Protests in the Kingdom of Bahrain: Are They Legitimate & Where Are They Going1?

The Internet, CNN, AJE, etc. have spun the dynamics of international politics beyond our wildest imagination. This is what a friend remarked to me whilst discussing the incontrollable nature of the developments of uprisings taking hold all over the Middle East that go now by the name of Arab Spring, now turned into a very hot and prolonged Arab summer, that might well be, in the words of Jane Kinninmont, an Arab English-style summer, sunny one minute, then thundering, forecasts often wrong. The friend was certainly not mistaken, for, as I have argued elsewhere, the experts and news anchors have become soothsayers no less than the countless bloggers and the opinionated street, none of us or them for that matter were prepared for what this otherwise uninteresting year with the exception of one underpublicized rapture and end of the world that eventually did not occur was ready to bring. In the online world there are many people who say that they were not interested in politics until it hit home and we saw them then, leaving behind blogs about cuisine, sports and video games, in order to be turned suddenly into political experts addressing the most poignant questions, throwing tantrums and interpellations at their politicians and journalists of choice with unabated self-security. Expertise in this case is more often a personality type than it is an actual choice of words and arguments. The TV certainly did not prepare us for this, even a few weeks before, as science fiction, it would have

ThefollowingarticleisareflectionandcriticismontheworkofIcelandicphilosopherJonOlafsson,fromhispaper ProtestforProtestsSake:DoesActivismRequireRationalJustification?(inRearticulationsofReasonRecent Currents,LeilaHaaparanta,ed.HelsinkiSocietasPhilosophicaFennica2010,pp.261274)availablehere, hereinafterPPS.Thisarticlesaimistothinkthroughtheparadoxesofprotestandactivismusingthecaseof Bahrainasaparadigm.Olafssonswork,thoughinatraditionsignificantlydifferentfromthecentralEuropeanthat Iamaccustomedto,andalbeitnotunique,providesanexcellentframeworkofreferencecertainlynotasa comparativemodel(foritisnearlyimpossibletocomparethecasesofIceland,e.g.liberaldemocracyandBahrain e.g.undefinedsystem)butbecauseofitsnonrelianceonoverelaboratephilosophicaljargonandtheparadoxeshe isalludingto.OlafssonsbookAndf,greiningurogrur(Dissidence,Conflict&Propaganda), HsklinnBifrst,2009,availablehere,providesanendlesssourceofvaluableinformation,howeveritis availableonlyinIcelandicandIrathernotventureintopartialtranslationswithoutpermissionoftheauthor,inthe futureIplanonincludingthatbookinamorecomprehensivestudy.InthecaseofBahrain,theextantliteratureis almostnonexisting,howevertwopaperscometomind:StaciStroblsFromcolonialpolicingtocommunity policinginBahrain:thehistoricalpersistenceofsectarianism(JohnJayCollegeofCriminalJustice,NewYork, InternationalJournalofComparativeandAppliedCriminalJustice,Vol.35,No.1,February2011,pp.1937) availablehere;andKatjaNiethammersVoicesinParliament,DebatesinMajalis,andBannersonStreets:Avenues ofPoliticalParticipationinBahrain(EuropeanUniversityInstituteWorkingPapers,RSCASNo.2006/07)available here.Thefindingsinthesetwoworks,albeitnotsymmetricalopposed,aresubstantiallydifferent.Avery importantwork,thoughdealingwiththeBahrainIntifadaof19941997butprovidingawealthofinformationand analysisstillvalidnowadaysandyetvirtuallyunknownisUteMeinelsDieIntifadaimOelsheichtumBahrain, HintergruendedesAufbegehrensvon19941998,LIT,2003.TheonlyextantworkontheBahrainuprisingsofthe 1990spublishedintheWest,butunfortunatelythisworkhasnotbeentranslatedintoEnglish.Inthispaperwe willrefertoherpaperIntifadaundReformprozessinBahrain.DasOelscheichtumalsBeispielfuer Demokratisierung,DAAD,Cairo,2003,availablehere.
