A couple of generations ago, banks were a necessity of life. Neither good nor bad. Just there. Today I know few people who regard them as anything other than a necessary evil.
This little tale might go some way towards explaining why.
Four years ago, I opened a corporate bank account for the newly established company I co-own in Bahrain. Being British, I looked no further than good old HSBC. You know HSBC – the World’s Local Bank. The one that didn’t need a bail-out in 2008. Nice and safe.
They’re also the one that had to pay a $1.2 billion fine to the US banking regulator for doing business with money launderers in South America. Oh yes, and one of several banks that are currently under investigation in the UK for possible involvement in the LIBOR fixing scandal.
Of course neither of those little peccadilloes – proven or not – were apparent when I signed up with them in Bahrain. I’d done business with them before both personally and at a corporate level, and they were OK. But that was in the UK.
The Bahrain experience was a completely different story. For the first year, things went OK-ish. Customer service was not great, but I quickly discovered that it was no better or worse than that provided by any other bank on the island. In the Middle East, you don’t get stressed about poor customer service unless you want to end up on Prozac in short order. You expect the worst, but are prepared to be pleasantly surprised. I have learned over many years to greet each cock-up with a resigned shrug, followed by a few choice curses out of earshot. Fortunately I had a relationship manager who put things back on track whenever the service went awry, which it frequently did.
About 18 months ago, things started going seriously downhill. I discovered by accident that I no longer had a relationship manager. Then I got a letter telling me that my monthly charges had risen by 150%, and that I would no longer be issued with a company cheque book. After two or three attempts to find out why I was being asked to pay far more for a drastically reduced service, I discovered that the bank had cut back on services for corporate customers with annual turnovers of less than $30 million. No apologies, no explanation. Just the kind of impersonal, stonewall attitude that any self-respecting bureaucrat would be proud of.
So why did they do that?
This is just speculation, but my best guess is that the bank’s senior suits sat down for a nice lunch – or series of lunches – and applied the Pareto Principle to their business. They determined that 80% of their profit came from 20% of their customers. Perhaps their algorithm was a bit more sophisticated than Pareto – after all they are masters of the universe – but the effect would be broadly the same.
So what could they do about it? Get rid of the unprofitable customers! A good idea, and while they were about it, scale down operations in their most unprofitable territories and shed 30,000 jobs in the process.
But how to get rid of the customers? Well how about making our service so stripped down that we force them to look elsewhere? And if they don’t get the hint, we’ll double or treble the cost of doing businesses with us.
The attrition continued when last year they switched off their much-vaunted regional internet banking service – apparently because they had experienced “many problems” with it. Not half as many as I had. Payments failing without any notification or explanation, mainly. So I had to sign up for their global platform, for more money of course. By now I was paying up to $2500 per annum for running a checking account with no cheque book!
At this point you might ask why I didn’t switch banks. Good question. At the time I took the view that none of the other banks were likely to be any better. And since for my company, being a subsidiary of a US company I co-own, changing banks would involve sending someone from North Carolina to Washington DC to get various documents certified by Hillary Clinton, a local notary and God knows who else, and finally stamped by the Bahrain Embassy, I decided to opt for a quiet life and stump up the outrageous charges until I had the time and energy to make the change.
Last month HSBC took the decision out of my hands. I received a letter, with the scrawl of an unnamed signatory and the name of the country misspelled, telling me that the bank was planning to close the account within 60 days.
The letter opened with this wonderful passage:
“We write to advise you of some important changes to HSBC Business Banking services that will directly affect you.
“HSBC Business Banking has been focused on helping SMEs grow and trade internationally for almost 150 years globally and for over 68 years in the Kingdom of Bahrain. As such, international business remains a key competitive strength that lies at the heart of our strategy, and we now aim to devote more resources to those customers we are best placed to help.
Following a strategic review of our business customers, we will now be providing a relationship manager in all cases but subject to qualifying criteria. This is partly so that we are able to provide expertise and support in line with our key strengths as a leading international trade and business bank, but also due to HSBC’s stringent regulatory obligations as a global banking provider.
Based on the above, we are sorry to advise that you will no longer qualify for business banking services from HSBC, and we will need to close your account with us.“
So what the bank is saying is: “the good news is that we are planning to improve their service to corporate customers. The bad news is that your company doesn’t qualify, and you’re fired!”
