectarians. In District 4, Da`iya, a Sunni primary was cobbled together shortly before the election to oppose two very strong Shi`i candidates, an incumbant parliamentarian, `Ali al-Baghli, and Husain `Ali al-Qallaf, the man whose strong run in District 8 in 1992 had been stymied by sectarian diwaniyya voting for Isma`il al-Shati (see chapter 6). Nine organizers got the Sunni candidates to agree to a “Sunni primary,” a poll to be taken at selected diwaniyyas to choose the two strongest Sunni candidates. All the candidates agreed in advance to withdraw from the race should they lose the primary, improving the winners’ chances of taking the district. However, shortly before the primary was run, the Sunni incumbent backed out of the agreement. The primary went on as scheduled and the winners, `Abd al-Wahed al-`Awadhi and Jasim al-Mudhaf, campaigned as a team until the election.
To close off further use of the primary by sectarian groups, several bills to end all primaries held in conjunction with elections to national or municipal offices were submitted to the 1996 parliament. Like pushing for a single district as opposed to a reapportionment of voters across twenty-five geographically defined districts, this proposal appears to be antitribe. The tribes developed the primary strategy and (with the exception of the single Sunni primary run in 1996—which in practice was more like diwaniyya voting than like the primaries run by the tribes) are the only ones who have used it. The chair of the parliamentary committee charged with reviewing the bill, Fahad al-`Azemy (T, Subbahiya), stated publicly that the committee could not support a ban that targets a particular segment of the community—i.e., the tribes—and that if the proposal could not be worded to apply uniformly to all groups for all elections to any office, including offices in unions, cooperative societies, and voluntary organizations, it would be rejected in committee. 40 In 1998 the parliament came up with an acceptable compromise, passing an amendment to the election law that made all primary elections, whether held by tribes or by sects, illegal. 41
During the 1999 campaign season, more than a dozen tribal primaries were held, most of them organized by the seven large tribes that had held a majority of the elected seats in the 1996 parliament. 42 The tribes attempted to evade the ban by gathering in small groups called “coordinating meetings,” limited to random samples of about one hundred members selected by computer. 43 But to the surprise of tribal leaders and meeting participants, the public prosecutor arrested and questioned hundreds of tribesmen, including members of the dismissed parliament, about the primaries. One of them, Khaled al-`Adwa, was reported to have won the `Ajman primary in his district (Ahmadi). He was arrested for his participation in an illegal primary during the campaign, put under a travel ban, and released only on payment of a KD 2000 bond, which just happens to be the maximum fine for this offense. 44 Whether the government deals as harshly with other tribe members found guilty of violating the primary ban or simply allows the issue to fade away, primaries as ad hoc grassroots institutions that simultaneously reflect and entrench the power of geographically concentrated ascriptive groups will continue to be undermined by growing perceptions of their inherent unfairness. Helped along by the dismay engendered by the Sunni primary in 1996, as well as by the refusal of some young tribe members to participate in them even when they were legal, the change in the electoral law adds to the declining legitimacy of self-regarding interference by any single political force in Kuwaiti elections.
Even though the unregulated primary has become a formally illegitimate institution, the single-district plan finds support among Kuwaitis for reasons in addition to whatever virtues it might have as an anticorruption measure. Political scientist Lani Guinier has written extensively on “the tyranny of the majority.” By this she means the ability of a numerical majority to use electoral rules to deny representation of the interests of minority groups in policy-making bodies. 45 The tyranny of the majority operates in Kuwait as as it does in the United States and other majoritarian winner(s)-take-all systems constructed on narrow, geographically based constituencies, particularly where there are no effective political parties to create communities of interest among members of a district.
In Kuwait the interdependence of these factors is revealed in a number of ways. One is opposition to tribal primaries from members of smaller clans. Members of a small clan have little chance of achieving direct representation whether they hold a tribal primary or not. They also see themselves as denied interest representation because, without being able to put a member of their own group into office, they are not confident that their interests will be taken into account. They have no trust in the system and perhaps little reason to feel otherwise. Some Kuwaiti Shi`a also feel disenfranchised, as do Sunni residents of the few districts that are predominantly Shi`i, one reason for the hysteria in both groups over the 1996 Sunni primary in District 4. Guinier argues that an electoral system that denies not only direct representation (that is, one that denies members of minority groups the possibility of being elected) but also interest representation (that is, one that denies minority groups the power to affect the results of elections) is unfair. 46 Of the two, Guinier believes that interest representation is by far the more important, both in terms of normative principles and with regard to the function of representation as a support of the legitimacy of a political regime. In fact, as she points out, direct representation is no guarantee of interest representation. Even a member of a voter’s own nominal group could fail to represent her or him on issues that do not relate directly to the particular dimension of group construction. Also, any individual or group whose ownership of an office cannot be contested successfully under whatever rules may be in effect is likely to be deaf to unwanted demands from any segment of her or his nominal constituency. Fair representation, minimally defined as a situation in which it is possible for a coherent interest of reasonable size to win at least some of the time, depends less on electing a representative who shares specific attributes with a majority of the voters than on electing someone who has to depend on multiple elements of a mixed constituency to win. These same principles would contribute to a dampening of intergroup conflict in Kuwait.
