Vision or Mirage

Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

David Rundell

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781838605940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mediorientale

'Clear-eyed and illuminating.'
Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor ' A rich, superbly researched, balanced history of the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.'
General David Petraeus, former Commander U.S. Central Command and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency 'Destined to be the best single volume on the Kingdom.'
Ambassador Chas Freeman, former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Assistant Secretary of Defense 'Should be prescribed reading for a new generation of political leaders.'
Sir Richard Dearlove, former Chief of H.M. Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) and Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Something extraordinary is happening in Saudi Arabia. A traditional, tribal society once known for its lack of tolerance is rapidly implementing significant economic and social reforms. An army of foreign consultants is rewriting the social contract, King Salman has cracked down hard on corruption, and his dynamic though inexperienced son, the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, is promoting a more tolerant Islam. But is all this a new vision for Saudi Arabia or merely a mirage likely to dissolve into Iranian-style revolution? David Rundell - one of America's foremost experts on Saudi Arabia - explains how the country has been stable for so long, why it is less so today, and what is most likely to happen in the future. The book is based on the author's close contacts and intimate knowledge of the country where he spent 15 years living and working as a diplomat. Vision or Mirage demystifies one of the most powerful, but least understood, states in the Middle East and is essential reading for anyone interested in the power dynamics and politics of the Arab World.

PART I

Creating a New Nation

In the early hours of November 4, 2017, Saudi Arabia changed forever. Across the country, princes, bureaucrats, and businessmen who had long believed themselves above the law discovered that their immunity had evaporated. Charged with corruption, some were pulled from their beds, while others were summoned to nonexistent meetings or detained as soon as their international flights touched down in the kingdom. Among them were air force generals, navy admirals, and three sons of former King Abdullah, including the commander of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard. A former minister of finance and a governor of the Central Bank found themselves confined together with former ministers of commerce, planning, and communications. Along with three brothers of Osama bin Laden, some 300 prominent individuals were taken to Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, which was converted for the occasion into the world’s first five-­star prison.

These events marked the end of an order that had governed Saudi Arabia for sixty-­five years. Gone was a political structure in which numerous princes made collective decisions. Gone, too, was a military structure in which senior princes controlled independent armies. Some called it the Saudi Spring. Others saw the start of the Fourth Saudi State, or “Salman Arabia.” It left some celebrating and others distraught. All agreed that it was part of a revolution that King Salman had initiated when he ascended the throne in January 2015. There was, however, much less agreement about what it would mean for Western diplomatic and commercial engagement with Saudi Arabia.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud had been dealt a poor hand. Unlike his half-­brother Abdullah, Salman had not inherited an oil boom that would fund enough royal generosity to win him the title “King of Hearts.” Instead, in 2015 oil prices were collapsing—and with them, Saudi Arabia’s economic growth and government revenues. The Saudi welfare state was fast becoming unsustainable. As one cabinet official told the author, “We were going to hit the wall – and in our own lifetime, not our children’s.” Unfortunately, in 2015, King Salman lacked the means to right his listing ship.

What he had was a well-­established but shambolic and somewhat medieval system of government. Thousands of princes believed that they were entitled to privileged social status, legal immunity, and generous state-­funded incomes. The conservative Wahhabi religious establishment, upon whose support the monarchy’s legitimacy partially rested, controlled most of the country’s legal and educational institutions. Its religious scholars were determined to maintain their historical importance and to block social change, especially when it related to the role of women. The civil service, which employed 70 percent of working Saudis, was filled with sinecures, nepotism, and corruption. This bureaucracy lacked both the motivation and administrative capacity to implement serious reform. Under the Obama Administration, Saudi Arabia’s strongest ally, the United States of America, had grown distant, while its greatest adversary, the Islamic Republic of Iran, had grown more menacing. The Saudi military remained loyal and firmly under civilian control, but after years of training and billions of dollars invested in advanced weaponry, it was still unable to defeat a militia of Yemeni tribesmen or protect vital oil installations from inexpensive drone attacks.

Salman bin Abdulaziz had not expected to inherit these problems. He was only a few years younger than his two full brothers, Sultan and Naif. Both of them had been named crown prince and both had died younger than Salman would be when he ascended the throne. Although fate made Salman an unexpected king, he was not unprepared. He had been governor of Riyadh Province for forty-­eight years. Intelligent, pragmatic, hardworking, well organized, and disciplined, he was also strict, demanding, and humorless. He made firm decisions and would become known locally as the “King of Decisiveness.”

