THE GENIE WAS OUT OF THE BOTTLE
SHEIKH ʿABD AL-ILAH, THE CLERIC WHO IN 1991 HAD STUDIED the jurisprudence of demonstrations, was born into a religious family in the 1960s. He joined a Quran memorization circle when he was six. At that time, these circles were traditional institutions, “without any hint of Awakening,” he said. The sheikhs running them taught children to memorize the Quran, no more, no less.
The members of Juhayman’s group renamed the circles “libraries” in the 1970s to insist on the academic dimension of their religious experience. They gathered hadith collections and legal books in a room or a corner of the mosque. Their study circles became research groups exploring religious knowledge and legal resources and making them available to worshippers.
“Juhayman’s followers . . . used to meet in Riyadh in the Skirina neighborhood,” Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah told me when I interviewed him about his career in the Islamic Awakening. “Other neighborhoods got very excited about the idea, and many libraries emerged at that time. They were not centralized so as not to arouse suspicion, but they all belonged to specific cultural or religious coalitions.”
Mosque libraries aimed at religious revival and transnational Islamic solidarity and were linked to one another. But contrary to what their detractors said, the libraries did not come from Egypt and had not been imported to Saudi Arabia by the Muslim Brothers: they were a Saudi variation on a classical theme.
“We once had a library in Riyadh where state clerics would meet, near the house of the mufti,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “It was not the National Library—this one was created for the liberals—but the Religious Library. And it still exists today, within the House of Fatwas.1 It was where students in religion and the more political clerics would meet. They would talk about the removal of King Saʿud from power, about dissent within the royal family, etc. I imagine that the idea of the library developed either from there or from Skirina.”
King Faysal deposed his brother Saʿud in a palace coup in 1964, with the support of the chief clerics and of their Religious Library. Juhayman’s disciples democratized the exclusive institution of the library, which had shown its political power during the coup, by replicating it in many neighborhoods and opening it to commoners. This politicization was inconspicuous at first. Libraries tended to open in new mosques, built in the recent suburbs. Far away from city centers and state institutions, libraries were pioneering new spaces.
“Young activists started inviting me to events,” Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah said, talking about his high school years. “Around 1976, they also invited me to join a library . . . that had just been created in a nearby mosque. The mosque was brand new. A Quran memorization circle had opened there for a short period, then they had put up a sign saying ‘Library.’ That is where the young Islamic activists met in the late afternoon, and students would gather around them. They taught them the Quran and organized lectures. And these lectures were, obviously, about activist topics. They called for cooperation, mutual support, brotherhood; they taught you a culture of collective action. And they told you about the misfortunes of Muslims to exhort you to a common belonging and a shared adhesion.”
But ʿAbd al-Ilah’s father cut his visits to the library short.
“I stayed with them for Quran memorization, but I did not like to sit in the other meetings, because my father . . . did not want me to get in trouble. It was around the time when Juhayman started having problems with the state. There were confrontations between the state and activists. The elderly were anxious; they feared for their safety. People had just lived through King Faysal’s repression of nationalist and leftist movements. I went with the library only once. . . . And then my dad forbade me to join any activity outside of school. . . . Like all paternalist fathers, my dad was afraid of the issues arising with secret organizations”: denunciation, arrest, jail, and potentially torture. ʿAbd al-Ilah kept to himself after that, reading works of literature and philosophy. He was 16 when Juhayman and his group occupied the Great Mosque.
“Our professors warned us against dissent. . . . Two of my maternal uncles were thrown in prison at that time. One of them had given financial support to Juhayman’s group. He did not follow the news and did not really know what he was doing. He was politically far away from their positions, but he gathered donations and would send money to charitable causes. . . . My other uncle was inside the Great Mosque on the day they occupied it. He managed to escape but was accused of being one of them. They questioned him for a long time and he was not imprisoned, but put under house arrest.”
The designation of “library” faded away in the early 1980s because of its association with Juhayman al-ʿOtaybi, but the Quran memorization circles continued. Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah introduced me to other activists and I grew closer to one of them, Thamir, who taught religion in high school and had created an Islamic awareness group. Thamir told me why the name “library” was still used in some provinces of the country while it had fallen out of favor in others.
“In some regions, it became harder to call an Islamic group a ‘library’; it was too odd,” Thamir told me. “Why ‘library’? parents would ask. They did not accept this new term; it was too strange, too modern. As for those running the libraries . . . ‘Who are these guys?’ parents would say. ‘Two young men? Our kids go to school, who are these older guys who hang out with them all the time?’ So Islamic activists looked for more acceptable activities, and they found them in the Quran memorization circles, which had been around for a longer time. . . . Mobilizing students through the circles was not as suspect; nobody would question their goals or be worried to see them together.”
