Chairman Dr Saeed Shehabi: I would like to welcome you all to this session which is being held in exceptional circumstances. Or maybe they are the normal circumstances in the Arab world. This normality sometimes becomes underground and you cannot see it and sometimes it becomes over ground and this is what we are seeing.
What has happened in Tunisia, Egypt and Algeria is not something that is totally unanticipated. The situation in the Middle East for decades has been bad and has been going from bad to worse with despotism, dictatorship, lack of democracy and violations of human rights. This situation is unsustainable. You can’t sustain a society in the modern age that is being ruled with old style autocracies. You cannot continue to have one man controlling a country for life.
Offices are held for a specific period of time and they should always be a renewable. You always have to have a degree of pluralism. We have not had this in the Arab world for several decades and what we saw in recent weeks is only the tip of the iceberg. They will continue. Whatever suppression takes place it is unlikely that the will of the people will be completely eradicated. You cannot destroy the people – if they want to live, they will live.
Human beings have the ability to sustain life, to create life, to make life and the people of Tunis have spearheaded the revolt against these autocracies which have a limited life span. In the next few years you will see maybe not a total domino effect but a degree of succession and change.
Arabia is at the centre of attention of the world. And Saudi Arabia itself is a country which is rich in oil, which is central to Arab politics, which is located at centre stage of the Muslim world and it is probably the most important country in the Muslim world. More than two million go to hajj every year and throughout the year you have an influx of people going to Saudi Arabia. This is in addition to the oil tankers that are going through the Gulf every day to carry oil to the Western countries.
Since the modern state was established Saudi Arabia has not seen major changes. Many people are asking why don’t we any development in Saudi Arabia or other Gulf states which are members of the Gulf Co-operation Council. Since this inception in 1981 we haven’t seen real positive changes for the people. Yes, they have oil, yes they are living but at what expense, at what level of human dignity are they surviving.
Saudi Arabia is central to the region. We have to look at what is going on in Saudi Arabia, the dynamics of politics and the dynamics of change despite the fact that we do not see any movement is it really as stable as we observe? Is it as strong and powerful a regime as the regime itself would like to tell the world? Or are there forces at work behind the scenes.
Tonight we have a distinguished academic who has written several books the latest of which was published just a few months ago about the history of Saudi Arabia. She has written extensively about her country. She is a native Saudi and is following events closely as an academic and as a Saudi national who is concerned with what is happening in her own land. She will discuss whether it is a state of security or a security state.
Dr Madawi Al-Rasheed: Thank you Dr Saeed. It is a pleasure to address this distinguished audience and thank you for inviting me. This is not the first time. I have been invited before by Dr Saeed and I appreciate his initiative in bringing people together and also diversifying and getting audiences in multiple voices. That is perhaps only possible in a place like London for us who come from the Arab world.
The title of my talk today is ‘After king Abdullah a state of security or security of the state?’ First let me just start with a remark. The ideas that this title invokes such as state security or security of the state does not mean that during the rein of King Abdullah Saudis were enjoying a real good time.
I have four points to make: first the image of the current King Abdullah as the reformer. I am sure you have come across newspaper articles, media reporting and many other sources from Saudi Arabia including journalists and some distinguished academics and scholars who project the rule of King Abdullah as a complete break from the past.
Abdullah is known, or he would like to be known, as ‘malik al insaniyah’ that is the humanitarian king. And people justify this kind of title by citing examples of going to the Vatican, inter-faith dialogue and many, many other incidents which I would call pr initiatives in order to fix Abdullah in the historical imagination as a reformer king.
An assessment of his legacy will conclude with a statement that he made cosmetic changes. That is the conclusion that I reached in the last book that I wrote which Dr Saeed just quoted: ‘A history of Saudi Arabia’.
What do I mean by cosmetic change. All Abdullah did was to modernize authoritarian rule – basically to put some kind of decoration on that authoritarian repressive system in Saudi Arabia. These initiatives which are called change and reform are not structural or they are not embedded in institutions. He came to power at a time which was considered the worst time for Saudi Arabia. He became king in 2005 and that is only four years after 9/11.
