Third Lecture delivered at Hillsdale Lifelong Learning Seminar, “Islam and the West.” Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, Michigan.
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 harbor. The ship 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 the debacle of the aristocratic and monarchic regimes of Europe–foreign, modern empires dominated Islamic civilization.
In some respects the Wahhabi movement in 18th-century Saudi Arabia was the first modern Islamist movement, thus one of the earliest responses of ‘fundamentalist’ Islam to modernity. The life of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab spanned most of that century, the century in which the modern project began to take hold noticeably, 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 philosophy, or any other mental structure not seen in the Koran. In practice, Abd al-Wahab asserted that any dependency other than dependency upon God is 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.
Abd al-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 Shar’a, Wahhabists regard the Koran itself as the only foundation of the Shar’ia. He based many of his teachings on the writings of the medieval jurist and warrior Ibn Tamiyya, who had excoriated idolatry, devotion to saints, and philosophy some three centuries earlier. Appropriately enough, Ibn Tamiyya’s writings were republished in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s. Abd al-Wahab particularly 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, grounded on the ban on polytheism. Above all, Wahhabism requires jihad or armed struggle against the polytheists and infidels. Wahhabists tend to regard true Islam as preeminently Arabic, and this happens to comport well with one aspect of the modern world, the nationalism that democratization and statism both foster.
As these teachings suggest, Abd al-Wahab, like the Prophet himself, and like Ibn Tamiyya, had the soul of the warrior. His movement has been compared to the more militant forms of 17th-century Protestantism. Although anti-modern in his doctrines, Abd al-Wahab had no compunction about the use of modern technology on the battlefield; he used firearms, 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 Abd al-Wahab did not, and family, then as now, counted for a lot in Arabia. For his part, Ibn-Saud needed Abd al-Wahab needed Abd al-Wahab for the warriors he brought with him, and of course benefited from the authority conferred by the Wahhabist religious method. To this day the Wahhabi-Saudi alliance forms the regime of Saudi Arabia, with the Koran as its constitution.
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 declined in the early 20th 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 Arabian Peninsula 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 peninsula. Europeans recognized the monarchic regime of Ibn Saud in the mid-twenties, 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 Colonel T. E. Lawrence “of Arabia,” who advocated support of the Hashemite royal family, which today rules Jordan. More radical elements among the Wahhabis opposed the British/infidel presence, but were crushed in 1929 by the Saudis and the British. One might think of the radicals as Osama bin Laden’s precursors.
Ibn Saud formally proclaimed the Saudi Arabian Kingdom in 1932. One of the most unusual features of this monarchy is the line of succession he established. The throne passes not from father to son but from brother to brother. To this day, the Saudi king is a brother of Ibn Saud. Saudi Arabia 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. Could Islam support a modern state?
The modern state needs substantial revenues. In 1933, Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with the new monarchy, and did discover oil there, a few years later. Just as Abd 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 19th-century Germany and Austria had failed to meet the political challenges of modernity, but they had modernized their economies quite successfully. Among their main institutional innovations was the state-owned enterprise, typified by railways. Monarchs love state-owned revenue sources. Such enterprises radically decrease the need for tax revenues, thus decreasing the need for recognizing political demands for government by consent and representation—republicanism. The kinds of enterprises the German and Austrian regimes owned rather unfortunately required complex manufacturing and legislation. This meant that those monarchies became too complicated to remain truly monarchic. They became cumbersomely bureaucratic states; under the pressure of protracted war, they finally spun out of the control of their rulers.
Oil differs from many other sources of revenue. The technology needed to extract and refine it can be left to limited numbers of foreign infidels who can be isolated from the rest of society. Oil has been indispensable to the operations of the modern world, but its exploitation did not require the importation of any monarch-threatening infrastructures. State-owned oil revenues precluded the need for taxation and with it any economically-based 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 annually. 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 relative size and wealth to the other parts. How would the Saudi monarchy fare as the royal family enlarged and enriched themselves?
As early as the 1920s some Wahhabis grumbled that Ibn Saud had become too lax, taxing tobacco instead of banning it, allowing the use of telegraphs and other suspect devices. But 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 persecuting Christians. But none of this fazed the new American president, Franklin Roosevelt, who made his move to Wareplace the British as Saudi Arabia’s top ally during the Second World War. Americans feared the return of the Great Depression after the war, and had rather disliked the British Empire since it had last proved useful—around the 1760 and the end of the French and Indian War. Just as the British had undermined the Ottomans in Arabia, so the Americans started to undermine the British, as chronicled by FDR’s son, Elliot Roosevelt, in his postwar memoir, As He Saw It. But we don’t need Elliot; we have, for example, the President’s toast to the king in September 1943. “In the future we should seek to know each other better,” he suggested, turning on his celebrated charm. “We have much in common. We both love liberty—both Nations” he continued, in a resounding slap at British imperialism. “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. ‘Ibn Saud’s most engaging quality is a kingly belief in eventual rightness. 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 also not merely victory [in the war] but the bright and honest world that should go along with it.'” The end of imperialism, the advent of the United Nations: yes, surely, FDR and Ibn Saud were very nearly soul-mates, although they might have differed somewhat on the principles under which nations ought to united. A detail left to another day.
