At some stage, the democracy protests were hijacked by people who had old arguments with the Bahraini state. This isn’t to say there weren’t Bahrainis who wanted more rights—there were. The government’s crackdowns on protesters also entailed well-documented acts of torture, which were indefensible. But even if many Bahraini Shia felt discriminated against, it didn’t follow that they wanted to live in a religious state run by Shia clerics.
The Shia opposition, while raising some legitimate concerns, could also be mercurial. In February, Crown Prince Salman bin Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa met with representatives of Al Wefaq, the largest Shia political party, including its secretary-general, the cleric Sheikh Ali Salman. According to Salman’s account, this meeting was held on the understanding that the crown prince was prepared to consider the significant demands for reform being expressed in the demonstrations. “During these discussions, which reportedly lasted for three hours, Al Wefaq voiced its reservations about the existing Constitution; expressed discontent with aspects of the government’s performance, composition, and powers; and asked that demonstrators at a major traffic circle be allowed to remain there,” it was later reported. “According to Al Wefaq’s account of the meeting, despite having previously agreed to consider the significant reform demands, the Crown Prince stated that he was not mandated to reach an agreement on these issues. The Crown Prince suggested that the demonstrators move to a more secure location because the [Bahraini government] was concerned for their safety from possible attacks by vigilantes.”
After six Bahraini protesters were killed in a three-day period, another meeting was arranged, but Ali Salman didn’t show up. The crown prince waited all night. After this, the government concluded that the opposition didn’t want a legitimate agreement, further damaging any trust between the parties. The chances for a fruitful dialogue vanished.
I traveled to Bahrain briefly in February 2011. I’d never been there, and I didn’t know what to expect. I spent time at the funerals of protesters who had been killed in the demonstrations, including a teenage boy who had died of a head wound. The doctors told his family he’d been hit by a tear gas canister. The family thought it was intentional. The women screaming and beating themselves at his funeral reminded me of the mourning for Aquila al-Hashimi in Iraq. But what the women in Bahrain shouted was different from what the crowd in 2003 had said. The Bahraini women called for “death to the soldiers of Yazid and Muawiya,” a reference to the Battle of Karbala in AD 680, when the soldiers of Yazid I, the Umayyad caliph, killed Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the son of Ali, along with many relatives, including Hussein’s infant son. The killings made Hussein a martyr and cemented the division between Sunni and Shia Muslims. The Shia consider themselves the loyal followers of Ali and commemorate the Battle of Karbala during the sacred month of Muharram with marches, tears, and self-flagellation.
I asked the grieving women who they were talking about. The police and security forces, they told me.
Like Bahrain’s government, the country’s security forces were mostly Sunni, while the protesters were mostly Shia. But some Shia police told me they were constantly under attack from their own communities, and they showed me videos of burning cars to prove the point. Many Bahraini police were of Indian or Pakistani descent, exposing another rift between the native Bahrainis and these migrants (and their descendants), who were mainly Sunni but often lacked the benefits of citizenship and faced discrimination as “outsiders.”
Later that year, I ran into my former Washington Post colleague Anthony Shadid at a conference in Qatar. Anthony had been a persistent and definitive voice on the Arab Spring, and he had been violently kidnapped in Libya while covering the revolt against Gaddafi. He shared my interest in Bahrain, and he urged me to go back.
But things were changing at the Times. In June, Bill Keller announced that he would step down as executive editor. Bill had always been a great supporter of the kind of investigative journalism I was doing, and of me personally. Along with my direct editors, he’d done much to help me in my years there.
The new leadership at the paper had different plans. In one conversation later that year, a high-level editor told me that because Osama bin Laden had been killed, terrorism was no longer a major threat. The Arab Spring was a game changer, he continued. He seemed to believe that the Islamists had been soundly defeated by the energy of youthful democracy activists. I tried to explain that my conversations with Cuspert and my time at the Tunisian-Libyan border had suggested that a new generation of jihadists was emerging. But this editor was sure the Middle East was changing and that there wouldn’t be any space left for jihadists in this new world.
I was shocked by his assessment and worried that if we didn’t cover these developments we’d be negligent, as we had been in the past. I remembered Maureen Fanning, the September 11 widow who had asked so movingly why no one had told her that so many people out there hated Americans. We couldn’t afford to let readers like her down again.
At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder what these changes would mean for me as a freelance reporter working on contract. Was this the end of my career at the New York Times? My fears were soon borne out, as I found myself writing less for the flagship paper and more for the international edition, including a section called “The Female Factor.”
There were many stories to tell about women in Bahrain. Of all the countries in the Gulf region, its society was the most open-minded. Women had more rights; they could drive and hold leadership positions. Women also played an important role in the protests there. I interviewed Rula al-Saffar, a forty-nine-year-old nurse who had been detained for five months. She described being blindfolded, threatened, and tortured with electric shocks. Her description took me back to my experience in the Egyptian prison. I remembered the screaming I’d heard when I was blindfolded. The truth was, I felt a deep sympathy for her. But when I asked her and others about the rules for medical personnel protesting during work time and challenged some of what they said, a woman serving as a minder from Wa’ad, one of the leading opposition groups, asked me, “Are you working for the other side or what?”