Saudi Arabia, a Kingdom Divided (Page 3)

Other young people--not necessarily the most disadvantaged--have taken a much more dangerous path. Many left in the 1980s to go fight the Communist enemy in Afghanistan, in response to a summons from their government and with the help of the United States. In later years people who were outraged by the massacres in Bosnia and Chechnya followed them, often to train in Taliban camps. Some of these "Afghan Arab" mujahedeen--estimates range as high as several thousand--are fighting the US occupation in Iraq today. Mobilized in the beginning against the foreign, distant enemy--first the Soviet Union, then the United States--some later turned against the Saudi regime, whose legitimacy they questioned in the name of Islam.

We should remember that the kingdom was born of a desire to reform Islam. In 1744 Muhammad Ibn Saud, a local emir from the Nejd region, signed a pact with a religious reformer, Muhammad Ibn Abdel Wahhab, to make "the reign of the word of God" triumph, "even if it's by means of weapons," as the French Islamic scholar Henri Laoust writes. Wahhab wanted to restore Sunni Islam to its primal purity, at a time when the Ottoman Empire was becoming increasingly fragmented and Shiism was growing in Persia and Iraq. Wahhab rejected all non-Sunni sects, and he condemned the worship of saints and what he considered to be dangerous innovations. His doctrine, which became known as Wahhabism, would become the basis for state-building by the Saud family, an alliance of the sword with the Koran. After several failures the kingdom as we know it today was built at the beginning of the last century by Abdel Aziz Ibn Saud, who widened its borders and made the country a founding member of the United Nations in 1945.

Despite numerous challenges, including one posed in the 1960s by Arab nationalism led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the monarchy maintained the stability of its reign through this alliance with the religious hierarchy. The ulemas, as guardians of dogma, watched over the religious conformity of the king's decisions, but they also legitimized the Saud dynasty. When they did try to oppose the government (by, for example, rejecting the introduction of the telephone and television and the education of girls), they were forced to yield.

In the 1980s, in an attempt to co-opt an Islamist wave stemming from the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the occupation of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a radical Islamist group, the government developed a much more Islamist rhetoric, imposing stricter rules concerning the segregation of women and emphasizing the closing of the country to foreign influences. It also established more Islamic universities, which would become the fermenting agent for future protest movements. It encouraged jihad against the Soviets, but--just as in Egypt, where President Anwar Sadat had favored Islamic fundamentalists--this Islamization would come back to haunt the monarchy.

The Saudi government's appeal to the United States for protection after Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait was met with protest from some of the clerics, even though the regime had obtained an approving fatwa from the religious establishment. From that day forward, it was the kingdom's relationship with the United States and the presence of US troops on Saudi soil (as well as the corruption and antidemocratic nature of the regime) that would mobilize the Islamist opposition. This was severely repressed in the mid-1990s, but in the prisons and under torture, Islamist activists would become even more radicalized and go on to violent rebellion, with the first attacks coming in 1995-96. Muhammad Mahfoudh, a Shiite intellectual, noted, "The government should have engaged in a national dialogue at that time, but it did so only ten years later. Wasn't that already too late?"

During this crucial period, in 1995, King Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke, and the kingdom itself was afflicted with a certain paralysis of power. Crown Prince Abdullah, commander of the National Guard, assumed the regency, but he was seriously hemmed in by his half-brothers: Sultan, the defense minister; Nayef, the interior minister; and Salman, the governor of Riyadh. Each of them led a virtual state-within-a-state, with tens of thousands of dependent civil servants. The fact that by 2000 Fahd, Abdullah and Sultan were all around the age of 75 did not encourage innovation, even though Fahd affirmed his desire for moderate reform.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.