In a nutshell : the cunning Saudi Crown prince has Donald
Trump and the rest of the world completely fooled, and both Iran
and his professed "anti-terror, moderate religion and
anti-corruption" brutal prosecutions, violent assassinations and
military warfare, are but convenient excuses and scapegoats, that
the Saudi Crown Prince is cunningly making use of, to carry out his
own personal power grabbing agendas, that in reality have nothing
to do with "anti-terror, moderate religion and anti-corruption". In
reality, who is the real terror, who is the real extremist, who is
the real corrupt, do you see it?
November 8 at 6:00 AM
Rosie Bsheer is assistant professor of history at Yale
University and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman knows how to win over the
West. But his soothing rhetoric disguises his illiberal
politics.
At a recent global investment event in Riyadh, Saudi Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced his plans to build a global
megacity, NEOM, on the northwestern coast of Saudi Arabia over the
next 10 years. To increase investor confidence in the kingdom, he
reassured the world that Saudis want to “return to a moderate Islam
that had existed in the country prior to 1979.”
That pledge contained both a promise and a threat: The crown
prince vowed an immediate end to extremist ideas and the
reestablishment of a tolerant Saudi Arabia, while blaming Iran and
its 1979 revolution for sparking Saudi Arabia’s turn toward
state-sponsored radicalization of religious thought.
The double-sided comment tells us a lot about bin Salman’s
goals, as well as how he plans to achieve them. Much like last
weekend’s crackdown, which included the arrests of some of the
wealthiest and most powerful people in the country in the name of
cleaning up corruption, the prince’s liberalizing rhetoric cloaks
far more sinister motives.
Attacks on extreme religion sound positive to people of all
political stripes in the West, promising political liberalization
and evoking the language of the “war on terror.” But it is the
second half of bin Salman’s statement — his decision to single out
the 1979 Iranian Revolution as the turning point in Saudi politics
— that signals trouble for the region. It indicates his plans to
escalate the conflict with Iran and its proxies as a way to shore
up global backing after having failed to rally support at home
(indeed, Saudi Arabia issued a bellicose warning to Iran on Monday,
accusing its adversary of “an act of war”). That President Trump,
the leader of the so-called free world, has endorsed the Saudi
regime’s domestic crackdown, anti-Iran escalation and threat of war
against Lebanon has only emboldened bin Salman.
Even as Western governments and media outlets sing his praises,
the young crown prince is viewed domestically as an incompetent and
corrupt ruler who hides behind liberalism, tolerance and
anti-corruption rhetoric. This view is shared by ruling members of
the monarchy, economic elites and the population at large, who see
bin Salman as someone who has disturbed the status quo for the sake
of massive personal enrichment and political aggrandizement.
Personal enrichment is a huge part of the NEOM project, which is
an attempt to generate new revenue streams that would primarily
benefit Salman, now that he has sidelined many of the country’s
traditional economic elites.
But the announcement of NEOM and the alleged shift toward
religious tolerance also contained a much-overlooked irony: The
crown prince’s plan for a tolerant Saudi Arabia relies on decidedly
intolerant sectarian appeals, casting Iran (and Shiite Islam) as
the culprit for all things bad in the kingdom. Recall that 10 to 15
percent of the Saudi population is Shiite.
Potential investors overlooked this irony, focusing instead on
the potential profits to be derived from the now-friendlier climate
for foreign investment. But mainstream media outlets also let it
slide, instead largely endorsing NEOM and hailing the crown
prince’s critique of religious extremism — coming on the heels of
the scheduled end of the ban on women driving in June 2018 — as
indication of his serious commitment to liberal reform.
That interpretation, though, ignores the Saudi regime’s
concerted and violent crackdown against all its critics, including
religious scholars, secular intellectuals, Shiite activists,
writers, bureaucrats and the religious establishment itself. Though
the crackdown against the opposition has been in effect for some
time, it only generated global headlines after the high-level
arrests of the past several days.
These arrests, cloaked in populist rhetoric trumpeting a
purported campaign to end corruption, actually aim to silence and
disempower, if not to completely purge, bureaucrats and members of
the ruling family who hold economic and political power and are
still not on board with Salman’s rise to power.
