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Saudi Arabia
Islamism in Saudi Arabia
The decade of the 1980s was characterized by the rise of ultraconservative,
politically activist Islamic movements in much of the Arab world.
These Islamist movements, labeled fundamentalist in the
West, sought the government institutionalization of Islamic laws
and social principles. Although Saudi Arabia already claimed to
be an Islamic government whose constitution is the Quran, the
kingdom has not been immune to this conservative trend.
In Saudi Arabia, the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, had been
years of explosive development, liberal experimentation, and openness
to the West. A reversal of this trend came about abruptly in 1979,
the year in which the Grand Mosque in Mecca came under attack
by religiously motivated critics of the monarchy, and the Islamic
Republic of Iran was established. Each of these events signaled
that religious conservatism would have to be politically addressed
with greater vigor. Although the mosque siege was carried out
by a small band of zealots and their actions of shooting in the
mosque appalled most Muslims, their call for less ostentation
on the part of the Saudi rulers and for a halt to the cultural
inundation of the kingdom by the West struck a deep chord of sympathy
across the kingdom. At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini's call
to overthrow the Al Saud was a direct challenge to the legitimacy
of the monarchy as custodian of the holy places, and a challenge
to the stability of the kingdom with its large Shia minority.
In the years following these events, the rise of the ultraconservative
periphery has caused the vast center of society to shift in a
conservative direction, producing greater polarity between those
who are Western-oriented and the rest of society. The 1991 Persian
Gulf War marked another dramatic shift toward conservative sentiment,
and this conservative trend continued to gain momentum in the
early 1990s.
The conservative revival has been manifest in literature, in
individual behavior, in government policies, in official and unofficial
relations with foreigners, in mosque sermons, and in protest demonstrations
against the government. The revival was also apparent in increased
religious programming on television and radio, and an increase
in articles about religion in newspapers.
On an individual level, some Saudi citizens, especially educated
young women, were expressing the revivalist mood by supplementing
the traditional Saudi Islamic hijab (literally curtain
or veil), a black cloak, black face veil, and hair covering, with
long black gloves to hide the hands. In some cases, women who
formerly had not covered their faces began to use the nontransparent
covering once worn mainly by women of traditional families. Some,
especially younger, university- educated women, wore the hijab
when traveling in Europe or the United States to demonstrate the
sincerity of their belief in following the precepts of Islam.
In the Hijaz, another expression of the Islamic revival was participation
in the ritual celebration of popular Islamic holidays. Some elite
Hijazi families, for example, have revived the mawlid,
a gathering for communal prayer on the occasion of the Prophet's
birthday, or to celebrate a birth, mourn a death, bless a new
house, or seek God's favor in fulfillment of some wish, such as
cure of an illness or the birth of a child. Mawlid rituals,
especially when performed by women, were suppressed by Abd al
Aziz when he conquered the Hijaz because they incorporated intercession
and the Wahhabis considered them the equivalent of polytheism.
Reacting to the revivalist mood, the government has backed the
mutawwiin in responding to calls for controls over behavior
perceived as non-Islamic. In November 1990, a group of forty-seven
women staged a demonstration to press their claim for the right
to drive. The mutawwiin demanded that the women be punished.
The government confiscated the women's passports, and those employed
as teachers were fired. The previously unofficial ban on women's
driving quickly became official. As a further indication of the
growing conservatism, considerable criticism of the women's behavior
in asking for the right to drive came from within the women's
branch of the university in Riyadh.
Religiously sanctioned behavior, once thought to be the responsibility
of families, was being increasingly institutionalized and enforced.
Women, for example, were usually prevented from traveling abroad
unless accompanied by a male chaperon (mahram), a marked
shift from the policy of the late 1970s, when a letter granting
permission to travel was considered sufficient. This rule has
compounded the difficulties for women wishing to study abroad:
a 1982 edict remained in force that restricted scholarships for
women to those whose father, husband, or brother was able to remain
with them during the period of study.
State funding has increased for the nationwide organization of
mutawwiin that is incorporated into the civil service
bureaucracy. Once responsible primarily for enforcing the attendance
of men in the mosque at prayer time, the tasks of the mutawwiin
since the 1980s have come to include enforcing public abstinence
from eating, drinking, and smoking among both Muslims and non-Muslims
in the daylight hours during Ramadan. The mutawwiin (also
seen as Committees for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention
of Vice or Committees for Public Morality) are also responsible
for seeing that shops are closed at prayer time and that modest
dress is maintained in public. Foreign women were under increased
pressure to wear clothing that covered the arms and legs, and
men and women who were unrelated might be apprehended for traveling
together in a car. In the early 1980s, an offending couple might
have received an official reprimand, but in the early 1990s they
might experience more serious consequences. In 1991, for example,
a Saudi citizen who gave a foreign female coworker a ride home
was sentenced to a public flogging and his coworker subsequently
was deported.
