Citizens not serfs can save Saudi Arabia

By David Gardner

Published: February 27 2011 19:06 | Last updated: February 27 2011 19:06

On his return from months of hospitalisation and recuperation in the US and Morocco, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was characteristically unstinting in his generosity. He lavished $36bn on his subjects, in pay rises and debt forgiveness, and to help them buy houses and start businesses. As munificence goes, this was princely. Whether it was politic is another question.

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It might buy off whatever unrest is brewing underneath the kingdom’s thick layers of political, military and religious control. Or it may be perceived as the panicky response of an absolute monarchy to the wave of revolution unfolding across the Arab world; the rulers of neighbouring Bahrain offered their people a similar bribe but they took to the streets anyway. Yet King Abdullah’s decision to hose Saudis with money to pre-empt any revolt is certainly old politics in a new era – and unless it is followed by political reforms the king himself has timidly championed, the future of the kingdom must be in question.
The House of Saud is, of course, resilient. It resisted the radical pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser when Nasserism was sweeping all before it, from Syria to Yemen. It saw off Ayatollah Khomeini’s attempts to export the Iranian revolution. It has overcome violent Islamist challenges, and emerged reasonably unscathed after inviting half a million foreign troops on to its soil – the birthplace of Islam – during the 1990-91 Gulf war. Many have bet against the al-Saud, but here they still are.
The king’s largesse looks like an attempt to renew the social contract between rulers and ruled that underpins absolutism in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. At its most complete, this is cradle-to-grave paternalism, where the oil revenues of a rentier state free its rulers from the political bindings of their society, enabling provision not only of education and health but jobs and housing, in exchange for loyalty and obeisance.
But even for a kingdom with such financial might – the Saudis plan to spend $400bn on infrastructure, education and jobs creation to the end of 2014 – this deal is looking dilapidated. Oil-dominated economies create few jobs, especially if they support a bloated royal family that affects not to understand where a privy purse ends and a public budget begins.
Only in the past few years has per capita income started to get back to where it was three decades ago. Youth unemployment in Saudi Arabia is comparable to Egypt’s or Libya’s. Yet there is less opportunity, less social as well as political freedom – but probably as great an awareness of global and regional change courtesy of satellite television and the internet. More than a million Saudis have been educated abroad, often to a high level.
More fundamentally, this attempt to renew the social contract strengthens the historic compact which is the foundation stone of the Saudi state: between the monarchy and the clerical establishment, the House of Saud and the House of ibn Abdul Wahhab – the 18th century preacher whose ideas have provided Saudi Arabia’s rulers with religious legitimacy. This symbiosis of temporal and religious power, which claims to have redeemed Arabia from a tribal stew of idolatry and chaos, ignorance and vice, all but anathematises all other beliefs and treats reform as a synonym of licentiousness.
In return for the religious cover it provides, the Wahhabi clerical establishment wields decisive social control, not only over religion and public comportment, such as the segregation and cloistering of women, but also over education and justice.
Wahhabi power therefore cuts right across King Abdullah’s incremental reforms, which he sees as vital if the Saudi kingdom is to survive. He has tried to rein in the clerics and reform the judiciary, rid school textbooks of fanaticism and vet teachers, and to foster a more pluralist concept of Islam. Recognising that the Saudi state has remained static, while its subjects have been dragged into a brittle modernity imported like an air conditioner, he launched a “national dialogue” in 2003. This held out the prospect of more open government, tighter financial controls on the royal share of national wealth, greater rights for women, even the gradual introduction of elections.
A coalition of Islamist reformers and liberals responded with what amounted to a blueptint for constitutional monarchy called “A vision for the present and future of the homeland” that, for the first time, identified Wahhabism as the deathly hand holding back the emergence of Saudia Arabia as a successful modern state all its citizens could support.
But the king’s most powerful brothers do not share his sense of the need for a more open society. No sooner was the dialogue under way than Prince Nayef, the interior minister, summoned dissidents to his office where, says a reformer present, they were told: “What we won by the sword, we will keep by the sword.”
Because of the paramount importance the al-Saud give to family consensus, and because they will soon face a wrenching succession, Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no absolute monarch. King Abdullah, now 87 and in poor health, may be its last hope for reform for some time.
His notional successor Crown Prince Sultan, the defence minister, is thought to be 86 and in even worse health, making the arch-conservative Prince Nayef, 77, his most likely successor – and he wants nothing to do with reform.
There is a path forward, but only a short time to take it. That is to move towards a more constitutional monarchy under the rule of law. If the al-Saud treat their people as citizens rather than serfs they can build a counterweight to the deadweight of the Wahhabi establishment, and lay a new and solid foundation stone for a modern kingdom, in tune with its Islamic heritage but more at ease at home, in the region and the world.