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Politics wasn't a favored subject of discussion for the sheikh. The Gulf War's scripted violence had left a strong impression: When prompted, he often reduced political matters to military or special forces' work. He revered the British royal family and the SAS, Britain's commando elite, and was surprised to learn that I had not voted for George H.W. Bush, the liberator of Kuwait. I soon learned that he admired winners in general. An avid sports fan, he supported Manchester United and the Dallas Cowboys, then the reliable champions of British and American football. For the first time in our acquaintance, this love of winners made his unfocused mind appear predictable.

Few Bahrainis acknowledged the large U.S. naval base that remains today

He seemed to be blandly incurious and without serious prejudices. He certainly did not read or write for pleasure. In fact, my ability to make sense of ordinary maps surprised him, as if a mark of special training

While government hours are 7 to 2, a concession to the sweltering climate, I soon learned to arrive by 10, preceding by a half-hour the sheikh and his retinue

I visited the new University of Bahrain and naively asked around for the political science department. The country's public university didn't teach the troublesome social sciences

The sheikh once saw the four-wheel-drive Range Rover he had provided for my personal use covered in mud, the result of a winter downpour that flooded the old part of Manama, which lacked street drains. He winced as if he had been pinched. He politely asked my plans to have the car washed, and I shilly-shallied an answer. The capacious Rover was soon quietly replaced by a small Mercedes 190 with mechanical problems. The exchange worked to my disadvantage in more ways than one, for the Rover's license plates indicated it belonged to the sheikh's father, Bahrain's security chief. The Rover thus conferred comic book superpowers that induced Pavlovian salutes from traffic cops and building guards – such a machine rightly should not have been dragged through the mud. In contrast, a Pakistani mechanic once patched the undistinguished Mercedes with cardboard wrapped in twine.

The monarchy is not wholly bereft of tolerance; it just occurs near the apex, among the family's scattered layer of advisers and aides, many of whom are foreign born. The Al Khalifa are ambivalent about otherwise touchy matters if they judge someone useful to their purposes. Issues such as religion, my shopkeeper-ish Indian ethnicity or my habit of calling the sheikh by name without prefixing his inherited title – unthinkable for a Bahraini commoner – never came up. I wasn't unique: The sheikh's banker, the man who handed me cash each month, belonged to the same Iraqi-Jewish émigré family as Bahrain's current female ambassador to the U.S., also a Jew.

Of course, ownership of the many reefs and islands between the two states had implications for oil and gas exploration. Yet the sheikh always spoke to me as if only family honor mattered. This normally unexcitable man clearly disliked Qatar's Al Thani rulers. He viewed the boundary disputes as a contest between entitled Al Khalifa patricians and Al Thani nouveau riche – possessors of the world's largest natural gas field, rulers of the country with the world's highest per capita GDP, and, one might add, imminent founders of the upstart Al-Jazeera TV network. Propelled by rivalry, Sheikh Fawaz simply wanted to beat them this time.

I also kept mum about the surprisingly incautious lawyers I had met who spoke bitterly about the regime's poor human rights record and discrimination against Shiites. I found these middle-aged men in their cheap, gray suits in almost every coffeehouse or bar I frequented. None appeared bent on importing Iran's revolution. They seemed defeated and physically worn, even underweight, but determined to share with a foreigner their stories of regime prejudice and abuse

Modern Bahrain works on the bases of stark social segregation, selective memory and diversion. I caught glimpses of the thousands of dark-skinned Asian laborers only as they fixed roads in the debilitating heat, or sat in the cheapest curry shops and all-male hookah stands where air conditioning was absent and Indian films played nightly on color TVs. Local lore had it that weather forecasters lied about the temperature to avoid work stoppages. The island's wealthiest foreigners were diverted in ways that assumed – often accurately – an inebriate's view of the good life. Although the teetotaler Sheikh Fawaz showed no interest in nightlife, Manama groaned under the weight of barhoppable hotels and nightclubs. Many clubs featured teams of comely Filipinas belting out pop songs. A large bar in the downtown area catered to U.S. sailors, complete with country-themed karaoke, line dancing and Budweiser beer.