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been unfathomable. But neither did the extensive political analyses, the books of political philosophy and the business intelligence report prepare us for these Springy times. The symbol of the Arab Spring has become, all over the world, not the pleasantries that adorn your idyllic spring but the unmistakable image of the protester. For the Western audiences this image is nowhere new, yet the defiance of the Arab Spring in being properly understood, lies precisely in that we do not fully understand if were dealing with protests or revolution or what not, however ascertained we might be of the legitimacy of the demands in the eyes and for the sake of liberal democratic values. Unprecedented as this may be, the situation is not unusual, for, who might be wise enough to dissect the truths that are unfolding in the absolute present of here and now? Though the media tends to throw in together as Arab Spring, political events unfolding in a region extending all the way from Morocco to Iran, it would be difficult and unfair to speak of one revolution spreading all over, though it is not difficult to acknowledge what all these countries have in common and it is something less concrete than forms of government as a legacy. After the unprecedented events in Egypt and Tunisia, the unrest reached the pearl-sized island-kingdom of Bahrain off the coast of Saudi Arabia, in the middle of February, and what began as a peaceful pro-democracy revolt, escalated in the following months into violent clashes, human rights abuses, media scandals, arrests, torture and unleashed an international crisis in a country that many people had never heard of. Bahrain has been simmering under a veil of anger and contempt for the ruling Al-Khalifa who have stolen the country of Bahrain, its future, its wealth and its freedom2. That people take to the streets to demand their rights often met with little success is not a novelty in the political history of the 20th and 21st century, however the violent reaction of the government, is remarkable in their heinousness, in light of the weight and urgency of the peoples demands. The information, in favor and against these protests, the consequence on the social and political map of Bahrain and the difficult resolution of the issues at hand is already widely available in the worlds media outlets. It raises the question over the legitimacy of these protests and the incredible paradoxes they contain, for it would be not only too quick but also irresponsible to say that every protest is legitimate in every way, in spite of the common adage that when dictatorship is a fact, revolution becomes a right. Perhaps the statement, albeit true, is rather short-sighted. Let us begin by defining protest as non-routinized ways of affecting political, social and cultural processes3; in which case, they already fall within the politics of the extraordinary. In the classical European definition, protest, is an organized public demonstration objecting to an official policy or course of action; revolution, on the other hand, is the forcible overthrow of a government of social order, in favor of a new system. If the case of Bahrain, let alone the Middle East, adjusts to any of the two definitions outlined above, leads to a simple but paradoxical answer: Yes and No. A protest is considered successful when successful protest has the capacity to mobilize public opinion through unorthodox forms of action and thus puts pressure on decision makers4; if this is the case, then the months of protests in Bahrain and the idea of continuous protest extending into months changes dramatically the nature of what one would call protesting have been