To survive repression after 1980, Islamic activists also had to join the state campaign against Juhayman’s influence.
“This was a period of sudden withdrawal,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “But what served some Islamic activists well, at that time, was their clear position against Juhayman. They were part of the movements that the state supported against revolutionary Salafism.
“The Muslim Brothers were very loyal to the state. Of course, twenty years later, we found out that there had been communication channels between the security services and some Muslim Brothers who lived abroad, which strengthened the alliance between them. . . . The state adopted the Islamic ideal and considerably bent its own modernizing course; it then managed to contain the Islamic wave, because it had become part of its own values. . . . Meanwhile, the politicization of the Islamic Awakening was postponed by about ten years. This confiscation of the Islamic Awakening prevented Islamic activists from openly declaring any negative position vis-à-vis the state.”
But Islamic activists kept organizing in mosque circles, schools, and universities. ʿAbd al-Ilah studied sharia in the early 1980s and kept his distance from what he called “a vociferating polarization” between various political groups. It is around that time that he stumbled on Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason at the university library and was “stunned by its immensity.” Despite his theoretical interests, he also kept his finger on the political pulse of the country.
“Students were simmering across the kingdom,” he said. “They were angry at the prodigious corruption that we were witnessing at the time. We would read booklets and pamphlets denouncing corruption and the illegitimate deals” between Al Saʿud and Western nations, in particular arms deals. “People were extremely angry. . . . We would talk to a number of sheikhs and ask them, ‘Why do we not do something? Why do we not speak up against corruption?’ But nobody could say anything; there was no way you could appear on the public scene. The media were repressed; any movement was shut down, especially when it came to politics. Those who had political aspirations could not move in any direction.
“Four or five years after Juhayman’s events, the climate got calmer at the Sharia College, and we witnessed new cultural phenomena, lectures, and clubs. The Janadriya Festival started around that time.”
The Janadriya Festival was launched in 1985 by the National Guard in a northern suburb of Riyadh to feature the openness of the regime while building a top-down national heritage out of scraps of traditions and historical shrapnel.2 The festival’s military origins did not prevent it from becoming a political scene of sorts; it is there that a culture war was waged, which Saudi activists and intellectuals nicknamed the “battle of modernity.”3
Two groups in particular fought each other at the festival: the “modernist youth” and the “Islamic youth.” Saudi modernists had become a literary trend in the 1960s. In the mid-1980s, unable to criticize the government directly, Islamic activists protested the link between the state and the modernists, while modernists pointed at the public funding of religious institutions. The “battle of modernity” was a turning point in ʿAbd al-Ilah’s career. “It marked my practical entry into the Islamic Awakening,” he said. What was true of ʿAbd al-Ilah was probably true for other students, too: the audience of the Islamic movement grew exponentially in the mid- to late 1980s.
Suburban Janadriya became a recruitment and training ground for the Islamic Awakening. Activists refined the art of the “oral intervention” at the festival. After public lectures, they would ask questions that snowballed into heated speeches while other activists heckled the lecturers. They perfected other modes of action as well.
“[We had] countless lectures, roundtables, and house meetings, to create a block, to gather ourselves, to cooperate, to set the clerics and the people in motion. Preachers gave sermons, they spoke out—they became activists. There were very brutal oral interventions during talks at Janadriya. . . . There were visits to the decision makers. Of course, this was a common practice at the time: petitions to the decision makers, petitions to state clerics to ask them to protect us during confrontations.”
Activists mobilized everyday resources, from the private space of the house to the public spaces of the mosque, the lecture hall, and the royal palace. Like Juhayman’s followers ten years before, they were also preparing themselves for later confrontations. In 1988, in an effort to put an end to the battle and avoid the attacks of Islamic activists, the Ministry of Information banned the word “modernity” from all written and broadcast media.4
“No modernist remained standing,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “Their social and media image was broken. Even their families were under fire. They were socially dead.”
But state elites punished Islamic activists, too. A popular religious sheikh, ʿAʾid al-Garni, was accused of pedophilia by a powerful prince and imprisoned. Al-Garni “had gained his popularity and his followers in the streets, with a group of young sheikhs whose popularity was growing at the time and that included Safar al-Hawali, Salman al-ʿOuda, etc., who competed with state clerics and were becoming religious figures,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. An “unbelievable social movement” came out in support of al-Garni. “Hundreds of people visited him. Clerics and students mobilized. They created powerful committees to conduct an inquiry and clear his name.”
The networks that Islamic activists had created at the Janadriya Festival were now directly pushing back against an Al Saʿud prince.
