From Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion, ed. Robert Wuthnow. 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, Inc., 1998), 670-672.

Saudi Arabia

Containing Mecca, the center of the Islamic religion, oil-rich modern Saudi Arabia occupies most of the Arabian peninsula, which is located between the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf. Islam and politics in Saudi Arabia are closely intertwined and mutually interdependent. Most Saudis are Sunni Muslims, the majority Islamic sect.

The holy cities of Mecca (Makkah) and Medina in western Arabia were the birthplace of Islam in the seventh century. Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca and moved to Medina in 622. Although both cities continued to be pilgrimage sites, they soon lost much of their prominence as the capital of the Muslim empire shifted elsewhere. Ruling Mecca conferred some prestige on later external rulers such as the Ottoman dynasty, who protected and encouraged the pilgrimage to it, but most of Arabia was too arid to support agriculture and too poor to tempt foreign empires. The isolation of central-eastern Arabia was broken in 1745, when Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a Muslim religious reformer, formed an alliance with a local prince, Muhammad ibn Sa'ud. This religious-political alliance has endured through many generations and has served as the basis for the creation of three Saudi kingdoms in Arabia.

The doctrines and ideas of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab were called Wahhabism by his enemies; his followers rejected this term, believing themselves to be the only pure Muslims. The Wahhabis emphasized such core beliefs as the unity of God. They opposed intercession by invoking the prophet Muhammad, objected to the veneration of graves, violently fought followers of the minority Shi'ite sect of Islam and the mystical Sufi tradition, condemned a merely surface adherence to the faith, and sought to eradicate all innovations that they believed had marred the original practices of Islam.

Acting on the basis of this puritanical but appealing approach to Islam, Muhammad ibn Sa'ud and his successors in the Saudi royal family rapidly conquered much of central Arabia, thereby establishing the first Saudi kingdom. This expansion was stopped when the Saudis seized Mecca and Medina, thereby impelling the Ottoman Empire and Egypt to invade Arabia, capture the Saudi capital in 1818, and execute the ruling Saudi prince.

Seemingly, the Saudi-Wahhabi political-religious experiment was at an end, but the faith lived on in the desert and towns of eastern Arabia, and a second Saudi kingdom with its capital at Riyadh replaced Egyptian domination in 1824, gradually conquering most of the territory held earlier. The Saudis gained experience in exercising power, concentrating their rudimentary institutions of government on administering justice, collecting taxes, and fostering Islam. A disputed succession in the royal family in the 1870s, however, led to civil war, foreign intervention, and, by 1891, the overthrow and flight into exile of the Saudi ruler.

The Third Saudi State

A young Saudi prince, Abd al-Aziz (born about 1880), regained control of Riyadh in 1902 and began the third Saudi kingdom. Abd al-Aziz, who was known in the West as ibn Sa'ud, demonstrated good judgment, leadership skills, and extraordinary courage as well as a deep personal and political commitment to Islam. Once again the Saudis reconstituted their empire in central and eastern Arabia. In addition to employing town militias, Abd al-Aziz helped to raise an enthusiastic army from among the former nomads who had been settled and trained as warriors for the faith.

Abd al-Aziz expanded first into coastal eastern Arabia, a region subsequently famous for its oil deposits but then thought to be poor. In 1924-1925 the Saudis added to their realms the crucial cities of Mecca and Medina, thereby expelling the Hashimite royal family. The new united state, officially designated as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, suppressed internal opposition and established peace with its neighbors, thus abandoning further armed expansion of Wahhabi Islam.

After the end of World War II, in 1945, revenues from oil steadily grew, eventually reaching staggering amounts whose allocation and disposal challenged the ingenuity and skills of the royal family. The new prosperity transformed the austere life of the Saudi subjects, enabling dramatic increases in the standard of living, the building of infrastructure, the movement of people to the big cities from the countryside, and the expansion of public education. All these changes brought into question the internal relationship between government, religion, and society.