The arrests benefit Salman in two ways. Politically, they upend
the balance of power in the Saudi regime, leaving Salman with few
rivals. Financially, they make it easier to claim his rivals’
assets as his own, part of a two-year effort to consolidate
economic power.
Salman has been able to do all this by relying on a
tried-and-true tactic for Saudi leaders: masking policies in
positive-sounding and U.S.-friendly rhetoric. The distortion of
past and present is central to Saudi power, which often uses
globally popular frameworks like the war on terror, moderate
religion and anti-corruption to crack down on political opponents.
Likewise, deploying sectarianism and anti-Iranian rhetoric to do so
has also been a staple of Saudi power.
Those tactics are evident in Salman’s claim that Saudi Arabia
was a “moderate” Islamic state until the Iranian Revolution in
1979. His timeline is off by at least a decade. The very making of
the Saudi state was premised on an intolerant and anti-Shiite
reading of Islam. But it was the late King Faisal, in power from
1964 to 1975, who consolidated the conservative religious state we
are familiar with today.
That consolidation was not a response to the Iranian Revolution,
but rather to progressive domestic mobilizations that had
threatened the Saudi monarchy as well as U.S. imperial interests in
the 1960s. With U.S. support, Faisal’s regime crushed these
movements, foreclosing secular political life in the kingdom.
With secular critics all but eliminated, popular struggle and
anti-regime activism became increasingly religious in nature. After
the 1973 oil embargo, Islamists became more critical of the regime
because of its financial excesses and the strengthening Saudi-U.S.
alliance.
Their discontent culminated in November 1979, when 100
non-establishment Wahhabi Islamists staged an armed takeover of the
Grand Mosque in Mecca, an act meant to draw attention to the ways
in which a corrupt Saudi regime had used religion and violence to
maintain its own authoritarian rule. The same conditions also
fueled peaceful civil unrest that led to the anti-regime Qatif
Uprising in the oil rich Eastern Province that same month.
Under a complete media blackout and with the help of foreign
troops, the regime militarily crushed two structurally different
movements that fought against authoritarianism and a blindly
pro-U.S. foreign policy and blamed both on Iran and Shiite
radicalism.
Nowhere, however, is this pattern of repressing domestic critics
more evident than in the case of the peaceful Sahwa, or Islamic
Awakening, movement. The Sahwa movement, which emerged in
opposition to authoritarianism and state-sponsored religion, gained
unprecedented popularity in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War. It has
posed the single longest and most serious threat to Al Saud’s hold
on power. Every single Saudi regime since then has taken various
measures to curtail this movement, from coercion and co-optation to
jailing and intimidating.
In recent months, Salman’s regime has imprisoned many of its
leaders and foot soldiers alike in the name of ending radicalism,
when these are, in reality, opponents of state authoritarianism,
war mongering, corruption, economic mismanagement and the utter
disregard for civil, human and political rights in Saudi Arabia.
Salman is borrowing from his predecessors by framing this war as
one between modernity and conservatism to obscure the opposition’s
political critiques.
The younger generation of Al Saud rulers — represented by the
recently appointed crown prince — have created the illusion of a
“new” Saudi Arabia, one defined by youth, moderation and
liberalization. But far from embodying a break with “traditional”
Saudi rule, the new generation has simply doubled down on the tried
and tested approaches to modern Saudi statecraft.
Like its predecessors, the current regime uses great repressive
force to maintain its rule. It relies on the very same programs of
reform and modernization to shore up international support while
exacerbating sectarian tensions and violently crushing all forms of
political opposition, including the very forces of moderation it
purports to support.
The timing of these announcements speaks to the regime’s
desperate need for a victory to cover up its many domestic and
regional failures, to increase confidence in the regime’s
commitment to reform and to provide fodder for its all-out war
against domestic opposition and regional rivals. This is not to say
that change in Saudi Arabia is not possible, nor to discount the
efforts of thousands of Saudis who have risked so much to improve
their living situations. But in the hands of relentless dictators
in such an authoritarian context, “change” is elusive at best.
Rosie Bsheer is assistant professor of history at Yale
University and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/made-by-history/wp/2017/11/08/dont-be-fooled-by-the-comforting-rhetoric-coming-from-saudi-arabias-crown-prince
