But this was still not enough. Religiously-sanctioned obedience to rulers had to be re-invoked to remind the constituency of a godly obligation. From the minarets of mosques, religious functionaries of the regime preached sermons in which they reminded their audiences of the obligation to obey God, the Prophet and the al-Saud rulers. They warned against demonstrations, civil disobedience and open criticism of the leadership. They glorified the current leadership for its adherence to Islam, and warned against chaos. They vehemently denounced Shiites for their agitations in the Eastern Province, where oil is abundant. Any call for demonstrations was depicted as a Shiite Iranian conspiracy against a pious Sunni nation. They called on the believers to support the rulers, much needed at a turbulent moment. Increasing sectarianism within Saudi Arabia is a reflection of an on-going cold war with Iran.

With the fall of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak, Saudi Arabia lost a close ally against its enemy of three decades. The Arab spring is perceived by the Saudi leadership as an opportunity for Iran to increase its penetration of Arab countries and civil society. Agitation in Bahrain was definitely seen by the Saudis as yet another example of Iran's growing influence and ability to stir up trouble in a neighboring Gulf country with a Shiite majority. With the support of the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Saudis sent troops to help the al-Khalifa rulers against the pro-democracy movement, allegedly an arm of the Iranian regime. The Saudis consider their intervention an important measure to roll back Iranian influence. In Bahrain, for the moment, they seem to have been the winners in their on-going confrontation with Iran. But in Syria, the situation is still unresolved. For the Saudis, the protest in Syria is another opportunity to win Syria back to the Arab fold, after President Bashar Assad increasingly drifted towards Iran. So sectarianism seems to work at two levels: repel Iranian influence and silence dissidence at home. Saudi conservative and anti-Shiite religious tradition is an effective policy against both internal dissidents and external foes.

Saudi Arabia's last step was to tighten security just in case oil and God failed to produce the desired acquiescence. A digital "Day of Rage" was announced on March 11. While Saudi opposition calls were gathering momentum in the virtual world, a different reality was unfolding on the ground. Saudi security forces were mobilized in the main cities. This amounted to a state of emergency with troops on the ground and helicopters flying low in the sky. An atmosphere of intimidation was soon established. The calls failed miserably to attract demonstrators. But hundreds of activists were arrested, including several Shiite and Sunni agitators. Two petitions calling for more political participation, constitutional rule, and social justice remained unanswered. The regime responded by introducing a new terrorism law that criminalizes any open criticism of the king and the grand mufti.

For the moment, these three Saudi regime strategies seem to have absorbed the wave of real turbulence made apparent as a result of the Arab spring. Digital activism never stopped, providing a great cathartic service to a population denied the basic principles of freedom. However, with internal protest crushed and apparent western silence over political reform, the Saudi regime seems to be comfortable in the short term. The regime deployed classical strategies to contain protest. Religious bans on demonstrations and sectarian discourse against the Shiites appealed to the Sunni majority and ensured a momentary truce between the regime and the multiple and disorganized voices calling for political reform. Heavy policing, together with tailored economic benefits rewarding those who had expressed strong support for the regime--mainly the religious establishment and the coercive forces--led to reluctance to engage in real protest.

But in an opaque country like Saudi Arabia, one is bound to believe that discontent among substantial sections in society that occasionally manifests itself through virtual activism and petitions is currently fermenting underground.

Despite revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, it seems that Saudi Arabia is still lagging behind in terms of the structural conditions for real mobilization leading to organization and protest. The conditions that triggered revolt elsewhere, for example economic and social deprivation, in addition to political oppression and corruption, are all present in Saudi Arabia. But these conditions are not sufficient to precipitate a revolt. Saudi Arabia does not have organized trade unions, a women's movement or an active student population. These were the three important structural factors that made it possible for the virtual Egyptian and Tunisian protests to move from the virtual world to the ground.

The Saudi case attests to the limits of cyber-utopianism, the euphoria surrounding the so-called Twitter and Facebook revolutions. In addition to the three regime strategies deployed to thwart protest, the failure of the Arab spring to reach Saudi Arabia is a function of energy, lack of experience with rudimentary forms of democracy and civil society, and the monarchy's unconditional support from western governments.

But sometimes when all appears to be quiet on the eastern front, fermenting discontent within society could erupt in violent ways. In Saudi Arabia's continuous climate of oppression and secrecy, violence practiced by both state and sections of society is often an indication of deep-rooted problems. The Arab spring may be delayed in Saudi Arabia but its winds could yet blow over one of the least democratic and most opaque countries in the Arab world. In the absence of a tradition of peaceful protest and with religiously-sanctioned bans on such protest, violence against the regime and society by disenchanted groups may again become the only option--as it had been over the last century.

The Arab spring has both deprived Saudi Arabia of loyal allies such as Mubarak and put the kingdom face-to-face with the rising Iranian challenge. The outcome of the Saudi-Iranian cold war will definitely be determined not in Bahrain but in Syria, a larger and more important strategic country. It remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia can claim victory in a war of attrition that has been brewing for more than three decades. At least for the moment, the home front seems to be quiet

The book focuses on how wealth and development reached Bahla where a rival religious theocracy had ruled over parts of the country. From a discussion in chapter two on the projects of the heritage industry and restoration of historical forts, to mass education, oil, water resources, notions of race and identity, and uncertain political succession, Omani society experienced great oil transformations that brought it face to face with an age of great change and prosperity but also uncertainty.

One of the most interesting sections of the book is the chapter on women’s religious circles (chapter four). As modernising states across the Arab and Muslim world introduced mass education at an unprecedented scale, informal circles of religious knowledge, historically known as madrasa or halaqa refused to disappear. In fact, they continue to flourish as alternative and complimentary spaces for religious learning with social and political implications, hence the multiple actors who compete to control, monitor and shape the content of their teaching material. In the southern suburb of Tehran, the tribal frontiers of Pakistan, immigrant neighbourhoods in London, and the old town of Bahla in Oman, the fieldwork site of this book, the informal religious circles of knowledge are here to stay. Their persistence especially in overcrowded cities and remote villages has baffled many observers. The origins of the Taliban as students (talib) in the religious schools set up for the Afghan refugees in the 1980s in Pakistan has tarnished informal religious study circles, from now on seen as hubs for the propagation of radical religious knowledge and breeding future generation of terrorists.  The momentary and sudden interest in informal religious education had a strict security agenda that diverted attention from the social dynamics of these circles and their multiple meanings. This book offers a welcome insight on the nature of these informal religious study circles. In chapter four Limbert traces women’s responses and adaptation to new formal education and employment in a region where housework, family obligations,  and  traditional roles had occupied a previous generation of women. As most Arab states tried to educate their young people in a generic Islam, detached from its local cultural and historical contexts, many newly educated young men and women sought to supplement this Islam with further deeper studies in the alternative confined circles of religious knowledge. Limbert’s  focus on how women’s study circles fill a vacuum. Her analysis of the dynamics of these circles is a welcome ethnographic account of the place of women in the local context of a small town and the wider context of Oman, its history, oil, religious debates, development and gender policy. The analysis goes beyond the limited understanding of such circles that have dominated scholarly work on the madrasa.