Salman spoke little English and had no university degree, but as he sometimes told visitors, “I did not need to go to the Sorbonne to learn how to be a Prince.” He read widely in Arabic and owned one of the largest private libraries of any Saudi prince. Salman was firmly dedicated to preserving the monarchy, but recognized that doing so would require political, economic, and social change. At a minimum, he would need to manage the transition of power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons, reduce the country’s dependence on oil, and bring its social practices more into line with those prevailing in the rest of the world.

The realm that King Salman inherited was politically stable. Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, it was not a police state ruled solely by fear. Nor was it an inaccessible “hermit kingdom” like North Korea. It was, however, unquestionably authoritarian and culturally isolated. There was no legal mechanism for its people to change their government. Ancient tribal and religious practices, once common in much of the world, remained a part of daily life in Saudi Arabia. Freedoms of speech, press, and assembly were very limited. Although there were far more political prisoners in Egypt or Turkey than in Saudi Arabia, dissent was not tolerated.

In 2020, Saudi Arabia is a very different place than it was in 2015. The complexities and contradictions that long made the kingdom difficult to understand have been compounded by rapid, unexpected, and disruptive change. Politically, the king has sought to prepare the government to pass smoothly on to the next generation of princes. Economically, he has sought to reduce the scope of the Saudi welfare state. Socially, he has sought to transform a closed and conservative society into a more tolerant one. In all of these efforts the king and his son, Mohammed bin Salman, have been partially successful.

However, these unsettling changes have made Saudi Arabia less stable than it was in 2015. Although a majority of the population continues to support the monarchy for a wide range of reasons, voices demanding either much more or much less change have become louder. Although there is more openness to the outside world, at home fear has become more prevalent.

The king and his son are not trying to make Saudi Arabia more democratic, but they are trying to make it more stable, prosperous, and religiously tolerant. They have a vision, but will it prove to be a mirage? Should the West shun them or seek to help them—and, if so, how? To answer these questions, one needs first to understand the legacy of dynastic power, religious reform, and national unification that the king and his son are trying to preserve. The Al Saud have two-­and-a-­half centuries of local history behind them. That history provides the foundation of the dynasty’s legitimacy and a starting point for understanding Saudi Arabia.

Chapter 1

The Rise and Fall of the House of Saud

For many centuries, Central Arabia suffered from lawless violence, political instability, and economic backwardness. Known locally as the Nejd, this was a harsh, haggard, barren, unforgiving land that no great power had wished to occupy for long. Since the Bronze Age, it had been a collection of wandering nomads and warring city states. Its local chieftains rose and fell. Their “states” were merely loose alliances of townspeople and nomads; the Hadhar and the Bedu, respectively. The nomads lived by animal husbandry and raiding; the townspeople engaged in farming, trade, and simple manufacture. These “states” provided only minimal administration and had no well-­defined borders. Every town and tribe had its own independent, hereditary leadership. The urban notables were known as aiyan and the tribal chiefs as sheikhs.

When the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz bin Abd al-Rahman al-Saud (1876–1953) was born, the Arabian Peninsula was as fragmented as Germany had been before Bismarck, or Italy before Garibaldi.¹ Saudi Arabia did not exist. East of Riyadh in Al Hasa, the Ottoman Turks controlled some of the world’s largest date-­palm groves in what would become the world’s largest oil fields. Along the rest of the Gulf coast from Kuwait to Oman, Britain had established effective control over the local rulers, whom it administered as part of its Indian Empire. In Mecca, the Hashemite Sharif Hussein ibn Ali governed and administered the annual Hajj pilgrimage on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan. To the north lay Ha’il, seat of the Al Rasheed dynasty, which based its power on the large Shammar tribal confederation. In the southwest, Imam Yahiya Mohammed Hamid al-Din ruled Yemen from his mountain capital at Sanaa. By 1930, all but Imam Yahiya and the British would be gone. By the 1960s even they would disappear from Arabia’s political landscape and a new nation state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, would have effectively united most of the Arabian Peninsula for the first time in 1,000 years.

