The Gulf's huge youth population stands at the center of the boom. As young people come of age in societies that discourage unsupervised contact with the opposite sex, text messaging offers a way to duck parents and defy gender segregation. In one of Riyadh's gleaming shopping malls on a recent Thursday night, veiled teenage girls in black-robed flocks giggled as they messaged boys across the food court. Teenagers send messages to flirt, plan social events and even set up clandestine dates, Saudi parents and teenagers said.
Less innocent slander and pornography also flow through text channels. When a Saudi mobile phone provider announced new photo and video messaging services this month, it issued an unusual press release to encourage socially responsible use of mobile phones and to argue that innovative technology should not be blamed because a few people abuse it.
Women demonstrate for voting rights outside parliament in Kuwait City. It was the biggest such rally in the country's history, thanks in part to text messaging.
(Gustavo Ferrari -- AP)
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In Gulf politics, too, text messaging "allows people to send messages that they would not say in public," said Fawzi A. Guleid, program officer with the National Democratic Institute in Bahrain. "It is alarming to me the messages that come."
Activists have learned how to blast thousands of attack messages while hiding their own identities. "People who use those messages are denouncing, insulting opposition figures, members of parliament and the government," Guleid said, suggesting that the new technology encourages unrestrained personal invective as new democratic cultures are formed.
Many of the insults and comments would sound tame to an American politician.
The technology also helps democratic organizers who are often badly overmatched by the Gulf's authoritarian governments. In a region where formal political parties are banned but loose political societies are often tolerated, text messaging allows organizers to build unofficial membership lists, spread news about detained activists, encourage voter turnout, schedule meetings and rallies, and develop new issue campaigns -- all while avoiding government-censored newspapers, television stations and Web sites.
The Gulf's network of Muslim Brotherhood chapters has been especially aggressive in adopting such tactics, several of its leaders and campaign managers said in interviews. The Brotherhood is a global network of conservative Islamic political activists, often drawn from elite professions, who seek to establish religious governments and societies, usually by peaceful means. Its members control student and professional unions across the region and have won seats in several of the Gulf's limited parliaments.
Before text messaging went commercial, black marketers sold CDs containing lists of cell phone numbers smuggled out of government ministries or phone companies, said Mohammed Dallal, a lawyer and Brotherhood campaign manager in Kuwait City. Now "the mobile companies are giving the services," he said. "You give them the message, they'll send it to 40,000 people" for a fee.
Before this year's municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, the first in the kingdom in decades, Dallal spoke to prospective candidates and campaign managers in three Saudi cities. "I try to convince them to use the technology," he said.
In Bahrain, Shiite opposition organizers who frequently stage unauthorized or illegal demonstrations said they used services originally meant for commercial advertisements to keep protests on track even as the government tries to shut them down.
Kuwaiti women organizing protests for voting rights said they had been more effective during their 2005 campaign than during their last serious effort five years ago because text messaging had allowed them to call younger protesters out of schools and into the streets.
For all of these appealing practical benefits, text messaging also appears to be popular because it has captured Arab pop literary imaginations. In Gulf societies, where rhetorical speech is celebrated and poetry is prominent, the short, quipping format of a text message offers a new twist on tradition. Activists deliberate over their compositions and memorize their favorite zingers, passing them from phone to phone.
For Dashti, the women's suffrage activist insulted for being of less than pure Kuwaiti ancestry, the sting was salved by the message her own group blasted out that same night of the historic demonstration about the speaker of the Kuwaiti parliament, Jassem Kharafi, who had shut down their rally. The activists accused him of being more interested in making money from business contracts than in helping Kuwait advance democratic reforms.
"If you want Kharafi to vote for women's political rights," an anonymous member of the suffrage movement wrote, "just issue the right as a tender contract."