The Wahhabist clerics surely had their own ideas on that matter. In 1964, King Faisal came to power, hoping to modernize the country. But in that same decade, his country saw an influx of Islamist activists and militants who had been exiled from the secularized despotisms of Nasser’s Egypt, Assad’s Syria, and Hussein’s Iraq—regimes then allied with Moscow. These were true Islamists, often affiliated with the Egyptian-based Muslim Brotherhood. The interaction of these activists with the Wahhabists led to the radicalization of many of the latter, especially the younger generation. Faisal was himself assassinated by one of his young cousins. As a result of this ferment, the Saud dynasty needed to strengthen its ‘Islamic legitimacy,’ and for this it could turn to no other group than the clerics, which Faisal’s successor, King Khalid, quickly did.
The dynasty’s need only intensified a decade later, when neighboring Iran came under the rule of fundamentalist Shi’a clerics, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. Acceding to clerical demands, they gave the clerics thoroughgoing control over education and (perhaps in response to the ‘Second Wave’ of feminism in the West, tightened control over women. In this they were responding not only to the wishes of the clerics but to the demands of Islamist youths, their numbers swelling as the Kingdom experienced the consequences of its own postwar ‘baby boom.’ Many of these young men were ‘exported’ to fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, an experience which hardly caused a tempering of the Islamist ambitions among those who survived and returned. It was a ‘pressure valve’ likely to work only so long as they militants stayed safely abroad.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, King Fahd, Khalid’s successor, requested that troops of the American-led “Coalition of the Willing” be stationed on Saudi soil in order to protect the oil fields from any possible Iraqi attack. Once again, a Saudi king needed Wahhabite backing, and once again, the clerics were only too eager to cooperate, again at the price of further Islamicization of Saudi society. The Saudi defense minister entered into negotiations with the young jihadi Osama bin Laden, who offered to defend the border with his troops. This was a step too far even for a desperate regime, and the dynasty’s refusal alienated bin Laden, turning him against the regime of his homeland, with results we considered in the previous lecture.
Perhaps the most important consequences of the regime’s increased intertwinement with the Wahhabis has been the use of Saudi oil revenues for Wahhabi proselytizing and for funding Wahhabi terrorist groups. The Wahhabi-Saudi alliance extends to such allied countries as Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and, in recent years, Syria. Although Kurds, Jordan, Turkey, Iran, and most European Muslims remain outside the Wahhabi camp, substantial inroads have been made in Kosovo, Algeria, and Tajikistan, 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 Wahhabi-dominated. The notion of Pan-Islamism, invented by the Ottomans in the 1770s, has been taken over by the once-obscure Arabian sect founded by Abd al-Wahab. These remarkable inroads have been paved by the adroit use of modernity—oil technology—in some respects against modernity, and especially against democracy and secularism.
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. Saudi Arabia lacks a substantial middle class—the class inclined to demand political representation and to moderate the republicanism they build—not only demographically (there simply are not many middle-class people in the country—but also with respect to the country’s character, its ethos. Oil revenues fund a vast welfare state. The ‘commercial’ side of commercial republicanism is just as lacking as the ‘republican’ side. There is no ‘work ethic,’ as commercial republicans practice it. 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 people, produce less than Spain. Ambitious men look to careers in religion and politics, but political careers are blocked by the monarchy. No wonder, then, that their ambitions turn toward the ruse o religion for revolutionary political purposes 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 blocs any such re-channeling—politically, doctrinally, and economically.
The Saudi ethos thus always stands ready to injure the Saudi ruling body and then to overturn or take over Saudi political institutions if that ruling body strays too far and too conspicuously from the doctrinal content of the ethos. The wealth generated by the oil economy has tempted the Saudi ruling body (the extended 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 have fallen in recent decades—that is, throughout the lives of the current generation of youth, the most numerous of any Saudi generation hitherto, resulting from years of having the highest population growth of any country in the world.
This population growth has hit the royal family itself. The king receives his title through the consensus of the royal family; family members, the Shar’ia, and the clerics limit his authority. The Saudi royal family consists of 15,000 members and, like the rest of the population, it is growing rapidly. Under current economic trends, such a large family cannot sustain itself at the levels of affluence it has grown accustomed to enjoying. Further, affluence has led to a degree of luxury, of personal and social corruption, that the stricter Wahhabis find offensively impious. Hence Osama bin Laden.