InthewordsofAlialAhmed,thedirectorofInstitutefor(Persian)GulfAffairs(IGA)inaninterviewwithPressTV http://www.presstv.ir/detail/165390.html 3 Olafsson,PPS,pp.261,fromDellaPortaD.&M.Diani,SocialMovements:AnIntroduction,Blackwell,Oxford, 2006,pp.165 4 Ibid.pp.163

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nothing but successful, yet there has been no political gain whatsoever, unless international awareness and media attention qualifies as political gain highly doubtful, however, the success of a protest does not make it legitimate. Successful doesnt mean legitimate: Mobilization, action and pressure refer to methods beyond speaking, and freedom of speech does not imply the freedom to use unorthodox forms of action. Protest action is usually more than just the exercise of free-speech more than just an expression of opinion.5 Of course this well-structured argument comes under fire when tested in the Middle East, not only because the action referred to in here, is not necessarily political action in the strict sense6, but also because protest defined as the exercise of free-speech is entirely mistaken, given the fact this freedom is so severely limited; journalists constantly exposed not only to slander campaigns but also to imprisonment or deportation in the case of foreign media, independent media is virtually non-existent, public gatherings are technically forbidden and the internet is censored at times. Freedom House, an international non-governmental organization that assesses the degree of perceived political freedom states in its report on Bahrain from 2010 (prior to the unrest, during which the situation only deteriorated dramatically) that in spite of constitutional protections guaranteeing this freedom, media and freedom of speech is heavily restricted by the government; Bahrains 2002 Press Law outlines several offenses that can result in imprisonment, including amongst others criticism of Islam or the King, inciting actions that undermine state security or advocate for a change in government. The Ministry of Culture and Information censors local and foreign publications and the government maintains a monopoly on all broadcast media7. Not to mention restrictions of free speech in institutions of higher education and civil society in general. Freedom House overall qualifies Bahrain as a non-free country. The ultimate result that perverts the idea of political protesting as part of free-speech is that the public spaces in which politics normally occurs in a liberal democracy are virtually non-existent. If protest, as Olafsson argues, is an special form of communication, different from deliberation, discussion and other forms of public, political exchange8 then we are faced with the issue that this political forms of public life such as deliberation, discussion and exchange are partially absent in Bahrain, however the matter is further complicated by the fact that they are not entirely absent, rather, they are strictly controlled. In a country with such established unorthodox authoritarian practices, the principles behind protesting must be equally assessed under an unorthodox prism. Olafsson proposes a four-fold perspective on protest and activism, namely, the arguments of personal conviction, free speech, political rationality and political irony, and one might substantially agree that none of the above provide legitimacy for protesting9. Neither the arguments in favor political conviction that provide a connection between values and action,

Olafsson,PPS,pp.261 Ontheconceptofpoliticalaction,seemyActivismonHumanRights?availablehere,mostilluminatingis HannahArendt,TheHumanCondition,Univ.ofChicago,1998,pp.175243;DanaR.Villa,Arendtand Heidegger,PrincetonUniv.Press,1996,c.1&2,pp.1779 7 FreedomHouse,OngoingAbusesinBahrainDelegitimizeUpcomingNationalDialogue,June282011, http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70&release=1446,seealsoFahadDesmukh,TheInternetin Bahrain:BreakingtheMonopolyofInformation,ForeignPolicy,September2010 http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/09/21/bahrain_government_vs_the_internetandthisinteresting comiconthewaneoffreedomofspeechinBahrainhttp://mahmood.tv/2007/02/11/freedomofspeechonthe waneinbahrain/ 8 Olafsson,Ibid 9 Olafsson,Ibid.pp.262
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or the right to free speech or the rationality of protest hold up in our case. Personal convictions indeed make protesting legitimate or illegitimate for moral reasons rather than for procedural reasons (that is, in terms of the rationality of action), freedom of speech, in its absence, as we have already seen, is not necessarily applicable and the argument of rationality as a prima facie legitimization of institutions is relevant only in Western-type liberal democracies where there exists a public space where a consensus about what this legitimization consists of, for a rational argument has to rely necessarily on the existence of weak forms of authority. It would help shifting the weight on the meaning of protest from an organized public demonstration into a form of communication, of absolute communication, that is, of communication that demands communication from the other party as well, by unorthodox means and this defies the popular thesis of protest as exercise of free speech because the protester demands a right which goes beyond the right to free speech10. The demand obviously, in distinction from polite requests and from finding ones way through the procedural hierarchy of either justice or right, cannot possibly make sense but through the use of force and hence points to the obvious truth of the ineffectiveness of speech11. In democracies susceptible to criticism and rational processes in politics, the demands may well go beyond the right of free-speech already guaranteed and there might be additional demands, but public speech isnt necessarily ineffective. In unorthodox environments such as Bahrain what this use of force entails is open to debate and cannot be considered or scrutinized under traditional categories. Authorized bodies might refuse to respond to protest on the ground that they are illegitimate or that they pose a danger to public order, but not responding does not necessarily mean that no other means will be utilized to bring the extraordinary situation to an end by peaceful or coercive means12. However, it is interesting to notice, as Olafsson makes us aware of, that the authoritarian paradox of protests comes from the fact that in liberal democracies protests groups are less likely to elicit a response from relevant authorities than in the case of authoritarian governments13. A group of protesters in a country such as France or the Netherlands might never face violence unless they go beyond the expression of protest and break the law, but they are unlikely to have their demands heard at all, at least by means of protesting. In the Middle East, Bahrain included, the reaction to protest is often immediate and even more often violent, but paradoxically just as in the case of the protesters receiving a response to their protest whether the desired response or not also authoritarian governments fall into this trap, by granting protest an almost automatic recognition by reacting to the fact of this unusual communication, with violence or otherwise. That means, in authoritarian systems where there is no legal provision for protesting even peacefully the justification of protests is acquired indirectly by the mere response that implicates a form of communication poor or otherwise and goes beyond moral and procedural arguments. Here we have not received yet word on whether protesting is legitimate in the case of Bahrain. It might be justified because of personal convictions derived from injustices committed ruling out as irrelevant the argument of free speech and that of rationality, no less than the justification obtained the moment a government decides to respond in any way, even if the actions openly declare or at least imply that the protest group is threatening: Once a protest group is recognized as threatening, it has, in a way, acquired the formal power that the right to