A few days later I took the letter to the bank and spoke to a person at the front desk. Since they don’t have name tags, I will call her Mrs X.
“I got the letter”, I said. “Ah, the letter”, she said. “Yes, lots of people have received this letter.”
I will not put Mrs X’s job in jeopardy by quoting her further, except to say that I got the clear impression that she was not much more impressed by her employer’s actions than I was. Or perhaps this was her way of showing empathy. During the conversation, she confirmed that the criterion for having the privilege of continuing to pay exorbitant fees to the bank was a having turnover of $30 million or more.
Rather short-sighted, I would have thought. How were they to know that we would not hit that number in 2013? And what about all the owners of fast-growing Bahraini companies they are “encouraging” to go elsewhere? Unless they are making exceptions to their cut-off criterion, HSBC’s door is no longer open to budding entrepreneurs.
Certainly they would have had no way of knowing about the state of my business, since over years I have been banking with them, I have not had a single conversation with any officer of the bank about what my company does, how it’s getting on, what the prospects are – all the kind of information that you would expect a bank to want to know. So much for the “stringent regulatory obligations”.
I did once have a meeting with the CEO in which I shared my thoughts about their customer service. But of course my comments were as water off a very sleek and pinstriped duck’s back. Not the slightest interest shown in my business.
I have no problem with the concept of culling customers that don’t fit the business plan. But to do so in such a graceless and cack-handed way shows a company long on vision but disastrously short on implementation. A phone call or a meeting to explain their policy change would have made all the difference. But they couldn’t be bothered.
I am not one to wax nostalgic for the good old days when well-meaning and avuncular managers offered you unsolicited advice about how to run your life or business, and ignored the occasional financial slip-up committed by their impoverished customers. But the approach did work for the bank I signed up with as a student, and with which I still do personal business 45 years later. But these days it’s quite shocking how cynical and impersonal banking has become for all but the wealthy.
HSBC delivered their cuddly message shortly before I left the country for an extended break in the UK. This gave me no time to make alternative arrangements, so our business will shortly become bankless in Bahrain. Not a problem, since we have other accounts. But it’s a sour ending to a relationship that has caused me more grief than any other over the past four years. So as far as I am concerned, it’s good riddance to bad rubbish, since I can say without reservation that HSBC in Bahrain are the worst bank with which I have had the misfortune to deal over a forty-year business career.
And that’s the end of the story. The tale of a bank that has earned the undying enmity of at least one customer, and I suspect many others who, like my company, were first welcomed with open arms and subsequently dumped like a half-eaten takeaway.
The reputation of Britain’s clearing banks – once the jewel in the City of London’s crown – is currently at an all-time low. The World’s Local Bank is doing an excellent job in dragging it down further by its activities in at least one of its foreign subsidiaries.
If Sir Thomas Sutherland – the entrepreneur who founded HSBC in Hong Kong and Shanghai nearly 150 years ago on the back of the opium trade – could see what a lily-livered, risk-averse entity his creation has become – I suspect he might turn in his grave.
Three controversial issues seem to have converged yesterday in a single news story from Saudi Arabia.
The Arab News reported that a number of Indian nationals were arrested for running an illegal Voice-Over-Internet (VoIP) business in the Kingdom’s second city, Jeddah:
“This comes just over a week after the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) banned the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) firm Viber in the country. Reports stated that the ban was because the three telecom operators — STC, Zain and Mobily — were losing millions in revenue.
The CITC has also stated that it may take action against other Internet companies offering free or cheap voice, text and audio messaging on the Internet, including Skype and Tango.
The telecom providers and Internet service providers are believed to be using VoIP blocking software to protect their revenues by preventing Internet-based VoIP traffic from running on their networks.
There are no specific regulations over the use of VoIP software in Saudi Arabia and this gray area has led to confusion. According to the VoIP regulatory framework, set by the CITC, all telecom operators can offer Internet telephony services in Saudi Arabia, but none of them does so.
However, the regulations state that it is forbidden to use unauthorized methods to make phone calls. Saudi Arabia is one of two countries in the Gulf region that have tolerated a VoIP culture, while other countries have dealt severely with offenders.
