Chapter 3

HOW CAN THE STATE TORTURE CLERICS?

UNLIKE OTHER ACTIVISTS, NAWWAF HAD NEVER BEEN A REGULAR member of an Islamic group, yet his socialization took place in the context of the Awakening. How did he become politicized in the larger environment created by the Islamic movements?

Nawwaf was a white-collar employee in his mid-twenties when I interviewed him. Neither tall nor short, he was handsome yet unremarkable. His white robes were spotless and ordinary. He did not wrap his checkered headdress in any particular fashion. He simply folded its right extremity on his left shoulder, which gave him a no-nonsense, down-to-earth air. He drove a secondhand Lexus, which compounded this first impression: he knew material things were of little worth and refused to pay a steep price for them. His job was perhaps the least ordinary thing about him: most employed Saudis worked in the public sector, but Nawwaf worked for a private company, which was both a more demanding and a less rewarding career path. (Private companies usually paid less than the state.)

Because of his limited means and the housing crisis in Riyadh, Nawwaf still lived with his parents, whose “love and support for the government” he no longer shared. His father was a blue-collar employee who had recently retired from the Ministry of Education. Nawwaf knew his father was “not educated,” just like his mother, a homemaker who had brought up three sons and two daughters. Nawwaf was the last child, “the last thing,” as he said, and his ideas started diverging from theirs when he was in middle school, “to the point that I stopped asking my dad for money.” Nawwaf was slowly becoming his own man.

His teenage years were a time when state clerics considered satellite television sinful, but he bought a satellite dish and brought it home. His parents and brothers tried to stop him, arguing that religion was threatened and that a dish on one’s roof was a mark of shame. Shareʿ ʾIblis, the Devil’s Alley: this is how Riyadh residents had renamed the stretch of the Sulaymaniyya street where one could buy satellite dishes. Nawwaf did not budge, and his relatives stopped resisting his purchase.

The Gulf War broke out when Nawwaf was in middle school. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Kuwait. The Saudi royal family, convinced by the U.S. vice-president, Dick Cheney, that Saudi Arabia was next, allowed a coalition of Western militaries to use the Saudi territory as a launch pad for their war on Iraq. From 1991 to 1994, a group of intellectuals, clerics, preachers, professors, doctors, judges, and civil servants publicly criticized Al Saʿud for calling on Westerners for military help after they had spent billions of dollars on U.S., British, and French weaponry. Where had all that money gone, they asked, if the country was now unable to defend itself? Other grievances followed. The newly formed opposition was linked to the wider Islamic Awakening movement. Its leaders demanded wide-ranging reforms, including the creation of a parliament, the independence of the judiciary, and the protection of basic rights. They also wanted an end to the special relationship between Saudi Arabia and the United States, which had resulted in more repression and fewer freedoms.

Sheikhs, professors, doctors, judges, engineers, and students signed petitions and organized demonstrations and sit-ins. But there was no legal way to institutionalize the protest movement, and hundreds of activists and religious sheikhs were arrested. High-profile arrests became occasions for more protests, especially in the Qassim region, northwest of Riyadh, where the city of Burayda witnessed what has since become known as the “Burayda Intifada,” led in particular by the sheikhs Salman al-ʿOuda and Safar al-Hawali, two prominent Awakening activists who were arrested in 1994.1

“It deeply shocked me: these are sheikhs,” Nawwaf said. “Sheikhs here are dignified, and people respect them. Especially the state, which says all the time, ‘We respect clerics.’ They have a privileged status. Why, those are clerics. How can the state throw them in jail and torture them?”

Nawwaf’s father and uncles, despite their religious feelings, however, were unfazed. “Old people looked at these activists and said, ‘These people studied in the West and were influenced by the West; they are secularists who came back here carrying Western ideas and Western influence.’”

For more traditional Saudis, asking for the independence of religious institutions marked you as a secularist and a Westernized spirit, even if you were a sheikh or a cleric yourself. The Islamic Awakening was so deviant a phenomenon that it had to stem from the West.

