What do you get when you combine an unscrupulous Levantine merchant, a Singapore-based mobile phone manufacturer and sectarian tensions in Iraq? A business opportunity.
Ilkone Asia has been marketing its new i-800 handset as the "biggest Islamic-related product since the advent of prayer beads." The phone features the full text of the Koran, as approved by the Sunni authorities at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, and a GPS compass that orients the faithful to Mecca. It punctually belts out the adhan, the Muslim call to prayer, five times a day; one can also set the alarm to vibrate—a divine sensation nudging the worshipper awake for dawn ablutions.
Now a Lebanese-American businessman has convinced Ilkone that there's a niche market waiting to be tapped: the Shia branch of Islam. He proposes customising the i-800 for the world's Shias and market-testing the idea in Iraq; a country where the Muslim population is becoming so segregated that different consumer habits are developing. The sect-specific features for the "Shia mobile phone" are still being worked on but would include, in addition to an arrow pointing to Mecca, a second arrow pointing to the holy city of Najaf. The adhan would be sung in the Shia tradition, which contains more verses than the Sunni one, and the phone may come with Shia lamentations, usually recited against Sunni injustice, in MP3 format.
"All sorts of things about the calendar need to be modified," says a source with first-hand knowledge of the deal. "The Shias have 12 imams, so that adds up to 12 birthdays and 11 deaths"—since the Mahdi is ostensibly in occultation and hence alive—"and Shia users will get pinged on every occasion they celebrate, which could end up in the hundreds."
But the i-800 has a major handicap: it does not include Bluetooth technology. Many Iraqis have already turned their mobile phones into sectarian status symbols by disseminating anti-Sunni or anti-Shia propaganda—jokes, ditties, gruesome footage of the victims of sectarian strife—through Bluetooth connectivity. Sunni terrorists and Shia death squads have been able to figure out the sectarian identity of potential victims by perusing the audio and visual files on their phones. Maybe the Shia i-800 needs a hot-button taqiyya feature—the Shia practice of dissembling one's faith to escape persecution—thus turning it into a "Sunni phone" in case of a run-in with al Qaeda.
Ilkone is negotiating pricing with Iraqi distributors as its team of software engineers reprograms the i-800 for the launch of the Shia version. Discussions are also under way to develop a Kurdish mobile phone.
Jabr's favours
With oil prices sky high, the fact that the Iraqis may be sitting on a quarter of the planet's remaining oil has fired up Wall Street's imagination—Iraq currently lags behind in oil exploration technology and experts predict a bonanza of new discoveries. But American investors will have to get used to a new way of doing business. Iraqi politics are being determined by representative government and federalism—a first for the middle east. This means that the deputy chairman of Samawa's provincial council has more say over who drills for oil in his backyard than the deputy minister of oil in Baghdad. The old-boy networks that oil executives are used to dealing with in the middle east—50 per cent of the world's oil is owned by four families in the Persian Gulf—can hook them up with the folks in Baghdad, but not in Samawa.
This is why Iraq's minister of finance Bayan Jabr spent late October holding a flurry of discreet meetings with investment bankers and oil giants. Jabr's implicit message was that he and people like him could be very useful to potential investors, since his party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, won most of the provincial elections in Iraq's Shia south. It is another variation on the theme that the old Sunni Arab order has been irrevocably broken in Iraq, and that the Shias are ascendant.
Exchange rates and good tidings
Early this year, Jabr put together a plan with the Central Bank of Iraq to firm up the nation's currency; their goal was to have one US dollar trade for 1,000 dinars. The dinar, though, is hovering at around 1,250 to the dollar, having appreciated by 20 per cent in the last year. Jabr's plan seems to have been stymied by a counterintuitive trend: drawing courage from the improving security situation, Iraq's private sector investors are withdrawing their dinars and buying commodities, in dollars, from world markets.
During most of 2006 and 2007, the Iraqi private sector contracted as violence escalated, and Iraqi businessmen took advantage of the lucrative 18 per cent interest rate the central bank had placed on dinar-denominated deposits. Consequently, they transferred their dollar wealth into dinars. But now consumerism is back, as shops open and cash-rich Iraqis begin to load up on goods, and those businessmen need to pay international manufacturers in dollars for their merchandise. So if the dinar starts falling, it means things are looking up—yet another odd facet of the Iraq story.