The majority of expatriates from India, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan, use the Internet to talk to their families and friends back home using the software on their smart phones or computers. Many are not even aware that it is illegal. They have almost abandoned calling through the local telecom operators.
Because of the cheap and illegal VoIP calls to Asian countries, Saudi telecom companies often offer special discounts, sometimes reducing overseas calls by 50 percent, at 55 halalas a minute, to most of these countries.”
Ho hum. So Zain, Mobily and Saudi Telecom use software to prevent the use of VoIP applications. That’s news to me and zillions of others, who have happily been using Skype from the Kingdom for many years. And there are no specific regulations over the use of VoIP, yet it is “forbidden to use unauthorised methods to make phone calls”. Something does not compute, unless you take the view that anything that is not specifically authorised must be illegal. I can think of a lot of activities that might be caught under that criterion.
The piece suggests that the prohibition of Viber is specifically about money – in other words, the Government is seeking to protect the three major telecom operators in the country. I wonder what the World Trade Organisation – of which Saudi Arabia is a member – would have to say about that? The WTO frowns on protectionism, and while I’m sure that the Kingdom is not breaching its obligations to the WTO, helping its telecom operators shore up revenues at the expense of VoIP providers might appear to some onlookers as being against the spirit of free competition.
After all, in the West, operators have long been faced with the threat of VoIP. Companies like British Telecom have changed their business models to face the threat to their traditional revenues. BT has invested in upgrading its network to provide higher internet bandwidth, and has diversified into broadcasting and teleconferencing. At home in the UK, I have faster internet than ever before, and happily Skype around the world.
On the other hand, Saudi operators, as the Arab News pointed out, do not provide VoIP services. It might seem that that they have failed to adapt their business models, know it, and are hurting. For example, Zain, the third major player, has recently agreed to a substantial loan package following the Government’s deferral of $1.5 billion in licence payments over the next six years.
So money is the first issue.
The second is social control. A reason frequently cited in the Saudi media for moves against VoIP operators like Skype is that their encryption software makes it very difficult for governments to monitor message and voice traffic. The Saudis are concerned that extremists make use of these tools precisely because they are difficult to monitor. Recent cyber-attacks against Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, have not helped their nerves.
Also the good humour of the authorities will not have been enhanced by the statement from Talman Marco, the CEO of Viber, who told the Arab News that “We will not rest until the service has been restored in Saudi Arabia,” adding that “We are developing technology that will circumvent this block. It will be rolled out in phases. We hope to have the first step in a couple of weeks.” Not exactly the kind of discreet negotiation favoured in the Kingdom.
The final issue is the desire by the Ministry of Labour to stamp out businesses illegally owned and operated by foreigners. Recent clamp-downs against foreigners operating under the sponsorship of Saudi nationals who act as sleeping partners, but effectively owning the business themselves, have resulted in the potential closure of many small businesses. Combined with an initiative to regularise the status of thousands of foreign nationals who are working legally, yet not in the roles specified in their work permits, the move against illegal business operators has caused much anxiety in the labour market and resulted in the expatriation of large numbers of workers, many of whom originate from South Asia, as do the men arrested in Jeddah.
So which of the three issues is bearing down most heavily on the Saudis? I would make an educated guess that social control is at the top of the list, followed by the labour issues, with the plight of the telecom operators coming in third.
With the ever-present threat from perceived enemies within and beyond its borders, the deadline for the regularisation of the status of workers looming next month, and the pain being felt in the telecoms sector, Saudi Arabia has plenty to think about right now. Add to the mix the worrying outbreak of the MERS coronavirus which the Saudis are trying to get a grip on before the arrival of millions on the annual pilgrimage in October, as well as the creeping proliferation of the Syrian conflict, and you have quite a confluence of challenges.
I suspect that a number of officials in the Kingdom will not be enjoying their customary summer breaks this year.
This will be short and sweet, unlike many of my posts.
Carol Fleming, known to the blogosphere as American Bedu, passed away on May 27 after a long illness. I never knew Carol, but she was one of the reasons I took up blogging. Her posts about life in Saudi Arabia were illuminating, balanced and always worth reading. She set a standard for others - like me – who write about the Middle East.
As a former American diplomat married to a Saudi, she was able to write about the country with the curiosity of an expatriate but with the insight of someone who was much more than a mere guest.