Some people argue that since the mid 1990’s Abdullah was actually the defacto ruler of Saudi Arabia while his brother, King Fahd, was incapacitated. Abdullah did many things. I will list some of them. Abdullah decided that political change is out of his reach. He was not intending to make any political reform and by political change I mean increasing political participation, granting human rights, allowing the country to breathe, creating a space of civil society and also increasing political participation – I mean specifically an elected national assembly.
All Abdullah was able to do was a number of things. First religious change. Religious change means some cosmetic change in the form of promising to change the religious curricula or sacking so-called radical preachers while the religion of the state remained intact. He was not able to change the structure but he was able to fire this preacher or that preacher, cancel a paragraph from this religious text or that religious text. But structurally Saudi Arabia is still hostage to one religious interpretation, that people know as Wahabia.
At the level of society, Abdullah thought that he could fight terrorism by allowing women greater visibility in society. So today we see more Saudi women in, for example, the media or as journalists. He was even photographed with Saudi women and this was taken as an indication that women are now actually gaining their rights in Saudi Arabia under the umbrella of King Abdullah.
But this is social liberalization that does not cost him too much. And it is interesting how authoritarian rulers love women. And I mean love women both literally and metaphorically. Somehow they like to engage with women. They would marry more than one or two or three or four and so it goes on forever. Somehow dictators or authoritarian rulers like to engage in that and it is an extension of power and an extension of wealth. Old men sometimes do that.
At the another level he engages with women because women have the status of a minority and authoritarian rulers sometimes like to be seen as engaging minorities because giving women some freedom does not challenge authoritarian rule. They do not represent a real challenge. But if women went to the streets and asked for their political rights then they are a challenge. So far no Saudi women had joined a demonstration to ask for political rights in a country where men do not have political rights.
The third thing that Abdullah did was economic liberalization. He opened the economy and this was not because he was a neo liberal. This was done in the late 1990’s under the pressure of a serious economic and financial crisis resulting from the debt that Saudi Arabia accumulated over the last two decades, the 1980’s and 1990’s under King Fahd. Therefore the economic pressure on Abdullah had pushed him to refinance the debt of the Saudi government at a time when oil prices were extremely low and oil prices did not go up until after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. So it was a god sent gift for Abdullah in 2003 to have a sharp rise in the price of oil.
When it came to political change, I did not notice much difference between the rule of Abdullah and the previous decade. At the height of American pressure he came up with municipal elections. And even then only one-third of the elected members of the municipal council were allowed to be elected. The others were appointed. These elections were supposed to take place every four years. They took place in 2005 and they were cancelled in 2009. Also they were very limited. Women were excluded as voters and candidates.
Under the past five years we have be living under the myth of these reforms. To just give you an example of how under the rule of Abdullah political prisoners were treated. There was a group in 2004 – 2005 calling for constitutional change and an elected national assembly, through writing petitions and presenting them to the king. Most of them were put in prison for extended periods of time and up to the present some of them cannot leave the country and they have had their passports confiscated. Abdullah was helpless. He couldn’t do much.
Now his supporters blame this wave of repression on his brother but in a way the incapacity of Abdullah to do much about political change is a function of the fact that there isn’t one single Saudi state today, there are multiple states within the state that we call Saudi Arabia. Each minister from the major ministries runs the ministry as his own country. Therefore we have multiple power centres within the state and the age of a centralised state is gone.
This picture that I painted makes people object and they will say I have go it wrong. Abdullah is the greatest thing that happened to Saudi Arabia. We could debate that during the discussion.
What will happen after Abdullah? I am sure you are aware that for the last two months he was in New York undergoing surgery. He is 86 and he has just gone to Morocco to recover.
So nothing will change dramatically after Abdullah. If it is bad now it is likely to become worse because of the uncertainty of the succession in Saudi Arabia. Power and its distribution will remain the same, because already there are major power holders in the ministries: the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other ministers who will remain if not themselves, their sons. There might be some kind of shuffle between the sons who are running the ministries because the fathers are too old to do the job and this reshuffle would confirm the people in their place.