10 11

Olafsson,Ibidpp.265266 Ibid 12 Ibid 13 Ibid

free expression did not entail14. The fact of being labeled as threatening is not taking away the justification but rather increasing it and while it is not legitimizing anything, it is not denying the possible legitimacy altogether. Once the group is considered threatening, there exists already a formal platform in which the protesting group may well acquire political power and in turn delegitimize the government or claim that it was never legitimate after all. This kind of political power, when acquired, is extremely fragile and short-lived, and in order to survive it must promise yet more power and not violence: Protest cannot be effective unless it promises something different than itself. It must implicate a form of power and a possibility of the unleashing of that power, creating insecurity, even panic, among elites.15 Needless to say that this kind of power has been acquired, maintained and unleashed in the case of Bahrain, the fact of protesting is widely justified, whether legitimate or not, but it has led to no political gain whatsoever, what necessarily backfires again on the point of their legitimacy and ability to effect political change. We will explore now how this has come to happen, not without saying that though the model proposed by Olafsson is not entirely applicable; it has brought a number of paradoxical issues that in his own words protest evades some of the assumptions usually made in political discussion. Protest creates a dialogic relationship to authority and the social order16. We are not talking in the case of Bahrain either of protests or of revolutions in the traditional sense, either positively or negatively, no matter how hard the actors involved, in the government and the protesters, would want to persuade us otherwise. Whatever is at work there, we do not yet know, but it is highly questionable to speak of protest or revolution altogether, and therefore the legitimacy over protesting becomes increasingly important; Olafsson has provided perhaps some of the most interesting and paradoxical questions and arguments available in the liberal tradition but while the question of legitimacy in the political and legal realm remains unanswered in the Western liberal democratic tradition, it cannot even be properly posed in the Middle Eastern context of Bahrain. The unrest in the country is by no means politically extraordinary or new, and while it is fortunate that it has coincided once again with the Arab Spring, for as long as the Al-Khalifa family has ruled Bahrain there has been constant discontent, internal divides and permanent unrest17. To be sure it was no god-sent rule, for in the end of the 18th century they won a war that brought to an end the Persian occupation of the island and soon enough they had struck a deal with British colonial forces that instated them as absolute rulers in exchange for loyalty. British and Dutch mercenaries were hired to keep maintain order and suppress protests and, particularly after 1860, within the contexts of established treaties between the Sunni rulers and the British helped them maintain absolute control of the population. The sectarian divide, policies of discrimination, tight control on the disenfranchised Shia majority is certainly not an innovation introduced to fence off the alleged influence of Iran in Bahraini politics in the course of the 20th century, but can be immediately traced to British support of the ruling Al-Khalifa family, during

Olafsson,Ibidpp.268269 Ibidpp.269 16 Ibidpp.273 17 UteMeinel,IntifadaundReformprozessinBahrain.DasOelscheichtumalsBeispielfuerDemokratisierung, DAAD,Cairo,2003