The newly educated young girls of Bahla have been introduced to alternative ways of living, learning and socialising. Despite their engagement with modernity and development, young Bahlawis retain old notions of individual piety that finds expression in newly founded informal religious study circles where young volunteer instructors create autonomous space to exercise their own judgement and interpretation of religious sources. Limbert explains that while old women continue their traditional visiting patterns and sociality around words, coffee and dates, young educated girls seek alternative space where sociality is entangled with individual empowerment, knowledge, and organisation. Young women are critical of old women’s gossip during well-orchestrated visiting patterns that link households in Bahla to a network of well-known women. Young women organise private study circles that attract the literate youth. Combining sociality with religious education seems to be a valued endeavour. Remembering God is better than the gossip associated with traditional women’s gatherings, according to those involved in these religious circles. But the new piety generated in the context of the study circle refrains from public displays of religiosity. In this respect, Limbert’s informants differ from other Muslim women, for example the Lebanese Shia, studied by Lara Deeb. In Oman, women promote individual piety and engagement with religious sources. The only public display of this piety is in the symbolic significance of their clothing. Unlike their mothers, the young girls of the study circles are conscious of their veils as markers of piety. Enrolling in a women run circle allows young girls to practice a new religiosity in dialogue with male sources on religion and as opposed to their mothers.

Oil wealth and development not only led to new religiosity among the young generation but their impact  reached the very fabric of Omani identity, the subject of chapter six. A country well-known for its historical transnational links in Africa and Asia, the recent reinvention of Oman as an Arab state is well documented in this study. Limbert explores the meaning of racial categories in Oman at a time when genealogy fixed the Arab character of the inhabitants and distinguished them from East African slaves and servants, known as akhdam.  In modern Oman, the Zanzibari intelligentsia, mostly returnees from East Africa and Zanzibar in the 1960s and 1970s, came to define the modern bureaucratic state in Muscat while new identity constructions and heritage industry projects fixed Oman as an Arab state. Early pre-1970 migration to Africa  in search of economic opportunities against an impoverished Oman defined two places as contrasting terrains. The hardship experienced in Oman prior to migration pushed Omanis to Africa, seen as the land of economic ease. Their return in the 1970s to participate in the country’s new development not only opened new economic opportunities but also generated debates pertaining to Omani identity and its transnational connections. The return of many Omanis to Oman reversed the memory of the two places, Oman and Africa. Oil made Oman the land of plenty while Africa became poor.   The reversal of the meaning of the two places has become a function of fate, that altered old established wisdom about places and identity. In this reversal, Omani Arab identity was constructed out of fragments of genealogies.

If miracles and fate dominate aspects of Omani present development, the future seems uncertain and subject to speculation. In chapter seven, Limbert elaborates on three important elements that combine to create serious concerns for many Omanis. First, Oman’s dwindling oil resources enforce in the mind of its people that one day there will be no oil, thus contributing to perceiving current prosperity as a fleeting moment of affluence. Second, the persistence of the Ibadhi doctrines that had been the founding impetus behind the theocratic Ibadhi state in the interior of Oman remains a living memory, at least to the old generation. Limbert asserts that some of her informants expressed a longing for the re-restoration of the Ibadhi imamate. And finally, there is the problem of succession that remains a mystery as Sultan Qabus had done nothing so far to regulate it. Given that he has no son to succeed him, Omanis never stop to speculate over the issue of the leadership after his death.

The strength of Limbert’s book lies in its exploration of the multiple levels of development and modernity associated with oil transformations. She clearly traces the impact of centralised state interventions with special reference to notions of piety,  religiosity, identity and political future. In this book, the salience of the past in the lives of Omanis is fully explored in the context of fieldwork in Bahla. This past has come to mean different things to different people and it seems that it will continue to do so especially in the context of the recent economic and political challenges facing  Oman. Since January 2011, youth demonstrations calling for employment and end to corruption shook this remote and quiet Gulf state, that has so far not exhibited public display of agitations or mass protest. Perhaps Mandana Limbert’s predictions of the uncertainty of Omani future, that echoed people’s fears, have already become certain.

In some parts, the book may appear lacking a common thread as a result of the presentation style and somewhat poetic chapter titles and sub-headings. Moving from one story to another without a common thread makes the book enjoyable but difficult to situate in a relevant theoretical framework. The book is written in a narrative style that may not appeal to certain anthropology audiences. Yet, here there is a dense ethnography worth reading. The book offers a rich panoramic view of Bahla and its people, intercepted by rich everyday life stories and explained in light of major oil transformations.

With the rise of the Egyptian middle class at the beginning of the twentieth century, Egypt joined other nations in exhibiting an anxiety over marriage under what was constructed as a ‘marriage crisis’ that many would see as existing only in the minds of those who coined the term. By the time the Great Depression hit colonised Egypt, nationalists, social reformers and ordinary middle class people were already fetishizing the marriage crisis by which they meant an increasing number of effendis choosing bachelorhood over marriage. While the Egyptian press of the 1930s was the platform where the crisis was debated and condemned, Egyptian courts offered platforms for the unfolding of the many facets of the crisis. To use Egyptian colloquial Arabic, the effendi was an educated urban professional multilingual middle class man in a white collar job. Like their colonised counterparts elsewhere in the world, the effendis were obsessed with modernity and its impact on society. Marriage became a platform upon which critiques of society can be constructed while promoting new visions of modern marriages. Modern marriages were entangled with not only new husband-hood but also a new nation that was in the process of being imagined and constructed.  Writing articles in the press, reformers and nationalists wrote about bachelorhood as a metaphor for the ills of the nation, from colonial subjugation to socioeconomic downfall. Needless to say, those who went into frenzy over the alleged crisis were urbanites, newly educated salaried spokesmen of an emerging middle class.

An historian at the American University of Cairo, Hanan Kholoussy’s new book considers marriage a central lens for studying anticolonial nationalism in Egypt. While previous historiography focused on gender, the nuclear family, women, and the home, Kholoussy builds on this tradition by bringing a new central dimension in the study of early twentieth century constructions of Egyptian nationalism and national identity.