Let me go to the second important issue and that is who is going to rule Saudi Arabia after Abdullah. Is it sultan? Is it Naif? Is it Sulman? Are we going to see somebody from the second generation.
Saudi Arabia has a problem in the sense that so far succession is horizontal. It goes from one brother to the other. It is very difficult to see how it could move from this horizontal pattern to the vertical pattern without creating major schisms within the royal family. So for example if one follows the line of succession when Abdullah dies the crown prince will become king, that is sultan but he is equally ill. He is not in very good shape. And if he dies Naif will become king.
But again Naif is very old. So what is going to happen. They could reach a dead end and they would have to skip this old generation and move vertically to one of the sons. And here we are going to have some kind of problem because the sons have actually built their muscles in the shadow of their fathers and therefore each one of them is going to inherit the position and the power of his father.
Here I am talking about a couple of important princes, for example the deputy Minister of the Interior Mohammed bin Naif and Sultan’s son Khalid and then his other son Bandar in addition to for example other princes, the son of Fahd who is the governor of the Eastern Province.
In this kind of situation they could rule as a family corporation which means that they rule together and they may put a ceremonial king just for outside consumption, for ceremonies and pomp that is related to power. But on the ground we know that the country is actually shared and divided. I mean this literally in terms of it resources. And as long as the price of oil remains high it means that there are many resources available to divide.
So far the system worked with this kind of division. Those who have real power will have for example the army or the security forces. They have military might and money and there are others who are compensated. They just have economic and financial might such as Walid bin Talal to give one example. This kind of situation will continue and Saudi Arabia will be ruled by multiple kings with a ceremonial head of state.
Now how does this system work? The regime works and functions because of the complicity of large sections of Saudi society. Each of the contestants, each of those princes has a large constituency. If we talk just about the Ministry of the Interior, it employs almost half a million people. And this is quite a substantial part of the labour force. And as long a people are directly employed by ministries, not only through direct employment but through networks that allow people to have a close relationship with the centres of power, this means that these large sections of Saudi society would remain loyal and also they do not want to undermine their status as beneficiaries of wealth, prestige and power by being so loyal to the princes. They would be able to defend their realm because they want their own person to stay where he is and therefore nothing will change.
Let me move from talking about the state and multiple states to talking about Saudi society. What are the alternatives? We have been talking about Tunisia and yesterday and today Egypt. Things are moving very fast.
But as Dr Shehabi said there are some countries in the pipeline that are going to experience some change and Saudi Arabia is not going to be at the top of the list for the reasons I will outline.
What is happening to Saudi society under this system? First of all Saudi society does not have a history of trade unions, of civil society organisations or of political activism. The best they can do today is write a petition and get 100 or 150 people to sign it and even then its not guaranteed that you will sleep in your house after you sign that petition.
Saudi society does not have the history of political mobilisation like we see in Egypt, in Tunisia and in many other Arab countries. It had known two types of mobilisation either through violence or through demonstrations. The violence has been associated with dissidents from within the Saudi system such as for example from 1927 until the jihadi trend now we have seen that those people who oppose the Saudi state from within always resort to violence – they blow people up and they have been doing that since 2002.
The other kind of mobilisation that we have seen was in the early 1980’s among the Shia in the Eastern Province. And this was a time of mobilization and we can see now what is happening in places like Egypt and Tunisia. But in Saudi Arabia we have not seen this kind of mobilisation.
Who are the main constituents of Saudi society who might take up the issue of political reform and change? Let us look at one category that is very ambiguous and that is the Saudi liberals. Saudi liberals are a category that has nothing to do with liberalism as we know it in the West or through the philosophical and political understanding of it. Those who are called liberals today are very much into social liberalisation.
All they do and write and I am in the process of monitoring everything they say and write, it is a state supported trend which means they are loyal to the state. They think that the state is the saviour. A saviour from what? A saviour from the instructions of the mutaba (the religious scholars) and the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prohibition of Vice.