Her blog is immensely popular, and rightly so. The best way to commemorate her is to urge you to visit her website. If you are unfamiliar with Saudi Arabia, you will find a rich source of information, stories and perspectives that will bring that fascinating country alive.
Saudi Arabia often gets a bad press from the international media. Sometimes it deserves the criticism, sometimes it is undeservedly stereotyped. Carol did not shrink from talking about the dark side, but she always drew her thoughts from a well of love.
She did more than any other person I know of to portray a society that shares the same hopes, fears and dreams as the rest of humanity. For that, Saudi Arabia should thank her, as should all of us whose understanding of that country has been much enhanced by the light she shined on it.
I wish I had been her friend.
About fifteen years ago I took my elderly parents to a couple of war cemeteries in France. We were there to visit the graves of my mother’s uncle and my father’s half-brother. Both were killed in the First World War. They were buried within a few miles of each other.
It’s impossible not to be moved by the endless rows of gravestones, sitting in perfect symmetry among lawns and flowers on a breezy summer’s day. For me, as no doubt for the multitudes who have visited the same places before and after me, it was an unforgettable experience.
I think back to those graves when I read about yet another mass killing or mutilation in some part of the world. And in a curious kind of way I give thanks that the vicious attacks on the soldier in Woolwich and the runners in Boston produced such shock and outrage. Because the war in which my relatives died was an example of industrialised killing that has happened relatively infrequently in the past seventy years and hardly at all in the back yards of Britain and America.
That we can still be shocked shows how far we have come since 1945, when casualties in the thousands were the norm, and when weary populations were hardly capable of feeling any emotion, except when death touched those nearest to them.
Yet it’s hard not to get a sense that there is evil all around us. As a friend commented in an email this evening:
A deepening culture of total violence is setting in (or returning from the dark ages) by the day, that is the situation. That violence is financial sometimes (as in Bangladesh), physical (as in France), or political (as in the UK and in Mali). But it’s all around.
I don’t share his pessimism, but I understand it.
There are many parallels between the Boston bombers and the two men who took their cleavers to the young soldier who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. In both cases they were on the radar of the security forces. In both cases the apparent perpetrators had roots in other countries. The Tsarnaev brothers and the Woolwich killers were well educated and at some point fell by the wayside form the mainstream of the societies in which they lived. It also seems that none of them expected to survive their encounters with the police.
Beyond that we’re in the realm of speculation. Were they part of a network? Were they manipulated by others? Were they alienated youngsters desperate to belong – who found no sense of belonging in the society in which they lived? Perhaps we will find out in the course of time.
The main difference between the Boston and Woolwich attacks was the public reaction to them. In the US, the dignified memorial to the victims set the tone for a far more emotionally intelligent response. By and large one got a sense that the thoughts of the many were with the victims, and focused on affirming Boston’s way of life, rather than on a flood of Islamophobic sentiment.
In the UK, the reaction of the English Defence League extremists was almost instant, and so were reports of fear among the Muslim community. This is not a good augury for the future.
Two more thoughts in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich killings, neither of them particularly original.
First, it would be foolish to start pointing fingers at MI5 for their “failure” to stop the killers. We – and I’m speaking as a Brit – should be profoundly grateful for their efforts in heading off any number of similar threats in the years since 7/7. Of course there should be an investigation, but if there were failings they should be seen in the light of many successes.
Second, I’m left with a strong sense of “is that the best you can do?” If the vicious act of a couple of individuals is the return on six years’ effort on the part of tens and perhaps hundreds of jihadis who spend much of their lives mainlining extremist propaganda, then it doesn’t say much for their intelligence. This is not to say that there is no threat, and that the threat will not grow when those who survive their killing adventures in Syria return home. But one unfortunate soldier is a pretty meagre reward to date.
When the shock dies down, perhaps we should reflect on those gravestones in France, and give thanks that unlike our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents – and unlike many in today’s conflict zones – we are not living with the threat of instant death from the skies, or sitting in a corpse-strewn battlefield waiting for the shell that has our name on it.
Can you feel economic growth? Can you touch it? In fact, does it really matter to the average person trying to muddle through a life of uncertainty?
Isn’t it really a matter of the odds changing – the odds that you will keep your job, find a job, make ends meet, succeed or fail in business? And do those odds change so dramatically if your country’s gross domestic product goes up or down by a couple of percentage points over a given period?
