Controlling Unity

Essay written for Arablife.org.

And the Pilgrimage to the Temple (the hajj) is an obligation to God for those who are able to journey there.

Quran. Sura 3: 90-91.

Last month the Governor of the Mecca region, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal bin Abdulaziz, congratulated[i] all involved for the smoothing running of this year’s hajj. Thankfully, there was no repetition of last year’s tragedy, when 364 people were killed in a huge crush at the stoning ceremony, in part because of an extension to the Jamarat bridge that alleviated the flow of people. However, the invitation of Ahmedinejad to perform hajj – a hand extended by King Abdullah – reminds one that such a central event in Islam is never free of controversy.

Every day begins facing Mecca. It is the birthplace of Muhammad, where he first heard God’s call, and where he first proclaimed his message. It is the centre of the world; even if, for most Muslims, it is a centre out there; something to which one orientates oneself. The centrality of the hajj to Islam can scarcely be overemphasised: it is one of the five basic duties incumbent upon every Muslim.

When we remember that Mohammed believed the message he received was not a new message, but a return to the one true faith already given to Abraham, we see that within Islam there is already a return, a recursiveness. The hajj is a return journey to that home – to the foundations of the religion; to the centre, even if, for most Muslims, it is a centre out there.

Such a return brings with it a corresponding emphasis on the unity of the ummah over all; this is, after all, a place non-Muslims cannot go: it is a sphere that should be purely religious.

Such a display of unity is not an easy thing to bring about: gathered together are almost two million people from a host of different cultures, many of whom do not speak the same language. The cultural estrangement brought about by the pilgrimage can be difficult for many: one is among fellow believers, and yet one discovers, here, at the centre of Islam, that one does not even share a similar language, and that, for each, what constitutes belief varies significantly.

Delaney[ii], in her work on the Turkish experience of the hajj, notes the bewilderment with which the Turkish pilgrims greeted this mix of culture and belief. Indeed, one can note that what should be an experience of great unity can also be one of great self-doubt, as beliefs and practices one believed to be an essential part of Islam are revealed as local concerns not shared by one’s fellow pilgrims from across the globe.

Such divisions are not so much overcome in Mecca as they are organised: during their stay in Saudi Arabia, pilgrims live in tent cities organised according to nation-state. Such an arrangement, necessary in an age where the numbers of pilgrims have exploded, reflects the domination of the state in the organisation of the hajj.

Ninety years ago, when there were only an estimated 300 to 350,000 attending the hajj – with only 150,000 hailing from outside the kingdom[iii] - people arrived at Mecca on foot, or on camel, after long journeys that could include extended stays for work along the way. But such a route was already being closed down by the end of the nineteenth century: with the firming of national and state boundaries in the area, territories were delineated, and pilgrims’ movements were controlled no less than migrant workers and the flows of goods.

Fast forward nearly a hundred years, and it is illegal to go to Mecca by land. It is the plane that is now the key. Saudia (the national Saudi airline) carried 893,702 Hajjis on 1,754 flights from 70 international destinations. At Jeddah, they are awaited by two special Hajj airport terminals, the largest such structures in the world.

Even before entering these terminals however, the budding hajji, searching for unity under Islam, will have been marked and classified by the nation-state. For a start, not everyone can go. Quota systems have been imposed to lessen the considerable administrative strain on the Saudi government. And even then, to be registered requires being organised according to one’s classification of residence and place of origin – just as later in Saudi Arabia one lives in areas arranged by nationality.

One should not be too nostalgic for an era of free travel however. The sheer scale of the modern hajj, itself a reflection of changes in technology and travel, require it. According to the official Saudi figures, a total of 2,454,235 pilgrims from 181 nations performed last year’s hajj, 1,707,814 from outside the kingdom[iv]. To provide housing, food, water, sanitation and transport for all these people is a considerable challenge.

One of the many problems that the Saudi government faces is public health. In 1956, the Saudi Ministry of Health assumed responsibility for health and sanitation during the hajj, and now has extensive sanitation and health facilities across all the sites of the pilgrimage. In doing so, they are unwittingly following in colonial footsteps.

Modern public health services were instituted at the hajj in the nineteenth century due to fears in Europe over the spread of cholera: it was alleged that Asian hajjis brought the cholera to Mecca, and it returned to Europe with North African pilgrims. Europe then pressures the Ottoman sultanate to establish an international organisation to oversee public health at the hajj.

The politics of unity

There are other colonial echoes in the contemporary organisation of the hajj. In the late nineteenth century, the hajj was perceived as a serious political threat by the colonial authorities; people were brought together from all over the Muslim world, and could exchange dangerous ideas about nationalism or Muslim politics. In order to avoid such contact, the Dutch government, anxious about the Netherlands East Indies (today’s Indonesia) established a vice-consulate in Mecca[v].

Today the Saudi government is perhaps less concerned with the spreading of anti-colonial ideas, but controlling not just the people, but also the religious discourse surrounding the hajj, remains crucial. As the central symbolic event of Islam, political dissent at the hajj sends out wider reverberations than a corresponding action at any other time.

In his fascinating account of the Hajj, Abdellah Hammoudi[vi] sets out some of the political and symbolic clashes that occur over the smallest actions at the pilgrimage. At each stop for prayer he details disputes: over where the women should stand, which text should be recited, and over who should lead the prayer; at such a central time, each act takes on a decisive importance, and, given the mixture of people and types of Islam involved, the clashes and debates should not be surprising.

Neither should the Saudi government’s reaction: which is to rigidly attempt to control, not just the people, but the ideas disseminated on the pilgrimage.

They have vested reasons to do so. The official title of the Saudi king is “the Guardian of the Two Holy Places” and much of their legitimacy is derived from their claim to look after these sites, the holiest in Islam. Indeed, the justification for the conquering of the Hijaz was to save Islam from those who would engage in shirk (deviation), and to restore a properly pure Islam. As Okruhlik[vii], among others, has noted, the religious authority of the king, in the absence of a properly nationalist project of forming citizens, has been one of the few means of keeping together Saudi Arabia’s fragile social contract.

When Ibn Saud conquered the Hijaz, and the Holy Places within it, in the 1920’s, controlling and organising the hajj became one of his most important tasks. Initially, controversies over religious interpretation (and correspondingly, who had the political power to enforce their interpretation) marred the hajj. In Mecca the cupola over the house of Khadija, wife of the Prophet Muhammad, was destroyed, and the Nadji who came with Ibn Saud condemned the veneration of sites associated with saints and earlier Islamic leaders[viii].

The Al-Saud was also careful to ensure that not only was there religious interpretation to be followed, but that no political dissent was to occur. In 1928[ix], an Indian Sunni pilgrim denounced the Wahhabis as infidels, and was promptly sent to jail. This incident inspired a tightening of the laws governing religious preaching at Mecca.

Such tension has continued up to the present day. During Nasserism and Arab nationalism, people sought to use the attention given to the hajj as a platform for political protest. The Saudis response was predictable, and, to a degree, understandable: the hajj is a time for religion and unity, not division and political dissent.

However, such a claim should be treated with suspicion. For the Saudi claim, that the hajj is not political, is the basis for a very political claim: that the Al-Saud family are the legitimate guardians of the two sites. Such a logic means, essentially, that when one questions the right of the Al-Saud family, and the degree to which they accord to their own religious justification, one is told that this is religious, and when one tries to enter politics into religion, then one is told this is no place for politics. Such a slippery exclusion is permanently in tension during the hajj.

Perhaps the paradigmatic example of this is the storming of the Mecca mosque by Juhayman al-Utaybi in 1979, recently the subject of an excellent article by Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix[x]. Part of al-Utaybi’s justification for the event was the criticism of the Saudi leaders, whose behaviour contradicted the word of God, and equally their claim to be living in accordance with it. Turning the claims of the Saudi leadership to represent Islam in Saudi Arabia, and using them to show the Al-Saud as corrupt, has been a theme of Islamist criticism in Saudi Arabia up until the present. By preventing political criticism through religious justifications, the Saudi regime invariably create an opposition that creates a political movement through religion; through events like the hajj.

The Al-Saud, in any event, have no qualms in using the hajj for political purposes, provided they control the politics. Witness the very public invitation extended to Ahmedinejad this year by King Abdullah, a step in a political program that saw the two leaders meet earlier last year to discuss Iraq and Lebanon.

Furthermore, one could also note the political implications of the raids that took place during the hajj. Al-Arabiya television reported that an unnamed security official claimed that the “al-Qaeda” militants aimed to make attacks during the hajj[xi]. Given the instant condemnation with which such attacks would be greeted around the Muslim world, it seems highly unlikely any Islamist militants would consider such a plan. Instead, it seems more probably the Saudi government used the excuse of the hajj to round up suspects, and create a feeling of public anger towards the Islamist opposition by suggesting that they would make an attack during hajj. We are Muslims, such a statement claims: they are outside.

To ensure the sanctity of the religious sphere is always difficult. Politics, everyday life, cultural differences – all of them threaten to intrude on an event that should be the moment of Islam at its purest for every hajji. The Al-Saud claim they want to ensure this purity. In reality, the unity they want to ensure, first and foremost, is the unity of the Al-Saud. This means, inevitably, using religion for political ends. It means controlling unity.

---

[i] http://www.kuna.net.kw/Home/Story.aspx?Language=en&DSNO=1053484

[ii] Carol Delaney. (1990) The “hajj”: Sacred and Secular. American Ethnologist, Vol. 17, No. 3. 513-530.

[iii] http://www.saudi-us-relations.org/articles/2007/ioi/071216-long-hajj.html

[iv] http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipfqgTGHS1baQESLyxKdWcN6g9Dw

[v] Michael Gilsenan. (2006). And you, what are you doing here? London Review of Books. 19/10/2006.

[vi] Abdellah Hammoudi. (2004) Une saison à la Mecque. Récit de pèlerinage. Paris: Seuil. A short extract is also published by OpenDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/arts-Literature/mecca_2889.jsp

[vii] Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.

[viii] For more information on these issues, see my earlier article: Joshua Craze, On Wahhabism. SaudiDebate. 24/1/2007. http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=568&Itemid=134

[ix] See William Ochsenwald (2007) Islam and Loyalty in the Saudi Hijaz, 1926-1939. Die Welt des Islams. 47(1).

[x] Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix. (2007) Rejectionist Islam in Saudi Arabia: The story of Juhayman al-Utaybi revisited. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 39: 103-122.

[xi] http://www.reuters.com/article/newsMaps/idUSL214957720071221

Capital’s War

Essay previously published with Arablife.org.

4/01/2007.

With the dismantlement of the Soviet Union the security environment confronting China deteriorated daily, Western hegemonic states daily tightened the ring of encirclement around China. Its causes do not lie in ideological differences, but in the fact that current conventional sources of raw materials no longer support the rise of an Eastern Great Power with consumption levels equal to that of the West.

Zhang Wenmu (2004)[i]

A glance at the map also suggests that a country dominant in Eurasia would almost automatically control the Middle East.

Zbigniew Brezinski. (1997) The Grand Chessboard. American primacy and It’s Geostrategic Imperatives[ii].

Later this month George Bush, stumbling into the last year of his presidency, with his allies deserting him in droves, will make a grand tour of the Middle East. Along the way, he will make his first visit to a country that has remained steadfastly loyal to the American government, muted criticisms of American actions in Iraq and Israeli actions in Lebanon aside: Saudi Arabia.

And while the kingdom has announced it will ask George Bush to “pressure Israel to halt settlements in east al-Quds”[iii], the Americans may want to talk to King Hussain about some more frequent visitors to Riyadh: the Chinese government.

For while George Bush prefers to keep his allies at arm’s length, the Chinese have been busy consolidating ties with Saudi Arabia.

It is not all one way traffic. Saudi Defence Minister Prince Sultan and Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi Oil Minister, have both made frequent visits to China – the latter making six trips in the past two years alone.

The Chinese presence in Saudi Arabia then, is not entirely unappreciated. Understandably so: China is the 4^th largest economy in the world in terms of GDP, and presents a growing market for Saudi oil that is especially welcome at a time when the relationship between Saudi Arabia and America has become strained. China, on the other hand, sees in Saudi Arabia’s oil reserves a possible source for its ever growing energy demands. Given that both countries oil industries are run by state companies, we can see this shift as one reflecting official policy.

A 1999 agreement between the two countries formalised the arrangement. It was agreed that Saudi Arabia will open its domestic oil and gas markets to China[iv], and in return China agreed to open its downstream sector (refining petroleum products for the end market) to Saudi firms[v]. The pay off for China has been rapid: the annual rate of Saudi imports from China has risen by 600% in aggregate terms[vi] over the past decade, and the Saudi’s are upgrading the famously inefficient Chinese oil refineries, which might finally allow them to process the low quality heavy oil the Gulf produces.

China’s realism?