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which sectarian policing was instrumental in the enforcement of imperialist colonial policy18. Though for a long time it was believed that the Belgrave Diaries, now banned in Bahrain, were the only source of official sectarian and social policy in the island, newer documents have emerged from colonial archives in India and elsewhere with records that date back to the 19th century. Modern Bahrain and its well-known gerrymandering policies have only emulated all too well what they learnt from the loose yet tight-grip of the British colonial administration: the Residents and Agencies were made up of wealthy merchants of Indian, Arab and Persian origin that without giving away, legitimated the presence of British rule and reported to the East Indian Company, they didnt hold any official or judicial or diplomatic titles or powers but gathered intelligence to report and negotiated after the styles of honorary consuls between the rulers, the populations and the British and established extremely complicated systems of political negotiation and power at the regional and local level in such a tight but invisible way that the control over the island was absolute. Same policy practiced forever in the municipal councils and the electoral districts in the Emirate and then in the Kingdom of Bahrain19. The Shiite population has by no means endured this silently until today, for there have been major political uprisings advocating for reform in 1938, 1950 and 1994, all of which have been nicely suppressed with the use of unabated violence, first with the help of colonial powers, and then with the help of Saudi Arabia and the same colonial powers under a different guise20. After Bahrain became a Kingdom and it had to promulgate a new constitution and civil code to replace and reform all sorts of constitutionally-entrenched abuses (though the website of the Ministry of Justice says otherwise) different innovative means have been found to perpetuate the same old situation. The government of Bahrain has often exaggerated the role if Iran in Shiite politics and foreign observers admit to the widespread fear among Sunnis, exaggerating its actual power and appeal, mainly due to the religious symbolism with which Shiites in Bahrain have expressed their deep-seated frustration21. Though security constraints in the oil era have been so often utilized as the rationale behind a great deal of policy and state policing in the Gulf states, within the limits set by the new era of commodities, a great deal of the older colonial structures remain fully instated, as we can see in the tribal administration, ordering of public space, urban and community policies in the city of Manama in the late 19th century and 20th century that are hardly different from those in place today after the promulgation of the constitution in the 21st century22. Deterioration only furthered by the process of political naturalization in which tribal Arabs and Sunnis from other countries have been brought in to counter political influence and in order to once again, control the disenfranchised Shiite majority through a variety of

StaciStrobl,FromcolonialpolicingtocommunitypolicinginBahrain:thehistoricalpersistenceofsectarianism, JohnJayCollegeofCriminalJustice,NewYork,InternationalJournalofComparativeandAppliedCriminalJustice, Vol.35,No.1,February2011,pp.24 19 JamesOnley,TheArabianFrontieroftheBritishRaj:Merchants,RulersandtheBritishinthe19thcenturyGulf, OxfordUniversityPress,2007,pp.35,104187 20 FalahalMdaires,ShiismandPoliticalProtestinBahrain,Domes.Milwaukee:Spring2002.Vol.11,Issue1,pp. 20;seealsoArsenalofTyranny:TheWesternHandinBahrainin http://arabunity2011.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/arsenaloftyrannythewesternhandinbahrain/ 21 StaciStrobl,Ibidpp.28 22 ForreferenceonpreoilmunicipalpoliciesinManama,seeNelidaFuccaro,HistoriesofCityandStateinthe PersianGulf:Manamasince1800,CUP,2009,pp.7376
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administrative measures, community policing and outright suppression23. All this being said, the case of Bahrain is substantially different from that of other Arab nations, not only because of the sectarian divide involved but also because there was no such a thing as unrest in the tiny-island Kingdom, but rather, unrest has never stopped. This of course has to be properly contextualized, because this unrest is not what we understand as unrest in the Western world but rather a preposterously established status quo in which there is never total unrest but neither reconciliation or even worse, any real attempts at reform that are not watered down by internal constraints. This has led to a situation and legacy that is not possible to solve under the present circumstances only by means of political dialogue as the one currently underway, not just because the apolitical nature of most of the actors involved24 or but also because of the great resentment among the Shiites that has created what Ute Meinel has so accurately termed Angstkultur25, that has engendered a whole confessional dimension with concrete cultural and hence political symbols that alienate Sunnis in the larger context of things and is further deteriorated by economic inequality26. The status quo is not only incidental or necessarily within the dialectic of either authoritarian or anti-democratic but a wholly different form of government or rather of political economy known as the Arab rentier state, states which derive all or a substantial part of their revenues from the rent of indigenous resources to external clients, where only a tiny part of the population is engaged is involved in the generation of the rent and most importantly, it is a state in which the government is the principal recipient of the revenues. The exploitation of the resources available is dependent as well on the exploitation of foreign labor, both menial and qualified, and in spite of the wealth resources available, there is a great challenged posed in developing a civil society and democratic institutions27. Bahrain defies however the classification of the rentier state on several fronts; firstly its oil reserves have nearly depleted, therefore it will be unable to uphold its rentier status and in full awareness of this, it has attempted to develop a more diverse economy not without a certain sloppiness relying on the powers that be of the global economy, secondly it has a distinct cosmopolitan and well-educated global middle class inimical to the project of a rentier economy and thirdly its size is disadvantageous in terms of shaping regional policy and counterweighing international pressure. Once again the mysteries of Bahrain lead to yet another contradiction. To make matters worse, the rentier state in the Persian Gulf is not only a phenomenon, but a fully fledged structural principle of the region from top to bottom28. This system is supported in a perversion of the old patriarchal myth29, in which the ruler, acting as a father ruthless as it may be offers protection in exchange for loyalty, in

