Kuwait Strips Prominent Thinker Tariq Suwaidan Of Citizenship

In a royal decree, the Kuwaiti government has stripped one of its best-known thinkers, Tariq Suwaidan, of his citizenship. An academic and activist who has published and lectured widely across the world for over thirty years, Suwaidan was one of two dozen Kuwaitis whose citizenship was revoked in a decree by Emir Mishaal bin Ahmad earlier this month.

Although the decree did not list a reason, critics have often accused Suwaidan of being an “Ikhwani” – referring to the Islamist political movement that retains widespread intellectual and cultural influence throughout the Muslim world and won the 2012 election in Egypt before its subsequent ouster in a coup. Although the Ikhwan had a longstanding relationship in the twentieth century with Arab monarchies such as Kuwait, often providing much of the professional and educated class, the relationship strained in the twenty-first century and in some cases broke down following the “Arab Spring” protests that saw the movement briefly rule Cairo after winning the 2012 election.

Suwaidan’s career was a case in point; he was long a welcome figure in the Gulf, lecturing and writing, and spoke on a television channel owned by Saudi prince Waleed bin Talal. In 2013, shortly after a coup partly supported by Riyadh against the Ikhwan government in Cairo, Waleed sacked Suwaidan for belonging to “the Brotherhood [Ikhwan] terrorist [sic] movement.” This occurred amid a broader crackdown on Ikhwan-affiliated figures.

Suwaidan was accused of having styled himself a member of the Ikhwan during a trip to Yemen, even though the Yemen Ikhwan, known as Islah, had a longstanding relationship with the Saudi government. The irony was further compounded when Saudi Arabia was forced to repair ties to Islah after they emerged as a major opposition to the Houthis, who seized control of Yemen the following year; that relationship persists today, though Saudi tolerance for Ikhwanis outside Yemen remains low. Hostility toward Ikhwanis and other independent Islamists has been frequent under an increasingly strong-arm Saudi government since then: to cap off the irony, Prince Waleed himself would be theatrically imprisoned for alleged corruption by Riyadh in 2017, by which point the anti-Islamist campaign had peaked to include a spurious blockade on Qatar.

It is unclear if the revocation of Suwaidan’s citizenship is linked to a similar anti-Islamist impulse in Kuwait, which, like Qatar, has traditionally been one of the Gulf states friendlier to the Ikhwan. What is known is that Kuwait is also close to the United States, where anti-Islamist, and especially anti-Ikhwan, discourse is a staple of the far-right and especially of the Zionist lobby. Suwaidan had widely lectured and spoken against the Israeli genocide.

 – by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

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