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CIAO DATE: 06/06
The Saudi Labyrinth: Evaluating the Current Political Opening
Amr Hamzawy
April 2006
Introduction
Recent years have witnessed unprecedented political dynamism in Saudi Arabia. Since 2002, the government has pursued various reform policies. Its most relevant measures have included reforming the Shura Council, holding municipal elections, legalizing civil society actors, implementing educational reform plans, and institutionalizing national dialogue conferences. Although these measures appear less significant when compared with political developments in other Arab countries, such as Lebanon and Egypt, they constitute elements of a meaningful opening in Saudi authoritarian politics.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi Arabia represented a clear case of authoritarian consolidation. The Al Saud royal family used high oil revenues to boost its control and to expand existing networks of patrimonial allegiance across the country. The state apparatus swelled and, with it, the role of the security forces and the Wahhabi religious establishment grew dominant. The government's authoritarian grip over society tightened. A degree of pluralism rooted in the tribal structures of the Saudi society and in the benevolent rule of the first kings was replaced by an emerging repressive state and an aggressive, fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology.
There were a number of changes that signified this transformation. Among others, the government abolished the municipal elections that had been held regularly up to the 1960s. Dissenting views on political, social, and moral issues were no longer tolerated. Minorities, in particular the Shiite community in the Eastern provinces, suffered from systematic discrimination and hate campaigns. Saudi politics became the monopoly of royal princes, Wahhabi clerics, and their allies in the state bureaucracy.
Although modernization and urbanization processes changed the social map and created a stable middle class, popular demands for reform remained weak. Saudis seemed to either consent to the patrimonial logic of "no taxation, no representation" or approve of the conservative turn taken since the 1970s. The few examples of opposition groups challenging the authoritarianism of the royal family—such as the 1979 seizure of the Great Mosque in Mecca by a fundamentalist group and the initial rise of the Islamic Awakening Movement (al-Sahwa al-Islamiyya) in the 1980s—were efficiently contained.
However, in the 1990s this political scene began to change slightly. The 1991 Gulf War hurt the Saudi economy, and the presence of U.S. troops in the cradle of Islam undermined the legitimacy of the royal family. Rising unemployment and poverty rates led intellectuals and religious scholars to demand substantial political and economic reforms. Most significant, a Memorandum of Advice was addressed to late King Fahd in 1991 in which nearly fifty signatories—religious scholars—called on him to create a legislative council, enact anticorruption measures, and promote an equal distribution of the country's resources among its citizens. After harsh reactions by the security forces against the signatories, the king announced in 1992 the establishment of an appointed national consultative council, the Shura Council, and detailed a plan to appoint municipal councils in all provinces of the kingdom. However, neither the Shura Council nor the municipal councils were endowed with legislative or oversight powers. In the second half of the 1990s, other minor reform measures, primarily administrative, were implemented to quiet growing popular dissatisfaction.
Since then, the authoritarian grip of the royal family has not loosened. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, the government, faced with the rise of violent jihadist groups, resorted to outright repressive instruments to deal with dissenting views in general and leaned heavily on the religious establishment to generate legitimacy among the population. In return, offi cial Wahhabism stiffened its control over three focal points in society: mosques, courts, and schools.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, exposed Saudi society to the catastrophic outcomes of its authoritarian Wahhabi lethargy. The most immediate impact of the 9/11 attacks was to subject the royal family to increasing international pressure to introduce significant reforms to combat terrorism and extremism. However, the attacks also served as a catalyst for wide-ranging debates among the political and intellectual elites about "what went wrong" and "what should be done." Domestic calls for reform were suddenly given a better hearing. In recent years these two factors—international and domestic reform demands—have injected new elements of dynamism and openness into Saudi Arabia's political reality. They have also generated suffi cient incentives for the government to embark on the road of reform.
