On the eve of the Arab uprisings, Saudi Islamists had already reinvented themselves as peaceful activists seeking reform of the regime from within. During the uprisings they reclaimed their position on the map of Saudi Arabia.  They developed their own strategies in order to remain relevant and central to any debate about the future of the country.  The Arab uprisings reinvigorated them as two Islamist parties came to power - al-Nahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.  At the same time they supported the struggle of Tunisian, Egyptian, Libyan, Yemeni and Syrian activists whom they dubbed Sahwa Islamiyya, (Islamic awakening). Many Saudi Islamists saw the Syrian uprising through the lens of sectarian politics and considered the Syrian rebels defenders of Sunni revival against the hegemony of a minority Alawite regime.  On the Bahraini uprising, Saudi Islamists concurred with the Saudi regime that described the Bahraini revolution as a Shia-Iranian conspiracy to undermine the security of the Gulf.  They also condemned the Saudi Shia uprising in the oil-rich Eastern Province.  They accused the Shia of opportunism and blamed them for provoking the regime to increase oppression and arrest among their own activists.

Unlike the majority of official Saudi religious scholars, veteran Islamist Salman al-Awdah (born 1956) anchored peaceful collective revolutionary action in an Islamic framework and reached out for humanist interpretations that assimilate Western intellectual positions with his own Salafi orientation.  He surprised his audiences as when he published As’ilat al-Thawra (Questions of Revolution) in 2012. Al-Awdah rehabilitated revolution after decades of Sunni religious scholars associating it with instability, chaos and danger.  This book put him in a position different from both traditional official Saudi ulama and Jihadi ideologues, who had adopted violent strategies locally and globally.  Needless to say the book was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia, prompting the author to circulate it on the internet.  In this book, al-Awdah’s engagement with the question of revolution brought him back as a relevant figure at a critical moment in the Saudi and Arab public sphere.  The eruption of unforeseen and unexpected revolutions needed an Islamic endorsement, interpretation and justification.  Al-Awdah swiftly seized the opportunity and improvised a text that moved away from the duality of the permissible and prohibited in Islamic political theology.

Al-Awdah fuses western political thinking on revolutions by Marx, Popper and Fanon with his own Islamic Salafi heritage, producing a hybrid discourse that aims to reach beyond religious study circles.  He defines revolution as building on the past, reform and reconstruction rather than destruction.  It always starts peacefully but may later become militarised when confronted with oppression.  Simply phrased, revolution is a fruit that ‘may ripen, dry prematurely or be belatedly harvested.’

Al-Awdah proposes to go beyond the duality of total obedience to rulers or military revolt.  His ‘third way’ centres on ‘organised collective action that regulates political opposition and accountability.’  The social contract, exemplified by the English Magna Carta, represents in al-Awdah’s thinking an early example of limiting monarchical powers and asserting individual rights.  The strategy that collective action requires is not necessarily violent.  Revolutionary attire, slogans and hunger strikes prove to be efficient and justified steps in a peaceful revolution.  He acknowledges the diversity of al-jamahir, the critical Arab publics behind the revolutions.

On the sharia in a post-revolutionary phase, al-Awdah calls for gradual application in an attempt not to burden societies after revolutionary upheaval, a burden that may precipitate total rejection.  Post-revolutionary justice requires accepting the diversity of Arab publics opinion. This justice requires reconciliation with all sectors in society including supporters of deposed regimes: as the Prophet said, ‘go, you are free’.

He warns against raising slogans such as demanding the immediate application of sharia, thus capitalising on people’s emotional dispositions.  The purpose of sharia is to establish justice, protect property and guard lives.

Al-Awdah asserts that in Islam there is no scope for a theocracy, the rule of Islamic jurists.  The Islamic state is a contractual project between people on the basis of a civil contract.  In his opinion, democracy proves to be better than autocracy.  He calls for representation of the people, freedom and civil society.  Why should Muslims accept autocracy and reject democracy if the latter proves to be the best available option simply because it is a western import, he asks. Democracy promises to be inclusive. Pluralism is a precondition for just government. He warns against alienating sectarian and ethnic minorities, a potentially dangerous strategy that triggers foreign intervention and civil war.  He calls for respecting minority rights within a democratic framework.

While hesitating to call for revolution in Saudi Arabia, many Saudi Islamists have learnt hard lessons from a decade of terror that was displaced by peaceful collective action across the Arab world. It remains to be seen whether these new Saudi intellectual mutations will lay the foundation for a new era in an age of hybridity and pluralism. From the heartland of Salafism, Islamists are beginning to engage with this hybridity thanks to those Arab masses who have opened a new chapter in their struggle for freedom, dignity and social justice.

Madawi Al-Rasheed is Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King’s College, London. Her most recent publications include A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia (CUP 2013), Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (CUP 2007), and a History of Saudi Arabia (CUP 2010). 

Source: http://www.al-monitor.com

Saudi Arabia is neither an island of tranquility in a turbulent Arab sea nor a country on the verge of revolution. Rather, it is a kingdom in regression, plagued by regular reshuffling of princes and lacking energetic leadership with a serious vision for the future. Its aging king, Abdullah, has had two of his most senior brothers, Minister of Interior Naif and Minister of Defense Sultan, die within the last two years while he continues to hold on to the reins of power as an honorable senior member of an expanding clan-turned-corporation. All King Abdullah can do these days is micromanage the demands of the second-generation princes eager to secure a political post after his death, hence he regularly reshuffles.

