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StephaneLacroix2011-TheDevelopmentoftheSahwa1.pdf

The Development of the Sahwa

When the situation became diffi cult for the Muslim Brother- hood . . . they found refuge in the kingdom, which welcomed and protected them, and, aft er God, guarded their lives. . . . Aft er they had spent a few years among us, we realized that they needed work, so we found ways for them to support themselves: some of them became teachers, others university professors— we opened the doors of schools and universities to them. But unfortunately, they had not forgotten their ear- lier affi liations, and they began to recruit people, to create movements, and they rose up against the kingdom!

Prince Nayif, Saudi interior minister, November 2002

Th e Muslim Brotherhood— Egyptians and non- Egyptians— played an essential role in the development of the kingdom, particularly in the areas of moral education, general educa- tion, and Islamic culture. Since the time of King Faysal— blessed be his name— they have served the kingdom! Th ey played a considerable role in the creation of institutes and universities, and in teaching, writing, and the establish- ment of educational programs for the children of the king- dom at a time when no one else in Arabia was able to take on that task!

Lashin Abu Shanab, member of the guidance council of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, November 2002

Th e 1960s and 1970s witnessed the development in Saudi Arabia of a vast social movement practicing a modern form of Islamic activism

Holoch, George, et al. Awakening Islam : Religious Dissent In Contemporary Saudi Arabia, Harvard University Press, 2011. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/asulib-ebooks/detail.action?docID=3300965. Created from asulib-ebooks on 2020-09-14 22:03:29.

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that until then had been absent from the country’s po liti cal land- scape. Th is movement was called the Islamic Awakening (al- Sahwa al- Islamiyya), or simply the Sahwa. Relying on the state’s own institutions, it soon managed to gain a hold over an entire generation of young Sau- dis. At the same time, more highly structured networks were developed within the Sahwa. Taking advantage of an extremely favorable po liti cal climate, it soon became a central element of the Saudi social fabric.

The Muslim Brotherhood and Saudi Arabia

Although the Sahwa quickly succeeded in assuming a native color- ation by incorporating key elements of Saudi religious culture into its language and conduct, its principal originators were the exiled Mus- lim Brothers, who came from social and po liti cal contexts completely foreign to Saudi Arabia.

Th e movement of the Muslim Brotherhood was established in Egypt in 1928. Its found er, Hasan al- Banna (1906– 1949), a disciple of the more conservative faction among the Muslim reformists, led by Rashid Rida, wanted to establish an or gan i za tion al framework to promote and implement his masters’ ideology. From the outset the movement had a dual purpose: to fi ght against foreign occupation and to work for the establishment of an Islamic state that would apply shari aʿ. Th e movement grew rapidly in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, where it began to establish branches by the late 1930s. Th e Brotherhood provided crucial support to the Egyptian revolution of July 23, 1952, that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. But although it hoped to see a new po liti cal arrangement emerge that would favor it, the move- ment soon became the principal victim of the military regime. In De- cember 1954, aft er an assassination attempt against Nasser that the Brotherhood was accused of fomenting, it faced a terrible wave of re- pression. It suff ered a second ordeal when it was accused of conspiracy in 1965.

It was in the concentration camps that Nasser set up for the Broth- erhood that the movement’s thinking developed in decisive ways. Th ere, Sayyid Qutb (1906– 1966), imprisoned from 1954 to 1964, wrote

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his voluminous commentary on the Koran, In the Shade of the Koran, as well as what an entire generation of Islamists considered his major work, Milestones. In that work he asserts that “the whole world is liv- ing in a state of jahiliyya” (in Islamic historiography, the age of “igno- rance” preceding the advent of Islam), which is based on “opposition to God’s domination of the world and to the characteristic of the di- vine, namely, sovereignty [hakimiyya].” Th e sovereignty of God will be restored only when there is a pure Islamic state, based on shari aʿ alone. To overcome the material obstacles barring the path to that goal, a vanguard (tali aʿ) must act (that is, use “movement,” haraka).

Although the concepts Qutb uses remain relatively undefi ned, there is no doubt that his doctrine radicalizes the positions taken by al- Banna. Al- Banna had never described his society as a modern jahili- yya, nor had he ever called for anything other than daʿwa (preaching), in the belief that in order to win power, it was necessary to begin by winning hearts. By the early 1970s, aft er the trauma of the Nasser years, supporters of the traditional reformist line, known as “Ban- naists,” and supporters of the revolutionary line, known as “Qutbists,” competed for control of the movement in the Middle East.

Th e Brotherhood’s concern with Saudi Arabia was of long stand- ing. Hasan al- Banna had shown increasing interest in the country by the late 1920s. Almost annually he went on a pilgrimage to the holy cities, and he took advantage of these trips to strengthen his ties with notables in the Hejaz who were favorable to his ideas and, through them, with Saudi offi cials who assured him of their support. But this support did not mean that the authorities were favorably disposed to the movement taking root in the kingdom. According to a well- known anecdote, in October 1946, at a time when the Brotherhood was be- coming established in most countries of the Middle East, Hasan al- Banna asked King Abd al- Aziz for permission to open a branch of the or ga ni za tion in Saudi Arabia. Because this violated the prohibition of activity by po liti cal parties on Saudi territory, the king rejected his request, reportedly saying: “What good would that do? Here, we are all brothers, and we are all Muslims.”

During the same period other Egyptian Brothers traveled to Saudi Arabia, but they were few in number and taught there for short spells

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before returning home. Th e situation changed when authoritarian na- tionalist regimes came to power in the Middle East beginning in the 1950s. Fearing the growing popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood throughout the area, those regimes subjected the movement to harsh repression. For many of its members, emigration became the only means of survival. Following the Nasser regime’s fi rst wave of repression in 1954, many Egyptian Brothers found refuge in the Gulf States, par- ticularly Saudi Arabia, which even granted some members Saudi na- tionality. Aft er the United Arab Republic joining Egypt and Syria was established in February 1958, Syrian members of the Brotherhood were threatened by Nasser, and many of them also took refuge in the Saudi kingdom. Th e dissolution of the United Arab Republic in 1961 reduced pressure on the movement in Syria, but the lull was of short duration. Aft er the Baathist military coup of 1963, repression of the Brotherhood resumed. In Iraq the coup d’état by General Abd al- Karim Qasim in July 1958 marked the beginning of persecution of the Brotherhood there as well, and members left the country in large numbers.

A second wave of emigration, primarily of Egyptian members, to Saudi Arabia took place in the 1970s, in a very diff erent po liti cal con- text. Nasser’s death in 1970 and Sadat’s succession produced an easing of relations between the Egyptian government and the Islamist move- ment, and most imprisoned members were released in 1971. Hence emigration was now driven more by economic than by po liti cal con- siderations. Th e oil boom had opened exceptional career opportunities, and Muslim Brothers, who had solid networks in the kingdom, were particularly well placed to seize them.

From the earliest days of their emigration until the late 1950s, the Brothers in Saudi Arabia generally occupied minor positions and re- mained po liti cally inactive. As the geopo liti cal context changed and regional rivalries increased, the position of the Brotherhood changed as well, and it became a pivotal player on the Saudi stage. In 1957 hitherto- cordial relations between King Saʿ ud and Nasser suddenly deteriorated. Th e episode marked the onset of the Arab cold war that remained intense until the late 1960s between a “progressive” bloc leaning toward the Soviet Union, with Nasser as its self- appointed

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leader, and an “Islamic” bloc led by Saudi Arabia that favored Ameri- can interests. Th e Yemeni revolution of September 26, 1962, that brought to power an ally of Nasser, Abdallah al- Sallal, on the southern border of the kingdom was under these conditions a point of no return.

It was during this period of increasing tension that the Islamic bloc was or ga nized around what offi cial Saudi discourse designated as the principle of “Islamic solidarity” (al- tadamun al- islami). Th e creation of the bloc was spurred by Prince Faysal (who was intermittently in charge from 1958 on, although he did not offi cially become king until 1964). Faysal understood the necessity of not surrendering the ideo- logical arena to a master of propaganda like Nasser. To confront Nass- er’s pan- Arab socialism, he had to make Islam, the kingdom’s chief symbolic resource, into a counterideology, but the very traditional Wahhabi ulema were quite incapable of engaging in a po liti cal debate of this magnitude. Th us the members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Saudi Arabia were increasingly brought into the anti- Nasser propa- ganda apparatus and became its core by 1962. No one but these expe- rienced Islamists, sometimes themselves Nasser’s victims, was in a better position to denounce the “ungodliness” of his secular government and to use Islam as a weapon against it.

To perfect this ideological counterattack, Faysal strove to provide those involved with the same resources that Nasser was using to broadcast his message. To counter Sawt al- Aʿrab (the Voice of the Ar- abs), Nasser’s propaganda radio station that had successfully pene- trated even rural areas of Saudi Arabia, where it was very pop u lar, he established Sawt al- Islam (the Voice of Islam). Against the Egyptian press, which described the Saudi monarch as “an agent of imperial- ism,” the Saudi press responded by presenting Nasser as an “Egyptian Stalin.” Oft en understood merely as an expression of Faysal’s mod- ernizing tendencies, the decision in 1962 to establish the fi rst Saudi tele vi sion network, which began broadcasting in 1965, must also be seen as an element in this propaganda competition.

In addition to this media counteroff ensive, two institutions emerged to complete the anti- Nasser apparatus. One was the Islamic University of Medina, established in 1961 as a competitor to al- Azhar University in Egypt, which Nasser had brought under his control with the great

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reform in 1961 offi cially aimed at “modernizing” it, and with which he hoped to give religious legitimacy to his propaganda. When King Saʿ ud declared in May 1961 that the operation of the Islamic Univer- sity would rely on those individuals “who have been driven from their country aft er having been robbed, abused, and tortured,” he clearly identifi ed the Muslim Brotherhood as key players. Th e other impor- tant institution the Saudi government created to counter Nasser’s infl uence was the Muslim World League, established in 1962. Here the Muslim Brotherhood held a less central position than in the university because the aim of the league was to be a forum for repre- sentatives of all countries and movements belonging to the Islamic bloc. Nonetheless, it was represented by two infl uential fi gures: the Egyptian Saʿid Ramadan, Hasan al- Banna’s son- in- law, and the Jor- danian Kamil al- Sharif. Th e league also included fi gures from move- ments close to the Brotherhood, such as the Pakistani Abu al-ʿAla Mawdudi, the found er of Jamaat- e Islami.

An Educational System at the Ser vice of the Brotherhood

Th e Arab cold war allowed the discourse of the Muslim Brotherhood to gain a foothold in Saudi Arabia, but primarily as one intended for export and directed to the outside world. Beginning in the mid- 1960s, this changed when the discovery of radical cells declaring adherence to Arab nationalist and left ist ideas in major Saudi cities persuaded Faysal that the fi ght against them needed to go beyond external propa- ganda. Th e members of the Brotherhood were now asked to direct their activities within the kingdom, notably through the media, where they had taken positions since the early 1960s, but also from other platforms, such as lectures and public seminars.