But while people are taking note of the new relationship between Saudi Arabia and China, there is less certainty about what precisely the Chinese want. Approaches that try to explain Chinese foreign policy tend to be solidly realist. Indeed, there is an interesting split between the thousands of anguished articles which analyse what it might mean to have an “ethical foreign policy”, or try to trace the route of a “realistic Wilsonianism” (Fukuyama’s latest formulation[vii]), and the absence of any consideration of Chinese foreign policy outside of a narrow framework that sees China interested simply in fulfilling its energy requirements. The idea that China’s foreign policy might have a history does not seem to be considered by the op-ed writers of the Global North. Put simply, while people still talk about Wilson, Lin Biao is swept under the carpet of history: part of the history of communism we no longer want to connect to China.

Despite their ahistorical approach, the way the realists interpret China’s foreign policy is not entirely without merit. The argument was summed up in a recent article by Perry Anderson, a man we could never accuse of being ahistorical, in the New Left Review[viii].

Far the largest, by any measure, must be the emergence of China as the new workshop of the world: not just the rapid expansion of one outsize national economy, but a structural alteration of the world market, with a global impact closer to Victorian England than the more parochial settings of Gilded Age—perhaps even Post-War—America. Three consequences of China’s high-speed growth have followed. Domestically, it has created, amid dramatically increasing inequality, a substantial middle class attached to the status quo, and a more widespread ideological conviction, extending well beyond the middle class, of the benefits of private enterprise. Internationally, it has locked the PRC [People’s Republic of China] into a close embrace with the United States, through a level of economic interdependence surpassing that of Japan. Globally, it has in the past four years helped sustain—or unleash—world growth rates not seen since the sixties.

In this depiction, China becomes the rising capitalist dragon. Its rapid economic expansion creates unprecedented demand for raw materials, and it is largely this demand – notably, in the case of Saudi Arabia, for oil and gas – that has led to a foreign policy that seeks to assure a stable supply of materials. The need for a stable supply and the inter-linking of the Chinese economy, globally and in particular with America, has engendered a foreign policy that is careful not to upset the balance of power in the Middle East, something that China has been emphatically insisting it does not do through its arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Iran.

This vision of capitalist China would see America as the hand-maiden, waiting to give the running of the ship to China. And quarrels in such an arrangement (say, over Taiwan) would be seen as small disruptions on the periphery of capitalist development.

There are a lot of reasons to be suspicious of such a view, in particular, because it underplays the differences between Chinese visions of the world order and America’s, and because it neglects to try and understand Chinese policy through the prism of its history.

However, it must be conceded that this explanation seems to superficially fit the facts.

In 1993, China became a net importer of oil, and the Communist Party’s long-held policy of self-sufficiency had to be abandoned.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer of crude oil, has been wooed ever since. This relationship first came to light in 1998, when China sold 36 CSS-2 missiles and nine launchers to Saudi Arabia. Since the 1999 agreement alluded to above, there has been a steady strengthening of times, with both countries co-operating on downstream projects in China[ix], and more projects in the pipeline. China has also been involved in Saudi Arabia: in 2004, Sinopec won a contract for a natural gas project in the north-western block of the Rub al-Khali gas fields, an area that has not been open to foreign firms for the last twenty five years.

Such developments seem to fit the type of realist model sketched out at the beginning of this section. Rather than being concerned about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, or attempting to stir up revolution, China has been noticeably silent about Saudi Arabia’s domestic policy, a situation echoed in China’s relationship with, among others, Sudan and Angola, both countries that are hardly models of Western behaviour, and both are countries that, conveniently enough, have oil reserves not yet dominated by the Global North. As the quote from Zhang Wenmu that started this essay makes clear, finding sources of oil and gas out of the reach of America is a priority of Chinese energy policy.

The formula seems simple. A country with burgeoning energy needs seeks countries with oil and gas supplies; in exchange for supplies we offer hard currency, arms sales, and the absence of any critique of your domestic policy. It is a nice ad, and seems to fit what a western political scientist would define as realism: a pragmatic foreign policy without any idealistic goals, such as bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Yet, while the facts may seem to fit the explanation, we must remember Baudrillard’s comment, that “My principal objection to reality is, moreover, its character of unconditional surrender to any hypothesis that one can make about it”[x]

Which is to say, while Chinese actions may seem to fit into the explanations given by American analysts, we should be wary at accepting that these explanations really reflect the strategy of the Chinese government: to understand this, we would have to place these developments against the history of Chinese foreign policy.

Encircling the encirclers

The quote from Zbigniew Brezinski that begins this essay indicates the degree of fear that the Americans have about one country getting the upper hand in the region that used to be called the great chess board, and the correlative control that country would exert over the Middle East. America has always taking corresponding steps to ensure that Central Asia does not come to be dominated by one country; initially this applied to the Soviet Union, and thus the American support for the Afghanistan mujahedeen (ably assisted by the Saudis) from 1979.

However what looks like self-protection to the Americans can seem like, to paraphrase Wang Zenmu, the gradually tightening encirclement of China by Western hegemonic states. This relates to much older memories: China’s experience in the 19^th century was of gradual encroachment by expanding colonial powers on its western and eastern borders. This fear of encroachment has continued in the People’s Republic of China. When America embarked on its policy of containment (the Korean War, support for a separate Taiwan), China, inspired by the United Front strategies developed in the Marxist thought of the 1930’s, tried to develop buffer zones around itself.

We would be too quick to dismiss these ideas as part of ancient history. There is still a concerted effort to limit Chinese domination of the pacific, and America’s development of military bases in Central Asia after 9/11 cannot be understood solely in terms of terrorism, without reference to limiting Chinese ambitions in the region. Furthermore, in several areas of current Chinese policy in the Middle East, we can see echoes of United Front strategies, and even Lin Biao’s concept of the People’s war. Some Chinese writing[xi] has ascribed an absolutely central role to Iran in the battle against US hegemony, and current Chinese support for Iran can be seen as a means of ensuring China maintains a link to Eurasia and the Middle East against any possible encirclement.

Encirclement was a common term in the PRC until recently. But while it has now vanished from diplomatic language and official documents, the Chinese policy towards Saudi Arabia testifies to the fact that many aspects of the thinking remain intact. In particular, the Chinese tributary system, which privileged coalitions based on non-interference, can be seen in the lack of criticism China makes of strategically important countries with which it has relations.

The nature of the deals China makes with Saudi Arabia also provide a clue to the type of foreign policy the PRC want to adopt. In Saudi Arabia, like in many of the countries China has recently strengthened relations with, the deals are exclusive, with China paying over the odds, so as to ensure they are not held hostage – either by the international oil market or by a competitors. In a similar fashion, while the arms deals China has concluded with Saudi Arabia can be seen as a way of offsetting balance of payments deficits created by large-scale oil deals, it is also true to say that this deepening of dependence and obligation on China resembles a style of foreign policy that has larger historical echoes.

Containing younger brother

Despite these echoes of a Communist past, America has no real reason[xii] to be worried about the relationship between Saudi Arabia and China. Given the problems the Saudis face, China is not a credible alternative to America. Furthermore, both Saudi Arabia and China are US allies, in their different ways. China’s economic inter-dependence with America, and that fact that they require a stable oil price in a volatile region, means it is unlikely they will rock the boat. Speaking of boats, it is ironic that the shipping lines upon which oil travels from Saudi Arabia to China are guarded by American vessels, and given the commitments of the Chinese navy around Taiwan, this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Finally, while China is building up its commitments in the Middle East, most of China’s emphasis is on the places the West fears to tread: Angola, Sudan and Russia[xiii].

Equally, despite recent friction with the United States, Saudi Arabia is in no position to disturb their relationship. That said, despite the continued dependency on the United States, Saudi Arabia has been expanding its economic connections throughout South Asia. It is not just benefiting from oil revenues and arms either. The Saudi economy now supplies the Chinese textile industry with petrochemical products, and the Chinese economy is an increasingly popular place for Saudis to invest and recycle the enormous liquidity produced by the current record-high oil levels, especially since America has become a less attractive country to invest in.

Saudi Arabia is now reliant on both countries, despite the benefits it is reaping, for ultimately, as a recent report by a Chinese scholar states, Saudi Arabia “cannot stop pumping oil without shattering its fragile social contract with its own population.”[xiv]

Between two worlds

Given such inter-dependence within a globalised economy, the realist perspective on Chinese policy towards Saudi Arabia would largely seem to be justified: the diversification of Saudi’s oil policy poses America no real threats in the short term. However, just because this is correct, this does not imply that by ignoring the history of Chinese foreign policy, they are not misunderstanding the subjective intentions of the Chinese government. That said, reading an unproblematic continuity between the isolationism of the Cultural Revolution and the opening up of foreign policy that began under Deng Xiaoping is untenable. In reality, neither of these perspectives are satisfying, what we need to do instead is to understand the way the objective conditions of China’s energy needs are seen through the prism of Chinese history, and why the currently apparent capitalist Chinese state emerged out of, and could only have emerged out of, its communist past.

On this point, in conclusion, it is worth recalling a remark made in a different context by the Hungarian philosopher, George Lukàcs[xv]:

The pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist Party, the fact that it is a fighting force presupposes its possession of a correct theory, for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it.

---

[i] Zhang Wenmu is a professor at the Centre for Strategic Studies in Beijing and a prolific writer on Chinese foreign affairs. This quote is taken from Radtke K. W. (2007) China and the Greater Middle East: Globalization No Longer Equals Westernization. Perspectives on Global Development and Technology 6: 389-416.

[ii] Some choice quotes from this book are available at: http://www.comw.org/pda/fulltext/9709brzezinski.html

[iii] http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=37411&sectionid=3510203

[iv] Excluding upstream oil exploration and production.

[v] I have analysed this agreement in more detail in an earlier article. See The end of the affair? Saudidebate.com http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187&Itemid=134

[vi] Leverett, F. And Bader, J. (2005-6) Managing China-United States Energy Competition in the Middle East. The Washington Quarterly. (29(1): 187-201.

[vii] http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/19/magazine/neo.html?ex=1141362000&en=a6ab5b762c549c55&ei=5070

[viii] Perry Anderson. (2007) JOTTINGS ON THE CONJUNCTURE. New Left Review 48, November-December 2007. http://www.newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2695

[ix] South China Morning Post, October 5 2004.

[x] Jean Baudrillard (1993) Paroxysm: The Perfect Crime. Paris: Association Française d'Action Artistique.

[xi] See Radtke (2007:394) for a review.

[xii] Perhaps the only caveat we should add here is that the Sino-Saudi collaboration could pave the way for OPEC to accept payments for oil in a variety of different currencies, rather than relying exclusively on the dollar – a move which would have serious implications for the dollar’s status as the world vehicular currency.

[xiii] Andé Mommen. (2007) China’s Hunger for Oil: The Russian Connection. Journal of Developing Societies. 23:435.

[xiv] http://www.wsichina.org/%5Ccurr03.html

[xv] George Lukàcs. (1971) History and Class Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 327.

About Lewis

A review of Al-Rasheed, Madawi. (2007) Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. First published here, at SaudiDebate.

Being an anthropologist of Saudi Arabia does not make for an easy life. Rigid state control of research in the Kingdom means Al-Rasheed has (p.12)(n.1) “not come across an impartial sociological or anthropological study of religion and religious practice… conducted by a Saudi researcher.” And while being outside Saudi Arabia allows you the liberty of working critically, it prevents you doing the type of intensive ethnographic fieldwork that is the mainstay of anthropology elsewhere in the world.

To make matters worse, the world is not exactly receptive to the type of nuanced analysis for which good anthropology has become known. When it comes to Saudi Arabia, many writers seem content to trot out a few clichés about Wahhabism and to dig no further into the facts of the matter. That Al-Rasheed has overcome these problems to produce a finely nuanced account of the ways in which the Saudi state is contested at the start of the 21st century is a triumph.

It is important to emphasise the fact Al-Rasheed is an anthropologist because an anthropological approach seems to avoid some of the central problems hampering much of the writing about the Kingdom. If the reader is anything like me, he or she will by now have read hundreds of articles which endeavour to calmly delineate those age-old categories: Wahhabi, Salafi, Sahwi, Liberal and Jihadi. Reading these articles, nothing seems simpler than the way people happily adhere to the roles they have been given. The problems start when you read another article, which has an entirely different set of categories, and find out that actually, according to article (b), those calm categories of article (a) aren’t actually the way we need to see Saudi Arabia, and that the author of article (b) has the definitive set of categories.

There is a problem when an article contains more categories than there are people mentioned in the article to fill them.

Madawi Al-Rasheed does not full into the trap of classification. Contesting the Saudi State is full of people, many of whom have moved between categories, most of whom do not fit neatly into any of them. Al-Rasheed is well aware that categories are only useful in so far as they allow us to understand the richness and complexity of the human relations beneath them. She is also aware that these people may not agree with the categories they have been placed in(n.2) . Most importantly, the books starting point is that even if people call themselves a certain name, or put themselves in a certain category, that self-ascription might be contested by others.

