This is the third in a series of lectures for the Hillsdale College Summer Hostel program, “Islam and the West.”
The eminent scholar Bernard Lewis tells the story of an official of the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth century who marveled at an English gunboat in Istanbul. The gunboat symbolized Europe’s new military technology and commercial reach. That official could not foresee the implications of the modern political-philosophic project that the ship represented. By the end of the First World War—itself a debacle for the old aristocratic and monarchic regimes of Europe—foreign, modern empires dominated Islamic civilization.
The Wahhabi movement is, in a way, the first modern Islamist movement. It began in the eighteenth century and provided the ruling principles of today’s Saudi Arabia. The life of Muhammad ibn Abdul-Wahab spanned most of that century, the century in which the modern project began to take hold beyond Europe. He called his followers Muwahhadun, meaning Unitarians—believers in the oneness of God, as distinguished from polytheists (including those Trinitarians, the Christians). God, he taught, is not only unitary; God is also “exclusive,” meaning he must be addressed directly, with no physical, human, or even ideational intermediaries. A physical intermediary might be an amulet, a gravestone, or any sort of ornamentation on a mosque (minarets should be torn down, he taught). A human intermediary might be a saint or a holy man. An ideational intermediary would be a philosophic doctrine, or any other mental structure not seen in the Koran. In practice, Abdul-Wahab asserted that any dependency other than dependency upon god is justly punishable by the forfeit of property and life, on the grounds that any such dependency implies polytheism blasphemy. Your amulet, your holy man, your philosophy has become, in effect, another god to you.
Abdul-Wahab was a Koranic fundamentalist or literalist. Whereas much of traditional Islamic jurisprudence had been founded upon the consensus of believers, held to be the foundation of the sharia, Wahhabists regard the Koran itself as the only foundations of the sharia. To this day, the Koran is the constitution of Saudi Arabia. Abdul-Wahab based many of his teachings on the writings of such medieval jurists as Ibn Tamiyya, whose writings were republished in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s.
Abdul-Wahab especially loathed the Sufi branch of Islam, which inclines toward peaceable mysticism, and might lead to innovation; his Islam insists on strict legalism. Wahhabism also requires asceticism—again, on the grounds of the ban on polytheism, broadly understood. Above all Wahhabism requires jihad or struggle (very much including armed struggle) against the polytheists and infidels. Wahhabists tend to regard true Islam as preeminently Arabian, a claim which happens to comport with one aspect of the modern world, the nationalism that democratization and statism both foster.
As these teachings suggest, Abdul-Wahab, like the Prophet himself, had the soul of a warrior. His movement has been compared to the more militant forms of seventeenth-century Protestantism. Although profoundly anti-modern in his doctrines, Abdull-Wahab had no compunction about the use of modern technology on the battlefield; he used firearm, not lances, in his many wars. In 1744 he allied with Muhammad ibn-Saud, the emir of a village near what is now the city of Riyadh. Ibn-Saud came from a distinguished family, as Abdul-Wahab did not, and family, then as now, counted for a lot in Arabia. Ibn-Saud needed Abdul-Wahab for the warriors he brought with him, and of course benefited from the authority conferred by the Wahhabist religious message.
Declaring jihad against neighboring Arab tribes, the two men expanded their territory. Their successors captured Mecca in 1803—just as the United States and the Barbary monarchs went to war. This conquest attracted the unfavorable attention of the Ottoman Empire, home of the caliphate. The Ottomans sent Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman ruler of Egypt, to quell the movement. Ali expelled the Wahhabis from Mecca in 1812 and stayed in the region until 1819, conquering Riyadh itself. Defeated, the Wahhabi House of Saud nonetheless remained intact.
As the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the early twentieth century, the Saudis saw their chance. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance recaptured Riyadh in 1902, and they consolidated their power over local Bedouin tribes during the First World War. With the Ottomans out of the area after the war, the Saudis recaptured Mecca and Medina in the mid-1920s. True to their iconoclastic doctrines, Wahhabis smashed tombs of Muslim saints and imams throughout the Arabian peninsula. Europeans recognized the sovereignty of King Ibn Saud in the mid-1920s, but other Muslims did so more reluctantly—the last holdouts being the Egyptians, who waited until 1936. The other Muslims had reason for concern about Wahhabist control over the two most holy cities of Islamic civilization.
The British backed the House of Saud, over the objections of T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” who advocated support of the Hashemite royal family as rulers of the area. More radical elements among Wahhabis, opposed to the infidel British presence in the kingdom, were crushed in 1929 by the Saudis. When Osama bin Laden condemned American troops in his country he was echoing these radicals of seventy years earlier.
