Saudis in quest for a 'Luther' to bring tolerant Islam

As Dr. Madawi Al-Rasheed eloquently and capably illustrates, unless the fundamentals of the Saudi political structure are transformed from the top down, Islam will be used as means of oppression, intolerance, deprivation, confusion, segregation and as a deadly tool to legitimate the absolute control of one family over a nation of twenty six million people. Her article below was published on SaudiDebate.com, which is an excellent place to find diverse views on problems with Saudi Arabia and the Mid East. As always don't forget to check out our website at www.cdhr.info

Saudis in quest for a 'Luther' to bring tolerant Islam
SaudiDebate.com Sunday, 11 June 2006

By Madawi Al-Rasheed


Luther fought against ecclesiastical abuse, indulgences and papal authority. He also advocated the doctrine of ‘justification by faith alone’. By nailing his ninety-five theses to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral, he changed the history of Europe forever.

After 9/11, politicians, research centers and think tanks in the West wished that a Saudi Luther would emerge to free Islam from so-called ‘radical interpretations’ and ‘preachers-of-hate’. Both the US and the Saudi regime hoped that the emergence of a Luther would deliver Saudis from the grip of radicalism and into the arms of tolerance.

Freedom House’s recent damning report on the revised Saudi religious curriculum concludes that, when it comes to Saudi religious education, plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose. The report emphasized that the revised curriculum simply repeats previous bigotry against Christians, Jews and other Muslims.

The media coverage of this report was a major set-back to the ‘charm-offensive’ of Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faysal and his brother Turki al-Faysal, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington. Pro-Saudi representatives of US Muslim associations launched a counter-attack to discredit both the report and it authors.

An important dimension in the debate on the Saudi religious textbooks is often forgotten. Saudi authoritarianism itself is predicated on the very same religious interpretations that would form the target of a Lutheran-type Reformation. Consequently, a Saudi Luther, propagating the kind of moderate and rational religious thinking advocated by Freedom House, would actually undermine the Saudi regime, at least in its current form.

Not just words

Calls for changes in Saudi religious texts formed an important plank of the ‘War on Terror’. For perhaps the first time, the enemy was believed to thrive on a school curriculum, old religious textbooks and medieval Islamic interpretations. The West is joined in this quest by authoritarian Arab regimes threatened by a variety of Islamists. Yet both assume that these texts are inspiring contemporary violence and terrorism rather than the context within which these radical interpretations find resonance.

It is more likely that Jihadis are more inspired by Jihadi nashid (songs and recitations), media images of death and horror in Iraq, Palestine, Chechnya and Afghanistan, and internet sermons by Bin Laden, than by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s treatise on Tawhid, Jihad and the Age of Ignorance. It is highly unlikely that the four London bombers of 7/7 had read Ibn Taymiyya’s epistle on Jihad, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s treatise on despots or Abdul Salam Faraj’s, the Neglected Duty. They were more likely to have watched images of death and destruction in Muslim lands on Western media, and were definitely not a product of the Saudi education system.

A Luther who will propagate civil and moderate Islam, according to the specifications of American think tanks such as Freedom House or Rand, may never emerge in Saudi Arabia. The insistence of Western literature that the Muslim world is experiencing a European-style reformation is misconceived. We are not witnessing a Muslim reformation – at least not in the heartland of Islam. The concept of reformation is deeply rooted in European history, the relation between church and power, and other prevalent socio-economic conditions.

Ulama at a loss

The religious Reformation in the Europe of the 16th century needed a Pope for a Luther to emerge. In other words there is no Luther without a Pope. In Islam there has never been a Pope and therefore there will never be a Luther to lead such a Reformation. In theory sanctity in Islam rests in the word of God, the Quran, rather than the word of men. To this extent, Luther ended where Islam began.

In Saudi Arabia, like in many other Arab and Muslim countries, we are witnessing transformation whose main characteristic is the fragmentation of religious authority. This fragmentation has been brought about by factors such as mass education, literacy, and new communication technology, all of which have encouraged the dismantling of religious hierarchies and monopolies, especially that of the ulama (religious scholars). The Saudi state turned such ulama into religious functionaries whose main function was to legitimate its authoritarian rule.

