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April 15, 2018 7:47 am
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Saudi Moderation? Prince Mohammed Is on Shaky Ground

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avatar by James M. Dorsey

Opinion

US President Donald Trump welcomes Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House, March 20, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Jonathan Ernst.

No doubt, Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s recent reforms in Saudi Arabia have benefited women and created social opportunity with the introduction of modern forms of entertainment, including the opening this month of Saudi Arabia’s first movie theater, as well as concerts, theater, and dance performances. Anecdotal evidence testifies to the popularity of these moves, certainly among urban youth.

But Prince Mohammed’s top-down approach to countering religious militancy rests on shaky ground. It involves rewriting history rather than owning up to responsibility; imposing his will on an ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim establishment whose change of heart lacks credibility; and suppressing religious and secular voices who link religious and social change to political reform.

Prince Mohammed has traced Saudi Arabia’s embrace of ultra-conservatism to 1979. That year, a popular revolt toppled the Shah of Iran and replaced the country’s monarchy with an Islamic republic. Also during that year, Saudi zealots took control of the Great Mosque in the holy city of Mecca.

While there is no doubt that the kingdom responded to those two events by enhancing the power of Saudi Arabia’s already prevalent ultra-conservative religious establishment, Prince Mohammed is brushing aside Saudi history.

The dominance of radical Wahabi Islam in Saudi Arabia dates back to 1744, when Muhammad bin Saud, the founder of the al-Saud dynasty, concluded a power-sharing agreement with Islamic scholar Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab that lent Bin Saud the religious legitimacy he needed to unify and control Arabia’s warring tribes.

Similarly, Saudi global propagation of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism significantly accelerated in the wake of the events of 1979, but predates them by almost two decades.

Prince Mohammed’s uncle, King Faisal, who ruled Saudi Arabia from 1964 until his assassination in 1975, embodied the export of ultra-conservatism as a pillar of Saudi diplomacy and soft power. Faisal saw it as a way to create a network of supporters capable of defending the kingdom’s strategic and economic interests, while simultaneously catering to the outlook of Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment.

Both the Muslim World League, one of the kingdom’s primary vehicles for the funding of its global campaign, and the Islamic University of Medina were founded in the 1960s. The university served as a citadel of ultra-conservative learning and thought, including the idea that Islamic law dictates unquestioned obedience to the legitimate ruler.

Prince Mohammed has now exploited that view to put the religious establishment in its place and legitimize reforms it condemned for decades. In doing so, he not only undermined the credibility of ultra-conservative scholars but also enhanced that of both more militant ones and those he has either imprisoned or silenced because they advocated not only social but also democratic reforms like free and fair elections, release of political prisoners, and respect for human rights.

Prince Mohammed’s assertion that Saudi Arabia propagated ultra-conservatism as part of countering communism during the Cold War is accurate, but it ignores the fact that Saudi Arabia felt threatened by Arab nationalism. This was not simply because countries like Egypt and Syria aligned themselves with the Soviet Union, but also because they questioned the legitimacy of monarchs. Aligning Saudi Arabia with the West, moreover, ensured that the US had a greater stake in the survival of the House of Saud.

Born 14 years after the events of 1979, Prince Mohammed’s vision of a kingdom whose liberalism was hijacked by Cold War-inspired policies and errant Islamic scholars jars with the experience of Saudis who are generations older. They recall a process in which post-1979 ultra-conservative social mores were codified into rules, regulations, and laws.

“I was a teenager in the 1970s and grew up in Medina. … My memories of those years … are quite different,” said Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi journalist who last year went into self-imposed exile because he feared arrest.

“Women weren’t driving cars. I didn’t see a woman drive until I visited my sister and brother-in-law in Tempe, Arizona in 1976. The movie theaters we had were makeshift. … You would pay 5 or 10 riyals (then approximately $1.50-$2) to the organizer, who would then give a warning when the religious police approached. To avoid being arrested, a friend of mine broke his leg jumping off a wall. In the 1970s, the only places on the Arabian Peninsula where women were working outside the home or school were Kuwait and Bahrain.”

Prince Mohammed seemed to acknowledge ultra-conservatism’s long-standing and deep-seated shaping of Saudi culture when he was asked about abolishing the kingdom’s system of male guardianship that forces women to get approval of a male relative for most major decisions in their lives. “We want to move on it and figure out a way to treat this that doesn’t harm families and doesn’t harm the culture,” Prince Mohammed said.

Khashoggi traces the formalization of existing social restrictions on women’s rights not to an edict issued by the religious establishment, but to an attempt by a 19-year-old princess to elope with her lover. The couple’s drama, ending in public execution in 1977, was described in “Death of a Princess,” a dramatized 1980 British documentary that strained relations between Britain and Saudi Arabia.

The incident marked the kingdom’s first major effort to use its financial muscle and the oil weapon to thwart freedom of the press beyond its borders and shape its international image. It also spurred codification of the suppression of women’s rights.

“The reaction of the government to the princess’s elopement was swift: The segregation of women became more severe and no woman could travel without the consent of a male relative. … MBS would like to advance a new narrative for my country’s recent history, one that absolves the government of any complicity in the adoption of strict Wahabi doctrine. That simply isn’t the case,” Khashoggi said, referring to Mohammed bin Salman by his initials.

Liberals were already warning in the 1970s that Saudi restrictions would tarnish the kingdom’s image. Celebrated poet and novelist Ghazi al-Gosaibi, who served as minister of industry and electricity, urged King Khalid in a handwritten letter in 1980 to shy away from banning the projection of women’s images in the media “so we would not be made an example of rigidity and stagnation in front of the whole world.”

Al-Gosaibi’s warning fell on deaf ears at the time, but it has been heard loud and clear by Prince Mohammed. To put his reforms on solid footing, however, Mohammed will have to acknowledge and confront his country’s demons and pursue structural reform. This includes a revamping of religious education, which is currently limited to shaving off raw ends like hate speech.

Structural reform will also have to entail the grooming of a more independent and critical class of Islamic scholars. Such reform is preferable to simply whitewashing the royal family’s role, whipping former allies into subservience, and suppressing any expression of dissent.

“Strangling moderate independent Islamic discourse may succeed in silencing democratic voices within Islam in Saudi Arabia, but it will also create a vacuum for the less moderate discourse that the state has shown it tolerates,” said Abdullah Alaoudh, a post-doctoral fellow in Islamic Law and Civilization and the son of Salman al-Odah, a Saudi scholar who has been imprisoned since September for calling for social and political reform.

Dr. James M. Dorsey, a non-resident Senior Associate at the BESA Center, is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University and co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers, such as this one, are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family.

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