The complicated procedures of the single-district plan have their critics and others dislike it because of its effects. For example, some say it would deny them representation by their neighbors, people they know. At-large electoral systems do favor candidates whose appeal transcends local concerns. In consequence, at-large elections tend to be biased against newcomers and individuals whose situations are such that their views and talents are less well known than those of more famous persons. Single districts also favor candidates capable of putting together a broadly based voter coalition over those who rely on particular attributes such as sectarian affiliation or clan membership. Thus, the automatic primacy of the largest plurality based on personal attributes like religion and family membership would disappear, engendering opposition from persons for whom these are electoral plusses under the current system. A single-district system also has the potential to redistribute offices among the set of persons affiliated with a political bloc. This attracts individual opposition and support depending on how each potential candidate assesses his chances under each system. 47
It is clear from this discussion that electoral rules affect more than the distribution of representation. They also constitute grounds for the reflexive process that shapes political attitudes and behaviors in the future. This is particularly true in Kuwait where urban legends cluster around issues where there is a lack of faith in the reliability of expert systems and a lack of trust in existing institutions. It is these issues that provoke the strongest desires in average citizens to return to the stability of tradition. Yet modernization cannot simply be turned off or turned back. As Giddens implies and Polanyi insists, modernization is not merely a path toward modernity but is itself, as a process, something that disassembles the material, social, and psychological supports for traditional life. It is this aspect that makes the association of Islamism with modernization and modernity most troubling.
Islamism uses religious symbols to mobilize people for political action. In doing so, it taps into emotions that are so powerful and deeply embedded in the human brain that we cannot comprehend them rationally except through mythic stories such as family romances, or bring them under our conscious control except through exemplary rituals such as the Catholic Mass or the Muslim ram sacrifice. 48 All religions have at their disposal a repertoire of myths and symbols whose effects can be benign or horrible depending on how they are used. 49 Such myths and symbols rationalize powerful negative emotions like anger, fear, insecurity, and dread, and one way they do this is by demonizing enemies to explain their power to harm and hurt. Symbolic violence and real violence are connected through action undertaken in spaces of appearance, 50 where the politics of religion has a special power to unleash violence that the initiators of action find themselves unable to control because religion is so intimately connected to primordial human emotions. Religion informs cognition and behavior by giving shape to these emotions such that human beings can continue to live in the presence of pain and the imminence of death. Ideally, religion strengthens individual and collective capacities to reconcile desire to necessity; when such a reconciliation is not possible, religion has an enormous capacity to inflict harm.
Islamist movements appeal most strongly to those who are left out of the benefits of modernization, not only the transitional generation(s) who have “paid their dues” and yet are deprived of the customary authority and privileges of age, but also people of all ages facing acute insecurity, and those who must compete for positions that they believe tradition entitles persons of their status to receive automatically. Like other fundamentalisms, neofundamentalist Islamism promises to restore tradition by reinstituting the subjection of women and minorities, entropy-resistant persons who can serve as scapegoats and, by their subjection, reaffirm the premodern social order. But to say or even imply that tradition is recoverable in a simple, direct, and nonviolent way is untrue. An even bigger lie is the representation of Islamism, a movement that attacks political authority and proposes radical revisions in religious norms as well, as compatible with tradition. 51 Islamism uses gender politics to attest to its traditionality 52 but, as Fatima Mernissi among others notes, Islamists do not hesitate to appropriate those aspects of modernity that suit their political purposes, particularly technologies that speed reflexivity. 53
Inasmuch as Islam provides a principled and coherent set of values under which one can live a moral life, it is not religion but rather the co-optation of religious symbols by political entrepreneurs that is the crux of arguments against Islamist politics. However, it is difficult for people to disentangle religious and political claims, especially where religious traditions are complex, on the one hand embracing values compatible with pluralism and democracy and on the other enjoining obedience to authority, including clerical authority, to control significant aspects of a believer’s personal life. 54 This complexity allows both liberal and fundamentalist movements to claim religious sanction for their goals and, in Kuwait, helps to explain why many Islamists share some liberal values, just as many liberal “secularists” are devoutly religious. Even so, the dangers of neofundamentalism to peaceful political change are acute, and among my greatest problems in assessing whether democratization in Kuwait can proceed comes from the conundrum with which I began this chapter: an inability to decide whether Islamism is building civil society through new social movements and coalition politics faster than it is destroying civil life by acquiescing to the rulers and mobilizing the street. Another question for Islamists is whether they can be both populists and institutionalists. Among the lost opportunities that have marred Kuwaiti politics since liberation are those caused by the repeated failure of Islamists and secularists to hammer out unified and principled positions that both groups can support wholeheartedly. The 1999 parliament marks what could be the last opportunity to achieve democratic politics in Kuwait based on this nationalist vision.
Turning the Kaleidoscope: Plus ça change . . .
The 1999 parliamentary election shifted the positions of key actors in Kuwaiti national politics. The unprecedented constitutionality of the 1999 dissolution, along with the amir’s decision to force the issue of political rights for women, added new dimensions to old political divisions. Yet the perennial twin dilemmas of Kuwaiti domestic politics remain to be resolved. The first is a problem of agency for the regime. Does it accept the necessity of democratization and therefore the legitimacy of the parliament as a partner in making national policy, or will it continue to undermine the operation and effectiveness of all of Kuwait’s representative institutions? The second is a problem of agency for the parliament. Does it have the collective capacity to make itself the legitimate representative of the highly varied collection of constituencies that make up the Kuwaiti nation, or will it continue to allow primordial loyalties and private desires to impair its capacity to act in the national interest?