They want greater social liberalisation. They want women to mix in schools and universities. They want them to go to restaurants and cafes, they want them to drive cars, they want less interference in their privates lives, they want to be able to go shopping during prayer time. So all that kind of appearance of Islam they want to limit but it is very important for the state because without the appearances of Islam the state has no Islamic legitimacy. So by unleashing the muthaba on the street the state can assure some other constituency that it is Islamic. So in a way those so-called liberals have never asked for political participation with the exception of one them. But the majority who call themselves liberals are state functionaries.
They are either working in the state owned and dominated press or as independent writers and authors. But none of them has produced a kind of vision for a liberal project. Those are the liberals and they are completely co-opted by the state. They think the state protects them against the radicalism of the religious establishment.
In terms of the other groups. There was a constitutional movement that gathered momentum in the last decade but it has strong and old roots before. This was known as the constitutional movement that was asking for sort of political change along the lines of the constitutional monarchies that exist in the Arab world. They think this is a first step. Let’s get there first and then we will see what happens. So they aspire to something like Bahrain or Jordan or Morocco.
They have been fragmented from within as a result of authoritarian rule. The whole trend almost evaporated and in a way it was initially an amalgamation of different people with different political persuasions. Some of them were ex communists, ex nationalists and some were moderate Islamists and they came together under the pressure of 9/11 and they tried to present themselves as reformers who could bring solutions against terrorism. This was the context. Therefore they were advising the government to accept change, to protect society from those radicals.
So they thought that political participation would divert people from violence into real political activity. And they had a point at that time. But the state co-opted some members, put some members in prison and released others. And today they are all over the place not being able to come together again.
Some of the people formed an organisation called Jamiat Al Hukuk Al Madiniah wa Saisayyah (The committee for the organisation of civil and political rights). One of the main people behind it is Abdullah Hamed who was part of the constitutional monarchy. They are all academics and lawyers who originate from the central part of Saudi Arabia.
Recently they signed a petition and sent it to the king complaining about his brother Prince Naief. And here I will come to state security or security state. This petition denounced the Minister of Interior and accused him of deviating from Islam because he used the war on terror for excessive policing and torture in prison etc. So far they got away with this petition with the exception of one person who wrote an article on the internet and he was in prison. That is Mohammed Abdul Karim. His article was about the internal situation of the royal family. This was taboo. You cannot discuss the internal affairs of the family and who is going to succeed in the country. You can’t discuss this – it is a secret. And this letter was sent to the crown prince. They asked for the resignation of the Minister of the Interior and taking him to court for the excesses of his ministry against the people.
This jamiat is interesting. It is almost like a new trend that is trying to be like democratic salafis. This might be a contradiction. They are trying to stretch the boundaries of salafi thought in the sense that they are talking about political participation which is haram in some salafi circles, not all. They remind me of a similar trend in Kuwait that is run by Hakim Al Tayabi the founder of Hizeb Ummah which is banned. They are trying to remain within the salafi trend but stretch it. They are talking about human rights, about the relationship between hakim makuk. – this kind of language that the traditional salafis of the Saudi regime would regard as blasphemy, as kufir. You don’t discuss this relationship. The ruler is here and we are just here to obey and we don’t discuss him.
But those people are stretching the boundaries and they are trying to rationalise safaia and make it more rational. So far their activism has been on face book and on the internet and in a way it is very deceptive. The oppression is so great that people think if they write something on face book it is a courageous act. You can imagine the situation in Saudi Arabia. But even then people get arrested. More recently the government introduced a law that governs electronic publications and insisted that the editors of electronic newsletters and publications should be approved, as in the state media. So not just anybody can start a newsletter on the internet without a license.
So even the internet is carefully controlled and censored. If somebody wants to go to an internet shop they have to give their identity card before they use it. So the state is making the space for freedom less and less every year.
