Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

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.