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 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’s assassination in 1975 at the hands of a nephew, the takeover of the Great Mosque in Mecca by jihadists in 1979, and the rise of al-Qaeda. So far, the size, wealth, and political experience of the Saudi royal family have kept the regime in place. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz faced a threat from the al-Quaedists which peaked in 2003-04, but that threat declined after an effective campaign of internal repression, helped by the U. S. troop surge in Iraq, coupled with the turning of Iraqi Sunnis against the Qaedist forces in that country. A recent conference of Islamic clerics hosted by the Saudis was condemned by an al-Quaeda spokesman: “He who is called the defender of monotheism by the 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 recently has been able to muster against bin Laden’s old arch-enemy regime in Riyadh. Most conservatives, 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 the oil money has purchased friends in those towns.
The main external threat to the Saudi regime now is Iran, which seeks to extend its influence throughout the Gulf through Shi’a proxies in Iraq and elsewhere. Here too theological-political disputes push the Saudis and Americans into cooperation. At the same time, Saudis do not want the United States to attack Iran and rid the Sunnis of their Shi’ite problem more or less altogether; such a war would disrupt the oil trade, and the Saudis, having watched the Americans in Iraq, rather doubt that the American military would do a more effective job in Iran. But the Saudis do need the Americans for defensive purposes, being militarily unimpressive themselves.
And so for the time being the Saudis have wanted peace, except when challenged by the sort of threats in Yemen, where the Shi’a Houthis were threatening a revolution against the ruling Sunnis, and now seen in Syria and Qatar. All of these are ‘proxy’ conflicts with the Iranians. Elsewhere, Saudis are backing peace negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians. They also want peace in Iraq, if such a peace would reduce if not necessarily eliminate U. S. ground forces, allow the Sunni minority there the capacity to defend themselves, and insure that Iraqi Shi’a do not become pawns of Iran. And they don’t want to be ‘flanked’ by the Iranians in Syria or Qatar, either. They want 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 Wahhabism, through the construction of mosques and other means of religious ‘networking.’ They have become good at that, for the past century or so.
The Saudis are tending to their substantial economic interests in a variety of ways. They are investing some of their rising oil revenues in refining capacity and in the petrochemical industry. At the moment, the top five refiners are the U. S., China, Russia, Japan, and Germany The Saudis want to join the club, and state-owned Saudi Aramco hopes to bring the Kingdom from #12 in the world (where it is now) into the top five, in five years. 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.
They don’t have as much as in the past. The oil price decline of the past few years hasn’t caused the American natural gas industry to collapse, as the Saudis had hoped. They have needed to liquidate some of their foreign investments and to cut social spending. This puts pressure on the regime. Although they still control about 20% of the world’s proven oil reserves, from which the government derives 75% of its income, their grip on the international oil cartel has weakened. They’ve been forced to liquidate $70 billion in foreign investments and even to cut the social spending that has kept most of its population quiet for so many years.
This also imperils their strategy for meeting the pending worldwide shortage of food. Here, the proverbial shoe is on the other foot, inasmuch as Saudi Arabia, once identified on maps as ‘Arabia Deserta,’ is as food-poor as it is oil-rich. Desalinization is not sufficiently advance technologically to make cereal grains viable on the Arabian peninsula. The Saudis have given up on their program to grow wheat. They have attempted to solve this problem by purchasing overseas agribusinesses. Declining revenues won’t help. And this is also 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.
Today, the reigning king is Salman, who ascended to the throne in January 2015. Given the fact that the brother-to-brother succession line established by Ibn Saud can no longer be sustained, Salman made an important and controversial decision in designating not a second-generation family member but a third-generation nephew, Muhammad bin Nayef, as crown prince. He has appointed his son, Mohammad bin Salman, as Deputy Crown Prince; in this post, his son has overseen the military intervention against the Houthis in Yemen and has also worked for the diversification of the economy, and he has helped this year in orchestrating the diplomatic isolation of Qatar from other members of the Gulf Coordination Council. As you might imagine, these ‘personnel’ moves have proven controversial within the royal family, especially among the second-generation royals, who have been passed over in the royal succession.
To put matters more generally, Saudi Arabia’s regime has used modernity to resist modernity. In doing so, it has deliberately 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 aristocracy or oligarchy, it is threatened today not by a moderate middle class but by a fanaticized, Wahhabi-educated, Wahhabi-propagandized populace, angry at corrupt royal rule and susceptible to the arguments made by the radical Islamists.
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