“Old people are not educated,” Nawwaf said. “Westerners often believe that our elders are venerable sages. Let me tell you: those in their fifties, sixties, or seventies, when they were young, they used to work really hard, they worked tough jobs, in construction. . . . They worked from sunrise to sundown and then went home to sleep. And again, from morning to night, to earn a crust. And then the oil era began, they became civil servants, they got money and new houses. They thought these things were gifts from the government. They thought they had to be thankful. That is how they see their lives: I had to toil, and then I could rest. Life was tough, and then it became easy. When some old guy buys a car with his own money, he ends up curtsying to the royal family. He thanks them for the car, even though he bought it.

“So Saʿd al-Faqih and the other Islamist exiles, those who criticized them used to say, ‘The government paid for your education. It paid for your U.S. or English or German PhDs. How dare you not be grateful?’ That is what the media and the elders said, as if that money was the private property of the prince. As if, when the state gives you money, it is out of the goodness of the princes’ hearts, and not out of duty.

“Look, in our society, the elders love the government. Those who come after them, much less so. Many even started hating the government. And the third generation has inherited something from this second generation. Today, people my age or younger love to insult the government. It is something we have inherited. Do not pay attention to what the media say: the revolt will not calm down. It will not vanish.

“Why do you think I liked to read the pamphlets of the opposition? Because they were banned. Why did I like to listen to BBC Arabic? Because it was banned. There was no other alternative. . . . I joined Islamic groups in school for a very short period of time because of what they were offering: they had desert trips, excursions, activities. Then I left them. I also joined a Quran memorization circle at the mosque; I stayed about a month and did not continue. I did not really adhere to Islamic groups. I do not think they are actual organizations.”

Nawwaf was a free spirit who had been moved by the Awakening’s protest movement of the early 1990s and shocked to see its sheikhs and leaders arrested, one after the other. He came of age politically during the repressive 1990s, when the main Awakening activists were behind bars and the movements they had fostered were being cracked down on. But Awakening groups were not the only spaces of debate. Suburban homes featured semi-public spaces, and this is where Nawwaf experienced his first political disappointments. A typical middle-class house was made up of a semi-public and a private zone. The courtyard, behind a gate frequently left open, often featured a fireplace2 or an annex³ that were the house’s most public spaces, where the household head received his friends, colleagues, and neighbors and could hold any conversation he saw fit. Inside the house, the men’s sitting room⁴ and a restroom were semi-public as well and could also be used for public or familial functions.

As a teenager, Nawwaf often sat in his parents’ sitting room among “people older than myself, people who know better, from my family, from the neighborhood, friends. And I often found their conversations naïve and disappointing. I did not like to sit around people who talk about music, culture, soccer, mundane topics. I preferred to chat about politics and political legitimacy.” He started to listen to Radio Reform and developed his political consciousness by listening to the exiled Awakening activist Saʿd al-Faqih. Nawwaf himself was not an Awakening activist, but he had grown up, intellectually and politically, in the large shadow cast by the Awakening movement.

The Islamic Awakening relied on three main structures, two of which operated year-round, while the third was seasonal. Islamic awareness groups⁵ in middle and high schools and Quran memorization circles⁶ in mosques were the permanent structures, organized by teachers and college students. Summer camps⁷ were seasonal activities offered by several institutions during summer holidays.

The problem faced by the Islamic Awakening was how to rally in punishing circumstances. Political indifference might have helped Nawwaf mobilize; but the Islamic Awakening sought to fight the very apathy and powerlessness that Nawwaf and others so eloquently described. Islamic awareness groups were typically started by middle and high school teachers and offered extracurricular activities, from sports to theater and from camping to religious culture. The Arabic word for awareness8 literally meant “conscientization,” and activists called on students not only to embody religious tenets in their daily lives but also to become political actors and fight social and political evils.

Their counterparts in local mosques were Quran memorization circles. Quran memorization was encouraged by the state and could pass as an innocuous activity—yet it was crucial to the Islamic Awakening. Islamic awareness groups in schools attracted a broader constituency and they were not as noble, in the activists’ eyes, as Quranic circles. Because they emerged in the shadow of two state institutions, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, however, Islamic awareness groups and Quranic circles were at constant risk of being choked.