After the death of Abd al-Aziz in 1953, four of his sons ruled in turn, retaining most political power in their hands. The Saudi official view was that the kingdom needed no written constitution, legislature, and political parties since the Qur'an, the sacred book of Islam, served as the basis of the state and the political system. Religious education dominated the formation of values in the schools and universities, and the ulama (scholarly men of religion) provided legitimacy to the ruling elite. In return, the kings and the expanding bureaucracy maintained the supremacy of conservative religious values in law, social customs, gender roles, the media, and in culture generally.

Saudi foreign policy was also based in part on religious considerations: the government opposed both Jewish Israel and the atheist Soviet Union. In the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the movement toward peace between the Palestinians and Israelis, Saudi Arabia could turn its attention elsewhere. Since the onset of oil prosperity, the kingdom has donated large sums of money to support the spread of Islam and to back various Muslim nations and groups. Saudi Arabia has also served as the chief patron of the Muslim duty to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, expanding arrangements to house and transport the millions of pilgrims who come from all over the world. Saudi contributions played a major role in the World Muslim League, a religious-propagation agency founded in 1962 with its headquarters in Mecca, while Saudi Arabia was also highly influential in the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a multinational grouping of Muslim countries that periodically organizes summit conferences of government leaders.

Challenges to the Political-Religious Alliance

On the first day of the Muslim year 1400 (November 20, 1979), a group of fundamentalist Islamic militants seized control of the Ka'ba, Islam's most sacred place, in the Grand Mosque in Mecca. They called for the overthrow of the Saudi dynasty and a return to strict Islamic practices. Although this uprising ultimately was suppressed, the regime recognized that its legitimacy was threatened and continued vigorously a policy of co-opting religious conservatives. Most of the Islamic Middle East, other than the Islamic Republic of Iran, had gradually become more secular in the post-World War II period, but Saudi Arabia remained strongly committed to fostering a large role in public life for religion. Many Muslims in Saudi Arabia nevertheless criticized the regime for the corruption prevalent among government officials and members of the large royal family as well as a perceived exemption for princes from the equal application of the sacred law.

Three crises have posed a dramatic challenge to Saudi Arabia in recent years. A sharp fall in revenue from oil exports in the mid-1980s continued for most of the next decade to curb government revenues. War between Iraq and Iran (1980-1988) threatened Saudi Arabia both with military confrontation and with the threat of Shi'ite Islamic revivalism from revolutionary Iran. Most dangerous of all was Iraqi leader Saddam Husayn's invasion and annexation of nearby Kuwait in 1990. Hundreds of thousands of foreign troops, including many non-Muslims from such countries as Britain and the United States, defended Saudi Arabia against possible Iraqi attack. Then, with the approval of the United Nations, Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a war in early 1991 that successfully forced Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait.

Domestic critics and some foreign Muslim governments criticized on religious grounds Saudi dependence on the non-Muslim United States for protecting its security against Iran and Iraq. In 1992-1993 King Fahd instituted a broad range of political reforms, including the appointing of a consultative council (Majlis al-Shura), an institution long desired both by secularizing liberalizers and conservative Islamic revivalists. The reforms did not stop the growth of underground religiously oriented opposition groups, particularly among young people in the cities, university students, preachers, elements of the ulama, some professionals, and a few of the Shi'ites living in the wealthy Eastern Province. Although the fragmented opposition was generally peaceful, two bombings directed against American military forces stationed in Saudi Arabia in November 1995 and June 1996 may have been the result of Saudi underground religious factions.

Despite serious challenges, Saudi Arabia has continued the alliance of religion and the state begun in 1745 and articulated during the three Saudi kingdoms. Using enormous new wealth arising from oil, the Saudi dynasty and the ulama have maintained a mutually interdependent relationship while substantially expanding their influence in the world.

See also Islam; Jordan; Mecca; Sacred places.

Author: William Ochsenwald

Bibliography

Dekmejian, R. Hrair. "The Rise of Political Islamism in Saudi Arabia." Middle East Journal 48 (autumn 1994): 627-643.
Long, David. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.
Ochsenwald, William. "Saudi Arabia." In The Politics of Islamic Revivalism: Diversity and Unity, edited by Shireen T. Hunter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988.
Salibi, Kemal. A History of Arabia. Delmar, N.Y.: Caravan Books, 1980.
Al-Yassini, Ayman. Religion and State in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1985.