Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia

382 Pages·2011·2.04 MB·English

by  Stéphane Lacroix

Awakening Islam

Awakening Islam
Th e Politics of Religious Dissent
in Contemporary Saudi Arabia
Stéphane Lacroix
Translated by
George Holoch
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2011
Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Originally published as Les islamistes saoudiens: Une insurrection
manquée, © Presses Universitaires de France, 2010.
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Lacroix, Stéphane.
Awakening Islam : the politics of religious dissent in contemporary
Saudi Arabia / Stéphane Lacroix ; translated by George Holoch.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978- 0- 674- 04964- 2 (alk. paper)
1. Saudi Arabia—History—1932– 2. Religion and politics— Saudi Arabia.
3. Islamic fundamentalism— Saudi Arabia. 4. Islam and state— Saudi Arabia.
I. Holoch, George. II. Title.
DS244.63.L345 2011
320.5'5709538—dc22 2010040833
Th is work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance,
received fi nancial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Aff airs,
the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and
FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
Contents
1. Islamism in a Fragmented Society 1
2. Th e Development of the Sahwa 37
3. Re sis tance to Sahwa Ascendancy 81
4. A Sacrifi ced Generation 122
5. Th e Logic of the Insurrection 151
6. Anatomy of a Failure 201
7. Th e Islamists aft er the Insurrection 238
Conclusion: Th e Lessons of the Insurrection 265
Glossary 273
Note on Sources and Transliterations 279
Notes 281
Ac know ledg ments 345
Index 347

Awakening Islam

1
Islamism in a Fragmented Society
Saudi Arabia has remained a pers ist ent blind spot in studies of Is-
lamism. Although all writers agree that the religious infl uence of the
strongly proselytizing Saudi kingdom is a key factor in the emergence
and expansion of Islamist movements in the Middle East, there are
very few who can describe with any precision the tenor and methods
of that infl uence. Th e choice is oft en between caricature and outra-
geous oversimplifi cation. Saudi Arabia is said to export a retrograde
Islam, homogeneous and unchanged since the eight eenth century,
when it was revived at the instigation of a preacher from central Arabia,
Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd al-W ahhab. In this picture, modernity
enters into play only indirectly, through the discovery of oil, which
provided a religious idiosyncrasy with the resources for global expan-
sion. Th e limitations of these descriptions can easily be explained:
contemporary Saudi Islam has been the subject of few studies, and
they have mostly been based on secondary sources. For both journal-
ists and researchers, Saudi Islam is terra incognita.
Th e fi rst task is to describe the multiplicity and variability of Islam
in Saudi Arabia. To accomplish this, it is necessary to eff ect a kind of
Copernican revolution in the accepted approach: although Saudi Ara-
bia is oft en considered solely as a power that exports Islam, it also has to
be seen as the recipient of infl uences emanating from most currents of
nineteenth- and twentieth-c entury Islamic revivalism. Th ose infl uences