At the same time, the 1960s and 1970s were marked by a vast pro- gram of institutional modernization in Saudi Arabia, notably in the area of education, made possible by the infl ux of petrodollars. How- ever, the kingdom was sadly lacking in elites able to participate in this pro cess because the Wahhabi ulema had little knowledge of modern

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matters, and members of the young intelligentsia, whose ranks were still sparse, were usually assigned to administrative tasks and pur- posely kept away from educational institutions. Under these circum- stances the Brotherhood, which counted many university graduates in its ranks, seemed to be ideal candidates. Moreover, Faysal had adopted the mantra of “Islamic modernization,” a concept that was in many respects close to the views of the Brotherhood. Th e Muslim Brother- hood would then to be for Faysal what the Muslim reformists had been for his father Abd al- Aziz, but in a context where resources were immeasurably larger.

In the early stages of the establishment of the Saudi educational system, the Brotherhood played only a minor role. When the king- dom’s fi rst university, Riyadh University (soon to become King Saʿ ud University), was founded in 1957, very few Brothers worked there. Located in the “liberal” neighborhood of al- Malazz, it even gained a reputation as a haven for the intelligentsia. Th is was particularly the case because the very existence of some divisions, such as the Faculty of Commerce, remained controversial in the eyes of the ulema. By the early 1970s, however, the university had fallen back into line as the number of Brothers on the faculty increased in both science divisions and the Faculty of Education, which became their stronghold. At this time as well, specifi cally in 1971, the university’s purportedly liberal president, Abd al- Aziz al- Khuwaitir, was replaced by a more conserva- tive fi gure, Abd al- Aziz al- Fadda.

At the Islamic University of Medina, founded in 1961, foreign activ- ists made up the bulk of the faculty from the outset. Muslim reform- ists were most heavily represented in the early 1960s, but the propor- tion of Muslim Brothers constantly increased in the course of the de cade. Among the well- known Brothers who taught at Medina Uni- versity in this period were the Syrian Muhammad al- Majdhub and the Egyptian Ali Juraysha.

But it was at King Abd al- Aziz University in Jeddah and its annex in Mecca that became Umm al- Qura University in 1981 that the Brothers were virtually in the majority from the beginning. Among the Syrians on the faculty were three of the most illustrious fi gures in the movement: Muhammad al- Mubarak, who chaired the shari aʿ

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department from 1969 to 1973, as well as Ali al- Tantawi and Abd al- Rahman Habannaka, both of whom taught in the same depart- ment. Among the Egyptians were Muhammad Qutb, Sayyid Qutb’s brother, who was appointed a professor in the Faculty of Shari aʿ of Mecca aft er his release from prison in 1971; Sayyid Sabiq, author of the celebrated book Th e Jurisprudence of the Sunna, a still largely unchallenged legal reference work for the Brotherhood, who chaired the department of legal studies in Mecca and later graduate studies as a whole; and Muhammad al- Ghazzali, who chaired the department of daʿwa and the fundamentals of religion (usul al- din) until the mid- 1980s. Th e Palestinian Brother Abdallah Aʿzzam, who would be- come the leading proponent of Arab jihad in Af ghan i stan, also made a strong impression when he taught a semester at King Abd al- Aziz University in 1981.

Th e Brotherhood had an equally signifi cant presence at Imam Mu- hammad bin Saʿ ud University (known as Imam University) in Riyadh, founded in 1974. Among the Egyptians were the fi rst representative of the Brotherhood in the kingdom, Mannaʿ al- Qattan, who climbed the rungs to become head of graduate studies, and Muhammad al- Rawi, who chaired the exegesis (tafsir) department. Th e Syrian Brotherhood was well represented in the persons of Abd al- Fattah Abu Ghudda and Muhammad Abu al- Fath al- Bayanuni. A Muslim Brother from Sudan, Zayn al- Aʿbidin al- Rikabi, former editor of the journal of the Kuwaiti Brotherhood, Al- Mujtamaʿ (literally “society”), also played a prominent role beginning in the mid- 1970s. On the basis of his long experience as a journalist, he helped establish the university’s Faculty of Daʿwa and Communication. He even became the chief adviser to Abdallah al- Turki, president of the university and himself a former member of the Saudi Brotherhood.

A signifi cant number of the most renowned members of the Muslim Brotherhood were thus teaching in Saudi Arabia in this period. Th is explains why the leadership chose Mecca to hold in 1973 its fi rst meet- ing to restore the movement’s advisory council since the repression of the 1950s. Th is was the fi rst step toward establishing an “international or ga ni za tion” (al- tandhim al- duwali), which was set up in the late 1970s; its existence was made offi cial in 1982. Although the presence of these

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illustrious Brothers in the kingdom’s universities was emblematic, it should not obscure the fact that since the late 1960s, hundreds of the movement’s grassroots militants had permeated the various levels of the Saudi educational system, where they taught all subjects, religious and secular. Th ey made up the bulk of the personnel in the religious secondary schools, called Scientifi c Institutes (ma aʿhid iʿlmiyya), of which there were thirty- seven in the kingdom in 1970. Some of these Brothers later achieved notoriety, including the Syrians Muhammad Surur Zayn al- Aʿbidin, who taught in Scientifi c Institutes in Haʾil, Burayda, and the Eastern Province from 1965 to 1973; Muhammad al- Aʿbda, who taught at the same time in Arʿar and al- Rass; and Saʿ id Hawwa, future ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, who taught in Hufuf and Medina from 1966 to 1971. During that time Saʿ id Hawwa wrote the books that made him famous when he returned to Syria, particularly the short work Soldiers of God, which later be- came an essential reference for Middle Eastern Islamists. Members of Qutbist groups with no direct connection to the Brotherhood were sometimes also present, as in the case of the Egyptian Umar Abd al- Rahman, the future muft i of the assassins of President Sadat, who came to teach in a Saudi Scientifi c Institute in the 1970s.

Th e Brotherhood’s members aff ected the Saudi educational system not only as teachers but also by acting as a major force in reconfi gur- ing it and in redefi ning the curricula. In this way they introduced into the system the essential elements underlying their ideology and view of the world.

When the Islamic University of Medina was created in 1961, an advisory council was set up on which, along with a majority of Mus- lim reformists, sat an infl uential Brother, the Syrian Muhammad al- Mubarak, known as an expert in Islamic education because of his leading role in the foundation of the Faculty of Shari aʿ of Damascus in 1955. Other members of the Brotherhood were also consulted infor- mally, among them Mahmud al- Sawwaf, former leader of the Brother- hood in Iraq, and the Syrians Ali al- Tantawi and Muhammad al- Majdhub.

In 1964 the Saudi authorities called on Muhammad al- Mubarak to set up the curricula for the Faculties of Shari aʿ and Education in

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Mecca. In the latter faculty he was the originator of a new discipline, “Islamic culture,” defi ned by one of its specialists as “the science of the totalizing character of the Islamic conception of the world with re- spect to values, systems, and ideas, and the critique of the humanist legacy they contain.” A few years later he taught two courses in Is- lamic culture in that faculty: Contemporary Islamic Society and Th e System of Islam.

In the late 1960s the rapidly developing but still very heterogeneous educational system called for the adoption of a national educational policy that would bring about its unifi cation, but the control Muft i Muhammad bin Ibrahim exercised over the religious component of the educational system blocked any initiative along those lines. His death in 1969 made it possible to move forward on the issue. To pro- duce its broad outlines, King Faysal had already established a group of experts in a subcommittee on education in 1965. Th e rapporteur of the subcommittee, which included a number of Brothers, was the Egyptian Brother Mannaʿ al- Qattan, who was also already the repre- sentative of the movement in Saudi Arabia. Th e subcommittee’s work led to the adoption in 1970 of the text known as Educational Policy in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is still the primary document concerning education in the country. It defi nes the purpose of education as “conveying the understanding of Islam in a just and comprehensive manner,” as “creed, religious practice, conduct, shari aʿ, government, and system.” At the individual level, “Th at requires inculcating in [the student] an Islamic epistemology so that his conception of the universe, the individual, and life emanates from a total Islamic vision.” Th is consciously totalizing conception of Islam owes more to the thinking of the Muslim Brotherhood than to traditional Wahhabism.

To carry out these objectives, “religious sciences will occupy a cen- tral place at every level of primary, intermediate, and secondary edu- cation, and in all branches, and Islamic culture will be a central subject at all levels of higher education.”  As seen with Muhammad al- Mubarak, who introduced the concept to Saudi Arabia, the concep- tion of Islamic culture is closely connected to the modern vision of the Muslim Brotherhood. Islamic culture, indeed, became the Brothers’

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preferred subject. Consequently, its prominence in the educational system, as ratifi ed by the new educational policy, only widened the scope of the Brotherhood’s infl uence. Osama bin Laden, for example, although he was an economics student, allegedly came into contact with his earliest po liti cal infl uences, Muhammad Qutb and Abdallah Aʿzzam, in the required Islamic culture course.

Th is new educational policy also enabled the Brotherhood to pro- mote another of its obsessions, the Islamicization of the sciences, par- ticularly the social sciences. One of the proposals set forth in the document calls for “giving to the sciences and to the various fi elds of knowledge . . . an Islamic orientation . . . so they may take their inspi- ration from Islam.” Th us, for example, King Abd al- Aziz University in Jeddah off ered courses in Islamic economics taught by one of the fi rst alleged Saudi Muslim Brothers, Muhammad Umar Zubayr. An entire department of Islamic economics was established in 1976. Later, departments of Islamic psychology and Islamic sociology were estab- lished at Imam University, both bastions for the Muslim Brothers and their Saudi followers.

Outside Islamic culture and Islamicized sciences, their strong- holds, a signifi cant number of Brothers also taught, among the reli- gious sciences, exegesis of the Koran and Islamic jurisprudence (fi qh). One subject, however, always remained outside their control: creed ( aʿqida). Th is was traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the Wah- habi ulema, and under no circumstances would they delegate its teaching. Th e only exceptions were the Egyptians of the pro- Wahhabi association Ansar al- Sunna al- Muhammadiyya, whose members were considered suffi ciently close to the Saudi religious establishment to be granted that distinction.

A study of the annual cata log for 1977– 1978 (Hijri 1397– 1398) of the Faculty of Fundamentals of Religion of Imam University is very enlightening in this regard. Th e teaching committee of the depart- ment of creed included eleven members, nine of whom were Wah- habis from Najd, while the remaining two were Egyptians known for their fervent pro- Wahhabism (and probably with ties to Ansar al- Sunna al- Muhammadiyya). Th e teaching committee of the exegesis

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department, however, presented an entirely diff erent picture: it was headed by the Egyptian Muslim Brother Muhammad al- Rawi and in- cluded eight other members, most of whom were Syrian or Egyptian, oft en close to the Brotherhood.