The Islamic Awakening was the result of a myriad of individual and small-scale endeavors to re-enchant public life. Everyday practices were key to the movement: going to school, joining small study circles, picnicking in the desert, and hanging out with friends all became politicized practices as young activists turned them into weapons against police and intellectual repression.⁹

After the Islamic Awakening supported the protests of the early 1990s, the Ministry of Education tried to rein in Islamic activities. Mosques were no longer able to be the open spaces they had been in the 1960s and 1970s. The Islamic challenge prompted the security services to tighten their grip: the Interior Ministry planted informers among worshippers, and the mosques were now closed between prayers lest they serve as recruiting and organizing grounds.¹⁰ In response, Islamic activists became even more secretive.

“Nobody broadcasts that he is working in this field,” a local Awakening organizer said to me. “The only thing that is visible to society is the activities: mosque circles and school activities.” Of course, the security services knew what was going on inside the Islamic movements, more or less, and secrecy was no longer a way to protect oneself. It had become more cultural than functional. “The state knows about these movements in detail,” the organizer continued, “but society does not know a lot. . . . The state does not officially acknowledge the existence of organizations within Saudi Arabia, but it lets them work. . . . The state does not want these organizations to go public, and within the movement there is an unwritten understanding that going public would scare away society.”

There was an implicit contract between Islamic movements and the state, in other words, whereby activists were complicit in their own silencing. As long as they behaved as if their organizations did not exist, the state kept its distance, allowing members of society to be recruited and join without fear. Repression struck when activists went public and announced the creation of political institutions, as happened in the 1990s with the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights and again in the late 2000s with the Association for Political and Civil Rights. Both organizations were shut down and their members imprisoned.11

As a result of this secrecy, students who joined mosque or school activities were not necessarily aware of their connection to a particular Islamic organization, whether it be the Muslim Brothers or the Salafis. “You are aware from the get-go that you are engaged in some action, but you cannot clearly picture it in your mind,” the organizer said. “You intuitively know that you are in the midst of a huge group, engaged in one action, behind one leadership. You feel it when you are with the youth, because you are in the same summer camps and you see the same activities in various youth groups and in different mosques.”

It was only later, after they had become more intimate with the movement, that new members would understand that they were part of a given organization. This realization typically took place during a formal rite called “revelation.”¹² “After you stay with a certain group for a while,” the organizer said, “they pick some of the members, and they take them to more private sessions, with intellectual debates, books, readings. . . . They tell them, ‘We are such and such a group; we have an organization and a history.’ They tell them what the other groups are.”

Because of this careful organization, the Islamic Awakening was very fragmented. The notion of an organization does not really describe what was going on within the Awakening: it was more a movement of movements than any kind of top-down, hierarchical structure. The Awakening lacked stable leaders, a known ideology, a defined program, or regular slogans.¹³

Despite this fragmentation, activists often distinguished between two main trends within the Islamic Awakening: the Muslim Brothers and the Salafis. Since the 1950s, the Muslim Brothers had formed several organizations in the country and had mobilized youth within the Ministries of Education and of Islamic affairs, where many of them worked. Salafis had a reputation for being stricter. They were often more interested in understanding the scriptures than in engaging in social and political action.

“Salafism is an intellectual methodology before being a movement,” the organizer said, “whereas the Muslim Brothers are a movement before being a way of looking at the texts.”

Saudi Salafi activists emerged in and around the Islamic universities that Al Saʿud created beginning in the 1950s. The term “Salafism” came from the word “ancestors,” al-salaf: those contemporaries of the Prophet who had a living memory of his actions and sayings. Their consensus was the basis of Sunni Islam and the bottom line to which they aspired. Salafis were characterized by their insistence on scholarship; Salafism, as already noted, was therefore an academic milieu before being a social movement.14

The Muslim Brotherhood also emerged in universities and schools starting in the 1950s, but its members thought of it as a social reform movement, not primarily as an academic enterprise. Prominent Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi Muslim Brothers had taken refuge in Saudi Arabia from the repression that struck their movements in the 1950s and 1960s. The Egyptian activist Mannaʿ al-Qattan was one of the first Egyptian Muslim Brothers to arrive in Saudi Arabia in 1953; he started teaching at the capital’s Sharia College and later became the dean of the new Islamic University of Riyadh. Foreign-born Muslim Brothers were closer to the circles of power. It was they who convinced King Saʿud to create the World Islamic League in 1962. In the 1960s, they advised King Faysal on his Islamic policies, including the creation of the Islamic Development Bank in 1975 and, from the 1970s onward, the publication of religious curricula. Muhammad Mahmud al-Sawwaf, a prominent Iraqi Muslim Brother, became King Faysal’s adviser and his informal ambassador to African nations.¹⁵

“Today, you cannot find anywhere a single copy of Sayyid Qutb’s In the Shade of the Quran,” the local organizer said. “At the time of Faysal, they were given away for free.”