Political posts in senior ministries bring not only power and privilege, but also incredible wealth, as ministers buy services and equipment for the state under conditions of opaqueness and corruption. The most recent reshuffle involved the sacking of Deputy Defense Minister Prince Khalid ibn Sultan, known as the Desert Warrior when he was head of the armed forces in the 1990–91 Gulf War, and his replacement with Prince Fahd ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammd ibn Abdulrahman. In January 2013, the powerful governor of the Eastern Province, Muhammad ibn Fahd, was relieved of his duties and replaced by Saud ibn Naif, the brother of the minister of interior, Muhammad ibn Naif, both descendants of the once powerful, but now-deceased Naif. These appointments put the Naif clan in charge of internal security and oil, the most important foundations for the survival of the Saudi monarchy.
Such reshuffles are bound to accelerate in the future, simply because the first rank of the royal clan is advanced in age, and each senior prince wants to ensure that his mini-fiefdom survives his death. Nothing will ensure this except the placement of a son in a senior government position. Needless to say, these reshuffles are a private family affair, with ordinary Saudis serving as mere spectators on the receiving end of sudden decisions. Saudi citizens have never had a say in such matters, which are driven by the balance of power between powerful clans within the Saudi royal family.
Saudis can only speculate why the king has sacked this or that prince and appointed another. Such curiosity surfaced when Khalid ibn Sultan was removed from the deputyship of the Ministry of Defense in April this year. Rumors circulated that he had "expired," with his performance deteriorating, especially when he mobilized the Saudi army against the Yemeni Houthis, who were able to trespass on Saudi territory. When Muhammad ibn Fahd was removed from the governorship of Eastern Province, it was attributed to his mishandling of the Shia riots that erupted in 2011.
It would be inaccurate, however, to assume that these reshufflings are solely a function of princely bad performance, as princes are not subject to regular appraisals. Many Saudi princes remain glued to their government chairs despite old age, illness and mismanagement in their jobs. Minister of Foreign Affairs Prince Saud al-Faisal, for example, has been in his post since 1975. Many princes are at the center of machinations involving serious fraud and corruption, yet remain in their positions unaffected by international media reporting on these affairs, which remain taboo in the local press.
The princely reshuffles are a function of the circulation of elites in a balanced and orchestrated game. Bringing a prince into a senior job and then dismissing him to appoint another one is the way power and wealth are distributed among a large circle of princely contenders. The king’s role has become to ensure fair play and occasional access to wealth and power. While all Saudi princes are recipients of monthly salaries, the value of which depends upon their seniority and closeness to the main al-Saud line, such salaries are no longer enough. They must be combined with government and administrative jobs, not to mention business interests on the sidelines to the extent of dominating the private sector through camouflaged companies and franchises.
While senior princes and their sons are reserved positions at the important ministries, minor princes are rewarded with soft power that allows them access to funds and constituencies. From patronizing youth and sport to tourism and literary salons, the lesser princes are thus also given a sense of their royal status. Even more important, they become stakeholders and thus have an interest in not rocking the boat and avoiding dissent. As long as there is imagination and money, there will be enough titles and posts created to absorb the growing number of second- and third-generation princes.
The indeterminate Saudi system of succession remains vague while claiming to honor the principle that only the most able is chosen for the highest position, including, for example, the kingship. So far, seniority has not been respected, as senior sons of the founder of the kingdom, Ibn Saud, have been in the past overlooked as contenders for the throne. Both brothers of King Abdullah, Mishal and Talal, have been surpassed as possible future kings despite their seniority. Such an indeterminate system creates apprehension, as no prince can take it for granted that he is second in line.
Moreover, the system creates the illusion that all princes have an equal chance of one day becoming king or crown prince. This uncertainly raises the hopes of a large circle of princes, especially at this time, when the first-generation princes are in decline. Young princes constantly occupy a waiting list for future jobs, which means that no one is willing to undermine the system just in case he is second in line for a coveted reward.
Both apprehension and illusion keep the al-Saud princes under control despite the noises some of them occasionally make to express dissatisfaction with their exclusion. This applies in particular to Prince Talal, who occasionally gives media interviews to voice his disagreement with arrangements in which he does not seem to be given any serious political responsibility. Yet, despite his exclusion from politics, Talal has little to complain about since he was lavishly rewarded with money and privilege that led to his son al-Waleed becoming a global business tycoon. Talal, like other princes, will nonetheless remain under the illusion that one day he may become king simply because of the unpredictability of the Saudi succession system.
The proliferation of second- and third-generation princes is destined to make Saudi Arabia a kingdom with multiple heads. Although King Faisal succeeded in centralizing the Saudi state in the 1960s and 1970s, his surviving brothers may have to live with a decentralized monarchy consisting of multiple fiefdoms, each led by the descendants of the main Saudi royal branches. They may need only an honorary king, a role that King Abdullah has been playing since 2005. The days of a centralized absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia are giving way to a decentralized autocratic and secretive family corporation.

Madawi Al-Rasheed (MAR): First, the banality of superficial opinions on Saudi women that is so pervasive. In the public sphere, especially in the West, Saudi women are either superstars or victims of their own society and religion. I felt it was time to contribute to this debate from an academic perspective. I do not want to write a book that celebrates the achievement of Saudi women, seeks pity, or even condemns them to the duality of victim/survivor. As a woman with a Saudi background, I feel that we share with other women a certain degree of discrimination and have our own grievances as Saudis. I also feel uncomfortable with the category of “women” as a homogeneous undifferentiated mass. Class, ethnicity, and religious affiliations cut across this category that is varied, stratified, and experiences discrimination in different ways. So the book reflects my own personal journey first, and second, my academic interests.

My previous work always had an awareness of the construction of gender, and the role of women in politics, society, and religion. Since my PhD research in the 1980s, I allowed women their place in my political and historical narratives about the Saudi past and present. More recently, in A History of Saudi Arabia (2002 and 2010), I demonstrated how women feature in the legitimacy narratives of the state and its quest to merge with society as a result of marriage. In A Most Masculine State, I gave this awareness the attention it deserves by situating gender at the center of debates about politics and religion. I have thought about this book for years. It became an urgent project as the Saudi “woman question” has ceased to be merely a local issue and has become a truly global concern. This was an outcome of Saudi internal challenges and external pressure, especially after 9/11, when Saudi Arabia came to the forefront, not simply as an oil producing territory, but as a contested country.

J: What particular topics, issues and literatures does it address?

MAR: The book tries to resolve the debate about whether society, culture, and religion are responsible for the extreme marginalization of Saudi women in the public sphere. I argue that neither Wahhabi Islam nor a tribal ethos is alone sufficient a variable for explaining inequality in Saudi Arabia. Instead, my argument situates this discrimination in the evolution of the state from one relying on religious revival to one anchored in religious nationalism. Under the state, Wahhabiyya became a religious nationalist movement, playing a similar role to that of secular nationalism in Arab countries where secular Arab nationalism was promoted. Nationalism in both situations tends to appropriate women, turn them into symbols, objectify them, and make them the criteria for measuring sometimes contradictory outcomes. Women are central to political and religious projects. In the process of serving the nation, they lose control over their destiny and become subject to other people’s projects.

I also problematize the role of oil in the book. It is true that the oil surplus allowed women education and welfare services, but it has also contributed to their further marginalization and exclusion from the labour force, and has even contributed to increasing state control through the use of surveillance technology and expansion of institutions such as the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice. Without oil, the Saudi state would not have been able to maintain sex segregation, control, and surveillance in public spaces. Oil is therefore a mixed blessing.

At another level, as Saudi women’s organizations and civil society are still curtailed, I found myself using the abundant women’s literature, for example novels, in which women have found a niche to express dissent, resistance, and subversion of the status quo. I examined these novels from an anthropological rather than literary criticism perspective. Saudi women’s novels blur the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. This became clear when I started interviewing novelists and discussing issues wider than literature.

The book engages with academic work in gender studies, feminist theory, and politics. It also has a diachronic dimension to allow tracing change and continuity, especially in a country that has undergone dramatic social change over a short period.

J: How does this work connect to and/or depart from your previous research and writing?

MAR: I consider the book as illustrating an approach I have adopted in my previous work. I always combine history and anthropology to understand the present. Yet the book differs from my earlier work in two ways: first, its subject matter (the centrality of gender relations); and second, its wide range of sources, such as textual documents, interviews, and even internet sources. The latter became important as women’s mobilization migrated or was forced to migrate to the virtual world. The internet has become a refuge for dissenting voices through Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube; all are incorporated in my analysis. These new sources represent a challenge to research, but together with other sources, they actually illuminate new areas, especially youth mobilization, resistance, and subversion.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MAR: As the book is written in English, its prime audiences are English speakers. Academics and students would obviously be the first to read it, but I hope that its topic and style will encourage policy makers, journalists, activists, and other interested civil society organizations to read it, too. The book offers an interpretive approach to understanding the complexity of Saudi society. I hope the book will be translated into Arabic, as my other books have been, so that it can reach Arabic speakers in general and Saudis in particular. They will find reflections on developments that they live in their everyday life, but written from afar. In particular, Saudi women of all political and ideological persuasions, from liberals to Islamists to undecided ones, will hear their voices in this book.