Which is to say, giving names to things is not a prologue to understanding a situation; understanding the contested nature of the names involved in a situation is, in an important sense, the situation itself. In Saudi Arabia at the dawn of the 21st century, understanding the arguments that revolve around names like Salafi is to understand much of the current situation.

Such an approach means not taking names to refer to absolute objects, but understanding that underneath names are discourses that legitimate themselves, and that these discourses are in turn used to respond to very local concerns, which often have only limited relevance to the explicit intentions of the discourse. Al-Rasheed uses such an approach to look to see how underneath different interpretations of what it means to be Salafi there are discourses which encourage and legitimate different types of action on a local level. For instance, (p.137) “even if Jihadism… is a function of global terror networks and transnational religious and political flows, it grows in a specific local context with its own cultural codes and experiences.”

Her method of analysis is vital in Saudi Arabia not just because political science is content to rest at the level of names, but because so much of the politics of contestation in Saudi Arabia is about naming; the official ‘ulama call the Jihadi’s Kharijites, the Jihadis return the compliment – and unless one understands the background underneath all this catcalling, these names float in a vacuum.

Most of the book is taken up in working out what it might mean to be a number of names: Muslim, Saudi Arabian and Salafi being the most prominent. One of the great successes of the book is the way it, in looking at these names, manages to talk about faith. As Al-Rasheed argues (p.210), in social science faith has too often been either an ideological supplement to what is essentially a materialist motivation, or it has stood apart as an irrational motivation for action. Contesting the Saudi State instead traces a very delicate path through the ways religion has interacted with politics; how many Jihadis are not in search of some sort of nihilistic redemption, but are rational actors (ibid) “guided by divine power, empowered by faith in a world where such empowerment is dismissed as emotional, irrational, misguided and even destructive.”

The danger with writing such a book – stood away from your field of research and working from discourse, especially when you want to take faith claims seriously – is that discourse becomes the horizon of your work. It is to Al-Rasheed’s credit that, as far as possible, she does not allow this to happen. Very early on in the book, she makes the point that despite the claims of the official ‘ulama, the government operates according to personal political gains rather than religion.

Indeed, much of the dissent Al-Rasheed writes about in the book emerges precisely from this gap between words and things. It emerges due to the distance between the words of a regime that praised jihad in Afghanistan and the fact it allowed American troops into the country during the first gulf war. Al-Rasheed eloquently describes this contestation of a regime that (p.1) “insisted in complete submission to political authority while preaching total submission to God.”

The book traces the development of the official Wahhabi religio-political discourse, and its implications on contemporary political life. While Al-Rasheed is admirably sceptical of the official claims, proving their verity, or otherwise, is not the focus of the book. For instance, the Wahhabi myth (p.23) “claims that Muslims in Arabia were and are blasphemous, and their salvation is entirely dependent on the message of Muhammad ibn Abd Al-Wahhab.” Now clearly, the fact there was tomb worship does not mean that everyone was a tomb worshipper. But this sort of exercise is not what Al-Rasheed is driving at; she wants to understand how this claim functions to legitimate the Al-Saud regime, and the effect it will have on how those who want to challenge the Kingdom create their opposition.

This review does not allow me the space to go into her claims in detail, suffice to say that even when her book deals with relatively worn ground, the perspective she takes allows new insights. For instances, much of the academic debate on the emergence of the Sahwa centres on whether it was an internal development to Saudi Arabia, or whether it was an imported phenomenon that arrived with the Muslim Brotherhood in the 60’s. Al-Rasheed, characteristically, turns the debate on its head. While she disagrees (p.73) with Kepel (n.3) , who claims that the Sahwa enters the Kingdom with the Muslim Brotherhood, and even suggests the reverse – that the Muslim Brotherhood were influenced by ideas from inside the Kingdom – she suggests this is not the point. What is more important is to see how these ideas (foreign, ‘internal’), are understood on the ground, and made relevant to local concerns in the Kingdom.

Nowhere is this better achieved than in her portrait of Lewis Atiyat Allah, “one of the most popular Jihadi Islamist internet writers” (p.175). Under a nom de plume, he writes sophisticated critiques of the Kingdom, and responds articulately to criticisms. His support of al-Qa’ida is not simply based on the sentiment of “kick the infidel from the Arabian Peninsula”, but is a carefully phrased argument which examines the duty of jihad, and the task of making Islam a hegemonic religion. Reading Al-Rasheed’s presentation of his ideas, you may not agree with him – I hope you don’t – but you cannot walk away claiming his argument is anything other than considered. Her presentation of his work moves from global to local (Saudi Arabian) concerns, not simply showing how the local is now part of the global, and visa versa, but how both local and global share similar dynamics. At each stage of the argument, Al-Rasheed shows the relationship between Lewis’ ideas and the official Wahhabi discourse. It is a rich portrait, that should be required reading for anyone interested in the Peninsula.

This portrait also points to the necessary limit of the study. Inevitably, given the repression within Saudi Arabia, Al-Rasheed’s fieldwork has been a virtual one. In one sense, this is the same movement that has occurred within Saudi Arabia: due to internal repression, critics of the regime have in large part also moved to the internet. However, her treatment creates a slight imbalance in the book. For while we get a sense of the gap between the official discourse and the way the Saudi state functions, the majority of the book – which deals with the ways this discourse is contested – rests on the level of a discursive analysis. Which is to say that the ethnography of jihad has yet to be written, but one cannot fault Al-Rasheed for this. As a nuanced picture of the contradictions of Wahhabi religio-political discourse, and the actors contesting it, Contesting the Saudi State succeeds admirably, and deserves the widest possible readership.

Notes

n.1: All page references to Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation will be indicated by a number inside brackets. Other books will be referred to in the normal way. Notes are denoted by the letter (n)
n.2: Have you ever met anyone who describes themselves as a Wahhabi?
n.3: Kepel, G. (2004) The War for Muslim Minds. pp. 170-196. Cambridge: Belknap Press.

Lines in the Sand

An article shortly to be published with SaudiDebate.

Title: Lines in the sand

Text:

It is difficult to draw lines in the desert. The wind tends to quickly cover them up with sand, and the surface is as before. The problem is exacerbated if one has to draw lines around a nation bordered by seven other countries. If that wasn’t difficult enough, it is especially hard to draw such lines when you have three competing ideas of where the line should be. Nation states like clear lines between organised sovereignties, separating out the vivid blocks of colour on our maps. Such an understanding is not shared by nomadic peoples, whose concept of territorial ownership can often be durational and change with the seasons. Nor is such an understanding shared by Islamic movements that see only one border: that between Islam and the non-believers.

Suffice to say, Saudi Arabia has always had a problem with lines.

This problem is further complicated by the fact that the Saudi Arabian state relied on both Islamic movements and nomads to achieve power. The territorial expansion of the House of Saud in the 30’s would not have been possible without their alliance with the Ikhwanⁱ, a religious and military brotherhood derived from Bedouin tribes. Their notions of movement and expansion did not sit well with the centralising tendencies of Ibn Saud’s nascent state. After a significant deterioration in the relationship, leading to a rebellion in 1929-30, Ibn Saud crushed the movement.

The battle with between the Ikhwan and Ibn Saud was not simply a question of a difference between badw (nomad), and hadr (settled) populations; it was also about two different varieties of Wahhabism. On the one hand, Ibn Saud wanted to consolidate the state he had already established, on the other, the Ikhwan, who cared little for the static boundaries established by the British, and wanted to continue the expansion of Wahhabism.

While the Ikhwan were defeated in the 1930’s, the tension continues between a centralizing state with pragmatic concerns about survival and a religious ideology that, while acting as the justification for the state, implicitly rejects the centralisation of the House of Saud. Many of those who captured the grand mosque in Mecca were descendants of the defeated Ikhwan.

But it is not just the Ikhwan’s descendants who are unsatisfied with the borders Saudi Arabia has drawn up around itself. The Saudi government had encouraged the fighters who had gone to Afghanistan in the 1980’s to fight against the Soviet occupation. On their return, it was these fighters, along with a new generation of religious clergy, that decried the presence of American troops on Saudi soil during the first Gulf war. Again, at stake was a question of boundaries. For al sahwa al islamiyya (the Islamic awakening), the idea of having infidel forces present so close to the holy sites of Mecca and Medina was against Islamic law:differing perceptions of religious and national borders clashed. These tensions was exacerbated by the perceived lack of political will on the past of the Saudi state to intervene in situations, such as Palestine, where members of the umma were under attack.

These tensions continue to build.

Walking the line…

Today, Saudi Arabia is again worried about Saudi militants returning from foreign wars to sow dissent back home. Except this time, the foreign war is rather closer to home. In fact, it is just next door. Most worryingly, as Okruhlik notesⁱⁱ: “The jihadis engaged in the war in Iraq are returning to Saudi Arabia much younger and perhaps more independent than the mujahideen who returned from Afghanistan in the 1980s.”

Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq is 900km long, undemarcated and undefended. Before the American invasion, the chief concern for the Kingdom was the smuggling of alcohol and weapons. Now, peopleⁱⁱⁱ have to be added to the list. The Saudi government has reacted forcefully. According^iv to a recent report by the Saudi defence analyst Nawaf Obaid, Saudi Arabia has spent $1.8 billion securing its border with Iraq since 2004.

They have every reason to be worried. The Shi’a resurgence in Iraq means the Kingdom is becoming worried about the possibility of a generalised Shi’a awakening across the region. Despite recent reforms instituted in Saudi Arabia, the Shi’a population are still very much second class citizens, and the Kingdom doesn’t want them catching the revolutionary wind. In theory, that would leave Saudi Arabia backing the Sunni factions in Iraq – if it wasn’t for the fact that many of the Sunni factions have links, or at least shared sentiments, with the jihadis currently active in Saudi Arabia.

For the moment then, the border is staying firmly shut. Thousands^v of Iraqi’s are fleeing: at least 100,000 to Egypt, 730,000 to Jordan and 660,000 to Syria, with more arriving each month. Very few are getting to Saudi Arabia. And if the message wasn’t being understood before, the Kingdom hope that the wall^vi they are building, which will cover the entire length of Saudi Arabia’s border with Iraq, will give the message loud and clear. Given past experience, bets are off on Saudi Arabia managing to keep many people out.

…Or crossing it?

If they did fail to build the wall, it wouldn’t be the first time. In 2003, the Kingdom embarked on an ambitious project to build a fence along the border with Yemen. The Saudi government claimed the fence was being constructed to stop smuggling.

They have a point. In December 2003^vii, more than 4,000 people and large quantities of weapons and drugs were seized in the south of the country. The Yemeni side of the border is dominated by tribes that are less than totally obedient to the government, and this makes enforcement of border restrictions difficult. In December 2001 the government attempted to capture Abu Ali al-Harithi, a former body guard of Osama bin Laden, who was believed to be in Ma’rib. The tribal forces responded, and the Yemeni government troops were forced back with heavy losses. To make matters worse, between March 2002 and February 2003, thirty six Saudi border guards were killed in the frontier town of Jizan.

There is not only an unmanageable border with Yemen, but thousands of weapons to be smuggled over it. Decades of civil war mean that there is now^viii an estimated three weapons per head of the population in Yemen. These weapons have been finding their way into the hands of jihadis in Saudi Arabia – two AK-47 assault rifles used in an attack on the U.S consulate have been traced to Yemen’s Defence Ministry.

Despite all these reasons for alarm, the wall was eventually abandoned following fierce disagreements with the tribes living on the Yemeni side of the border. The origin of these arguments is complex.

The Saudi-Yemeni border was first officially fixed by the Ti’fa^ix agreement of 1934, following a war between the two countries. Under the terms^x of Ti’fa agreement, Saudi Arabia agreed to give back some of the gains it had made during the war, while consolidating its hold on Jizan and Najran provinces^xi. The agreement was supposed to last for twenty years, but at the appointed time was neither renegotiated nor renewed. Instead, years of warfare in Yemen followed. It was finally unified in 1990, a policy which Saudi Arabia completely disagreed with, hoping to keep the two countries separated.

However, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Yemen deteriorated through the early 90’s, as Riyadh supported a number of factions that destabilised the country. The lowest ebb in the relationship was reached in 1994, when oil was found at Ma’rib, which was claimed on Saudi maps, and there were clashes between Saudi and Yemeni troops. Relations then improved in the late 90’s, leading to the Jeddah^xii agreement of 2000, which definitively fixed the borders between the two countries.

It is strongly believed that the Jeddah agreement was already agreed in 1997, and the delay between agreement and implementation was due to it being used as a political tool to gain leverage on other issues, such as the restoration of suspended financial aid from Saudi Arabia to Yemen. Despite no agreements being reached about such issues, the final agreement closely follows the Ti’fa agreement.

