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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Saudi Arabia
Index
The decade of the 1980s was characterized by the rise of
ultraconservative, politically activist Islamic movements in much
of the Arab world. These Islamist movements, labeled
fundamentalist in the West, sought the government
institutionalization of Islamic laws and social principles.
Although Saudi Arabia already claimed to be an Islamic government
whose constitution is the Quran, the kingdom has not been immune
to this conservative trend.
In Saudi Arabia, the 1960s, and especially the 1970s, had
been years of explosive development, liberal experimentation, and
openness to the West. A reversal of this trend came about
abruptly in 1979, the year in which the Grand Mosque in Mecca
came under attack by religiously motivated critics of the
monarchy, and the Islamic Republic of Iran was established. Each
of these events signaled that religious conservatism would have
to be politically addressed with greater vigor. Although the
mosque siege was carried out by a small band of zealots and their
actions of shooting in the mosque appalled most Muslims, their
call for less ostentation on the part of the Saudi rulers and for
a halt to the cultural inundation of the kingdom by the West
struck a deep chord of sympathy across the kingdom. At the same
time, Ayatollah Khomeini's call to overthrow the Al Saud was a
direct challenge to the legitimacy of the monarchy as custodian
of the holy places, and a challenge to the stability of the
kingdom with its large Shia minority.
In the years following these events, the rise of the
ultraconservative periphery has caused the vast center of society
to shift in a conservative direction, producing greater polarity
between those who are Western-oriented and the rest of society.
The 1991 Persian Gulf War marked another dramatic shift toward
conservative sentiment, and this conservative trend continued to
gain momentum in the early 1990s.
The conservative revival has been manifest in literature, in
individual behavior, in government policies, in official and
unofficial relations with foreigners, in mosque sermons, and in
protest demonstrations against the government. The revival was
also apparent in increased religious programming on television
and radio, and an increase in articles about religion in
newspapers.
On an individual level, some Saudi citizens, especially
educated young women, were expressing the revivalist mood by
supplementing the traditional Saudi Islamic hijab
(literally curtain or veil), a black cloak, black face veil, and
hair covering, with long black gloves to hide the hands. In some
cases, women who formerly had not covered their faces began to
use the nontransparent covering once worn mainly by women of
traditional families. Some, especially younger, university-
educated women, wore the hijab when traveling in Europe or
the United States to demonstrate the sincerity of their belief in
following the precepts of Islam.
In the Hijaz, another expression of the Islamic revival was
participation in the ritual celebration of popular Islamic
holidays. Some elite Hijazi families, for example, have revived
the mawlid, a gathering for communal prayer on the
occasion of the Prophet's birthday, or to celebrate a birth,
mourn a death, bless a new house, or seek God's favor in
fulfillment of some wish, such as cure of an illness or the birth
of a child. Mawlid rituals, especially when performed by
women, were suppressed by Abd al Aziz when he conquered the Hijaz
because they incorporated intercession and the Wahhabis
considered them the equivalent of polytheism.
Reacting to the revivalist mood, the government has backed
the mutawwiin in responding to calls for controls over
behavior perceived as non-Islamic. In November 1990, a group of
forty-seven women staged a demonstration to press their claim for
the right to drive. The mutawwiin demanded that the women
be punished. The government confiscated the women's passports,
and those employed as teachers were fired. The previously
unofficial ban on women's driving quickly became official. As a
further indication of the growing conservatism, considerable
criticism of the women's behavior in asking for the right to
drive came from within the women's branch of the university in
Riyadh.
Religiously sanctioned behavior, once thought to be the
responsibility of families, was being increasingly
institutionalized and enforced. Women, for example, were usually
prevented from traveling abroad unless accompanied by a male
chaperon (mahram), a marked shift from the policy of the
late 1970s, when a letter granting permission to travel was
considered sufficient. This rule has compounded the difficulties
for women wishing to study abroad: a 1982 edict remained in force
that restricted scholarships for women to those whose father,
husband, or brother was able to remain with them during the
period of study.
State funding has increased for the nationwide organization
of mutawwiin that is incorporated into the civil service
bureaucracy. Once responsible primarily for enforcing the
attendance of men in the mosque at prayer time, the tasks of the
mutawwiin since the 1980s have come to include enforcing
public abstinence from eating, drinking, and smoking among both
Muslims and non-Muslims in the daylight hours during Ramadan. The
mutawwiin (also seen as Committees for the Propagation of
Virtue and Prevention of Vice or Committees for Public Morality)
are also responsible for seeing that shops are closed at prayer
time and that modest dress is maintained in public. Foreign women
were under increased pressure to wear clothing that covered the
arms and legs, and men and women who were unrelated might be
apprehended for traveling together in a car. In the early 1980s,
an offending couple might have received an official reprimand,
but in the early 1990s they might experience more serious
consequences. In 1991, for example, a Saudi citizen who gave a
foreign female coworker a ride home was sentenced to a public
flogging and his coworker subsequently was deported.
