Saudi Reckoning
Bombing, Crackdown Show New Resolve

It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:—
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
— Rudyard Kipling, Dane-geld

Whether the fact that The Estimate has just quoted Kipling for the second time in two months says something about resurgent imperial notions or not, the above quotation seems particularly apt in the case of Saudi Arabia, at least as matters are perceived by many critics in the West. Certainly the Saudi crackdown on radical Islamists since the May 12 bombings in Riyadh — accelerated now after the November 9 bombing there — suggests that the Saudis are reaping the domestic harvest of years of looking the other way as radical Islamists recruited, preached, and exported revolution. That the House of Saud has always been the prime target of Usama bin Ladin has never been a secret to anyone who believed the words of Bin Ladin, but seemingly it has finally come home to the Saudi authorities. A gradual, perhaps even grudging, but apparently real tendency towards reform since the May 12 bombings was not enough to preclude a recurrence. Genuine demonstrations of opposition (See the issue of October 31) have become public, but more importantly, open clashes between security services and radical Islamists have led to open shootouts in major cities, something almost unthinkable in Saudi Arabia since the siege of the Holy Mosque in Mecca in 1979. To the Kingdom’s critics, the dragon’s teeth sown like those by the mythical Cadmus are rising up, as they did for Cadmus, in arms.

So what is really going on? Neoconservative critics of what they denounce as a “Wahhabi” ideology in Saudi Arabia are indulging in a certain Schadenfreude now that the regime seems to be under direct attack, but the neoconservative view of the Kingdom has always been simplistic and blind to the complexities of the strange yet extremely important society that is Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia has never been the sinister bête noire imagined by the most ideological of the neoconservatives, but it is not exactly a society readily understood by the average Westerner, either. Anything one says about the Kingdom is going to be an oversimplification, because it is a country of small indigenous population but considerable variety: Mecca, as the central pilgrimage center of Islam, is ethnically and in many other ways a cosmopolitan city. Jidda is a trading port where ancient merchant families still have sway. The Gulf coast is a mix of strict Najdi Sunni tribes who are the underpinning of the ruling family, and of Shi‘ites who have rarely been given any acknowledgment. The western Hijaz has always been more international and cosmopolitan in its outlook, but subordinated to the stricter traditions of the Najd. The ruling family is Najdi in tradition though many princes take their particular loyalties from their mother, and mothers, in a polygamous society, come from many backgrounds. Generalizations are difficult.

The “Wahhabi” Identity
Many of the neoconservatives who at least until recently have had such a preponderance of influence in US foreign policy discourse have loved to denounce the Wahhabi “Sect” which they say is the dominant ideology of Saudi Arabia. Yet it is far from clear if these critics know what “Wahhabi” means, and certainly their equation of the term with the radical jihadism of Usama bin Ladin is debatable if not downright wrong. Bin Ladin would not likely call himself a Wahhabi, but then, no one whom others call a Wahhabi calls himself a Wahhabi either (with, perhaps, some exceptions in Pakistan and the Caucasus). Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab was a radical Islamist (in modern terms at least) in 18th century Arabia, but his ideological writings are few and in essence he was merely a reformer demanding the implementation of the puritanical, rigid Islamic interpretation of the Hanbali school of Sunni Islam as interpreted through the 14th Century Syrian scholar Ibn Taymiyya. Although Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab is still known as “the sheikh” (that is, par excellence) in Saudi Arabia and his descendants are the Al al-Sheikh, the family of the Sheikh, Saudis do not use the term “Wahhabism” and generally object to it. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s followers called their movement the Muwahhidun or “unitarians”, those proclaiming the unity of God (and of the Islamic community) in its purest form. There was nothing terribly innovative in Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s version of Ibn Taymiyya’s beliefs, except that he formed an alliance with a political leader, the founder of the Saudi house. In short, Wahhabism was simply puritan Hanbali Islam, but puritanism that had found its Cromwell.

Saudis still do not call themselves Wahhabis: it has always been a pejorative term used by their opponents, and its modern resurgence seems to be due mostly to the Russians, of all people, who started denouncing the Chechen rebels as “Wahhabis” and using the term as equivalent to revolutionary Islamists. In fact, Hanbali Islam as interpreted by Ibn Taymiyya is indeed very conservative, but it has its interesting points: including its insistence that the “Gate of Ijtihad”, the right of individual interpretation of religious law, is open to trained believers. The other three schools of Sunni Islam are actually more conservative on this key point.

A Battle for the Kingdom?
Readers are by now saying, all right, nice history lesson: but what has this to do with the current crisis in the Kingdom? There are several strains of opposition to the present leadership in Saudi Arabia. There are radical Islamists of the Bin Ladin stripe, who may have derived their rigorous puritanism from the Wahhabi/Hanbali/Ibn Taymiyya tradition, but who have overlayed that fundament with a radical interpretation of jihad and a rejection of the historic alliance between the Al al-Sheikh descendants of Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab and the House of Saud. There are liberals, who want to see genuine democratic reforms, and their role is too easily overlooked or dismissed. And there are genuine conservative “Wahhabis” who neither seek radical jihad against the rest of the world nor the overthrow of their traditional patrons. And there is that not inconsiderable body of Saudis who are either themselves members of the royal family (perhaps 25,000 upwards not counting intermarried clans), the key Najdi tribes dependent on the family, the Al al-Sheikh, and others.

There is also the large, now enormous, body of educated young, growing and not clearly employable. Many of the elite are educated in the West; many at home are educated in schools where radical Islamists have held sway. How these young, potentially dissident, certainly still dispossessed Saudis break down will be critical to the country’s future. Those who claim to know the answer to that question are guessing.

Change is taking place. It is real. Whether or not it is pre-revolutionary is debatable. It is not yet a true challenge to the regime, however, and Crown Prince ‘Abdullah’s leaning toward reform, even symbolic reforms like electing half of local councils (in a country which has never held an election at all), should not be dismissed out of hand. Saudis are conservative, and this applies not just to the ruling elite: though things are not as prosperous as they once were, few are eager to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. But ‘Abdullah and others do see that some movement is essential, as his continuing advocacy of reform throughout the Arab world suggests. Is this belated, compensatory reform enough, or too little, too late?

It is too early to say. Saudi Arabia is moving into a period of genuine ferment and change. The House of Saud may or may not be able to accommodate that change. But, over time, the House of Saud has shown a remarkable ability to preserve the family business, even when it meant deposing a King (as with Saud in the 1960s). Change is in the air, but at the moment evolutionary change seems likelier than revolutionary change.

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