Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic, and Religious Change

Abstract

Saudi Arabia has long been an important country because of the pilgrimage to Mecca, leadership in Muslim institutions, oil wealth, rapid economic and social change, and its controversial role in both opposing and fostering Islamic radicalism. In early 2015 King Salman's succession to the throne initiated a series of changes, particularly in foreign and military affairs, that have increased Saudi Arabia's importance. Understanding current affairs in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a country that has historically been inhospitable to critical research, is therefore vital. The work under review here, Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change, is a good source of information and analysis for the general public and for specialists.In the introduction (chapter 1) the three editors pose two questions: Why were there no mass mobilizations or protests in Saudi Arabia during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings such as those experienced in other Arab countries? Why have so many analysts erred in their evaluations of Saudi politics? The answer to the first question may be found by reading many of the book's essays. In the view of the editors, the chief answer to the second question is that before the year 2000 few foreign scholars were able to conduct fieldwork in Saudi Arabia. The chief value of this book then resides in recent research conducted chiefly by foreign and some Saudi scholars, as epitomized in the fifteen chapters contained in this volume. The three editors also argue that an analysis of Saudi politics and society based solely on any one factor, such as oil, is inherently flawed, given the complex and dynamic nature of change currently underway in the kingdom. The introduction provides a rapid overview of developments in Saudi society and government, concentrating on the importance of the kingdom for the world, domestic and international challenges to the status quo, material and symbolic resources mobilized by the ruling family to meet these challenges, and contextualization of Saudi strengths and resources showing their strengths and weaknesses.The first theme treated in the book concerns oil, more specifically the role, impact, and effects of oil and the wealth it produces for Saudi Arabia. Oil plays a significant part throughout modern Saudi history and in all parts of this book. However, chapters by F. Gregory Gause, Toby C. Jones, Giacomo Luciani, Bernard Haykel, and Steffen Hertog most directly relate to this topic.Oil wealth is widely presumed to play a key role in determining political events. However, F. Gregory Gause, in his perceptive and timely analysis of this presumption in chapter 2, shows that periods of low oil prices do not automatically lead to political unrest and stress. Indeed, periods of high oil prices and high governmental revenues have often coincided with political mobilization, unrest, and violence, as in 1979–80, 1990–91, and 2003. The key determinants leading to such events were external crises in the Middle East or domestic non-oil factors. The Saudi rulers also were able to use saved investments, domestic borrowing, and tactics designed to raise world oil prices, thereby averting grave threats to the regime from low oil prices.Toby Jones in chapter 3 similarly argues that the benefits of oil wealth are sometimes overrated. Saudi Arabia has remained entirely dependent on oil revenues rather than using wealth to diversify the economy. The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which opened in 2009, was meant to re-emphasize the earlier role played by science and scientists in the centralizing of the state, the creation of its institutions, and the development of a political narrative emphasizing progress and development. Here, Jones discusses agriculture as a case study in the use of science by government, a process described at greater length in his book, Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia (Harvard University Press, 2010).In chapter 5 Giacomo Luciani examines the often-volatile price of oil on the world market and consequent challenges to long-term planning and economic investment. After 1985 the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) as a whole and Saudi Arabia in particular have not been able to play the role of price maker, leading the author to note that “statistically, our ability to model or project prices into the future is essentially nil” (74). Volatility has been increasing, as seen in dramatic swings in oil prices in 2007–9, and, one might add, more recently in 2015–16. Political-military upheavals also increase volatility, though Saudi Arabia has in the past increased marginal production of petroleum during such periods, as in 1990–91. Luciani argues for several changes in oil pricing policy that Saudi Arabia should, in his view, undertake; many of these proposed changes relate to the growing importance of