Ibn Saud proclaimed the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in 1932. It was a modern, unitary state in its structure, but one dedicated in theory to the strictest Islam. While the figure of the armed prophet—Muhammad himself, as well as Abd al-Wahab—and the valorization of war do indeed square with Machiavellianism, the rest of Islam does not. How could Islam support a modern state?
In 1933 Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with the new monarchy. Just as Abdul al-Wahab had availed himself of modern military technology as an instrument subordinate to the expansion of Islam, so the House of Saud would employ oil technology for the same purpose. The monarchs of nineteenth-century Germany and Austria had failed to meet the political challenges of modernity, but they had modernized their economies quite successfully. Among their main techniques was the state-owned enterprise, typified by railroad companies. Monarchs love state-owned revenue sources. Such enterprises radically decrease the need for tax revenues, and thus decrease the need for recognizing political demands for government by consent and representation—republicanism. The kinds of enterprises the German and Austrian monarchs owned rather unfortunately required complex manufacturing legislation, and support from other infrastructure. This meant that those monarchies became tooo complicated to remain truly monarchic. They became highly complex and cumbersome states; under pressure of protracted war, they finally spun out of the control of their rulers.
Oil is a different kind of revenue source. The technology needed to extract and refine it can be ‘farmed out’ to limited numbers of foreign infidels, who can be isolated from the rest of society. Oil as been indispensable to the operations of the modern world, but its exploitation did not require the importation of any monarch-threatening bureaucracies—at least, not in the short or medium term. Revenues from state-owned oil companies precluded the need for taxation and with it any call for popular political representation. The American republican slogan, “No taxation without representation,” can have little attraction to those who pay no taxes.
At the end of the Second World War, Saudi oil fields produced 21.3 million barrels annually. By 1975, they produced 2,852 million barrels. In that time, the enormous wealth generated by that production transformed Saudi society. Aristotle remarks that a regime may change if one part of the political partnership drastically increases in size and wealth relative to the rest of the political parts. How would the Saudi monarchy fare as the royal family enlarged and enriched itself.
As I mentioned earlier, as early as the 1920s some Wahhabis grumbled that Ibn Saud had become too lax, taxing tobacco instead of banning it, allowing the use o telegraphs and other suspect devices. By Ibn Saud faced them down, by force and by law. He made the Koran the constitution of his kingdom, and his successors, if anything, toughened the laws they inherited from him—restricting the activities of women outside the household, for example, and actively persecuting Christians instead of merely holding them in quiescent submission.
The 1940s and the Second World War saw an important change in the monarchy’s alliance structure. The British had used the disruptions of World War I to undermine the authority of the Ottoman Empire in the region; now, President Franklin Roosevelt made a move to replace the Brits as the Saudis’ main ally. Americans feared the return of the Great Depression after the war, and of course had never much liked the British Empire to begin with. FDR in particular seldom missed a political opportunity. On September 23, 1943, FDR toasted King ibn Saud by saying, among other things, “We have much in common. We both love liberty”—a love, presumably, for independence from the British Empire, and not so much for, say, the Bill of Rights. But FDR was just warming up. “I think we all know that the King is a very wonderful person. I was reading this afternoon a little magazine, and it was all about the King, and there was one little paragraph at the end that I liked a lot—all of it goes along with my own philosophy. [Reading]: ‘Ibn Saud’s most engaging quality is a kingly belief in eventual rightness.’ [That does sound rather like FDR’s self-estimation, doesn’t it?] ‘It did not surprise him greatly when Allah, who sent Arabia its ancient rains, provided also its new oil. Nor will it surprise him greatly if God presently provides not merely victory but even the bright and honest world that should go with it.'” For FDR, the bright and honest post-war world was to have the United Nations as its centerpiece, but the Saudi king probably had somewhat different ambitions, ambitions that became clearer in the decades to come, as displayed by his sons and heirs to the throne.