Despite their novel aspects, the dissolution procedure and the election that followed are very much part of the Kuwaiti political tradition that I have traced throughout this volume. As I noted in chapter 8, the 1999 dissolution, like its predecessors in 1976 and 1986, was preceded by conflict over economic policy and a threatened parliamentary investigation of fiscal malfeasance by a member of the ruling family. In addition, the 1996 parliament, which had sat for nearly three years, had managed to pass very few laws. The dissolution allowed the amir both to take full control of policy-making and to draft much-needed legislation.
Between the dismissal of parliament on May 4 and the election on July 3, the amir issued some sixty decrees. The decree on housing tackled a critical long-standing domestic problem. The decree conferring full citizenship rights on women also was long overdue. Most of the decrees dealt with economic issues. These ran from routine housekeeping measures such as the national budget and annual accounts for state institutions, to new policies on contentious subjects such as upstream privatization and domestic economic restructuring. Both the intermingling of issues and the absence of the emergency conditions which article 71 requires for amiri decrees to be promulgated legitimately during a parliamentary recess, complicated the parliament’s response.
The lack of an overriding necessity might have been used as grounds for the wholesale cancellation of all the decrees as unconstitutional. This hard-line position was argued strongly by Ahmad al-Sa`doun even before the July election, and contributed to the determination of the rulers to prevent his reelection as speaker in the 1999 parliament. The defeat of Ahmad al-Sa`doun (see below) and the commencement of the new fiscal year in the interim between the dissolution and the election persuaded members to treat the budget bills as necessary and deal with them immediately. Discarding the option of voting all the decrees up or down at one time opened a window for possible compromise on several measures. These were bound over for consideration in the session due to begin in October, leaving more than two months for negotiations among members of parliament and the government. Even in the absence of a fiscal exigency, the inclusion of the women’s rights proposal among the decrees blocked their wholesale cancellation. Cancellation without debate would have been castigated by foreign observers and by Kuwaiti feminists as just one more instance of masculinist obstruction by the parliament of Kuwaiti women’s achievement of their legitimate rights. As he did with his proposal for the Majlis al-Watani, the amir once again succeeded in drawing attention away from unconstitutional actions by himself and his government by clothing them in superficially democratic garb—an election in 1990 and women’s rights in 1999.
However, as Shaikh Ahmad al-Jabir discovered during his confrontation with the 1938 parliament, dismissing a sitting parliament and calling for new elections do not always bring in the desired results. A listing of the 1999 winners and their political affiliations can be found in table 9.1. A brief inspection reveals that many of the regime’s most vociferous opponents were returned by the voters in 1999, along with a large number of members who are designated as “independent liberals,” a term that signifies, in addition to a lack of affiliation with an organized political group, a strong commitment to constitutionalism. The press described the result as a victory for “Islamists and liberals,” 55 shorthand for a parliament in which the regime’s opponents are heavily represented. Equally important is that less than a quarter are first-time winners, so the 1999 parliament has an unprecedented proportion of experienced members (please refer back to table 6.2).
| Table 9.1: Results of the 1999 Parliamentary Election | ||
| 1. Sharq | ||
| `Adnan `Abd al-Samad | INA, Shi`a | |
| * Saleh Ashour | Independent Islamist, Shi`a | |
| 2. Al-Murqab | ||
| `Abd al-Wahhab al-Haroun | Independent liberal, M | |
| `Abdullah al-Nibari | KDF | |
| 3. Al-Qiblah | ||
| * Muhammad Jasim al-Saqr | Independent liberal, M | |
| Jasim al-Khorafy | Independent | |
| 4. Al-Da`iya | ||
| `Abdullah al-Roumi | Independent, M | |
| `Abd al-Mohsin Jamal | Independent Islamist, Shi`a, io | |
| 5. Al-Qadisiya | ||
| Ahmad Baqr | IPA, Sunni | |
| `Abd al-`Aziz al-Mutawa’ | Independent | |
| 6. Al-Faiha’ | ||
| Mishairy al-`Anjari | Independent liberal, M | |
| Mishairy al-`Osaimi | Independent liberal, M | |
| 7. Kaifan | ||
| Walid al-Tabtaba’i | IPA, Sunni | |
| * Ahmad al-Duaij | IPA, Sunni | |
| 8. Hawali | ||
| Hasan Jawhar | INA, Shi`a, io | |
| `Abd al-Mosin al-Mudej | Independent liberal, M | |
| 9. Al-Rawdha | ||
| * Faisal al-Shaye` | Independent liberal, M | |
| Nasir al-Sane` | ICM, Sunni | |
| 10. `Adeliya | ||
| Saleh al-Fadhalla | Independent, io | |
| Sami al-Munayes | KDF | |
| 11. Al-Khaldiya | ||
| Ahmad al-Sa`doun | Independent, M | |
| Ahmad al-Rub`i | Independent liberal, M | |
| 12. Al-Salmiya | ||
| Mekhled al-`Azemi | ICM, Sunni | |
| Salim al-Hamad | Independent, M | |
| 13. Al-Rumaithiya | ||
| Husain `Ali al-Qallaf | Independent Islamist, Shi`a | |
| Saleh Khorshaid | Independent, Shi`a, pg | |
| 14. Abraq Khaittan | ||
| Walid al-`Osaimi | Independent, pg | |
| Hmoud al-Jabri | Independent, pg | |
| 15. Al-Farwaniya | ||
| * Mubarak al-Haifi | Independent | |
| * `Eid al-Rashidi | Independent (cabinet minister) | |
| 16. Al-`Umariya | ||
| Mubarak al-Duwailah | ICM, Sunni | |
| Mubarak Khrainej | Independent, pg | |
| 17. Julib Al-Shiyoukh | ||
| Musallem al-Barrak | Independent liberal, M | |
| * Husain Mazyad | Independent | |
| 18. Al-Sulaibikhat | ||
| Khalaf Dimethir | Independent, pg | |
| * `Abdullah Aradah | ICM, Sunni | |
| 19. Al-Jahra’ al-Jadida | ||
| * Muhammad al-Khalifah | Independent | |
| Ahmad Nasir al-Shriyan | Independent, M | |
| 20. Al-Jahra’ al-Qadimi | ||
| * Muhammad Busairi | ICM, Sunni | |
| Talal al-`Ayar | Independent, pg | |
| 21. Al-Ahmadi | ||
| Walid Jari | Independent | |
| * Sa`doun `Otaibi | Independent | |
| 22. Al-Riqa | ||
| Sa`d Tami al-`Ajmi | Independent, M | |
| * Mubarak al`Ajmi | ICM, Sunni | |