For Better, For Worse is an excellent historical account of Egypt’s so-called marriage crisis as it was constructed on the pages of the local press in the twentieth century when the country found itself under an awkward quasi-independent and semi-colonial British rule. In addition, analysis of Egyptian Islamic court records and cases offers a comprehensive study of conceptions of marriage, gender and nationalism. The combination of these two sources allows the author to move away from elitist constructions that sit comfortably on the pages of the local press to the working of courts, judges, and litigants.  A broader perspective is achieved as the testimonies  of plaintiffs, defendants and witnesses are incorporated in the analysis.

The first chapter is an introduction to the study, its theoretical underpinnings and methodology. Chapter two explores a rich repertoire of press articles in which authors blamed bachelorhood on the economic crisis during the Great Depression. A combination of inflation, unemployment and greedy fathers who raised their daughters’ dower meant that men delayed marriage or simply made beyond the reach of most middle class men. Those were accused of spending too much time in coffee houses, brothels, and bars. The unruly bachelor needed marriage to tame him and turn him into a good member of society, serving the nation through its most cherished nuclear family. The marriage crisis became a platform for critiques of economic domination and middle class materialism. In such a context, new masculinity was in the process of being defined. A man needs to become a husband to fulfil this new masculinity. 

In Chapter 3, kholoussy turns her attention to court records in which she found a plethora of cases dealing with the marriage of minors. It is in the context of the court that a wife’s duties are reasserted, while arranged marriages, and obedience orders were imposed on women. This chapter is very interesting as it reflects how the discourse of the press, which had very limited circulation at the time, and meant very little to the majority of illiterate Egyptians, was being reinforced in the court room. Both created boundaries for wifehood at a time when increased educational opportunities for women were being felt by a small section of Egyptian society.  

The break up of marriages created anxieties over the future of the nation. This is discussed in chapter 4. Here again, nationalism seems to restrict divorce, seen as a threat to the nation’s reformation and modernisation, both were seen as dependent on making marriages more permanent. Both nationalist reformers and legislators cooperated to construct modern marriages as pathways to an independent and modern Egypt. While the permanency of marriage was stressed, women were seen as less appropriate guardians of children in cases of divorce. In chapter 5, Kholoussy shows how courts increasingly awarded custody of minor children to fathers while the press highlighted the role of women as mothers of the nation. In this chapter, the divergence between legal and nationalist projects appears as Egyptians debated divorce cases in the press. While Egypt may not be unique as a colonised country with a small but growing effendi class and social reformers, both struggling with colonial modernity, its early twentieth century marriage crisis was uniquely Egyptian, according to Khaloussy. It was constructed out of the unique social, political, legal and economic crisis of the 1930s. Kholousy concludes that  the crisis became a space to criticise  colonial domination and construct a new middle class masculinity. At the root of this crisis was an economic depression, inflation, unemployment, and low wages.  If Egypt shared anything with other nations that found themselves in the same colonial context, it must be the fact that debates about marriage are often deployed in order to articulate, represent, and conceive national hopes and futures.

After a revolution that overthrow President Mubarak’s regime on 25 January 2011, we find that Egyptian youths  have been the most active in a revolution that was not only concerned with individual freedoms, corruption, political and civil rights, and economic depression again, but also with a contemporary marriage crisis, beautifully  and humorously dramatized in a book entitled ayza atjawez, (I want to marry). Contemporary social scientists looking for causes to account for the recent Egyptian revolution will benefit from reading For Better, For Worse.

The book contributes greatly to understanding not only Egyptian past concerns over marriage but also the rest of the Arab world where nationalists, Islamists and governments continue to focus on marriage not only to define their nations but also to divert attention from more pressing political and economic concerns.  Marriage  (nikah) and the recent resurrection of many old forms and names, (muta, misfar), with each one constructed according to different duties and responsibilities, remain one of the hotly debated institutions across the region.

For Better, For Worse is an excellent historical document capturing a national  anxiety that a hundred year later is still felt across all classes in Egypt. The book  should be read by historians and social scientists working on politics, gender, and nationalism. Although the book is a relatively short historical monograph, it is succinct and written in an accessible and enjoyable style. It should appeal to an audience wider than the usual academic circles.

Madawi Al-Rasheed

Filiu deconstructs existing narratives about the Arab world and explains why so far only two Arab autocrats in Tunisia and Egypt have been successfully overthrown under the pressure of peaceful uprisings, and with relatively little bloodshed. Other more violent cases from Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain are discussed but without clear conclusions.  Countries that have experienced minor protest such as Saudi Arabia and others that have remained immune, for example Algeria, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait are mentioned in passing. Two monarchies in Morocco and Jordan are currently under pressure but Filiu thinks that they will eventually succumb to pressure and move towards more constitutionalism that will limit the monarchs’ power. The mix of local trajectories and outcomes over the last six months make the ‘Arab’ title of the book highly controversial.

The chapters reflect the ten lessons to be drawn from revolutions that many scholars of the Arab world have failed to predict. Most of Filiu’s lessons state the obvious as he debunks obsolete myths that have been disregarded by all serious scholars of the region with the exception of die hard orientalists and their patrons among policy makers. He argues that Arabs desire democracy like other nations and their religion cannot explain the previous stagnation of their political life. He invites policy makers  to watch the angry unemployed youth who have dominated the protest movement. Young Arabs will remain volatile and agitated lest new economic opportunities are created. The facebook generation, assisted by its counterparts in the diaspora, created webs of social networks that drove millions into the streets of Arab capitals. Lacking  central charismatic revolutionary figures, a collective youth movement put unprecedented pressure on aging but powerful autocratic presidents. Its youth and anger may well create perpetual revolutionary momentum, not so conducive to stable democratic evolution.  If democracy is delayed, then chaos will follow. To mitigate against this chaos,  the largest and most organised Islamist movement, known as the Muslim Brotherhood with its many branches in the Arab world,  must seize the opportunity and accept to share power with other secular and liberal political forces. The peaceful protest made the violent Jihadi trend obsolete.

Finally, the Arab revolutions will not generate a domino effect. So far only an Arab public sphere longing for greater freedoms, economic opportunities, and respect for civil and human rights has emerged across borders inherited from the colonial era. These borders proved to be resilient and are unlikely to be redrawn as a result of the spirit of democracy sweeping across the region.

Rich Gulf monarchies, mainly Saudi Arabia, stand as safety nets. This seems a naïve reading of the role that conservative and oppressive monarchies can play to thwart democratic change in the region. One wonders how an oppressive regime with vast oil revenues could be a safety net in a volatile region when its ultimate concern is to maintain the status quo in order to escape the very domino effect that Filiu dismisses?

It is astonishing that Filiu’s ten lessons do not include a serious assessment of Western support for Arab dictators over the last five decades. This support was perhaps the main difference between Eastern Europe where the West sided with the people against archaic communist regimes and the Arab world, where Western governments supported the autocrats themselves. If there is a lesson to draw, policy makers must conclude that they may continue to support dictatorships but cannot rescue autocrats at their darkest moment. The powerful slogan of the revolutionaries ‘the people want the downfall of the regime’ was a symbol of an unstoppable mass movement. Another shortcoming is Filiu’s failure to assess the long-term consequences of Nato’s bombing of Libya in support of armed rebels. The prospect of civil war, partition, sectarian and ethnic cleansing loom large in the hot spots.
This book is a premature account of a complex unfinished historical moment.

