From Sheikhs to Sultanism

Statecraft and Authority in Saudi Arabia and the UAE

Christopher M. Davidson

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781787383937
• eBook ISBN: 9781787387492
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Muhammad bin Salman Al-Saud and Muhammad bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, the respective princely strongmen of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have torn up the old rules. They have spurred game-changing economic master plans, presided over vast anti-corruption crackdowns, tackled entrenched religious forces, and overseen the mass arrest of critics. In parallel, they also appear to have replaced the old ‘sheikhly’ consensus systems of their predecessors with something more autocratic, more personalistic, and perhaps even analytically distinct.

These are the two wealthiest and most populous Gulf monarchies, and increasingly important global powers—Saudi Arabia is a G20 member, and the UAE will be the host of the World Expo in 2021–2022. Such sweeping changes to their statecraft and authority structures could well end up having a direct impact, for better or worse, on policies, economies and individual lives all around the world.

Christopher M. Davidson tests the hypothesis that Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now effectively contemporary or even ‘advanced’ sultanates, and situates these influential states within an international model of autocratic authoritarianism. Drawing on a range of primary sources, including new interviews and surveys, From Sheikhs to Sultanism puts forward an original, empirically grounded interpretation of the rise of both MBS and MBZ.

1

BUILDING A REGIME-TYPE FRAMEWORK

1.1 Scholarly Consensus: Lessons Learned

As a first step in trying to understand the nature and impact of the changes taking place in these two increasingly influential states, it seems important to consider what ‘type’ of regimes their rulers (or rather de facto rulers) now represent. Indeed, much of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates’ recent conduct—at home as well as abroad—has evidently already caused considerable conceptual confusion. After all, neither country appears to still conform to the behavioural patterns usually associated with the longstanding ‘Gulf monarchies’ grouping—a popular classification mostly based on the six states’ shared cultural, historical, and economic experiences, and perhaps best symbolized by their almost forty-year-old experiment in politico-economic union, the Gulf Cooperation Council (which emphasized in its founding charter the ‘ties of special relations, common characteristics, and similar systems founded on the creed of Islam’).¹

Nonetheless, despite such contemporary ambiguities the foundations do seem to exist on which to build a regime-type framework, with much of the area studies scholarship agreed on the kinds of political systems that had been developing in Saudi Arabia and the UAE prior to the emergence and consolidation of their current regimes. Until recently, for example, Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s statecraft and authority structures (alongside those of the other four Gulf monarchies) were mostly understood to have been derived from a mode of culturally rooted ‘sheikhly rule’. Under these polities, the government and finances of the state were effectively intertwined with the ruling or royal family, but with the tamimah (or ‘paramount’) sheikh almost always conferring with a wide range of advisors, relatives, merchants, and tribal allies.²

In Islamic terms, such ‘sheikhly rule’ was essentially governance according to the principles of Shura (‘consultation’)³ and reinforced by the Uli al-Amr (the ‘Verse of Obedience’), which calls on believers to not only obey Allah and the Prophet Muhammad but also ‘those in possession of authority among you’.⁴ Meanwhile, in the discourse of Western social sciences, it was often seen as something on a spectrum between ‘patrimonialism’ (in which governance is dominated by the ruler, his family, and his friends) and ‘neo-patrimonialism’ (in which modern-looking institutions and rules serve as a veneer for patrimonialism), though with a greater propensity towards consensus-building than usually found in other authoritarian regimes.⁵ Certainly, notwithstanding the often-substantial differences between the Gulf monarchies’ respective state formation processes (including varied degrees of religious influence and contrasting levels of British or US involvement), most scholarly works on their evolving political systems have tended to emphasize the same broad features and characteristics of such consultative-patrimonialism or consultative-neo-patrimonialism.⁶

