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The Saudi Insurgency
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The Saudi regime’s response to opposition |
The
hostage taking in Khobar, Saudi Arabia, has once again dragged the
resource-rich desert kingdom into the international spotlight and into
the heart of the war on terror.
The
situation in Saudi Arabia is similar to that witnessed in Egypt in the
early 90s, with the state attempting to contain and brutally quell a
militant Islamic insurgency. One had hoped that the Saudi regime would
not follow the example of Egypt, which extirpated Islamic radicalism at the cost of many innocent
lives and the almost total eradication of human rights and civil
liberties, though the more cynical might note that Saudi Arabia had little in the way of either in the first place.
The
Saudi regime is experiencing a more direct form of the blowback
currently being experienced by the United States. They are both learning, at great cost, that a state cannot fuel and
fund a militant pan-Islamic ideology and then expect the adherents of
that ideology to renounce their beliefs in the interests of the
state’s foreign relations and international standing.
During
the Afghan Jihad of the 80s, Saudi Arabia was one of the leading
states that contributed to the war effort against the Soviets, along
with various other Muslim states, and of course, the United States.
Back
then it was expedient for all involved to utilize the concept of
Islamic solidarity, of a holy war against the infidel occupier. It was
useful to emphasize that the Muslim dead would be martyrs. But when
the Soviet occupation ended, the idea abruptly went out of vogue. But
the power of the ideology did not, partially because Saudi Arabia was founded as a Salafi Islamic state; the ideology was
intrinsic to its society and religious makeup. Hence, the ardor that
drove countless Muslim youth to seek death on the Afghan battlefield
still burned intensely in the hearts of countless Saudis.
The
Saudi government runs the risk of creating martyrs out of
the militants. |
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But
the belief system was larger than Afghanistan and larger than the Soviets. It could not be contained, particularly
not by a state that based its legitimacy on its role as a bastion of
orthodoxy, a state born out of a struggle to restore a puritanical and
iconoclastic Islam to preeminence.
In
the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, the religiously conservative Saudi
society was deeply traumatized by the government’s decision to host
US troops and bases in the Holy Land. Disillusioned, many devout Saudis came to realize that their
government had cynically manipulated and used the façade of religion
to further its own interests and that, when convenient, religion would
be tossed aside by the issuance of a questionable “religious”
ruling that was often short on logic and jurisprudential reasoning.
This created an atmosphere that served to discredit the regime and the
Muslim scholars who moved in its orbit. The stage was set for the
legitimization of the more radical face of Islam that culminated in
the conflict raging in Saudi Arabia today.
Prospects
are grim. The Saudi government runs the risk of creating a martyr out
of every militant it guns down in the streets. Already militant Web
sites proudly display pictures of the dead, who they allege have been
blessed in death with karamat, or minor miracles, such as bodies that
do not decompose even weeks after burial. The militants’ religious
commitment has become a badge of honor: One popular photograph shows a
dead militant with his index finger extended skyward, a Muslim gesture
meant to affirm the oneness of God.
Additionally,
the grievances against the Saudi state are sharp and many. The large
discrepancies in living standards are becoming increasingly hard to
ignore, as is the considerable rate of unemployment. But that is not
to simplify the issue and suggest that militancy is bred out of
poverty in a direct sense; rather, it exacerbates the sense of
injustice and resentment many already feel towards the government. It
is felt that thousands of princes live opulently and with no form of
accountability, reducing the royal family’s standing in the eyes of
many who would question the justice of allocating substantial amounts
of the country’s oil revenue to grant large stipends to princes
often notorious for frivolity and carousing, while countless ordinary
people are left jobless and poor.
Many
of the royals are also resented because of the impunity they enjoy;
tales—doubtless many of which are exaggerated—of their debauchery
have long been popular among many Arabs, not just Saudis, whereas the
“religious police” willingly beat and arrest regular people for
any infractions.
This
dovetails with another issue: human rights. One tends to believe the
majority of Saudis, contrary to popular belief, are not looking for
Western style democracy and human rights. They do not have an
objection to Islamic law, penal or otherwise, which Western media
often identifies as “barbaric” or “harsh”; rather they have a
problem with the application thereof. Saudi Arabia is just one of many Muslim states that have exhibited, contrary to
Islamic teachings, an extraordinary brutality in quelling legitimate
dissent and opposition with torture and prolonged imprisonment. That,
coupled with the arbitrariness of the implementation of the laws, is
where the problem lies for many Saudis.
Saudi
Arabia
has exhibited an extraordinary brutality in quelling dissent with torture. |
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Realistically
speaking, where Muslim regimes have allowed torture to run rampant and
have turned a blind eye on the practices of their jailers and security
forces, there has almost always been a core of opponents who, made
victims of terrible abuse, gradually turn to the more radical aspects
of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), declaring such rulers and regimes
apostates and enemies to be fought.