Madawi Al-Rasheed

761 words

For the last three decades, and despite serious efforts elsewhere, Iran stood as a lonely revolution in a “sea of Sunni Muslims.” Its regime looked comfortable after the removal of Saddam in 2003. Consequently, it has secured many clients in Iraq, some of whom command serious forces on the ground. Iran reached a modus vivendi with the remaining American troops, and continues to act in Iraq as the godfather of preachers and political parties. It can send its fighters to bomb Iraqi territory without any serious consequences. Iraq has thus become Iran’s lebensraum. Its enthusiasm for revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Bahrain where the uprisings stumbled badly, is in contrast with its unequivocal condemnation of the Syrian uprising. Tehran risks losing its influence in the Levant following the demise of the Syrian regime. While its leadership and media project the North African revolutions as an Islamic awakening, that of Syria is seen as the work of terrorists and agitators.

None of the current Arab revolutions will ever produce a replicate of Iran’s wilayat al-faqih [Rule of the Religious Jurist]. Yet serious political overtures are on their way: for example, the normalization of Egyptian-Iranian relations after three decades of sporadic antagonism. The passage of Iranian ships through the Suez Canal and the recent visit by Egyptian delegates to Tehran reflect a new era. But Iranian expansion in the Arab world may have reached its limits, not because of a lack of will and determination, but because of the limitations of Iranian Shiism and, in particular, its political doctrine. Iran’s expansion among Arabs had been founded on supporting resistance to Israel rather than historical affinities or religious proximity. Many Arabs would like to see Iran raising the flag of Palestine, but after their spring, none of the emancipated Arabs would look to Iran for political inspiration. They are more likely to look towards Turkey.

Hip-Hop Turkey

Turkey is another regional power looking for opportunities. Turkey is on its way to becoming even more important as a regional player in light of the ongoing Arab Spring. In Lebanon and Palestine, Turkey’s influence had already preceded the Arab Spring. Its recent patronage of Levantine politics is now boosted following the events in Syria. A defender of Palestinian rights, a friend of several Lebanese political players, and an former friend of Bashar Assad, Turkey is beginning to be seen as a model of an Islamic democracy, slightly different from the liberal version, but faithful to its most important principles. Its hosting of the Syrian opposition conferences, held on its territory, attests to a growing opportunity. Its Foreign Minister Ahmet Oglu, has put his weight behind serious political change in Syria. Turkey’s flourishing economy, its functioning marriage between Islam and democracy, and its energetic and impressive leadership have become the envy of many Arabs. In the eyes of Sunni Islamist forces like the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, and their more conservative Saudi and Gulf counterparts, Turkey has scored high. Many see it as a strong, autonomous country capable of pursuing its own agenda rather than that of the West, while continuing to build strong ties with Western countries. Its consumer goods flood Arab markets, while its entrepreneurs demonstrate the success of capitalism with an Islamic flavor. Its popular culture and television soap operas, dubbed in Syrian Arabic, make news across the region. Turkey, however, does not only appeal to Arab Islamists. Arab Nationalists may continue to see it as an old imperial power, but they cannot stop being impressed. The new youth of the Arab world are fascinated by its hip-hop Muslim girls with their colorful scarfs. All aspire to an Islamic cosmopolitanism al la Turque, an alternative to Western globalization with its contested social and moral foundation.

Counter-Revolutionary Saudi Arabia

There remains the most politically repressive, economically powerful, and dangerous counter-revolutionary regime of Saudi Arabia. The fall of the Mubarak regime has removed, for the time being, the largest and most important Arab country from regional politics. Egypt’s absence has created a void that Saudi Arabia is desperately trying to occupy as the vanguard of Sunni Islam. This will be the second time the Saudis try to do so — the first was after the 1967 Egyptian defeat by Israel. Without a revolution in ‘The Land of the Two Holy Mosques,’ the authoritarian Saudi regime was compelled to take pre-emptive counter-revolutionary measures in anticipation of the domino effect of the Arab Spring. Internally, in addition to classical Saudi strategies to appease the population with economic benefits and intimidate potential protesters with security measures, the state succeeded in fragmenting protests and dividing protesters using the sectarian Sunni-Shia religious rhetoric of its own religious establishment. The regime activated sectarian discourse against the very politically active Shia minority in order to abort the development of ‘national politics’ that cross regional, ideological, sectarian, and tribal boundaries. By depicting calls for protest as a Shia conspiracy against the Sunni majority, with the objective of spreading Iran’s influence in the Sunni homeland, the kingdom deepened sectarian tension and undermined efforts to stage minor protests in various cities, including those where Shias live.

Saudi Arabia is desperately trying to contain two Arab Spring challenges. First, the regime is on alert lest contagious revolutionary winds reach its heartland. The regime mobilizes its religious militia to condemn potential protesters and activists while security forces pick them up in their offices and homes. But Saudi sectarianism proved to be the most successful strategy to thwart mobilization. Even women calling to lift the ban on driving are depicted as Shia agents, determined to westernize the country and corrupt its pious society. Preachers praise their regime of oppression as a defender of Sunnis not only in the Arab world but also across the globe. The princes enjoy the flattery. They let the preachers propagate sectarian and conservative messages in return for the preachers efforts to keep the population under control and away from ‘blasphemous’ democracy talk.

The second challenge for the Saudis is external, in countries where revolutions did take place. In Bahrain, the suppression of the pro-democracy movement with the help of Saudi troops allowed the regime to contain a truly threatening revolution. Riyadh sent strong signals not only to its own agitated Shia minority but also, more importantly, to its Sunni majority. The regime compelled its subjects to support it against Shia foreign agents, allegedly acting in the name of Iran. For the moment, and under the pressures of tense regional and internal dynamics, it seems that the Saudi regime has succeeded in suppressing its own minor protest and created a volatile situation in Bahrain that may explode any time in the near future.

