Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

One thing is certain. When a Saudi security consultant makes policy recommendations, he is anything other than an independent voice.

Such recommendations are often described by unnamed Saudi officials as only representing the views of the people who express them. This is exactly what happened after Nawaf Obaid’s recent reflections on the Iraqi crisis.

Obaid’s article in the Washington Post (29 November 2006) addresses an American audience that is increasingly sceptical about its own military adventure in Iraq and which is beginning to search for exit strategies (the latest being the report of the Iraq Study Group, published on 6 December).

By Madawi Al-Rasheed

Globalisation refers to structured flows from above, which are led by government agencies, large corporations, and other powerful state and non-state actors.

Saudi Arabia was both an importer and an exporter of global flows, whose economic, religious and cultural flows are a product of oil wealth. Since the discovery of oil in 1933, Saudi Arabia has been integrated into the world capitalist economy. Oil drew Saudi Arabia into global flows which were mainly under the control of global actors, specifically states, oil companies, financial services groups, and other conglomerates.

Contesting the Saudi State Islamic Voices from a New Generation Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, November 2006A prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler, subjecting them to the troops and imposing the endless other hardships which his new conquest entails Niccolo Machiavelli The Prince

Outsiders often refer to Saudis as Wahhabis or Salafis. In the twenty-first century Saudis themselves do not agree on the meaning of these terms. Contemporary Saudis debate religion and politics in traditional and novel public spaces, thus violating a well-established taboo. Under the influence of mass education, printing, new communication technology and global media, Saudis engage in formulating opinions that can generate both consent and contestation of official religio-political discourse. Modernity, together with state and oil wealth, consolidated official Wahhabi religious interpretations, especially those that generate social conservatism and political acquiescence. Yet the same forces that allowed this discourse to become hegemonic are now responsible for its contestation. Drawing on a plethora of classical religious sources, contemporary interpretations and interviews, this book presents an ethnography of consent and contestation. It highlights the fluidity of the boundaries of religious and political debate and the overlapping categories that dominate our thinking about so-called official, moderate and radical Islam. The book examines how state-initiated global religious flows develop their own momentum once they travel to distant locations. Bridging the gap between religious text and context, the author offers an understanding of the subtle ways in which states and citizens manipulate religious discourse for purely political ends and how this manipulation generates unpredictable reactions whose control escapes those who initiated them.

Madawi Al-Rasheed

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter One: Gertrude Bell: a biographical Note

Chapter Two: Hail in the Nineteenth Century

Chapter Three: The Journey and the Photographs

Chapter Four: Hail between Two Empires

Chapter Five: the End of an Era

Bibliography

Preface

On a rainy day in January 1987, I found myself in a narrow dusty basement in the photographic library of the Royal Geographical Society in Kensington, London. I was writing a thesis on the political and social history of the Rashidi emirate of Hail, a small state founded by one of my ancestors in the nineteenth century. Having spent months locating this history in various archives, diplomatic correspondence, and monographs of travellers, I was aware that images of Hail at the beginning of the twentieth century would be an invaluable record of a bygone era. My search for these images led to the Royal Geographical Society, where I came across the incredible collection of Gertrude Bell. Later I found out that the complete collection is held at the University of Newcastle. 

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia
by George Rentz. London Arabian Publishing, 2005 Pp.xlii+275, bibliography, index.  xxxxx(cloth), ISBN 09544792 2 X

Since the 11 September the Saudi regime launched a serious public relations campaign to rescue its reputation in the West and that of its religious establishment. While print and visual media remain the most important platform for this campaign in the West, Saudi sponsored academic conferences and annual lectures in English proved to be equally important as these quasi-academic activities influence a different audience. 

David Commins The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia London: I.B. Tauris 2006, pp. 276, ISBN 1 845 11 080, Hardback £39.50
Tim Niblock Saudi Arabia Power, Legitimacy and Survival London: Routledge 2006, pp. 206, ISBN 10 0-415 30310 9, Paperback £19.99

Anthony Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid National Security in Saudi Arabia Threats, Responses, and Challenges Centre for Strategic and International Studies and Westport: Praeger Security International 2005, pp. 426, ISBN 0-275 98811 2 Hardback

Dependence on Saudi oil and strategic location in the heart of a volatile Arab region made this country the centre of academic interest in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia itself, the country received further focused attention. Researchers flooded to Saudi Arabia to investigate its history, society, religion and security challenges.

1744-2003, Paris: La Decouverte.

