The most sustained American inquiry into the trail of Islamist radicalism, the 9/11 Commission Report, could not really crack the Saudi riddle. The commissioners and their staff had given the terror of September 11, 2001, their most concentrated official assessment. After the public hearings and after the expert testimonies, the report noted the opaqueness of the Saudi realm, the ambivalence that ran through its tangled relationship with its American protector: “Saudi Arabia has been a problematic ally in combating Islamic extremism. At the level of high policy, Saudi Arabia’s leaders cooperated with American diplomatic initiatives aimed at the Taliban or Pakistan before 9/11. At the same time, Saudi Arabia’s society was a place where Al Qaeda raised money directly from individuals and through charities. It was the society that produced 15 of the 19 hijackers.” The oil-for-protection bargain had broken down: a relationship that had been an affair of the two governments was now in full public view. And the relationship could not stand up to scrutiny. America had been in Arabia for well over six decades; yet the American access to the inner workings of the Saudi world was limited at best. The 9/11 Commission could only scratch the surface of things. The Americans had not really known that “problematic ally.”
What follows is an attempt to fill a gap in our understanding of that country. There are travel notes, but they are not definitive, for this is not a traveler’s account. I am lucky to have some access, gained over the course of two decades, to Saudis drawn from a broad segment of the population. I try in these pages to be true to what they told me. I have dispensed with their names, for this is an overly discreet country, and there is nothing to be gained from providing these names.
Luck came my way in the sudden emergence of a new wave of Saudi literature, works of fiction and biography that afford us a new view of the Saudi reality. A generation earlier, that country was relatively silent. But Saudis are now writing revealing literary works, and I have drawn on a fair amount of this new literature. The bulk of it is unavailable in English, and it was immensely rewarding to try to do justice to it. Then there are the bloggers, their verve and irreverence, and the immediacy of what they write, providing a window onto the world of the skeptics and the modernists in that land.
Once upon a time, Saudis were consumers of the literature of Beirut and Cairo and Damascus. Now they render their own world. To be sure, they are not free in the Beiruti way, or in the way of the Arab diaspora in Europe, but they can now be heard and read. I don’t ask in these pages the sort of questions that have been the norm in the standard writing on Arabia—the sources of instability, the prospects of its rulers, the problems of succession from one royal to another. I try to depict the journey of that country from the early 1990s to the present day. In the 1990s, it was the practice to write of a crisis of the regime—some wrote its obituary. But the order rode out that storm. The religious diehards did not carry the day. But they have fed a current of obscurantism and a culture of intolerance toward “the other” that haunts their country. There is a price, too, that countries pay for stability.
These pages walk a fine line between the political culture of Saudi Arabia and its conduct and influence in foreign lands. I have not drawn a sharp distinction; my aim was to chart the Saudi way both at home and abroad. An inquiry into the political culture of Saudi Arabia is, by necessity, an inquiry into the matter of Islam in its public life. My working assumption is simple: men and women cut all religious cloth to their preference, they make of religion what they are inclined toward. Something the great American novelist Cormac McCarthy wrote in his stunning work The Road informs my view. “Where men can’t live gods fare no better,” he observed. Religion is there, and the believers work their will on it. They endow it with mercy or with unforgiving zeal, it can shelter or it can forbid and scold.
The dominant creed in Saudi Arabia is the Wahhabi doctrine—though strictly speaking, Saudis frown on that designation, for to them their faith is the pristine message of Islam itself, unsullied by heresies and deviations. The mind of Wahhabism, and its workings, will become clearer in the pages that follow. But this much can be said by way of precision and background. Wahhabism is named for a stern influential jurist of Central Arabia, Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab (1703–92). This desert preacher cast himself in the role of a reformer and a “purifier” of Islam from the “compromises” and accretions that befell it since its rise. The principle of tauhid (the assertion of the divine unity of God) is central to Wahhabi thought. The founder of this creed was given to a belief that Islam had been disfigured by doctrines of mysticism, by the visitation of shrines, by the kinds of beliefs the minority sects of Islam—the Shi’a, in the main, but other sects as well—brought into Islam. It was Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab who struck the deal, in the mid-eighteenth century, that still anchors the Saudi state: the alliance between the religious scholars, the ulama, who adhere to Wahhabism’s exacting and severe teachings, and the House of Saud.
FOUAD AJAMI
Stanford, California, 2010