In Yemen, the Saudis struggled to push a Gulf Co-operation Council agenda that guarantees the safe delayed exit of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, but found themselves nursing an injured president. Riyadh does not deal with Yemen as a matter of foreign policy. It has always considered the country a security concern, first handled by Prince Sultan, Minister of Defence, and more recently by Muhammad ibn Nayif, Deputy Minister of the Interior. Both men are not associated with diplomacy. After it pushed its own Jihadis into Yemen, the regime fears Yemen becoming even more of a safe haven for al-Qaeda. There is also the problem of arms smuggling and illegal immigration. While Bahrain was a temporary quick fix, Yemen may yet prove to be a more complex bee hive full of aggressive hornets. In a country where three revolutions take place in one, the Saudis may have reached a dead end with their previous policies of patronage, divide and rule, and export of Salafi teachings. The struggle between the Yemeni notable families of al-Salehs and the al-Ahmars, between the regime and the old opposition parties, and between the revolutionary youth and the President’s men, not to mention two separatist groups in the north and south, may prove to be too much to handle for the ageing Saudi leadership. The latter will try to find a puppet, but Yemen is definitely not Bahrain. The Saudi regime may once again play the sectarian and separatist card as a pre-emptive counter-revolutionary strategy that exaggerates religious differences and hatred and mitigates against the consolidation of national politics in Yemen.

While the Saudi regime dreams about becoming the sole fixer and protector of the world of Sunni Arab Islam, its political system is not one that many Arabs aspire to emulate after their Arab Spring. Arabs will welcome Saudi economic largess but may well challenge the patron-client relations that the Saudi regime has always deployed to silence regional Arab competitors. With Iran losing its appeal, the new confrontation may well be with Turkey. The Saudis think that Iran can be defeated with anti-Shia sectarian hatred. To confront Turkish regional ambitions, they may find their old Wahhabi manuals that denounce the Sufi Turks and a reinvented Arab nationalism handy. They have already purified The Land of the Two Holy Mosques from signs of a historical legacy, when the country was under nominal Ottoman suzerainty.

But despite the exhaustion of Arabs following their spring rebirth, regional powers may not find in them this time the easy clients they are looking for.

Madawi al-Rasheed is professor of anthropology of religion at King’s College, University of London and a political commentator on Middle East Affairs.

Awakening Islam focuses on the failure of Saudi political Islam and the fragmentation of its religious field, thus echoing the argument of Oliver Roy and many other observers. Building on previous research, Stephane Lacroix offers a detailed and elaborate description of the main Saudi contestants. He links Saudi Islamism to the exiled Arab Muslim brotherhood cadres who in the 1960s were welcomed in Saudi Arabia. The result in his opinion is a fusion with local Saudi Salafi discourse, creating in the process what is commonly known as al-Sahwa al-Isalmiyya, the Islamic awakening. This fusion had a solid institutional base in Saudi schools and colleges of religious higher education.  

The Islamic awakening was not monolithic. It evolved, mutated, and fragmented into mainstream and splinter groups, all claiming to be heirs to an unprecedented Islamic renaissance. Although Lacroix acknowledges that Saudi Islamists were not simply blind followers of Arab Islamists, he does not give sufficient consideration to this statement, which became an excuse official Saudi figures propagated in order to absolve their own indigenous Islamists from any wrong doing after 9/11. Lacroix does seem to endorse this official view although he acknowledges its limitations.

Explaining why the religious field fragmented and resulted in a thwarted Islamic awakening, Lacroix does not give sufficient attention to state oppression as a determining factor. Instead, he argues that the state encourages ‘sectorisation’, a strategy of fragmenting intellectual and religious communities.

Lacroix  is good at explaining the outcomes of the awakening failure. In his view, an Islamo-liberal trend that is more in tune with global discourse on democracy and human rights from an Islamic perspective emerged in the late 1990s. Furthermore, resorting to spectacular violence, a violent Jihadi group made its presence felt.  

The book invokes the contested notion of post-Islamism, a phase that scholars like Asef Bayat and others believe is reached in several Muslim countries. It refers to the proliferation of the discourse of human and civil rights within Islam after a long time of emphasising duties. In Saudi Arabia, Islamists are constantly defining and redefining themselves. Some may have moved towards post-Islamism.

But the mistake is to see Islamism through the sole prism of success or failure. It is an evolving project that mutates. One of the main shortcomings prevalent in research on it is privileging text over context. Not many scholars take a grass-root approach that highlight class, urbanisation, education, and other factors that contribute to its strengthening, weakening or total failure.

The book is a product of serious scholarly interpretive and linguistic skills. It should appeal to specialists, although novices may find it difficult to read.

Madawi Al-Rasheed is Professor of Social Anthropology at King’s College, London and author of a History of Saudi Arabia and editor of Kingdom without Border and Dying for Faith.

The government in Riyadh continues to devote huge resources to sustaining a vast religious bureaucracy, promoting its upkeep of the holy sites, and sponsoring transnational Islamic institutions. In fact, however, the Saudi regime has lost most of its religious legitimacy. Its intimate alliance with the United States, and failure to defend Islamic symbols when they are or appear to be under assault - from Jerusalem to the incident of the Danish cartoons and Pope Benedict XVI’s retrieval of disparaging medieval sources - leave the royal elite looking incapable of living up to its religious narrative.

Many Saudis see the regime as a puppet constellation of corrupt princes whose fate is determined in Washington rather than Riyadh. This view is partially accurate but also ignores the fact that the regime is capable of manipulating its western protectors. The main vehicle of this counter-twist has been the regime’s use of oil to transform itself into a powerful ally. Its Wahhabi religious tradition became important in defeating secular, leftist and national political movements in the Arab and Muslim world. This religion served the west well as it mobilised the vanguards of Islam to defeat communism in Afghanistan.

The fusion of oil interests and Wahhabi Islam became a form of blackmail of the west, extracting from it an eternal silence over the regime’s abuse of human rights. True, Riyadh's strategy of using Wahhabi Islam as an instrument of foreign policy backfired with the assaults on the high towers of New York; yet the west soon allowed the Saudi regime to move from being an incubator of terrorism to appearing a victim of it. Thus the regime seamlessly re-emerged as a strategic partner in the United States-led “war on terror”, a partner with whom the west shares intelligence and sells weapons of mass destruction and surveillance technology.

The vacuum

The core strategic calculation in Washington and London over Saudi Arabia invokes realism and pragmatism to argue that there is no alternative. But authoritarian regimes are not known for creating space where alternative political leadership grows - for if they do so, they would cease to be authoritarian. So the logic of western policy is permanent support for the Saudi elite and its guarantee of “stability”.

Saudi religion proved to be equally important when Iran moved from being a western island to an Islamic revolutionary hotbed in 1979. Saudi Arabia sponsored Saddam Hussein’s eight-year war against Iran (1980-88) and inflamed the imagination of its own people with sectarian rhetoric denouncing Shi’a heretics. The same religious hate-rhetoric is mobilised today to intervene in places like Yemen in support of Ali Abdullah Saleh against the al-Huthi rebellion in the north, and in support of the al-Khalifa rulers of Bahrain against the peaceful pro-democracy movement on the island.

