Arabian Night
DONNELLY, TOM
Arabian Night Can the Saudi kingdom extricate itself from terror? BY TOM DONNELLY Al Qaeda's May 12 bombing in Riyadh is a wake-up call for the Saudi Arabian royal family, President Bush declared....
...He found shelter, patronage, and a partnership with a young prince named Muhammad ibn Saud...
...Dore Gold, a longtime associate of former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has faced charges that his account of Saudi Arabia is sensationalist and extreme...
...To read Dore Gold's Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism is to see the unfortunate fact that al Qaeda-like fundamentalism is central to the Saudi social and political regime...
...But the clarity of ibn Abd al-Wahhab's religious vision was matched by an eye for political opportunity...
...Nonetheless, Hatred's Kingdom provides a comprehensive answer for anyone with the question: "Why do some Saudis, at least, hate us...
...Thus, Saudi political rule has always been inseparable from Wahhabism...
...But the clever ibn Saud understood that he needed a base for broader rule, especially in the largely Shia eastern provinces...
...All of this talk out of Washington and Riyadh is carefully couched within what both sides call the "longtime strategic partnership" between Saudi Arabia and the United States (just as it was after the 1995 bombing of the American military mission in Riyadh and the 1996 Khobar Towers bombing...
...Gold traces what he describes as the "Saudi-Wahhabi Covenant," the bargain between the House of Saud and the sect that traces its origins to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his movement in the eastern Arabian peninsula at the beginning of the eighteenth century...
...Ibn Abd al-Wahhab reacted strongly to a variety of religious and political currents of his time: the decadence of the Ottoman Empire (and perhaps also the rising power of European Christendom), the traditional polytheism of Bedouin tribesmen, the Shia strain of Islam...
...Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute...
...Over time, the clerics provided the ideological glue that sustained the Saudis through attacks from the Ottomans (who could not ignore the rivalry for suzerainty over Mecca and Medina and the threat to their legitimacy as Muslim rulers), from the Hashemites, and from the West...
...It is far from clear, however, that the problems of that partnership are amenable to tactical adjustments...
...Other than its title and some of its chapter headings, however, Gold's Hatred's Kingdom is relatively free of rhetorical excess, and the book's review of the history of Saudi Wahhabism gives the reader a sense of where Saudi-American relations are bound to go...
...The need for internal balance and stability was greatly magnified by the prospect of oil wealth...
...A White House spokesman added that the terrorist attack "makes it clear" the Saudis need to do more to fight terrorism...
...Wahhabism emerged as an attempt to recover the severest form of Islam and politicize it...
...The bargain between the royals and the Wahab-bis has been extended by focusing fundamentalist zeal outward, through the Islamic world and indeed globally...
...Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal explained that al Qaeda made a bad tactical error by angering and uniting Saudi Arabia "in resisting and confronting the work they are doing...
...This also allowed the Saudis to compete for leadership within the Arab world...
...Indeed, the formula of radicalism fueled by oil money has proved more durable than the secular pan-Arab nationalism of Nassar or the Baath parties...
...After World War I, as ibn Saud struggled to create the modern Saudi state, he first employed the Wah-habi Ikhwan—the militarized "brotherhood" that eventually became the Saudi Arabian National Guard—to overthrow the Hashemites...
...The alliance of 1744 was consecrated by a mithaq, or covenant, under which ibn Saud formed the first Saudi state, and Wahhabism became its ideology...
...In turn, the oil revenues were key to ibn Saud and his successors...
...He may err on the side of optimism when he says that the Saudi regime can change in response to external pressure...
...It was, in short," Gold writes, "a political bargain: Ibn Saud would protect ibn Abd al-Wahhab and spread his new creed, while ibn Abd al-Wah-hab would legitimize Saudi rule over an expanding circle of Bedouin tribes, which were subdued through a new jihad...
...Subsidies—and bribes to individuals—helped ameliorate the divisions within Saudi society...
...Not surprisingly, his puritanism put him at odds with the local clerical hierarchy and the Ottomans...
...In response, the Saudis pledged they will do better—for now both Saudis and Americans are in the crosshairs...
Vol. 8 • June 2003 • No. 37