Weakened by the war, the British Empire did begin its retreat from the Middle East and Asia generally in the next few years, and the U. S. and Saudi Arabia found common cause in opposing the Soviet Union. One of the causes of the collapse of the Soviet empire was the Saudi’s deliberate lowering of oil prices, a principal source of revenue for the Soviet Union. But the Saudis began to see some troubles of their own, beginning in the 1960s. At that time, the kingdom saw an influx of Islamist activists and militants who had been exiled from Egypt, Syria, and Iraq—nationalist/secular regimes then allied with Moscow. The foreign Islamists were often affiliated with the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The interaction of these Islamists with Wahhabis led to the radicalization of many of the latter, especially in the younger generation. Crucially, that was a large generation; Saudi Arabia had experienced the same postwar ‘Baby Boom’ seen in the United States and Europe, with parallel social and political consequences. King Faisal, who had taken the throne in 1964, was assassinated by a member of this younger generation eleven years later. More significantly, however, by then the vast increase in oil revenues had led to social tensions between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ in Saudi society; the most obvious symptom of this crisis was the November 1979 takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by young militants. To maintain cohesion, the monarchy turned once more to the Wahhabis, who for their part demanded and received ironclad control over the kingdom’s education system. But the Wahhabis the monarchy enlisted were culled not from the clergy—now despised by the younger generation—but from the ranks of the militants. To find a parallel in American history, one might consider the way in which the New Left militants were brought into the universities in the 1970s as teachers and administrators; in both cases, the established regime hoped to co-opt the radicals, and the radicals hoped to take over the institutions and funds the regime had made available. Militants who refused this peaceful solution were often sent off to fight in Afghanistan against the Soviets, where those who survived learned guerrilla warfare tactics.
These ‘safety-valve’ tactics deferred revolution for a decade, but in August 1990 Iraq provoked a new crisis by invading Kuwait. King Fahd then invoked a defense agreement King ibn Saud had made with FDR near the end of the Second World War, and American sent troops into the kingdom to protect the oil fields. This didn’t sit well with the Wahabbis, who endorsed the move only in exchange for further Islamization of Saudi civil society. Osama bin Laden offered to deploy his jihadists on defensive positions in order to make the U. S. troops unnecessary, but the monarchy refused, and of course ‘the rest is history.’
Less clearly understood is the oil-revenue-funded activity of the non-al Qaeda Wahhabis, the ones who remained in the kingdom as allies of the monarchy. They have funneled substantial monies into an international campaign of proselytizing and militancy. Just as the Iranians run a network of propaganda and paramilitary organizing in many countries, the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance extends to such allied countries as Quatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Although Kurds, Jordan, Turkey, and most European Muslims remain outside the Wahhabist camp, substantial inroads have been made in Kosovo, Algeria, and Tajikstan, where they have met defeat, and in Chechnya, Nigeria, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, the Philippines, and, of course, the United States, where many mainstream Muslim organizations (such as CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations) are Wahhabist. The notion of “Pan-Islamism,” pioneered in the modern world by the Ottomans in the 1770s, now bears a Wahhabist stamp.
The Saudi monarchy has thus achieved many of the benefits of modernity without admitting into its realm any substantial number of the characteristic social class of modernity, the middle class. This is not just a social or economic issue but a regime issue Saudi Arabia lacks the very class inclined to demand political representation and to moderate the republicanism they often demand. This is true not only as a matter of demographics but also with regard to the country’s way of life. Oil revenues fund a vast welfare state. The commercial side of commercial republicanism is just as weak as the republican side. There is no ‘work ethic,’ as seen in the West. For the young there is more incentive to study Koran than calculus. the Saudi economy lacks commercial diversity and the opportunities such diversity brings. Indeed, the economies of the twenty-two countries of the Middle East, with a combined population of some 300 million, produce fewer manufactured goods than Spain. Ambitious men look to careers to religion and politics, but political careers are blocked by the monarchy. No wonder that their ambitions turn toward the use of Islam for revolutionary politics and not, for example, toward commercial entrepreneurship. In the West, the political philosopher Montesquieu proposed that the energies generated by religious passions be re-channeled into peaceful, commercial pursuits. The Saudi regime carefully blocks any such re-channeling—politically, doctrinally, and economically.
The Saudi way of life thus always stands ready to injure the monarchic portion of the Saudi ruling body and to overturn or take over Saudi political institutions if that ruling body strays too far and too conspicuously from the purposes of the clerical portion of the Saudi ruling body. The wealth generated by the oil economy has tempted the Saudi royal family to stray—quite far, in some instances. Add to this a crisis in the oil industry itself. Revenues to support the Saudi state declined as oil prices fell in the past three decades—that is, throughout the lives of the current generation of youth, now the most numerous of any Saudi generation hitherto. In Saudi Arabia, the ‘baby boom’ of the postwar years wasn’t followed by a ‘baby bust,’ as in the West. Saudi Arabia has the highest population growth rate in the world. The Saudi population has risen from about 3 million in 1950 to about 20 million today. Half of the population is under the age of twenty-five.
Population growth has hit the royal family itself. The king receives his title through the consensus of the royal family; family members, the sharia, and the clerics limit his authority. A Saudi king is no tyrant. The Saudi royal family consists of over 30,000 members, a number that will double in the next two decades. Given current economic trends, such a large family cannot sustain itself at the levels of affluence it has grown accustomed to enjoying. Further, such affluence has led to a degree of luxury, of personal and social corruption, that the stricter Wahhabis find offensively impious: hence Osama bin Laden, the wealthy Saudi renegade, bred of the regime itself and dedicated to its destruction.