J: What methodologies did you use to gather information from Saudi women on questions of equality and recognition in the current public sphere?

MAR: My textual sources include government publications, novels, media interviews, and statistics from NGOs and international organizations.

I complemented those with interviews. I have travelled in the Middle East to meet Saudi women and interview them. When this was not possible, we talked on Skype and exchanged emails and tweets. Sometimes, women themselves contacted me, seeking to inset their stories in the book as soon as I published short articles while still researching the topic. They sent me documents in which evidence of their plight was documented. Some women wrote their own life histories and sent them to me. I even met women royals and wives of princes who wanted to talk about certain issues. Of course, I could not have used all this material, as it can be confidential, but the stories informed my understanding of gender relations in my own country.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MAR: At the moment, I am recovering from writing a Most Masculine State and enjoying the company of my students after two years of absence under the Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

I have plans to start a new research project on topics that have become urgent with the Arab uprisings: for example, the body and political dissent. The body as a weapon, consent, and dissent appeal to me as ways to trace historical shifts and contemporary transformations.

Excerpt from A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics and Religion in Saudi Arabia

Authoritarian States and Women: Low Cost, High Profit

Weaving the story of Saudi women’s exclusion together with religion and politics opens new avenues for contextualizing and interpreting why authoritarian states such as Saudi Arabia champion women’s causes. While in the past Saudi religious nationalism dictated the position of women and insisted on their seclusion, today the state promotes women’s empowerment. The cost of this about-face remains low compared with the high cost of losing international legitimacy, internal political dissent, and, eventually, revolution. Women’s empowerment under King Abdullah coincided with the advent of many new challenges, both internal and external, to the Saudi state. Terrorism, strained relations with the United States—the guarantor of the security of the regime—rising unemployment, an agitated youth bulge, and more recently a changed Arab world where friendly dictators may appear a thing of the past are but a few of the real threats facing the ageing Saudi leadership. And, through both real and virtual mobilization, women themselves are challenging the state to act on their many grievances. International human rights reports continue to embarrass Saudi Arabia in the global community, not to mention sensational stories about women flogged for driving or victims of rape stoned while their attackers go unpunished. The state can no longer hide behind the rhetoric of Islamic specificity, as many women themselves are aware that Islam alone does not explain their persistent marginalization.

In this changed context, the king has shifted the legitimacy of the ruling family to a new level, seeking to feminize the masculine state. From the point of view of the state, women are needed as a group in order to fight political dissent (by men) and appease the West. The state is playing on women’s aspirations and co-opting their mobilization to achieve new local and external legitimacy. Faced with new mobilization around several campaigns, from driving to employment rights, as discussed above, it has pre-empted the outcome by patronizing women and channelling their activism towards state-controlled objectives. This culminated in promising women the right to vote in the future and to be appointed to state institutions, all announced during the Arab Spring.

Moreover, women’s causes do not directly challenge authoritarian rule. When the state decided that its religious nationalism had become a burden on state security and survival, it immediately championed women’s causes as a means to defeat those Islamists who challenge it using both peaceful and violent means. It reached out to new liberal and democratic political constituencies, consisting of both men and women, that have emerged in the country over the last decade. In this respect, the authoritarian state kills two birds with one woman. It contrasts itself with the radical backward and conservative elements in society while appealing to dissenting liberal voices. As such, the Saudi state has been compelled to champion women’s causes to achieve its local and international objectives. Since 2005 King Abdullah has joined past rulers in the Arab and Muslim world to become a gender reformer, seeking new legitimacy through the women’s question. The king’s old age and marginality within the royal circles of power also prompted him to seek new loyal subjects, who had been marginalized in the past. Women have proved to be receptive.

If the authoritarian state benefits from championing women’s causes, why do women ally themselves with authoritarian patriarchal structures to achieve more rights and visibility while others invite the state to maintain the status quo? Saudi women have not been able to gain the consensus of their society behind their emancipation. In fact, some women resist the idea, and seek greater restrictions on what they consider to be threatening their own interest as women. Given such a lack of unity, weak groups such as liberal women seek state intervention and protection to avoid reprisals from society. This is compounded by the fact that women are denied the right to organize themselves into an autonomous pressure group. In fact, Saudi Arabia remains one of the countries where civil society is curtailed by a legal system that does not leave great space for non-governmental organizations to operate outside state control. Even women’s charities are heavily controlled by the state through extensive princely patronage networks. Saudi women of all persuasions look for the state to increase its policing of men, restrain their excesses, and force them to fulfil their obligations and responsibilities towards women. In such a political context, Saudi women are left with limited choices. An authoritarian state proved to be willing to endorse some of their demands, increase their visibility, and free them from the many restrictions that they are subjected to. The power of the state and its wealth have proved too good to resist.

This book showed that a most masculine state is today, at critical moments of historical crisis, compelled to espouse its own feminization. It is not possible to maintain a purely masculine state, continuing to ignore feminine voices. By championing women’s causes the authoritarian Saudi state may in the short term have succeeded in containing women’s mobilisation. But in the long term no doubt Saudi women like other women in the world will try to move beyond state-sponsored feminism and achieve their dream of becoming full citizens. The journey may be long and arduous, but it has certainly started. The voices of the many Saudi women discussed in this book represent light at the end of the tunnel. This book was an attempt to capture this light.

Bil3afya: After the Arab Spring, how do you place women struggles in the Gulf and Maghreb regions?
Madawi Al-Rasheed: The Arab uprisings brought about the well-known struggles of women in both the Gulf and the Maghreb that was fermenting in the twentieth century. In the Maghreb, women were part of national struggles for liberation throughout the anti-colonial struggles but failed to gain rights after decolonization with the exception of some measures under the discourse of modernization and nationalism. They were disappointed with the patronage of male national elites and felt betrayed by the state feminism that dominated the policies of many Maghreb governments. They participated in the recent uprisings throughout North Africa from Cairo to Rabat, moving beyond slogans that touch them as women to national politics, and demonstrating the limits of state feminism under dictatorships. They proved that they are not a homogenous mass but differentiated by class, education and economic situation. They showed diversity in solutions they sought to improve the conditions of the entire nation rather than simply one section of society. They were Islamists, liberals and ideologically non-committed individuals who simply wanted freedom, dignity and justice. After the success of the revolts, they reverted back to their niches as activists grounded in one position, which threatens to divide not only the cause of emancipation but also the nation itself. I hope the opening of the political systems allows women of all political persuasions to voice their dissent without the threat of arrest or even death.

In the Gulf, we have old examples of Kuwaiti and Bahraini women being at the forefront of old national struggles and emancipation. Unfortunately, governments in these countries managed to co-opt women's mobilization and replace it with state feminism, which reflects the move to making women more visible but without power to change their situation and that of their society. Authoritarian rulers thought that a woman's face give dictatorship a soft internationally appreciated look. Hence women were appointed to high positions but without the whole nation having reached the level of political representations and elected governments. In the Saudi situation, women have been late comers to the struggle and unfortunately because the government wanted to co-opt them they became a token for the improvement of authoritarian rule.  Women in Saudi Arabia are weak at the level of organization as they are denied the right to establish their own civil society, or women student associations, trade unions or similar civil society. Also society still resists granting women more rights. So in this situation, women have opted to bargain with the state, accept the roles of the game and hope that they will have a window of opportunity. Having said that, women are beginning to develop a consciousness that is articulated in their writings, blogs, novels and other mediums. Some women have participated in demonstrations seeking freedom and justice for political prisoners. Like men, they have become targets and attacked and imprisoned by security forces.