The ulama lost their independence and source of income under the umbrella of the nation-state. Their main function was to legitimate state policy and safeguard the piety of the realm. While they never controlled or influenced politics, the economy, international relations and defence, today they are gradually losing control over religious interpretation and society. The ulama have to compete with so many other interpreters of the tradition, both dead and alive. The emergence of the modern Muslim thinker, often a product of Western education, threatened the monopoly of traditional ulama.

Rational radicals

As a world religion with no established religious hierarchy (even if states since ancient times have struggled to establish such a hierarchy), Islam will always be subject to multiple interpretations of its texts. Muslims, who interpret the text, are grounded in specific social, political and historical contexts and are bound to see the text through the lens of such contexts. Desired ‘civil’ religious interpretations will neither emerge nor become hegemonic because the historical and political context makes radical interpretations rather than so called ‘modernist’ civil Islam resonate with substantial number of people inside Saudi Arabia and beyond.

A civil and moderate Islamic discourse had always existed in the Muslim world since the medieval time of the Mutazilah rationalist school of theology. But this heritage failed to become hegemonic in the Muslim world, except among a small minority of the intellectual religious elite. Islamist modernists remained cocooned in universities and intellectual circles, or in prisons – in the case of those who live in places like Iran. In Saudi Arabia, they remain muted. Authoritarian states define them as ‘the enemy’.

Saudi sponsorship of religious interpretations meant that the religious discourse that legitimates authoritarian rule became widely spread, in contrast to interpretations which call for unleashing the power of reason to handle religious texts. Also Saudi religious interpretations made Jihad haram, forbidden, at home and halal (acceptable) abroad, until Saudi Jihadis brought back the struggle to their own territory.

Fear of reason

Respecting religious tradition rather than critically assessing this tradition was a position conducive to the perpetuation of repressive regimes. Applying reason in the process of interpreting religious texts and the tradition in general will inevitably lead to questioning authoritarian rule. Applying a rationalist approach to the tradition – especially the one that invokes maqasid al-sharia, the purposes of Islamic law – may lead one to conclude that God wanted the faithful to fight domination, establish justice, and encourage tolerance. Authoritarian regimes always try to suppress applying reason to the interpretation of the tradition. They prefer rote learning and memorising the tradition.

Saudi petrodollar privileged a confrontational religious discourse with the world to the detriment of modernist and rationalist interpretations. To guard against the dispersal of oil wealth and the flux of immigrants from all over the world, old radical and exclusionist interpretations thrived, which amounted to xenophobia clothed in a religious cloak. Saudi authoritarian rule needed an exclusionist religious discourse purely for internal consumption, to legitimate a political system that from the very beginning presented itself as the guardian of pure Islam and protector of true Muslims. Muslims who lived outside the Saudi ‘land of piety’ were considered blasphemous.

Commanders of the faithful

The foundation narrative of the Saudi state assumed that all Muslims were blasphemous (sacrilegious) except those who subscribed to its own religious interpretations and become subservient to its political will. Religious interpretations enforced the view that only territories under the rule of the Al-Saud are pious geographies. In order to maintain the piety of these geographies, a radical Islam denouncing all other Muslims flourished.

Today this religious discourse has backfired and began to haunt those who initially sponsored it. The same Saudi religious discourse that accused all other Muslims of blasphemy is now turned against the Saudi regime itself, as this regime is labelled a regime of blasphemy by Bin Laden and many religious scholars. While previously state sponsored religious interpretations declared other Arab and Muslim leaders as blasphemous, for example Nasser, Qaddafi, Bourguiba, Khomeini and Saddam, today the Al-Saud themselves are considered blasphemous and unfit to rule.

The establishment of the Saudi state was based on mass excommunication of other Muslims. Today the Al-Saud themselves and their ulama are declared blasphemous by people who had been brought up on Saudi religious interpretations.

It is impossible to drop Saudi religious interpretations and keep the Al-Saud. The two go together and have been linked for more than two hundred and fifty years. One cannot survive without the other. Dropping radical religious interpretations would deprive the Saudi regime of its identity, legitimacy and raison d’etre. Without these interpretations there will never be a Saudi regime.