In both these conflicts, the Saudis project themselves as defending Sunni Arabs against the alleged Safavid (Iranian) Shi’a takeover of the Arab world. The west watches the contest and confirms its old wisdom about those sectarian, tribal and essentially conservative religious fanatics. Few examine the political and economic contexts that fuel such conflicts; are willing to go beyond Islam to explain the flourishing primordial identities and their resurgence in every country in the region; or are prepared to see how the Saudi regime contributes to this resurgence by its deployment of a potent sectarian discourse.

The Saudi elite, having failed to defend Muslims in Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, now pledges to guard its Sunni co-religionists against their historical arch-enemies: none but the Shi’a. The rising sectarian tensions in Bahrain, Kuwait and Yemen, and the recent memories of sectarian conflict in Lebanon and Iraq, exemplify the dangers of this route. Yet Saudi Arabia’s rulers are prepared to risk conflict with Iran - and with its domestic “fifth column” on the Arab shores of the Persian Gulf, including in Saudi Arabia itself - as a means of salvaging its vanishing religious legitimacy.

The chasm

Saudi officialdom’s efforts to thwart an embryonic civil-rights movement inside Saudi Arabia have intensified since protest movements in Tunisia and Egypt succeeded in overthrowing authoritarian rulers there, and spread across the region. The policy mixes scarifying propaganda about the prospect of an Iranian-backed Shi’a takeover of Sunni heartlands with emergency royal handouts worth $36 billion.

These have failed to defuse the widespread anger and frustration among Saudi young people especially: over crumbling urban infrastructure, unemployment, corruption and above all arbitrary detentions and abuse of human rights. Such sentiments emerged in the virtual world with the call for a “day of rage” on 11 March 2011.

Mohammed al-Wadani, an activist in his early 20s, posted a video-clip calling for the downfall of the regime. When he emerged from a central Riyadh mosque after Friday prayers with a small group of followers, he was arrested by plainclothes security personnel, and disappeared; his family was forced to issue a statement denouncing his actions and disowning him. Of nine founding members (including academics) of an Islamist political party, three disappeared.

On the so-called day of rage, the regime deployed its security forces on every major street in the main cities. A single protester, Khaled al-Johani, defied the show of force and marched into Riyadh’s city centre, telling a BBC interviewer: “I have had enough of this big prison. I have the right to demonstrate”. Both men were surrounded by security forces; Khalid joined thousands of activists and political prisoners held without trial.  

The arrests have escalated since 11 March, scooping hundreds more into the net. Some international and local independent human-rights organisations keep their cases alive though the regime’s oil-thirsty allies in Washington and London remain undisturbed. The conflict in the Libyan desert with another petro-state has in this respect proved to be a welcome excuse to ignore the problems of what the west routinely perceives to be spoiled and rich Saudi citizens.

Many Saudis do not fit this stereotype: they live on a meagre monthly salary of $800 in a country with no minimum wage. It’s true that many others are part-lured and part-forced into submission to royal power, with the promise and reality of royal largesse playing a big role. But the circumstances of most Saudis are very different from those of senior princes: a leaked document reveals that some of the latter were even in 1996 receiving monthly payments in excess of $270,000, supplemented by other handouts.

The opening

Many Saudi families use their resources to shelter their young members from the reality of marginalisation and unemployment. A small minority of young Saudis is searching for basic freedom from state authority, parental control, censorship, oppression and surveillance. Women, many of whom are educated and with rising expectations, are particularly active among this group. Indeed, women are the most frustrated category in Saudi society, and no wonder: 78% of unemployed women are university graduates (the figure among men is only 16%), and they are excluded from voting even in insignificant municipal elections.  

The internet provides a cathartic form of virtual escape for men and women alike. Some are courageous enough to go further. They include groups of veiled women that since 11 March gather in front of the interior ministry calling for their menfolk to be released from prison. The risks are great: an academic, Mubarak al-Zuaiyr, was granted a fifteen-minute meeting with a ministry official to ask about his imprisoned father, only to find himself held after interrogation.  

Missing Saudis is a video-clip published on YouTube and narrated by Ali al-Dhafiri, a Saudi journalist working for al-Jazeera. It highlights the plight of women and children whose husbands, sons and fathers are condemned to lengthy prison-terms. The clip will not be shown on al-Jazeera itself - Saudi prisoners do not make news, in part because most people in the west prefer to accept the official story that they are terrorists, sympathisers of terrorists, assisting terrorists or raising money for terrorists. Mutual interest and media deception combine to depict Saudi Arabia as a wealthy, prosperous and conservative society in which men and women worship God and their king.

The reality is different. Most Saudi prisoners are the nucleus of an emerging civil-society movement that poses more of a threat to the regime than the terrorism the latter created and then pretended to fight. This movement is familiarising people with ideas of entitlement, empowerment, human rights, and civil obligations. The movement is still fragmented but it is gathering momentum. Saudi citizens too are attempting to change their society for the better.

For a long time, championing the Palestinian cause with either the threat of war, large economic handouts, peace initiatives or even simple delusional rhetoric has been Arab dictators' most favorite road to celebrity status. Turkey and Iran are the contest's most recent arrivals. Unfortunately for Saudi Arabia's king and other aspiring rulers, this road has become a dead end. Neither the Palestinians nor the Arab masses are impressed by previous performance.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia proposed peace in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders. He pressed for the right of return for Palestinian refugees, and called for a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Israel did not accept. Five years later, the initiative's revival in March 2007 did not bring tangible results.

The aging 87-year-old Saudi monarch is a king of transition. It will not be long before a new king, most probably from the small circle of the seven Sudayri princes, replaces him. This will not bring about major Saudi foreign policy shifts vis-a-vis the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Saudi Arabia is not in a position to activate its involvement in conflict resolution at this time for several reasons.

Despite Saudi largesse, the country's influence has been shrinking in the Arab world. In Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, and more recently Egypt, the Saudi leadership lost acumen, long-established on the basis of sacred geography and black gold. More than any other Arab country, Saudi Arabia had a lot to lose as a result of Iran's rising influence in the region. Its equally aging foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, is looking frail and can hardly inspire confidence in a region that is experiencing a sudden political awakening triggered by youth bulges.

Since 2003, Saudi Arabia has lost all hope of bringing Iraq back to the Arab fold. Its involvement in the Iraqi elections proved futile in the face of Nour al-Maliki's new iron fist. When revolutions broke out in Tunisia and Egypt, Saudi Arabia became increasingly associated with a bygone era. Hosting one of the Arab world's most corrupt and brutal dictators, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia, meant that Saudi Arabia had begun to be seen as a safe haven for deposed autocrats. Saudi Arabia lost a close ally when Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak packed his suitcases and moved to Sharm al-Sheikh. The king was so devastated he offered to compensate Mubarak for the loss of US aid.