In general, the Arab uprisings led to breaking the taboo of women in the public sphere demonstrating and asking for rights. Women across the Arab world are sharing their experiences and images of revolt that will spread this consciousness beyond national borders.

Bil3afya: The two regions are almost alien to each other; do you see value in a shared dialogue?
Madawi Al-Rasheed: The Maghreb and the Gulf have never been alien to each other in old and recent times. Families from the Maghreb have lived in the Hijaz for example for generations and people from the Gulf have travelled to the Maghreb for years. The two regions have a lot in common but also have many differences. These are social, linguistic and cultural, in addition to the differences that were introduced by colonial powers, the French in the Maghreb and the British and later Americans in the Gulf.  While governments have their own reasons for dialogue, mainly economic and security concerns, people also have their interests revolving around economic opportunities, education, tourism, and other shared interests. The remaining Arab countries without a serious Arab Spring will have to get rid of the structures of authoritarian rule before they can actually benefit from the opening of the public sphere in the post Arab Spring countries. The exchanges are already taking place in conferences and intellectual forums.

Bil3afya: You always emphasize that a woman struggle in "Saudi Arabia" cannot succeed if separated from the general political struggle. Don't you see your approach problematic as it discourages women from stepping in?
Madawi Al-Rasheed: Women will never get full recognition if their struggle remains an isolated women's issue. No society can proceed with all its people oppressed but with one half more oppressed than the other half. The Saudi regime wants us to believe that we only have a problem of women but in fact there is a serious problem with how both men and women are oppressed and remain without political participation and formal representative institutions. I cannot accept that because I am a woman I am only allowed to talk about women's issues, which some Saudi women have accepted. This remains their choice and their bargain with the oppressive regime. As I am abroad, I am not under any pressure to reach a bargain with a regime that does not only oppress me but oppress my brother, father, etc.

Bil3afya: Tell us some of your observations after your recent visits to Tunisia and Morocco?
Madawi Al-Rasheed: On my two visits to Tunisia and Morocco recently, I noticed one troubling fact, the sheer number of young men and women roaming the streets, sitting in cafes doing nothing apart from watching the world go by. I am talking here about the economic situation which is really bad. Unemployment is the enemy of youth and must be dealt with as soon as possible. But at the same time, I saw defiant youth, proud and self-assured, convinced of their ability to change their world by action. They deserve to be proud unlike their counterparts in for example Saudi Arabia where consumption and illusions have dominated their thinking and have led to them begging jobs and waiting for royal largesses. Saudi youth need to learn lessons from Tunisian youth about how to seek rights by action rather than simply from the luxury of twitter on the IPAD. I am proud of other young men in Bahrain and Kuwait as they proved to be political actors who cannot be fooled by royal promises. One day, Saudi men and women will join them in celebrating their emancipation and empowerment.
                                                               
Bil3afya: What do you think of the GCC's attempts to make a union of monarchies that includes Morocco and Jordan?
Madawi Al-Rasheed: Gulf monarchies especially Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Kuwait must listen to their own people before staging the illusion of unions that only serve security purposes. There is an Arab unity that the Arab Spring enhanced at the level of society and youth culture but the governments are so far behind as always. We will continue to be one people with diverse cultures and social life but there is something beyond this diversity that refuses to go away, a feeling of common destiny! It is this destiny and brotherhood that makes me feel at home in Rabat, Tunis and Cairo. Dictators can never take that away from us Arabs or even circle it as a fake union that may not have real existence except among those who want to have solidarity against the people and their struggles for a better life.

ANNOUNCING

DEMYSTIFYING THE CALIPHATE

Last spring, a young Saudi named Muhammad al-Wadani posted a YouTube video of himself calling for democracy, human rights, and more jobs. Echoing Egyptian protesters, he declared, “The people want the downfall of the regime.” On March 7, shortly before a national day of protest planned online, he emerged from the al-Rajhi mosque in central Riyadh with a group of followers. Smiling and wearing an immaculate long white shirt, he held high a sign calling for peaceful demonstration. He was soon overwhelmed by plainclothes and bearded security forces who dragged him into their car and drove him to an unknown location.

Al-Wadani’s Dawasir tribal elders rushed to Riyadh to renew their allegiance to the regime. They issued a statement disowning their son as irresponsible and prey to outside influence. In the Arabian Peninsula, defying the aging leadership amounts to the rejection of parental authority and God. The consequences are banishment and withdrawal of family support, protection, and financial help.

The message was clear. March 11—the intended “Day of Rage”—came and went without mass protest. Al-Wadani disappeared without a trace.

Those Saudis expecting the Arab Spring to bloom in their country were no doubt disappointed. Using its classic strategies—anti-Shia religious rhetoric, a powerful and Western-trained security force, and economic handouts—the regime crushed any signs of an uprising.

The success of this carefully orchestrated response shows stark differences between Abdullah’s kingdom and the recently fallen dictatorships of the Arab world. Unlike Egypt and Tunisia, Saudi Arabia has no civil society of any significance. As a result, online calls to protest—beloved of so many “cyber-utopians”—had no place to take root.

This is how the revolutionaries were swept away with the sandstorms.

• • •

Frustration among Saudis has deep roots. Since the start of his reign in 2005, King Abdullah has promised reform. But, despite those promises, Saudi Arabia remains an oil corporation run by a large royal dynasty. The regime has much in common with a private family business: it subcontracts certain functions to outsiders, who in turn develop a vested interest in the firm’s success. For example, Saudi Arabia subcontracts its security to the United States and other Western players that rely on its oil.

At the age of 87, King Abdullah has assumed the role of the honorary patriarch. His half brother, Crown Prince Nayif, controls internal security. His other half-brother, Prince Salman, has controlled the Ministry of Defense since the death of Crown Prince Sultan last October. During the reign of King Faisal (1964–1975), Saudi Arabia was a highly centralized absolute monarchy, but in the last three decades it has become more diffuse, run by first-, second-, and third-generation princes, all descendants of the founder, King Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, who died in 1953.

The Al-Saud dynasty rules a country sitting on the world’s largest proven oil reserves. The regime bans political parties and independent civil society organizations; restricts human rights; directs the judiciary; and, with the help of Western expertise and surveillance technology, commands extensive security and intelligence services.

Al-Saud princes dominate major state and social institutions—not just defense and internal security, but foreign affairs, sports, literary salons, embassies, charities, and universities. The regime claims there is no need for representative government or a written constitution because Saudis have direct access to their leaders in informal open councils, majlis, and the constitution is the Qur’an. Appointed governor-princes who report to the minister of interior rule the provinces.

With the consolidation of dynastic rule, Saudi subjects have been increasingly marginalized and disempowered. Tribal chiefs, religious scholars, and regional elites, who once were strong enough to exert pressure on the ruling family, have become regime functionaries. Policy is largely the prerogative of senior princes who control state institutions, not of technocrats.