And even if they do change significantly for the worse, can’t you mitigate the odds by various means? Saving for a rainy day, being in a growth industry, or simply by making good use of the accident of birth that might give you a more privileged place in society, or perhaps inherited resources unavailable to others?
These are the simple questions that always go through my mind whenever I hear experts talking about economic growth as though our lives depended on it. If Ronald Reagan was a practitioner of “voodoo economics”, then my economic consciousness remains rooted in the Stone Age.
Which is why I do try to become more enlightened every so often. The other night I went to an event organised by Bahrain’s Economic Development Board and the Bahrain Institute of Banking and Finance. It was entitled Making Sense of Economic Growth: Global Experience and the Bahraini Context. The four speakers were very smart people: The EDB’s Chief Economist, Dr Jarno Kotilaine, the Executive Director for Banking Supervision at the Central Bank of Bahrain, Khalid Hamad, the BIBF’s Head of Research Dr Mohammed Omar Farook and Marwa Al-Eskafi, a research officer at the EDB.
The audience included academics, businesspeople like me, and a rather curious group of women sitting in front of me who appeared to have come to the wrong meeting – stopping long enough to scan the room, blow air kisses to their friends and then disappearing for the rest of the proceedings.
The speakers were intentionally brief, and the floor discussion was lively enough. It ranged through subjects like the importance of the non-oil sector, of focusing on growing existing small and medium-sized enterprises rather than spending resources on new start-ups, of building knowledge-based businesses rather than investing in more labour-intensive heavy industries (usually staffed by foreign labour) and intensifying efforts to prevent corruption, of paying closer attention to other sectors of fundamental importance to the region, such as IT and agriculture.
There was also an interesting observation from Dr Kotilaine about the cyclical nature of regulation: how regulation was increasingly perceived to be stifling enterprise in the decades up to the 70s, only to be dramatically loosened by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. It seems that we are now in an era when – post 2008 – tighter regulation has again become fashionable, especially in the financial sector.
We were treated to an array of statistics from the EDB which I didn’t fully understand. But one stat leapt out: a dramatic increase in the proportion of non-Bahraini workers over the past decade.
There was much talk about building a knowledge-based economy. Though I fully buy into the concept, as a short or even-medium term driver of economic growth I’m sceptical about its relevance. Building an economy that relies on human rather than physical resources takes generations. In recent decades, most of the dramatic turnarounds in growth have been sustained by discovery of natural resources – North Sea oil and gas in the UK, shale gas in the US, minerals in Africa for example – or underpinned by cheap labour – in China, India and other parts of the Far East. Knowledge plays its part, but without other catalysts it is difficult to grow and sustain.
Interesting as the session was, I didn’t hear anything that disturbed my Stone Age economic theory – that barring a dramatic economic collapse, the consequences of minor variances in growth are for most of us a matter of shifting odds, of decreased or increased risk, and that most of us can mitigate a moderate degree of risk. And that ultimately whatever the sober predictions, we are all vulnerable to infectious shifts in sentiment – also known as emotion: Franklin D Roosevelt’s fear (“we have nothing to fear but fear itself”) and Alan Greenspan’s “irrational exuberance”.
As a businessman who has started and grown businesses through recessions, I have always operated on the basis that a shrinking market is still a market – you just have to work harder and smarter to keep growing your share. Very naïve, I know, but it’s worked for me!
But back to Bahrain. Looking out from my neolithic cave, I’m far more interested in the country’s economic development. The majority of country’s economic growth – depending predominantly on oil and gas – is something that we can do little to influence. The bit that all Bahrainis should be concerned about is the 19% of the economy that depends on non-oil revenue. Of that small slice, banking and finance contributes by far the largest proportion.
Diversification is not a tin can to be kicked down the road much further. It’s an urgent issue that will become more urgent even if the impact of US’s dramatic increase in unconventional hydrocarbon extraction has only a minor impact on the income that the Middle East’s oil and gas producers will derive from their product over the next decade.
So economic development is surely far more important than small variants in growth. And I would be really interested to know what the EDB thinks are the most important indicators of that growth. Not just more statistics, but evidence that we can see, hear, smell and taste.