It is a well known fact that Arabian studies have been dominated by Anglo-Saxon scholarship, reflecting the historical, colonial and economic contexts of power relations in which academic discourse takes place. Throughout the twentieth century, English language publications dominated the sphere of knowledge and theorising about not only Saudi Arabia but the Arabian Peninsula in general. With the exception of two or three classical monographs and few traveller’s and colonial accounts, for example the monographs of Charles Huber and Robert Montagne, there has been little French academic engagement with Arabia up to the second World War. 

Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf: Power Politics in Transition.
London, I.B. Tauris 2003. Bibliography, index, pp. 181. Hardback.

The starting point for this book is the decision of Britain to withdraw from the Gulf in 1968 and the actual withdrawal in 1971. The central thesis states that no other superpower was ready to replace Britain in the Gulf at the time. The USA was occupied in Vietnam while the Soviet Union was still maintaining a cautious foreign policy. The author is strongly convinced that when British power was in decline, other superpowers never established unquestionable dominance or control over the region. Against this vacuum, politics in the Gulf went ‘local’, leaving Iran, the strongest and most ambitious and capable regional force to determine and reorder the political landscape. Therefore, the book argues that after British withdrawal, the new Gulf order was achieved by emphasising local concerns, thus giving regional powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states) supremacy over external forces in shaping the politics of the area.

by Daryl Champion . London: Hurst and Company.  2003. Pp.xxii+392glossary, index, bibliography. £ 45 (cloth) , £16.95 (paper), ISBN 1-85065-647-9 casebound, 1-85065-668-1 paperback. 

The intimate connection between Saudi Arabia and oil not only influenced historical development in this country but also left its fingerprints on Western scholarly work in the humanities and social science disciplines. More than any other country in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia polarised the academic community and created a rift between those who justify its alleged ‘exceptionalism’ and those who condemn its archaic and odd social, political, religious and cultural traditions. In this polarised scholarly atmosphere sound interpretation tends to be the first casualty.  With a number of exceptions, indigenous research in general has not so far produced nuanced interpretations either.

Saudi Arabia is an ‘Islamised authoritarianism’. The system rests on propagating religious interpretations of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet, which seek to anchor authoritarianism in the sacred tradition.

Several myths, propagated inside Saudi Arabia and outside it, continue to influence the way people assess the Saudi enigma.

One myth is the claim that the state reflects tribal coalitions. The reality is that today the only tribe which practices political tribalism in Saudi Arabia is that of the Al-Saud. Over the past 100 years the Al-Saud have evolved from being a family into being a tribe. Saudi society continues to hold onto the social and identity aspects of tribalism, but no political tribalism is evident. Sections of Saudi society adhere to the ethos of the tribe but do not exhibit the political aspect of tribalism.

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 was perhaps the most difficult challenge facing the Saudi government since the Gulf War of 1990-1.  The invasion was unprecedented, unprovoked, and lacking in wide Arab and international support and in the name of threats --WMDs, links to al-Qaidah--which proved to have little credibility. Official Saudi Arabia wished to see Saddam and the Ba’th regime go, but feared the aftermath. It opted for an indecisive position, hiding behind a confused rhetoric of open objections to the war in regional Arab meetings and forums and implicit approval, and even important co-operation in allowing US military command centres to conduct the war from its own territory. The ramifications of the swift collapse of the Ba’thist regime as a result of military intervention, without UN sanctions, has set up a precedent which could have serious consequences for Saudi Arabia and the whole of the Middle East. 

As Israel’s onslaught on Lebanon is allowed to enter its second week, Saudi statements continue to condemn Hizb Allah’s adventurism, which they hold responsible for the ensuing death and destruction in Lebanon. Enraged Muslims, including some Saudis, have interpreted this un-fraternal madness as yet another case of Saudi pandering to the US and its allies. On closer inspection, this view appears superficial. The real source of Saudi condemnation is a much deeper fear of Hizb Allah, who is seen to represent a much greater threat than Israel itself.

On 23 June this year, Saudis in Riyadh’s al-Nakhil neighbourhood woke up to count several bodies drenched in blood after a street battle between Jihadis and security forces.

Such scenes have become familiar to the residents of Saudi cities, and the interior ministry spokesman announced that the battle marked a victory over the group “that has gone astray” – the contemporary Kharijites of the Saudi regime, who have turned sleepy neighbourhoods into battlegrounds.

Luther fought against ecclesiastical abuse, indulgences and papal authority. He also advocated the doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’. By nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, he changed the history of Europe forever.

After 9/11, politicians, research centres and think tanks in the West wished that a Saudi Luther would emerge to free Islam from so-called ‘radical interpretations’ and ‘preachers-of-hate’. Both the US and the Saudi regime hoped that the emergence of a Luther would deliver Saudis from the grip of radicalism and into the arms of tolerance.