By Ben Rich PhD Candidate, Monash University, Australia Many claim that the relationship between Saudi ...
By Ben Rich
PhD
Candidate, Monash University, Australia
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”Shi'a 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 willful 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 sheiks”. 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 Shi'a. 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 criticised for
promoting a radicalising, 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 Shi'a 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 modernisation initiated by King Faisal. The 2003 attacks by
al-Qaeda inside Saudi Arabia were partially motivated by its accommodation of
“infidels”.
Historically,
this blow-back 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 mobilise thousands of young Saudis
into a conflict with a new infidel threat. Although Saudi Arabia began actively
discouraging such behaviour 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 hardline 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 antagonising 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?
This article was first published at The Conversation on July 28, 2015