Saudi Arabia wanted to build their wall roughly along the agreed boundary – albeit 20km into Yemen’s territory (as the limit of the neutral territory). The tribes living along the border were infuriated. Not only would this mean being deprived of a much needed revenue from smuggling, it clashes with the very different notion of territory held by the tribes living in the north of Yemen.

The Jeddah agreement tacitly acknowledges these differing conceptions of territory. One of the provisions reads:

“Shepherds in both countries will have the right to pasturage and water up to twenty kilometres beyond the border “according to prevailing tribal traditions”. However either side may set restrictions on the number of vehicles crossing the border with shepherds, the firearms shepherds may carry, and the like.”

It is commonly thought that nomadic tribes have no real conception of territory. This is, of course, false. However, their conceptions tend to differ from the absolute lines imposed by ideas of international sovereignty. As J.C. Wilkinson^xiii notes for nearby Oman, rather than thinking in terms of ‘mine’, nomads in the region tend to think in terms of ‘right.’ Pastoral people are reliant on water supplies that are not constant – but change with the seasons. Thus, the notion of ownership tends to be more complicated than the absolute lines of a nation-state; they are, instead, predicated on ideas of duration and co-operative exchange.

Now a line in the desert doesn’t disturb these arrangements, but a large wall certainly does. And sure enough, people were not pleased. The Sh’ite Wayliah tribe objected^xiv to the positioning of the border, claiming to have 240 year old papers that proved the tribes ownership of the land. Such papers may have had some validity – as it was only in 1934 that the areas now bordering Yemen were incorporated into Saudi Arabia, and the Ta’if treaty has only dubious international legitimacy. Be that as it may, Saudi Arabia didn’t listen to their claim and tried to pacify them by giving five hundred of them Saudi citizenship.

The Wayliah were unimpressed, rioting on a series of occasions^xv, and claiming^xvi, in 2004, that there were 3,000 fighters ready to give up their lives to stop the construction of the wall. The Kingdom responded by trying to claim it was not a wall of separation, but after extensive discussions^xvii with the Yemeni government, eventually backed down from the project.

In a fascinating account^xviii, J.C. Wilkinson notes that after the withdrawal of the British from the region, many border disputes were resolved by returning to older notions of territory. Today, two global movements increasingly prevent such accommodations being reached. Terrorism transforms empty stretches of desert into possible weaknesses. Oil transforms those same areas into liquid gold. The way the nation-state reacts to these two phenomenon has little respect for the older, more flexible nodal notions of territory.

Old Rivalries

If the relationship with Iraq and Yemen exemplifies Saudi Arabia’s concern about terrorism, then the border dispute with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) exemplifies the concern with having absolute territorial rights over oil.

The question of the borders between the two countries was re-opened by President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, who took power in the UAE in November 2005, during a formal visit to Riyadh^xix. The argument over the territory was publically reopened in 2006, following the publication of a UAE textbook showing a map^xx of the Emirates extending westward as far as Qatar, across Saudi Arabian territory^xxi.

The origins of this rivalry extend back before the existence of the Saudi Arabian state. At the time, the al-Sauds and the al-Nahyns (now the rulers of Abu Dhabi, the leading emirate) were dynastic families. The al-Nahyns were prepares to accept the dominance of the al-Sauds, but not Wahhabi Islam. The key bone of contention between them was the Buraimi oasis. Control of the oasis meant control of vital water for crops and herding in a desert region. Fifty years ago, the oasis was taken by Saudi Arabia. International arbitration between the two sides ensued. As the arbitration failed, Abu Dhabi retook the well with British support.

The situation changed in 1974, as the United Arab Emirates pressed for international recognition. Saudi Arabia only agreed to recognise the nascent state if Abu Dhabi relinquished a 25km stretch of land linking it to Qatar, and the Shaybah oil fields, now in the south of Saudi Arabia, where oil had just been found. In return, Saudi Arabia promised to relinquish its claim on the Buraima oasis^xxii, and recognise the UAE. An agreement was signed on August 12 in 1974.

Today, the Shaybah oil fields produced 550,000 barrels of light crude oil a day, and revenues from the field are in excess of $10 million per year^xxiii. Abu Dhabi now claims that the whole agreement was carried out under political duress, and want to renegotiate the Riyadh treaty. The treaty itself is of doubtful legality under international law, as it has never been published, nor was it ratified by the UAE Federal National Council. The UAE hope that with new kings in place in both countries, a change in the political climate could occur.

Border Crossings

Any border is overlaid with a series of meanings. The line in the sand is at the same time a national boundary, the route to a watering hole, the oil riches concealed underneath, and the route of a successful conquering army. In the pastiche state^xxiv, the national boundary has to manage the tension between all these different meanings.

But borders are not simply physical. If the nation state’s borders denote the physical territory over which it has the right to exercise sovereignty, there are a second set of borders, which denote which types of people will be treated as subjects of that sovereignty, and in what way. Saudi Arabia’s state religion has created, in part, a form of Islam that is in necessary contradiction with its physical borders. As the jihadi’s expand and push out to other countries, supported by the same ideology that supports the Saudi state, the physical borders of the country feel themselves come under threat. Jihadi’s trapped within one border by another. Saudi Arabia trapped between borders, between conflicting responsibilities. You can bet that the lines of sand will be redrawn yet.

ihttp://www.naqshbandi.org/ottomans/wahhabi/ikhwan.htm

iiOkruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170. p.158.

iiihttp://www.google.com/search?q=cache:http://www.ndu.edu/inss/Repository/Outside_Publications/McMillan/200601XX_INSS_McMillan_OPub_USIP.pdf

ivhttp://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0420/p07s02-wome.html?s=hns

vhttp://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/22/Worldandnation/Why_so_few_Iraqis_fle.shtml

vihttp://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7374-2126835,00.html

viihttp://yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=698&p=front&a=2

viiihttp://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/26d878228bfc4a0c34deb476519cfef4.htm

ixhttp://www.al-bab.com/yemen/pol/int1.htm

xhttp://www.yementimes.com/00/iss26/front.htm

xiBoth of these provinces are still felt to be ‘Yemeni’ by a large proportion of the population in Yemen.

xiihttp://www.al-bab.com/yemen/pol/int5.htm

xiiiWilkinson. J. C. 1983: Traditional Concepts of Territory in South East Arabia. The Geographical Journal. Vol. 149. No. 3, pp. 301-315.

xivhttp://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Pageia&ID=IA16204

xvhttp://www.islamonline.net/iol-arabic/dowalia/alhadath2000-oug-29/alhadath7.asp.

xvihttp://www.yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=711&p=front&a=1

xviihttp://www.theestimate.com/backissues/063000/dossier.html

xviiiWilkinson. J. C. 1991: Arabia’s frontiers: the story of Britain’s boundary drawing in the desert. London: Tauris.

xixhttp://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_23-2-2005_pg4_8

xxhttp://www.uaeinteract.com/uaeint_misc/pdf_2006/English_2006/eyb3.pdf

xxiThe UAE ministry of information and culture show another map (http://www.uaeinteract.com/) which reflects the status quo.

xxiiThough many Saudi maps still show the oasis as within its territory: http://www.mofa.gov.sa/Detail.asp?InSectionID=51&InNewsItemID=1750

xxiiihttp://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC05.php?CID=2431

xxivhttp://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=119

What is Wahhabism?

A long article I first published with SaudiDebate here.

Title: What is Wahhabism?

Text:

Certain figures take hold of the public imagination; they become scapegoats for all society’s ills. In the England of the 1990’s, single mothers fulfilled this function. Street violence? That will be the lack of a father figure for today’s youth. The NHS unable to cope? Blame it on all those pregnancies. Today, the single mother of international relations is Wahhabi Islam.

Wahhabism is that “hate-filled, extremist fringe of the [Muslim] religion that is the official Saudi creed¹.” In the eyes of the media, it is chiefly responsible for all global terrorism – from the Balkans to Indonesia.

Though, as for any good scapegoat², the ills for which Wahhabi Islam is held responsible vary, its representations in the international press have a number of common points. Wahhabi’s are backwards and archaic; uneducated with no interest in history³; insistent that fellow peoples of the book (Jews and Christians) are nothing more than “sorcerers and devil worshippers, fit for annihilation – a venomous dictum that Saudi mosques spew out to this day⁴“; sponsors of terrorism (or the terrorists themselves).

In sum, they are the “most retrograde expression of Islam⁵.”

Whether or not single mothers were actually responsible for the variety of ills for which they were held responsible is a moot point; such figures are so attractive precisely because whole constellations of different problems can be placed onto them. Knowing as little as possible about your enemy is a great advantage is carrying out such caricatures. Unsurprisingly then, despite all that is written condemning Wahhabi Islam, relatively little is known about its history.

What’s in a name

Wahhabism takes its name from Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab, founder of an 18C reformist movement. One of the central aims of Wahhabism was to remove the heretical innovations that had crept into the religion since the time of Prophet Muhammad; the worship of saint’s tombs and sacred stones, for the Wahhabis, was idolatry that had no place in a purified Islam. Given this emphasis, it should come as no surprise that the name Wahhabi is an anathema to Wahhabis. For a movement based on eradicating the association of divine characteristics with humans (shirk), calling yourself after a man would not be the best start⁶.

Instead, Wahhabi’s tend to call themselves ahl al-tawhid, drawing attention to the central importance of monotheism to the movement, or Salafi⁷, followers of the prophetic model as understood by the companions of Muhammad. Following such a model means placing an emphasis on following the examples laid down in the Sunna, and the rejection of the use of reason in the understanding of jurisprudence (fiqh). The importance of reason, in contrast, tends to characterise the modernist schools of Islamic thought. Wahhabi Islam should also be distinguished from traditionalists, who emphasize strictly following the work of early scholars (taqlid). Salafi’s refuse any intermediaries between themselves and the Qu’ran and Sunna.

All this is lost on Wahhabism’s detractors, for whom al-Wahhab is much like Bin Laden, an unlearned rabble-rouser. Unbeknownst to most western commentators, they are joining a long line of critics who have denounced Wahhabism without knowing much about it. The alliance between Wahhabism and the house of Saud in the 18C threatened many of the local Muslim rulers, who were worried that the austere brand of Islam promoted by al-Wahhab would undermine both their authority and the rich flow of revenue they gained from controlling the Hajj. During the period the house of Saud conquered what is now Saudi Arabia, alarmist stories spread that the Wahhabis were like The Kharawarij (of whom more later): fanatical extremists at the margins of Islam.

Two centuries later, little has changed, and there is still a great deal of uncertainty over what exactly al-Wahhab stood for. This is not entirely surprising, as it is exceedingly difficult to get access to his work. Thus we should be especially grateful that DeLong-Bas has recently published an extensive analysis of the writings of al-Wahhab⁸, after the Saudi government gave her access to the archives of his writings in Riyadh. Her work sets out a vision of the thought of al-Wahhab quite at odds with the views of his detractors, and they have reviled her for doing so⁹.

Far from being a unlettered rabble-rouser, al-Wahhab was part of a vibrant and international network of scholars¹⁰. He began by writing in the classical tradition, before moving to more personal commentaries. In these writings, he reaches many positions also arrived at by modernist scholars (who allow for the role of reason), though he does so by different means.

What comes through DeLong-Bas’ analysis of his writing most strongly is both al-Wahhab’s commitment to purifying Islam, and his equally strong repudiation of the type of violent acts normally associated with Wahhabi Islam. For al-Wahhab, one should be punished for wearing a talisman, but it is the talisman that should be destroyed, not the person. His mission was to purify the religion, not to destroy the unbelievers.

DeLong-Bas’ presentation of the gap between al-Wahhab and his image is most forceful when considering the question of jihad. Holy war (jihad), has meant a lot of things over the centuries. Classically, jihad is the justification for war – a description of the relation between the Islamic and non-Islamic worlds. To many modernists, jihad came to mean something personal: an individual commitment to Islam that could be equally carried out with the pen or the tongue. For al-Wahhab, jihad is the war itself, and this war could only be defensive.

In the Kitab al-Jihad, he uses the famous sword verse (Qur’an 9:5)¹¹ not to justify pro-active jihad, which is what jihadis have often used it to do, but to emphasize that during conflict women and children should not be killed. Far from believing, as some have claimed¹², that all unbelievers should be put to the sword, he states the relationships that should be cultivated with unbelievers (in order of preference) are: conversion, a treaty relationship where the infidels pay poll tax to the Islamic state, and last, their slaughter. Now while none of these three options may seem particularly appealing to the unbelieving neighbour of a Wahhabi group, he is here close to modernism – the fact of unbelief is an insufficient cause to go to war.

Waging the defensive war

While DeLong-Bas’ analysis of these issues is masterful, it is also overly defensive. By the end of the text one wonders how it is possible such a peaceful man could have inspired a movement that managed to create a nation-state from a patchwork of tribal allegiances¹³. She is so committed to defending al-Wahhab against the often ridiculous allegations made against him that she is occasionally disingenuous. For instance, in her defence of al-Wahhab’s view of jihad, DeLong-Bas is to some extent fighting a straw man. As far as this author is aware, there is no tradition of fiqh that advocates going to war with a group because they are unbelievers. Even Al Qaeda justify most of their actions on the basis that ‘crusaders’ are attacking Muslims. Now while one can certainly question their grasp of the relevant political facts, it remains to be seen, if we accept their contextual political analysis as correct, they would have sufficient legal basis to go to war in al-Wahhab’s understanding of jihad.

Which is to say that DeLong-Bas’ defensiveness about her subject effaces the connections that do exist between the contemporary Wahhabi state, jihadi movements, and al-Wahhab’s teachings. She accompanies this move by shifting the blame for contemporary political developments onto Ibn Tamiyya. Every element of contemporary Wahhabism she finds distasteful is laid on his doorstep. And while her analysis of Ibn Taymiyya is excellent, is begs the question of the connections between the two thinkers.

If DeLong-Bas’ enterprise was merely academic – an exploration of the thought of an Islamic thinker in the 18C – then her failure to explore the links between al-Wahhab and later ‘Wahhabi’ movements could be justified as falling outside the scope of her investigation. It is to her credit that she attempts to do much more than this, and tries to explain contemporary developments in Wahhabi thought. Unfortunately, her defensiveness leaves an important question unanswered. What is the relation between the thought of al-Wahhab, the contemporary Saudi state, and Salafi jihadi thought?

In the eye of the beholder

Whatever distortions may have been introduced since the writings of al-Wahhab, al madhab al wahhabi is the sect and jurisprudence (fiqh) of the Saudi Arabian state¹⁴, and the link between Wahhabism and the house of Saud continues to be one of the its principle ideological justifications.

According to the ahl al-tawhid, God is the sole creator and sovereign of the universe, and only God can be worshipped. Such an idea is shared by all Muslims, however, and al-tawhid means something more extensive to the Wahhabis. Since the Qu’ran and the Sunna should govern every part of life, if it is to be in accordance with Islamic law, every act has the possibility of being an act of worship. What this establishes is a strong, and, as we shall see, ambiguous, relationship between belief and action. In such a framework, deviant behaviours are an indication of submission to something other than God’s law.

This ambiguous relationship is indicated by Sulayman, the grandson of al-Wahhab and a noted scholar. He was one of the figures involved in the first uprising of the Wahhabi’s, which was put down viciously by the Ottomans¹⁵. When he is asked if one can consort with the idolater, he replies¹⁶: “Even if he claims that he disliked it in his heart, there is no excuse because it is the outward appearance that counts, and, as he has displayed unbelief, he is an unbeliever.” Elsewhere Sulayman seems very reasonable; he allows Muslims to go to the unbeliever’s lands, provided they can practice his religion, and he emphasises that “there is no necessary relation between calling someone a hypocrite openly and him being a hypocrite inwardly.” However, in this quote about unbelief, he displays one of the central tensions in Wahhabi thought: given that every act can be an act of worship, and that we must remove the use of rationality and logic from the law, how can we properly discern if someone believes in Allah?

Put in a more simple way: what is the relationship between belief, faith and action?

The problematic status of such a question can be seen from the path taken by the students of Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-Albani, the well know Salafi hadith scholar who founded the al-Jamaa al-Salafiyya movement in Saudi Arabia in the 1970’s. While avowedly apolitical, it was a splinter group from the movement that stormed the Grand Mosque in the 70’s. al-Albani ended up living in Jordan, while his students took some very different paths. Ali Hasan al-Galabu, for instance, became a prominent scholar of non-violence, while Abu Qatadah became the mufti for the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. In a fascinating essay, Wiktorowicz¹⁷ claims what this indicates is that there is no substantial theological disagreement between what he calls the purists (those who refrain from political involvement), and the jihadis: their differences lie in their understanding of the political context for action.

Are catapults weapons of mass destruction?

The first signs of open unrest from Islamic scholars outside of the Saudi state structure occurred when al-Hawali and other scholars spoke out against the fatwa allowing American troops inside Saudi Arabia in 1991. One cannot forget the historical parallel here with the accusations of misrule that preceded the initial al-Saud conquest of the holy places.

But while this may have been the first explicit sign of dissent, the roots of the problem were laid a long time before. In the 60’s, the Muslim Brotherhood were forced to flee Nasser’s Egypt, and were welcomed with open arms in Saudi Arabia. While the brotherhood did not acquire a significant following in the country, their political awareness affected a whole generation of religious scholars, as people like Mohammad Qutb (brother of the more famous Sayyid Qutb) taught a generation of preachers, including al-Hawali.

Their anger with the religious establishment, Wiktorowicz argues, is not a matter of theology, but is due to the Saudi preachers reluctance to play a political role and intervene in world affairs.

A contemporary example of such a debate is about whether one can justify the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In order to support their use, jihadi’s turn¹⁸ to a hadith about the siege of Taif. During this siege, Muhammad sanctioned the use of a catapult to attack the city walls, though one could not discriminate between civilians and enemy fighters on the other side. He justified this on the grounds that the enemy fighters were responsible for civilians deaths because they choose to mix among them. Here, the questions are principally one’s of political context: there is no further information the hadith can give you about determining the relevance of the catapult to the nuclear bomb.

Now such a debate may seem miles away from the sober positions adopted by al-Wahhab. However, at heart of the debate is the same set of concerns: the refusal to allow reason to play a role in questions of jurisprudence and the ensuing ambiguity about political interpretation.

Takfir

This debate is played out most intensely in the arguments about Takfir (declaring someone an apostate). Historically, one end of the debate has been represented by The Khawarij. In the seventh century, after the death of Uthman, the third caliph, Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad defeated most of his rivals. Mu’awiya ibn abu Sufyan, a close relative of Uthman, accused Ali of hiding his killers. Eventually, Ali conceded to place the matter before an arbitration. Some of his followers were appalled by his decision and turned against him, feeling only God has the right to judge such matters. They became known at The Kharawarij, declared Ali an apostate, killing him in 660.

Whereas mainstream Islam separate out questions of belief and faith, and their relationship to action, according to Wiktorowicz, The Khawarij conflate them: performing sinful actions for them did not simply mean a lack of faith: from such sinful actions could also be intuited a lack a belief. This extreme understandings of Takfir has marginalised The Khawarij in the Muslim world.

Now Salafi’s reject these principles and agree one cannot base a judgement of Takfir on bad behaviour. Bad behaviour could be simply a result of lack of faith, rather than a lack of belief. There are three categories that could excuse people who are acting badly. People could be acting in an ignorant fashion, they could be coerced, or they could simply be acting out of greed. If any of these conditions are met, then one cannot be declared an apostate. These conditions are equally supported by Al Qaeda¹⁹. Following an attack in Riyadh in which Muslims were killed, some argued one of the victims was an advocate of obscenity. Al Qaeda²⁰ responded by saying²¹: “the debauchery and sins mentioned in connection with that victim does not justify his killing.”

However, how these categories are applied is extremely ambiguous. How does one gain access to the someone’s psychology in a fashion that allows one to know whether someone acts out of greed or not? al-Albani, the Saudi religious leader, has a limited definition, claiming that one cannot know what is in the heart of a sinner unless he himself gives an explicit renouncement of the faith. Al-Hawali responded by criticising him as separating thought and action (irja). Many jihadis then claim that if a ruler persists in legislating sinful acts, despite warnings from scholars, then there is sufficient evidence to conclude he is an unbeliever; and thus to kill him. How, here, one judges what duration of time and types of action qualify as “persists” seems, again entirely open to political interpretation. In these debates, we see the same tensions that also characterise the writing of al-Wahhab.

The limits of discourse

Despite general theological agreement, there are vast difference of political interpretation over such matters as whether America is waging a war against Muslims (justifying a defensive war), or whether the house of Saud are still truly believers. Wiktorowicz uses this division to argue that what we need is to improve the political awareness of the purist scholars (those connected to the house of Saud, in this case). “A purist scholar with a Ph.D in the Islamic sciences as well as advanced education in international relations would be well situated to deconstruct and rebut Al Qaeda’s worldview (though there is obviously the danger that purists might arrive at similar conclusions about politics).²²“

One must note the implicit conservatism in his argument: that what we – as the United States – wants is the Saudi Arabian government. This thesis, which runs through his essay, can be seen in his characterisation of the Saudi state religious apparatus as purist and “non-political.” This characterisation allows him to set up the purists as the force for good in Wahhabism. But though their politics might not be explicit, that is often a luxury afforded to those who have the power of the state behind them. Wiktorowicz argument essentially comes down to a support for the Saudi religious establishment and the state that supports it (and is supported by it).

This dichotomisation means Wiktorowicz fails to see the links between purist and jihadi – how the contradictions in the power base of the purists has produced the jihadi movement as its necessary correlate^23. This is one of the reasons trying to support a purist worldview is doomed to fail.

One can also note here if Wiktorowicz is correct, and the main way of overcoming jihadi thought is through fighting the interpretation of context – then surely the best way to do so is to change American military policy so the context itself changes. This is not a conclusion he would endorse, nor is it one that is entirely correct.

Indeed, the absurdity of such postulations point to the limit of the method employed in both this article and the main texts (DeLong-Bas and Wiktorowicz) under discussion. Discursive restrictions on action are important: to act without an explicit base for action that one’s supporters consider reasonable would mean losing legitimacy. But it is incorrect to deal simply with these discursive arguments outside of the social, political and economic worlds in which they are produced.

Context is not produced in a vacuum, but from a particular perspective. Likewise, discourse may justify action or condemn it, but it should not be seen as identical with the action itself. Winning the unobtainable battle of discourse would not make Bin Laden put down arms, nor would his support suddenly dry up. To solve the latter problem would require attending to the unemployment and alienation in Saudi Arabia that proves such fertile ground for the Wahhabi ideology. A study of Wahhabi Islam that had a strong degree of explanatory power would have to explain the interconnections between the social organisation in Saudi Arabia, the economic and political situation of the jihadis, and the way these elements interact with discourse.

Such a study is yet to be written.

1Alexiev, A. 2003: Among the Wahhabis. Commentary. May 2003; 115, 5. p.70.

2See, among others: Girard, R. 2005: Violence and the Sacred. London: Continuum.

3The claim that al-Wahhab’s Islam is literalist is one of the most common errors made by commentators. For instance: El Fadl. K. A. 2001: Islam and the Theology of Power. Middle East Report. No. 221, pp. 28-31.

4Alexiev. p.30.

5Schwartz, S. 2004: The two faces of Islam: the house of Saud from Tradition to Terror. New York: Random House.

6Wahhabism tends to be a name used only by the movements detractors, and normally in order to impute a foreign influence in another country. It is thus an irony that it is Wahhabism’s emphasis on the deculturation of Islam, stripping it from impute local practices, that make it such an ideal agent of globalised Islam. See, Roy. O. 2004: Globalised Islam: The Search for a New Ummah. London: Hurst Publishing.

7Though Salafism refers to a much wider range of positions than is normally associated with Wahhabi Islam. Furthermore, Salafism should not be confused with the salafiyya, the Islamic modernists influenced by people like Rashid Rida.

8Delong-Bas, N. 2004: Wahhabi Islam: From Revival and Reform to Global Jihad. London: Oxford University Press.

9http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,245384,00.html

10See Voll, J. 1975: Muhammad Hayya al-Sindi and Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab: An Analysis of an Intellectual Group in Eighteenth-Century Madina. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Vol. 38, No. 1. pp. 32-39.

11“Then, when the sacred months are over, kill the idolaters wherever you find them, take them [as captives], besiege them, and lie in wait for them at every point of observation. If they repent afterwards, perform the prayer and pay the alms, then release them. God is truly All-Forgiving, Merciful.”

12Alexiev, A. 2003: Among the Wahhabis. Commentary. May 2003; 115, 5.

13There are of course a whole series of reasons aside from Wahhabism that led the house of Saud to be successful. Some of the most interesting theories are to be found in Kostiner, J. 1993: The Making of Saudi Arabia 1916-1936: From Chieftancy to Monarchical State. Oxford: OUP.

14See, among others. p. 166. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.

15Sirriych. E. 1989: Wahhabis, Unbelievers, and the Problems of Exclusivism. Bulletin (British Society for Middle Eastern Studies), Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 123-132.

16ibid. p.130. My italics.

17For much of the following analysis the author is relying on the account given in Wiktorowicz, Q. 2006: Anatomy of the Salafi Movement. Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. 29: 207-239.

18Nasser ibn Hamed. http://www.memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=jihad&ID=SR2504. Quoted, Wiktorowicz. p. 215-216.

19This points marks a distinction between Al Qaeda and Qutb, whose ideas allowed the condemnation of entire continents.

20Given Al Qaeda’s evident flouting of these conditions, in could be asked if such discursive structures have any real import. Yet despite the theological justifications being severely strained by Al Qaeda actions, they are nonetheless a constraint on the types of action jihadi groups will consider. Equally, a reticence about judging Takfir from external actions is part of the reason the Saudi religious establishment has refrained from declaring Bin Laden an apostate, a decision that would have large reverberations.

21“The Operation of 11 Rabi al-Awwal: The East Riyadh Operation and Our War with the

United States and its Agents,” FBIS translated text, 1 August 2003. Available at (http://www.whywar.

com/files/qaeda_east_riyadh_operation.txt). Quoted, Wiktorowicz, p. 230.

22ibid. p.234

23For instance, the way a combination of ideological austerity with the decadence of the ruling class has systematically eroded both bases of power, and produced a movement that criticises one on the basis of the other.

The desert and the city

The article below as first published by saudidebate here.

‘History doesn’t repeat itself. But it does rhyme’

Mark Twain

This year sees two notable anniversaries. It is the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attack, and the newspapers are full of commentators(1) trying to work out the relationship between Wahhabism, Al Qaeda and the House of Saud. Meanwhile, in July of this year, a conference(2) of Arab writers gathered in Yemen’s capital Sana’a to mark a little noticed event – the 600th anniversary of Ibn Khaldun’s (1332-1406) death.

There are more similarities than one might think between these two anniversaries. Both Osama bin Laden and Ibn Khaldun have roots in the Hadramut region of Yemen, and both men travelled widely in the Muslim world, and drew on their experiences to formulate wide ranging theories.

There the direct comparisons stops. For while bin Laden took the path of violence, Ibn Khaldun was born in Andalusia, and during a nomadic career held political positions all over the Muslim world. Out of this experience emerged a work that has led him to be regarded as “the father, or one of the fathers, of modern cultural history and social science.”(3) In the Muqaddimah(4), Ibn Khaldun constructed a theory of history centred on the relationship between sedentary and nomadic life. Today such a theory might seem to be of only academic interest – how could reflections on camel herders help us understand modern problems?

More than one might think.

In a time when the problems of Saudi Arabia are being explored through the lens of the expectations of Western states, it comes as no surprise that a great Islamic and Arabic thinker whose concerns seem so distant to our own is being marginalised. Part of the reason for this is how deceptively familiar the Muqaddimah seems. His emphasis on the importance of personality is reminiscent of Weber’s notion of charisma, and the cyclical aspect of his ideas about history seem superficially similar to Vico. All too often the tendency has been to relegate Ibn Khaldun to an antecedent of later western thought, robbing him of his specificity as an Arab and an Islamic thinker, and removing him from the intellectually fertile era in which he lived.

The gamble of this essay is that perhaps, in his reflections on Arab politics in the fourteenth century, there is something which can explain the Saudi Arabia of today – perhaps not a repetition of times past, but at least something that rhymes.

History starts in the desert

The discussion of human civilisation in the Muqaddimah begins with a description of Bedouin life. In Ibn Khaldun’s analysis, the Bedouin are strong and self-reliant, interested “only [in] the necessities of life and not [in] luxuries or anything causing, or calling for, desires and pleasures.”(5) This internal cohesion introduces one of Khaldun’s most important notions, asabiya, translated by Franz Rosenthal as group feeling. Such a notion seems similar to the idea of organic solidarity in Durkheim – the semi-mystical bond that holds society together – but such a comparison would be misleading. Asabiya is a complicated term; it encompasses both the “the cohesive force of the group, the conscience that it has its own specificity and collective aspirations, and the tensions that animate it ineluctably to seek power through conquest.”(6) Asabiya then, is a feeling of belonging, but it is also a feeling of belonging to something which is expanding, and the only way this can come about is through looking up to a leader. The feeling of asabiya is thus also tied to the leader of the community – “the goal to which group feeling leads is royal authority.”(7)

There is a strong asabiya among nomadic populations. The self-reliance fostered by living with the elements means that they are able to achieve superiority over other tribes and found dynasties. With this increase in wealth and status comes a move into the cities. The cities have much to recommend to them – specialisation and diversification of labour, luxury products, and a thriving intellectual life. However, for a dynasty to live in the city requires luxury, and the army is reduced to pay for the allowances of the royal family. With luxury and ties with strangers comes the breakdown of the asabiya that led the dynasty to achieve power – people start to get soft. At this point Ibn Khaldun states that the dynasty will be overturned by those who are younger and still have a strong asabiya, for by the third generation of a dynasty, they will have “completely forgotten the period of desert life and toughness “(8) – it is timely to remind ourselves that King Abdullah is the fourth king on the Saudi throne (though only of the second generation).

So if Ibn Khaldun’s theory was applicable we should be seeing the House of Saud becoming senile – he compares the live of a dynasty to the life of an individual – and the coming to power of other dynasties, whose lives have not been corrupted by luxury. But, one of the notable aspects of Khaldun’s work is that it is not determinist – these cycles are not inevitable, but depend on the “the degree to which particular collectivities employ their God given reason to place themselves in contexts where the forces of history may assert themselves,”(9) as Rosen notes in an excellent essay. Ibn Khaldun does not have an abstract theory that can be applied to all civilisations; his ideas emerge from a particular historical context. Indeed, for Ibn Khaldun, there is no theory without practice. Our task then, is to understand whether such a cyclical idea of history is applicable today.

From the desert born…

“Man is a child of the customs and the things he has become used to. He is not the product of his natural disposition and temperament.”(10)

Khaldun argues that “the Bedouin are of all nations the one most remote from royal leadership.”(11) He holds that the Bedouin are more savage and more closely attuned to desert life than any other nation, and thus they find it hard to restrain themselves sufficiently to maintain power. However, as we saw in the quote that begins this section, Ibn Khaldun believes that man is determined by his customs. He argues that the Bedouin can become dynasties once their nature has been transformed by religion.

Such a process was started in 1744, when Muhammad al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, agrees with the emir of the Najd tribe, Muhammad ibn Saud, to a deal exchanging protection for religious support. This led to the establishment of the first dynasty of the House of Saud. During the 19C, two Saud dynasties fall, but the Muhammad ibn Saud who rides out at the turn of the 20C to restore the rule of the house of Saud and establish the modern Saudi state traced his lineage directly back to that fateful meeting. As I have noted in earlier articles, Saudi Arabia continues to be driven by this uneasy alliance between the House of Saud and the Wahhabi religious institutions which both legitimise and constrain the royal family.(12) This connection between Ibn Khaldun’s theories and Saudi Arabian politics is cemented by the notion of citizenship in Saudi Arabia, where Okruhlik notes: “loyalty to the family structure is linked with loyalty to the state under the al-Saud; the private family reinforces the public family”(13) – this is exactly the type of structure we would expect in a Khaldunian dynasty structured by ties of kin, or by ties of loyalty that resemble them.(14)

It would be correct to object that the House of Saud is not properly a Bedouin tribe – ibn Saud first settled in Deraiyya before moving to Riyadh. But they do rely on the type of strong kinship ties (and religious purity) that are characteristic of nomadic asabiya. The territorial expansion of the House of Saud in the 30’s would not have been possible without their alliance with the Ikhwan,(15) a religious and military brotherhood derived from Bedouin tribes. Furthermore, the political organisation of Saudi Arabia seems to support the applicability of Ibn Khaldun’s theories. Okruhlik(16) has noted the extent to which the political economy of the country is run, even today, broadly on tribal lines, and where access to networks of power is necessary for political advancement. Moreover, these ties are personalised; it is not your role as much as your personality which determines your advancement. Similarly, in Khaldun’s ideas about history there is no emphasis on the institution, but solely on the personality of the leader. As Rosen has argued, this reflects a very different conception of the individual to the one we see underlying Weber’s theories of the state, which emphasise the important of anonymous functionaries fulfilling roles; such a conception of the role of the individual in politics might be of help in explaining Saudi politics today.

To the desert we return…

These similarities have not gone unnoticed before. While the House of Saud managed to appease many of the older Shia leaders after the 1979 uprising, many young activists fled into exile. They started an influential magazine in the 90’s, Al Jazira Al Arabiyya, which made continuous reference to the theories of Ibn Khaldun. It became so influential that part of the conditions of an amnesty agreement reached with the House of Saud was the end of its publication.

During the 90’s, the magazine drew attention to the long urban tradition of the Shia in Saudi Arabia, and their marginalisation by the Najd. In a leader article, Abdullah al-Hasan(17) criticised the regime for promoting tribal asabiya at the expense of a national identity.

Al-Rasheed(18) has called Saudi Arabia a pastiche state, and what this means can be best comprehended through Ibn Khaldun. In the Muqaddimah, conquered tribes and nations will quickly assimilate themselves to their conquerors – Khaldun gives the example of the Spaniards and the Galicians(19). Whether this easy assimilation ever actually took place is a question for another article, but it is certainly almost impossible today. The demand of a nation state is to create a notion of national identity that is in someway abstract – removed from ties of kinship and subjection. The House of Saud is able neither to command control through methods that might have been effective in Khaldun’s era, nor are they able – due to their reliance on kin based asabiya, to construct an embracing notion of national identity. Thus they remain between the two worlds – a pastiche state not able to command its people.

While not rooted in Ibn Khaldun’s world, the House of Saud are not entirely excepted from the problems he sees occurring to royal dynasties in his time. The distance of the royal family from the people, the possession of the land of citizens, allowing oneself to be dominated by a foreign power, deviating from one’s own religious legitimacy, indulging in luxury which removes your ability to lead, corruption – Ibn Khaldun sees all these processes occurring to a dynasty as it reaches senility, gradually sapping its strength and the asabiya of the group(20).

The King is dead?

Khaldun is fairly accurate at diagnosing the ills of the modern Saudi Kingdom. But his theory works less well at explaining how the House of Saud have managed to stay in power despite all these ills. It is not the case, as it might have been in Khaldun’s day, that when the monarchy declines another more vigorous power will rise up out of the periphery. The hegemony of the nation state has meant such challenges have more or less vanished in the middle east.

However, we would be doing a disservice to Ibn Khaldun if we tried to adapt his ideas without taking account of these different historical circumstances. Especially since, as we have seen, many of Khaldun’s ideas seem to explain the Saudi state far better than the Weberian ideas of a unitary state that underlie most analysis today.

Nomads in Ibn Khaldun occupy a complicated place. They are thought of as morally better, as they have not been corrupted(21) by luxury and bad habits. However, they are also thought of as savage. It is because of this savagery that they have sufficient asabiya to form dynasties. Nomadic civilisation is thought of as the precondition for the sedentary civilisation that they must inevitably become. But it is also nomadic civilisation – or those with a stronger asabiya, and thus those closer to it – who will in turn bring down one dynasty and found another.

A very similar process is at work today in Saudi Arabia. While the Bedouin are reduced to symbols of the nation identity,a mixture of religious puritanism and tribal strength is still the basis for Saudi Arabia. It forms the precondition for the state – it remains to be seen whether it can overwhelm it.

A recent article(22) by Al-Rasheed suggests a pattern to support this argument. She describes three individuals. Aysal al-Duwaysh, who challenged the authorities in 1927 over their capitulation to Britain, who at the time was drawing up colonial boundaries; Juhyman al-Utaybi, who took over the Grand Mosque in protest at the religious degeneration of Saudi Arabia’s rulers; and bin Laden. All three were a product of an asabiya that mixed religious indoctrination with strong kinship ties. Moreover, all three were a product of the royal family, and they all forsook a life of comfort and luxury for a life of hardship. It maybe that the pattern suggested by Ibn Khaldun continues today in a different form – as the royal dynasty get corrupt, they venture further and further from their religious legitimacy, and those on the outside rise up to overwhelm them.

---

Notes1) http://commentary.threatswatch.org/2006/09/on-911-islam-the-nature-of-the/
2) http://www.yementimes.com/article.shtml?i=968&p=front&a=1
3) Mahdi, M. 1968:Ibn Khaldun. In International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences. New York: MacMillan. p. 56
4) Khaldun, I. 2005: The Muqaddimah: an introduction to history. Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2005 Edition. All references to the Muqaddimah shall be indicated M. followed by the page number; all references will be to this edition.
5) M.96
6) Talbi, M. 1973: Ibn Khaldun: Sa vie-Son Oeuvre. Tunis: Maison Tunisienne de l’Edition. p.44. Quoted from Bruce B. Lawrence in the introduction to the 2005 edition Khaldun, I. Muqaddimah: an introduction to history.
7) M. 107
8 ) M.137
9) Rosen, L. 2005: Theorizing from Within: Ibn Khaldun and His Political Culture. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Volume 34, Number 6, November 2005, p. 597
10) M.95
11) M.120
12) Okruhlik, G. 2002: Networks of dissent: Islamism and Reform in Saudi Arabia. Current History: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:alISvGlMtwMJ:www.currenthistory.com/org_pdf_files/101/651/101_651_22.pdf
13) Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. p. 154
14) M.98
15) http://www.naqshbandi.org/ottomans/wahhabi/ikhwan.htm
16) Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.
17) p.128 Quoted in Al Rasheed, M. 1998: The Shia of Saudi Arabia: A Minority in Search of Cultural Authenticity. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 25, pp. 121-138
18) http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=119
19) M. 116.
20) M.247
21) M.94
22) http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=189&Itemid=119

Saudi Arabia: a state for ‘rent’?