The country's relations with Syria have been fraught with suspicion and mistrust since Israel's war on Lebanon in 2006. When protests broke out in Deraa two weeks ago, Syrian sources alluded to a Saudi conspiracy against the regime in Damascus. Bashar al-Assad had called Arab leaders half men when they blamed Hizballah for the Lebanon conflagration. The Saudis went into a frenzy. Personal insults of this kind have a lasting impact on inter-Arab personalized politics. Saudi Arabia had always aspired, though unsuccessfully, to wean Syria off Iran's largesse.

Backing one Palestinian faction against another and remaining silent over the Israeli blockade of Gaza did little to endear the Saudi leadership to substantial sections of the Palestinian population. From the perspective of the Arab street, Turkey cared more about Palestinians than did the Saudi king. Since the 1979 Camp David agreement, Saudi Arabia has aspired to replace Egypt as the main orchestrator of a different peace. With its aging leadership and fading diplomacy, it has stagnated and become more and more irrelevant to the persistent conflict.

Today Saudi Arabia is looking to consolidate its position, not on the shores of the Mediterranean, but on those of the Persian Gulf. It moved troops to the small island of Bahrain to save the ruling al-Khalifa family and crush a peaceful protest movement demanding more political rights. Its own Shiite and Sunni population is looking increasingly agitated and ready to engage in street protest.

As the Bahraini demonstrations were being crushed, a more deadly protest movement started in Yemen. Saudi Arabia has long supported the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, but can no longer rest assured that he will remain in power. Saudi Arabia is facing external threats from its poor southern neighbor that has an armed population not so appreciative of Saudi interference in its affairs. From the Zaydi Huthis in the north to the separatists in the south, Yemenis have come to associate Saudi Arabia with meddling.

If the neighbors are troubled and troubling, the interior of the country is looking even bleaker. Inspired by the peaceful Egyptian pro-democracy movement, Saudi activists circulated more than two lengthy petitions calling for constitutional monarchy. Others called for the fall of the regime. Since March 11, the so-called "Day of Rage" organized by Saudi Facebook activists, the security sources have arrested more than 160 men and women, according to Human Rights Watch. Feeling the heat, the king distributed benefits worth $36 billion. Heavy policing and threats of the wrath of God from mosque minarets ensured that the demonstrations fail. Yet the leadership remains on edge. It has resorted to a "wait and see" policy at home and is flexing its muscles against the Shiites of Bahrain.

The internal Saudi scene, coupled with major external challenges, will confine Saudi Arabia to a marginal role in resurrecting the API in the near future. The only external force that can make a difference in this ongoing conflict, is in fact not Saudi Arabia, but a democratic Egypt. It may take several years to stabilize and return to its major regional role. But when it comes back, Egypt can make a difference, especially with a new political leadership untarnished by its contribution to the Israeli injustices inflicted on Palestinians.

In the long term, the obstacle remains the increasingly religious right-wing state of Israel. The growing "Judaization" of the conflict means that crises persist as compromises disappear. It has never been easy to divide the sacred or share it, but political compromises are always possible.

If there is a change in Israeli internal politics towards more rationality and away from religious mystification, Palestinians and Israelis will have a better chance of reaching the conclusion that they alone can make a lasting peace. Neither the Saudis nor other external players can offer them what they cannot offer each other.

The "no solution solution" may not be a viable option in times of regional turmoil. These autocrats have lived off this conflict for too long. To wait for Egypt is also not an option. Under the revolutionary law of contagion that has taken the region by surprise, the Palestinian human crisis may erupt in the face of Israel at any moment. Saudi Arabia will not be relevant as it is busy expanding eastward towards the Gulf. Saudi Arabia has many dilemmas. At the moment, Palestine is not one of them. -Published 6/4/2011 © bitterlemons-api.org

Saudi Arabia is ripe for change. Despite its image as a fabulously wealthy realm with a quiescent, apolitical population, it has similar economic, demographic, social, and political conditions as those prevailing in its neighboring Arab countries. There is no reason to believe Saudis are immune to the protest fever sweeping the region.

Saudi Arabia is indeed wealthy, but most of its young population cannot find jobs in either the public or private sector. The expansion of its $430 billion economy has benefited a substantial section of the entrepreneurial elite -- particularly those well connected with the ruling family -- but has failed to produce jobs for thousands of college graduates every year. This same elite has resisted employing expensive Saudis and contributed to the rise in local unemployment by hiring foreign labor. Rising oil prices since 2003 and the expansion of state investment in education, infrastructure, and welfare, meanwhile, have produced an explosive economy of desires.

Like their neighbors, Saudis want jobs, houses, and education, but they also desire something else. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003, they have expressed their political demands in their own way, through petitions that circulated and were signed by hundreds of activists and professionals, men and women, Sunnis, Shiites, and Ismailis. Reformers petitioned King Abdullah to establish an elected consultative assembly to replace the 120-member appointed Consultative Council Saudis inherited from King Fahd. Political organizers were jailed and some banned from travel to this day. The "Riyadh spring" that many reformers anticipated upon King Abdullah's accession in 2005 was put on hold while torrential rain swept away decaying infrastructure and people in major cities. Rising unemployment pushed the youth toward antisocial behavior, marriages collapsed, the number of bachelors soared, and the number of people under the poverty line increased in one of the wealthiest states of the Arab world. Today, nearly 40 percent of Saudis ages 20 to 24 are unemployed.

Meanwhile, scandal after scandal exposed the level of corruption and nepotism in state institutions. Princes promised to establish investigative committees, yet culprits were left unpunished. Criticism of the king and top ruling princes remained taboo, and few crossed the red line surrounding the substantial sacrosanct clique that monopolizes government posts from defense to sports. The number of political prisoners and prisoners of conscience swelled Saudi prisons. Under the pretext of the war on terror, the Saudi regime enjoyed a free hand. The interior minister, Prince Nayef, and his son and deputy, Prince Mohammed, rounded up peaceful activists, bloggers, lawyers, and academics and jailed them for extended periods. Saudis watched in silence while the outside world either remained oblivious to abuses of human rights or turned a blind eye in the interests of oil, arms, and investment.

"We are not Tunisia," "We are not Egypt," "We are not Libya," (and perhaps in a month's time, "We are not the Arab world" have become well-rehearsed refrains of official Saudi political rhetoric in recent weeks. There is some truth in this: Carrots are often the currency of loyalty in oil-rich countries, including its wealthiest kingdom. But the Saudi royal family uses plenty of sticks, too. Public relations firms in Riyadh, Washington, and London ensure that news of the carrots travels as far as possible, masking unpleasant realities in one of the least transparent and most authoritarian regimes in the Persian Gulf. What cannot be hidden anymore is the political, economic, and social problems that oil has so far failed to address.