Th e 1970s thus witnessed the establishment in Saudi universities of two centers of attraction and infl uence: a Wahhabi center with creed as its bastion and a Muslim Brotherhood center focused on Islamic culture but extending its sway to most other departments. Th e hold of the Brothers, followed by that of their Saudi disciples, soon became so great that they even managed to penetrate the Wahhabi sanctuary of creed. Safar al- Hawali tells how a Syrian member of the Brotherhood, Muhammad Amin al- Masri, as head of graduate studies in the Faculty of Shari aʿ in Mecca, “made strenuous eff orts to introduce the study of contemporary schools of thought [al- madhahib al- fi kriyya] into the creed curriculum. God wished that this subject be taught by one of the fi gures of contemporary Islamic thought, Professor Muhammad Qutb, may God protect him.” Qutb thus found himself in the highly unusual position for a Brother of being affi liated with the department of creed. In the 1980s some of the Sahwi ulema, in par tic u lar Safar al- Hawali, a student of Muhammad Qutb, were in turn given that honor, teaching the same course on “contemporary schools of thought.”

Th e text of the 1970 Educational Policy also established a very strong, almost symbiotic connection between ta lʿim (education in the intellectual sense) and tarbiya (education in the moral and ultimately religious sense, conveyed through Islamic socialization). Education thus was viewed as a matter not only of transmitting knowledge but also primarily of producing “good Muslims.” In the end, learning was to be dedicated to that goal alone. Th is was indicated by the article defi ning the role of education as “transmitting to the student the in- dispensable ideas, feelings, and capacities for him to bear the message of Islam.” In addition, the aim was to stimulate in the student a form of social activism by “teaching him to identify cultural, economic, and social problems in society and preparing him to contribute to their solution.” To develop this side of tarbiya, a whole series of extracur- ricular Islamic activities was put in place, oft en at the instigation of the Muslim Brothers and their disciples. Th ese activities were consid-

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ered complementary to the education acquired in schools and univer- sities because they were a way of putting into practice the principles that had been inculcated, of making them alive.

Th e fi rst stages of this development go back to the 1960s, when com- mittees for raising Islamic consciousness (lijan al- taw iʿya al- islamiyya) were set up in various parts of the kingdom to coordinate the Islamic activities or ga nized by teachers in primary and secondary schools. Th is led to the establishment of a high commission for the same pur- pose, which unifi ed the activities of the committees. Th e secretary general of the commission was the Saudi Muslim Brother Hamad al- Sulayfi h, who was also partly behind the creation in 1972 of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (al- Nadwa al-ʿalamiyya li- l-shabab al- islami, known as WAMY). Although the activities of the WAMY extended far beyond Saudi Arabia, it actively helped establish extra- curricular activities of all kinds in the kingdom.

For the youn gest students, circles for the memorization of the Ko- ran (halaqat tahfi dh al- qur aʾn) were set up as complements to modern schools. An offi cial document recounts that in 1962 a Pakistani sheikh named Muhammad Yusuf Sethi, who had established several hundred of these circles in his native country, suggested to notables and ulema in Mecca that the same idea should be adopted in the Saudi king- dom. Th e fi rst Charitable Association for the Memorization of the Koran (al- Jamʿiyya al- khayriyya li- tahfi dh al- qurʾan al- karim) was es- tablished in Mecca, and it was soon imitated in other cities in the kingdom. In Riyadh, for example, a similar association was estab- lished in 1966 with the help of a local sheikh, Abd al- Rahman al- Faryan. Th e number of circles attached to these associations grew quickly: in 1971 there were 48 of them in Riyadh and 17 in the rest of Najd. Beginning in the late 1970s, these groups experienced exponen- tial growth. In 2003 the kingdom counted 104 associations for the memorization of the Koran, supervising 27,987 circles for the memori- zation of the Koran.

In the early 1970s the range of activities of Islamic tarbiya broad- ened, notably with the gradual Islamization of student activities. Th ose activities went back to the 1940s and 1950s and at fi rst were in- debted mostly to the Anglo- American model that had been imported

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into the Middle East through Egypt. Islamic activism soon started spreading through primary- and secondary- school clubs (andiya tul- labiyya) and, in universities, through cultural, social, and sports com- mittees (lijan). Islamization also reached the scouting movement (al- kashshafa or al- jawwala), which had been in existence in the kingdom since 1943, when the fi rst scouting group was established in the School for the Preparation of Study Missions (Madrasat tahdir al- biʿthat) in Mecca. When the Brotherhood entered the picture, its model of scouting, which had experienced its glory days in Egypt in the 1940s, attained dominance. Activities with a religious purpose, such as campaigns to assist pilgrims, became preponderant.

Beginning in the mid- 1970s, camps (mukhayyamat or marakiz) were set up, usually in the desert, where youth could gather on week- ends and during summer school vacations. Th e camps, divided into “families” named aft er heroes of Islamic history, included a mixture of sporting and religious activities, similar to the ones the Brothers had or ga nized through their scouting or ga ni za tion in Egypt. It is therefore no surprise that the fi rst of these camps were established by Saudi scouting organizations. Th e practice was gradually taken up by other organizations, such as the committees for raising Is- lamic consciousness and the university committees, and then by in- stitutions such as the universities and the WAMY. In time, summer camps came to represent the archetype of tarbiya organizations. In 1990 there were thirty summer camps in the city of Riyadh alone, while Imam University or ga nized fi ft y- fi ve of them around the kingdom.

Activities carried on in the framework of these organizations were of several kinds. Some were purely religious, such as Koran recitation contests. Others involved sports, such as footraces or soccer games. Still others joined play to ideology: “Islamic chants” (anashid islami- yya), for example, with themes ranging from “the greatness of Islam” to “the Palestinian re sis tance,” that were learned by heart and sung a cappella by the group (musical instruments were considered prohib- ited according to Wahhabi jurisprudence). Other activities had intel- lectual aims, such as editing a magazine discussing Islamic subjects. Sometimes there were also small exhibitions on the “wounds of the

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umma.” Th ey were intended to sensitize young Saudis to the misfor- tunes of their coreligionists elsewhere in the world.

One particularly signifi cant activity was theater. In committees for raising Islamic consciousness or in summer camps, young partici- pants were oft en asked to stage episodes in the contemporary history of the Muslim world that were considered traumatic. One young Is- lamist recalled participating in a play on “the expulsion of the Mus- lims from Palestine,” depicting Palestinians driven off their land by a cruel and domineering David Ben- Gurion. Other plays took Anda- lusia as a subject, with similar ideological purposes. Th rough theater, young participants were to experience vicariously, mentally if not physically, the suff erings of the Muslim world. Th e purpose was to in- troduce and naturalize frameworks for the interpretation of the world produced in very diff erent contexts and to integrate them into a new identity that was in the pro cess of gestation, that of the Sahwa. In this pro cess certain feelings, beginning with sadness and disgust at the mis- fortune of coreligionists, played an essential role. Th ey were sometimes expressed in spectacular ways. It was not unusual for an audience at a play evoking the suff ering of its “brothers” to break collectively into sobbing.

The Emergence of the Sahwa

Saudi Arabia in the 1960s thus experienced a massive infl ux into the local religious fi eld of an exogenous tradition, that of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the establishment of institutions that were largely in its ser vice in both form and content. Th is transplantation was the source of a vast social movement that produced its own countercul- ture and its own organizations and, through the educational system, soon reached almost all the fi elds of the social arena.

Locally, the social movement was known as al- Sahwa al- Islamiyya (Islamic Awakening), or simply the Sahwa. Th is notion was not spe- cifi cally Saudi but applied more generally to the widespread Islamic resurgence that had taken hold in the Muslim world since the 1960s. In the Arab world the phenomenon was closely linked to the rise of

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Islamist movements, particularly the Muslim Brotherhood. In Saudi Arabia, one of the countries where it was a driving force behind the resurgence, the taboo against po liti cal organizations meant that any explicit public reference to the Brotherhood was banned. Th e term “Sahwa,” less po liti cally charged, therefore prevailed as the name for the movement resulting from its infl uence.

Th e Sahwi counterculture was defi ned by adherence to an ideology and to certain practices that ran, at the time of their emergence, against the preponderant social norms. Th e ideology of the Sahwa is located at the juncture of two distinct schools of thought with diff erent views of the world: the Wahhabi tradition and the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Muslim reformist tradition from which it de- rives, the tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood is primarily po liti cal and was constructed, in its Bannaist version, against the “imperialist West,” and in its Qutbist version, against the “godless regimes” of the Middle East. Th e Wahhabi tradition, in contrast, is primarily religious and was constructed against the bida ,ʿ that is, the impurities that were supposed to have grown up around the original dogma of the pious ancestors. Historically, its principal enemy was not the West nor the po liti cal authorities but the non- Wahhabi groups within Islam, begin- ning with the Shiites and the Sufi s.

Th e concerns and priorities of the two traditions were thus totally distinct. Th is made them formally complementary and laid the ground- work for the emergence of the Sahwa through the intermediary of the educational system that, though dominated by the methods and think- ing of the Muslim Brotherhood, maintained creed as a Wahhabi preserve. Ideologically, the Sahwa could be described as a hybrid of Wahhabism and the ideology of the Brotherhood. On theological ques- tions connected to creed and on the major aspects of Islamic jurispru- dence, the Sahwis adhered to the Wahhabi tradition and considered themselves its faithful heirs. But on po liti cal and cultural questions, their view of the world tended toward that of the Muslim Brotherhood, although it was partly reformulated in terms derived from the Wah- habi tradition.

Within the Sahwa, both Bannaist and Qutbist tendencies were ini- tially represented, but the latter soon came to dominate. Th ere is in-

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deed a close ideological affi nity between Qutbist thinking and the Wahhabi tradition, both of which are based on the same Manichaean opposition between Islam and jahiliyya. More prosaically, the prepon- derance of Qutb’s ideas is connected to the fact that the Brothers who fl ocked to Saudi Arabia in the 1970s, soon overtaking by their num- bers the ones already present, had frequently been socialized in Qut- bist circles.

Beyond internal disputes, several fi gures are considered the intel- lectual fathers of the Sahwa ideology, the outlines of which became clear in the course of the 1970s: Muhammad Qutb, who played a prom- inent role in its theoretical development, which led some disciples to call him the “sheikh of the Sahwa”; Abd al- Rahman al- Dawsari, who was the fi rst to encourage the move from theory to practice and be- came known by some as the “precursor of the Sahwa”; and Muham- mad Ahmad al- Rashid, whose writings broadly infl uenced the ways the movement acted and or ga nized itself. In addition, the Kuwaiti journal Al- Mujtamaʿ had a strong infl uence on the beginnings of the Saudi Sahwa.

