I used to believe that there were only two options for leadership change in the Middle East: the coup or the coffin. But now there’s another thing for embattled authoritarians to worry about. It’s not the Republican Guard, CIA, MI6 or Mossad, Delta Force or the SAS – it’s Covid-19. And while the virus may well end up fundamentally changing many of our own political expectations, not least about China (Huawei anyone?), and the resilience of our own societies, it may have an even bigger impact on the fragile political ecosystem of the Middle East and North Africa.
And that’s because it is there that a superannuated old order has most persistently refused to die. Revolutions have been dead ends, reform an illusion. No new political dispensation has been carried to term for 70 years. The body politic in many Arab countries – and Iran – was already suffering from serious underlying health conditions. And now this.
Iran has had the worst of it so far. After a long period of denial, the health minister announced on 19 March that people were dying at a rate of one every ten minutes – and this was accelerating. As I write, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Centre reports 50,000 confirmed cases and over 3000 deaths, the fifth highest mortality rate in the world. And that’s just the official figures, which many Iranian doctors in private claim are a vast underestimate. Several ministers, senior politicians and others close to the Supreme Leader have succumbed. The heart of the epidemic seems to have been the shrine and pilgrimage city of Qom, which is central to Iran’s production of clerical knowledge and power, and therefore to the regime’s legitimacy. Around 20 million Iranians and 2.5 million foreigners visit every year, with many of the latter, who include several thousand Chinese, studying in densely packed seminaries.
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