Later that night, Sheikh H. and I talked politics again. Tired, he quietly noted that he hadn't been surprised to hear that the crown prince wasn't liked in the cafes. He said this accorded with his own sense of the future ruler's unpopularity. He added that others in the ruling family had serious doubts about the man, too. They worried that the crown prince was infatuated with the tiny military forces he commanded and wasn't savvy enough to handle the complexities of being emir. But, Sheikh H. admitted, nothing could be done about it. Looking back, Crown Prince Hamad may have felt little need for the savvy of an emir. He succeeded his father in 1999, and, in 2002, elevated his own title from "His Highness the Emir" to the historically unprecedented "His Majesty the King of Bahrain." Today, he shakes that vainglorious title over a resentful patrimony less than one-third the size of Rhode Island.

discrimination and chronic inequality explain the Kingdom's centrifugal politics better than old doctrinal differences. Nonetheless, the strategy of minority rulers cultivating the support of other minorities is a tested one (witness Syria). The Al Khalifa also have a long history of reliance on authoritative foreigners, stretching over a century from Bahrain's days as a British protectorate past independence in 1971. Indeed, Bahrain is now a U.S. protectorate, as the quietly expanding presence of the 5th Fleet confirms. An American arms dealer dubbed "The Merchant of Death" was a recurring figure throughout my stay in Manama.

Sociologists say that pre-modern bureaucracies value personal relations over professional merit. Sheikh Fawaz unwittingly supported this notion when he asked me to attend meetings with foreign investment companies seeking to do business with the national Pension Fund. Initially, I took notes while two chatty Merrill Lynch representatives pitched portfolio options. The reps struggled to discern my relationship with the sheikh they wanted to impress. The scene was repeated with other would-be fund partners, some of whom affected a false camaraderie that left Sheikh Fawaz unmoved. After a while, he asked if I would write a report on the Pension Fund's performance. The idea was laughable – I knew nothing about investment. But I didn't say no. Staring at the fund's data, I parroted the language of "small caps" versus "big caps" and other terms found in the introductory investment texts Sheikh Fawaz supplied, and wrote his report, inserting a couple of charts for gravitas.

the sheikh asked if I would consider writing a doctoral thesis for him at Cambridge or another elite English university. I quickly said no; ethical considerations aside, I knew he was unlikely to do it anyway (a correct assumption, it turned out)

He has severely curtailed foreign and local media since becoming information minister in 2010. In the months preceding the Arab Spring, the anti-censorship group Reporters Without Borders dropped Bahrain's rank from 119th to 144th in the world. As regime apologist, the sheikh still speaks in the same, mildly narcotized cadence that suggests aristocratic ennui more than stupidity. He effusively praises the largely foreign security forces responsible for the killings, torture and detentions, while claiming that outsiders want to destabilize the country. Even so, the minister now insists, the affairs of the Kingdom are "back to normal."

A relieved Sheikh Fawaz – now with 14,000-plus followers on Twitter – ecstatically praised the current crown prince "for his great exertions to return the Grand Prix race to Bahrain." Echoes of the sports-obsessed young heir pinged through my head

He was a rigid and competitive yet unsinister man 20 years ago. What would he have become given a different pedigree? Dictatorships, like Sheikh Fawaz today, work to obscure those choices

Blocking websites like Facebook and Twitter would have angered the business masters in whose lap [Hosni Mubarak’'s son] Gamal Mubarak was sitting. It was an unholy coalition between the sponsors of the corrupt regime and the popular social-networking Web sites.

youths in Egypt, pre-revolution, lived two lives, one online and one off-line. The off-line life is very limited in access to information, freedom of speech and mobilization, and even in access to each other. For decades, it was illegal for five people to gather for any reason (per emergency law), although it was tolerated except when it was politically motivated. Online political activists used terms like “group,” “room,” and “comment” as if they had physical meanings. The Internet offered an open environment that politicized the youths, allowed them to raise awareness on possibilities of shaping their future, diversified their perspectives, anonymized their identities, gave them the taste of free speech, and pushed them to see through the regime propaganda and despise it.

