Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. Part 5 is here. Part 6 is here. Part 7 is here.
A “tension between the royal family and religious fanatics was a part of the social dynamic of modern Saudi Arabia from the very beginning,” wrote Lawrence Wright in his 2006 book, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. As Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks a quarter century ago indicated, Saudi Arabia is caught between Islam’s sectarian claims and the practical interests of a state whose wellbeing depends upon cooperation with non-Muslims globally.
Fossil fuels in Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region, the energy behind the modern global economy, have made strange bedfellows between this Muslim monarchy and the United States along with its Western allies. “Few countries in the world were so different from each other, and yet so dependent on one another, as America and Saudi Arabia,” noted Wright:
Americans built the Saudi petroleum industry; American construction companies, such as Bechtel, built much of the county’s infrastructure; Howard Hughes’s company, Trans World Airlines, built the Saudi passenger air service; the Ford Foundation modernized Saudi government; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built the country’s television and broadcast facilities and oversaw the development of its defense industry. Meantime, Saudi Arabia sent its top students to American universities—more than thirty thousand per year during the 1970s and 1980s. In return, more than 200,000 Americans have lived and worked in the Kingdom since the discovery of oil. Saudi Arabia needed American investment, management, technology and education to guide it into the modern world. America, for its part, became increasingly reliant on Saudi oil to sustain its economic and military supremacy. In 1970 the United States was the tenth greatest importer of Saudi oil; a decade later, it was number one.
Oil revenue fueled revolutionary changes in the Arabian Peninsula, Wright observed:
Many Saudis were unprepared for the abrupt transformation that their culture had endured since the first oil boom. In their own lifetimes, they remembered a country that was starkly fundamental in every aspect. Most Saudis in the 1950s lived as their ancestors had lived two thousand years before. Few actually thought of themselves as Saudi, since the concept of nationality meant little to them, and government occupied practically no place in their lives. They were tribesmen without boundaries. The enforced equality of poverty and meager expectations had created a society as horizontal as the desert floor. Tribal codes of behavior, coupled with the injunctions of the Quran, had governed individual thought and action. Many, perhaps the majority, had never seen an automobile or a foreigner. There was little education beyond the ritual memorization of the Quran, and scarce need for more. The essential experience of living on the Arabian Peninsula was that nothing changed. The eternal and the present were one and the same. Suddenly into this desert rushed a flood of change: roads, cities, schools, expatriate workers, dollar bills, and an overriding new awareness of the world and one’s place in it.
This modern oil prosperity contrasted with Saudi Arabia’s historic Islamic piety, as becomes clear in Wright’s words:
Unimaginable wealth had fallen on these austere desert nomads—a gift from God because of their piety, they genuinely believed. Paradoxically, this gift was undermining every facet of their identity. Within twenty years of the first great oil boom in the 1950s, the average Saudi income was nearly equal to that of the United States and increasing at a rate that promised to make the Kingdom the largest economy in the world.
Saudi royal rule had always legitimated itself as Islam’s dutiful protector, particularly as interpreted by Muhammad ibn al-Wahhab. Wahhabism takes its name from this Muslim cleric who aligned himself with the Saudi clan under Muhammad ibn al-Saud in the eighteenth century. Naturally, therefore, social upheaval incited among Saudis a reaction of increased religiosity in this faith’s birthplace. “Their country and their lives became alien to them,” explained Wright:
Thrown into the global marketplace of ideas and values, many Saudis looking for something worthy in their own traditions found it in the unsparing beliefs that informed their understanding of Islam. Wahhabism provided a dam against the overwhelming, raging river of modernity. There was a widespread feeling, not only among extremists, that this torrent of progress was eroding the essential quality of Arabia, which was its sacredness.
This faith-based understanding of Saudi society presented political dangers to Saudi royal family members and their allies who saw in Saudi Arabia an opportunity to enjoy worldly pleasures afforded by wealth. Saudi Arabia’s longtime intelligence chief, Prince Turki Al Faisal Al Saud, focused in the 1980s particularly on Saudi Arabia’s religious police, the mutawa. “The super-piety of the muttawa was bound to focus itself on the conspicuous depravity of some members of the royal family,” Wright explained Turki’s concerns. “Many family members were cowed by the religious posse that roamed the malls and streets with policemen at their command.”
As Wright examined, the religious police’s crude zeal especially worried Turki, who
secretly began monitoring members of the muttawa. He learned that many of them were ex-convicts whose only job qualification was that they had memorized the Quran in order to reduce their sentences. But they had become so powerful, Turki believed, that they now threatened to overthrow the government.