| 23. Al-Subbahiya | ||
| Khamis Talaq | Independent, M | |
| Fahad Lumaia | Independent, pg | |
| 24. Al-Fahaheel | ||
| Rashid Saif al-Hujailan | Independent | |
| * Fahad Hajri | Independent | |
| 25. Um al-Haiman | ||
| * Mashan al-`Azmi | Independent | |
| Marzouk al-Habini | Independent | |
|
Notes: * Denotes a newcomer to the Parliament Organized political groups
Other leanings
Cabinet member: in the Council of Ministers appointed on July 13, 1999. Sources: In addition to the sources listed for other tables, Kuwait Information Office, Washington, D.C. <www.kuwait-info.org>; and personal communications from Ghanim al-Najjar and Haya al-Mughni. Haya supplied the list of movement activists which was published by Al-Tali`a, July 7–13, 1999, 1. |
||
The rulers tried to deal with this by offering cabinet positions to prominent members of the opposition. 56 As I discussed in chapter 7, the structural position of the cabinet is a serious impediment to parliamentary independence. The cabinet serves at the will of the crown prince in his role as prime minister. The joining of these two positions is sanctified by recent custom but is not supported by law and theoretically could be changed. In addition, appointed members of the cabinet vote as members of the parliament while elected cabinet members find their hands tied by two other informal customs—the practice of bloc voting by cabinet members and the norm forbidding cabinet members to speak against a government position once it has been taken. Even though neither is required by law, these customs would be difficult to violate regardless of who is prime minister.
The consequences of these informal systems were highlighted in chapter 7, in the discussion of the 1992 parliament which, like the 1999 parliament, also had an ostensible opposition majority. Following its impressive victory in the 1992 election, the opposition saw its majority as a ticket to dominate the cabinet. However, the ride was a bumpy one. Although as many as six elected MPs held cabinet portfolios during the tenure of the 1992 parliament, all—Islamists and liberals—found themselves bound by the custom of bloc voting and gagged by the custom dictating no dissent. Equally galling, the voices of these members not only were lost to the parliament but also were submerged in the cabinet where opposition parliamentarians were outnumbered by pro-government appointees. While it is easy to say that parliamentarians who do not like the restrictions imposed by cabinet rank should resign their portfolios, the resistance of Ahmad al-Rubi` to such a solution despite great pressure indicates that this option is not so easy to choose in practice. It is simpler to refuse a portfolio than to resign one.
With its single elected member, the first cabinet—Council of Ministers—appointed during the tenure of the 1999 parliament is, in one sense, a return to the past when the rulers’ objectives included keeping elected members out of the government. But the lessons of postliberation cabinets were learned by both sides. The rulers sought to immobilize key opponents by offering them portfolios. The opposition chose to retain its independence by refusing them. Consequently, a third of the ministerial portfolios went to members of the Sabah. Signifying the continued if uneasy alliance between the regime and the mosque, three portfolios, two of which (Electricity and Water, and Housing Affairs) oversee the distribution of significant social benefits, went to a strong Islamist. Opposition trends clearly evident in the election results also are represented in the cabinet. From the Chamber of Commerce, `Abd al-Wahhab al-Wazzan, who is a Shi`a, holds two portfolios: Trade and Industry, and Labor and Social Affairs. Two founding members of the new National Democratic Rally also received portfolios: linguistics professor Sa`d al-`Ajmy, who had made two unsuccessful bids for a parliamentary seat, was named Minister of Information; another professor, economist Youssef al-Ibrahim, is the new Minister of Education. All three men are liminals, persons who occupy two worlds and can bridge differences between them—if the other occupants of the two worlds only will allow it. 57
The elected members of parliament bear an equal responsibility with the government for political outcomes, but the government’s initial moves reduced the 1999 parliament’s capacity to act in the collective interests of the body. The openly antigovernment stance of Ahmad al-Sa`doun, along with the unexpectedly large majority of opposition candidates elected in 1999, prompted government intervention in the election for speaker between Ahmad and his rival, Jasim al-Khorafy. To ensure their success in defeating Ahmad al-Sa`doun, the government is reported to have made a deal with ICM members. In exchange for the government’s agreement to overlook the activities of what the Kuwait Times calls the ICM’s “illegal committees hiding under charity work,” 58 ICM members were to vote for Jasim al-Khorafy. The illegal activities included “diverting several million dollars missing from funds raised for Kosovar Albanian refugees to run election campaigns.” 59 Out of a total of sixty-four valid votes, Ahmad al-Sa`doun received only twenty-seven; Jasim al-Khorafy won thirty-seven and the speaker’s chair. Had the six ICM members maintained solidarity with the opposition in this instance, the vote for speaker would have gone the other way, as it had in 1996. 60
