This year, Bahrain, Jordan, and Morocco each observe silver jubilees as the three Middle East kingdoms celebrate the 25th anniversaries of their respective monarchs’ accession to the throne. In 2024, Bahrain’s Hamad bin Isa, Jordan’s Abdullah II, and Morocco’s Mohammed VI — the newest and youngest Arab heads of state at the turn of the 21st century — are now the three longest reigning monarchs in the Middle East, potent symbols of the resiliency and stability afforded by dynastic rule in a turbulent region.
In December 2000, less than a year before the 9/11 terror attacks and a decade before the Arab Spring, I published an article in the Middle East Quarterly entitled, “Want Democracy? Get a King,” arguing that the stability and security monarchies afforded fulfilled important prerequisites for the development of democratic practices. In contrast, ostensibly republican governments like those in Libya, Tunisia, Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen posed “a significant risk to regional stability” due to “the bankruptcy of their ideological or revolutionary underpinnings.”
At the turn of the new century, the new generation of dynastic rulers appeared ready to embrace change to underpin and rejuvenate the basis of royal legitimacy. In Oman, Qatar, and Kuwait, this meant extending universal suffrage, albeit to highly constrained elected chambers, by the end of the century’s first decade.
At the time, Bahrain’s Sheikh (now King) Hamad bin Isa said his country needed “to engage in serious and fruitful work to revive Bahrain so that it can once again catch up with the fast developments taking place in our contemporary world.” It was a sentiment shared by other Arab royals, but one that failed to resonate amongst the region’s presidents-for-life.
While the status of Arab republicanism was shaky at best in 2000, events post 9/11, including the 2003 ouster of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, appeared to seal its fate as the cloak of fear that abetted one-party rule finally lifted, even if only briefly. Within a decade, protests if not civil war ousted Tunisia’s Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh. Apart from Algeria’s generals, who beat back the threat in the early 1990s, only Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad remains of the old guard, clinging to power with the assistance of Russia and Iran.
The Arab Spring that swept aside the old order in Tunis, Cairo, Tripoli, and Sanaa may have failed to sow lasting democracy, but it did strip away the vacuity of anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist Arab nationalism as a viable political ideal. Today, there is nothing remotely revolutionary or “popular” to describe the region’s current presidential regimes. They are garden-variety despots.
As if to prove the bankruptcy of anti-colonial, imperialist tropes that once rallied popular sentiment behind the hubris and adventurism of Qaddafi, Hafez al-Assad, and Saddam Hussein, but which left millions in poverty, the royal houses again prove themselves more attuned and responsive to global realities. Whether the Abraham Accords, which upended a half-century of consensus and conflict; the transformational objectives of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030; or Morocco’s ambition to be become a renewable energy and regional transportation powerhouse, the Middle East’s monarchs are not sitting idly as the world advances.
Today, Arab monarchy finds itself secure enough to contemplate the once unthinkable — actual peace with Israel. The question now is whether the region’s dynastic houses also feel confident enough to deliver on prior promises and popular expectations of expanded civic and political space. With 55 percent of the Middle East and North Africa’s population under 30 and the underlying tensions of the Arab Spring still lurking, realizing ambitious visions for the future may depend on it.