Muhammad Qutb was born in Musha in Upper Egypt in 1919. He grew up in the shadow of his brother Sayyid, who was thirteen years his se nior and whom he described as the person in his life who had the greatest infl uence on him: “He supervised my education and my intel- lectual development, he was for me a father, a brother, and a friend.” Muhammad studied at Cairo University, graduating with a degree in En glish literature in 1940. Like his brother, he grew close to the Mus- lim Brotherhood in the late 1940s, and both were arrested and tor- tured in 1954. But Muhammad, who was much less implicated, was soon released from the prison where Sayyid remained for ten years. In 1965 he was one of the fi rst Brothers to suff er from the new wave of repression unleashed by the government. Th e Egyptian authorities ac- cused him— most probably mistakenly— of being at the head of the Brotherhood’s secret or ga ni za tion. He was released by Sadat in 1971, aft er six years in prison and the death by hanging of his brother in 1966. A few months later he left for Saudi Arabia, where he was ap- pointed professor at the Faculty of Shari aʿ in Mecca (this faculty became the core of Umm al- Qura University in 1981).

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Little known at the time for his own intellectual work, Muhammad Qutb arrived in Saudi Arabia as the intellectual heir of Sayyid. In his writings from then on, he attempted to mediate between the conceptual apparatus forged by his brother and the precepts of the Wahhabi tradi- tion: the opposition between jahiliyya and hakimiyya (divine sover- eignty) that was the driving force behind Qutbism was viewed as parallel to the opposition between jahiliyya and tawhid (the oneness, unity, and transcendence of God) propounded by Ibn Abd al- Wahhab. Muham- mad Qutb’s purpose was to establish an equivalence between the full application of shari aʿ, which was at the core of the Muslim Brotherhood’s demands, and the purifi cation of creed, the central concern of the Wah- habis. As he explained in Th e Jahiliyya of the Twentieth Century:

Th ere is no diff erence between the question of creed and the question of shari aʿ: either there is government according to God’s revelations [al- hukm bima anzala Allah], or jahiliyya and shirk [the association of God with other entities]. For the knowledge of the Truth of God and just belief in Him imply granting sovereignty [hakimiyya] only to Him as they imply directing adoration [uluhiyya] only to Him. . . . ʿAqida [creed] and shari aʿ are the two sides of a single question, they emanate from a single source and lead to a single end. Th is source and this end are belief in God and submission [islam] to Him.

Going so far as to redefi ne the foundations of Wahhabism in the light of notions developed by Sayyid, he stated that in addition to the three forms of tawhid described by Ibn Abd al- Wahhab, there is a fourth, which he called tawhid al- hakimiyya (the unity of sovereignty), mean- ing that God alone must be sovereign, and therefore that the application of shari aʿ can brook no obstacles. Th is new concept is perfectly ortho- dox, Qutb explains, because it derives directly from the tawhid al- uluhiyya (the oneness of God as an object of worship); it therefore adds nothing to the teaching of Ibn Abd al- Wahhab but merely makes his thinking explicit. Th e “unity of sovereignty” would soon come to oc- cupy a prominent position in the theoretical apparatus of the Sahwa.

In addition to making himself the leading theorist of the Wahhabi- Qutbist hybrid, Muhammad Qutb tried to mask those elements of his

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brother’s legacy that were incompatible with the po liti cal and religious environment of his adopted country. In par tic u lar, that involved sweeping Sayyid’s very fi rst works under the rug, such as Artistic Repre sen ta tion in the Koran (1945), whose references to art and mu- sic were considered incompatible with Wahhabi norms, and especially Social Justice in Islam (1949), whose arguments laid the groundwork for the theory of Islamic socialism, which was later given real sub- stance by the Syrian Brother Mustafa al- Sibaʿ i in Th e Socialism of Is- lam. In the Saudi po liti cal context of the 1970s, such left ist positions had obviously become untenable in the face of a government that pro- claimed itself the champion of conservative Islam. Moreover, in Social Justice, Sayyid Qutb attacked the Umayyad dynasty and its hereditary power in extremely violent language. Th is could not fail to outrage both the Wahhabis, who rejected any challenge to the role of the fi rst generations of Muslims, and the Saudi regime, which also made he- redity the principle for the transmission of its power.

Sayyid Qutb’s controversial writings were neutralized in two ways. First, new editions of Social Justice in Islam published by Dar al- Shuruq in Cairo were revised to eliminate the most problematic passages and terminology. Second, Muhammad Qutb reiterated to anyone who would listen: “Th is is the fi rst book [Sayyid] wrote aft er fi rst having been interested in literature and literary criticism, and it does not rep- resent his thinking at maturity. . . . He did not advise that it be read. . . . Th e books he recommended not reading are all those that preceded In the Shade of the Koran, including Social Justice.” Th e result of this pro cess was that the Qutbist strain that took root in Saudi Arabia was what could be called late Qutbism, from which all left - leaning infl u- ences had been removed. What was left , then, was essentially In the Shade of the Koran and Milestones.

Muhammad Qutb, moreover, produced explanations of these two books intended to attenuate their revolutionary implications. He wrote unambiguously: “Th e situation of the daʿwa today is practically iden- tical to the situation of the Muslim community during the Mecca period. . . . Under these circumstances, resorting to violence does not help the daʿwa.” Consequently, the path to follow was now that of bayan (speech, as opposed to the “movement,” haraka, advocated by

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Sayyid Qutb) and tarbiya (moral education). In addition, Muham- mad Qutb, like the majority of the Sahwa at the time, refused to call into question the Islamic character of the Saudi state, qualifying the passages in Milestones where Sayyid had written that there were cur- rently no Islamic states on earth. But despite these precautions, the subversive potential of Qutbism remained largely intact.

Muhammad Saʿ id al- Qahtani, a professor at Umm al- Qura and a prominent student of Muhammad Qutb (who directed his thesis), continued the work of cross- fertilization begun by his teacher in a book that had a signifi cant infl uence on the nascent Sahwa: Allegiance and Rupture in Islam (Al- walaʾ wa- l-baraʾ fi - l-islam), published in 1984. Its originality lies in the reformulation of the fundamentals of Qutbist ideology in terms that, although they had become common in Wah- habi discourse, were still considered distinctive markers of Wahhabi exclusivism. Al- Qahtani thus establishes an equivalence between the pair hakimiyya/jahiliyya and the pair wala /ʾbara :ʾ applying the Law of God, he explains, means declaring allegiance to the umma, while ad- vocating jahiliyya, notably by subscribing to “contemporary schools of thought” such as nationalism, Nasserism, secularism, and the like, means pledging allegiance to the infi dels.

In addition, al- Qahtani redefi nes the notion of allegiance and rup- ture to make it a weapon directed not only against “heretical Mus- lims,” as in traditional Wahhabism, but also against the West and its civilization. Th is usage was adopted and amplifi ed by the neojihadis of the late 1990s. Although it never enters into the details of the exclusiv- ist body of doctrine, aside from surface correspondences, Allegiance and Rupture in Islam nonetheless signifi cantly helped rehabilitate Wahhabi exclusivism in Sahwi circles. Th is facilitated alliances that were established in 1993 and 1994 between the Sahwa and the rejec- tionists, ardent disciples of the exclusivist school.

Abd al- Rahman al- Dawsari was born in 1913 in a merchant family from the Qasim region that had been settled in Kuwait for ten years. He attended the Mubarakiyya School, the fi rst modern school in the

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emirate, where he was taught by Muslim reformist sheikhs. He later moved toward the Muslim Brothers, among whom he admired Hasan al- Banna and later Sayyid Qutb, although he never offi cially joined the or ga ni za tion. When the Brotherhood supported Nasser’s revolu- tion in 1952, al- Dawsari defi nitively distanced himself from the move- ment. In his view, “Th is revolution is a continuation of the revolution of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk the Freemason; behind it lie America and Freemason circles.” Th e word “Freemasonry” (al- masuniyya), hith- erto absent from the Saudi lexicon, became al- Dawsari’s trademark. It represented for him a unifying principle bringing together all the “enemies of Islam”— Judaism, secularism, communism, and national- ism, as well as materialism, existentialism, and others— in a vast con- spiracy against the entire umma. Although all these elements are con- nected, al- Dawsari explains, priority must be given to the battle against the inner enemy, the “hypocrites” (munafi qun), “nationalists, off - spring of Jewish Freemasonry and students of colonization, who are more harmful to Muslims than what is known as the state of Israel.” Th is priority is justifi ed by strategic considerations because the hypo- crites “are the ones who enable the existence and resiliency of Israel and give Muslims the experience of torture,” as well as by the simple need to purify the Muslim creed from those “modern schools” that, just like the medieval “Kharijites, Muʿtazilites, Qadirites,” and others, deviate from correct dogma. Using this twofold po liti cal and dog- matic justifi cation, al- Dawsari links the concerns of the Muslim Broth- erhood to those of the Wahhabis. In doing so, he carries out a transfer of the hostility of the Wahhabis against their traditional enemies, Is- lamic groups whose creed is seen as deviant, to the traditional enemies of the Muslim Brotherhood, secularists, communists, and the like.

In 1961 al- Dawsari left Kuwait and moved to Riyadh, not far from the Qasim region, his family’s original home. According to some ac- counts, he had just been jailed in Kuwait for stirring up public opin- ion against the constitution of the newly in de pen dent emirate, which he denounced as a violation of the supremacy of shari aʿ. King Faysal is said to have bowed to pressure from Muft i Muhammad bin Ibrahim and to have negotiated al- Dawsari’s release on condition that he settle

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permanently in Saudi Arabia. In the same year al- Dawsari gave up his business activities to devote himself full- time to preaching. He was thereaft er very active in the Saudi religious fi eld, where he had two kinds of infl uence. Th e fi rst was ideological, because he actively con- tributed to spreading an early form of po liti cal consciousness in reli- gious circles, thereby creating an environment suitable for the Sahwa’s infl uence. Also, at a time when the world of cultural production re- mained highly segmented, he was the fi rst sheikh to attack untiringly the “deviations” of Saudi liberals among the intelligentsia and in the nascent intellectual fi eld. His second kind of infl uence related to his methods. He engaged in a veritable jihad through the pen, sending a letter to the editor of the respective newspaper for every article in the press in which he detected a violation of Islam. Some of these letters were published in the newspaper in question or in the magazine Al- Daʿwa, the organ of the offi cial religious institution, but most of them piled up in editors’ desk drawers. At the same time, al- Dawsari was traveling throughout the kingdom, visiting mosques, summer camps, government departments, and schools to denounce the “Masonic peril” he thought threatened the country. He did not mince words: for ex- ample, when asked to give a lecture at the Institute of Public Adminis- tration of Riyadh, a bastion of the Saudi intelligentsia, he began his talk by stating: “I am speaking to you from one of the havens of world Freemasonry in Riyadh,” and went on to violently attack the institute’s programs.

Abd al- Rahman al- Dawsari succeeded in exercising signifi cant in- fl uence in the Saudi religious fi eld until his death in 1979, even rub- bing shoulders with the highest authorities of the Wahhabi religious establishment. He was able to do this primarily because he had a major advantage over the Muslim Brothers in exile: he was of Najdi origin and was thereby seen as legitimate in a religious fi eld in which lineage still carried great weight. Because of his origin, he could allow himself to launch fi erce attacks against Saudi liberals, whereas Mus- lim Brothers, as immigrants, were generally reluctant to get involved in the internal aff airs of their host country. All of this made him the “precursor of the Sahwa.”