China, Japan, and India in world oil consumption. The author predicts that barring such changes the international oil market as presently constituted will collapse.A very different analysis of oil's impact may be found in chapter 7, where Bernard Haykel first briefly discusses opinions and writings about oil among popular poets (Bandar bin Surur), among the ulama (ʿAbd al-ʿAziz ibn Baz), among Arab nationalists (ʿAbd Allah al-Turayqi), and among the royal family and technocratic bureaucrats. A particularly effective discussion involves the religious-legal claims of the state to ownership of mineral resources (134–35). Even more valuable is Haykel's analysis of al-Qaʿida's radical views on oil wealth that should lead to Saudi oil wealth being shared by all Muslims, and al-Qaʿida's changing opinions on the advisability of attacking oil facilities.In chapter 6 Steffen Hertog describes the regional impact of central government oil revenues, pointing out the key role of this money in the Saudi political economy and in the creation of an integrated business elite. The Najd in the central part of the country has received a higher proportion of spending than its population would warrant. Hertog argues that the most disadvantaged regions are neither the oil-rich east nor the cosmopolitan Hijaz in the west, but rather the southern regions close to Yemen. Government employment, promotions to high office, population growth, registration of private companies, real estate loans—in all these matters government most promotes the Najd, then the Hijaz, and last the southern regions. This argument expands upon and revises the earlier work of Kiren Chaudhry, The Price of Wealth (Cornell University Press, 1997).The second theme of the book is the role of Islam in Saudi Arabia. Chapters by David Commins, Nabil Mouline, Stéphane Lacroix, Saud Al-Sarhan, and Thomas Hegghammer discuss various aspects of Islam in the kingdom.In chapter 8 David Commins addresses the terminology used to describe the strand of Islam begun by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century, often labeled Wahhabism. Foreign defenders of this approach first labeled it as a variety of Hanbali Sunnism that followed medieval thinkers like Ibn Taymiyya. After the third Saudi state led by King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz conquered the Hijaz in the mid-1920s some supporters in Egypt, including the influential Rashid Rida, argued that so-called Wahhabism was a variety of Salafism, seeking to return Islam to the practices of early Muslims. By the 1970s establishment Saudi clerics used the term Salafism to describe themselves, though they rejected the liberal strand of Salafism. Identification with Salafism became a tool used by Saudi religious figures against the pretensions of the Muslim Brotherhood and various Muslim radicals.Nabil Mouline's chapter argues that the Saudi political authorities sought to gain ascendancy over the Wahhabi ulama by the creation in 1971 of the Committee of Senior Scholars and a raft of similar groups designed to curb and organize the clerical power. However, the ulama expanded their own organizations, bureaucratized them, and adapted themselves to the new challenges of the 1990s. Mouline examines the powers, working arrangements, and political importance of the Committee of Senior Scholars. In this regard his chapter could be usefully supplemented by reading Muhammad al-Atawneh, Wahhabi Islam Facing the Challenges of Modernity: Dar al-Ifta in the Modern Saudi State (E. J. Brill, 2010), though both works need to be revised to include recent changes.One aspect of Islam in Saudi Arabia that has gained a great deal of attention since the 2003 attacks on New York City by al-Qaʿida Saudi recruits is radical terrorism. Stéphane Lacroix in chapter 9 looks at the opposite of this phenomenon: urban Islamist networks, particularly in educational institutions, that implicitly mobilized support for the regime from the 1960s onward. Employing social movement theory, Lacroix discusses the Islamic networks' effective opposition to al-Qaʿida in the Arabian Peninsula in 2003–5, thereby denying al-Qaʿida support from most Saudi religious youths. The Islamic networks played a dominant part in the 2005 municipal elections as well.In chapter 10 Saud al-Sarhan adopts a more familiar point of view, by analyzing the ideas and actions of three jihadi-salafist radicals—Humud ibn ʿAbd ʿAllah al-ʿUqla al-Shuʿaybi, Nasir ibn Hamad al-Fahd, and ʿAli ibn Khudayr al-Khudayr—for the years 1997–2003. These three opposed the monarchy, the official ulama, the alliance of Saudi Arabia with the United States, and the prevalent Saudi interpretation of the obligation to wage jihad (holy war), but their influence waned after 2003.Chapter 11 contains an informative essay on the causes of the weakness of violent radicalism in Saudi Arabia written by Thomas Hegghammer. In his view, “transnational Islamist militancy” is divided into those favoring “foreign fighter activism” such as