The Saudi Muslim Brotherhood was not a centralized institution but rather a loose network of movements with a strong regional base. There were at least three main Brotherhoods in the country: the Hijazi Muslim Brothers; the Najdi Muslim Brothers, based around Riyadh; and the Zubayr Muslim Brothers, based in the Eastern Province and in Riyadh and named after the Iraqi town of Zubayr, where many Najdi families had emigrated before the discovery of oil. These three movements were divided, in turn, into sub-movements and branches.

“The nature of the Muslim Brothers’ thought does not require an organizational link between the different groups and the mother ship,” the organizer said. “It is a thought that allows you to work even if you are all alone. It is a decentralized thought.”

“Ideas do not play a role” in mobilization, he continued. Since Islamic movements had to remain secret, they did not attract recruits through political exposés or ideological programs, but through the activities they organized.

“Teachers come to class,” he said, “and advertise for their activities and their group. I remember joining because, in my first year of high school, a teacher came who represented the Muslim Brothers of Zubayr and said, ‘We have activities, theater, and we go out every other weekend to play soccer.’ I worshipped soccer at the time, and I did not know where to play. I talked to other students and we joined. I went there for soccer.”

Fun played an important role in the Islamic movement; it was by offering entertainment and sports that Muslim Brothers and Salafis attracted new members. Because of this lack of a defined ideology, the difference between Muslim Brother and Salafi networks had more to do in the end with personalities and historical circumstances than with ideas. The line between the two movements was often blurred.

“In the end, the logic of the Brothers, when they look at Islamic texts, is Salafi,” the local organizer said. “From this perspective, the Brothers are Salafi. And they say of themselves, ‘We are a Salafi group, we belong to the Salafi mission.’”

Salafis were often seen as being more indigenous to the Saudi context, even though they also were the product of complex international migrations; Muslim Brothers on the other hand were often seen as a foreign implant, even though by the 1980s they were fully indigenized. Salafis borrowed from the Muslim Brothers their notions of organization and the very idea of a political movement. And to recruit Saudi members, the first Muslim Brothers who set foot in the country showed allegiance to Salafi methods.16

The Muslim Brothers’ interest in Salafism was not only tactical. After the repression of the 1990s, many Muslim Brothers found it safer to focus on the study of religion, keeping their distance from public preaching and social action. This also allowed them to expand further and become a truly hegemonic movement.

Islamic Awakening intellectuals had thought a lot about the difficulties of organizing in Saudi Arabia. Muhammad al-Duwish, born in 1963 in Central Arabia, taught at the Islamic University of Riyadh’s college of education and supervised a network of Islamic awareness groups in the city’s high schools and colleges.¹⁷ I attended a lecture he gave on “Social Institutions and Youth.” Right before the event, eight middle school and high school students demonstrated a few tae kwon do forms under the watchful eye of their instructor. I was seated near a Syrian-Saudi man and his teenage son, who was a member of his high school’s Islamic awareness group. The atmosphere was relaxed: there were green coffee, red tea, and cookies on a table, and children were quietly playing in the back of the room.

“Why talk about social institutions?” al-Duwish asked his audience. “Because the Islamic world suffers from an excess of individualism. Institutions do not work well. At the state level, for instance, power is personalized. There is no continuity in government. . . . Even the institutions of preaching are limited, and when they succeed, this success is due to individuals. Our society is governed by individualism. Even in families, it is an individual, the father, who governs all the other individuals.”

Al Saʿud had fought communal mechanisms and embraced a divide-and-rule strategy. Authoritarianism, to al-Duwish, was an extreme form of individualism.

“We lack a culture of collective action,” he said, “even though many Islamic sayings stress the importance of the community. To be religiously valid, for instance, prayer has to be collective; the same goes for fasting. Legislation is also a group endeavor that has to be carried out by the community of believers, even when the ruler is unjust or ignorant. The Prophet compared Muslims to a unified body: people often read this saying superficially and say that, if a problem arises, the Prophet simply asked us to stick together. This is a superficial understanding: sacred texts are deeper than that.”

Contrary to what state clerics said, citizens did not have to obey their rulers, especially if these were unjust or oppressive. Against the consensus of establishment clerics, al-Duwish also considered legislation to be a collective endeavor.

“Collective action is the foundation of the community of believers,” he went on. “It is also the type of action that works best when applied to life, from the economy to preaching. Youth, like laws, are everybody’s business. They bring an energy that we often mistake for a problem, but which is in reality a wonderful opportunity for the whole society. The young are ready for everything, they are energetic, malleable; let us not mistake their energy for a catastrophe, because we can really turn it into a chance.”

For al-Duwish, youth and the law would come to shape the future of society and needed to be managed collectively. Youth could be heaven and hell, resource and curse, energy and catastrophe. It was not a self-evident idea that youth was a specific period in the life of men and women, between childhood and adulthood, between the age of dependence and immaturity and the age of independence and maturity. That childhood and adulthood should be separate ages was not, either.18 And the notion that the law should be a collective matter was totally foreign to the Saudi context.

Al-Duwish was daring, but his audience was sparse and his barely veiled criticism of the personalization of power was met with silence. In front of him, middle-aged family men were attentively following his reasoning, nodding here and there. Al-Duwish presented his expertise as apolitical, as the informed opinion of an educator who held back from meddling in politics and was weary of generalizations. The day before, during another lecture, he had said that his “political interests” were “limited by [his] job as an educator.” In this lecture, too, political comments were coated in specialized, technical speech about education and management. These neutral topics allowed him to talk about politics, often in a trenchant tone, without shocking his audience.

It was often by appearing as detached and apolitical as possible that Islamic Awakening activists were able to talk about politics. Muhammad Nasir al-Din al-ʾAlbani, a Syrian cleric who had had an international career, between Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, used to put it this way: “The best politics is to leave politics behind.”¹⁹ This paradox exemplified the complex ways Islamic activists engaged with a locked-up political sphere. In the face of state repression, they had to cultivate indifference and apathy to reach another level of political consciousness. This was not calculated deception; it was the cultivation of an ethical (and political) attitude of detachment from the state and the political sphere. Political indifference (la mubala) was the paradoxical condition for autonomous politics.

Saudi Islamic activists started seeing youth as a resource in the 1960s, at a time when the progress of higher education had made references to the social sciences, in particular Egyptian and European sociology, more generally accessible. Islamic activists saw youth as teenage vitality and social resource. This idea had emerged during the late industrial revolution as a way to integrate young adults into the labor and consumer markets and into the budding European and Middle Eastern party systems and to enroll them in various wars.20 The generalization of waged labor in an era of high oil prices and public sector growth had also given birth to the idea of leisure, empty time that needed to be filled, occupied, exploited. Islamic Awakening activists wanted to seduce youth, to harvest their energy to reform society.

The Saudi state elites, meanwhile, were wary of the youth. They wished to enroll them in the economy and to keep them away from protest politics. But this official attention had the effect of politicizing youth: it transformed an age group into a site of political action. The Saudi state created the General Presidency for Youth Patronage²¹ in 1974, a year after the oil boom sent the Saudi economy into an upward spiral. The Presidency, which was renamed the General Sports Authority in 2016, organized collective sports and managed soccer clubs and public swimming pools. Since the 1979 occupation of Mecca’s Great Mosque, the Saudi state has been eager to control its youth and to provide them with carefully regimented leisure, under the benevolent patronage of the royal family. The Saudi elites did not hesitate to send the most energetic youth to Afghanistan. It is perhaps no coincidence that the notion of youth as both a resource and a curse took flight during a time of war, as Saudi Arabia was investing money and young men in the Afghan resistance against the Soviet Union.²² Crushing collective action and entertaining the youth were crucial to the survival of Al Saʿud. Boredom and the great passions it could give rise to were not to be tolerated.