Since the Egyptian government had made the brick-and-mortar world so unfriendly to free expression and the Internet was so readily available to just tweet, update Facebook, or send a quick blog post, it became the space to express your thoughts or post a news item. As the people posted live, people would react live and a conversation developed. I believe 2010 was a tipping point for this interaction; we went from conversation to a public debate, and just not with activists but with a larger, less engaged tech-savvy population. Administrators were very deliberate in cultivating a relationship with this population.

none of the administrators in Egypt, for obvious reasons, could use his real Facebook identity to administer the page, and that was a violation of Facebook terms and conditions. Nadine, given her relatively safer location, was the firewall whenever Facebook realized the fake identities we used and deleted them. She would give us back access.

the most important factor in triggering the Egyptian revolution was the effect of Tunisia’s revolution, which did not start on Facebook. Neither did any of the other Arab revolutions. If it weren’t for Facebook, the Egyptian revolution would have started anyway. The effect of a Facebook call to a timed revolution with a large outreach (that activated an organized political activist community that’s been in the making for decades) is making the revolution shorter, more organized, with fewer casualties and more theatrical. These are important effects, especially to reduce casualties. But the multitude of factors involved with the startup, the process, and the success of the Egyptian revolution makes the Facebook effect a minor one

the angle that I hear most on Arab revolutions in Western media is the social media/Facebook/Internet one, rather than the more important, stronger and more direct effect of the injustice perpetuated by the dictators sponsored by Western regimes.

We have to remember that 850 people died. Not just Facebook profiles but flesh and blood people

Gebril stated that in Egypt constitutions were conventionally drawn by government appointed commissions and approved by the public in a referendum. However, for this to function well today, he argued, it was crucial to inform the public. Gebril purported that Islam did not reconcile with secularism. The moderator, Huveydi, challenged Gebril’s statement and indicated that it was possible to make secularism and Islam congruent as it was the case in Turkey. Gebril argued that the principles needed to accomplish a real democracy were present in the traditions of Egypt and Islamic world.

underlining the weaknesses of the characteristics of representative democracy of the 1924 constitution stated that the tutelary approach of 1960s was fortified with the 1982 Constitution. The present constitution could not meet the demands of the society

in Egypt and what needed to be discussed today was the role of military, place of religion and especially the balance of powers.

since it could not be based on one group’s interests and opinions, it had to be structured in a way that would include and protect minorities in the political mechanism. Stating that secularism did not always bring democracy, it was argued that the important thing was the presence of democracy and that ways to reconcile universal values with local conditions had to be sought without resorting to reactionarism..

more towards strengthening the democratization process in Turkey, and he argued that this approach carried the potential to reverse the homogenous nation building process, decrease the power of tutelage regime and widen the political field. Ete concluded his analysis with two observations: 1. Turkey’s history of democracy was full of instances in which the authoritarian regime regenerated itself. 2. Decisive steps must be taken in the struggle for democracy

Abd Rabou specifically emphasized four different dimensions of the change in Egypt: democratization; institutionalization and formation of democratic organizations; free elections and the transformation of political culture

Demirel, who found the simplification of arguments to to authoritarian regime vs. democratic public problematic, argued that the authoritarian tendencies of the public also had to be heeded. Demirel argued that the advances made in civil-military relations in the recent years were not yet solidified in the political life and a regression back to military rule was still a possibility.

Reiterating that the retreat of the military did not necessarily signal the end of the tutelage regime, Demirel argued that it was still probable to regress into complete tutelage especially in the context of the Kurdish problem. He ended his speech by issuing a warning against the threats to civil rights and freedoms from the political powers.

this revolution toppled the foundations of the Sykes-Picot order. He objected the perceptions of the revolution as the new Sykes-Picot order. In other words, he opposed the idea the revolution and its aftermath were imposed on the region by external powers. He insisted the post revolution was a period in which the region decided on its own fate in accordance with the changing dynamics. In parallel to other participants, he argued this was the first time an Arab individual claimed his own destiny. He further claimed that in this process, in which the driving force is a quest for dignity, regional politics will be determined by internal dynamics and stated that the region will be changed to the extent the revolution maintains its momentum.

Iran and Turkey were the beneficiaries of this new order.

in both Turkey and Egypt an approach that perceived the making of the new constitution as an instrument to limit the power of the ruling regime instead of a process that reflected the current distribution of power in the country

such a constitutional culture and such a constitutional system that protects human rights by striking a balance between universal and local values will contribute to the resolution of minority problem in Egypt and identity issues in Turkey.