“This was a new battle, against the state this time, and no longer against modernist intellectuals,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “People held meetings and created coalitions; there were many sessions with the sheikhs to discuss the issue and mobilize hundreds of participants. The idea emerged that grassroots coalitions were possible, that we could create quasi-institutions around the activist clerics who opposed the state.”
Another step toward popular mobilization was taken in 1989, when Sheikh ʿAbd al-Muhsin al-ʿObeikan created grassroots committees to monitor public spaces, command virtue, and combat vice in Riyadh. To command virtue and combat vice: this Quranic principle was the motto of the ubiquitous morality police (the Committee that Commands Virtue and Combats Vice). Created in 1926 by ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Al Saʿud, the Committee that Commands Virtue and Combats Vice had turned what might elsewhere have been an individual or communal duty into a state monopoly.5 Such Islamic activists as Sheikhs ʿAbd al-Ilah and al-ʿObeikan were of two minds over the morality police: they saw its work as essential to the making of a religious society but did not believe that the Quranic principle should be appropriated by the state.
Thousands of people attended a public meeting Sheikh al-ʿObeikan organized at the Jawhara mosque, on Khazzan Street, and activists agreed on the urgency of organizing collective action. But Prince Salman nipped the people’s committees in the bud. He summoned al-ʿObeikan to his office and ordered him to keep quiet. The sheikh kept organizing, and the prince asked Sheikh ʿAbd al-ʿAziz bin Baz to convince him to stop organizing.6
“Opposition in itself was an event and a good piece of news,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “My colleagues and I wanted to infiltrate these committees to lead them toward something more important than women’s veils or public morality in shopping malls. I attended one of the meetings and told them that the issue was not only this, but also how state money was spent.”
The Quran described the Islamic community as “the best nation produced as an example for mankind,” a nation that “commands virtue and combats vice.”7 Islamic activists insisted that virtue and vice were not only individual, but also collective, and that commanding virtue and combatting vice had to encompass state affairs, too. In their sermons, for instance, the sheikhs Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-ʿOuda articulated religion, morality, and politics. They became the spearhead of the Islamic movement by shifting the general conversation from the battle of modernity to the reform of the state and from morality to politics.8
“When the Gulf War happened, we knew who the activists were,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “During the first ten days, we could not understand what was going on. Then we started to consult people, to meet friends we had made during the battle of modernity and at Janadriya.”
A few weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, the sheikhs Safar al-Hawali, Salman al-ʿOuda, and Nasir al-ʿOmar publicly denounced state clerics and condemned their support for the Gulf War.
“The genie was out of the bottle,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “The state was weakened; it was unable to fight on all fronts.”
ʿAbd al-Ilah joined a loose coalition of sheikhs, Islamic intellectuals, and young activists to put pressure on the government. Just like Juhayman had done in 1965, Islamic activists tried to recruit Sheikh ʿAbd al-ʿAziz bin Baz to their cause.
“Sheikh al-ʿObeikan visited Sheikh bin Baz [late 1990] and asked him, ‘How can you stay silent when the king is a hesitant, vile spendthrift who wastes the state budget, leads the country to bankruptcy, and misleads people?” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “Bin Baz asked him, ‘Well, what do you want?’ ‘I want to write a constitution and impose it on the king,’ al-ʿObeikan said. Bin Baz told him, ‘Write a constitution, gather the sheikhs and have them sign it, and we will impose it on the king; we will ask the king to implement it.’
“Al-ʿObeikan called us. Of course, he did not know how to write a constitution; he barely knew what a constitution was. . . . And we told him, ‘No, if you say ‘constitution,’ the state clerics will withdraw. They will tell you that our constitution is the Quran, and this will create a secondary front where you will be defeated.’ He asked, ‘What do we do, then?’ We responded, ‘Write down the legitimate principles of government. Write a concise text, do not dwell on or get sidelined by secondary questions, which would allow the state to sow discord among us.’”
This platform became the Letter of Demands,9 discussed and publicized in 1991 through suburban networks in dining rooms, mosques, and rest houses. Activists sent the Letter to King Fahd in May 1991. The list of signatories “triggered a massive shock in the state apparatus,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “Later, when we were in prison, they told us during interrogations, ‘The worst thing you did was to separate the state from its most trusted men.’” By mobilizing important religious clerics, the Islamic Awakening was shattering the state monopoly on religion.
The first arrests took place the same month. The following year, Islamic activists sent a more detailed petition to the king: the Memorandum of Advice.10 Arrests became more frequent, which prompted a transformation of the Islamic movement from a reform movement to a movement of self-defense.