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Muhammad Ahmad al- Rashid, the pseudonym of Abd al- Munʿim Salih al- Aʿli al-ʿIzzi, was born in Baghdad in 1938. He joined the Iraqi Muslim Brotherhood in 1953 and began the study of religious sci- ences. Predisposed to the Hanbali tendencies of the Baghdad branch of the movement, he turned to the few sheikhs in Iraq who were carry- ing on the pro- Wahhabi Muslim reformist tradition inherited from Mahmud Shukri al- Alusi, notably Abd al- Karim al- Shaykhali. Al- Rashid thus came to mix Wahhabi religious culture with the Brother- hood’s po liti cal culture. A dedicated supporter of clandestine activ- ism, he resisted the successive waves of repression that struck the Iraqi Brothers in the 1960s until, weary of the battle, he fl ed to Kuwait in 1972. From then on he contributed regularly to the magazine Al- Mujtama ,ʿ where he began to work out his vast theory of daʿwa, which he titled “For a Renewal of the Jurisprudence of daʿwa.” He left Kuwait in the 1980s and thereaft er divided his time between the United Arab Emirates, Malaysia, and Switzerland. Aft er the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, he is reported to have returned to live in Iraq.

Muhammad Ahmad al- Rashid’s essential contribution to Sahwi ideology was to theorize Islamic activism in accordance with the pre- suppositions of the Wahhabi tradition. Two of the fi ve books he de- voted to the subject even became part of the basic Sahwi library. Th e fi rst, Th e Point of Departure, is a demonstration of the legitimacy of or ga nized po liti cal action, relying on jurists such as Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al- Jawziyya, who are recognized and accepted by the Wahhabi tradition. Th e second, Th e Journey, is a veritable treatise on po liti cal activism that deals with three complementary subjects: the movement’s “external policy, defi ned by the nature of relations be- tween the movement and governments, parties, and other groups, that might take the form of warfare, truce, alliance, support, or a call for assistance”; its “internal policy, which establishes the form of the or ga- ni za tion, determines the requirements for becoming a member or an emir, and the rights and duties of preachers”; and its “educational policy, which determines how preachers are trained . . . notably on the moral level.” Deeply aff ected by the experience of repression in Iraq, al- Rashid discusses extensively the forms of clandestine or ga ni za tion

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and the po liti cal strategies that should be adopted in an authoritarian context. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that the book was banned in Saudi Arabia, but according to a former member of the Saudi Mus- lim Brotherhood, “It circulated clandestinely everywhere, and some bookstores we knew even sold it secretly.”

Al- Mujtama ,ʿ the magazine that made al- Rashid’s work known, was published in Kuwait from 1969 on by the Association of Social Re- form (Jamʿiyyat al- islah al- ijtimaʿ i), the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Th is magazine played a major role in the intellectual development of the Sahwa. Ismaʿ il al- Shatti, its editor from 1979 to 1991, explains: “Saudi Arabia was our primary market; we sold a large number of copies there, even in offi cial circles. Universities, schools, and government departments were regular subscribers.” Although con- tributors included infl uential theorists such as al- Rashid and Muham- mad Surur Zayn al- Aʿbidin, the magazine’s principal role was to off er readers “Islamic news” by keeping them informed about the “misfor- tunes” of the Muslim world, which it presented from an ideological angle. Th is was how, in al- Shatti’s view, Al- Mujtamaʿ helped politi- cize the Saudi religious fi eld. It should be added that although the magazine was established at the initiative of the Bannaist wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, when Ismaʿ il al- Shatti assumed the editorship, it moved closer to the Qutbist wing, which made it more in step with the spirit of the Saudi Sahwa.

In addition to the ideology that distinguished the Sahwis within the religious fi eld, they adopted a set of very specifi c social practices. Th ose practices were intended to “politicize everyday life” in order to establish the group and delineate its place in the social arena.

Th e Sahwis viewed Islam as a total system that should govern every detail of daily life, including ways of dressing and speaking and forms of social behavior. Th e Sahwis thus adopted a very strict code of con- duct that they considered an emanation of the Islamic norm. In the pro cess they borrowed widely from the practices of Wahhabi ulema, but although these practices had hitherto been the preserve of a small religious elite, the Sahwa made them a model applicable to everyone.

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On certain questions, Sahwis even sought to distinguish themselves from traditional ulema by showing greater intransigence.

Relying on various hadiths, most Sahwis, for example, asserted that it was forbidden (haram) to wear a tunic coming below the ankle and to trim one’s beard. In contrast, the Wahhabi ulema thought wearing a long tunic was merely reprehensible (makruh) when it was not done out of vanity and allowed beards to be trimmed if they grew larger than a fi st. Like the Wahhabi ulema, but much more forcefully, the Sahwis also opposed wearing the iʿqal (the cord holding the shmagh or the ghutra, the cloths Saudis wore on their heads). Sahwi women wore their long black dress ( aʿbaya) on the head, not the shoulders, gloves to conceal their hands, and socks inside their shoes. Some of these practices were designed primarily to reinforce the group’s separ- ateness in the social arena rather than to conform to some preexisting religious norm. Th is was true for wearing the shmagh or the ghutra without an iʿqal, which was not in response to an explicit prohibition but to a much vaguer legal principle: wearing an iʿqal would be “con- trary to what is most appropriate” (khilaf al- awla).

In their conversations the Sahwis adopted “Sahwi speech” that im- mediately identifi ed them in social settings. For example, they endeav- ored to blend their dialect with classical Arabic. Th ey frequently used religious formulas such as “may God help you” (Allah yu iʿnak) “may God bring you success” (Allah yuwaffi qak), and “fear God” (Ittaga- llah). Th eir discussions concerned both religious prohibitions (their Wahhabi side) and the situation of Islam and Muslims (their Brother- hood side).

Th eir singular identity was constructed and reinforced through ac- tion. Th e various extracurricular activities described earlier played a key role in this pro cess. Th is was particularly true of the summer camps, which enabled the Sahwis to give their charges the sense of belonging to a group and sharing values and a worldview that set them apart from the rest of society. Th e fact that the camps were generally held in the desert reinforced this feeling of separateness by adding the physical to the moral.

Th e Sahwi identity in the pro cess of formation suff ered, however, from a fundamental ambiguity. It was in revolt, of course, but the revolt

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was against an abstract reality— the “infi dels” (kuff ar) and the “hypo- crites” (munafi qun)— with no precise embodiment on Saudi territory. Th erefore, when Sahwis, following the teachings of the Brotherhood, evoked the suff ering of Muslims, they were careful to specify that they were talking about the suff ering of all Muslims around the world ex- cept those in the Saudi kingdom. Deprived of fl esh- and- blood ene- mies, the Sahwa emerged primarily as a movement of “rebels without a cause.”

The Jamaʿat as Vanguard of a Countersociety

By the late 1960s or ga nized networks had sprung up within the Sahwa, the members of which were distinguished from the mass of Sahwi sympathizers by a greater commitment to serving the cause. With a unique capacity for mobilization, these networks were the backbone of the Sahwa.

Th e Sahwa community can be described as being made up of three concentric circles. Th e third and largest included everyone brought up in the Saudi school system reformed by the Brotherhood and thereby socialized, willingly or not, in a Sahwi intellectual environment. Al- though individuals in this circle had all been aff ected by the Sahwa’s ideology and worldview, many of them had not adopted its practices. Apart from a few exceptions, they represented an entire generation of young Saudis who sometimes identifi ed themselves as the “Sahwa generation” ( jil al- Sahwa).

Th e second, smaller, circle included those who, in addition to having gone through the educational system, had chosen to participate in extra- curricular activities, through which they established the fraternal bonds that gave substance to the identity of the Sahwi movement. For many, that meant an Islamic commitment (iltizam), expressed in the adoption of the Sahwi practices described earlier. Th e Sahwis identifi ed the members of this second circle as the “committed” (multazimun).

Th e fi rst and smallest circle included the committed who, when participating in extracurricular activities, had been recruited— oft en unknowingly— into one of the Sahwa’s or ga nized networks. Th ey then

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took regular classes in small groups known as circles (halaqat) or families (usar) that inculcated the specifi c ideological body of doctrine of the network to which they now belonged. Th ese networks were generally known in Islamist parlance as jama aʿt tarbawiyya (tarbiya groups), jama aʿt daʿwiyya (daʿwa groups), jama aʿt al- maktabat (li- brary groups, referring to the area of the mosque where books were kept, known to be a place where those groups liked to meet), or simply jama aʿt (sing. jama aʿ). Th e members of this inner circle were known as “affi liates” (muntamun), meaning members of a jama aʿ.

Technically, there were two main jama aʿt in the Sahwa. Th e fi rst of them was made up of four loosely connected subgroups, also referred to as jama aʿt, which all claimed affi liation with the Muslim Brother- hood (al- Ikhwan al- muslimun). Th e members of the other main jama aʿ were referred to as “Sururis” (al- sururiyyun). Th ese fi ve networks (the four Brotherhood groups and the Sururis) were or ga nized hierarchi- cally and were headed by an advisory council. In addition to the young affi liates, they brought together thousands of offi cials from the educa- tional system and the administration and managers from the private sector. Most of them had been recruited when they were young and had ascended the rungs of the jama aʿ, where they now occupied se nior positions. Although the jama aʿt were overwhelmingly male, they did have female sections, more developed among the Brothers than among the Sururis.

Aside from a few fl eeting references, no work of scholarship or journalism has dealt with these jama aʿt, although they have existed for nearly forty years. Th ey have always been a signifi cant taboo in Saudi politics, and none of their known leaders has ever publicly acknowl- edged their existence. Even recently, Salman al- Aʿwada, when asked by a reporter whether he was a Sururi, answered with a pun and changed the subject. But in the last few years some mid- ranking members and young activists of the jama aʿt, whether still affi liates or dissidents, have timidly begun to speak out. Given the great secrecy under which the jama aʿt were established and the resulting near absence of written documents concerning them, this attempt to retrace their history is mostly based on personal interviews with those insiders, as well as with non- Saudi Islamists who played a role on the regional level. As will be

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seen in the next chapters, shedding light on the jama aʿt allows us to introduce an essential variable without which it would not be possible to adequately understand and explain the dynamics behind Islamist mobilizations in Saudi Arabia.