In his essay on the region’s rulers in the nineteenth century, for instance, Peter Lienhardt not only described patrimonial-like structures, but also stressed how ruling sheikhs ‘held their power in order to do a job for the people…and were not there by any absolute right or by brute force’.⁷ Likewise, though Harold Dickson’s post-Second World War thesis on the Arabian Peninsula recognized the authoritarian tendencies of many sheikhs, it nonetheless portrayed them as ‘fathers to their people’ and acknowledged their general accessibility and reputations for keeping ‘open houses’.⁸ Later reflecting on the period, James Onley and Sulayman Khalaf’s anthropological study, ‘Sheikhly Authority in the Pre-Oil Gulf’, determined that rulers usually ‘included relatives who were potential rivals in their [court] and consulted them before taking major decisions’.⁹ Rosemarie Said Zahlan similarly conceded that the sheikhs may have had ‘in principle… absolute power’, but that in practice they operated alongside influential consultative councils made up of other family members and ‘social and religious notables’. As she described, these councils were ‘…according to the Islamic principle of Shura…the concept of Shura was essential to the administration of authority…most decisions of authority were obtained in that manner’.¹⁰

Writing amidst the massive oil booms of the 1970s, which were fuelling rapid economic development and necessitating more sophisticated governance, John Peterson observed the effective fusion between Dickson’s open house politics and the newly emerging, more neo-patrimonial structures. Noting how a ‘fundamental evolution in political authority’ had, at least in part, led to a ‘reliance on political institutions in the Western mould’, he then described how ‘Shura, the process of consultation with tribal or community notables… has been formally incorporated into most of the area’s governments through provisions for consultative or legislative assemblies’.¹¹ Also linking Shura to this nascent neo-patrimonialism, but within a more theological context, Gregory Gause later explained how ‘Islamic groups throughout the Gulf states point to the Quranic injunction that rulers practise consultation in governance to support their calls for representative institutions that can act as a check on the arbitrary power of the executive’.¹²

Building on Zahlan, Peterson, and Gause (and concurring with much of the earlier scholarship), Michael Herb’s 1999 study on dynastic power in the Gulf monarchies underscored how for many years, ‘Bedouin sheikhs had a pressing need to reach consensus…if a decision was to stick, it had to have wide agreement’. However, he also emphasized that the regimes of the day were still ultimately patrimonial, regardless of their consultative institutions, Islamic or otherwise. As he put it, ‘the ruling families do not interpret the Quranic injunction upon rulers to consult with their subjects to mean they should share authority in the actual making of decisions, which remains the prerogative of the rulers themselves’.¹³ Drawing the same sorts of conclusions as Herb (though slightly more upbeat in tone), in 2006 Giacomo Luciani contended that ‘the practice of the monarchies and emirates in the Gulf is very much consensual…very few decisions are made without extensive consultation’.¹⁴ Similarly connecting Islam to the process, he further noted how those Arab regimes that relied the most on religious legitimation (a category in which he included the Gulf monarchies) were invariably the most likely to engage in consultative practices.¹⁵

Most other works on the Gulf states, including those with a specific focus on contemporary Saudi and Emirati politics, have tended to paint much the same picture. On Saudi Arabia, for example, in 2006 David Long recognized how more modern, formal institutions may have enhanced the Saudi government’s capacity, but also contended that the concepts of Shura and ijma (‘consensus’) remained at the core of the system.¹⁶ Likewise, Luciani claimed that (apart from the firing of senior government officials or certain foreign policy initiatives) ‘all Saudi kings’ major decisions for the previous twenty-five years had sought consensus from other key figures, and beyond, even if the consultative process was always behind closed doors’.¹⁷ Since then, Mark C. Thompson has illustrated how Saudi Arabia’s ‘pre-existing culture of consultation and discussion...is used [by the leadership] to negotiate within its own constituency and at times others’.¹⁸ In much the same vein, Stig Stenslie has described in his 2011 volume how there was always a ‘majlis tradition’ (in this context referring to consultative councils) under King Abdullah bin Abul-Aziz Al-Saud’s reign at almost all levels of government, stretching down from the monarch himself to provincial governors and city mayors. As Stenslie observed, ‘at such meetings, various problems can be discussed…criticising the Saudi government’s policies is officially prohibited, but there is still certain room for expressing political viewpoints…such matters are often discussed as a way of gauging public opinion’.¹⁹