Between 2000 and 2010, as Saudi oil revenues grew, activists presented several petitions to the king and key princes asking for political reform. There was no response. The leadership has typically answered such demands by arresting activists, co-opting them, or simply ignoring them. Instead of economic reform, the regime prefers to distribute benefits through development schemes. This approach may have near-term political benefits, but it has failed to stem unemployment. The official unemployment rate is above 10 percent, with unofficial estimates as high has 30 percent.

Transparency International consistently ranks Saudi Arabia high on the list for corruption. On personal and religious freedom, Saudi Arabia’s record is equally bad; it even lags behind other Arab and Gulf countries, according to Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and other human rights observers. Its universities remain underdeveloped, failing to prepare graduates for a competitive job market. The country hosts over 8 million expatriate workers. Despite successive “Saudization” programs aimed at increasing the employment of natives in the private sector, only 13 percent of private sector workers are Saudi. Women are hardest hit by unemployment; 78 percent of women graduates are unemployed, compared to 16 percent of men.

The Al-Saud dynasty runs the country much like a private family business.

It is in this context of repression and economic hardship that planning for the ill-fated Day of Rage commenced. It was preceded by two online petitions that began circulating after the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The regime moved quickly to censor the sites hosting the petitions, but hundreds rushed to sign them. Echoing a 2003 petition, the 2011 “Declaration of National Reform” demanded the regime’s gradual evolution toward constitutional monarchy with a written constitution, independent civil society, and elected local government in the provinces.

The demand for independent civil society demonstrates a lack of faith in existing organizations, such as the government-appointed human rights associations. And the interest in regional autonomy reflects recent corruption scandals related to land development and confiscation, which led to serious flooding and deaths in several Saudi cities. In February of last year, ten people drowned in Jeddah and hundreds of houses were swept away.

Immediately after this petition was posted, a diverse group of moderate Islamists and activists released a second. Reiterating a commitment to Islamic principles, this petition made no call for constitutional monarchy or regional government. The new petition, “Toward a State of Institutions and Rights,” asked for an elected national assembly, an independent prime minister, an end to administrative corruption, freedom of speech, independent associations, release of all political prisoners, and the lifting of a travel ban applied to activists. Within days, the petition attracted more than 5,000 signatures.

While the first petition attracted a “liberal” constituency, the second one had more Islamists among its signatories. The first appealed to civil and human rights while the second invoked Islamic rhetoric.

Both petitions were moderate. Neither called for the overthrow of the regime. Nor did they call for public demonstrations. In each case, authors were careful not to involve open opposition outside Saudi Arabia—for example, from the U.K.-based Sunni Islamist group MIRA, the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia.

Reformers told me that they refrained from taking a more radical stance to avoid arrest and accusations of sewing chaos or working with “outside agents.” Signatories insisted on staying close to previous reform agendas and pledged allegiance to the king. Most of the activists were either well-known veterans of reform, such as Muhammad Said al-Tayib and Abdullah al-Hamid, or young people who spread the petitions on Facebook and Twitter.

The protests reflected a growing sense of disappointment with King Abdullah, who has failed to implement a single political demand from previous petitions. However, in spite of their disappointment, reformers from a wide range of political ideologies—Islamists, nationalists, leftists, and liberals—are being cautious because the future could be worse. Many intellectuals and professionals are haunted by the prospect of losing their positions when Crown Prince Nayif becomes king. Abdullah has developed a quasi-liberal constituency and cultivated its interest in the state, business, and media. Reformers nonetheless loyal to Abdullah fear that Nayif’s iron fist will come down on them: functionaries of the ancien régime to be replaced.

• • •

While the two petitions were circulating, digital calls for demonstrations were attracting a broad range of activists.

Some, representing the Shia of Eastern Province, sought public protest to free Shia prisoners and establish equality with the Sunni majority. A Shia religious scholar, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who in 2009 first called for the secession of the oil-rich Shia region, played a leading role in mobilization efforts. In London, MIRA—which had been unsuccessfully pushing for demonstrations since 2003—asked its supporters to assemble on March 11 and identified meeting points outside major mosques in Saudi cities.

Around the same time, a new party, Islamic Omma, emerged suddenly. It too joined the call for demonstrations, demanding justice, equality, and representation. Omma, whose Salafi program diverges from the official Salafi-Wahhabist line, suffered a blow when four of its founding members were arrested immediately after announcing their party to the Saudi leadership with several more arrested later. But it continued to support the demonstrations and published two religious treatises debunking the official religious scholars who argued that peaceful protest is illegitimate in Islam. Omma has intellectual and possibly organizational links throughout the Arab world, especially in the Kuwaiti Salafi movement.

Another group, the National Coalition and Free Youth Movement, formed on Facebook and Twitter in spite of having no offline organizational presence. Their Web pages would disappear amid government censorship only to reappear at different addresses. Many pages gathered thousands of supporters, but it is difficult to claim that all were authentic. Cyber-warfare pitted activists and non-ideological young men and women against regime security, complicating the headcount.

The virtual opposition included a mix of Islamists, liberals, non-Saudis, and others. Some youth had clear political visions for the outcome of protest, but others simply expressed frustration at their limited economic opportunities. Young activists directed anger at the older generation—tribal, religious, and royal elders—and portrayed members of the royal family and their bureaucrats as corrupt and morally bankrupt. Young women in particular expressed frustration over their marginalization. These voices of digital protest would be tested on the ground on March 11.

Wahhabi religious scholars warned that the wrath of God would be inflicted on demonstrators.

Days after the resignation of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak on February 11, Saudi Facebook activists announced their March 11 Day of Rage, dubbed thawrat hunayn, invoking a symbolic battle between belief and blasphemy at the time of the Prophet Muhammad. Everyone knew that demonstrations were forbidden. In the past activists who announced their intentions to demonstrate were quickly arrested.

That activists relied so heavily on online recruiting and petitioning speaks to one of the fundamental challenges facing reformers in the Kingdom. There are essentially no non-state institutions in the country. Saudi Arabia has not had trade unions since the 1950s, when the government banned them in the oil-rich province where the then-American oil company ARAMCO was based. Likewise, there are no legal political parties, youth associations, women’s organizations, or independent human rights organizations.

The question for the protest organizers, then, was whether online enthusiasm would translate offline, where Saudis have little experience of solidarity.

• • •

While calls for demonstrations were gathering momentum in the virtual world, a different reality was unfolding on the ground. On February 14, thousands of Bahrainis, whose island state is linked to Saudi Arabia via a causeway, marched to the center of the capital, Manama, and took over Pearl Roundabout, their equivalent of Tahrir Square. The protesters represented the extension of the Arab Spring into the Arabian Peninsula. They called for real constitutional monarchy, a more powerful elected parliament, and genuine separation of powers. They also demanded an end to sectarianism and discrimination in employment.

The events there, which saw a Shia majority rise up against the Sunni Al-Khalifa royal family, left the Saudi leadership nervous. But Abdullah’s propagandists were able to take advantage.