Here are the questions that I would ask if I was an ordinary Bahraini – if there is such a person:
- How much of the economic output of the country is retained in Bahrain?
- How much is retained by Bahrainis?
- How much is spent in Bahrain?
- What proportion of the wealth generated in Bahrain reaches each stratum of society?
- How much is spent on infrastructure to support the growing army of foreign workers that would otherwise not be needed?
And finally there’s that big elephant stomping around the room: what is the cost of not resolving the current political unrest? You’d probably have to resort to voodoo economics to answer that one. Certainly I’m not aware of any published research on the subject, though anecdotal evidence is widely available.
These are some of the statistics that would be useful to know. Then there are the touchy-feely things that are perhaps even more important. Here we’re perhaps straying into the Bhutanese concept of Gross National Happiness, but surely we should be considering visible – and not just statistical – indicators of health, environment, transport, safety and above all education.
Evidence of poor health, chronic diseases, pollution, traffic accidents and congestion, industrial hazards, quality of housing, education infrastructure is reality that we can see all around us.
The intangible and less measurable factors are around us too. Back to sentiment: to what extent do Bahrainis across the spectrum feel that the country is a good place to bring up children, get a job, start a business, speak freely, influence the future of their country?
Put all these factors into the mix, and then you have a set of evidence that could inform the development of the country in a far more holistic way than the narrow confines of economic growth and even the wider dimensions of economic development.
But having a holistic view is all very well. What counts is creating the consensus that leads to effective action. And it’s clear that creating consensus depends not just on leaders but on leadership – at every level. Not just on the acts of leaders but on sustained, long-term demonstrations of leadership within communities, interest groups and institutions.
Mindsets will have to change, both socially and politically. The elite will need to revisit the concept of ownership and levels of wealth distribution. Society will need to reconcile itself to lower or variable levels of entitlement, perhaps to less subsidies for those who don’t need them. The very scarcity of natural resources will force the country to make painful adjustments sooner rather than later, whereas other states in the region can afford to keep kicking that can down the road.
Consensus is in short supply in Bahrain right now. But I remain convinced that of all the countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council, this one has as good a chance as any in the long term to develop into a contented and prosperous society, even if the process will continue to be painful for some time to come.
You don’t need oil oozing from every hole in the ground, the tallest buildings in the world, the biggest airports and Maserati police patrol cars to achieve a modicum of national happiness.
Other posts on Stone Age Economics:
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/double-dip-recession-yes-and-so/
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/09/22/double-dip-recession-the-view-from-private-frazer/
Getting the Western take on the utterances of Saudi religious leaders is always an interesting exercise – for me anyway.
A couple of days ago Sheikh Abdul Lateef Al-Ashaikh, the head of the Saudi Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (also known as the Haia, or the religious police) – raised a few eyebrows among social media aficionados by saying, as reported by Sebastian Usher of the BBC, that:
“anyone using social media sites – and especially Twitter – “has lost this world and his afterlife”.”
Yesterday he was joined by a Huffington Post regular, Betty Isaacson, who piggybacked on Usher’s report and stated under the headline Twitter, Saudi Arabia’s Top Cleric Says, Will Damn Your Soul:
“….with 70 percent of Arab Twitter users classified as “youths”, according one social media report, it’s no wonder Saudi authorities fear a disgruntled — and possibly more progressive — younger population speaking up. The desire to discourage Twitter users in Saudi Arabia is probably exacerbated by the recent history of youth-led “Arab Spring” revolutions in the Middle East.”
Isaacson’s piece was written through the lens of “Arab Spring good, religious conservatives bad, dissidents want Saudi Arabia to be more like the west”.
Usher was more balanced, but he failed to point out one key qualifier in the Sheikh’s statement. According to the Arab News, which first reported the story in English, Alasheikh’s exact words were:
“Those who resort to social networks and microblogs, especially Twitter, as their core life component, have lost their lives and their afterlife,” Abdul Lateef Al-Asheikh was quoted as saying in local newspapers. “Twitter has become a platform for those with no platform,” he said.
The bold type is mine. And I’m sure that many people – not necessarily of a religious disposition – would agree that living in an online bubble is not necessarily a great way of life, even if they might not use the Sheikh’s rather biblical language to describe the consequences.
