Saudi royal
guards stand on duty in front of portraits of the royal family
Many claim that
the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Islamic State (IS) is one of patron
and client. IS, they argue, is a pawn of the Saudi regime, used to check the “rising” Shiite
power of Iran in the Middle East.
This
allegation typically presents certain shared principles between the official
Saudi interpretation of Islam and the doctrine motivating IS as damning
evidence of complicity between the two.
Although there is a certain truth to this, it assumes
a wilful agency on Saudi Arabia’s part that simply isn’t there. Saudi citizens
supporting IS’s activities in Iraq and Syria are not the result of a coherent
plan directed by the kingdom’s rulers, but the overflow of a long-standing
system used to maintain its domestic legitimacy.
Evolution of state control
The Saudi state has relied on the
ultra-conservative Wahhabi movement since both emerged in
the mid-18th century.
Wahhabism was built on the desire to stamp out
religious innovation and restore the “proper” Islam. Its initial power rested
on two sources – the common distaste among the inhabitants of Central Arabia
for such innovation and preacher Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab’s ability to channel
this grievance into a populist doctrine.
The call produced something never encountered before
in the region: a proper mass movement.
The Saudis, a small clan of oasis nobility, formed a
symbiotic relationship with Wahhab. It lent him military support in return for
the movement’s resources and legitimacy. Wahhab agreed to defer all matters of
state and politics, restricting clerical activities to administering the social
and metaphysical spheres.
As “guardians” of Islam, the Saudis were able to
differentiate themselves from their local competitors. Revivalism attached a
mass appeal to their mission of conquest in an environment typified by
disparate local identities and “petty sheikhs.” The resultant state came to be
viewed as key to safeguarding the Wahhabi community, a central factor in its
expansion over much of the Arabian Peninsula by the late 19th century.
Realising the importance of the ongoing ideological
support of its subjects, the Saudi regime sought to instil Wahhabism throughout
conquered territories. The primary motivation for Saudi leaders was political.
By instilling the revivalist identity into greater numbers of its subjects, the
state was creating demand for its own rule.
Key to this effort was the securitisation of heterodox
sects, such as the Shiites. These “others” were presented as a threat to the
community’s metaphysical integrity due to their inauthentic practices, which
were not encountered during Islam’s early period. The logic dictated that their
existence necessitated a higher authority to moderate society and ensure the
correct Islamic form was maintained.
This is hardly a novel concept. States commonly construct threats of external
war and terror in order to gain domestic power. A by-product of such activities
has often been the rise of destructive exclusivist nationalism and xenophobia.
Where the Saudi state remains novel is in its use of a
purely metaphysical threat, the extent that it has relied on this to maintain
its position, and the longevity of the effort itself.
Glitches in the system
The state’s arms have commonly been employed to ensure
this status quo. Saudi Arabia’s education system has been criticized for promoting a radicalizing, sectarian narrative that
encourages violence against those outside the sanctioned community.
But while Saudi Arabia has carefully crafted an image
as Islam’s protector, it nevertheless has aimed to keep policymaking pragmatic,
not ideological. Decisions of economic and foreign policy have tended to be
dominated by technocrats, not clerics. In this, religion is often invoked, but
generally when it is instrumental to a wider political goal.
Ironically, for Saudis this arrangement has meant that
the state has been a prominent promoter of the “innovation” so detested in
classical revivalist thought.
This tension has occasionally produced outbreaks of
violence. The 1927 Ikhwan revolt was sparked in part by
King Abd al-Aziz’s refusal to exterminate the Shiites of Al-Hasa and his
diplomatic relations with external “infidel” powers.
Similarly, the 1979 Siege of Mecca was a rejection of
the previous two decades of radical modernization initiated by King Faisal. The
2003 attacks by Al-Qaeda inside Saudi Arabia were partially motivated by its
accommodation of “infidels.”
Historically, this blowback has been largely domestic.
Only since the 1990s have these types of unintended outcomes been felt
internationally.
This shift can be attributed to several factors. The
most prominent among them was Saudi Arabia’s tacit support for participation in
the Afghanistan wars of the 1980s.
The primary motivation for this was not one of
ideology, but political pragmatism. Saudi Arabia was experiencing an economic
downturn in which household incomes fell by more than half and unemployment
skyrocketed. At the same time the regime was struggling with a rising Islamist
current in the wake of the Iranian revolution, which was increasingly calling
into question its legitimacy to rule.
With a large number of disenfranchised young men at
home, a rival power walking into a geopolitical beartrap and a need to
appear to the Muslim community to be increasingly activist, the decision was
aimed at killing three birds with one stone. Thanks to its strong influence
over domestic Islamic identity, it took little encouragement to mobilize
thousands of young Saudis into a conflict with a new infidel threat. Although
Saudi Arabia began actively discouraging such behavior after the Soviet
withdrawal in 1989, the genie had been let out of the bottle.
Saudis continued to flock to “pan-Islamic” conflicts
throughout the 1990s and the 2000s – in Kosovo, Tajikistan, Chechnya, Iraq and,
most recently, Syria. They gravitated towards religiously hard-line groups, whose
ideologies meshed well with the sectarian narrative of their upbringing.
Treating the symptom, not the
wound
While Saudi Arabia has made several attempts to stem
the flow of fighters and finances to groups like IS, it has
been careful not to appear overly oppressive for fear of
antagonizing its own constituents. It may decry such groups, but it continues to
promote a system that inadvertently supports them.
Revivalist scholars claim that Saudi Arabia’s doctrine
is intrinsically opposed to the IS worldview. They cite esoteric textual
minutiae to support such assertions. But such arguments miss a wider point: the
issues at play are far less about literary nuance than the wider emotional,
psychological and sociological themes that Saudi Arabia promotes in its
populace.
Such structures created a demand for sectarian
confrontation in some people that cannot be met by the state and which drives
them towards radical action. Until such deeper issues are dealt with, other
responses will merely be token.
Unfortunately, the domestic efficacy of Saudi Arabia’s
control means that it is unlikely to be reformed any time soon. The state’s
manipulation of its population’s sectarianism during the Arab Spring, for
example, was key to its effective management of the 2011 crisis.
Within this wider context, the ruling elite see the
extremist habits of a small number of Saudis as an unfortunate yet tolerable
side-effect of a system that has allowed them to remain in power for nearly 300
years.
This certainly does not diminish the Saudi state’s
culpability. But it does pose the question: how does one change an entire
system of popular governance that inadvertently produces such outcomes and
appears structurally incapable of preventing them?
Ben
Rich is a PhD candidate at Monash University.
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