After Bahraini security forces killed at least four demonstrators on February 17, protest intensified. The Al-Khalifas felt threatened and called upon the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and in particular Riyadh. Meetings between several Gulf foreign ministers and GCC officials resulted in the dispatch of mainly Saudi troops—supported by a tactically insignificant but symbolically meaningful United Arab Emirates commitment—to rescue the Al-Khalifa family. Peninsula Shield, a GCC military force, would be used for the first time, not to defend the six founding member states from external enemies but to quash a rebellion against one of their ruling families. Kuwait and Qatar eventually sent troops, while Oman refrained but voiced their support for the Al-Khalifas.

On March 14, Saudi troops crossed the causeway, hands raised with victory signs from the hatches of tanks. Red cars followed carrying intelligence and security personnel to protect the ruling family and tighten their grip on the area. Three days later the protesters were chased out of Pearl Roundabout at gunpoint. Within a week, bulldozers flattened the iconic monument that had stood there.

By intervening, the Saudis hoped not only to protect their Bahraini ally, but to split their internal opposition using sectarian politics. As the protests grew and the GCC deliberated, the Saudi official press peddled the regime’s line: an Iranian-Shia conspiracy was targeting the Sunni heartland. The champions of Sunni Islam would save the Gulf from the Iranian-Shia takeover. The Saudi regime proved not only to its subjects, but also to Western governments, a determination to crush protest and expel Iranian and Shia influence from the peninsula. The message to President Obama was to think twice before supporting democracy and human rights in the Arabian Peninsula. The message to Saudis was that critics would be tarred as traitors to the nation and enemies of the faith.

• • •

Inside Saudi Arabia, the regime’s first line of defense against the planned March 11 protests was to mobilize anti-Shia sentiment and official Wahhabist religion. Religious leaders supported the regime in two complementary ways.

First, Wahhabi religious scholars warned from the minarets that the wrath of God would be inflicted on demonstrators. On March 7, the Council of Higher Ulama, the senior official religious authority, issued a fatwa against protests. Thousands of hard copies were distributed in mosques and neighborhoods, and digital versions made the rounds online. All local newspapers reported on it favorably.

Second, official religious scholars warned of an Iranian-Shia conspiracy directed by Saudi exiles in London and Washington and the Shia in the Eastern Province to cause fitna (chaos) and divide the country. The officials relied on conventional Wahhabi condemnations of the Shia, historically depicted as heretics and more recently as an Iranian fifth column. They reminded the believers of the need for ijma, consensus around the pious rulers of the country, and warned that protests would lead to fragmentation and bloody civil war. Neo-Wahhabi scholars—not directly associated with the official Council of Higher Ulama—had more freedom to denounce the Shia in local mosques, lectures, and sermons, all recorded and publicized on YouTube. Veteran Sheikh Nasir al-Omar joined the call against the Shia, thus adding weight to the opinions of the younger neo-Wahhabi scholars. Many in the younger generation are critical of the regime’s repressive gender policies, but they support its opposition to the Shia as alien, heretical, and loyal to Iran.

While religious leaders promoted obedience and sectarianism, the “liberal press”—also officially controlled—published articles denouncing sectarianism. Liberal authors attacked sectarian preachers of hate and instead celebrated national unity, wataniyya. Not that these liberal authors favored political protest or close ties with the Shia. Rather, they offered Saudis an alternative discourse that still served the regime’s interests. With society divided between supposedly liberal intellectuals and hateful preachers, the regime confirms in the minds of people that it alone can broker between the fiercely opposed groups.

• • •

Only hours before the Day of Rage, Shia demonstrators staged peaceful protests in Qatif, Awamiyya, Sayhat, and other towns and villages in the Shia-dominated Eastern Province. Security forces quickly moved to suppress and arrest demonstrators. Shia notables from the province hurried to Riyadh to express their allegiance to the king and to demand the release of political prisoners. In a gesture meant to calm the situation and demonstrate good will, some prisoners were released.

And then on March 11, the day of the planned demonstrations, things were quiet. Helicopters flew low in the skies over Saudi cities, mirroring the intimidation of protesters in Tahrir Square and Pearl Roundabout. Security forces spread through every corner and street.

When Shias began protesting, their leaders hurried to Riyadh to express their allegiance to the king.

An unannounced curfew loomed over Riyadh and Jeddah. At noon, Saudis prayed as usual, then they got into their cars to drive home for lunch and the usual siesta. One man dared to defy the curfew. The lone demonstrator, Khalid al-Johani, told BBC journalist Sue Lloyd Roberts and her camera crew, “The royal family don’t own us. . . . I need freedom; all the country is a jail. . . . We need a parliament.” Al-Johani anticipated that he would be arrested. “I demonstrate because it is worth it,” he said, “I am doing this for my four children.” He gave Roberts his mobile number, but after that day, al-Johani stopped answering his phone. Like Muhammad al-Wadani, he disappeared.

Since the aborted Day of Rage, small-scale protests outside government buildings in Riyadh, Jeddah, and the Eastern Province have become daily events. Protests appear to form spontaneously, aided by the speed of online and cell phone communication. Demonstrators raise cardboard signs demanding employment and the release of political prisoners, many of whom have been held without trial for more than ten years. At night in Awamiyya, heavily veiled women carry candles in memory of martyrs and prisoners and march in the Zaynabiyya procession, the name derived from Zaynab, the Prophet’s granddaughter, whose brothers Hasan and Hussein are symbols of Shia martyrdom. The marching women support their Bahraini Shia coreligionists, demand the end of Saudi occupation of Bahrain, and remember young men long disappeared. Women teachers ask for secure jobs. Women students assemble in university halls protesting unfair grading of their exams and calling for the “downfall of the principal.”

Protests are becoming common among private sector workers too. Security forces usually turn up, surround protesters, and force them to disperse. But they return another day. Meanwhile, the highest religious authority, Mufti Abd al-Aziz al-Shaikh, tours the country lecturing students about the sinful nature of peaceful protest and the obligation to obey the rulers.

Whatever sins the protesters may be involved in, disobeying rulers isn’t one of them. Protesters avoid arrest by supporting the king and demanding that bureaucrats respect his royal decrees. Anger is therefore channelled toward low-level civil servants without challenging the regime directly or insisting on royal intervention. As long as protests do not question the policies of senior members of the royal family, they are tolerated, perhaps to some extent welcomed as a means to vent public anger.

Even minor protests are astonishing in a country where trade unions, civil society, and other modes of organization and mobilization are banned. The press has dubbed the wave of small-scale demonstrations “protest fever.” Importantly, women are uniting in pursuit of their interests and rights, suggesting that this is the beginning of a civil rights movement. Saudi women have agitated before—in 1990 some were arrested for violating a driving ban—but the 2011 protests are different. At local and regional levels, women’s demands are more fundamental than before. They want employment, the right to vote in municipal elections, and freedom of speech.

But both online and on the street, the regime still has the upper hand. When protesters agitate for the end of the regime, they are shown no mercy. As of this writing, seven demonstrators have been shot and killed by Saudi security forces. In the virtual world, government agents continue to use propaganda, counterarguments, and rumors against calls for protest.

• • •

On March 18 frail King Abdullah—hoping to head off the spread of Egyptian-style protest and to stem frustration at the lack of housing, jobs, health facilities, and other welfare services—announced a package of twenty economic gifts to the people, worth an estimated $93 billion. While many Saudis expected serious political response to their patience and obedience, they received economic largesse.

