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.

Rather than shutting such inflammatory voices down, Prince Nayef finds it convenient to keep them on the streets: al-Umar runs a mosque as a government employee and operates an attractive Web site. By giving clerics such as al-Umar privileged platforms from which to spread their doctrines, Nayef gets the best of both worlds. To foreign critics, he can distance himself from al-Umar's extremism, claiming that the cleric speaks only for himself; at home, meanwhile, he can reap the benefit of al-Umar's threats, which strike terror into Shi`ite hearts.

Al-Umar's booklet promoting ethnic cleansing was written almost a decade ago, before the notion of a U.S.-Shi`ite conspiracy gained traction. The fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, however, has made him pay closer attention to this putative relationship. He has thus returned to his pet theme of a grand Shi`ite plot but reshaped the story in light of the new political reality to include a prominent U.S. role. In a lecture he gave last April, he depicted the United States as the "nursemaid" of global terrorism. For 30 years, he stated, Washington has been supporting terror around the world, something that went largely unrecognized until the war in Iraq. The war also demonstrated clearly "the strength of the bond between America and the Shi`ite heretics," who allied with each other in order to destroy the Sunnis.

Any analysis of the causes of anti-Americanism in Saudi Arabia has to account for people such as al-Umar. Many factors lead him to preach a deep hatred of America, but three are most significant: a deep loathing of Shi`ites, an ingrained habit of associating them with hostile external powers, and fears about the future position of Wahhabi clerics in the Saudi political system. No conceivable shift in U.S. policy would affect any of the three.

THE IRAQ CONNECTION

Last year's suicide bombings in Riyadh forced Prince Nayef to crack down on extremists inside Saudi Arabia. As a consequence, the Saudi security forces have clashed repeatedly with militants, arresting hundreds of activists and confiscating large caches of weapons. In Washington, these operations have helped to support the view that the Saudis have, once again, become our close allies. After receiving a wake-up call in May and a reminder in November, so the story goes, the Saudis have come back around to play their role as the strategic partner of the United States.

In late November, this optimistic view was reinforced when Ali al-Khudayr recanted on prime-time television. Speaking from jail, he renounced entirely his radical stance on takfir and jihad. It is impossible to say whether this about-face was sincere, coerced, or part of a political bargain, but the Saudis are treating it as a great victory against extremism. To emphasize the point, they even allowed Mansur al-Nuqaydan to publish his columns again. Although this is certainly a positive development, the roots of Saudi unrest extend beyond the contest between these two figures. The thousands of disgruntled young men who looked to al-Khudayr for guidance are still angry, and the central question of whether to reduce the power of the clerics remains locked in controversy.

As the case of Nasir al-Umar demonstrates, the domestic Saudi conflicts that originally generated anti-American feeling are still in operation. Moreover, indications suggest that, despite the recent crackdown, al Qaeda and the establishment Saudi clerics still share a strong sense of the common enemy.

Consider, for example, a statement that Abu Abd al-Rahman al-Najdi, an al Qaeda spokesman, issued in early October 2003. What preoccupied him was not the Saudi security services' crackdown on al Qaeda but the rise of the Shi`ites in Iraq:

We call openly on our brothers, all the mujahideen in Iraq, to kill the Sunni clerics who befriend the Americans, because those clerics are infidel apostates; and to kill every satanic Shi`ite Ayatollah who befriends the Americans -- first among them the satanic Ayatollah Muhammad Bahr al-Ulum and those like him. Likewise we demand from the Shi`ite youth that they return to the book of God and the Sunna of Muhammad.