Abd Al-Rahman Alyan, 30, is not a man to mince words, and there’s little reason he should. As editor of Kuwait Times, the oldest daily in the Gulf region, Alyan enjoys considerably more freedom to speak his mind than most other Arab journalists. With the sole exception of criticizing the ruling Emir personally, Kuwaiti papers can say pretty much anything they like.

And, together, they say a lot. Since a 2006 press law ended the ban on new dailies, a slew of them has hit the stands, with five coming onto the market in 2007 and another three this year, bringing the total of number of dailies published in Kuwait to 17, with 14 in Arabic and three in English, according to the Middle East and North Africa Media Guide. That’s a lot of column inches for a country of just 3.5 million people.

The first daily in the Gulf in any language, Kuwait Times was founded by Alyan’s late father, Yousuf Saleh Alyan, in 1961, the year of Kuwaiti independence. Alyan, who took over as editor when his father died in 2007, keeps a copy of the first edition in his office bearing a scar, a hole ripped out of the middle by invading Iraqi troops when they ransacked the office in 1991.
“Everybody keeps asking why the first daily in the Gulf was in English and not in Arabic,” Alyan says. The number of educated Kuwaitis was still relatively low, his father was one of the few who studied, traveled and worked in Europe prior to independence. “There were quite a few Brits, as well, in Kuwait, since it was a colony. He decided to make the newspaper in English to convey the Kuwaiti message to the world.” Last year, the paper had a claimed circulation of 45,000.

Kuwait had just entered a period of political turmoil when this interview took place in November. The stock exchange had been temporarily shuttered by court order after investors complained that share prices were falling too fast, and the Kuwaiti Parliament was on the verge of being dissolved amidst a threat by three Islamist MPs to interrogate the prime minister. Alyan says this is effectively the equivalent of a vote of no confidence.

Once known as “the jewel of the Gulf,” Kuwait is one of the most democratic countries in the Arab world, its Parliament one of the region’s only elected legislative bodies. But as other rich Gulf states build skyscrapers, the Kuwaiti government squabbles, with tribal interests often seeming to trump national ones in Parliament. Many Kuwaitis say Parliament is proving to be a hindrance to progress.

What’s your 30-second assessment of the state of Arab media?
Throughout life, we’ve always had censorship, all over the media. In Kuwait, we don’t have that anymore. This happened after the [first] Gulf War. They never set up the censorship bureau again and they stopped sending officers to us. Throughout Kuwait’s history, we’ve been pushing these restrictions to the limit. And we’ve reached where we are now, and I think the Kuwaiti media is the most vocal among all the Gulf media. Throughout the Gulf, we see print media in general improving – slowly, slowly. They do a fantastic job in the UAE. I think they’re still a bit restricted on local politics.

They’re often tiptoeing around things. Do you feel a need to do that here?
No, we don’t have to. The rules are clear. There’s only one thing we avoid, which is His Highness the Emir. We cannot write anything against him directly.

And the royal family?
The royal family is open. You can criticize the royal family – any member of the royal family. Even policies – you can criticize any policy, even if the Emir made the policy. That’s not an issue. You just don’t go slandering the person.

Your newspaper often talks about MPs threatening to “grill” the prime minister. It’s such a serious threat that it almost sounds literal, like they’ve got the barbeque and they’re firing up the coals and they’re going to grill him.
The MPs look at it that way. Unfortunately our democracy is not working the way it should.

What’s the problem?
The problem is the MPs themselves. Let’s look at the people who are in Parliament. Why are they questioning all the time? What do they want? I look at the progress that they’ve made so far: They’ve segregated schools. We still suffer on electricity. We had what they called “systematic cut-offs,” where they had to [ration electricity] in order to keep the whole country running. This is coming from a country full of energy and oil. And nobody has questioned that. Nobody has questioned why we had problems with the water last summer. Nobody questions what projects we’re doing. Nobody questions why we have, every now and then, fires in one of the oil wells. The only thing on their minds is not allowing parties, stopping concerts and, slowly, slowly they’re democratically taking us to the level of Afghanistan, the way it used to be. And that doesn’t sound good. A few months back, they were talking about this 14- or 15-year-old girl who ran up on stage to hug a famous Egyptian or Lebanese performer. Is this even an issue we should be discussing in Parliament? And you want to grill the minister for it?
Now they want to grill the minister of education. We all know why they want to grill her: because she’s not wearing a hijab and because she’s a woman. But they started searching for something in order to grill her. Because of these things, she has to cut a deal with them. This is why we have segregation in schools. She wanted them off her back.

Do you believe in Arab democracy?
I think it’s very difficult. I don’t think Western democracy works in the Arab world, because we are tribal. The problem comes back to the MPs again. They come into parliament and they have their own agendas. Some of them are there to make money, and they make money through tenders, using their influence to get these tenders to the companies that will give them money. We get a lot of evidence of things that are going on, and sometimes we hand it over to people to start questioning it, and sometimes we just have to just ignore it because you can’t really prove anything.

What is going to dominate the pages of your newspaper in 2009?
I think it will be more or less the same old stuff unless some dramatic change happens. Look at the history of Kuwait: We had the best medical system, and now we have one of the worst. Nobody trusts it. We used to have the best schools, the best university in the region. We’ve lost that now as well; most Kuwaitis would prefer to put their kids in private schools or send their kids to be educated in foreign universities or the private universities that recently opened. Kuwait TV used to be one of the best TV stations in the region; now it’s something that people only watch during Ramadan, and now that we have foreign private stations, we may have lost that as well. When you look at all this backward movement, it doesn’t make you feel satisfied. It doesn’t give you a good impression.

Will the situation be the same in five years?
It’s hard to tell, because there are so many theories about what’s going to happen in the country. Some people are saying parliament is going to be dissolved and the Emir is going to take charge. If he does that, although it might look to the rest of that world as though it doesn’t seem very democratic, I think it would be a lot better for us at this stage, because I know he has plans to improve and develop the country economically. The only scary thing about having the system running that way is that the system would be dependent on the person who’s ruling the country.