When Saudis were poor and lagged behind the world in education, aspirations, and infrastructure, oil was the balm that healed all social wounds. The wave of coups d'état that swept the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s did not make much impression on Saudis, despite some agitation here and there. Few Saudis were impressed by the effervescence of Arab revolutionary or liberation movements. At the time, most Saudis lacked the education or inclination to question their government, apart from a handful of activists and agitators, including a couple of princes. By the 1970s, oil wealth was developing their taste for the consumer economy and the pleasures of cars, planes, running water, air-conditioning, and sunglasses. Political participation wasn't part of the package.

Today, oil remains abundant, but Saudis are different. They enjoy more consumption and liquidity than others in the Arab world, but less than those in neighboring Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Saudis are today looking for something else. They are young -- youth under 30 account for two-thirds of the Saudi population -- educated, connected, and articulate. Above all, they are familiar with the global discourse of democracy, freedom, entitlement, empowerment, transparency, accountability, and human rights that has exploded in the face of authoritarian regimes in the Arab world since January. They watch satellite channels like Al Jazeera and eagerly consume news from uprisings around the region.

So far young Saudis have occupied their own "Liberation Square" on a virtual map. In the 1990s their exiled Islamist opposition used the fax machine to bombard the country with messages denouncing the leadership and calling for a return to pristine Islam. Later, a wider circle of politicized and nonpoliticized young Saudis ventured into Internet discussion boards, chat rooms, blogs, and more recently Facebook and Twitter to express themselves, mobilize, and share grievances. These virtual spaces have become natural homes for both dissenting voices and government propaganda. Recently the king's private secretary and chief of the royal court, Khaled al-Tuwaijri, launched his own Facebook page.

Saudis thought that they were safe in their virtual world, but the regime has been determined to trace each and every word and whisper that challenges its version of reality. Young bloggers, writers, and essayists have been jailed for asking simple questions like: Who is going to be king after Abdullah? Where is oil wealth going? Who is responsible for corruption scandals associated with arms deals? Why do the king and crown prince take turns leaving the country? Why are Abdullah's so-called reforms thwarted by his brother Prince Nayef? And who is the real ruler of Saudi Arabia? All unanswered taboo questions.

On Feb. 23, King Abdullah, 87 and frail, having spent three months abroad undergoing from two operations in New York and recuperating in Morocco, was brought back to Riyadh amid a package of welfare promises worth $36 billion. These were for the most part a rather transparent attempt to appease the burgeoning youth population and deflect it from the lure of revolution -- public-sector salary increases, unemployment benefits, and subsidies for housing, education, and culture.

In years past, such handouts have been welcomed by a population that has grown used to royal largesse, but now the economy of unmet desires is raising the bar. The king, too old and too weak, may have misread the level of disappointment among many Saudis of all political persuasions, who are voicing their complaints on the Internet. The common thread is a demand for genuine political reform. All signs suggest that Saudis are in a rush to seize this unprecedented opportunity to press for serious political change. The response to King Abdullah's handouts on Saudi Facebook sites is the refrain "Man cannot live by bread alone."

Of course, it's not just liberals who are demanding change. A couple of weeks before the king's return, a group of Saudi academics and professionals announced the establishment of a Salafi Islamic Ummah Party and launched a web site. Reformist Salafists are calling for democracy, elections, and respect for human rights. Five of the founding members were immediately put in jail. The king's brother, Prince Talal, disenchanted and politically marginalized but extremely wealthy, went on BBC Arabic television to praise the king and criticize other powerful royal players, the so-called Sudairi Seven (including Crown Prince Sultan, the defense minister; Prince Nayef, the interior minister; and Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh) without naming them. He revived his 1960s call for constitutional monarchy, which is now being endorsed by some Saudi activists. To date, 119 activists have signed the petition calling for constitutional monarchy. More petitions signed by a cross section of Saudi professionals, academics, and journalists are circulating on the Internet. A broad swatch of Saudi society is now demanding political change.

If Saudis do respond to calls for demonstrations and rise above the old petition syndrome, the majority will be young freethinkers who have had enough of the polarization of Saudi Arabia into two camps: a liberal and an Islamist one, with the Al-Saud family presiding over the widening gap between the two. They want political representation and economic opportunities. An elected parliament is demanded by all.

So far, Saudi Shiites have remained relatively silent, with only minor protests in the Eastern Province. Having watched the Feb. 14 massacre in Bahrain's Pearl Roundabout, they may hesitate to act alone. If they do, it would be quite easy for the regime to mobilize the Sunni majority and crush their protest, exactly as it did in 1979. In fact, the Shiites would do the regime a great favor at a critical moment when its legitimacy among the majority of Sunnis in the country cannot be taken for granted.

The Shiites may have to wait until they form solid coalitions with mainstream Saudi society to remove any sectarian dimension to their demands. The Hijazis along the western coast would be natural allies, as their complaints about the poor infrastructure of their main city Jeddah may act as a catalyst to push for more political rights and autonomy. A liberal constituency there would be more receptive to overtures from the Shiites of the Eastern Province. If Jeddah and Qatif were to unite in their demands, Riyadh would look more isolated than at any other time. It has many supporters among its historical Najdi constituency, but even they are flirting with the global discourse of freedom. And now some Salafists, the puritanical literal interpreters of Islam, are calling for a real shura, in other words democracy.

It seems that the kingdom is at a crossroads. It must either formulate a serious political reform agenda that will assuage an agitated young population or face serious upheavals over the coming months. To respond to public demands, the agenda should above all start with a written constitution, limit the rule of the multiple royal circles of power within the state, regulate royal succession, inaugurate an elected parliament, and open up the political sphere to civil society organizations. Hiding behind Islamic rhetoric such as "Our constitution is the Quran" is no longer a viable escape route. Many Saudis are disenchanted with both official and dissident Islam. They want a new political system that matches their aspirations, education, and abilities, while meeting their basic human, civil, and political rights.

Like other falling Arab regimes before them, the ruling Al-Saud will inevitably seek to scare the population by raising the spectre of al Qaeda and warning against tribal, regional, and sectarian disintegration. They will try to thwart political change before it starts. Saudis may not believe the scaremongers. The command centers of the Arab revolutions today are not the caves of Tora Bora or Riyadh's shabby al-Suwaidi neighborhood, where jihadists shot BBC journalist Frank Gardner and his cameraman in 2004. They are the laptops of a young, connected, knowledgeable, but frustrated generation that is rising against the authoritarian public and private families that have been crushing the individual in the pursuit of illusions and control.

Yes, Egypt was key to the coming change, but when Saudis rise they will change the face of the Arab world and its relations with the West forever. Now is the time for the United States and its allies to understand that the future does not lie with the old clique that they have tolerated, supported, and indulged in return for oil, security, and investment. At a time of shifting Arabian sands, it is in the interest of America and the rest of the world to side with the future not the past.