Originally appeared here, where I work as  contributing writer.

Another month, another series of proposals on how to bring democracy to Saudi Arabia. Recent efforts include the Centre for Contemporary Conflict[1], which recommends developing private enterprise, and the Washington Quarterly[2], which argues for engaging with the autocrats. Many such proposals import a model of the state based on the Western experience, and lack an appreciation of just how different other states can be.

Enter the rentier state hypothesis. This tries to explain why countries which derive most of their income from external sources (the ‘rent’ bit) work in a very different way to countries where a people’s acceptance of their government comes from extraction (consenting to being taxed).

Count out the people

The theory claims that states that get their income from external sources have very little need to be accountable to the people they govern. Rather than deriving legitimacy from people consenting to being taxed, they gain legitimacy by dispensing money earned from external rents. According to rentier state theory, this has profound effects on the way a society works. As Shambayati[3] claims “renterism enhances state autonomy by eliminating economically motivated pressure groups and by making a segment of the bourgeoisie dependent on the state.” In such a theory, states are largely free to do what they want, using their control of the economy to dispense money and resources to mollify those who protest too much. Rentier theory holds that such a state enters a periods of crisis when the economy enters a downturn and there are insufficient resources available to appease all the groups previously supported.

In a rentier state, citizens do not oppose the government in the same way. In a country where the population have some control over the mode of production, opposition to the government can be carried out through economic groups (such as trade unions), who threaten to disrupt the flow of resources upon which the government is dependent. But if a state’s income is autonomous from its citizens, then opposition cannot be economic. Rather, rentier state theory holds, opposition will take the form of challenging the ideological basis for rule.

Saudi Arabia would seem to be a text book example of a rentier state. It derives almost all its income from external rents in the form of oil revenues, it does not tax its population, and if there is an economic underclass it is the foreign workers, who are not exactly the biggest source of trouble for Al Saud regime. Rather, in line with rentier state theory, the biggest source of opposition is based on people disputing the sovereignty of the house of Saud. Superficially, such a theory would offer a explanation for why the pace of reform in Saudi Arabia is so slow: the government uses oil revenues to co-opt a bureaucratic class, who thus has little incentive to press for reform. That is the theory. But does it work?

Give and take

One does not have to look hard to find examples of the royal family using money to attempt to buy off the opposition. In 1980, following Shi’a protests[4]cancellation of mortgage payments, costing the country over one billion dollars. This would all seem to fit the pattern of an autonomous state using its money to placate potential opposition. in the Eastern Province, the government immediately started to invest in improving the infrastructure of the region. Then, following the unrest over the Gulf war, Fahd issues a complete

However, both these examples are a good deal more complicated than they might seem. While the traditional Shi’a leadership might have been content with the offers of the state, some Shi’a went into exile, to continue the struggle from abroad. This was not simply a question of being offered insufficient resources. Rather, the movement became one against a official version of history and society which neglected to provide a place for the Shi’a.

The first problem with rentier theory is that is tends to foreground economic processes to the detriment of the political pressures that underlie economic decisions. Furthermore, even the reaction of the traditional leaders implies that while dispensing resources might not be equivalent to tax collecting, it nonetheless forces the state to be accountable to groups who would otherwise threaten the stability of the country.

Money is not given out in a vacuum. While this vast mass of fluid capital can be used to assuage potential opposition, as Okruhlik has pointed out[5], it also has a tendency to create an opposition. Unequal distribution of funds leads groups to feel excluded from power and resources. This is especially the case in times of crisis, when certain groups are privileged with the scarce resources available. This occurred during the retrenchment of the 80’s, where construction projects were almost completely cut – apart from those for mosques and Islamic education centres. Such a choice of distribution is an eminently political one. It cannot be understood simply as an economic decision to appease certain groups. It appeases a specific group. We have to know that the basis of the house of Saud’s power is partly derived from the backing of religious institutions, and that it made a decision to embrace rather than to confront religious radicalism, otherwise these decisions are inexplicable. Choices about resources are made politically, and in making these choices, governments make explicit their loyalties and priorities in society.

Together in the centre

Fahd’s cancellation of mortgage payments did not placate the opposition for very long. The 1992 petition continued to criticise “the total chaos of the economy and society.” This is not what would be expected in a rentier state model. In such a model, opposition groups would try to use pressure to gain access to resources, rather than demand a reform of the system. Part of the reason rentier hypotheses fail to explain such a situation is because they place too great an emphasis on the division between state and society.

During the reign of King Fahd, there was a slow transference of economic power from the Hejazi to the Najdis, as all the banks were transfered to Riyadh and the hajj became increasingly regulated by the state. During the growth years the house of Saud created a bureaucracy, dominated by the Najdis. In rentier theory, the Najdis would then play the role of the bourgeoisie co-opted by the government and dependent on the state’s benevolence. Yet during the years the oil economy was low, when the house of Saud wanted to restructure the economy, their creation came back to haunt them. Bureaucracy and business worked in alliance to oppose any government restructuring and to try and work towards a equitable rent distribution. State and society worked together to oppose the royal family. A convincing theory would have to not just explain the economic placation of the opposition, but recognise the myriad ways in which state and society are linked through a series of identities not determined by the state.

Forced together at the margins

While rentier state theory might not be very good at explaining the genuine desire for economic reform in Saudi Arabia, it fares far better at explaining the formation of other forms of opposition within Saudi Arabia today. The theory would have it that because groups are deprived of an ability to dissent economically, they are increasingly pushed towards cultural forms of expressing dissent. Indeed, the politics of the House of Saud seems to have played a major part in encouraging these forms of opposition. When in 1995 huge parcels of land in the south were confiscated by the state, the protests increased the strong ties the region has to Yemen. Likewise, the recent attempt to build a fence between Yemen and Saudi Arabia has met with strong resistance. Demands for inclusion into the state, rather than taking the form of economic resistance, have in part coalesced around regional identities.

That said, rentier state theory struggles to explain the ambiguous relationship between the ulama and the royal family. As Okruhlik argues, following the 1979 occupation of the Great Mosque, “the regime chose to embrace rather than confront religious radicalism to protect the centrality of the ruling family in national life[6].” This is not simply a question of finding some tired Marxist notion of religion as a superstructure that justifies the House of Saud’s total ownership of the economy. Rather, the close relation between the state and the ulama springs from the official narrative of the Saudi state, which weaves together the al-Saud’s as protectors and founders or the state with a particular articulation of Islam. Their difficult co-existence is not simply an economic affair.

Rent-a-theory

Some of the more ambitious uses of rentier theory have tried to link certain forms of behaviour to rentier states. For instance, it is claimed that rentier investors show a predilection for status projects and short term investments, given the insecurity of the economic climate and the absence of established economic rules. But to explain the construction projects in Saudi Arabia without referring to tribal and political pressures is only even going to give one half of the story. Nor is it the case that you can simply take an economic model, search for a political justification, and – hey presto! – you have an explanatory theory. Political choices are constitutive of the processes of the economy.

The battles we see taking place in Saudi Arabia are not simply battles for access to resources; they are a struggle to determine what it means to be Saudi. Despite rentier state theory’s economic determinism, it does point out how differently people feel allegiance in a state where they do not feel part of the process of production. It also correctly notes that in such a state many of the important battles are not those of resources, but those of identity. This is an important lesson to be learned for all those who still want to talk about bringing democracy to Saudi Arabia.

---

[1] http://www.ccs.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/mar/looneyMar04.asp

[2] http://pdf2html.spawncamp.net/pdf2html.php?url=http://www.twq.com/06spring/docs/06spring_adesnik.pdf
[3] p.308 in Shambayati, H. 1994: The Rentier State, Interest Groups, and the Paradox of Autonomy: State and Business in Turkey and Iran. Comparative Politics, Vol. 26, No. 3. pp 307-331.
[4]al-Rasheed, M. 1998: The Shia of Saudi Arabia: A Minority in Search of Cultural Authenticity. British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, pp. 121-138.
[5]Okruhlik, G. 1999: Rentier Wealth, Unruly Law, and the Rise of Opposition: The Political Economy of Oil States. Comparative Politics. Vol. 31, No. 3. pp. 295-315.
[6]p. 157. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.

US-Saudi: the end of the affair?

This first appeared here (I will be done posting older stuff soon).

The United States is not exactly feeling at ease with its Saudi allies at the moment. After the February 2006 attacks on the Abqaiq Oil Facility, oil prices hit crept towards the record prices of last year. Americans are hardly likely to be reassured by Saudi minister of Petroleum Ali Al-Naimi’s statement that while $63 per barrel was not a stable price, $45 could be. Add this to a cottage industry of books on the relationship between the House of Saud and terrorism, and we can see the relationship between the two countries is very much up for discussion.

In such a climate of uncertainty, mention of China can only set pulses racing. It is growing voraciously, and is currently Saudi Arabia’s fourth biggest client in Asia, consuming 450,000 barrels per day (b/pd). Thus, the spectacle of King Abdullah in Beijing signing five different co-operation agreements shortly after Bush’s state of the Union speech announced he will break the American addiction to [Middle East] oil, raises some questions about the Saudi-American relationship.

The beginning of a beautiful friendship…

1993 could turn out to be a crucial year in Saudi Arabian history. It was the year China became a net importer of crude oil. Since then, the Chinese demand for oil has exploded. Some 40% of oil demand growth over the past four years is from China, and it is now the third largest crude oil importer in the world, after the United States and Japan.

The visit of Jiang Zemin to Riyadh in 1999 initiated a ’strategic oil partnership.’ This saw China opening its downstream sector to Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, while Saudi Arabia agreed to open some of its domestic oil and gas market to China. It is an arrangement that has allowed China to modernise its notoriously inefficient refineries while developing a relationship with the country with the biggest oil reserves on the planet. China now imports 60% of its oil from the Persian gulf, and projections indicate this number could rise to 90% in the next two decades. These deals are frequently on an exclusive basis, with the Chinese paying over the market price to ensure exclusive agreements.

It is less clear that the exchange offers such immediate short term benefits to Saudi Arabia. Winter and Leverett, in an article for the Washington Quarterly, raise doubts about whether opening up gas resources to Chinese investment was coherent with the national policy of excluding foreign firms from the energy market. They quote a senior Saudi Aramco executive, who comments on the deal: “Well, getting foreign companies in was always about technology transfer. And we’ve achieved it, from Aramco to Sinopec!”

Yet the Saudi strategy does not seem too dissimilar to its strategy with America. Contrary to a recently reprinted Foreign Affairs article, Saudi Arabia does not give a dollar discount on the barrel to the US consumer in return for political influence. Rather, this 1$ is the difference in transport costs between selling in America and Europe: if Saudi Arabia tried to raise the price they would find their market share eaten up by competitors. Saudi Arabia seeks to maintain a dominant position in the US market because of its dynamic growth of demand. Likewise, the relationship to China cements links to a rapidly growing market.

There are also more pressing reasons that Saudi Arabia is open to overtures from China. Winter and Leverett argue that expanding their ties with China is part of a Saudi hedging strategy to compensate for the changing relationship with the United States. China is a much more amenable partner than the United States, and as we have seen in its dealings with Sudan, it is none too concerned with bringing democracy to its business partners. America, on the other hand, has seen increasing criticism of the relationship between the House of Saud and terrorists, and increasing numbers of calls for reform.

Business is Business is Business

Saudi Arabia has been transformed in the American imagination in recent years. From being one of the staunchest opponents of communism during the cold war it has become a state indelibly associated with 911 in American eyes. Bush tried to address these concerns in his State of the Union address, claiming America will: “replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025” by moving “beyond a petroleum-based economy, and [making] our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.”

Several concerns underlied his speech. As oil prices remain high, there is increasing doubt about the ability of the Saudis to increase oil production at a rate that can keep pace with the increasing demand. Matthew Simmons claims that most of the large Saudi fields are already in decline, though his claims run contrary to most analysts, including the recently published report by the CERA (Cambridge energy research associates) who argue there will not be a peak before 2020 at the earliest.

Perhaps more than any doubts about oil however, Bush’s speech was motivated by the increasing perception that Saudi Arabia is unstable, and cannot be relied upon for America’s energy needs.