Autocrats usually give the population what belongs to them, and this is exactly what King Abdullah did. Immediate handouts included an extra two months’ salary to public sector employees, promotions for high-ranking military personnel, thousands of new hospital beds, and a minimum wage of approximately $260 per month for the unemployed. (Tight restrictions were later imposed on 18–35 year olds trying to access those funds.) Benefits promised over the next five years include 500,000 houses and 60,000 new jobs in security and military services. The expanded recruiting of soldiers and police and lavishing of rewards on security personnel who policed the protests all seem geared toward militarizing Saudi youth.

In addition to these secular gifts, the king funded new religious centers to spread the Wahhabi message and Hanbali jurisprudence, the predominant school of religious law among Saudi Sunnis. The new facilities will encourage the memorizing of the Qur’an and missionary work inside and outside Saudi Arabia. The goals are not solely pious. The religious police, who saw their own slice of the extra funding, don’t only monitor public morality—they also spy on the population. And, with more jobs available, the religious bureaucracy will be able to absorb religious graduates who are of no use to modern economies.

• • •

About two weeks after the failed mass protests, Chas Freeman, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, gave a lecture at the Asia Business Forum in Riyadh.

He unequivocally asserted that there is no great power other than the United States capable of defending the Gulf. He called the Bahraini protesters an “unruly mob” and applauded the Saudis for their quick response to the Iranian challenge. As a retired diplomat, he does not represent official American views. But having seen that the United States could not save Mubarak once popular protest was in full swing, Saudi leaders took heart in Freeman’s commitment to the status quo in Bahrain.

So far Washington has remained silent on political reform in Saudi Arabia and maintained its special relationship with its most important regional ally. But should pressure start coming from the West, the Saudi regime knows how to exploit its allies’ weak spots: fear of terrorism and an insatiable appetite for oil and military contracts. The Bahraini episode, in which the West stood idle as the Saudis overran protesters, demonstrated clearly that the United States, Britain, France, and other Western countries still prefer security to democracy in oil-rich regions. After Bahrain, there can be no doubt of the hypocrisy of these liberal democracies. Authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia’s thrive on it.

So far Washington has remained silent on political reform in Saudi Arabia.

For the moment, the Saudi regime has avoided real turbulence. Religious bans on demonstrations, anti-Shia sectarianism, heavy policing, and economic rewards effectively halted the momentum toward mass protest. Digital activism will continue to provide an outlet to a population denied basic freedom. But with popular unrest largely under wraps and the West silent, the regime faces no threat in the short term.

Saudi Arabia’s experience of the Arab Spring demonstrates that it lacks the structural conditions for mobilization, organization, and protest, let alone revolution. The economic and social deprivation, political oppression, and corruption that triggered revolutions elsewhere are all present in Saudi Arabia, but these alone are not sufficient to precipitate an uprising. Saudi Arabia does not have trade unions—the majority of its working population is foreign, which has stunted the growth of organized labor—a women’s movement, or an active student population, three factors that helped to make protests in Tunis and Cairo successful. Elsewhere in the Arab world, in the absence of these important factors, revolt stumbled, turned violent, and could not progress without serious foreign intervention. Libya is a case in point.

And that foreign intervention won’t come in Saudi Arabia, where oil ensures unconditional support from Western governments. Tunisia and Egypt were Western allies too, but they lack the kinds of resources that deter foreign meddlers. The same resources that also enable the Saudi king to appease the people.

Finally, the Saudi case attests to the limits of cyber-utopianism, the optimism surrounding the so-called Twitter and Facebook revolutions. The Web is useful for publicizing action, but where the state is the only institution that matters, effectively bringing people together offline may be impossible.

If the delayed Arab Spring eventually reaches Saudi Arabia, it will likely be a bloody affair. Violent opposition is nothing new in Saudi Arabia, where jihadis have fought the state since 2003, and regime opponents took up arms in 1927, 1965, and 1979. In the absence of a tradition of peaceful protest and in the face of religiously sanctioned bans on even nonviolent activism, aggression against the regime and its enablers may again become the only option.

Defeating Russia in the Arab world was a priority for Saudi Arabia even before it became a fully-fledged commitment in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The current Syrian crisis is perhaps one last opportunity to undermine Russia's eroded sphere of influence in the region. The Saudis may think that defeating Russia this time in Syria could add fresh vigor to their old mythology about defeating atheism in the world and supporting Sunni Muslims globally. While Russia has changed in the last two decades, the Saudi regime is still very much dependent on projecting itself as the defender of Sunni Islam. Such claims are enough to worry the Russians in their own backyard.

Russia's insistence on rejecting calls at the United Nations Security Council for the overthrow of Syrian leader Bashar Assad or militarily intervention against him reflects agony over letting go of its last Arab ally. Arguably, there is more to the Russian position than the loss of a Mediterranean naval base and arms deals. It seems that Russia does not want to create a historical precedent where oppressed Muslim protestors seek international and Muslim solidarity against their dictators. The troubled Chechnya and Northern Caucasus region remain a threat to Russian security.

As a result, Russia's troubled relationship with Saudi Arabia has a lot to do with its own internal challenges, mainly the remaining Muslim population under central Russian control where endorsement of global jihadi strategies, ideologies, and iconography has been visible since the 1990s. Saudi ideological and religious connections to groups that challenge Russian policies continue to haunt Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin decades after the end of the Afghan jihad. In the minds of many Russians, "wahabiyya" is an evil religion that can produce the likes of Ibn al-Khattab and strike terrorist attacks in the heart of Moscow.

It may come as a surprise then that Moscow--rather than London or Washington--was the first to recognize Saudi occupation of the Hijaz and open a consulate in Jeddah in 1927. The ex-Soviet Union had internal reasons for this unexpected presence in the land of the two holy mosques. At a time when Muslims in the Soviet republics were being told to free themselves from the chains of religion, their Communist central government was trying to build bridges in a region where a substantial number of Soviet Muslim exiles from Chechnya, the Caucasus and the Central Asian republics had previously migrated in search of refuge after successive Russian repressions. The Hijaz was a destination for many Soviet Muslims seeking to escape Russian and Stalinist experiments at banishing religion from people's lives. A Russian foothold in Jeddah was desirable, then, to remain in touch with potential intrigues and appease local Soviet ethnic Muslims.

The rift between communism and Islam, magnified by decades of cold war politics, facilitated Saudi enlistment in defeating the "evil empire" in the Arab world first. From Egypt, Yemen, and Iraq to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia became active in eroding the Soviet Union's expansion in the region. After the death of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Saudi Arabia endeavored to bring his successor, Anwar Sadat, into the Arab-US camp thus weakening Russian influence. In Iraq and Libya, Saudi policy often blamed the Russians for backing the radical politics of these regimes.

Saudi-Russian relations entered a new phase of animosity with the Afghan jihad. For a decade, the image of the godless communists occupying and repressing fellow Muslims enflamed the Saudi imagination and gave the Saudi regime a great opportunity to demonstrate its Islamic credentials through active support. Even today, the memory of Saudi participation in the Afghan jihad remains alive among old jihadi veterans, who commemorate it in vivid online iconography and songs. The Saudi regime boasts about its wise religiously-driven policy to defeat atheism and tries to forget that this jihad backfired, haunting it afterwards.