On the UAE, Fatma Al-Sayegh noted in her 2004 study how consultative mechanisms were still central to the country’s decision-making process, asserting that the UAE’s ‘tribal and traditional political culture helped ensure the success’ of new political institutions. She also described how ‘the political order [still] showed signs of willingness to bring others into the policymaking circle’, and how ‘the political elites developed these political structures, which kept abreast of social and political consensus at the local level’.²⁰ Since then, Frauke Heard-Bey has explained that there exists in the UAE a ‘system of mutual responsibility between the sheikh and his people’, and how under this traditional consensus-based system, ‘the authority…can be withdrawn if this leader’s performance is not up to expectation and he gradually or suddenly loses majority support’.²¹ Using a similar approach, Kristian Ulrichsen has emphasized in his 2016 monograph the continuing importance of such practices, especially in individual emirate-level politics, as well as acknowledging Shura’s overall role in the UAE’s history ²²

Often in tandem with such culturally informed discussions on their modes of ‘sheikhly rule’, Saudi Arabia and the UAE’s polities (alongside those of the other Gulf monarchies) have also been widely understood in terms of their so-called ‘rentier’ characteristics. This usually means their perceived ability to co-opt or appease citizens with hydrocarbon-financed social contracts or ‘ruling bargains’; predicated on cocktails of ‘customary privileges’, including generous subsidies, housing, welfare, and almost guaranteed public sector employment.²³ Certainly, in much of the literature focusing on the impact and influence of oil and gas exports on Gulf politics, ‘rentierism’ has frequently been central to scholarly frameworks. In recent years, it has even become a media-friendly shorthand descriptor for the sorts of wealth distribution strategies and dynamics usually associated with such states. In the Economist, for example, a 2018 cover feature on the history of the Gulf monarchies concluded they had long been ‘rentier states [that] provided cradle-to-grave benefits in return for obedience’,²⁴ while reports in the Financial Times, the Washington Post, and other such outlets have regularly made similar references.²⁵

Rentierism as a concept was first discussed by Karl Marx in the 1860s in the context of a decadent class that benefits from profit-income derived from renting out property rather than actually producing anything itself.²⁶ It was then expanded upon in the early twentieth century to include the notion of entire ‘rentier states’ that could supply loans to less developed nations and charge them interest.²⁷ However, most of the contemporary rentier-Gulf analysis derives from Hussein Mahdavy’s study, first published in 1970. Mahdavy had revised the definition of rentierism to specify those states that were in receipt of significant rent from ‘foreign individuals or concerns’, and had used Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi’s oil-rich Iran as a case study (thereby situating rentierism within the wider ‘resource curse’ literature).²⁸ He thus managed to demonstrate an explicit connection between hydrocarbon rents being paid by foreign companies to governments, and the subsequent formation of new rentier political systems and societies, complete with sizeable and acquiescent ‘rentier elite’ classes.²⁹ Building on Mahdavy’s work (and again drawing on Marx’s views on class formation and the idea of a ‘resource curse’), in 1982 Theda Skocpol then explored the relationship between ‘rentier absolutism’ and the new Islamic Republic of Iran,³⁰ and in 1987 Hazem Beblawi sought to apply much the same concept to the Arab world. Reaching similar concl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Building a Regime-Type Framework
• 2. Research Methods and Data Collection
• 3. Sultanism: State of the Art
• 4. Routes to Power: The Rise of MBS and MBZ
• 5. Establishing Control: Political Patronage Networks
• 6. Establishing Control: Economic Affairs
• 7. Establishing Control: Institutions, Media, and Security
• 8. Ideology and Religion: A Balancing Act
• 9. Advanced Sultanism: A Category Emerges
• 10. Advanced Sultanism: A Broader Debate
• Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover