GET IN YOUR CAR AND DRIVE
SAʿD AL-FAQIH TOLD THE NEW YORK TIMES THAT, BEFORE THE October 14, 2003 demonstration, he “thought it was too early to call Saudis into the streets, that people needed their confidence built up to face the regime. . . . Since our culture is not one of demonstrations and vigils or opposing the government in a public manner, I never imagined they would appear in such numbers.”
Police crackdowns, however, were why people came out en masse, and for that reason, the police presence could not deter them from marching.
“For most of them, it was their first collective experience,” al-Faqih continued. “They had come only with Qurans in their hands and mats to kneel on, and they found themselves being treated very harshly. They are very angry about that. . . . Before October 14, even people who agreed with us thought we were talking about things that were impossible in Saudi Arabia, and they called me impractical and unrealistic. But now I am confident to say that the downfall of the regime is an inevitable result of what has started.”1
For Nawwaf, this was empty talk, and al-Faqih had “started from the end: a full-fledged demonstration.” The exiled activist had forgotten that, “in terms of preparation, we were all virgins.”
“The thing is,” Nawwaf said, “you can talk all you want about demonstrations, but nobody knows what they are. In a demonstration, you need a group; you need leaders to show the way; and somebody needs to give a speech, so the security forces understand what is going on. Because cops are Bedouins, they do not understand what the protesters want. ‘There are people fighting the government. They want to overthrow the government.’ That is all they understand. Well, no: protesters have claims; listen to what they are talking about.”
Nawwaf came from a sedentary background; he often expressed prejudice against Saudis with a nomadic ancestry. He thought the Bedouins who manned the security forces were both loyalist and unrefined and needed to be schooled by protesters.
“You know, that cop I met when I worked as a security guard?” Nawwaf said. “He told me he did not look down on the protesters. He was on their side. He told me, ‘Their message was strong; their message was powerful. These are things that can turn your head, they were convincing.’ So you need a plan with clear steps: one, two, three, four. . . . It would have been better to start at the beginning and tell them, ‘Guys, on that day, a month from now, get in your car and drive toward this avenue, at 9 pm.’ That is it. ‘Do not stop or congregate. Just drive there, that is all.’ In order to gradually get used to activism. It is only then that you organize gatherings. Little by little.”
“Get in your car and drive”: in a city of highways, driving is one way to escape police repression. Joyriders knew it: night after night, they organized high-octane automobile shows; they swerved cars, creating complex choreographies, to the applause of large crowds of followers; they regularly dodged the police, so much so that the police sometimes sought to learn from them to improve their own driving techniques.2 Joyriding, this car revolt, had been around since the 1970s, and continued unabated well into the 2010s. Police repression could be ducked, provided that one invested in speed and collective tactics.
The next demonstration al-Faqih organized was a clear failure. “They wanted to continue the protests,” Nawwaf said. “And there was the December 15, 2004 march, a few months ago: they called us to march and I came out, but marching was impossible. The security forces were well prepared.”
For this demonstration, nicknamed “the big drift”3 and organized in Riyadh, Jeddah, and a few other cities, the mobilization was uncertain. In Jeddah, the police shot at the crowd and killed at least one protester. In Tabuk and Haʾil, in the northwest of the kingdom, processions marched through town without major incident. In Riyadh, the riot police locked down the city in advance.
“People came from various regions,” Nawwaf said. “The day before the December march, all the cheap hotels were full. The police set up checkpoints on the highways. If they saw a group of men in a car, they would stop them from getting to Riyadh. A guy alone in his car was fine. But a bunch of guys would get arrested. And even if they passed the checkpoint, they could not get where they wanted to go. So nothing happened in the end, because the security forces were well prepared.
“I tried to join the movement. . . . The beginning of the demonstration was set for after the midday prayer, at 1 pm. I drove off, but the avenues were totally empty. There were very few cars, and the situation looked normal. But I followed the movement on the radio. There was a demonstration in Jeddah, some action. The fact that the security forces were prepared tells you that the government does not trust the people at all. . . . We always hear that the government is fostering people’s allegiance. . . . How many newspapers do they own? How many TV channels? They spend so much on communication, and you, with only one march, you manage to create a demonstration of cops. They do not trust the people, do they?”
The fact that he had publicized his demonstration projects meant that Saʿd al-Faqih was sending his troops into a predictable defeat. Joyriders were usually more astute and avoided the Internet: they generally organized through text messages and phone calls. Unlike al-Faqih, they stayed away from public platforms and used surprise as a weapon. Political activists could definitely have learned from joyriding: on this and other things, they were lacking in strategic acumen.
So that I might better understand the relationship between activism and repression, Nawwaf recommended that I meet with Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah, who had been central to the 1990s protest movement. In 1991, Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah was a recent college graduate. During the mobilization against Saudi participation in the Gulf War, he noted that a majority of activists refused to protest if they did not get a green light from state clerics. But this was something that could not happen, because state clerics, by definition, supported the existing order and, like Sheikh Salih al-Luhaydan, called any form of protest “deviant.”
Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah was eager to convince his fellow activists. He spent months researching what he called the jurisprudence of demonstrations:4 what jurists had said about protest action. He found only five occurrences of demonstrations in the corpus. He had come to the conclusion that, because state clerics had eradicated the very idea of peaceful protest, his fellow activists were torn between submission to the state and violent revolt: they had no notion of what a pacific opposition could look like, but they improvised and protested until 1993, when the state eventually cracked down. Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah himself was arrested and spent five years in a prison cell.
Nawwaf could name dozens of activists who had either been killed or landed in prison. During my field research, I came to realize that almost everybody I knew had at least one friend or relative who was jailed or had been disappeared for political reasons. Many jailed activists were tortured. Some were compelled to repent publicly. A few received sentence reductions if they agreed to collaborate with the security services. The interior minister himself had summoned senior activists to negotiate their liberation in exchange for their allegiance. Some joined the circles of power, while others refused and stayed in prison much longer.
“I am always amazed at those who repent,” Nawwaf said. “I find it bizarre. I think tenacity is part of victory. Victory does not mean reaching a particular goal. Only a minority will hold fast and will stick to their principles. For instance, Muhsin al-ʿAwaji had a very strong stance; why did he turn his coat?”
Muhsin al-ʿAwaji, who was born in 1961, was an agricultural science graduate who became, along with Saʿd al-Faqih and Sheikh Salman al-ʿOuda, a leader of the 1991–1994 mobilization against the monarchy. Arrested in 1994, he was tortured in prison and freed in the late 1990s. He was arrested and let go a few times in the 2000s and 2010s.
“Some people have no patience,” Nawwaf said. “Not like Sheikh Saʿid bin Zuʿayr, who perhaps committed a few mistakes, but pleased people through his tenacity.”
Born in 1950, Saʿid bin Zuʿayr was a university professor who also signed the 1991–1992 petitions to the king. Arrested in 1994, he was freed in 2003, then thrown into prison several times more. Activists considered him one of the oldest political prisoners in the country. In the early 1990s, Talal Asad compared one of bin Zuʿayr’s taped lectures, “Religion Is Integrity,”5 to Immanuel Kant’s writings on the public usage of reason. Kant viewed political criticism as a right patiently acquired by a few philosophers, against states that had become powerful thanks to absolutism and centralization. This right to criticize did not include a right to disobey: as Jeremy Bentham put it, a good citizen had “to obey punctually; to censure freely.”6 The liberal political tradition was based in part on a refusal of civil disobedience.
Saʿid bin Zuʿayr, by contrast, saw political criticism as a duty—and not only a right—incumbent on all believers who witness mistakes, oppression, or injustices. He and other Islamic Awakening activists revived the tradition of gently advising rulers for their own good, of offering moral and political advice.7 Depending on the political situation, this advice could range from supplication through public criticism to direct action, as shown by a famous saying of the Prophet: “Whosoever of you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand; and if he is unable to do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with his heart—and that is the weakest expression of faith.”8
“After nine years in the shadows, bin Zuʿayr refused to sign any repentance,” Nawwaf said. “He swore and said, ‘I will not lay a drop of ink on your paperwork.’ They had just asked him to sign. ‘I was jailed without a reason, this is an insult to human dignity.’ His parents even met with the interior minister, Prince Nayef. ‘Just tell us why he was jailed,’ they asked him. ‘Why nine years? Tell us why.’ And the prince responded, ‘If he signs, he gets out.’”
“What a mark of intransigence,” I said.
“Yes. You will find many marks of intransigence and toughness today.”
Nawwaf stood silent for a short while, then looked at me with anger.
“Did you think he would live a peaceful life? You, before you go to sleep, the security services inspect your bed before you lie in it. Are you happy like this? Before you sit on a chair, you fear there might be something under it. What intransigence? What toughness are you talking about?”
Nawwaf now seemed beside himself.
“This is not cool. You’ve heard of ʿOmar bin Khattab? He slept under a tree. . . .”
ʿOmar bin Khattab, the second caliph of Islam, had such trust in the justice of his estate that he was known to nap under a tree without a single guard in sight.
“Do you know anybody who would do that?” Nawwaf asked. “Checkpoints and arrests do not create any security.”
He pointed to a penholder on my desk.
“That penholder, there, because of checkpoints, can become a bomb.”
State violence shaped the public sphere and conditioned activism in ways that I was only starting to understand. Nawwaf had protested outside an international conference on human rights held by the interior minister, who ran the very institution that disappeared activists and imprisoned dissidents. Saudi repression was a liberal enterprise that painted its enemies with a wide brush and claimed they were “radicals,”9 “extremists,”10 enemies of reason and of moderation.
But to many of my interlocutors, including Nawwaf, repression and liberalism were not two opposites but one and the same thing. It was for liberal reasons that the Saudi state cracked down on all manner of political activity: Al Saʿud and its allies systematically labeled activists as extremists or terrorists. It was for liberal reasons that the United States and its allies had invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, for liberal reasons that the European Union and the United States were aiding some of the most repressive regimes on earth. Liberal repression and repressive liberalism were Saudi activists’ daily reality, which triggered both their rage and their apathy.
Repression was not only a police operation but also an intellectual project. Beyond the activist’s body, the Saudi state targeted the hearts and minds of the general population. ʿAdel was an Islamic activist I befriended early in my fieldwork. Younger than Nawwaf, he was a college student and belonged to two different Islamic groups: one, more radical, that he had joined while in high school and the other, more political, that he found at the university. But he had a complex relationship with the Islamic Awakening.
“I was one of its victims,” he joked when I interviewed him. “But it was really very helpful, really very, very helpful. And I guess that, had I not gone with them, I wouldn’t have become the ʿAdel you know today, even if I disagree with many of their ideas. . . . I would have become very dull; I would be up for anything and nothing. . . . If I had not gone with them, I would not have any goal.”
The Islamic movements awakened him to himself and gave him the practical and intellectual means to act in his everyday life. But he still liked to describe himself as an observer, even though, like Nawwaf, he had joined Saʿd al-Faqih’s failed December 2004 demonstration. When he saw the overwhelming police presence that day, he recoiled in fear. He summed up the situation later by saying, “Glory to God, Saʿd al-Faqih succeeded in organizing a cops’ demonstration.”
To ʿAdel, police repression was not sui generis, but it originated in an intellectual repression of sorts, which to him was the work of secularists, a visible lobby in Saudi politics in the mid-2000s.
“They are old,” ʿAdel said of them. “Poor guys, they might still have young bodies, but they have old minds. This is what happened to a lot of people among us, especially the elderly. As for the young . . . there is an awakening of the youth. There is new awareness. But for the elderly, there is no hope they might be convinced by new ideas. . . . Most fathers, when their sons talk to them—and these are sons who studied, who understand, whereas their fathers, in most cases, have not studied beyond primary school and are peasants—when their sons come to them and say, ‘Dad, I studied agronomy, and you ought to do this and that; I know this is none of my business, but you would be better off doing it this way,’ most fathers will respond, ‘What do you know? Yesterday we were bottle-feeding you, and today you want to teach us life?’”
In ʿAdel’s mind, secularists were an older generation, those who held on to positions of power and looked up to the state to protect them from Islamic activists, who were younger in mind and spirit.
“In high school my Islamic group held a literary competition. You had to write a poem or a short story, and I won the first prize for short stories. . . . My short story was about the newspaper Al-Riyad. We considered all newspapers to be secularist, and we had declared a war on that one in particular. My short story was called, ‘The Wolf’s Teeth. . . .’ It is the story of a man who goes to work in the morning, a large grin across his face. He gets in his car and drives to the newspaper headquarters, where he works from morning to night. Two hours before the end of the workday, somebody phones him and wants to publish an opinion piece; he agrees. Then somebody else comes to his office and wants to publish another opinion piece, a very different one, which I thought was on the right side. But the journalist refuses to publish it. The editor in chief then comes in, and what is amazing is that he and the journalist have exactly the same smile, an immovable rictus, the same, from morning to night. The editor in chief tells him that the meeting has begun, and they all convene in a meeting room, where everybody has the same large grin. After they all sit down, the editor in chief removes his mask, and they all do the same. That is when you see their wolf’s teeth.”
ʿAdel laughed. He found his old high school self slightly embarrassing, at least compared to the ʿAdel he had become after going to college. He had become a religious activist by opposing secularists. His Islamic group leader in high school tried to steer him away from unilateral thinking, but ʿAdel was too enraged at the power of secularism to take heed of the advice.
“Most tapes I listened to were Islamic,” he said. “By Sheikh Muhammad al-Munajjid, for instance, or Salman al-ʿOuda, Nasir al-ʿOmar. . . . Of course, I listened to their tapes when they were in prison . . . because what is forbidden is desirable. They said these had been banned, so I thought they would be special, and I wanted to know why they were banned. These tapes were useful; they are full of good things. Especially Salman al-ʿOuda’s tapes, for instance ‘The King of Clerics, al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam,’11 which was a revolutionary speech of the first order.”
Al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam was a thirteenth-century cleric who had publicly condemned injustice and criticized the Mameluke rulers of Syria and Egypt. “They say he was a seller of kings, and he actually sold princes, he sold them in the market, he auctioned them,” ʿAdel said.
The Mamelukes were slave soldiers who had become members of a ruling caste. When he was chief judge in Egypt, al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam refused to swear allegiance to the new sultan, Baybars, who was not only a slave but also the slave of a former slave. Al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam thought he could give these aristocrats a taste of their own medicine and treat them like the slaves they still (legally) were.12 Al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam published a legal opinion saying the Mameluke princes had to be removed from public office and should be auctioned off in the marketplace.13 Sheikh Salman al-ʿOuda used the story of the “seller of kings” as a model of political virtue and public criticism after the 1990 Gulf War. It did not seem to matter that Saudi princes were not slaves, but actually owned the country that was named after them.
“The Mamelukes thought Islam could be their slave,” ʿAdel said, “but they ended up selling themselves. Thanks to his religious authority, al-ʿIzz bin ʿAbd al-Salam was able to rule over politics.”
Secularists and princes were the new Mamelukes that Islamic activists had the mission to dethrone. “Islamic” in this case meant not only adhering to a set of rules and dogmas but also being able to speak truth to power and act in the face of political danger. Islamic action was a way for activists to affirm their own agency within a political and social context that they thought needed an intervention.
A police operation and an intellectual project, repression was also a spatial setting and the outcome of decades of expertise, urban planning, and infrastructural investments. As Nawwaf and ʿAdel understood when they came out to demonstrate, the space of Saudi cities, crisscrossed with oversized highways and burdened with long, low-density residential blocks and wide, sun-drenched avenues, was not conducive to public gatherings. Riyadh is not a city of squares, streets, or street corners. It is a city of walls and highways,14 of palisades and overpasses, gated communities, interchanges, fortified enclaves,15 and tunnels. In its older neighborhoods, streets, street corners, and squares died long ago because of car traffic and the proliferation of such indoor spaces as shopping malls and office buildings. Riyadh is a realization of Le Corbusier’s somber prophecy of the “Death of the Street.”16
The Islamic Awakening relied on the transportation infrastructure to shake up the dead public spaces of Riyadh. The organization of the Islamic movements was evidence of the centrality of space in the minds of activists. In Egypt, the smallest unit in the Muslim Brotherhood was the family,17 which was supposed to be the ferment of the future society that the Brothers were creating. In Saudi Arabia, there were also families in the Muslim Brotherhood: they were groups of ten to twenty people who regularly met under the guidance of a supervisor.18 But the smallest unit of any Islamic group was the car.19
Each Islamic family, in a very suburban manner, was divided into a number of cars. Each car was composed of four activists and one supervisor-driver, generally older and slightly higher up in the organization. Cities were spread out and cars were therefore crucial to activist groups. Quran memorization circles were few and far between, and older students with cars—often college students—were needed to ferry the rank and file, who were generally high school students. As for the Islamic groups in schools, they tapped into a pool of students who were already on site, but they still needed cars for weekend activities and other trips. The car war the basic, moving cell of the Islamic Awakening.
For Islamic activists, cars were not mere vehicles, and mobility was much more complex than a simple translation in space. “A car”—the metonym for “a car group”—stuck together. Its occupants held “car activities” to fill their commute time: they listened to sermons, read texts, or organized small competitions. “A car” went out to dinner or to the desert as a car: four activists and their supervisor-driver. Cars could be accused of individualizing mobility and society, of separating people into distinct, quasi-private spheres, hermetic extensions of their bodies; but activists turned these atomizing tools into bonding devices.
“We have that saying, that car activities are the most important activities,” a twenty-year-old Muslim Brother told me. “They are the most important because a Quran memorization circle is a vast, composite thing, with many moving pieces: individuals, families, cars. . . . When you count everybody, you may find yourself among forty people. So when you sit in a circle for a lecture, for instance, the amount of benefit will not be that great. It is not like car meetings, where four people debate and invite each other to religion. That is how you maximize profit. . . . The subdivision of Islamic groups into families and cars is very useful from an educational perspective.”
Just as Islamic Awakening leaders often talked of youth as a resource or an energy to harness, so their flock talked of the Awakening as a good investment of their time. ʿAdel had acquired self-respect and goals in the Islamic movement; this young Muslim Brother thought car activities were the most beneficial because of the intimate connection among their members. Cars were also instrumental to internal promotion within the Islamic groups. Ordinary members usually ascended to their first supervising position when they went to college and bought a car: they could then become “university students” in charge of a car, the first step toward becoming group supervisors. The hierarchy of the Islamic movement was predicated upon the ability to drive through suburbia and to bring together individuals who lived scattered across vast expanses of land.
It is perhaps not a coincidence that the Islamic Awakening emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, during the very time when Saudi cities spread out in all directions and turned into massive, car-based suburbs. To understand this transformation and the functioning of Saudi spatial politics, we need to go back to the founding of the state and to examine the complex relationships between activism, repression, and urban planning.