The religious practices of the Arabian Peninsula were as diverse as its political loyalties. Most inhabitants were Sunni Muslims, but there are four branches or schools of Sunni law and practice. The inhabitants of the Nejd were largely followers of the conservative Hanbali interpretation of Islamic law. The Ottoman Turks in Al Hasa were Hanafi and much of the Hejaz (Western Arabia) was Shafi. All four schools, including the Maliki, were present in Mecca.

There were Shia Muslims on the peninsula as well, and they too were divided according to whether they followed the twelfth, seventh, or fifth imam. In the date groves of Al Qatif, Hofuf, and Medina were large populations of “Twelver,” or Ithnashari Shia. In the south, near Najran, there were pockets of “Sevener,” or Ismaili Shia. Further south in Yemen were the Zaydis, or “Fivers,” some of whom have become today’s Houthis. In the Hejaz, Islam’s mystic Sufis were common. By the end of King Abdulaziz’s life, there would be only one centralized Hanbali religious and legal establishment throughout his realm.

Across the empty deserts of Arabia roamed the Bedu—nomads with no fixed location or political loyalty beyond those of their tribe, clan, and family. They lived off their camel herds. In summer, when temperatures reached 120 degrees (50 degrees celsius) and grass withered, they could be found camped by deep, permanent wells or at trading centers where they exchanged livestock, wool, butter, and cheese for dates, grain, bullets, tobacco, and coffee.² In winter, when the grass grew lush from the autumn rains, they could be anywhere. Their sheikhs came from well-­recognized noble families within each tribe and maintained their own legal systems, tax codes, and military forces. Within two generations, this political and economic independence of the Saudi tribes would be broken. Unlike in Yemen, Afghanistan, or parts of Iraq today, tribes would no longer challenge the political authority of the central government or act as an alternative source of social services.

All of these changes were brought about by the Al Saud family—and, most notably, by King Abdulaziz, or Ibn Saud as he is often known in the West. Their story began in 1744, when the dynasty’s founder, Imam Mohammed al-Saud, ruled only the small Nejdi village of Dir’iyyah. As in all the surrounding villages, its inhabitants eked out a subsistence living. They tended date palms, grew grain, dug wells, and prayed for rain. They engaged in simple handicraft manufacture and traded with the surrounding Bedouin tribes for livestock or wool. Their trade with other oasis settlements was limited. Their contact with any central government in Istanbul or Mecca was nearly non-­existent. Over the centuries their practice of Islam had incorporated many folk customs, such as worshiping saints and praying at graves. Imam Mohammed al-Saud died in 1765, and in such a backwater would have remained as obscure as the village that he ruled had he not met Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792).

Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab was something of an Arabian Martin Luther with a touch of John Knox thrown in. He was charismatic, possessed significant political skills, and saw himself as a religious reformer. Some would say he was a fanatic; he was certainly fervent in his beliefs and today would be called a fundamentalist. Like all fundamentalists, Abd al-Wahhab accepted a literal interpretation of his holy book and, like Luther, wanted to rid his religion of practices for which he could find no basis in scripture. Among these practices were: sorcery, idol worship, sun worship, fortune-­telling, animism, the cult of ancestors, seeking intercession from saints, and even worshiping stones, tombs, and trees.³ Above all, he emphasized the unity of God (tawheed) and the avoidance of innovation (bid’a), by which he meant anything not found in the Quran or known to the Salaf, the pious ancestors of Islam’s first three generations from whom the term Salafi is derived.⁴

The descendants of Mohammed Abd al-Wahhab are known as the family of the Sheikh or the Al al-Sheikh. Their alliance with the Al Saud is deeply rooted in the teachings of a fourteenth-­century scholar Mohammed ibn Taymiyyah (1263–1328), who is the intellectual godfather of what is today known as the Wahhabi movement. Ibn Taymiyyah saw the lay rulers (ummara) and the religious scholars (ulama) as the two branches of an ideal Islamic government. The ruler was charged with providing security and enforcing Islamic, or sharia law, while the scholars were responsible for interpreting that law.⁵ There was no need for a legislative branch of government, since God’s eternal laws had already been revealed in the Quran.

In a Wahhabi state, religious scholars do not govern or wield executive authority, but they do control the legal system and furnish the principal check on absolute executive authority. They provide advice, consent, and legitimacy to a Muslim ruler who must govern according to God’s law as expressed through...