Osama bin Laden domestically also began an “escalating verbal attack on America” with “the apparent complicity on the part of the royal family,” Wright stated. This “seemed a suicidal paradox,” given that “Saudi Arabia had replaced Iran as America’s main ally in the Persian Gulf” following the 1979 overthrow of Iran’s pro-Western monarchy by the Islamic revolution. “The Kingdom depended on U.S. arms and defense agreements for its protection.” Yet “so long as bin Laden remained focused on an external enemy, he diverted popular attention from the princely looting of the oil wealth and the spiral of religious fanaticism.”
Saudi Arabia burnished its Islamic bona fides not just domestically, but also abroad. Among the global diaspora of Muslim migrant communities, the kingdom disproportionately financed new mosques, in which Wahhabi staff often “were preaching the glories of jihad,” Wright noted. He elaborated how revenue from Western purchases of Saudi oil financed a global call (dawah) to a most doctrinaire form of Islam:
Not content to cleanse its own country of the least degree of religious freedom, the Saudi government set out to evangelize Islamic world, using the billions of riyals at its disposal through the religious tax—zakat—to construct hundreds of mosques and colleges and thousands of religious schools around the globe, staffed with Wahhabi imams and teachers. Eventually, Saudi Arabia, which constitutes only l percent of the world Muslim population, would support 90 percent of the expenses of the entire faith, overriding other traditions of Islam.
This dangerous intersection between piety and power is hardly new in Saudi history but goes back to modern Saudi Arabia’s origins in Arab tribal warfare beginning in 1902. Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman bin Faisal al-Saud (Ibn Saud) established the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932 in the Arabian Peninsula, “one of the poorest, most desolate places in the world,” Wright described. Abdul Aziz himself “lived in Riyadh, in a modest palace made of mud brick.”
To obtain power in “this fractious desert empire” of warring Bedouin tribes, Abdul Aziz relied upon “a group of religious fanatics called the Ikhwan,” or Muslim Brothers, Wright recalled. This “direct predecessor of al-Qaeda…formed Abdul Aziz’s own shock troops, massacring thousands of innocent and unarmed villagers in their campaign to purify the Peninsula in the name of Islam,” Wright elaborated. In 1924, for example, the city of Taif in the Hijaz region of Arabia “surrendered to the Ikhwan, only to see the town pillaged and more than three hundred men slaughtered, their throats slit, their corpses thrown into the public wells.”
Historian Said K. Aburish documented this carnage in his 1996 book, The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud. “No fewer than 400,000 people were killed and wounded, for the Ikhwan did not take prisoners, but mostly killed the vanquished. Well over a million inhabitants of the territories conquered by Ibn Saud fled to other countries,” he summarized. “The Saudi historian Madawi al-Rasheed notes that such figures are hard to credit, since there was no one doing the counting,” Wright caveated. Yet Rasheed personally wrote Wright that the “scale of Saudi atrocities in the name of unifying the country is massive.”
Prefiguring later Saudi divisions over pure piety and worldly practical interests, Abdul Azziz fell out with the Ikhwan. His interest in stable state building clashed with the Muslim Brothers, who wanted to take their jihad to the surrounding Middle East and beyond. Wright explained:
The king tried to control the Ikhwan, attempting to prevent their murderous raids from spilling over into neighboring countries. The Ikhwan already detested the king’s alliance with Britain and his extravagantly polygamous lifestyle, but they decisively turned against him because of his attempt to bridle jihad, which to them was limitless and obligatory, their duty to God. Abdul Aziz had to get the permission of the religious establishment to rein in the murderous zealots. This was the defining political moment of modern Saudi Arabia. By awarding the king the sole power to declare jihad, the Wahhabi clerics reaffirmed their position as the arbiters of power in a highly religious society. The king finally defeated the Ikhwan’s camel-mounted corps with the help of motorcars, machine guns, and British bombers.
Rasheed confirmed Wright’s narrative of how Abdul Aziz “put down a vicious revolt” of the Ikhwan. She communicated to Wright:
The Ikhwan were nothing but a mercenary force mobilized by Ibn Saud to fight his own wars and to serve his own purposes. Once they did the job for him he massacred them using other mercenaries, this time the sedentary population of southern Najd, other tribes, and the British Royal Air force stationed in Kuwait and Iraq at the time.
Thus, since the beginning of the Saudi monarchy, the royal family and its materialist-oriented supporters have played a double game with respect to Islam. Regime legitimacy flows from a publicly proclaimed allegiance to Islam’s seventh-century prophet Muhammad, whose supposed universal revelation knows no bound. Yet the Saudi kingdom has repeatedly sought the benefits of modernity through practical cooperation with the non-Muslim world, an affront to true believers. After British military power had decisively contributed to Saudi Arabia’s creation in the interwar period, Saudi Arabia’s dependence upon infidels would become critical again during the 1990-1991 Gulf War, examined in the next article.
Leave a Reply