The rise in conservatism also can be seen in measures taken to
obstruct non-Muslim religious services. Non-Muslim services have
long been discouraged, but never prohibited, in Arabia. Even at
the height of the Wahhabi revival in the 1920s, Christian missionary
doctors held prayer services in the palace of Abd al Aziz. In
the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Christian religious services were
held regularly in private houses and in housing compounds belonging
to foreign companies, and these services were usually ignored
by mutawwiin as long as they did not attract public attention
or encourage proselytism. With the end of the Persian Gulf War,
however, mutawwiin began to enforce a ban on non-Muslim
worship and punished offenders. In 1991, for example, a large
number of mutawwiin accompanied by uniformed police broke
up a Christian service in Riyadh and arrested a number of participants,
including children.
The most significant indicator of the growing shift toward conservatism
was the willingness of the state to silence opposition groups.
For example, in May 1991, more than 400 men from the religious
establishment and universities, including Saudi Arabia's most
prominent legal scholar, Shaykh Abd al Aziz ibn Baz, petitioned
the king to create a consultative council, a request to which
the king responded favorably in February 1992. In their petition,
however, the signatories asked not only for more participation
in decision making, but also for a revision of all laws, including
commercial and administrative regulations, to conform with the
sharia. They asked for the creation of Islamic banks and an end
to interest payments in established banks, as well as the redistribution
of wealth, protection for the rights of the individual, censure
of the media so that it would serve Islam and morality, and the
creation of a strong army so that the kingdom would not be dependent
on the West. The requests represented a combination of apparently
liberal petitions (a consultative council, redistribution of wealth)
with a conservative religious bent.
In a follow-up to the petition, a number of the signatories wrote
a letter stating that funds for religious institutions were being
cut back, that the institutions were not being given the resources
to create jobs, and that their fatwas were being ignored.
The letter further claimed that those who signed the original
petition had had their passports confiscated and were being harassed
by security personnel even though "they had committed no other
crime than giving advice to the Guardian." This affair suggested
that the government was sufficiently concerned about the increasingly
conservative mood to shift its strategy from merely co-opting
the conservative agenda to suppressing its extreme voices.
In another incident, a movement called Islamic Awakening, which
had a growing following in religious colleges and universities,
attempted to hold a public demonstration in early 1991, but participants
were threatened with arrest if they did so. At the same time,
the government arrested a well-known activist in the Islamic Awakening
while he was preaching a sermon in a Riyadh mosque.
Factors contributing to the increased attraction of Islamic conservatism
included the problem of impending loss of identity caused by overwhelming
Westernization. As secular education, population mobility, the
breakup of extended family households, and the employment of women
chipped away at cherished institutions of family and society,
religion was a refuge and a source of stability (see Cultural
Homogeneity and Values , this ch.).
Another factor was disaffection with the existing economic system
in the face of rising unemployment. During the rapid expansion
of the 1970s, employment in the public sector was virtually assured
for Saudi citizens with technical skills and for those with a
Western education. By the end of the decade, however, those positions,
especially in education and in the ministries, came under pressure
from increasing numbers of university graduates with rising expectations
that no longer could be fulfilled in public sector employment.
In addition, in the 1990s a growing number of young men educated
in Islamic colleges and universities were unemployed; their acquired
knowledge and skills were becoming more irrelevant to the demands
of the economy and bureaucratic infrastructure, even within the
judiciary where traditionally Islamic scholarship was most highly
valued.
An additional factor lay in the monarchy's continuing need to
maintain legitimacy as an "Islamic government." As long as the
ruling family believes it must continue to prove itself a worthy
inheritor of the legacy on which the kingdom was founded, it will
be obliged to foster religious education and the Islamic political
culture in which the kingdom's media are steeped. A lesser factor
in the rise of conservatism may be widespread sympathy with the
sense of being victimized by the West, as evidenced, for example,
in the continuing displacement of Palestinians in the occupied
territories and southern Lebanon.
Islam remained the primary cohesive ideology in the kingdom,
the source of legitimacy for the monarchy, and the pervasive system
for moral guidance and spirituality. The nature of the Islamic
society Saudi Arabia wished to have in the future, however, was
one of the important and passionately debated issues in the kingdom
in the early 1990s. The ultraconservative moral agenda appealed
on an emotional level to many Saudi citizens. But the desire to
expand the jurisdiction of sharia law and to interfere with the
banking system was also a source of concern for many people. Because
nearly all Saudis have reaped material benefits from state-funded
development, people were hesitant to jeopardize those benefits
and the political stability that allowed development. Some have
suggested that the new system of basic laws was a clear signal
that the monarchy was firmly committed to liberalization and no
longer felt compelled to tolerate conservative excesses. Close
assessment of the implications of the basic laws suggested, however,
that the monarchy was making no substantive changes and, in effect,
was taking no chances to risk disturbing the balance among competing
religious persuasions in the kingdom.
Data as of December 1992
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