The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia has been an important locus and sponsor of Islamic reformist thought and activism since the 1920s, even before the kingdom was officially established in 1932. Its founder, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz b. ‘Abd al-Rahman Al Sa‘ud (Ibn Sa‘ud, d. 1953), saw himself as heir to the Wahhabi movement that had emerged in central Arabia in the 18th century and dominated much of the Arabian Peninsula until the state it helped create was destroyed by the Ottomans in 1818. Wahhabism, which Ibn Sa‘ud labeled Salafism from as early as the 1910s if not before, is the religious ideology in whose name he united the disparate regions and tribes of Arabia. Its sponsorship by the state and the claim to implement Islamic law represent the bases for the legitimacy of the Al Saud dynasty into the early 21st century. Wahhabis seek to reform “errant” Muslims, leading them away from the reprehensible innovations (bid‘a) and superstitious practices that they are accused of having adopted. In Arabia, these involve beliefs and practices that Wahhabis deem to be polytheistic (shirk) and to contain elements of unbelief (kufr). They include such practices as worship at certain trees and the graves of holy men, as well as seeking the intercession or aid of dead or living persons and abandoning the ritual obligations of the faith (e.g., prayer, fasting, alms, pilgrimage). Wahhabi scholars argue for a return to the original teachings of the Qur’an and the sunna of the Prophet Muhammad, which they claim are embodied in the Wahhabis’ strict monotheistic creed centered on God’s unicity (tawḥīd). Wahhabis have not hesitated to use excommunication (takfīr) of persons accused of deviating from tawḥīd or to engage in armed struggle against them (jihad). In addition, Sufis and Shi‘is, and to a lesser extent Ash‘aris, have been singled out by Wahhabis as theological deviants and are regularly attacked in polemical writings, sermons, and various other media. It is the Wahhabi practice of takfīr and the potential violence it entails that have engendered the ire of other Muslims and their condemnation of the Saudi Arabian government.

While sponsoring Wahhabi scholars and teachings, the Saudi royal family has continuously had to balance the religious zeal of its foundational and legitimating doctrine with the pragmatic constraints of ruling a territorial nation-state. The first test of this came when the Bedouin-origin paramilitary force called the Ikhwan (Brotherhood) rebelled against Ibn Sa‘ud’s rule in the late 1920s, accusing him of not being faithful to the tenets of Wahhabism. He crushed this movement militarily because its repeated acts of violence on the frontiers of Iraq, Kuwait, and Jordan threatened retaliation from imperial Great Britain. But he also dispensed with the Ikhwan because their value as shock troops of an expanding Saudi state had diminished by the late 1920s and because their leaders were challenging his authority. Through the late 1960s, Saudi Arabia’s religious scene was dominated by traditional Wahhabi scholars, led by the mufti (legal specialist) Muhammad b. Ibrahim Al al-Shaykh (d. 1969), who deferred to the dictates of the royal family.

In the 1950s a new threat emerged for Saudi Arabia in the form of Arab nationalism and republican socialism, as promulgated by President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–70) of Egypt. The Egyptian government’s persecution of members of the Muslim Brotherhood led many of them to seek refuge in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s, and here they found employment in the then-nascent administrative bureaucracy and in teaching and religious institutions. Accused by Nasser of representing backward and reactionary forces, Saudi Arabia, under the rule of King Faisal b. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa‘ud (d. 1975), developed and sponsored Pan-Islamic ideologies and institutions to ward off the threats from Nasserism and socialism. This effort, which became known as the Islamic Solidarity Movement (Harakat al-Tadamun al-Islami), led to the establishment of the Islamic University in Medina (1961) and the Muslim World League (1962), among other Islamic missionary, educational, and religious institutions. Saudi Arabia, especially after accruing massive wealth from the oil booms of the 1970s, devoted considerable resources to these institutions with the aim of promoting a Salafi brand of Islam and emphasizing the Islamic legitimacy of its ruling family and political regime.

In 1979 three critical events took place that intensified Saudi Arabia’s effort to bolster its Islamic legitimacy. Two of these, the Iranian Revolution under the leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–89) and the seizure of the great mosque in Mecca by a group of millenarian Sunni zealots, directly threatened the religious legitimacy of Saudi Arabia. The third, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, provided an opportunity for Saudi Arabia to burnish its Islamic credentials by financially and politically supporting the Afghan resistance.

In the 1980s the Saudi government adopted more austere social and religious domestic policies, and this period corresponded with the rise of a more politicized generation of Saudi Islamist activists and thinkers. These Islamists were strongly influenced by the teachings of the Muslim Brotherhood and subscribed to a new hybrid ideology—one that combined the activism of the Muslim Brotherhood with the theological zeal of Wahhabism. Labeled Sahwis (Awakeners), they began a campaign of criticism of the Saudi regime’s pro-Western political orientation, especially after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the arrival of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to defend Saudi Arabia. The official Saudi religious establishment, which was led by Grand Mufti ‘Abd al-‘Aziz b. Baz (d. 1999), had issued a fatwa (religious opinion) legitimizing the foreign military presence, and this led to a steady decline in its prestige and authority in the eyes of many in Saudi Arabia as well as among Salafi and Islamist networks abroad. Concurrently, certain circles of Sahwis and Salafis became increasingly radicalized, and a number of these rallied to the call of al-Qaeda and joined its ranks in Afghanistan. The latter declared the Saudi royal family to be “apostate” rulers who should be toppled through violent means, and its religious leaders were described as corrupt and unprincipled lackeys and labeled pejoratively “scholars of the sultan.”

The events of 9/11 represented a watershed in Saudi Arabia’s religious politics, especially after al-Qaeda took aim at Saudi Arabia in a series of suicide bombing attacks in 2003. Since that time a change in rhetoric, religious appointments, funding, and policies has occurred. The effort aimed at tempering the intolerance and zeal of Wahhabism and its representatives while attacking al-Qaeda and its affiliates as an “errant group” that has many of the attributes of the heretical Kharijis.