Now I come to another category who have been there for a long time and they are the Saudi Islamists. In the religious field we have the Council of Higher Ulema and this is basically a redundant institution. It has lost all credibility, it doesn’t agree on anything and it has become an irrelevant organisation in the country. There is a long history where the official religious scholars are completely marginalised. And the Saudis made it very clear that after Ibn Baz who used to issue some bizarre fatwas, they chose the current mufti who has no credibility among the Saudis and he is a very limited, traditional person who is not aware of what is going on in the real world. So this organisation is completely redundant.
And now there is the second trend which was more politically active and this called the salafi ikhwani, – sometimes they are known as the sororis. They tried hard to maintain their presence but they have been subjected to heavy censorship and have their own schisms as most Islamist movements do. They have their own limitations especially after they have been curbed by the state. They had two options. One was to be outspoken and to end up in prison or to be completely co-opted and leave the political issues and concentrate on women – should they be allowed to drive. They are busy with these issues because they can’t do anything else. There are now famous scholars associated with this trend who are playing the role of the moderates and probably aspiring in the future to replace the Council of Higher Ulema.
Safa Al Hawani who was very outspoken is ill so he is out of the game. He could maintain his integrity because of his illness and not succumb to the pressure.
Then there is the opposition in exile, in London but it is also fragmented and cannot mobilise from abroad despite several calls to challenge the rules and stage demonstrations. They are active in a way. They are cartetic because they are allowing the Saudis to voice their grievances on air but without, so far, the ability to create serious mobilisation. There is a problem of working from aboard and I am sure the Islamist exiles in London face the same problem. Without serious organisation at the grassroots mobilisation is very difficult. It is very difficult to do it by fax, the internet or face book. These are the means of political struggle. They do not make the political struggle. You really need some serious social, economic and political conditions to allow face book and twitter to work. So they don’t make change. This new communication technology can escalate the situation once you have the grassroots sociological conditions for real political change.
Then we have the jihadi salafi which has been going on for a while now. During the last three or four years the security forces were able to capture the inner demons. They have managed to first gravitate towards Iraq and more recently they are found in Yemen. I am sure the trend is still there and it can activate itself.
Then we have another group and that is the Shia. They have a history of mobilisation and activism and we see they are actually divided. There is one loyal group that decided to return to the country almost 20 years ago and there is an outspoken group in exile. I am not sure what kind of co-operation takes place because these are secret networks that are not open to outsiders like myself. I can see a gap that can sometimes be wide between those who stay and those who leave. When we are facing a state with a high purchasing power it is not difficult to fragment oppositions and undermine their credibility from within.
Some groups among the Shia have limited their struggle with the regime to allowing personal religious freedoms and rituals. Overt discrimination against teachers and scholars continues without any real change in the political and religious rights of this community.
I was really surprised that a few years ago the king reshuffled the Council of Higher Ulema. He did it on 14th February which was like his Valentine present to the Saudi people. The ulema condemn Valentine’s Day as something the kafirs do and not us. The reshuffle included ulema from different Islamic fikr schools but it didn’t include the Jafaris. Some Shia called for inclusion in the Council of Higher Ulema. Personally I don’t know why anybody wants to be part of this organisation. Recognition of their madhab is something but to be part of this Higher Council of Ulema is just simply useless. Maybe there is a symbolic significance for this but I didn’t see it. I prefer to see real change rather than symbolic gestures.
They remain a minority trying to get small rights while the general picture of their structural exclusion is not demanded. Religious recognition is now a substitute among the Shia for serious political recognition as an integral part of Saudi society.
The Shia cannot continue to ask for sectarian rights and hope they will be part of the forces that shape the future of the country. They need to move beyond the narrow demands of their sect and be part of the national front that demands change. But this is not their choice. This is the choice of the majority and the opposition forces in that majority. They need to be asked to become part of the national front for change and their religious sectarian rights will become part of the right of every single person and citizen who lives in Saudi Arabia.
So after Abdullah with the prospect of Naif coming to power if sultan dies I think I asked a Saudi friend who know quite a lot about the internal dynamics of the royal family, I said to him who is going to be our next king and he said that depends on the king of death. So it was very witty and I think he is absolutely right.
