THE DAILY TELEGRAPH: Obama will need vision to shape events in the Middle East, says Richard Spencer in Cairo.Sheikh Ali Salman does not come across as a Mad Mullah. To say you’d happily share a pint down the local with him would be going too far – he is leader of Bahrain’s principal Shia Muslim party, the al-Wefaq, and sits comfortably in his clerical robes and turban. But he is young and pleasantly spoken and, unlike with some politicians, you leave a meeting with him thinking you would like to get to know him better, rather than desperately looking for the exit.
Sheikh Ali is a figure of suspicion though to the Bahraini regime, which fears his party would deliver this island kingdom to its fellow Shias in Iran, given half the chance. The ultimate result of that paranoia was seen all too graphically on the streets of Manama yesterday. He himself denies this, and in a recent interview with The Daily Telegraph said he had no ties to Iran, every respect for the Bahrain royal family, and just wanted a constitutional monarchy as in Britain.
For a century or more no one has trusted anyone much in the Middle East, and few interviews can be conducted entirely without a question mark in the back of the mind when such claims are made. But the image of Sheikh Ali as an Iranian fanatic did strike me as a clear example of the mismatch between perceptions of the Arab world and the modern reality.
This has been widely on show in recent weeks. For those who live in the region, the surprise lies not in the speed of revolution but in the time it took to get there. It is the West that has seemed shocked that an uprising in an Arab country like Egypt had as its figurehead a Google marketing executive, Wael Ghuneim.
Sheikh Ali himself is a bit of a puzzle, I expect, even for regular visitors to Bahrain, for whom the thought of “Gulf Arab in long robe” conjures up the idea of either a plutocrat lounging in the diwan of his palace, or a Saudi businessman cruising the bars of Bahrain and Dubai for alcohol and loose women. In truth, most Gulf Arabs are certainly more religious than Westerners, but they are as devoted to food, shopping, computer games and football as anyone else. >>> Richard Spencer, The Daily Telegraph’s Middle East Correspondent | Saturday, February 19, 2011