So contrary to the impression you might get from reading either article, as I read his words, he is not saying that if you tweet “hurray, exams are over!”, you will be instantly condemned to an eternity in hell. If you interpreted him more kindly, you might take his advice as meaning “nothing in excess”.
It’s also worth adding a little more perspective to the story than either Usher or Isaacson managed to reflect in their short pieces.
First, to describe Al-Asheikh as being part of a “Saudi establishment” as Usher did, is to forget that among the elite there are many shades of opinion. Does he represent a monolithic bloc of opinion, even among his fellow clerics? Not necessarily.
He is actually something of a reformer. Appointed last year by King Abdullah, a major item on his agenda has been to curb the abuses of Haia members by more clearly setting out their rules of engagement. And contrary to Isaacson’s assertion, he is not the most senior cleric in the Kingdom. If such a person exists, that honour belongs to another Al-Asheikh, Abdulaziz, the current Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, who has come out with even fruitier remarks about the social media.
Secondly, the voices of the conservative clergy may be loud and occasionally discordant to western ears, but they do not run the country. They are powerful stakeholders, but what they say does not automatically translate into government action.
Third, contrary to the perception of western observers who like to characterise divisions in the Kingdom in terms of the “clash of civilisations”, the Saudis, in my opinion, are concerned less about the progressive voices that urge reform on a western path. What keeps them awake at night is the extremist wing, whose ideological soulmates unleashed a reign of terror by their attacks on expatriate compounds and government institutions in 2003.
As Jamal Khashoggi comments in Al-Arabiya in an article reflecting on the events of 2003:
“What is more dangerous is that those who were rubbing their hands when the young Saudis blew themselves up and killed innocent people 10 years ago, and even after subsequent attacks took place, these people are still standing rubbing their hands, lying in wait for the state and its reform projects. They express their opposition through raising the “detainees” issue at times, and by classifying the reforms as westernized and a betrayal to the kingdom. They also claim many other allegations, including that the country is under atheist attack.
These are the thoughts and convictions that we fear. We feel that they are roguishly spreading with speeches about religion. There are neither weapons nor explosive belts here, but an ideology that can create them as soon as security is shelved to one side. This is why the kingdom has not removed the high walls and barbed wire yet. Only when we are able to remove them, then we will then be able to say that we won the battle with terror, and that we have become a country where people live without barbed fences.”
And if you read the Arab News story about Abdul Lateef Al-Asheikh carefully, you will notice that he is echoing those sentiments:
“The Kingdom has one of the highest rates of social media use in the Arab world amid reports that social media was reported to be the medium of choice among young girls and women for chatting and keeping themselves updated on the latest social developments, arts and fashion trends. However, online media networks have also been used by religious groups to propagate their ideologies and to enlist support from various countries.
The official said there were “segments” who were misusing social media to “demoralize young people and influence naive minds.”
“There are attacks on the country aiming to cause chaos that can lead to death, destruction and the separation of families,” he said.
“Security and stability can only be achieved through the solidarity of Saudis and through united efforts to deter attempts to mislead naive and simpleminded people,” Al-Asheikh said.”
So yes, “progressive bloggers” are being stamped on and occasionally arrested, but I don’t believe that they are seen as the primary enemy within. Recent protests have not been by those calling for democracy and freedom of speech. They have been by relatives of prisoners whom the west would describe as extremists, and also by activists from the Shia minority in the Kingdom’s sensitive Eastern Province, where most of the oil and gas industry is based.
Another observation is about the talk – some of it from official sources – about an impending clampdown in the social media, to which both Usher and Isaacson referred.
If you take the talk literally, you will believe that there is a Royal Decree just around the corner banning Skype and requiring anyone who wants a Twitter account to provide their national ID number – thus putting them within reach of the authorities if they step out of line.
But my experience is that these proposals are examples of a common practice in Saudi Arabia, which is to float an idea to gauge reaction before implementing it. In other words – to use western parlance – hoisting a flag and seeing who salutes it.
Perhaps there will be action, but perhaps also the words of the Haia chief and the announcements of impending action are shots across the bows – a warning that toleration has its limits.
Either way, perhaps if we apply some context to Abdul Lateef Al-Asheikh’s remarks, we would not be so hasty to condemn them as yet another example of the conservative religious faction fulminating against the ungodly habits of the Saudi youth.