Most accounts trace the origin of the Sahwa’s or ga nized networks to Mannaʿ al- Qattan, who was born in 1925 and was one of the earliest Brothers to settle in Saudi Arabia, in 1953. In the early 1960s, when the Egyptian Brother Ali Aʿshmawi traveled to Saudi Arabia, he was told that the Brothers in Saudi Arabia had chosen al- Qattan as their leader, or, as Aʿshmawi asserts, that al- Qattan had imposed himself as the person in charge. Al- Qattan seems to have been so completely unknown outside the kingdom at that time that when Aʿshmawi told a fellow Egyptian Brother that al- Qattan was the local leader, he ex- claimed: “Who is this Mannaʿ al- Qattan? Strange things are going on over there.” At that time the role of Mannaʿ al- Qattan was primarily that of mediator between the Saudi government and the Egyptian “central offi ce” of the Brotherhood. Under his aegis, and apparently with the blessing of King Faysal, the various branches of the move- ment in exile in Saudi Arabia had reconstituted themselves with the primary aim of providing logistic and fi nancial support to militants who had remained on the ground. But, as King Abd al- Aziz had done with Hasan al- Banna, Faysal did bar al- Qattan from establishing a Saudi branch of the Brotherhood.

Th e nature of Mannaʿ al- Qattan’s role in the creation of a network of Saudi Brothers is a matter of debate. Aʿshmawi believes that it was a direct one, but in the view of many, al- Qattan merely had a good deal of infl uence on the men who became the fi rst Brothers in the kingdom. Th is is the version adopted by Ismaʿ il al- Shatti, a leading fi gure in the Kuwaiti Brotherhood and very knowledgeable about the Saudi networks: “Saudis in any case would never have agreed to be led by a non- Saudi,” he argued.

Th e fi rst jama aʿ of the Saudi Brotherhood was apparently created by Hamad al- Sulayfi h. Born in Najd in 1938, he was one of the fi rst graduates of the Faculty of Shari aʿ of Riyadh in the late 1950s, and he went on to become a high offi cial in the Ministry of Education, where he was the fi rst person put in charge of supervising the activities of the

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committees for raising Islamic consciousness. Already under the infl uence of al- Qattan, who taught at the faculty, al- Sulayfi h was re- portedly also impressed by the ideas and the personality of the Egyp- tian Brother Saʿid Ramadan, Hasan al- Banna’s son- in- law, who fre- quently traveled to Saudi Arabia. In the late 1960s al- Sulayfi h decided to see more of the world and secured appointments as educational attaché in Iran and then in Pakistan. He therefore asked one of his subordinates, Abdallah al- Turki, born in the Sudayr region in 1940 and also a graduate of the Faculty of Shariʿa of Riyadh, to take over his embryonic network. When he returned to Saudi Arabia, he gave up his fi rst plan and created another jamaʿa, which became famous in Saudi Islamist circles as the Brothers of al- Sulayfi h (Ikhwan al- Sulayfi h).

Al- Sulayfi h’s fi rst jama aʿ that had been turned over to Abdallah al- Turki soon came under the leadership of another graduate of the Fac- ulty of Shari aʿ and a student of al- Sulayfi h and al- Qattan, Saʿ ud al- Funaysan, born in Zulfi in 1942. Al- Turki, who had just been appointed president of Imam University, wanted to distance himself from any potentially compromising activities. Th e group now under al- Funaysan’s leadership was closely tied to a small informal religious institute in Riyadh, which served as its base and recruiting structure, and where the group’s members oft en took courses. Located in the conservative neighborhood of al- Dikhna, the institute was called Dar al-ʿilm (Th e House of Religious Knowledge). Saudi Islamists, as a result, oft en called the group the jama aʿ of Dar al-ʿilm, or more prosai- cally, the Brothers of al- Funaysan (Ikhwan al- Funaysan). When al- Funaysan was transferred to Imam University in the late 1970s (where he became head of the Faculty of Shari aʿ in 1982), his jama aʿ estab- lished a powerful base there and was then sometimes known as the Brothers of Imam University.

Th ese two fi rst jama aʿt related to the Brotherhood were soon joined by a third, known as the Brothers of Zubayr (Ikhwan al- Zubayr), aft er the town of the same name southwest of Basra in Iraq. Families from Najd fl eeing frequent famines and wars had moved to this fertile oasis since the seventeenth century. In the late nineteenth century Zubayr became a base for the inclusivist Wahhabi ulema, who had been driven

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out by the domination of the exclusivists over the Saudi religious fi eld. Only inclusivists would have sought refuge in a town known as the site of the tombs of prestigious “saints,” namely, companions of the Prophet, including Zubayr, from whom the town derived its name. In 1922 Zubayr was annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq, thereby becoming part of a po liti cally turbulent country. Th e various movements active in the region set up bases there, but the am- bient conservatism ensured that the Muslim Brotherhood met with the greatest success. In the late 1940s a group of notables and ulema, among whom was Rashid al- Faqih, father of the Saudi opposition fi g- ure now living in exile in London, Saʿ d al- Faqih, created the Associa- tion to Combat Vice (Jamʿiyyat mukafahat al- radhila). It formed the core of the Association of Social Reform (Jamʿiyyat al- islah al- ijtimaʿ i), the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood established in 1952 and banned following the 1958 coup d’état. Th e persecuted members of the Brotherhood joined the great wave of emigration of the inhabit- ants of Zubayr to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that had begun in the 1930s and 1940s and had become signifi cant with the fi rst signs of oil wealth. Th e two countries had decided to off er citizenship under certain conditions to Zubayris who requested it. In Saudi Arabia a commission was set up to examine requests, two of whose members were illustrious Brothers from Zubayr, Abdallah al- Aʿqil and Umar al- Dayil. Th e emigration of the Zubayr Brothers had fundamental consequences for the two countries that received them. In Kuwait they played a key role in the 1963 creation of the Association of Social Re- form, the principal organ of the Kuwaiti Muslim Brotherhood, which bore the same name as the association they had established in Zubayr eleven years earlier. In Saudi Arabia they simply re created their Zubayr or ga ni za tion, making it the third Muslim Brotherhood jama aʿ active in the kingdom. Recruitment was for a long time limited to individuals from Zubayr and their descendants before being opened to all Saudis in the 1980s. Among the better- known fi gures of this jama aʿ was Saʿ d al- Faqih (before his exile to En gland).

In the late 1960s a fourth group of Muslim Brothers appeared, based in the Hejaz (the three others had been concentrated in Najd), known as the Brothers of the Hejaz (Ikhwan al- Hijaz). According to

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some accounts, its found er was named Ali al- Tchadi. Other ac- counts stress the role played by Muhammad Umar Zubayr, a Saudi born in the Hejaz in 1932 who became president of King Abd al- Aziz University in 1971. Th e World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY) that had been created with the help of al- Sulayfi h was quickly taken over by the members of this fourth jama aʿ, who made it their base and one of their primary recruiting organizations. Th e extent of the con- trol exerted by the Brothers of the Hejaz over the WAMY is illustrated by the story an interviewee tells of an individual belonging to another jama aʿ in the Muslim Brotherhood who was appointed to a key post in the association and was forced to resign under pressure. Th e jama aʿ of the Brothers of the Hejaz spread rapidly throughout the kingdom, particularly in the eastern and western provinces, where it met with great success, and to a lesser extent in Najd, so that in the late 1980s it was the principal Muslim Brotherhood jama aʿ in the country. Th e strong presence of the Saudi Brothers in the two provinces of the He- jaz and the Ahsaʾ can also be explained by the long familiarity of their populations with the movement’s ideology. In the Hejaz this was the result of traditional relations with Egypt, as well as of the long- standing Muslim reformist presence. In the Ahsaʾ it came from the region’s strong commercial and family ties with neighboring Bah- rain, where Muslim reformists and then the Brotherhood had been very active since the 1920s. Th e names of ʿAwad al- Qarni and Saʿid al- Ghamidi are frequently mentioned as prominent Brothers of the Hejaz.

Although these four jama aʿt of Saudi Brothers claimed the same affi liation, they never succeeded, despite numerous attempts, in estab- lishing formal unity. According to some Saudi Brothers, this fact was what troubled the Egyptian supreme guide of the Brotherhood, Mustafa Mashhur, when he wrote his little book Th e Unity of Islamic Action in a Single Region. But there were many bridges between groups. For instance, in the mid- 1980s there was reportedly a coordi- nating council comprising the principal leaders of the Brotherhood jama aʿt, except that of al- Sulayfi h. Most accounts stress the high degree of cooperation among the various jama aʿt, particularly in the or ga ni za tion of student activities. For the Brothers, this insistence

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on displaying a united front was in response to another consideration: the increasing power of a dissident and then competing jama aʿ, the Sururi jama aʿ, which appeared from the early 1980s to be a growing threat to their position in the marketplace of Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia.

One signifi cant question concerning those jama aʿt is that of the link between the Saudi Brothers and the parent or ga ni za tion in Egypt and the other branches of the movement, brought together in the late 1970s within the international or ga ni za tion. At the individual and informal level it is clear that ties were long standing and numerous through or- ganizations such as the WAMY, controlled by the Saudi brothers, and to a lesser extent through the Muslim World League. But formally it seems that these ties have never been given offi cial status. Among the thirty- eight members of the supreme advisory council of the interna- tional or ga ni za tion of the Brotherhood in the 1980s, the Kuwaiti Is- lamist Abdallah al- Nafi si notes the presence of a Saudi directly ap- pointed by the supreme guide and two others chosen in the name of regional repre sen ta tion. He goes on to say that the “Saudi emissary” (meaning the one appointed by the guide) was a naturalized Egyp- tian. As for the two remaining Saudi representatives, they also were, according to Ismaʿ il al- Shatti, who long represented Kuwait in the in- ternational or ga ni za tion, naturalized Brothers who remained offi - cially connected to the branches of their native countries: Mannaʿ al- Qattan and Abdallah al- Aqil, a historic member of the Muslim Brotherhood from Zubayr, who was based in Kuwait but had been granted Saudi citizenship. Al- Shatti adds that al- Sulayfi h may some- times also have been present, but because of his personal connections and never explicitly as a representative of his jama aʿ. More recently, in July 2009, Egyptian authorities accused Aʿwad al- Qarni of being a member of the international or ga ni za tion, a charge he has vehemently denied.

An even thornier issue is that of the bay aʿ (oath of allegiance) that the members of the movement are theoretically obliged to pledge to the supreme guide. According to various accounts, the oath seems never to have been required of members of the jama aʿt in Saudi Ara- bia. Th e subject was so sensitive that the foreign Brothers who had

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been naturalized as Saudi citizens, considering themselves already bound by a bay aʿ to the king of Saudi Arabia, refused to take another. Th is provoked dismay and sometimes anger among their comrades from other countries, who nonetheless accepted the fait accompli be- cause of the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia for the movement.