This
happened in Egypt, where the horrific torture inflicted on the generally moderate
Muslim Brotherhood produced a generation of Islamists that would not
compromise with the state, choosing instead to take up arms against
the government. This in turn generates a vicious cycle, where the
government decides to end the insurgency at any cost, and makes
wide-ranging use of torture and extra-judicial killing, planting the
seeds for a new generation of embittered and hardened militants. And
this is certainly what is happening in Saudi, judging by the writings
of the militants, in which they argue that the Saudi state must be
broken by force of arms, citing its record of torture and abuse of
Islamists.
Additionally,
the Saudi state’s official ideology of Salafi Islam does not sit
well with the close alliances the regime has forged with the United States. Disregarding the paranoid ranting many Muslims and Westerners now
choose to engage in vis-à-vis “Wahhabism,” Salafi Islam places a
substantial amount of emphasis on the twin creedal concepts of
al-walaa’ wa al-baraa’, loosely translated as “loyalty and
disavowal.” In that sense, the presence of US bases on Saudi
land—regardless of the recent scaling back of troop numbers—and in
light of the role those bases played in two major wars against Muslim
countries led several formidable Saudi Islamic scholars to threaten to
“excommunicate” the Saudi state. Judging by events across the past
few months, it appears that many have chosen to take that final step
and have indeed declared the regime apostate.
Another
major Islamic issue at stake is the explicit command by the Prophet to
expel non-Muslims from the Arabian Peninsula. While scholars have
often debated what constitutes the “Arabian Peninsula” in those
traditions, there’s been some agreement on the fact that many areas
of Saudi Arabia are definitively off-limits to non-Muslims, with more
conservative interpretations suggesting that the entirety of Saudi
Arabia is off-limits to non-Muslims. The militants contrast these
religious rulings with the reality on the ground, perpetuated and
approved by the government of Al-Saud, in that thousands of
non-Muslims live and work in Saudi Arabia (besides the more explicitly
problematic military bases referred to above), and that their
compounds enjoy a de facto extra-territoriality that many find
unacceptable. In fact, the militants have adopted a banner that reads
“Expel the Pagans from the Arabian Peninsula” (Pagans in this
sense is meant to connote all non-Muslims).
Many
of the militants have expressed a conviction that they feel
religiously obliged to see this commandment fulfilled, and have used
it to justify the jurisprudentially difficult question of killing
Saudi security forces, on the basis that they forcefully prevent a
religious tenet from being carried out, necessitating the counter use
or preemptive use of force.
The
use of US bases in Saudi against Muslim countries led several scholars to
threaten to “excommunicate” the state. |
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Like
Egypt, the Saudi government has used its domination of the media to
manipulate coverage of the insurgency and its consequences, waging an
intense media campaign to counter what street credibility the radicals
enjoy. Often, the Saudi regime has used lies and propaganda to portray
the militants as nihilistic sociopaths—a dangerous reduction when
one faces a backlash of this magnitude. Additionally, Saudi efforts at
using the media often lack finesse and contain blatant falsities,
leaving many readers—distressingly—to turn to the militants’
account of events.
In
fact, Saudi incompetence and propagandizing in media administration
has reached near Soviet proportions. Take, for example, Sheikh Ali
Al-Khodier, a popular Islamic scholar who had issued a fatwa
(jurisprudential ruling) prohibiting cooperation with the government
in arresting Saudi militants who were being sought for their
involvement in a number of attacks. Al-Khodier was arrested and
disappeared for several months, after which he was put on television
and made to publicly renounce almost every previous fatwa he had
issued that was not to the government’s liking, effectively tearing
down the ideological framework he’d built and advocated for much of
his life. This was repeated with other Saudi scholars. That this
highly suspect change of heart was understood to have occurred in a
Saudi prison did not appear to strike Saudi authorities as in any
sense counterproductive, as though it mattered not that people
believed he was coerced, as long as he publicly disavowed the
militants’ action.
Unlike
the situation in Egypt, it will be impossible for the Saudis to
eliminate the social machine that produces and supports the militants,
as the regime had built what little legitimacy it enjoyed on its
adoption and support of the Salafi school of Islam, for better or for
worse. Therefore, it is impossible to dry up the source, so to speak,
because society has become the source. The regime will try, though.
Already it is “re-educating” many imams, teaching them a form of
Islam radically different from the more confrontational one they were
allowed to preach back when it was convenient to do so, attempting to
impose new limits, cutting off support for “radical” Islamic
groups around the world. But the social and religious make-up of Saudi
Arabia does not sit well with such political machinations so late in
the day, and the regime, caught between a rock and a hard place, loses
credibility with each passing day.
Inevitably,
the Saudi government is dragging itself into a spiral of violence it
cannot hope to control. Like many of the states of the Middle East,
Saudi Arabia has been forged on complexities and conflicting
priorities that are almost impossible to peacefully undo. Coupled with
the increasingly importunate calls for reform in Saudi Arabia that
have been associated, rightly or wrongly, in the minds of many Muslims
with a marginalization of Islam, Saudi Arabia is placed in an
unenviable catch-22.
Azizuddin
El-Kaissouni
is a graduate of the American University in Cairo, he holds a BA
in Political Science with a specialization in International Law.
You can reach him at azizuddin@islam-online.net
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