M.B.Z. makes little distinction among Islamist groups, insisting that they all share the same goal: some version of a caliphate with the Quran in place of a constitution. He seems to believe that the Middle East’s only choices are a more repressive order or a total catastrophe. It is a Hobbesian forecast, and doubtless a self-serving one. [...]
On the domestic front, he has cracked down hard on the Brotherhood and built a hypermodern surveillance state where everyone is monitored for the slightest whiff of Islamist leanings. [...] M.B.Z. says his father’s pluralist instincts are at the root of his own anti-Islamist campaign. [...] Only after M.B.Z. returned to Abu Dhabi in the early 1980s did he recognize that the ideas promoted by the Brotherhood were incompatible with his own emerging role as an heir to power. M.B.Z. did not say whether he thought about the corollary of his choice: that for ordinary Emiratis, the Brotherhood’s appeal must have been even stronger. [...]
“We used to say in the Pentagon, the objective was to get M.B.Z. addicted to aerospace magazines so he’d buy everything we produced,” Riedel said. The seduction appears to have worked. The U.A.E. has spent billions on American jets and weapons systems, and visitors to M.B.Z.’s office say they still see stacks of military magazines there. [...]
At the same time, M.B.Z. mounted a broader assault on Islamist ideology. Many of the U.A.E.’s Islamists belonged to Islah, a group founded in the 1970s that was the local equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood. They included thousands of foreigners, mostly from Egypt, who had been welcomed decades earlier to fill the U.A.E.’s need for educated professionals and bureaucrats. The country’s ruling families had initially given their blessing to Islah, which they saw as a benignly pious group. [...] M.B.Z. authorized the firing of Islamist teachers and a sweeping rewrite of the country’s textbooks.
[...] M.B.Z. has made other quiet efforts to push religion into the private realm. He has given a platform to respected religious scholars who took a quietist approach, including a number of prominent Sufis like Ali al-Jifri, Aref Ali Nayed, Hamza Yusuf and Abdallah bin Bayyah, the renowned Mauritanian Sufi scholar who now chairs an Emirati council that oversees religious rulings. The U.A.E. also began exporting its own brand of Islam via training programs for imams abroad, including thousands of Afghans. [...]
M.B.Z. soon latched onto his Saudi counterpart — who was eager for big reforms — as the key to loosening Saudi Arabia’s ties to radical Islam. He appears to have been something of a mentor to the younger man, and he encouraged the Obama administration to support him. But he doesn’t seem to have any sort of brake on M.B.S.’s worst impulses. When the Saudis led a military campaign against the Iran-allied Houthi fighters in Yemen in March 2015 — with the U.A.E. as their lead partner — many expected it to last a few months at most. Instead, it has lasted nearly five years, becoming a catastrophe that shocked the conscience of the world. Ancient buildings have been smashed to rubble, thousands of civilians have been killed and Yemen — already the Arab world’s poorest country — has suffered terrible outbreaks of famine and disease. The war’s ostensible goal of uprooting the Iran-backed Houthi government is more distant than ever. [...]
At its worst, the feud with Qatar has cast M.B.Z.’s whole campaign against political Islam in a vengeful light, as if he were more keen on humiliating his rivals than anything else.
A large bronze sculpture stands outside M.B.Z.’s main office in Abu Dhabi, spelling out the word “tolerance” in English letters. The U.A.E. goes to enormous lengths to advertise its commitment to pluralism. In 2016, the government created a Ministry of Tolerance, and 2019 was branded the Year of Tolerance, kicked off in February by a much-heralded visit from Pope Francis, the first time a pontiff has set foot on the Arabian Peninsula. But the tolerance does not extend to Islamists or anyone who expresses sympathy for them. The U.A.E. has cracked down much harder on Islamists since 2011, arresting and incarcerating them en masse, on thin pretexts. There is an unmistakable chill in the air, an intolerance for fellow travelers reminiscent of the Cold War. In 2012, the Emirati authorities shuttered the Dubai offices of the United States-based National Democratic Institute and other foreign foundations that supported democratic institutions. In 2014, the government officially designated the Brotherhood a terrorist group. It has prosecuted at least one lawyer who defended Islamists and even, in some cases, secular critics of the government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/09/magazine/united-arab-emirates-mohammed-bin-zayed.html
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