Ibidpp.24,seealsoMarcOwenJones,TheProblemofPoliticalNaturalization,2011 http://www.marcowenjones.byethost2.com/?p=117 24 Mostofthoseinvitedtoparticipateinthedialoguearenotpoliticalsocietiesasseenin http://www.nd.bh/en/index.php/thedialogue/participantslistthatfurtherstheBritishcolonialstyleofover bureaucratizationwiththeultimateendofperpetuatingdivide.Thepoliticalsocietiesdonotactaspoliticalparties andarenotentitledtoanythingbutaverylimitedformalpoliticalparticipation. 25 UteMeinel,Ibidpp.7 26 Strobl,seenote21;KatjaNiethammer,VoicesinParliament,DebatesinMajalis,andBannersonStreets: AvenuesofPoliticalParticipationinBahrain(EuropeanUniversityInstituteWorkingPapers,RSCASNo.2006/07) pp.25 27 H.Beblawi,TheRentierStateintheArabWorld,inG.Luciani,TheArabState,Routledge,1990,p.8788 28 UteMeinel,Ibidpp.3 29 Ibidpp.13
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utmost feudal sentimentality, but this protection finds its ultimate meaning in blackmailing a whole population demanding absolute loyalty for not persecuting, arresting and disenfranchising. To be sure, all over the Arab world, this system relies upon the foundation of traditional values juxtaposed to Western or American values, but they are no less entrenched in the dynamics of the modern world this Islamist cul-de-sac, prevalent everywhere in the region, it is not a rebellion against the modern world or a natural reaction against American imperialism but is rather deeply embedded wherewith; after the same fashion that Agnes Heller resorted to when speaking of Jihad and global terror with which the Gulf region bears an embarrassing relationship: The people behind global terror are themselves global capitalists, just like Hitler was supported by German industrialists and financiers. Anti-capitalism merely serves as a slogan to direct massive resentment against the rich and to wage a racist or religious war. Many of them are frustrated intellectuals young people who want to be remarkable in a very unremarkable world, with big ambitions but little talent, or whose careers were hindered for other reasons30. It is not an opposition between traditional and modern values but an opposition of radical universals and hence, yet another legacy of colonialism. At the center of this political charade lies neopatriarchy, using state resources to secure loyalty among the population (not only money but also public property, in particular land and other benefits), blurring the lines between private and public life for those in power and supplanting the state bureaucracy with an official apparatus of corruption. Upon this neopatriarchal regime lie deep-seated hierarchies of authority blended in with ruthless capitalism on a global scale, in which some formal political participation is enabled at a stalemate under the absolute supervision of this loving father figure who gathers public support with this display of sentimentality but is in fact the mother ship of an international network of business, power and politics. This neopatriarchy evolved into a mass society (like those that preceded totalitarian rule) by granting privileges and unlimited power to a segment of society using the rentier state policy of unlimited corruption on the base of ethnic and family ties for purposeful exclusive accumulation of wealth and that is as far as the protection is extended. This is achieved by promoting the underdevelopment of the working and the middle classes, leading to increased conflict leaving people stranded in between modernity and tradition, capitalism and socialism, production and consumption and having ultimately no other option than mindless consumption and complacency or simply exclusion a contemptuous choice between submission or rebellion with nothing else in between. As the capitalist climax increases so do the ethereal promises of the reaction against itself and withal, the always so tempting option of fundamentalism31. In purview of this, one might argue that the situation did not necessarily deteriorate but rather that it never improved so that it would be inaccurate to speak of protests and revolutions and that indeed we are speaking of uprisings and revolts in which the use of force as means to materialize political power is an undeniable necessity and fact. But the complexity of the situation in Bahrain does not end there, for political groups have been stranded in all fractions and caught up in blockages already for decades at the hand of both the lack of political experience of the opposition groups and the irresponsibility of the neopatriarchal

