Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Book Review
Hanan Kholoussy For Better, For Worse: the Marriage Crisis that Made Modern Egypt. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, pp. 188, bibliographical references, index, ISBN 978-0-8047-6960-0 pbk.

Published in Middle Eastern Studies 2011-10-21

As a self-conscious group with its own economic mode of production, normative worldview, consumption patterns and styles of being and behaving, spokesmen of the middle classes often frighten society with stories about men not marrying, the disintegration of contracted marriages, and the break up of the nuclear family. Shunning away from marriage among urban men of this class is guaranteed to create a cross-cultural, almost a universal anxiety associated with elevating a personal choice into a political and national agenda that announces not only social ills and  psychological turbulences but also communal disintegration and the withering of the nation as a whole. Such urban anxiety does not often find echoes among the traditional old peasantry or their equivalents among industrialised agricultural communities. 

Book Review
The Arab Revolution. The Lessons From The Democratic Uprising,
by Jean-Pierre Filiu, London: Hurst and Co.
Paperback, ISBN 978-1-84904-159-1, 195 pages

Published in Times Higher Education Supplement 29 September 2011-10-21

It may be premature to draw lessons from the on-going Arab revolutions but Jean-Pierre Filiu, an expert on the politics of the region, identifies ten such lessons before the dust has settled. As such, the analysis is swift, relying on the author’s previous knowledge of the region and observations of current events. There is no grand theoretical framework to understand the uprisings, nor an attempt to see them through the prism of long duree historical process. As a result, the book is a cross between a sophisticated journalistic account and policy recommendations.

Stephane Lacroix Awakening Islam Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University press, 2011, £22.95

ISBN: 978-0-674-04964-2, 328 pages, 1 map

The surge in Arab revolutions since January 2011 has surprised many scholars and policy makers for one reason. The revolt is not currently orchestrated by the much studied Islamists. Since the 1970s, Western academics preferred to see the Arab world through the prism of Islam, which has become the constant variable that explained  everything- stagnation, resistance to democracy, oppression of women, discrimination against minorities, and recently terrorism. The majority of academics ignored a limited number of texts written by nuanced scholars who argued that we must go beyond Islam to understand the many social, political and economic problems of the region. Yet Western obsession with security after 9/11 and so-called Islamic radicalism meant that the academe had to follow suit and privilege the study of Islamists- many are seen as terrorists in the making. Privileging Islam as the only explanatory factor allowed policy makers in the West and the Arab world to avoid facing unpleasant realities such as demographic explosions, unemployment, poverty, corruption, authoritarian rule and abuse of human rights.The recent fall of authoritarian Arab regimes in Tunisia and Egypt at the hands of young and frustrated population proved that Islam alone can never and will never explain the Arab world. Yet the metanarrative persists.

Olivier Roy The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East, Hurst and Company, London 2007, trans. Ros Schwartz, ISBN 978-1-85065-894-8 paperback, pp 159+index
Six years after 9/11 French sociologist Olivier Roy produced a collection of essays to explain what went wrong with American policy in the Middle East. Building on a long career spent studying, analysing and interpreting religious and political trends in parts of the Muslim world and Europe, Roy’s recent book builds on complex but lucid theoretical position and sound methodological skills, both enable him to carve for himself a  sound academic niche and emerge as an authority on current social, political and religious developments that are today not confined to specific countries or regions but are themselves globalised.

Roy’s The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East  is a short collection of essays that captures a long scholarly engagement with Islamism, social movements, globalisation, and political development. Unlike some of the French academic literature on the Muslim world that has emerged since the 1970s, most of which has been grounded in dogmatic secularism  and  revulsion towards  the new Islamist social movements, Roy offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of  sociological and political trends that are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

After ongoing military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and now in Pakistan, and possibly in Somalia and Yemen in the near future, the world that America imagined would move towards democracy, stability, prosperity, and security is still far from materialising. In fact, it seems that the neo-conservative vision of the Great Middle East had stumbled in many regions and resulted in what Roy describes as chaos. The rationale behind Bush’s military strategy summed up as ‘whole sale and rapid annihilation of the enemy’ failed miserably to deliver the desired outcome.

Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 By Thomas Hegghammer Cambridge University Press 290pp, ISBN 978-0-521-51858-1 Hardback ISBN 978-0-521-73236-9 Paperback
How could Jihadi violence break out in a country seen as the historical heartland of Islam and ruled by a state that boasts about its many Islamic credentials? Thomas Hegghammer unpacks the paradox of Jihadi militancy in an Islamic state. 

The book is based on fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, and an impressive collection of biographies and written sources from well-known internet al-Qaida websites. Its ten chapters trace the evolution of militant Islamism and its later containment by the Saudi authorities.

Since 9/11 scholars and security specialists searched for plausible explanations to account for Jihadi militancy at the local and global levels. Wahhabi radical theology, Western foreign policies, socio-economic deprivation, dictatorships in the Muslim world, and more recently the internet, are often cited as causal factors.  In a global world, it has become difficult to isolate local conditions from global contexts. 

Hegghammer introduces his own hypothesis. Saudi Pan-Islamism, ‘a macro-nationalism, centred on the imagined community of the umma’ is the primary explanation for the brief outburst of violence in Saudi Arabia. As an orientation, pan-Islamism is mainly linked to the oil boom of the 1970s, when sympathy with the suffering of other Muslims became a new source for Saudi legitimacy, activism and engagement with the Muslim world. This engagement came to fruition in 1979, when Saudi Arabia joined Western powers to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It was an opportunity to direct Saudi Jihadi effervescence outward. The suffering of the umma on the periphery of the Islamic historical centre proved to be a successful recruitment slogan to draw Saudis, recently tamed by the luxuries of the new oil era, into the Afghan Jihad.

Rachel Bronson Thicker Than Oil America’s Uneasy Partnership with Saudi Arabia  Council of Foreign Relations, Oxford: Oxford University Press, hardback, 353pp, ISBN-13: ‎‎978-0-19-516743‎

Thicker than Oil investigates the U.S-Saudi relationship after this relationship became controversial in the aftermath of  9/11. It scrutinises the decision making process on both sides, ‎by necessity an account of the policies of kings, presidents, senior cabinet officials, royal confidants and chief intelligence officers (pp. 11). Bronson situates her narrative in between ‎two poles: Saudi bashing in America and anti-Americanism in Saudi Arabia. For fifty years, the partnership rested on shared interests, held responsible for sowing current radicalism ‎in the Muslim world. Yet because it was an uneasy partnership, the relation had to be conducted behind closed doors for over half a century.   ‎

Ibrahim Abu Rabi’ (ed.) The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought ‎Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2006 (Hardback), 675p. ‎

The Blackwell Companion to Contemporary Islamic Thought is a reference book that ‎introduces the reader to the diversity of Islamic intellectual tradition. The introduction ‎places Islamic intellectuals and their productions in the contemporary context of the ‎Muslim world. Diverse, fragmented, and unevenly developed, the Muslim world shares ‎common historical developments brought about by the experience of being drawn into ‎Western modernity in its various manifestations. Colonialism, capitalism, globalisation, ‎modernization, liberation struggles, the nation state, dictatorships, religious revivalism, ‎and fundamentalism are but few aspects of the arrival of modernity in Muslim lands. ‎

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.