Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Narrating Saudi Arabia has two dimensions: one targets the local constituency and one targets outsiders. The first aims at generating consent among obedient subjects; the second aims at achieving legitimacy beyond borders.

The modern history of Saudi Arabia was originally written by non-Saudis. Although chronicles, private papers and primary sources existed both inside and outside the country, until very recently it was Western and Arab historians who produced modern Saudi historiography. Saudi Arabia was one of the most recent countries to establish modern history departments and research centres, and it was only in the 1960s that the ‘modern’ Saudi historian emerged. Before then the profession had been dominated by ulama who played the double role of religious scholars and chroniclers, presenting the past from a theological rather than an historical perspective.

Making history

It was only after the first oil boom of the 1970s that the Saudi government turned its attention to systematically constructing the kind of great historical narrative that most other Arab regimes had already produced and propagated to consolidate the nascent nation-states that had emerged in the post-Second World War era.

Unlike in other Arab countries, and with the exception of one or two Saudi historians, modern Saudi historical research centres relied on foreign Arab scholars, who were either seconded from their own academic institutions or had settled in the country. Even then – and because of serious human resource shortages – Saudi school and university history textbooks (and even the religious curriculum) were often written by Arabs from abroad, mainly Levantines and Egyptians, who were entrusted with the task of creating an official history for Saudi Arabia.

This was designed to establish and enforce two important state legitimacy narratives, one reflecting the need to legitimise the state internally, the other aimed at justifying it externally in the Arab and Islamic contexts.

The establishment of the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives in Riyadh (known as al-Dara) in 1972 marked the beginning of institutionalised official historiography. The role of this research centre in shaping the historical imagination becameparamount. In the 1980s, as a result of an ambitious government scheme, at least thirty Saudi students arrived at various American universities to write Ph.D. dissertations on Al-Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, laying the groundwork for modern Saudi historiography. The efforts of such students and of al-Dara reached a climax with the 1999 centennial celebrations that coincided with the publication of hundreds of history books, foreign memoirs, translation of foreign testimonies, and official letters and sermons by King Abdulaziz ibn Saud (1876–1953, hereafter Ibn Saud), all marking ‘one hundred years of development, prosperity and political wisdom’. The publication of selected documents and letters from various archival sources marked the beginning of documenting Saudi history from an official point of view.

To establish the internal legitimacy of the 1932 state, history was constructed as a project of tawhid (oneness), thus continuing the tradition of theological history that had dominated early religious scholars’ approaches to the past. In Arabic tawhid means both monotheism and unification (in the political and geographical sense). According to state narratives, the project of purifying Arabia from blasphemy (kufr) and innovation (bid‘a), under the banner of jihad against a blasphemous population, had resulted in the political unification of the country, thanks to the efforts of Ibn Saud.

A different state

Post colonial states draw on both national struggle and the construction of national identity and culture by intellectuals to produce the foundation of the nation state, on the basis of which one finds a justification for the inclusion of diverse people in the polity.

Saudi Arabia differs from other countries in the Middle East. Saudis had never been involved in a national struggle against a foreign occupier. In fact the project of the state under the Al-Saud leadership was from the very beginning part and parcel of a colonial project. The demise of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Britain in the region are important factors that triggered off the formation of the current state. Over the last eighty years or so the Saudi royal family created a unified and centralised state not a nation. This history has important repercussions on the identity of the people who now call themselves Saudis.

From the perspective of the ruling group, unity was achieved by the sword. The Al-Saud often remind their subjects that they have the right to rule because the land belonged to their ancestors. The state of 1932 was simply an attempt to return to the land which is theirs. The state under their leadership is simply an exercise in re-appropriating what was initially owned by their ancestors. Here, the notion of milkiyya (ownership) dominate narratives relating to the foundation of the state.

Seeking legitimacy

However, this is not enough to convince the constituency of the legitimacy of the project. The Saudi royal family relies on another narrative, produced by a generation of religious scholars who in the past played the role of intellectuals, literate men in a pre-literate society. A small circle of ulama, often referred to as aimat al-dawa al-najdiyya (the Imams of the Najdi call), interpret Islam in its Wahhabi version. They claim to possess sacred knowledge, like elders, shamans, healers, and magicians who are often the “intellectuals’ of pre-modern society. They developed a sacred narrative that legitimated the concept of milkiyya – ownership – by the Al-Saud.

