A Year Of Elections In The Middle East; Expect Big Change In The Status Quo.

*** The Wahhabi Religious Order In Saudi Arabia Is Split Beyond Repair; Even Some Ulema' Of The Aal Al Shaikh Clan Are Now Challenging The Reformer Wing Of The Royal Family; To Them Elections Are A Thing That Does Not Belong To Sunni Islam  Some Of Sunni Religious Heads In Iraq Have Openly Decried Free Elections As Being A Violation Of Islamic Law 

*** Iraq's Al-Jaish Al-Islami, A 7-Div. Wahhabi Affiliate Of Bin Laden's Qaeda Working With Zarqawi's Group, Has Vowed To Hit Within USA In '05

*** Expect An Oil Price Shock Also During 2005

NICOSIA - There will be elections across the Middle East this year. The first were held in the Palestinian territories on Jan. 9 in which Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) was elected overwhelmingly as president of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to succeed Yasser Arafat, who died on Nov. 11. There will be legislative elections in Iraq on Jan. 30 - if these are not postponed in view of mounting violence - plus municipal elections in Saudi Arabia in February, presidential elections in Iran in June, Egypt's one-candidate referendum for President Mubarak's fifth term till 2011 and parliamentary elections in November. There will be elections in Lebanon and Yemen. While their outcomes will cause little or no change to the status quo in the Middle East before end-2005, they will pave the way for a huge change thereafter in view of the following developments:

The Wahhabi religious order in Saudi Arabia, like other such Salafi establishments in the Sunni world of Islam, has begun to show its rage against the notion of people freely electing their representatives or leaders. This was disclosed indirectly but well explained recently by Saudi-born Osama Bin Laden.

President George W. Bush's "Greater Middle East Initiative" (GMEI) to democratise this part of the world angered Arab rulers in February 2004 as leaks of the plan were published by the media. A revised version was discussed at a recent conference in Morocco by departing US Secretary of State Colin Powell; but there were no echoes of that either. Yet the Bush administration is determined to see this project implemented: it is part of a "process" on which it will not negotiate, not even if Saudi Arabia's unity is to be affected.

None of the Arab rulers is willing to cede power. The maximum degree of change they might be willing to permit would be cosmetic and should in no way affect the ruler's hold on power. With the exception of Syria's hand-picked Lebanese President Emile Lahoud, whose single six-year term was extended by another three years in early September 2004 thanks to a constitutional amendment imposed by Damascus, the term of every Arab ruler should be a journey that lasts from the throne to the grave, or from the throne to jail.

One revolution gathering steam is the emergence of new media outlets. Satellite TV networks like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya reached millions of Arab viewers, and Internet usage continues to surge, giving Arabs access to uncensored Weblogs and Websites. About 4m Arabs had access to the Internet in 2001. Now more than 17m Arabs are online; projections are for 50m Arab Internet users by 2008, according to Internet World Stats, an online service that tracks Internet usage. While Islamist and jihadi websites have also proliferated, uncensored news in the Middle East is available as never before. Growth in satellite TV and Internet usage will play a key role in shaping Arab views over the years - and decade - ahead.

A growing number of Ayatollahs in the Jaafari world have come to agree that Iran's Shiite theocracy has proved to be a failure. They have realised that power not only corrupts the people in charge but also distances them from God on the one hand and from the population on the other. Yet some theocrats in Tehran argue that their system allows a certain degree of democracy - theirs being a sort of reformation from Sunnism - whereas most Sunni religious leaders would accept nothing less than a "paying" autocracy. Some candidates to Iran's presidency are very moderate and democratic.

The Iraqi elections through 2005 will be the events most watched worldwide, with the various strands of Islam to be put to the test (see Iraq survey un this week's package - Re-drawing the Islamic Map).

Why Wahhabis/Salafis Are Against Elections & Democracy: Wahhabism - established over 250 years ago in what today is known as Saudi Arabia to reform the Muslim world by returning to the purity of Islam - is a sub-branch of Hambalism, which is one of the four branches of mainstream Sunni Islam. The way its fanatic proponents perceive it, Wahhabism separates the world into mu'mineen (Muslim believers) and kuffars (non-Muslims) and regards non-Sunni Muslims - like the Jaafari Shiites, Alawites, etc - as heretics worthy of persecution. To Wahhabism, democracy or free elections and anything else which does not belong to its Sunni tradition is sacrilege, to be prevented at all cost.