In spite of the cynicism that infuses this story (a story that has been denied by none of the alleged participants), there are reasons to believe that it is possible for the parliament to build coalitions strong enough to command a constructive role for the nation’s elected representatives in making the policies that shape Kuwaiti citizens’ lives. One is the evidence that growing numbers of independents with national political orientations are coming into the parliament. As long as the rulers can portray the parliament as nothing more than a collection of (to use the favorite term of the pro-government Arab Times) “mouthpieces” who speak only for the interests of a particular clan, class, or sect, they can paint themselves as the only representatives of the nation as a whole. This neat partition is disintegrating on both sides. The position of the ruling family as selfless representatives of the national interest continues to be eroded by revelations of financial peculations by its members. Meanwhile, the capacity of the parliament to claim that it too can represent the nation is growing as the result of two populist trends. One is the election of members based on their positions on national issues rather than on their connection to a particular sect or tribe, and the other is the growth of a new nationalist social movement advocating constitutionalism, democratization, and human rights. Shi`i members are prominent supporters of women’s rights and have a strong interest in blocking any alliance between the rulers and Sunni Islamists who are working to amend article 2. The latter has loosened the bond between the rulers and the Shi`a that goes back to the 1930s. Meanwhile, growing diversity among Kuwaiti Shi`a reduces pressures for bloc voting and contributes to the capacity of Shi`a to participate as individuals in issue-oriented coalitions.
Rising issue-oriented independence among Kuwaiti Shi`a is mirrored by a similar trend among secularist-“liberal” forces. Many independents who won election in 1999 are part of the growing political center whose members can vote either way depending on the issues involved. The National Democratic Rally is a key association in the movement, but movement activists include many Kuwaitis in addition to NDR members. Known movement activists among the winners of the 1999 election are noted in table 9.1. Even parliamentarians with traditional loyalties and preferences face pressures from modernizing constituencies that occasionally lead to independent votes.
“Independent” is a description which many members [of parliament] and candidates prefer. . . . [It] means . . . within the Kuwaiti political context, that the person is capable of taking independent stands against the government. . . . As for the general platforms, they vary immensely. Pro-government [members] are more likely to support the government on certain sensitive issues, but not necessarily all the way because they have to attend to their voters. 61
The need to “attend” to one’s voters is an outcome of the shift from wholesale to retail politics. This shift impairs not only the government’s ability to mobilize support from the tribes but also the ability of the organized political groups to trump demands from other constituents.
The machinations behind the election for speaker have damaged chances for accommodation between the parliament and the government on the tabled decrees. Economist Jasim al-Sa`doun believes that those measures initiating major departures in current economic policy are likely to be the chief casualties of the renewal of conflict between the parliament and the government.
Some of these decrees [dealing with economic reform] are unconstitutional decrees and very sensitive and therefore might be opposed by the parliament. . . . The government now expects perhaps more confrontation from the parliament rather than collaboration, and the victims might be some of those decrees. . . . With the government just formed we are closer to confrontation rather than collaboration. Without collaboration neither side will be willing to take responsibility for unpopular reforms. 62
It was a surprise to many observers that among the first casualties was women’s rights. The regime’s Sunni Islamist allies were predictably among the first to react negatively to the amiri decree conferring political rights on Kuwaiti women. Less predictable was the reaction of opposition liberals, several of whom followed Ahmad al-Sa`doun’s lead in condemning all the decrees as an encroachment on the constitutional authority of parliament. Throughout the period between the issuing of the decree and the time it was voted on in late November 1999, however, Islamists were the vanguard of the attack against it. The Islamist campaign was directed not only against the decree but also what Islamists alleged were other examples of foreign-inspired moves to denigrate Islam and secularize Kuwaiti society. The most prominent of these collateral attacks was the accusation by an Islamist leader against an article written by the chair of Kuwait University’s political science department. The accused, Ahmad al-Baghdadi, was arrested, tried, and convicted of blasphemy in October 1999. Despite a bad heart, Ahmad began a hunger strike in prison to protest his conviction. Meanwhile, his cause was taken up by an ad hoc human rights group, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, which put on a series of public events warning of the danger to all Kuwaitis that convicting an observant Muslim for blasphemy on such flimsy grounds represented. In response to these pressures, the amir quickly pardoned Baghdadi. Meanwhile, the Islamists who had accused the government of caving in to foreign influence were taken in for questioning.
By late November, when the women’s rights decree finally came up for a vote in parliament, the atmosphere was highly charged. The decree itself was voted down, forty-one to twenty-one, reflecting a confluence of interests between Islamist opponents of women’s rights and parliamentary opponents of legislation by decree. A new bill was introduced immediately by parliamentary supports of women’s rights but, less than a week later, it too was voted down, though very narrowly. Thirty members supported the bill while thirty-two voted against it and two members abstained.
In a regretful communication to Gulf2000 members that evening, political scientist Ghanim al-Najjar called November 30, 1999, a “sad day for women’s political rights in Kuwait . . . and for human rights in general,” although some comfort should be taken from the narrowness of the Islamist victory and the strong likelihood that another bill will be introduced in the next session. Interestingly, Ghanim numbered among the reasons for the failure of the measure to pass a lack of government “enthusiasm” for it. There were “no serious government proposals to talk to the `hard-liners’ ” who, in consequence, both decided on their own and then announced their decisions publicly, making it virtually impossible to persuade them to change their minds.