After Abduallah I think there would be an institutionalisation of the security state which means the police state. It will be there at the head of the state rather than a branch of the state. And this state would be obsessed with its own security rather than the security of the state because it has developed its expertise in policing people – not only openly but with the intelligence services and the damage is not going to be simply for Saudi Arabia but for the region as a whole because this is a ministry that is used to dealing with problems not through diplomacy, not through discussion, not through open channels that can be tested but through secret means, through intelligence services, through sheer force. For a state to have such a personality as Naif as its head is going to be detrimental not only for Saudis but for the region.
This sketch of what is going on in Saudi Arabia at the moment makes me ask are we going to see a next Tunisia? And the conclusion is ‘no, not really’. There are factors that mitigate against the serious drastic change I am talking about. Firs there are the high oil prices. They have been high since 2003 and the country is awash with money. This wealth has been used to buy loyalty as any rentier state would do. So far it has succeeded.
To give you an example the youth of the country. We have one of the biggest problems in the Arab world. That is shared with Egypt and Tunisia. We have a very young population which is seeking education but the economy cannot absorb it. Now one would say why don’t they go and demonstrate. Occasionally they do. Two hundred teachers can stand in front of the Ministry of Education asking for jobs but we don’t have massive mobilisation. Why?
First because the state has purchasing power. Through networks it can give hand outs. We have a society that believes in charity and people go and beg from charitable princes or charitable foundations and the charities absorb the tension. This is not available in Tunisia. Unfortunately the people have become beggars. On u-tube you can see people queuing in front of the doors of the local governor or the prince to get hand outs. Society got used to that. That is how wealth is distributed, a little here a little there.
We are blessed so far with strong family and cultural values that make it an obligation to help other members of the family. All these factors delay the Saudis from going onto the street and demonstrating as in other countries.
The second important factor is that Sarkozy let President Zine El Abdine Ali go and refused to host him in France because there are more than two million Tunisians in France who would object to that. But Saudi Arabia is not Tunisia and for the West Saudi Arabia has an extremely important function. First we know about oil. Oil is extremely important for Western economies. But Saudi Arabia has today made itself more relevant to the West in other ways. Since 9/11 it has convinced the West that it is its partner in fighting terrorism and it actually tells people in Whitehall and in Washington about terrorism And it has made itself important to the West by saying that we are key intelligence sources. You can’t get rid of us. You have to support us. And we have seen this intelligence in the sense that every now and then the Saudis would warn the West about a package that is going to be posted and suddenly they thwart a disaster.
This is very clever. Other regimes have played the game before the Saudis in the sense that they present themselves as great intelligence sources. We know these inner demons, we can catch them and therefore you have to give us technology. So terrorism has become the umbrella under which Arab regimes, including the Saudis, have been getting stronger during the past ten years.
And finally there is the investment. I mentioned that the country has got excessive cash at the moment and as long as we see Western economies declining we are going to see more reliance on cash in the form of sovereign funds, or in the form of investment or saving Western economies through buying weapons. The recent deal that was concluded between the US and Saudi Arabia to buy more planes is an example of how the oil wealth is circulating and basically going out of the country to buy equipment.
There is the emergence of the Saudi regime loyalists. Because of the oil wealth the circle is great and many people are accomplices, not only in the torture that takes place in Saudi prisons, not only in the arrests but also accomplices in the theft that takes place and the corruption. And therefore nobody is going to say my neighbour is doing that. There is a silence and we all have to be quiet. Everybody has a vested interest in the system staying as it is.
How is Saudi Arabia going to look after Abdullah? We are going to see more oppressive measures taken especially if people get the domino effect from Tunisia, even if they don’t intend to change the political system. They can start, for example, mobilising openly rather than writing petitions. So those who cannot find jobs get together as a result of networks and go out onto the street. If we see more of that, a sign that is going to happen we are obviously going to have more repression.
The state looks as if it is concerned with two issues. One is the internal security. That is extremely important – the internal security of the regime. Then there is the other external threat but we won’t have time to talk about and that is the Iranian Saudi context. I will leave it there and if there are any questions I will be happy to answer them.