Mainstream Wahhabism officially recognised by governments like those of Saudi Arabia and Qatar is moderate only to the extent that should satisfy the rulers in host countries who keep defending as well as financing the religious establishment. But the establishment has a vocation - ad-da'wa - to spread its faith worldwide; and after 9/11 the Saudi government has stopped financing any activity which the US and other Western powers regard as related to terrorism. The Saudi government has also begun revising educational curricula which, until 9/11, used to be controlled by the Wahhabi religious establishment. The one clan in Saudi Arabia which is the prime defender of Wahhabism is Aal Al-Shaikh (the house, or family, of the late Shaikh Mohammed Ibn Abdel Wahhab - of the Bani Tamim Tribe - who founded this religious order). The Saudi royal family is related to the Aal Al-Shaikh clan by marriage. The mother of the late King Faisal, father of the current Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al-Faisal, was from the Aal Al-Shaikh clan. Aal Al-Shaikh clan members now include the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, who in November 2004 was said to have issued a fatwa banning elections anywhere, and those who control the ministries most important to Wahhabism.

One of the 9/11 consequences, however, is that both the religious establishment and the royal family have been split beyond repair - simply because it is impossible for the royal regime to stop defending and funding Wahhabism's vocation (ad-da'wa). But - for fear of civil war - both sides are obliged to suppress their differences and keep things under the surface of "normal life" for as long as they can. Those who cannot are either condemned as "deviants" (the local definition of terrorists), such as the members of Bin Laden's Qaeda, or exposed to immense suffering or illness; Prince Saud Al-Faisal is said to have Parkinson's disease, early symptoms of which became apparent months after 9/11. Occasionally some of religious figures openly show their true colour, as in the case of those Wahhabi ulema who issued a fatwa calling on people to go to Iraq to fight in Falluja against US forces.

Much of what Bin Laden says reflects the thinking of the Wahhabi religious establishment. In his most recent audiotape, parts of which played on Al-Jazeera, Bin Laden condemned not only the elections scheduled for Jan. 30 in Iraq but also the Palestinian elections in the West Bank and Gaza on Jan. 9.

On tape, Bin Laden castigated the planned election of an Iraqi national assembly to draft a constitution, saying: "In the balance of Islam, this constitution is infidel, and therefore everyone who participates in this election will be considered an infidel". He called the Iraqi constitution "a Jahiliya constitution made by man", meaning it reflected the ignorance of the pre-Islamic era and did not derive from God. Electing a prince or a president is permitted, Bin Laden said, but only if "the prince is a Muslim, and he will institute Islam, that is, [Sunni/Hanbali] Islam is the only source of the rulings and laws".

"This", the Boston Globe (BG) said on Jan. 5, "is the reflection of a doctrine drawn from a particular, literalist interpretation of Islamic texts and traditions. It is the distillation of a political ideology - radical Islamism - that has its own theorists and propagandists. A large part of its appeal lies in the black-and-white certainty it offers, its severing of believer from unbeliever, the stark opposition it asserts between an ideal Islamic state founded upon sharia, or Islamic law, and the unjust, 'infidel' Arab states that actually exist. The simplicity and compression of Bin Laden's doctrine are attractive to some, but it has political limitations. As illustrated in his denunciations of the Iraqi and Palestinian elections, Bin Laden's worldview is harshly exclusionary. It demands not only that all Muslims heed his call for jihad (holy war) but also that they deny or distort reality".

In Iraq, as in the West Bank and Gaza, surveys indicate a popular will to hold elections and replace repressive, corrupt rulers with an accountable government. Yet Bin Laden, with no religious or scholarly authority, warned Iraqis and Palestinians that "anyone who participates in these elections has committed apostasy against Allah". And he declared that "Mahmoud Abbas is a Bahai" - implying that the Palestinian leader should not be considered a true Muslim. The BG said these views "amount to Bin Laden's death threat against all...who may be planning to vote this month". The paper added: "Bin Laden is waging a war within Islam, a war against all Muslims who refuse to obey his commands".

In Riyadh, billboard messages prepare citizens for the kingdom's first nationwide elections, for municipal councils. "Participate In The Decision-making" and "Your Voice Will Not Be Heard Unless You Register", they say. The balloting, set to start on Feb. 10, is the first since municipal elections were held in a few cities in the 1960s. But partly because of those elections and mainly because of his efforts at modernisation, King Faisal was assassinated by a nephew, called Prince Faisal, on March 25, 1975. Even now, councils will not be wholly elected and women will not be allowed to vote until 2009.

Saudi men are exhorted to embrace the process out of national pride and to turn out in traditional dress when registering. But May Yamani, the liberal daughter of former Saudi oil minister Ahmad Yamani, said registration has been slow and the kingdom's citizens had little hope for change through the elections. Less than 40% of the eligible male voters turned out to register for the kingdom's first ballot in decades.