The lack of active government lobbying until shortly before the vote was scheduled is likely to have been connected to the regime’s growing dependence on Islamist votes in the parliament. As I noted earlier, the government had had to agree to ignore illegal activities by ICM committees in order to guarantee Islamist votes for its preferred candidate for speaker, a reflection of the ideological shift in the composition of membership from tribal areas that formerly had supplied a bedrock of reliable support to the rulers. Yet the boldness of Islamist leaders in attacking the amir on the issue of women’s rights highlights the risks to the regime of regarding this alliance with the same assurance it had felt toward tribal traditionalists.
To avoid these political risks requires initiative from the center and a willingness of the government to allow the parliament to have more than a rubber-stamp role—that is, to allow the parliament to do what the constitution envisions. This might require old enemies to hold their noses in order to deal with one another. Even so, the ensemble of characters in parliament and on the Council of Ministers includes men who have both hands available for hammering out compromises. The 1999 election may be the first page in a new story rather than just a continuation of the old one. Stay tuned
Stories of Democracy
The example of Kuwait is a constant challenge to the myths of Arab and Muslim exceptionalism promulgated by governing coalitions and aspiring dictators throughout the Middle East. The myth that Arabs and Muslims are intellectually and culturally unsuited to democratic life also is embraced by prominent scholars and policymakers in the West, lending credence to the claims of local counterparts that authoritarianism is the only alternative to anarchy. Kuwaiti democracy, though imperfectly realized and seriously flawed, is a direct refutation of these myths. Kuwait’s democrats also refute the myth that democrats and monarchs are fundamentally incompatible. Like the British and the Scandanavians, whom few would accuse of being antidemocratic, Kuwaiti democrats have demonstrated again and again that they are in no hurry to dismiss their rulers, preferring that the Sabah be their partners in a constitutional system and accept legal controls on their power and authority.
The pro-democracy movement in Bahrain that burst into public view in December 1994 displayed many parallels to the Kuwaiti movement of 1989&-;90. Perhaps because these parallels were so apparent to Bahrain’s government, it resisted taking any responsibility for the conflict between citizens and the state, choosing rather to blame the situation on outsiders and seeking scapegoats among Bahrain’s Shi`i population. It moved quickly and ruthlessly, if not entirely successfully, to suppress the movement and punish its leaders. 63 Pressures for democratization elsewhere in the Gulf also continue and in Qatar have been met with positive responses indicating that populism as a political force is percolating outside as well as inside Kuwait.
The Kuwaiti example also has relevance to countries beyond the Arab Gulf and the Middle East. What is so striking about Kuwait is how populism is expressed as compared to our expectations and perceptions of populist movements in “adversary democracies.” 64 Even though Kuwaiti populism is not an unambiguously positive force with respect to democracy and democratization, it is a force whose positive effects still outweigh the negative. By themselves and as part of a broad array of new social movements, Kuwaiti populists have demonstrated more than once their ability to restore their constitution and to continue the process of institution-building that improves their prospects of achieving a stable democracy in the future. As the movements described in chapter 8 illustrate, populism and constitutionalism are interconnected strategies for democratization. Human rights activists move easily among populist and constitutional courses of action. The coordination of efforts between government and voluntary organizations that is such a large task in Western countries is hardly a task at all for human rights activists in Kuwait. Similarly, popular pressure increases the effectiveness of the sometimes less-than-diplomatic efforts of parliamentarians to curtail abuses of public funds.
Part of the ease in blending these two approaches to democratization lies in what some view as a defect of civil society in the Middle East: the interpenetration of government and civil bodies. 65 Understanding this interpenetration as a defect results from looking at it as though one partner, the state, is always dominant. The story of such a state is the myth represented in the frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan. There is the king, holding his mace, his large crowned head topping a body within which his subjects float like tiny corpuscles. As Patricia Springborg reminded us in chapter 2, this is the story of a tradition in which the king is not only the “head” of his country but also its only “person.”
Yet as we have seen over and over in this volume, civil bodies—citizens meeting together and defining themselves in speech and action—are more than capable of moving the state. Kuwaiti myths and political practices spring from such an ideal, one whose legends have been recounted for millennia by storytellers as different in time, place, and situation as the Greek philosopher Aristotle and the American suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt. The stories they tell us say that if the state is virtuous, it is citizens who can take the credit; if the state is unjust it is citizens who must be ashamed. They say that the state is not an enemy: rather, citizens and the state are part of a single whole. Although Kuwaitis have far to move before they arrive at a working model of citizenship that reflects modern democratic ideals, many of the political stories they tell about themselves acknowledge Kuwait’s shortcomings and some are tales of actions taken to bring state and society closer to these ideals.
Kuwaiti political myths are legends of a state and a civil society that envision both together as a shared enterprise. However much the fruits of this enterprise might be fought over, a sense of joint, if not yet equal, entitlement to an autonomous life is part of their message. That the myths and the reality are still far apart does not negate the reality of what Kuwaitis already have achieved, or the aspirations of those who persist in their attempts to shrink the remaining gap. Democrats everywhere have much to learn from the stories Kuwaitis tell about themselves and their politics. As they listen, they should imagine how these stories would sound if they were telling them about themselves.
Endnotes
Note 1: Interviews on October 23, 1992. Back.