ʿAbd Allah ʿAzzam and those espousing “anti-Western terrorism” such as Usama bin Ladin (207). Saudis generally favored classical jihadist theory and practice, thus participation in anti-Russian fighting in Chechnya and post-2003 Iraq was far more popular than al-Qaʿida's attacks against the United States or its terrorism inside Saudi Arabia itself in 2003–5.The third theme of the book, social change, is treated in two chapters dealing with Bedouins and genealogy (chapters 12 and 13, both written by Abdulaziz H. Al Fahad), and two chapters dealing with Saudi women (chapter 14 by Madawi Al-Rasheed, chapter 15 by Amélie Le Renard).Abdulaziz Al Fahad looks carefully in chapter 12 at the lament of the Najdi Bedouin poet Bandar bin Surur for the ending of nomadic lifestyles as a means to show one of the crucial aspects of modern Saudi rule—a centralization of political power that represented the settled inhabitants (hadar) at the expense of the nomadic tribes. The Saudi government ended tribal raiding, so Bedouins like Bandar bin Surur had to pursue other careers—in his case, becoming a truck driver and itinerant poet who celebrated the heroism, hospitality, and anti-hadar values of his ancestors, but who despised the new social order. Along the same lines, Al Fahad in chapter 13 discusses the flood of genealogical writings that starting in the 1980s seemed to show “a reaction against the decline of traditional modes of social and political organization, the atomization of society, the homogenizing powers of the modern state, and the failure of civil society to take root” (265–66). Both tribal and town identities were diminished; instead, the author argues that the Saudi state insisted on direct power over individuals, as seen, for example, in a national system of allocating male names or in the state selecting tribal leaders. In response, family associations emerged as private kin groups filling a void in civil society. The author supplements the pioneering work of Hamad al-Jasir on genealogy with his own ample research on the topic.Madawi Al-Rasheed in chapter 14 begins her incisive discussion of contemporary changes in the role of Saudi women by outlining the masculine state's subordination and exclusion of women from the public sphere through rulings by the ulama, regulation of women's attire, revival of polygamy, channeling of women to certain limited occupations, and in many other ways. However, in the 2000s there took place especially for female elites an “increased visibility of women [as] a product of modernizing authoritarian rule, economic liberalization, and, finally, the war on terror” (302). The author's analysis is presented at greater length in her book, A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge University Press, 2013).Amélie Le Renard discusses the importance of shopping malls in Riyadh for young Saudi women, who thereby gain access to urban public spaces despite strict gender segregation. The author discloses the negative practical consequences of religiously inspired social rigidity, while also pointing to recent changes in education and employment that have opened some new opportunities for middle-class women to interact with each other in a consumption-oriented milieu. Her analysis is more fully presented in her book, A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2014).This excellent collection of essays is highly informative and well worth reading. However, it does contain a few weaknesses. More contributions from Saudi scholars would have been beneficial. Some authors invoke theoretical frameworks in which they situate their work, but many do not. A dominant question among scholars who study Saudi Arabia is whether the kingdom is so exceptional that it cannot be usefully compared to other countries, though some researchers reject this exceptionalist narrative. In this book Gause, Jones, Lacroix, Le Renard, and the three editors in their introduction might be put in the anti-exceptionalist category. A more explicit discussion of this topic by the other contributors would have been welcome.One problem found in most of the chapters is that they end their coverage in the decade of the 2000s and thereby do not cover recent developments in Saudi Arabia, even though the book has a copyright date of 2015. This problem is somewhat alleviated by the introduction as well as a brief afterword written by Bernard Haykel, in which he discusses the Saudi ban on the Muslim Brotherhood enacted in 2014, the addition of women to the Majlis al-Shura, the spread of social media, and rising expectations among young people because of great wealth that accrued to the state when oil prices were high. The reader who wishes to pursue in greater depth the topics discussed in this book is encouraged to take a close look at the thorough bibliographical coverage presented in J. E. Peterson, “The Arabian Peninsula in Modern Times: A Historiographical Survey of Recent Publications,” Journal of Arabian Studies 4, no. 2 (December 2014): 244–74.