“When somebody was arrested,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said, “we would rejoice, because these were opportunities to march in the streets. In the Eastern Province, they organized a huge march when one of their activists was arrested. And in Riyadh, too, hundreds of people. We gathered in a mosque; we were between five hundred and a thousand people. And we demonstrated. We chanted for reforms. We shouted our demands.”
For a while, activists turned repression into a political resource. Demonstrations gave birth to grassroots committees “with an elected president, a budget, a secretary general, secretaries who would write meeting notes; they would meet every week, plan precise actions” to defend the rights of those arrested and gather donations in their name. Activists would sometimes reach the gates of the royal palaces. Once Prince Mishʿal, a brother of the king, slapped a sheikh in a shopping mall. This incident, too, was an occasion for mobilization.
“They rendezvoused with people at a mosque near the Riyadh governorate, and around three to four hundred people stormed Prince Salman’s office.”
At first these incidents emboldened Islamists, but after a certain threshold was passed, activists understood that they were now facing down something much more serious and terrifying than before: mass arrest and torture in prison. After another round of arrests in 1993, a handful of prominent activists launched the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights to advocate for the rights of the detainees.11
“[It] would be a human rights association, not a political party or an opposition group,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “It would defend anybody subjected to unlawful detention or a rights violation. There was a huge ambiguity, of course, because the Committee confronted political injustices. But . . . we did not want the Committee to confuse political confrontation with humanitarian, rights-based demands. We wanted it to be politically neutral, if that expression means anything. . . . It had to appear neutral and defend the victims of repression.”
As Islamic activists were organizing in Riyadh and the Central Region, a rival Islamic trend emerged at the Islamic University of Medina. ʿAbd al-Ilah called them “state Islamists” or “government Salafis.” These students in religion were sometimes nicknamed “Madkhalis” or “Jamis” after the sheikhs Rabiʿ al-Madkhali and Muhammad ʾAman al-Jami, who led the movement.
By 1994 the leading Islamic activists were in prison. ʿAbd al-Ilah was arrested, too, and incarcerated in the al-Hayer prison. Saudi guerrilla fighters coming home from Afghanistan in the early 1990s probably thought that they would be celebrated for defeating the Soviet Union. But several thousands of them were also detained. The failure of the reform movement and the repression that followed bolstered those who, like Osama bin Laden, advocated for a violent takeover.
“I met bin Laden twice,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said. “Once in 1991 in Riyadh, and the other time in 1992 in Jeddah. He was more receptive at our first meeting, and seemed to accept the idea of peaceful reform initiatives. But the second time we met, he was less optimistic and less encouraging. He no longer supported us. He refused to associate himself with us and said he believed more in armed action than in peaceful reform. . . . I invited him to sign the Letter of Demands, and he refused. At that time, al-Qaʿeda only targeted the Soviets in Afghanistan. It was still a legitimate organization, and the Saudi state supported them. We wanted to benefit from their contacts, to win their troops to the reform project, to help our action spread in the kingdom. . . . Bin Laden thought peaceful action would not yield any result, and said we were wasting our time.”
In retrospect, Sheikh ʿAbd al-Ilah said, he thought bin Laden had been right.
“Prison strengthened the partisans of armed action; it confirmed their notion that guerrilla action was the solution. It also confirmed everything they had said about the failure of peaceful reforms. Prison legitimized the idea of armed confrontation. It became the only alternative: you either get randomly arrested or choose to attack the security forces on your own terms, because you choose the place and the time. . . . Al-Qaʿeda was fueled by the idea that only confrontation would work, and that peaceful reform was an illusion.”
A wide spectrum of activists, students of religion, sheikhs, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, and guerrilla fighters experienced unlawful arrests, detention, and torture in the 1990s. Some died; others were released.
“Back in the 1930s and 1940s,” ʿAbd al-Ilah said, “there were opposition voices; there was some movement; people were taking positions; we had a media; there was repression of course, but it was limited; it was not that bad. . . . Severe repression came with the Cold War and security alliances” with the West. With repression, “another crucial aspect became clearer. What Islamic militants had been saying all along was true: confronting the regime was too dangerous, since its priority was to be on good terms with the Americans and the West in general. This gave birth to the project of attacking America and waging war on the Crusaders, as they called it at the time. Because in the end, America and the West protect the security apparatus, support security operations, and allow for something unprecedented in the history of Islam: the repression of free speech. There is no precedent for the repression we have experienced for the last thirty years.”
It is in this unprecedented situation that, in the mid-2000s, Islamic activists ran for office in the main cities of the Kingdom. The electoral drama would play out, once again, in and around Saudi suburbia.