The Saudi Paradox

Michael Scott Doran

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004

Summary:  Saudi Arabia is in the throes of a crisis, but its elite is bitterly divided on how to escape it. Crown Prince Abdullah leads a camp of liberal reformers seeking rapprochement with the West, while Prince Nayef, the interior minister, sides with an anti-American Wahhabi religious establishment that has much in common with al Qaeda. Abdullah cuts a higher profile abroad -- but at home Nayef casts a longer and darker shadow.

Michael Scott Doran is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

While Abdullah has signaled friendship with the West, Nayef has encouraged jihad -- to the point of offering tacit support for al Qaeda. In November 2002, for example, he absolved the Saudi hijackers of responsibility for the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In an interview published openly in Saudi Arabia, he stated that al Qaeda could not possibly have planned an operation of such magnitude. Nayef perceived an Israeli plot instead, arguing that the attacks aroused so much hostility to Muslims they must have been planned by the enemies of Islam. This statement not only endorsed the clerics' paranoid conspiracy theory, but, more important, sent a message that the secret police saw no justification for tracking down al Qaeda.

The case of the Saudi cleric Ali bin al-Khudayr helps explain Nayef's stance. A close associate of al Qaeda, al-Khudayr is known as a leader of the takfiri-jihadi stream of Islamic radicalism -- that is, as someone quick to engage in takfir, the practice of proclaiming fellow Sunnis guilty of apostasy (a crime punishable by death).* After September 11, he issued a fatwa advising his followers to rejoice at the attacks. Depicting the United States as one of the greatest enemies that Islam has ever faced, he chided those who had misgivings about the deaths of so many innocent civilians, listing a number of American "crimes" that justified the attacks: "killing and displacing Muslims, aiding the Muslims' enemies against them, spreading secularism, forcefully imposing blasphemy on peoples and states, and persecuting the mujahideen."

Al-Khudayr was eventually arrested by Nayef's security services, but only after the May 2003 suicide bombings in Riyadh that killed 34 people -- when the cleric's brand of extremism began to threaten the political status quo. Until then, he had been allowed to operate freely and spread his violent anti-Americanism without constraint. Why? Because along the way he helped terrorize critics of the religious establishment. For Nayef, Wahhabi vigilantism is useful in keeping reformers in check.

Saudi journalist Mansur al-Nuqaydan, for example, is an open critic of the hard-line clerics. An ex-Islamic extremist himself, he went to jail in his youth for rooting out idolatry by firebombing a video store. The combination of his personal background, his mastery of the clerics' idiom, and his clear and unflinching support for Taqarub makes him particularly threatening to the religious establishment. Consequently, the extremists have singled him out for special treatment.

Along with some associates, al-Khudayr accused al-Nuqaydan of apostasy, pointing to the text of an interview in which the journalist committed the crimes of "secular humanism" and "scorn for religion, its rites, and devout people." Particularly incriminating, claimed the clerics, was al-Nuqaydan's conviction that "we need an Islam reconciled with the other, an Islam that does not know hatred for others because of their beliefs or their inclinations. We need a new Reformation, a bold reinterpretation of the religious text so that we can reconcile ourselves with the world." On the basis of this expression of Taqarub he was sentenced to death, with the edict posted publicly on al-Khudayr's Web site. For five months, the authorities did nothing. In a regime where openly practicing Shi`ism can land you in jail for years, al-Khudayr's period of freedom speaks volumes. So long as the cleric was limiting his activities to inciting violence against Americans and intimidating reformers, Nayef had no argument with him.

Around the same time that al-Khudayr was arrested, on the other hand, al-Nuqaydan lost his job and soon after was barred from writing or traveling abroad -- a casualty of a parallel crackdown on the reform movement. For Nayef, whose chief concern is to protect the status quo, there is nothing puzzling about this juxtaposition. Al-Khudayr ran afoul of him when bombs targeting the regime started going off, but al-Nuqaydan also represented something of a threat to the Saudi elite. Nayef himself does not take overt responsibility for the persecution of the reformers, but the hand of the secret police is barely hidden from view.

The sequence of events is now familiar. Either without warning or in response to a complaint by a prominent cleric, a critic of the religious establishment loses his job. His employers subsequently refuse to comment. Islamic extremists then issue a death threat to the unemployed man over the phone or on the Internet. In 1999, for example, an associate of al-Khudayr's issued a fatwa against the Saudi novelist Turki al-Hamad, who later signed the National Reform Document. Partly as a result, al-Hamad received a slew of death threats. He and his family were also harassed by the CPVPV. The novelist turned to Abdullah for help, receiving a sympathetic hearing and an offer of physical protection. By offering only bodyguards, however, Abdullah tacitly admitted that he could not control the shadowy parts of the government that belong to his half-brother.

UNCLE TOM FRIEDMAN

In the aftermath of September 11, informed American opinion concluded that Osama bin Laden had attacked "the far enemy" -- the United States -- in order to foment revolution against "the near enemy" -- the Saudi regime. Subsequent events have confirmed that al Qaeda does indeed use the war with the United States as an instrument against its domestic enemies. Yet the tacit cooperation between Nayef and al-Khudayr shows that the relationship between al Qaeda and the Saudi royal family is more complex than most people seem to think.