Note 2: See, for example, MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, and Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Oases in the Desert: Hannah Arendt on Democratic Politics,” American Political Science Review 88 (1994): 156–68. Back.
Note 3: Among the recent calls to “abandon Western-style democracy” is one by a new Kuwaiti Islamist organization calling itself the Shura Advocates Group. See Arab Times, May 15–16, 1997, 5. Back.
Note 4: Haya al-Mughni, “Women’s Movements and the Autonomy of Civil Society in Kuwait,” in Robin L. Teske and Mary Ann Tétreault, eds., Feminist Approaches to Social Movements, Community, and Power. Back.
Note 5: Interview with Khaled Buhamrah, October 3, 1996, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 6: According to the announcement made at the rally held in conjunction with the strike, 570 Kuwaiti women signed pledges to stay home from work on the strike day. Back.
Note 7: Mideast Mirror, June 4, 1997, 12–13. Back.
Note 8: Arab Times, April 3–4, 1997, 1. Back.
Note 9: Shamlan al-`Eisa, quoted in Mideast Mirror, May 8, 1997, 13–14. Back.
Note 10: The National Democratic Rally included six women among its seventy-two founding members. They are Adela al-Sayer, Shaikha al-Nusif, Ma`suma al-Mubarak, Kawshar al-Jou`an, Nabila al-Mulla, and Moudhi al-Hmoud. All six of these women are members of the Women’s Cultural and Social Society, Kuwait’s oldest continuing feminist organization. Back.
Note 11: Mideast Mirror, June 4, 1997, 15. Back.
Note 12: Mideast Mirror, June 6, 1997, 14. Back.
Note 13: Mideast Mirror, June 4, 1997, 15. Back.
Note 14: Gulf2000, “Kuwait’s FM Hands in Resignation,” May 18, 1998. Back.
Note 15: Arab Times, January 30–31, 1997, 3. Back.
Note 16: Tétreault, The Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, 54. Back.
Note 17: Mideast Mirror, June 17, 1998, 15. This source reports that all the Kuwaiti newspapers declined to publish Shaikh Nasir’s statement. Back.
Note 18: Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity; see also Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, Education of the Senses. For a negative interpretation of these phenomena and their influence on public life, see Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. Back.
Note 19: Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Back.
Note 20: Not only Habermas in ibid., but others, most notably Benedict Anderson, identify commercial publishing as a powerful engine spreading modern ideas and behaviors rapidly through society. See Anderson, Imagined Communities. Back.
Note 21: Mideast Mirror, June 6, 1997, 14. Back.
Note 22: Quoted in ibid. Back.
Note 23: Mideast Mirror, June 17, 1998, 15. Back.
Note 24: Interview with Sa`oud al-`Enezi, October 9, 1996, in Kuwait City. Back.
Note 25: Because the law specified that the sons of naturalized Kuwaitis would be given the right to vote and run for office, expectations were that the newly enfranchised would be relatively young and well educated. Even so, the concentration of these new voters in the Jahra’ area also promised that some would be influenced by the leaders of tribes who saw themselves as having been denied fair representation—a fair share of services and other benefits—for more than thirty years. Arab Times, January 25, 1994, 1, 6. Back.
Note 26: Interview with Fadel al-`Abbas al-Khodary, campaign worker for and son of `Abbas al-Khodary, October 4, 1996, in Rumaithiya. The “bad paper” he refers to is the blank sheet that is the first “ballot” cast in the ballot-switching scam described in chapter 6. If ten persons (cars) are buying votes, there will be ten blank ballots. Back.
Note 28: Ghanim al-Najjar, October 5, 1996, at Kuwait University. Back.
Note 29: In March 1998 the parliament showed its intransigence in this regard once again when a bill to allow women to vote and run for office was struck down—unanimously—in committee. “Kuwaiti Women Demand Right to Vote,” Khaleej Times, March 8, 1998, Gulf2000 Archive. Back.
Note 30: An earlier example was the naturalization and enfranchisement of large numbers of badu, and the redistricting of electoral constituencies that preceded the 1981 elections. Back.
Note 31: Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 50. Back.
Note 33: Jill Crystal notes that a corruptly organized and badly run system of public financing forced the amir `Abdullah al-Salim to go to the merchants for money in the mid-1950s. The merchants lent him the money but demanded that he in turn “guarantee their wealth and see that they received a sizable portion of the new oil revenues.” The social contract they arrived at left as much of the private sector to Kuwaitis as the merchants wanted, and required the Sabah to stay out of Kuwaiti business, or at least engage in business locally with great discretion. See Crystal, Oil and Politics in the Gulf, 73–78 (quote on 75). Back.
Note 34: Most Kuwaitis I have talked to over the years believe that the rulers have interfered directly in elections since 1967, though not all agree with respect to the details of the alleged interference. Back.
Note 35: See, for example, statements by parliamentarian Talal al-Ayyar and Professor Shafeeq Ghabra in Arab Times, January 25, 1994, 1, 6. Back.
Note 36: A committee statement quoted in Arab Times, June 5–6, 1997, 6. Back.
Note 37: Arab Times, May 22–23, 1997, 1. The total elected in the two polls would be fifty persons, the same number as are elected under the current system. Back.
Note 38: Interviews with `Eisa bu Yabis, head of joint operations, Kuwait Oil Company, October 1, 1996, in Wafra; and with Ahmad al-Baghdadi, chair of the political science department at Kuwait University, October 2, 1996, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 39: Interviews with `Ali Murad, September 21 and October 10, 1992, in Kuwait. Back.