According to most available accounts, the second major Saudi jama aʿ, the Sururi jama aʿ, came into being in the late 1960s, that is, around the same time as the Brotherhood jama aʿt. Th e term “Sururi” comes from the name of the Syrian Muhammad Surur bin Nayif Zayn al- Aʿbidin (known as Muhammad Surur), born in the Hawran in 1938, who had been active in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood since the mid- 1950s. From the early 1960s, when he was a middle- rank member, he started expressing strong criticism of the movement. Po- liti cally, he adhered to the still minority Qutbist line of Marwan Hadid, who advocated immediate armed struggle. Religiously, he asserted that “to carry out daʿwa, one must be in agreement with the creed and the methodology of the pious ancestors.” In his view, this was not true of the Brotherhood, including the Damascus branch un- der ʿIsam al- Aʿttar, which, although reputedly more intransigent on the question of creed than the Aleppo and Hama branches, he criti- cized for its inclusivist and pragmatic tendencies. In 1965 he de- cided to leave Syria and move to Saudi Arabia. Th ere he at fi rst taught mathematics and religion in the Scientifi c Institutes of Haʾil, Burayda (where one of his students was allegedly Salman al- Aʿwda), and fi - nally the Eastern Province. In 1968, weary of “trying to reconcile [his] new convictions with [his] membership in the movement,” he left the Brotherhood for good.

He then decided, he explains, to adopt a new form of Islamic activ- ism in harmony with Wahhabi theological precepts. Th is was the origin of the Sururi jama aʿ in the Qasim region, where Muhammad Surur was based at the time. According to most accounts, however, although Surur was the instigator and, for some, the spiritual guide, he never really held the reins of the jama aʿ. Surur hints at the same thing when he explains that when he began this “new activism,” he had decided not to occupy the role of leader because he did not consider himself an aʿlim mujtahid (a sheikh suffi ciently knowledgeable to be

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capable of religious interpretation) and because he was afraid to “bur- den this project of reform and renewal with the responsibility for [his] past errors.” A Saudi secondary- school teacher named Falah al-ʿItri therefore assumed leadership of the jama aʿ, which became known in Islamist circles as the jama aʿ of Falah. Most foreign Brothers, un- aware of the Saudi religious scene’s internal dynamics, considered it to be a new Brotherhood jama aʿ. But rivalry with the Saudi Brothers in the kingdom began from the outset. Muhammad Surur explains: “Af- ter leaving [the Brotherhood], I had to suff er harassment and hostility from my [former] associates. I do not think that anyone in the Muslim world has suff ered as much from his brothers and former companions as I.” Th is is confi rmed by the account of a young activist in the Saudi Brotherhood: “Th e movement veterans told us that the disputes with Surur and his jama aʿ had started almost from the beginning. No one understood where he got his money. Some said that he was getting funds from enemies of the umma.” In 1973 Muhammad Surur was asked to leave Saudi Arabia aft er reports were received denouncing his activities as subversive. He then went to Kuwait, where he took ad- vantage of the confusion outside Saudi Arabia about his allegiance to join the Muslim Brotherhood magazine Al- Mujtama .ʿ He gradually lost direct contact with the Saudi jama aʿ he had inspired and even tried to found a new movement, based in the Salimiyya neighborhood of Kuwait City, but the plan failed. Ironically, it was not until the late 1970s, when Muhammad Surur was already far away, that the Saudi Brothers, especially in Riyadh, began to use the term “Sururi” to des- ignate the jama aʿ of Falah. Founded in the Qasim region, where it had established a monopoly in the sphere of Islamic activism, it had quickly spread to the capital, where it came up against competition from various groups of the Brotherhood. According to a former middle- rank member of the Sururi jama aʿ, “Th e term ‘Sururi’ was used [by the Saudi Brothers] in a disparaging manner. Giving the movement the name of a Syrian was intended to emphasize its foreign origin.”

Despite its polemical origins, the term “Sururi” soon became the jama aʿ’s most common designation also because its members refused to adopt a specifi c name, which would have amounted to acknowledg- ing their status as a movement. Th ey were satisfi ed with identifying

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themselves by vague names such as “the young” (al- shabab), “the pi- ous” (al- salihun), or “the good” (al- tayyibun) while distinguishing themselves from the Brothers, whom they called “comrades from the other side” (al- zumalaʾ al- akharun). As a young man who had been successively a Sururi and a member of the Brotherhood explained: “When you are with the Brothers, there always comes a moment when they explain to you that now you are in a jama aʿ, that you have obliga- tions and duties. To leave, you have, for instance, to write a letter to the head of your study group. But in the Sururis it is very diff erent. Th ey never talk about the jama aʿ.” Th is refusal by the Sururis to admit their status does not come merely from security considerations but is primarily ideological. In the traditional Hanbali- Wahhabi view, the fact of or ga niz ing into a hizb (party) or a jama aʿ (group) poses a prob- lem because it contributes to dividing the community of the faithful, whereas there should be only one party, the party of God. Th is is also in part what motivates members of the Saudi Brotherhood to remain silent publicly about its existence.

Th e considerable mobilizing power of the jamaʿat was not aff ected by their clandestine character. Th is was because they were very cohe- sive and their leaders enjoyed a high degree of loyalty, largely derived from the groups’ modes of socialization. Recruits, to begin with, were oft en very young, particularly those who joined through the circles for the memorization of the Koran or the committees for raising Is- lamic consciousness that were active in schools. By intervening in the primary socialization of children, the jamaʿat gave themselves the means to exercise deep infl uence. Young people later joined study groups and were expected, on pain of expulsion, to attend one or more discussions a week led by the member in charge of the group, the murabbi (educator), sometimes also called emir. Sometimes young members were assigned homework, such as a review of a book ap- proved by the jamaʿa, which would be the subject of a debate. On weekends and during vacations, members of the group, under the supervision of their emir, would go to a camp together or take part in similar activities. Th ese repeated experiences made it possible to bind the group around the emir, who exercised absolute authority. His or- ders, which sometimes came from his hierarchical superiors in the

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jamaʿa, could not be questioned. Th is situation sometimes ap- proached a cult of personality: the emir set himself up as a model for his disciples to imitate.

In part voluntarily, because they felt some distrust of the surround- ing world, and in part unwillingly, because their appearance and be- havior tended to marginalize them, those young Islamists gradually found themselves disaff ected with their society. Recounting his expe- rience as a young Sahwi affi liate in a unique autobiographical novel, Muhammad al- Muzayni describes the magnitude of the break be- tween the Sahwa and the rest of the social world:

Under the infl uence of these austere teachings, we lost feeling for the everyday pleasures. . . . Th e details of people’s faces disappeared, and our relations with them became brittle and superfi cial. From our point of view, they were all the same, there was no diff erence between a friend and a distant acquaintance, and that was even true for our close relations and our family. Th e idea of hanging on to our religion seemed to us the same as hanging on to burning coals. We felt the heat of the fi res glittering in people’s eyes. And we burned ourselves in that heat for the simple reason that we were alone in our short clothing that provoked ridicule and criticism from people who crossed our path, locked into the silence with which we responded to those faces that displayed expressions of surprise at seeing a mutawwaʿ [someone showing the external signs of religiosity] who was someone other than the imam of the mosque.

In this situation of near alienation, the study group and, more broadly, the jama aʿ became all the more indispensable.

Th e use of incentives made it possible to strengthen even further the members’ attachment to the jama aʿ. A fi rst kind of incentive was made up of the feelings the members were encouraged to develop. Some were positive. Muhammad al- Muzayni explains, “We always wanted to create bonds of love between ourselves, and we emphasized these ties by expressions like ‘I love you in God,’ or, as a form of introduc- tion, ‘your brother in God’.” Others were negative. Abdallah Th abit, author of a fi ctionalized autobiography with the theme of Islamist radicalization in Saudi Arabia, emphasizes the importance of fear “of

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the torments of hell and of death.” In the face of that fear, the jama aʿ seemed to be a “lifeline” in a directionless world.

Another sort of incentive was material in nature. Th e account of a Brother from the Eastern Province provides a good illustration: “At King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals [in Dhahran], the Brother- hood controls student housing. Th e competition is stiff for rooms on campus, because most students come from other regions of the king- dom. But anyone who belongs to the Brotherhood or joins up is cer- tain to get what he needs.” Many accounts confi rm this clientelistic use of the resources at the disposal of the jama aʿt. Because they enjoy real material benefi ts, their members are less likely to leave for fear of losing them.

It should be noted that at the periphery of the Sahwa, among those who did not belong formally to any jama aʿ, the authority exercised by the jama aʿt has traditionally been greater than one might expect. Be- cause of the authoritarian character of a country where any other form of social or ga ni za tion, aside from the family and the tribe, is prohib- ited, there are few infl uences in competition with the jama aʿt. It is therefore not surprising to observe that the orders given by jama aʿt leaders not only induced nearly complete obedience among members but also had signifi cant infl uence on the second and, to a lesser extent, the third circles of the Sahwa rotating around them.

A Favorable Context

Although the Sahwa was at fi rst partly the product of foreign infl u- ences, it thus acquired an endogenous character by producing its own identity and its own organizations. In the favorable context of the 1970s, it experienced spectacular growth. Th e explanation lies pri- marily in the religious fi eld, which provided the resources the Sahwis needed to conquer the social arena.

To understand what might have incited the Wahhabi ulema to pro- vide such decisive support to the Sahwa, it should be recalled that since the 1950s the ulema had been suff ering at the sight of a society that was becoming increasingly infl uenced by Western mores. Th is

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was at that time one of the main reasons for Muhammad bin Ibra- him’s fi erce opposition to a whole series of laws adopted by the govern- ment. But the segmented nature of the social arena had limited the capacity of a religious fi eld lacking any real social infrastructure to mobilize people in its name. It was partly to compensate for this struc- tural weakness that Muhammad bin Ibrahim, once he had moved into the inclusivist camp, was happy to accept the exiled activists of the Muslim Brotherhood, in whom he saw welcome reinforcements.

When he died in 1969, the major Wahhabi ulema changed tactics, not strategy. In the wake of his death, the government did all it could to limit the future capacity of the religious fi eld to serve as a counter- power. An “offi cial religious institution” (al- mu aʾssasa al- diniyya al- rasmiyya) was established, and its rules were set by the po liti cal fi eld. Th e personal and informal were replaced by the collegial and bureau- cratic. Th e title of muft i was abandoned, and various newly created organs shared the prerogatives until then jealously guarded by Mu- hammad bin Ibrahim. Th e chief one is the Committee of Se nior Ulema (Hay aʾt kibar al-ʿulamaʾ), made up of three entities: the Council of the Committee of Se nior Ulema (Majlis hay aʾt kibar al-ʿulamaʾ), whose members (seventeen at the time of the council’s creation) are ap- pointed by royal decree and which issues fatwas on the major ques- tions of society and on po liti cal issues directly aff ecting the regime; its counterpart, the Permanent Committee for Research and Fatwas (al- Lajna al- daʾima li- l-buhuth wa- l-ift aʾ), which issues fatwas on per- sonal matters; and the General Offi ce for the Management of Scien- tifi c Research, Fatwas, Preaching, and Guidance (al- Riʾasa al-ʿamma li- idarat al- buhuth al-ʿilmiyya wa- l-ift aʾ wa- l-daʿ wa wa- l-irshad), which ensures “coordination among all the associations and organizations of preaching in Saudi Arabia.” Th us was established something akin to an or ga nized hierarchical clergy, a relatively rare occurrence in the Sunni world. Most of its members belonged to the same “religious ar- istocracy,” the vast majority of whom came from a string of villages in Najd, referred to by Nabil Mouline as the “Najdi crescent,” who had dominated the religious fi eld since the nineteenth century. Th ese great ulema families had traditionally arrogated to themselves the

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monopoly of Wahhabi religious knowledge, and they controlled— and blocked others from— its transmission networks.

