In the opulent cool of a glass-and-steel office building on the shores of the gulf, Mohammad Al Gergawi exudes confidence. “The world is changing, and a lot of people think this part of the world will be the last to change,” he says. “But we are lucky enough to live in a place called Dubai.” After the emirate announced the creation of Dubai Internet City in October 1999, no expense was spared to make it happen. Gergawi, who runs the project, boasts that 364 days later it was ready for business, with more than 200 companies set to move in. Among them are large regional operations for Oracle, Microsoft and Canon. Along the roads nearby, each light post bears a banner proclaiming freedom of expression or freedom to create.
All across the Arab and Muslim world, from the poorest countries to the richest, people are clamoring for more access to the communications revolution. The appetite for information has been sharpened by now ubiquitous satellite-TV dishes. The ringing of mobile phones vies with the call to prayer. And wherever the Web is affordable and unrestricted, users and entrepreneurs spring up like grass in the desert after a rain.
As Arab potentates attend a summit in Jordan this week–denouncing the repression of Palestinians and calling for the end of Iraq’s decade-long isolation–a few may gently raise the much more fundamental question of how this part of the world can keep pace with globalization. “We are not saying ignore the political,” Egyptian Communications and Information Technology Minister Ahmed Nazif told NEWSWEEK; “we’re saying give the economic agenda equal weight.” But that’s probably wishful thinking. Even those regimes that are trying hard to adapt, like Egypt’s, are not sure whether the promise of the future is worth losing control over the present. For many, the whole idea of the Internet is suspect, and not without cause. “Hotmail and Yahoo may be the most subversive thing that ever happened to the House of Saud,” says one dissident from Jeddah.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that free speech (behind screen names) will win out in the end. The autocrats of the Middle East have a very long tradition of imposing ignorance on their subjects. Five centuries ago Ottoman sultans rejected the Gutenberg revolution that swept across Europe and banned the printing press for 235 years. Arabs have been struggling to close the gap ever since. But many of today’s emirs, kings and presidents-for-life are just as suspicious of the Internet as the sultans were of movable type. They’re stalling. And with the West moving at Internet speed, Arab leaders could easily condemn the Arab world to the dark side of the digital divide.
That doesn’t keep them from talking the talk. Even Saddam Hussein–who prohibited ownership of typewriters in the 1970s and ’80s–has recognized the need to open a token, tightly monitored Internet cafe in Baghdad. Syrian President Bashar Assad, who inherited his dictatorship from his father, presents himself as a reform-minded Web surfer. But even if the men at the top were sincere, the region’s pervasive secret police would not be ready to surrender their power. Telecommunications monopolies won’t easily give up their enormously lucrative franchises either.
And in many Arab countries poverty is a practical barrier to the Internet age. Who can afford a $500 home computer in Sudan, say, where optimistic estimates place the average annual per capita income at around $940? Or in Yemen, where it’s $750? International investors, meanwhile, are put off by the dearth of well-enforced commercial law. “There’s a lack of proper governance,” says Hisham El-Sherif, who started his own telecom company, Nile Online. “You make a deal with me, and the next day you change the rules of the game.”
The lack of infrastructure as such is less a problem. Even remote Mauritania is finding the basic resources needed for a taste of global communications. There are perhaps 20 Internet cafes in Nouakchott, and last November the government opened a handful of access points in the country’s interior. But the very success of those first outposts seems to have raised concerns. “It’s a revolution,” says Fatimetou Mint Mohamed-Saleck, undersecretary for new technologies. “We’ve got to channel it, because it’s going in all sorts of directions.” Only a handful of leaders–in Egypt, Jordan and Dubai–appear willing to embrace the potential risks as well as the potential profits of wide-open access to IT, and it’s not clear how long their liberalism will last.
Egypt, with a population of more than 65 million, had only 700,000 fixed phone lines in 1985. Now it has 5 million and hopes to double that number by 2004. The number of mobile-phone subscribers soared from 1 million to 2.5 million last year, according to Nazif. Internet “use”–calculated at about eight times the number of actual subscribers–jumped from 300,000 to 500,000. “We will be offering free Internet on all phone lines by the end of the year,” said Nazif. There are more than 60 Internet-service providers, and the government is encouraging them to subsidize the cost of computers and modems. Even the secret police appear to be on board. “I think we’ve been seeing a very progressive attitude from the security people,” said Nazif. “And that’s a big change.”
In Jordan, the dreary provincial city of Irbid hopes to claim the Guinness world record for the most Internet cafes on a single road. There are more than 100 along Shafiq Reshedat Street, the main drag near the local university. The first was established in 1998 by a young pharmacist, Aiman Haddad, who was looking to make an investment. He called it the Apollo, after the American space vehicle, because “you can see the whole world when you’re in here.”
Amid a hodgepodge decor that includes fading posters of Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, plastic plants and a dead Lava lamp, Haddad has 52 computers with reasonably high-speed (256K) connections. He keeps the place open 24 hours a day, charges about $1.40 an hour for use and offers free instruction for anyone who wants to learn to surf the Web. Haddad claims the Apollo has trained 23,000 people in the past three years. According to Haddad, students in the first couple of years of university use the Internet mostly to chat long-distance with friends and family. During the last two years of their studies, the research gets more serious. But there’s also more than a little element of romance. Many go on the Web looking for spouses in countries where they’d someday like to live and work. Haddad counts three Australian brides, four Canadians and about 30 from the United States.
Jordan’s honeymoon with the Internet may be in peril, however. Religious conservatives and the security forces are pushing to regulate Internet cafes. King Abdullah’s enthusiasm for IT is well known. “I have very important support from the top,” says Telecommunications Minister Fawaz Zu’bi. But the king needs the support of tribal leaders who think their values and authority may be threatened. Jordan has every reason to be concerned about Palestinian-Israeli violence and terrorist intrigues in cyberspace as well as on the ground. “[The Net] could be used against national security,” says Zu’bi. Olivier Faure, marketing director for Jordan Telecom, says that if proposed requirements for cafe patrons to register their computer access for government scrutiny are approved, the number of users will plunge.
Dubai has promoted its ambitious Internet City to such an extent that even as its first tenants are still unpacking boxes, the project is seen as a model for the Arab world. According to Lubna al-Qasimi, who heads its e-government project, the goal is to “make Dubai an enabler and leader for change” in order to “create one market from Egypt to India.” Even Dubai’s visionary leadership, however, represents only one of seven sheikdoms in the United Arab Emirates. It constantly has to bend the rules set by the others: so Dubai’s Internet City aims to be, as it were, a city within the city-state that’s within the federal union. It promises, somehow, to set its own policy for everything from work visas to company ownership and Internet connections. Yet for now and the foreseeable future, actual access to the Web has to go through the federally controlled state telephone monopoly Etisalat, which jealously guards prerogatives that earned it net profits of $654 million in 2000. In fact, because Etisalat imposes proxy servers and firewalls, and there’s no AOL or CompuServe in Dubai, road warriors with their laptops find it harder to work in Dubai than in Cairo or Amman. “The Dubai philosophy is ‘If you build it, they will come,’” said one local banker. The people of the Arab world will certainly come running to a new economic and technological order, but their governments may have to be dragged.