The rise in conservatism also can be seen in measures taken
to obstruct non-Muslim religious services. Non-Muslim services
have long been discouraged, but never prohibited, in Arabia. Even
at the height of the Wahhabi revival in the 1920s, Christian
missionary doctors held prayer services in the palace of Abd al
Aziz. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, Christian religious
services were held regularly in private houses and in housing
compounds belonging to foreign companies, and these services were
usually ignored by mutawwiin as long as they did not
attract public attention or encourage proselytism. With the end
of the Persian Gulf War, however, mutawwiin began to
enforce a ban on non-Muslim worship and punished offenders. In
1991, for example, a large number of mutawwiin accompanied
by uniformed police broke up a Christian service in Riyadh and
arrested a number of participants, including children.
The most significant indicator of the growing shift toward
conservatism was the willingness of the state to silence
opposition groups. For example, in May 1991, more than 400 men
from the religious establishment and universities, including
Saudi Arabia's most prominent legal scholar, Shaykh Abd al Aziz
ibn Baz, petitioned the king to create a consultative council, a
request to which the king responded favorably in February 1992.
In their petition, however, the signatories asked not only for
more participation in decision making, but also for a revision of
all laws, including commercial and administrative regulations, to
conform with the sharia. They asked for the creation of Islamic
banks and an end to interest payments in established banks, as
well as the redistribution of wealth, protection for the rights
of the individual, censure of the media so that it would serve
Islam and morality, and the creation of a strong army so that the
kingdom would not be dependent on the West. The requests
represented a combination of apparently liberal petitions (a
consultative council, redistribution of wealth) with a
conservative religious bent.
In a follow-up to the petition, a number of the signatories
wrote a letter stating that funds for religious institutions were
being cut back, that the institutions were not being given the
resources to create jobs, and that their fatwas were being
ignored. The letter further claimed that those who signed the
original petition had had their passports confiscated and were
being harassed by security personnel even though "they had
committed no other crime than giving advice to the Guardian."
This affair suggested that the government was sufficiently
concerned about the increasingly conservative mood to shift its
strategy from merely co-opting the conservative agenda to
suppressing its extreme voices.
In another incident, a movement called Islamic Awakening,
which had a growing following in religious colleges and
universities, attempted to hold a public demonstration in early
1991, but participants were threatened with arrest if they did
so. At the same time, the government arrested a well-known
activist in the Islamic Awakening while he was preaching a sermon
in a Riyadh mosque.
Factors contributing to the increased attraction of Islamic
conservatism included the problem of impending loss of identity
caused by overwhelming Westernization. As secular education,
population mobility, the breakup of extended family households,
and the employment of women chipped away at cherished
institutions of family and society, religion was a refuge and a
source of stability
(see Cultural Homogeneity and Values
, this
ch.).
Another factor was disaffection with the existing economic
system in the face of rising unemployment. During the rapid
expansion of the 1970s, employment in the public sector was
virtually assured for Saudi citizens with technical skills and
for those with a Western education. By the end of the decade,
however, those positions, especially in education and in the
ministries, came under pressure from increasing numbers of
university graduates with rising expectations that no longer
could be fulfilled in public sector employment. In addition, in
the 1990s a growing number of young men educated in Islamic
colleges and universities were unemployed; their acquired
knowledge and skills were becoming more irrelevant to the demands
of the economy and bureaucratic infrastructure, even within the
judiciary where traditionally Islamic scholarship was most highly
valued.
An additional factor lay in the monarchy's continuing need to
maintain legitimacy as an "Islamic government." As long as the
ruling family believes it must continue to prove itself a worthy
inheritor of the legacy on which the kingdom was founded, it will
be obliged to foster religious education and the Islamic
political culture in which the kingdom's media are steeped. A
lesser factor in the rise of conservatism may be widespread
sympathy with the sense of being victimized by the West, as
evidenced, for example, in the continuing displacement of
Palestinians in the occupied territories and southern Lebanon.
Islam remained the primary cohesive ideology in the kingdom,
the source of legitimacy for the monarchy, and the pervasive
system for moral guidance and spirituality. The nature of the
Islamic society Saudi Arabia wished to have in the future,
however, was one of the important and passionately debated issues
in the kingdom in the early 1990s. The ultraconservative moral
agenda appealed on an emotional level to many Saudi citizens. But
the desire to expand the jurisdiction of sharia law and to
interfere with the banking system was also a source of concern
for many people. Because nearly all Saudis have reaped material
benefits from state-funded development, people were hesitant to
jeopardize those benefits and the political stability that
allowed development. Some have suggested that the new system of
basic laws was a clear signal that the monarchy was firmly
committed to liberalization and no longer felt compelled to
tolerate conservative excesses. Close assessment of the
implications of the basic laws suggested, however, that the
monarchy was making no substantive changes and, in effect, was
taking no chances to risk disturbing the balance among competing
religious persuasions in the kingdom.
Data as of December 1992
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