Despite this reor ga ni za tion, in order not to appear to be interfering with the autonomy of the religious fi eld, the government had to make sure that the appointments it made appeared to respect the existing hierarchies within the fi eld. For example, a fi gure like the infl uential Abdallah bin Humayd, one of the last exclusivists and a reputed critic of the government, was appointed to the Council of the Committee of Se nior Ulema and then in 1974 became head of the Supreme Council of Justice (al- Majlis al-aʿ la li- l-qadaʾ). Th e government nonetheless had various means to neutralize strong ulema. Collegiality made it possi- ble to compensate for them with weak ulema. One such sheikh was Sheikh Abd al- Aziz bin Baz, born in 1909, vice president of the Islamic University of Medina since its founding in 1961, who was heavily handicapped by a khadiri genealogy, extremely rare among major Wahhabi ulema. In the case of Ibn Baz, the government even went so far as to promote his rise behind the scenes. It was widely reported that in the early 1940s Ibn Baz had demonstrated his in de pen dence by standing up to King Abd al- Aziz, whom he had criticized for having allowed American companies to set up shop in Saudi Arabia. As a re- sult, he had earned a short prison term before repenting. Th is “he- roic deed,” whether true or exaggerated, helped endow Ibn Baz with strong religious capital, indispensable to attain a high position in the fi eld. Aft er his appointment to the Council of the Committee of Se nior Ulema in 1971, in 1975 he was appointed president of the Permanent Committee for Research and Fatwas and then to that of the General Offi ce for the Management of Scientifi c Research, Fatwas, Preaching, and Guidance.

Although the case of Ibn Baz is emblematic of the ways in which the construction of sacred authority can result from profane pro- cesses, it was not the only example of po liti cal intervention in the reli- gious fi eld. Th e essential activity of the royal family consisted of the distribution of resources. With the sudden infl ux of petrodollars en- gendered by the oil boom, it now had the means to tighten the collu- sive transactions that tied it to the dominant fi gures in the religious

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fi eld. Much more eff ectively than in the past, when it had been un- able to prevent repeated criticism from Muhammad bin Ibrahim, it could now provide abundant resources to the “se nior ulema” and through them to the religious fi eld as a whole, while co- opting any- one who rose to prominence there. Th is distributive function be- came an essential aspect of the General Offi ce for the Management of Scientifi c Research, Fatwas, Preaching, and Guidance, which re- ceived the largest part of the bud get allocated to the religious fi eld and distributed it according to its own judgments. Autonomy was thereby apparently preserved, but it created no risks for the po liti cal authorities.

Th is reor ga ni za tion of the religious fi eld, coupled with the sudden infl ux of resources, produced a radical change. Whereas Muhammad bin Ibrahim had chosen in de pen dence, the “se nior ulema” now pre- ferred to systematically ratify royal decisions. Th e position of Ibn Baz on positive laws was emblematic of this change. Although Muham- mad bin Ibrahim had not hesitated to make their adoption a red line separating believers from unbelievers, Ibn Baz added a much more restrictive condition before takfi r could be pronounced, known as the condition of legalization (shart al- istihlal). Th is meant that there was a major act of impiety (kufr abkar), which alone merited excommuni- cation, only when the government went directly against shari aʿ by making lawful what God’s law had explicitly prohibited. Confronted with this contradiction with his master in an interview in a Kuwaiti magazine, Ibn Baz had no recourse but to answer: “Muhammad bin Ibrahim was not infallible. He was an aʿlim like the others, who was sometimes right and sometimes wrong. He was neither a messenger nor a prophet.”

Although these ulema no longer allowed themselves to take on the state, they nonetheless maintained undivided domination over the religious fi eld, and the government continued to delegate control over it to them. Unlike the situation at the time of Muhammad bin Ibra- him, when religious infrastructures remained lacking, the religious fi eld now enjoyed sustained development made possible by the daz- zling growth of oil revenue, the annual amount of which was multi- plied by seventy between 1970 and 1980.

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In this context, with colossal resources now at their disposal, the ulema of the offi cial religious institution or ga nized their re sis tance, so to speak, by acting directly on society. For example, they began to en- courage, morally and fi nancially, all initiatives, as long as they were not incompatible with Wahhabi norms, that were likely to strengthen the presence of Islam and, beyond that, their own presence in the so- cial arena. With their blessing, Islamic associations, organizations, and circles proliferated in a largely deregulated fi eld. “Saudi Islamist movements were practically acting in the open,” according to Nasir al- Huzaymi, who was active in this period. “During the hajj [pilgrim- age to Mecca], each one had its own camp and or ga nized its own campaigns. I even remember a speaker from al- Jamaʿa al- Salafi yya al- Muhtasiba [al- Huzaymi’s group] announcing over a microphone the opening of the movement’s campaign, explicitly identifying it.” Former Sururi Sulayman al- Dahayyan says, “If you just pronounced the word ‘Islam,’ everything was possible.” Th e result was the estab- lishment of what the Islamist intellectual Mazin al- Mutabaqqani described as “a veritable Islamic civil society.”

Th e emergence of this “Islamic civil society” was also made possible by the great freedom of tone and action that reigned in the religious fi eld because the “se nior ulema” in charge of policing it turned out to be incapable or unwilling. Mazin al- Mutabaqqani, writing about the late 1970s, observes:

It can be said with great certainty that no period of the Saudi regime was as marked by freedom of expression in the mosques and freedom of assembly as that period. I remember that in Jeddah alone there were about ten orators who delivered very vehement Friday sermons. No authorization from the Ministry of the Hajj and the Waq fs [religious endowments] or from any other government body was necessary. In the great mosque of Medina, it even happened that individuals stood up aft er the Friday prayer and started to criticize social morality, as well as the government in a subtle way. [Al- Mutabaqqani is probably referring here to preachers of al- Jamaʿ a al- Salafi yya al- Muhtasiba, the fi rst group to attack openly the “deviations” of society and then the government.]

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In this lively environment the offi cial religious institution acted as a kind of Vatican of the religious fi eld, actively supporting all its legitimate agents— those who did not challenge the bases of the Wah- habi tradition— and always striving to remain aloof from their inter- nal disputes. At the head of this Vatican sat Ibn Baz, a veritable Wah- habi pope whom all the participants in the Saudi religious fi eld called al- walid (our father). He was known to have good relations with all movements in the fi eld, whether the Muslim Brotherhood and the Sahwa, the Ahl al- Hadith, or even the Tabligh, a pietist and prosely- tizing movement from the Indian subcontinent that had grown expo- nentially in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. In turn, all these movements claimed support from Ibn Baz in their disputes, exhibiting fatwas and tazkiyat (recommendations) in which he had praised their merits. Th e same thing applied, to a lesser degree, to the man considered his de facto second in the Wahhabi religious institution, Sheikh Muham- mad bin ʿUthaymin.

Despite this proliferation of groups, the fact remains that because the Sahwa enjoyed a special position at the heart of the system, it was in the best position to benefi t from the patronage of the offi cial reli- gious institution. In this context extracurricular activities experi- enced dazzling growth. Similarly, the jama aʿt were able to extend their grip on the Saudi social arena without hindrance.

The Unifying Potential of the Sahwa

Th e fact that the Sahwa’s earliest base was the educational system had a decisive consequence. Because Saudi graduates were distributed throughout nearly all fi elds, the Sahwa was able to establish a presence throughout Saudi society. Above all, the considerable resources it re- ceived from the religious fi eld following the oil boom of 1973 enabled it to develop its networks further and make its presence more felt ev- erywhere. In the pro cess, although it had been built up initially on the margins of existing norms, it soon imposed a new norm, through which it tended to homogenize the social arena. Th is occurred at every level. For example, the ubiquitous presence of Sahwis blurred the

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boundaries that had existed between “religious” and “liberal” neigh- borhoods, unifying space in a conservative mode. Th is led to the pro- hibition of cinemas, an increased presence of the religious police, who no longer hesitated to violate private space, and, more symbolically, the disappearance of female singers from Saudi tele vi sion. Th e Sahwa also imposed a new language that, like Islamist discourse everywhere else, represented a bricolage of the language of the in- telligentsia with that of the ulema, which it combined and trans- formed. As a result, the rise to power of the Sahwa called into ques- tion the logic of segmentation that had long been dominant in the fi eld of power and in Saudi society as a whole.

But this pro cess had its limits. Desegmentation did not at this stage mean desectorization. Th e latent unifi cation of the social arena came up against the vitality of the logic of the fi eld. Even though the agents of the Sahwa may have shared the same ideological reference points, the fi elds to which they belonged imposed their rules on them. Sahwi ulema and Sahwi intellectuals (in the sense of educated laymen) did not act according to the same rationale and for the same stakes. Simi- larly, although the jama aʿt were in principle transsectoral, in routine circumstances they operated in a very decentralized fashion. Th is was particularly true for the fundamental distinction between religious and lay members, who continued to be socialized in entirely separate ways. Th is separation was strengthened by the division in the Saudi school and university system between religious and secular institutions.

Further, although it is possible to describe the fundamentals of a Sahwi culture, it would be mistaken to think that those fundamentals were received uniformly. Because of the diff erence between the back- grounds, dispositions, and worldviews of Sahwi sheikhs and that of Sahwi intellectuals, they did not see their commitment in a completely identical way. For intellectuals, the Sahwi message, like Islamism else- where in the Arab world, tended to state an implicit challenge to the authority of the ulema. Men of religion have little place in the work of Qutb, who thought that “they don’t understand the true spirit of the Koran.” But for the sheikhs, whether or not they belonged to the Sahwa, the ulema were still the “heirs of the prophets” (warathat al- anbiya )ʾ. Th e indispensable preeminence of the ulema was even a

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recurrent theme in the writings of Sahwi ulema. Th is in itself might suggest that they felt it necessary to justify their authority to the rest of the Sahwa. Th ere is what amounts to a paradox here: although the Sahwa constituted a latent principle of unity, it had to bow to fi eld rules. In this case the rise of the Sahwa even strengthened fi eld corpo- ratism by off ering to each side new discursive tools for asserting its superiority. Th e jama aʿt were also seen in distinct ways. For the ulema, they were akin to traditional networks for the transmission of reli- gious knowledge, but some intellectuals saw them as a form of embry- onic po liti cal or ga ni za tion.

Although the Sahwa represented an unpre ce dented principle of unity of the social arena, in routine circumstances it was thus unable to es- cape from the logic of sectorization. Th ese intrinsic problems were soon joined by an extrinsic threat. Although it laid claim to a monop- oly of Islamic activism, the Sahwa’s position was soon challenged by new actors arising at its margins.

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