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Abdullah clearly associates himself with
"taqarub." He has advocated relaxing restrictions on public debate,
promoted democratic reform, supported a reduction in the power of the
clerics, and even shown willingness to allow greater freedoms for Saudi
Arabia's oppressed Shiite minority. By floating the "Saudi plan" for
Arab-Israeli peace, moreover, and traveling to Crawford, Texas to
discuss the issue with President George W. Bush, he harmonized his
domestic and foreign agendas. To a Western eye, there is no inherent
connection between Abdullah's political reform agenda and his
rapprochement policies toward non-Muslim states and Shiite "heretics."
In a political culture policed by Wahhabis, however, they are seen to be
cut from the same cloth.
While Abdullah has signaled friendship
with the West, Nayef has encouraged jihad - to the point of offering
tacit support for al-Qaeda and overseeing a crackdown on Saudi liberals.
Nayef does not take overt responsibility for the persecution of domestic
reformers, but the hand of the secret police is barely hidden from view.
The sequence of events is now familiar. Either without warning or in
response to a complaint by a prominent cleric, a critic of the religious
establishment loses his job. His employers subsequently refuse to
comment. Islamic extremists then issue a death threat to the unemployed
man over the phone or on the Internet. Almost invariably, the campaign
achieves its desired result.
Everyone knows that Osama bin
Laden rejects the legitimacy of the Saudi family, but few recognize the
substantial overlap between the beliefs of al-Qaeda and the Saudi
religious establishment. The chief ideological difference between them
is that the former includes the Saudi royal family among its enemies
while the latter does not.
This hardly rules out limited or
tacit cooperation on a variety of issues. Al-Qaeda activists sense,
moreover, that the American desire to separate mosque and state across
the Middle East constitutes the greatest immediate threat to their
broader political goals. So al-Qaeda's short-term objective is less to
topple the Saudi regime than to shift the country's domestic balance of
power to the right and punish supporters of taqarub.
Projecting
their domestic struggle onto the external world, Saudi hard-liners are
now arguing that the Shiite minority in Saudi Arabia is conspiring with
the United States in its war to destroy Islam. Al-Qaeda's nightmare
scenario is that the Americans and the Iraqi Shiites will force Riyadh
to enact broad reforms and bring the Saudi Shiites into the political
community. There is no question that many hard-line Saudi clerics share
precisely the same fears.
These notions of an American-Shiite
conspiracy are not simply an internal Saudi matter. They legitimize the
daily attacks on American soldiers in Iraq's "Sunni Triangle," as well
as attacks such as the anti-Shiite suicide bombing in Najaf last August.
Nonetheless, changing the situation will be difficult, because the
United States has limited means of muting the anti-Shiism and
anti-Americanism that the Saudi clerics espouse.
Wahhabism is
the foundation of an entire political system, and everyone with a stake
in the status quo can be expected to rally around it when push comes to
shove. The United States has no choice but to press hard for democratic
reforms in both Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But the very attempt to create
more liberal political orders will set off new disputes, which will
inevitably generate anti-American feelings. As Washington struggles to
promote democracy in the Middle East, therefore, it will find once again
that its closest Arab ally is also one of its most bitter enemies.
This article originally appeared in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD
TRIBUNE on December 23, 2003.
Michael S. Doran is assistant professor of Near
Eastern Studies at Princeton University and adjunct senior fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations.
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Crown
Prince Abdullah listens to petitioners during a majlis, a council session.
Saudi man
praying
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