The majority of such scholars regarded the state as an act of purification. In their chronicles, epistles and responsa, they painted a gloomy image of pre-Al-Saud Arabia. The land and its population were considered to be blasphemous. Pre-Saudi Arabia is believed to have degenerated in its faith and rituals to the level of shirk (associationism) and kufr (disbelief). The project of the state was then a God-sent blessing to deliver Arabia from its debauchery. This was the ultimate purpose of the state. Many contemporary Saudis believe this nonsense.

The state adopted this interpretation of the men of religion because such narratives are invaluable for producing consenting subjects. The narrative was bureaucratised and institutionalised in history text books. In schools, a whole generation of young Saudis areindoctrinated in this narrative, which condemn their ancestors and count them as more blasphemous than the kafirs of Quraysh on the eve of Islam. Young Saudis learn that they and their fathers were delivered from the jaws of hell, thanks to the unifying state and its religious intellectuals. If ever there is such a thing as Saudi nationalism, it is no doubt a nationalism that condemns rather than celebrates the past – that is, the pre-Saudi period. Those who missed formal schooling are reminded of the blasphemy of their ancestors on daily television programmes and in religious sermons.

In this context, opposition to the state is a return to that blasphemous history of the ancestors. Obedience to the state, put on equal footing as obedience to God, is an act of piety that delivers people from a return to the hell of kufr. The narrative creates consenting subjects rather than citizens.

The future

Fortunately for Saudis, there is a small minority of writers who challenge the grand historical meta-narrative.

My work on Saudi Arabia has always been an attempt to scrutinise the grand mythological stories of the regime. I have ventured into local politics, state rhetoric, and religious narratives. The reason why I continue to do so is related to the fact that I live and work outside Saudi Arabia.

Others are less fortunate. The political scientist Khalid al-Dakhil tells a different story. Rumours about banning him from writing in the Gulf press, after an earlier ban in the Saudi press, are abundant. His sin is explaining the formation of the Saudi state in terms of a political project rather than the alleged religious reasons given by official ulama andhistorians. Since his last article in which he deconstructed the myth of the religious state, I have not come across one article written by this scholar. Has he been silenced for ever? Has he joined hundreds of reformers who are banned from communicating their ideas and from travel abroad?

Today only princes and their intellectuals are allowed to fabricate the past. The latest of this fabrication is a lecture by Turki al-Faysal, ex-intelligence minister and Saudi ambassador in Washington, now turned intellectual. At St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, the Prince sketched the evolution of the constitution of Saudi Arabia, in the context of an annual lecture paid for by the Al-Saud themselves. He took his audience from eighteenth century constitutionalism under the auspices of the two Muhammads (Ibn Saud and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab) to the bayah council of 2007, meant to institutionalise the succession after King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan.

It is unusual to sponsor an annual lecture and deliver it at the same time, especially at the high towers of academia, but it seems that the Saudis always manage to get away with it. While the investigation of their alleged corruption in weapon purchases are halted by British prime ministerial decrees (very similar it seems to the Saudi royal decrees; i.e. decrees which are capable of undermining the independence of the judiciary), they continue to pay and deliver the grand meta narrative abroad.

The evolution remains faithful to Islam, authenticity and specificity of Saudi Arabia, in the words of the prince. In this evolutionary scheme, there is no room for mutations, deformity, and disability. It is ironic that the Prince celebrated over two centuries of constitutionalism while at the same time reformers, who simply called from some kind of timid but real constitutionalism, were being raided with tear gas, hand cuffed and horded into Saudi jails.

The dismantling of authoritarian rule begins with deconstructing hegemonic narratives of that rule, which coerce the minds and hearts of people. The most appalling of these narratives are the ones constructed in the present to legitimate the past. They often have nothing to do with the past, but are contemporary fabrications by monarchs and their so-called intellectuals. They induce people to submit out of habit and fear. They turn the most brilliant of minds into repetitive parrots who utter the narratives without questioning, without doubt, without reflection.