In Saudi Arabia, Assad's regime is likewise being depicted as a godless dictatorship, the last remaining heretical minority state that oppresses Sunni Muslims while supported by the Russians. Many Saudi religious scholars have already called for beheading Assad, if captured, and launching a global Islamic jihad against his Alawite troops. For many Saudis, the Syrian revolution is a religious war against blasphemy, repression and heresy.

Saudi Arabia was initially hesitant to recognize the Syrian National Council, arm the Free Syrian Army, or support calls for jihad in Syria made by the likes of religious scholar Aaidh al-Qarni. By February 2012, however, the Saudis took a strong position against Assad, with Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal declaring that arming the Syrian rebels was an excellent idea. This came when the "Friends of the Syrian People" international conference, attended by 60 countries, was held in Tunis.

Saudi Arabia rejected Tunisian President Munsif al-Marzouqi's suggestion that the Syrian crisis be ended through negotiations, safe exit for Assad, and the formation of a transitional government along the lines of the Saudi-backed agreement in Yemen. Al-Faisal actually walked out of the conference upon hearing these ideas.

Al-Faisal's position can only be interpreted as a diplomatic statement obfuscating his country's plans to arm the Syrian rebels despite a lack of international consensus. To this end, long-standing links to the Hariri dynasty across the border in Lebanon will undoubtedly prove useful, not least because of shared animosity towards the Syrian regime. The most likely transit point for arms and jihadis alike is the deprived Akkar area of northern Lebanon, with its neglected Sunni population. On Youtube, Syrian rebels have already circulated images of the "King Abdullah Brigade" allegedly formed to honor the kingdom's commitment to overthrowing Assad and arming Syrian revolutionaries.

This will no doubt be a very risky policy unleashing old familiar radical forces and precipitating a long civil war, ethnic cleansing and sectarian strife in Syria and neighboring countries.

Russia's rejection of such futuristic plans can only be understood in the context of its own internal challenges and the historical legacy of its troubled relationship with the Saudi regime. The memory of Saudi religious and military interventions in Russia's backyard continues to haunt Russian leaders.

It is unfortunate for the Syrians that their revolution has become the terrain where old scores are settled, among them Saudi-Russian rivalries.

Source: the world today | february & march | 2012Saudi

The meaning of rights for womenIt’s not just about cars, argues Madawi Al-RasheedNews reports from Saudi Arabia often ap-pear bizarre and outrageous: young wom-en lashed for defying a driving ban; women accused of witchcraft beheaded; victims of rape stoned to death. Such practices are not unusual in Saudi Arabia and regularly exposed by organisations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.

The 2010 Global Gender Gap Report gave Saudi Arabia a high gender gap index, ranking it 129th out of 134 countries. Here, decisions about a woman’s education, her career choice, even health issues are made by male guardians. But Saudi women are mobilising to expose this discrimination.

Inspired by the Arab Spring, women ac-tivists launched campaigns to be given a role in 2010’s municipal elections; they demanded to be allowed to drive; unem-ployed school teachers assembled outside the gates of the Education and Labour Ministries demanding jobs; others ap-peared at the gates of the Ministry of Inte-rior demanding fair trials and release of unlawfully detained relatives.

The Saudi leadership bans all forms of civil activism. Taking part in a demonstra-tion can lead to a serious prison sentence. Women who defy the ban on driving are put in jail and interrogated. Manal al-Sha-rif, who organised a campaign to lift the ban, was imprisoned for nine days in June 2010, while Shaima Justiniah, caught driv-ing in Jeddah, was sentenced to 10 lashes.

King Abdullah has sought to convince the West that he is a great gender reformer. Improved employment opportunities for women have been promised since 2005, a new all-women university was created in 2008, and last year, the king pledged that women would be appointed to the Consul-tative Council and be allowed to vote and stand in future municipal elections. Re-cently, shops selling women’s lingerie were banned from employing men, creating 30,000 low-paid jobs for women.

These limited measures have been hailed by the international media as great success stories promising women emancipation and empowerment. Such stories also ap-pear in official Saudi media in which gender inequality is blamed on the impact of the Saudi Wahhabi religious tradition.

The question why authoritarian states that deny their population political repre-sentation suddenly champion women’s causes may be puzzling. Like Zine El-Ab-din Ben Ali in Tunisia and Husni Mubarak in Egypt, King Abdullah is eager to pro-mote women’s rights, education and em-powerment because this is often a low-cost strategy yielding high profit.

Championing women’s causes brings international legitimacy. Global discourse on women’s empowerment, coupled with regular exposure of abuse, discrimination and injustice, embarrasses authoritarian states and their Western allies.

After the Arab Spring, the long-term banality of the West’s support for dictators in the region has been exposed. While the Saudi leadership has been shielded from open Western condemnation for its lack of democracy, many officials in Washington and Riyadh would like to see changes. Gen-der reform in particular is always appreci-ated. It does not immediately impact on the stability of authoritarian regimes nor undermine the security police state they create. In fact, gender reform projects a bright reformist image that conceals the excesses of authoritarian rule.

The move towards women’s empower-ment under King Abdullah has coincided with the Saudi regime facing internal secu-rity challenges. Since 2003, terrorism has shattered the myth that Saudi Arabia is a sea of tranquillity in the middle of a volatile Arab region. By championing women’s causes, the Saudi leadership exaggerates its difference from a radical alternative, name-ly violent Jihadis. Despite its regular abuse of human rights and enforcement of gen-der inequality embedded in its legislations, the state becomes the only alternative as a shield and promoter of women’s rights.Women, who are structurally excluded from political, religious and economic decision-making, have no option but to consider the authoritarian state their ally against the oppression of men.

The emerging state feminism is not unique to Saudi Arabia but a characteristic of all authoritarian states that reach out to women occupying a “minority” status, even though they may outnumber men and exceed them in educational achievement.

In this changed context, King Abdullah has shifted the legitimacy of the ruling fam-ily to a new level by seeking to feminise the masculine state. Women are needed as a group with which to fight the dissent of men and appease the West. The state co-opts women’s aspirations to achieve new local and external legitimacy.

Faced with women’s protests, the state channelled their activism towards state-controlled objectives. This culminated in giving women the right to vote in the fu-ture and the promise of access to state in-stitutions, measures announced during the Arab Spring.

Women’s causes do not directly chal-lenge authoritarian rule. When the state decided that its religious tradition had be-come a burden on state security, it cham-pioned women’s causes to help defeat those Islamists who challenge it.

If the authoritarian state benefits from championing women’s causes, why do women themselves look to authoritarian patriarchal states to achieve more rights and visibility? The fact is there is no con-sensus in Saudi society in favour of wom-en’s emancipation. Weak groups such as women often seek state intervention and protection to avoid collision with society.

By championing women’s causes, in the short term the Saudi state may have suc-ceeded in containing an imminent wom-en’s revolution. But in the long term, no doubt Saudi women like other women in the world will try to move beyond state-sponsored feminism and achieve their dream of becoming full citizens.

Like their sisters in Egypt and Tunisia, Saudi women will soon realise that gender equality and emancipation are limited un-der authoritarian rule.

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.