How do things stand in Saudi Arabia today?
Saudi Arabia looks like a throwback to the Europe of the early modern period, the sort of traditionalist monarchy that declined in the West in the latter half of the nineteenth century. But despite the problems I’ve mentioned, the Saudis have proven resilient, surviving such crises as a revolt by religious militia in the late 1920s, the deposing of King Saud in 1964 by his half brother, King Faisal, and then the assassination of Faisal in 1975. Islamist rebellions have been quelled, so far; the size, wealth, and the political experience of the Saudi royal family have kept the regime in place. The threat from al Qaedists peaked in 2003-04, but that threat declined after an effective campaign of internal repression, helped by the U. S. troop surge in in Iraq a couple of years later, wherein Iraqi Sunnis turned against al Qaeda forces in that country.
A recent conference of Islamic clerics hosted by the Saudis was condemned by an al Qaeda spokesman: “He who is called the defender of monotheism by sycophantic clerics is raising the flag of brotherhood between religions… and thinks he has found the wisdom to stop wars and prevent the causes of enmity between religions and peoples. By God, if you do not resist heroically against this wanton tyrant, the day will come when church bells will ring in the heart of the Arabian Peninsula.” But such hand-wringing is just about all al Qaeda has been able to muster against bin Laden’s old arch-enemy regime in Riyadh. Most non-jihadists, both in Saudi Arabia and in Iraq, care first of all about their local communities; they do not appreciate the military attention al Qaeda brings to their towns. And all that oil money that has flowed into Saudi coffers—from $40 per barrel in 2003 to $104 per barrel before the recent decline, instigated by the Saudis themselves—has purchased a lot more friends in those towns.
The main threat to the Saudi regime today is Iran, itself seeking to extend its influence throughout the Gulf, through Shia proxies in Iraq and elsewhere. Here too theological-political disputes push the Saudis and Americans into cooperation. At the same time, the Saudis do not want the United States to attack Iran and rid the Sunnis of their Shi’a problem more or less altogether; having seen the Americans in Iraq, the Saudis doubt that the American military would do a more effective job in Iran. But the Saudis do need the Americans for defensive purposes, being military unimpressive themselves. As we have all seen, the Obama Administration’s nuclear weapons deal with the Iranians worries them not only for the obvious reasons but also because they fear it might betoken a U. S. alliance shift away from themselves. The civil war in Syria has only complicated matters, as the Iran-backed Alawite regime fights for its life against Saudi-backed Sunni militants who will fight to undermine the Saudi regime itself, if and when they return to their homeland.
Under such circumstances, the Saudi rulers would like to do what their onetime rulers, the British, excelled at; they want to muddle through, live to see another day, and meanwhile use their considerable economic leverage, worldwide, to promote their own interests, including Wahhabi Islam, through the construction of mosques and other means of religious ‘networking.’ They have been rather good at that, for the last century or so.
The Saudis are tending to their substantial economic interests in a variety of ways. They are investing some of their oil revenues in refining capacity and in the petrochemical industry. At the moment, the top five refiners are the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and Germany. The Saudis want to join that club, and the state-owned Saudi Aramco hopes to bring the kingdom from #12 in the world (where it is now) into the top five, by early in the 2020s. That is optimistic, but there is no reason to think that this goal is unachievable eventually. It is a matter of money, and the Saudis have a lot of it.
One vulnerability often overlooked when we look at Saudi Arabia is food. The country is as food-poor as it is oil-rich. Desalinization is not sufficiently advanced technically o make cereal grains viable on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis have given up on their program to grow wheat. Solution? The purchase of overseas agribusinesses. But here is where the Saudis’ lack of military capacity could hurt them. In a worldwide food crisis, food producers will feed their own populations first, and the Saudis will need to cut deals for any surplus that remains—if there is one. This will hold true whether or not the Saudis own the farmlands in foreign countries.
More ambitiously, the Saudis have unveiled a longer-range plan to diversify its economy. This would be economically beneficial, but how will the regime manage the concomitant rise of a middle class? Will that class support or undermine the monarchy, in the long run? But that’s the long run. More immediately in using modernity to resist modernity—by using oil revenues to enhance the sway of Wahhabism—the monarchy has insulated itself from its weak middle class, the usual backbone of social democratization, but without making itself immune from social democratization itself. If the extended royal family may be said to constitute a sort of oligarchy, is threatened today not by a modern middle class but by a fanaticized, Wahhabi-educated, Wahhabi propagandized populace, angry at corrupt royal rule.
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