It would be a mistake to read to much into the speech. While America might be successful in reducing American reliance on importing Saudi oil, this would not reduce their reliance on Saudi oil. As Clawson and Henderson note in their Washington Institute report on reducing vulnerability to middle east oil shocks, even without importing a drop of Saudi oil, America is dependent on the market. Problems with Saudi oil would reflect in oil prices world-wide.

What makes Saudi Arabia even more important is the question of surplus capacity. It is the only country in the world which can adjust the world market to sudden shortfalls in supply, as it did during the first Gulf War. Furthermore, while the long term price of oil is dependent on the market, the cost of short term price spikes, is not insignificant. Finally, in the present climate it remains highly doubtful that America would let a hostile government come into power in the centre of the Muslim world. For all the talk of ending America’s dependency on the middle east, it is clear that they remain committed to a role there for the foreseeable future.

The Choice

What this role should be remains the heated question.

The United States policy towards Saudi Arabia has always been split between realism and idealism. During the cold war, the two met happily in an anti-communism that saw American support for the monarchy. In Saudi Arabia, the fight against communism was an Islamic struggle that saw fighters go to Afghanistan. It is precisely this legacy, and the continuing closeness of the relationship between the House of Saud and radical elements that remains the question disputed in America today.

The splits in how to handle Saudi Arabia are endemic of the disagreements about American foreign policy in general. Several commentators occupy an idealist position, and continue to argue for increasing the pressure on the House of Saud to make tangible reforms. While there has been some not insignificant reforms, Orkhrulik has pointed out that the irony of Islah (reform) is that it has tended to increase the power of the royal family. It has also tended to sidestep central questions of the reform of the House of Saud, the judiciary and the role of religion. The idealist position has taken rather a knock in recent months however, with the recent election of Hamas in Palestine and the continuing disorder in Iraq reminding idealists of the possible unintended consequences of ‘importing democracy.’ From an American perspective, too hasty reform in Saudi Arabia would not be in their interests. As Bronson notes anti-Americanism is widespread and the sahwa movement is still very active. It is also important not to make any simplistic correlation between social and political beliefs. A social conservative does a not a political conservative make.

However, such a policy would surely not be worse than its collary, a crass isolationism combined with the support for authoritarianism that Fukuyama argues would be the worst reaction to the failed idealism of Bush in Iraq. In Saudi Arabia such a policy would see increasing criticism and distance from the House of Saud, combined with a lack of positive pressure for change. While the House of Saud is not the fragile edifice some commentators seem to suggest, there are sufficient areas of concern that such a policy would fail to address the deep structural problems Arabian society is facing.

The third option seeks to combine idealism and realism in a pragmatic idealism, as advocated by Bowman in Parameters. This would see pressure placed for the pace of reform, while appreciating the difficulties of moving too swiftly.

Current American policy can be seen to encompass all three strains of thought. While Rice is talking about transformational democracy and the NSP document is being rewritten, in line with a more moderate neo-conservatism, the adventure in Iraq continues. There is also a continuing strand of isolationism, as witnesses by the hysteria surrounding the attempt to buy In the ongoing Dubai Ports Such a reaction can also be seen, as Leverett and Bader note, in the decision to block the Chinese bid for UNOCAL, which just increased Chinese perception is cannot rely on the market for its oil needs and forced it towards more of the exclusive operations it makes with Saudi Arabia.

None of this points to the end of the affair, but perhaps it is time to renegotiate the rules.

Looking after the kids

 This originally appeared here.

Saudi Arabia is getting younger. In 2004, one out of every two Saudis was less then fifteen years old. That means a lot of new jobs are going to need to be created by the time these kids are out of school.

And that is just the problem. Despite fairly high levels of investment, gross domestic product (GDP) increased by just 1.6% between 1990 and 2000, while the population kept growing by an annual rate of 2.7%. If that wasn’t bad enough, there are not even enough jobs to go round those who are already old enough to be working. The unemployment rate is 8.1%, reaching a high of 32% among younger workers. Cordesman’s book, Saudi Arabia Enters the 21st Century (1), points out even the 8.1% figure released by the Saudi Central Department for Statistics assumes that only 19% of the population actually participates in the labour force. Only 19% of the population participates in the labour force. Add unemployed young people to discontent with the government and a three year campaign by militants in the kingdom and you have an explosive mix.

The idea of unemployment in Saudi Arabia might strike many people as a novelty. Across Asia and the Middle East Saudi Arabia has become thought of as representing the possibility of work. For alongside all this unemployment there is a huge force of immigrant workers. The Ministry of Labour estimated that there were roughly seven million foreigners in 2003 – making up a third of the population of the country. Some estimates put the numbers even higher. In 2004, the statistics department of the ministry of economy and planning claimed that this immigrant population accounted for 67% of the Kingdom’s labour force.

The government, clearly concerned about the problem, has been trying to implement a policy of Saudization, which would mean the replacement of foreign workers by nationals. In 2003 the government issued guidelines saying that foreign workers and their families should not exceed 20% of the population by 2013. While this is not a new idea, having been called for since at least the fourth development plan in 1985, with the population increasing and the situation getting more desperate, does it have any chance of succeeding?

Boom town

To answer this question, one needs to understand how this strange situation came about.

With the boom in oil prices that started in 1973, Saudi Arabia needed to build a lot of new infrastructure. Lacking the manpower necessary for these jobs, the government brought labour from abroad. First people came from other Arab states, noticeably Yemen and Egypt. And despite the economic downturn of the 80’s, immigration continued to increase apace, except this time it was mainly people from Bangladesh, India, Philippines and Pakistan – populations that today make up half of Saudi Arabia’s expatriate population (2) .

As Maurice Girgis notes (3), by the end of the 80’s there was a situation of mass unemployment and mass immigration. It is a situation that continues to this day.

You can’t work here

It is noticeable that while expatriate labour constitutes 67% of the labour force, it is 95% of the labour in the private sector. The reasons for this go a good way towards explaining the story. Working for the Saudi Arabian state is still the employment of choice for young Saudis today, as they remember – and feel entitled to – the benefits and secure job opportunities it gave their parents. Indeed, it has come to be seen as something of an entitlement to work for the state. The problem being, rather like in France (4), the government can’t provide the same jobs to everyone any more.

While relatively less difficult (as we shall see), it is still hard to get Saudis into private sector jobs that are highly skilled. This has its history in the idea that everyone had an entitlement to work for the state. Until 1984, Saudi graduates were forbidden to work in the private sector and had to work for the government who sponsored their studies. The government used these jobs to distribute oil revenue in what some describe as a rentier state (5). This has led to overstaffing, underemployment and a labour market uninterested in the private sector.

Moreover, during the 90’s there were very few people who had the necessary technical ability to do high skilled jobs. Between 1995 and 1999, of the 120,000 people who had graduated from Saudi Universities, only 8% had studied technical subjects – this is just 2% of the total number of Saudis who entered the job market during the period. As Okruhlik points out, this has a lot to do with religious politics. Following the Shi’a uprising and al-Utaibi’s capture of the great mosque in Mecca, the regime “The regime chose to embrace rather than confront religious radicalism to protect the centrality of the ruling family in national life.” (6) This meant that the religious institutions continued to grow even as other programs were cut back. The combination of the lack of skills and the relatively privileged outlook of a state job meant that high level private sector jobs were effectively marked off for immigrants.

However, highly skilled work amounts to only 15% of the total immigrant worker population. The rest do jobs that the Saudis “refuse to take what are commonly considered menial jobs.” (7) Just how menial cannot be understated. In its 2003 report (8), Human Rights Watch describe working conditions for immigrants where pay is regularly lower than agreed upon, people have to work 16 hour days, and exploitation and abuse are commonplace. There is summary dismissal, forced confinement, and abuses of the foreign labour sponsorship agreement which sees people bundled from employer to employer for less and less money. In such conditions it is hardly surprising that no one wants to work ‘menial’ jobs.

The big plan… version three

But it is not this that is worrying the Saudi royal family. Their concern is their flagging economy. But the two things are linked. Guest workers, made to feel highly unwelcome, tend not to spend much money in the Saudi domestic market. Instead it is sent back home in remittances. Between 1993 and 2002 expatriates remitted roughly $15 billion a year. In 2003 the Saudi GDP was $287.8 billion. Abdel-Rahman (9) argues that remittances between 1990-1999 equalled 11.79% of the countries GDP. With a Saudization campaign that money would stay in the country. More importantly, it would mean increased spending in the private sector, which would in turn stimulate business growth.

Saudization should therefore bring employment, a boosted economy and a youth employed and not alienated and radicalised. This fine plan has proved difficult to implement in practice. The sixth development plan (10) targeted the creation of nearly 320,000 new jobs through Saudization. Instead, the number of expatriate workers grew by 58,400.

Being effectively a command economy (11), the main way the Kingdom is trying to achieve Saudization is through quotas. Starting in the mid-90’s, when private businesses employing more than 20 people were required to increase their Saudi quota by 5% each year, the kingdom has gradually called for decreases in foreign workers. By now, almost all administrative and government jobs are off limits to foreigners. However, this progress is only being made in the public sector, and even some of this is doubtful. As Al-Dosary and Rahman note: “To solve the unemployment problem, the government has forced the public sector to higher Saudis for nonexistent jobs, which has turned government agencies into a vast social welfare system.” (12)

Still, some good moves are being made. The Kingdom has invested in training institutes for various professions to make up the skills shortfall, and some companies are responding well to the call. Saudi Aramco, the huge state petrol company, has restricted contracts for foreign companies and set up a centre to teach Saudis how to work for contractors. But as Robert Looney argues in an article for Strategic Insight, new jobs will have to be created, and the best way to get Saudis into new jobs is to make them employable.

This can be done through market mechanisms rather than quotas that force the market to adapt artificially. However, some of the mechanisms that Looney suggests are bound to be very unpopular. To improve the attractiveness of the private sector he suggests “Separating wages and social benefits in the public sector” (13) and making it easier to fire nationals from jobs. This would not just be unpopular economically. In a country where “The official narrative meticulously weaves together the power of Islam and the al-Saud family as protector of Saudi Arabia’s moral integrity,” (14) changing the role of the state as provider for the people would further erode the limited legitimacy of the House of Saud. It would also be heavily resisted by those currently benefiting from the arrangement.

While making state jobs marginally less attractive might make people want to work high end jobs in engineering – it will have no difference at all in terms of the jobs done by the bulk of the immigrant population. Given the current conditions for many guest labourers, it remains highly unlikely there will be a Saudi replacement. Thus, ironically, it may need the Kingdom to improve working conditions for the immigrant workers for them to be replaced. And in a country where “I am Saudi” came to mean “I am not an imported labourer,” (15) it may be through making Saudi Arabians a bit more exposed to the working conditions of the market, and a bit more equal to the immigrant workers, that the Kingdom develops a private sector and a notion of citizenship less based on the House of Saud as a paternal distributor of oil revenues and favours.

---

1. Cordesmen, Anthony: Saudi Arabia Enters the 21st Century (http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0275979989/026-5565941-9051630?v=glance&n=266239) Quoted in *Al-Dosary, A. S. & Rahman S. M. Saudization (Localization) – A Critical Review. Human Resource Development International, vol. 8, No. 494-502 (December 2005).
2. http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=264
3. Maurice Girgis, Would Nationals and Asians replace Arab workers in the GCC? For the Fourth Mediterranean Development Forum Amman, Jordan. October 2002.
http://pdf2html.spawncamp.net/pdf2html.php?url=http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/mdf/mdf4/papers/girgis.pdf
4. http://www.cafebabel.com/en/article.asp?T=A&Id=1736
5. http://www.saudidebate.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=87&Itemid=127
6. p. 157. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.
7. Looney, R. Saudization and Sound Economic Reforms: Are the Two Compatible? Strategic Insights, Volume III, Issue 2 (February 2004) http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/feb/looneyFeb04.asp
8. Human Rights Watch, “Bad Dreams” Exploitation and Abuse of Migrant Workers in Saudi Arabia. http://hrw.org/mideast/saudi/labor/
9. Abdel-Rahman, A-M. M. The determinants of Foreign Worker Remittances in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. http://www.mafhoum.com/press6/184E15.pdf
10. http://www.un.int/saudiarabia/ch6-6pln.htm#LABOR
11. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_economy
12. p.500 Al-Dosary, A. S. & Rahman S. M. Saudization (Localization) – A Critical Review. Human Resource Development International, vol. 8, No. 494-502 (December 2005).
13. p.6. Looney, R. Saudization and Sound Economic Reforms: Are the Two Compatible? Strategic Insights, Volume III, Issue 2 (February 2004) http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/feb/looneyFeb04.asp
14. p.154. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.
15. p.155. Okruhlik, G. 2005: The Irony of Islah (Reform). The Washington Quarterly. 28:4. pp. 153-170.