Finally, the Sheikh would doubtless be interested to hear this interview with Jake Davis, the young Briton who has just been convicted for his involvement the Lulszec hacking group. In the interview by Susan Watts for the BBC, there is a telling comment:
Jake Davis, who went by the online alias Topiary, says he now regrets “95% of the things I’ve ever typed on the internet”.
“It was my world, but it was a very limited world. You can see and hear it, but you can’t touch the internet. It’s a world devoid of empathy – and that shows on Twitter, and the mob mentality against politicians and public figures. There is no empathy.
“So it was my world, and it was a very cynical world and I became a very cynical person.”
If we focus on the Sheikh’s core message rather than the headline-catching references to the afterlife, is Jake Davis not the kind of person he is talking about?
“Let me put it this way, I have never met anybody except perhaps Palestinians who really give one good goddamn about the Palestinian people. The love of the Palestinian people is largely a function of the hatred of the nation state of the Jewish people. People who don’t care about the Kurds, who don’t care about the Armenians, who don’t care about the Tibetans, who didn’t give a damn about the Cambodians, who didn’t say a word about the people of Rwanda and the people of Darfur, suddenly have discovered the Palestinian people. The deep hatred that people have of Israel– I’m not talking about criticism; I was very actively involved in the anti-apartheid movement, I remember how strongly we felt about white South Africa, it didn’t come close to the kind of hatred that many people feel today about Israel. Let me put it this way, Stephen Hawkings [sic] would not refuse to attend a conference in a country that was equally oppressing another country, say China and Tibet, or Russia and Chechnya– it’s all about the fact that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. You cannot understand the hatred of Israel if you eliminate the fact that Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people. Is that anti-Semitism? You know– you name it, I’m describing it.”
The words of American lawyer Alan Dershowitz, spoken in a debate with Peter Beinart, as reported by Mondoweiss via Mideastposts.com.
If it were not for the fact that Dershowitz is such a prominent figure in US public life, one could dismiss his words as the rant of a blinkered extremist.
His argument is a variant of the old line that if you criticise Israel it is because you are anti-Semitic. He also implies that if you criticise Israel, you hate Israel.
Who are these people who don’t give a damn about Armenians, Tibetans and Kurds, who have “suddenly discovered the Palestinian people”? And how offensive to suggest that people who have a deep sympathy for the plight of the Palestinians, of whom I am one, feel that sympathy because they hate Israel.
I have sympathy for the Palestinians because I have visited the country. Because I have known many Palestinians over thirty years. Because I have spoken to Palestinians about life before and after the nabka. And because only someone with their eyes shut would be able to ignore the injustice done to them since 1948.
And yes, I have also visited Israel. I have Jewish friends. I have listened to holocaust survivors. And no, I do not hate Jews. I don’t hate Israel. And only someone with a minimal knowledge of history – or a selective memory – would be able to ignore the persecution of Jews over centuries, culminating in the holocaust.
Dershowitz’s arguments might work with an American jury. But they don’t wash with me, and I suspect that they won’t convince others who are able to distinguish between the actions of a state and its leaders, and the human beings who populate that state.
As for Stephen Hawking, Dershowitz could be right. Perhaps Hawking would accept invitations to Russia or China, despite their human rights records. But would that invalidate his decision to protest in his own way against the actions of Israel? Is there any universal principle that says one must follow identical tactics in protesting against each country accused of human rights violations?
I certainly suspect that Hawking’s decision not to travel to Israel will have made a bigger impact on public opinion than a similar protest against China, for the simple reason of Israel’s pride in its democracy, its tradition of free speech and its scientific heritage.
Alan Dershowitz is a distinguished and talented man who has never been afraid to express his opinions. I agree with some of them – such as his stance in favour of gun control and animal rights.
But I find it hard not to be insulted by his cavalier dismissal of the motives of people like me who are able to be outraged by acts of inhumanity without that outrage being rooted in hatred.
Previous posts on Israel and Palestine:
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/jerusalem-blood-ecstasy-and-the-end-of-days/
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/11/11/postcard-from-galilee-rocks-ruins-churches-and-birdsong/
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/palestine-the-demolitions-continue/
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/palestine-education-under-the-gun/
http://59steps.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/oh-little-town-of-bethlehem-life-on-the-checkpoints/