New voices?

After 9/11 several young Saudis converted from jihadism to moderate humanist Islam. They continue to appear on Saudi-owned Arab satellite television stations propagating their new faith. They claim to have repented. The media hailed those converts as the new voices of reform. The redeemed are indulged at home and in the West for abandoning their Jihadi past, in much the same way that modern Saudi authors are indulged when they include three to four pages about adolescent sex in their novels. Many appear fascinated by Saudi radicalism and sex, yet neither should be seen as reforming or liberating!

Religious conversions are not only apparent among a less sophisticated group of young men who years ago set video shops ablaze in their quest to purify the land of Islam from blasphemy and debauchery but is also evident among established religious scholars. One sophisticated convert to so-called ‘moderate Islam’ is a famous ex-Sahwi religious scholar with a substantial social base, who is now re-inventing himself as a moderate, rational Islamist. He has become a regular fixture on Saudi-owned Arab satellite television screens where he develops a kind of “civilised Islam” suitable for Arab television viewers.

Other Saudis convert from moderate Islam to jihadism. They flourish on internet discussion boards where they send defiant messages. They make their presence felt through a combination of violence and new media appearances.

The new imperialism

The more that Saudis have access to literacy, education, printing and media, the more religious discourse will fragment and proliferate. There is no single credible religious or political authority in the world of Islam today. Religion and politics are de-centred in the Muslim world. Think about Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia and you will get the picture of a fragmented universe with no state capable of playing a leading role. State controlled pan-Arab and pan-Islamic organisations have lost their credibility.

After 9/11 the USA took an interest in Saudi religious textbooks. For the US to think that it can control religious discourse reflects the arrogance of military might. The American imperialist project of today may be contrasted with those of the past, such as Britain’s. The latter was mainly concerned with trade routes, strategic locations and economic resources. For a long time Britain turned a blind eye when it encountered young Hindu women throwing themselves over the ashes of their dead husbands and did not intervene except at a later phase in its Imperial history. As long as there were tribal sheikhs, Rajputs, and Maharajahs, Britain was happy to let them run the show in return for honouring British interests. Britain never contemplated changing other people’s culture, religion or way of life. Perhaps Imperial Britain was too arrogant to consider the possibility of the natives becoming one day a mirror of Britain. Perhaps Imperial Britain cared only about raw materials and trade.

The current American project resembles that of Imperial France. America wants to rekindle the Napoleonic, universalistic dream that so far has lived in slogans rather than practice.

Awaiting tolerance

To achieve the desired kind of Islam from the point of view of the West, the right context must prevail. Against a previous ‘glorious’ contribution to the world, today Muslims in general have failed to make an impression, except though violence. Their territories host foreign armies against the wishes of the people but with the blessing of authoritarian regimes. Their territories welcome local and foreign torture camps without the ability to investigate those camps. Their children continue to die at the hands of powerful armies, invading under the pretext of the ‘War on Terror’ or liberating them from dictatorships. Muslim men are interred in camps and prisons where they are tortured and abused. Muslims slaughter each other on the basis of sectarian divides. Their economies are crippled by corruption and poverty. Muslims are consumers of global flows rather than initiators of these flows, with the exception of gifted natural resources. Schools are hardly functioning even in the wealthiest states. Women are excluded from full participation in the work force – not surprising, when men suffer from very high unemployment rates, reaching 30 per cent of the work force in Saudi Arabia. The welfare state is crumbling under demographic explosion and corruption. Economic liberalisation and privatisation promise to improve the dysfunctional welfare system and replace it with efficient services, beyond the reach of most citizens.

Once the right context is dominant, there will emerge a tolerant Islamic tradition. Even then, radical interpretations will not disappear altogether. They will simply stop making sense to people. A secure religious tradition that feels unthreatened from outside or within can tolerate radical fringe interpretations. Today, neither Islam nor Muslims are secure. Their insecurity has also made the West insecure. Saudis and the West may never see a Luther. In the meantime, observers of the Saudi scene will have to content themselves with Anabaptists and other religious dissenters who challenge the status quo.