AgnesHeller,PlusMinusInterviewwithRzeczpospolita(Poland),09.07.2005 UteMeinel,Ibidpp.13;HishamSharaby,Neopatriarchy:ATheoryofDistortedArabChangeinArabSociety, OUP,1998,pp.125156;theideaofneopatriarchalorneopatrimonialoriginatesintheworkofPeterPawelka, HerrschaftundEntwicklungimNahenOsten:Aegypten,MuellerJuristischerVerlag,1985,pp.2297

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structure in power32. Shiite political groups have long refused to join elections and to join in the limited sphere of political participation, what will necessarily have hindered the legitimacy of their cause and therefore bring into question the legitimacy of an uprising, for one would argue that some political participation is better than no participation. Nevertheless political societies (as they are called in Bahrain) are only surrogate for political parties and do not actually hold any of the benefits or responsibilities of political actors; all of it not just informally practiced but constitutionally ruled by a Law of Governing Civil Societies of 1979. In this climate of ambiguity neither government or opposition cooperate with consulting bodies (that are not elected but this standard practice as well in European constitutional monarchies) and the opposition falls back upon boycott since their basic demands are not met, demands not only political but of basic rights and liberties for the population33. Change, on the other hand, and reform, is according to standard theory, a gradual process, predicament that has never won a favor among the opposition groups that insist on a permanent status quo of boycott of elections and other political processes, already undermined to begin with34. The demands of the opposition are not unfounded, the government is radically authoritarian and relies on lessons learnt from colonialism insofar as it concerns gerrymandering, division, suppression and hierarchies of power; but so far advanced in mapping the complexities of contradiction, often one on top of the over, what are the odds of the current uprisings in achieving lasting political change? We are not in a position to judge from a moral point of view whether the protests are legitimate or not, taking into account the scandalous abuses that the people have been subject to historically but their success in eliciting a response violent or otherwise is only limited to the creation of a public space in which politics can eventually take place, what in spite of the appearances, has not been the case. Gradual change is an interesting concept to toy with when we are dealing with a variety of complex opposing themes: Sectarianism, modernity and tradition, discrimination, policing, political naturalization, confessional strife, foreign intervention, corruption, neopatriarchy, colonial structures, inequality, gerrymandering, Islamism, etc. the list is endless. Whenever change is addressed in one direction forward about a certain topic, it is immediately regressive in another topic. Democracy is an even more interesting project, even in the form of a constitutional monarchy with limited participation. It would be completely nave to think that the outcome of the uprisings will be a secular republic or that it is possible to shun off the regional and international context of things. Before the Kingdom of Bahrain can address political questions with a true intention of reform in any direction, the house must be cleaned from ghosts. Living stranded in between so many contradictions it is unlikely that the opposition will be able to come up with a solution that will move forward rather than backwards, at least at present time. If anyone living in medieval France would have come to the authorities and explain to them that it is not in their minds to change the established order of authority and religion but that they only demand gay rights, inclusion, freedom of speech, religious freedom, academic freedom, equality, constitutions, elections, accountability and the like, they would have been told that they have lost their minds. The case of Bahrain is not so different. The Middle East and in particular the Gulf have a very twisted idea of what modernity means, and in general adhere to a commercial version thereof in which modernity stands for 3G phones, skyscrapers, Louis Vuitton stores and shopping malls; because

