by Dr. James M. Dorsey
His top-down approach to social change, which brushes aside Saudi history, rests on shaky ground.
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman al Saud,
photo via Office of the President of Russia
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 794, April 12, 2018
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Saudi
Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has dazzled international media and
public opinion by lifting some restrictions on women’s rights and
holding out hope for the abolishment of others, vowing to return the
kingdom to a vague form of moderate Islam that many believe is defined
by the social reforms he has already implemented, and curbing the powers
of the country’s ultra-conservative leadership. But his top-down
approach to social change, which brushes aside Saudi history, rests on
shaky ground.
No doubt, Prince Muhammad’s recent reforms have
benefitted women and created social opportunity with the introduction of
modern forms of entertainment, including the opening this month of Saudi Arabia’s first cinema as
well as concerts, theater, and dance performances. Anecdotal evidence
testifies to the popularity of these moves, certainly among urban youth.
But Prince Muhammad’s top-down approach to
countering religious militancy rests on shaky ground. It involves
rewriting history rather than owning up to responsibility, imposing his
will on an ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim establishment whose change of
heart in publicly backing him lacks credibility, and suppressing
religious and secular voices who link religious and social change to
political reform.
Prince Muhammad has traced Saudi Arabia’s embrace of ultra-conservatism to 1979.
That year, a popular revolt toppled the Shah and replaced Iran’s
monarchy with an Islamic republic, and Saudi zealots took control of the
Great Mosque in the holy city of Mecca.
While there is no doubt that the kingdom responded
to those two events by enhancing the power of Saudi Arabia’s already
prevalent ultra-conservative religious establishment, Prince Muhammad is
brushing aside Saudi history.
The dominance of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia dates
back to 1744, when Muhammad bin Saud, the founder of the Al Saud
dynasty, concluded a power sharing agreement with Islamic scholar
Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab that lent Bin Saud the religious legitimacy
he needed to unify and control Arabia’s warring tribes.
Similarly, Saudi global propagation of Sunni
Muslim ultra-conservatism significantly accelerated in the wake of the
events of 1979 but predates them by almost two decades.
Prince Muhammad’s uncle, King Faisal, who ruled
Saudi Arabia from 1964 until his assassination in 1975, embodied the
export of ultra-conservatism as a pillar of Saudi diplomacy and soft
power. Faisal saw it as a way to create a network of supporters capable
of defending the kingdom’s strategic and economic interests while
simultaneously catering to the outlook of Saudi Arabia’s religious
establishment.
Both the Muslim World League, one of the kingdom’s
primary vehicles for the funding of its global campaign, and the
Islamic University of Medina were founded in the 1960s. The university
served as a citadel of ultra-conservative learning and thought,
including the notion that Islamic law dictates unquestioned obedience to
the legitimate ruler.
Prince Muhammad has exploited that view to put the religious establishment in its place and legitimize reforms it condemned for decades.
In doing so, he not only undermines the credibility of
ultra-conservative scholars but also enhances that of both more militant
ones and those he has either imprisoned or silenced because they
advocated not only social but also democratic reforms like free and fair elections, release of political prisoners, and respect for human rights.
Prince Muhammad’s assertion that Saudi Arabia
propagated ultra-conservatism as part of countering communism during the
Cold War is not inaccurate, but it ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia
felt threatened by Arab nationalism – not simply because countries like
Egypt and Syria aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, but also
because they questioned the legitimacy of monarchs. Aligning Saudi
Arabia with the West, moreover, ensured that the US had a greater stake
in the survival of the Sauds.
Born 14 years after the events of 1979, Prince
Muhammad’s projection of a kingdom whose liberalism was hijacked by Cold
War-inspired policies and errant Islamic scholars jars with the
experience of Saudis who are generation older. They recall a process in
which post-1979 ultra-conservative social mores were codified into
rules, regulations, and laws.
“I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina… My memories of those years…are quite different,” said Jamal Khashoggi,
a prominent Saudi journalist who last year went into self-imposed exile
because he feared arrest. “Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a
woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe,
Arizona in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift… You would pay
5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who
would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid
being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In
the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were
working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.”
Prince Muhammad seemed to acknowledge ultra-conservatism’s long-standing and deep-seated shaping of Saudi culture when
he was asked about abolishing the kingdom’s system of male guardianship
that forces women to get approval of a male relative for most major
decisions in their lives. “We want to move on it and figure out a way to
treat this that doesn’t harm families and doesn’t harm the culture,”
Prince Muhammad said.
Khashoggi traces the formalization of existing
social restrictions on women’s rights not to an edict issued by the
religious establishment but to an attempt by a 19-year-old princess to
elope with her lover. The couple’s drama, ending in public execution in
1977, was described in ‘Death of a Princess,’ a dramatized 1980 British
documentary that strained relations between Britain and Saudi Arabia.
The incident marked the kingdom’s first major
effort to use its financial and energy muscle to thwart freedom of the
press beyond its borders and shape its international image. It also
spurred codification of the suppression of women’s rights.
“The reaction of the government to the princess’s
elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe, and no
woman could travel without the consent of a male relative… MBS would
like to advance a new narrative for my country’s recent history, one
that absolves the government of any complicity in the adoption of strict
Wahhabi doctrine. That simply isn’t the case,” Khashoggi said
(referring to Muhammad bin Salman by his initials).
Liberals were already warning in the 1970s that
the restrictions would tarnish the kingdom’s image. Celebrated poet and
novelist Ghazi al-Gosaibi, who served as minister of industry and
electricity, urged King Khalid in a handwritten letter in 1980 to
shy away from banning the projection of women’s images in the media “so
we would not be made an example of rigidity and stagnation in front of
the whole world.”
Al-Gosaibi’s warning fell on deaf ears at the
time, but it has been heard loud and clear by Prince Muhammad. To put
his reforms on solid footing, however, Prince Muhammad will have to
acknowledge and confront his country’s demons and pursue structural
reform including a revamping of religious education, which is currently
limited to shaving off raw ends like hate speech. Structural reform will
also have to entail the grooming of a more independent and critical
class of Islamic scholars. Such reform is preferable to simply
whitewashing the royal family’s role, whipping former allies into
subservience, and suppressing any expression of dissent.
“Strangling moderate independent Islamic discourse
may succeed in silencing democratic voices within Islam in Saudi
Arabia, but it will also create a vacuum for the less moderate discourse
that the state has shown it tolerates,” said Abdullah Alaoudh,
a post-doctoral fellow in Islamic Law and Civilization and the son of
Salman al-Odah, a Saudi scholar imprisoned since September for calling
for social as well as political reform.
BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family
Source: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/saudi-arabia-moderation/
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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