Note 40: Arab Times, June 17, 1997. Back.
Note 41: Arab Times, June 16, 1999, 6. Back.
Note 42: “Kuwait Tribesmen Set to Consolidate Power,” AFP, June 30, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive. Back.
Note 44: Ibid. Interviewed after his release, Khaled said, “There is no evidence that we held any primary, and our tribe has unanimously decided to support us.” He also called the detention of tribesmen “shameful and defying democracy.” The penalties for violating the law against primaries include a jail term of not more than three years and/or a KD 2000 fine. Arab Times, June 16, 1999, 6. Back.
Note 45: Lani Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy. Back.
Note 46: Guinier, The Tyranny of the Majority, 74–91. Back.
Note 47: This is a point made by Barbara Geddes throughout her book—see Politician’s Dilemma. Back.
Note 48: For an analysis of the ram sacrifice and its political significance in Morocco, see M. E. Combs-Schilling, Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice. Michael Sells examines the use of religious and quasi-religious rituals to mobilize Serb nationalists to attack Bosnian Muslims in The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Both Combs-Schilling and Sells emphasize the sexualization of religious symbols in these contexts, an indication of their deep embeddedness in the unconscious mind. The incommensurability of mythic and philosophic knowledge systems is discussed in Hatab, Myth and Philosophy. Back.
Note 49: The contribution of religious myths to centuries of European anti-Semitism, and the use of religious symbols and stories to mobilize nationalist movements today, for example, in the former Yugoslavia, are subjects of intensive study. For the former, examples include the writings of Gavin I. Langmuir, such as his exemplary History, Religion, and Antisemitism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). A more recent examination of the latter phenomenon can be found in Sells, The Bridge Betrayed. The civil war in Algeria as it is described by novelists such as Aïcha Lemsine echoes the patterns of interwoven politics, sexuality, and religion documented by Langmuir and Sells in these other cases. Studies of religious justifications of violence in the modern Middle East (though not including Algeria) can be found among the articles in Mark Juergensmeyer, ed., Violence and the Sacred in the Modern World. Back.
Note 50: Connections between “real violence” and “symbolic violence” are explored in Mark Juergensmeyer, “Is Symbolic Violence Related to Real Violence?” in Violence and the Sacred, 1–8. Back.
Note 51: Olivier Roy shows this in great detail in The Failure of Political Islam. Others support his contention that political Islam is without an adequate theory or practical plan for governance—see, for example, John Waterbury, “Democracy Without Democrats? The Potential for Political Liberalization in the Middle East,” in Salamé, ed., Democracy Without Democrats?, 39–44; also, Aziz al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, esp. ch. 2. Back.
Note 52: This is depicted very well for Iran in Haideh Moghissi’s Populism and Feminism in Iran. Deniz Kandiyoti has written for many years about the use of female subjection as attesting a group’s traditional values and goals. See, for example, “Women and the Turkish State: Political Actors or Symbolic Pawns?” in Nira Yuval-Davis and Floya Anthias, eds., Woman–Nation–State, 126–49. Back.
Note 53: Mernissi, Islam and Democracy. Back.
Note 54: The complexity of Islamic tradition in this sense is discussed in ibid.; see also James P. Piscatori, Islam in a World of Nation-States, and the articles in Mahnaz Afkhami, ed., Faith and Freedom. Back.
Note 55: For example, MEES, July 12, 1999, C2; Mark Huband, “Kuwait: Islamists and Liberals in Poll Victory,” Financial Times, July 6, 1999, FT Archives; “A Bolder Kuwait,” The Economist, July 9, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive. Back.
Note 56: Reuters reported that ten “newly elected MPs” were approached to take cabinet portfolios. Among those named in news reports were `Abdullah Nibari, Ahmad Baqr, Mishairy al-`Anjari, `Abd al-Mohsen Jamal, Muhammad al-Saqr, `Abd al-Mohsen al-Mud`ej, Walid al-Jari. See “Opposition Figures Turn Down Kuwait Cabinet Invite,” Reuters, July 12, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive; “Kuwaiti Oppostion MPs Not Impressed by Offers of Cabinet Posts,” Mideast Mirror, July 17, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive. Back.
Note 57: Tétreault, “Out of Body Experiences,” 69–70, 73–74. Back.
Note 58: “Ouster of al-Sa`doun `an ICM-Govt. Plot,’ ” Kuwait Times, July 22, 1999 (issue no. 11121) from <http://www.paaet.edu.kw/ktimes>. Back.
Note 59: AFP, “Islamists Seek to Strengthen Grip on Kuwait’s Parliament,” June 29, 1999, Gulf2000 Archive. Back.
Note 60: The Kuwait Times notes that the ICM’s role in this alleged deal was not welcomed by younger members of the association, another example of the progression of issue-based internal differences within the Islamist movement. “Ouster of al-Sa`doun `an ICM-Govt. Plot,’ ” Kuwait Times, July 22, 1999. Back.
Note 61: Ghanim al-Najjar, “Kuwait Election Results,” July 12, 1999, Gulf2000. Back.
Note 62: Quoted in MEES, July 19, 1999, B4. Back.
Note 63: Mary Ann Tétreault, “Gulf Winds,” 23–24. Back.
Note 64: Jane Mansbridge, Beyond Adversary Democracy. Back.
Note 65: This issue is discussed in Augustus Richard Norton, “The Future of Civil Society in the Middle East,” Middle East Journal 47 (1993): 215. Back.
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