32 33

KatjaNiethammer,Ibidpp.8 Ibidpp.12&19 34 Ibid.pp.22

of being so deeply trapped in this predicament they strongly believe they have a right to liberal democracy, but this is hardly the case. Before democracy in its full power flawed as it is can reach the Persian Gulf notions of authority must be torn down in advance, in order to be replaced by variegating forms of rationality, including that of the political kind. The critique of religion is the first necessary step, for authoritarian theo- and geopolitics cannot live side by side with the kind of rights that are being demanded. This reform, on the plane of the intellectual and the political cannot be partial and cannot be gradually negotiated and its terms cannot come from the example of the Western world or from negotiations overseen by foreign observers. They must be achieved by means of revolutions, and a revolution is usually not achieved by revolutionaries who are only prone to become the staunchest conservatives the day after the revolution in order to maintain the fragility of the newly established order upon fear of past events. Political power is not achieved by overthrow, it is achieved only when political institutions rise out of the will of peoples and violence is never the will of peoples but only of individuals. Perhaps at this stage if pushed hard enough, the neopatriarchal rule will enable some basic rights, but the establishment of truly lasting democratic institutions is very far away. The language of violence and aggression that assassinates the political is ever so present in the government as much as in the opposition, just like the language of revenge and most certainly, the language of confessional politics in either direction. In this climate of things, one could hardly conceive of legitimacy for the protests since the system itself does not have legitimacy of the rational kind and at best one could say that the protests are justified. In order to legitimize protests, uprisings and to pave the way for a revolution there must be a change of strategy that looks less at the Western world and that believes what until now no country in the world does it is possible to build a democratic policy that is not entirely based on economic interests and on the religion of global politics. The opposition is looking too much into the outside and the government is trapped too much in the inside; situations both of which lead to a deadlock of either utopian demands or ruthless policies. The opposition movement should look at themselves and their country in a more objective manner so that they get an idea of what it is that they can effectively realize and demand that and only that before their political power runs out and their protests once again are silenced in having become protests for the sake of protest. It is true that pragmatism doesnt rule the world and that it is necessary to be somewhat idealistic, but in the world as it is today one is ought to live with a certain measure of skepticism, even skepticism about oneself and that includes the possibility of scrutinizing ones own thoughts and actions and subjecting them to reckless criticism, not without some irony owned up to. Truth is a complicated matter when it comes to politics, because it is not the only guiding principle. The kind of corrupt autocracy that the government wants to perpetuate is unsustainable but the Western democratic project rooted in Islam and traditional values that the opposition is demanding is no more realizable than the aforementioned. Perhaps the opposition should focus on human rights, but the democratic project cannot be realized lest they scrutinize, criticize and reform themselves as well in a radical manner. Protesting is a legitimate action, and thus, a model of political communication, wherever there is a political structure per se, what is in the case of Bahrain partially absent, therefore demanding legitimacy from an illegitimate rule on behalf of a current unrealizable project is justified no matter how misled. The status quo of contradiction and aporia must reach a final end, but if this end happens to be a violent one, we will back to square one, in no time. Bahrain will never achieve its 2030 vision of surpassing Switzerland because one cannot skip over a thousand years because of financial center and an unlimited checking account. Legitimacy and justification is the least of Bahrains opposition issues, much more is demanded.