The October 27 edition of The Guardian, UK’s premier daily, quoted Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, as saying that he is committed to “return the country to moderate Islam.” He added that this is the kind of Islam the country practised before decades of experimentation with stricter forms of the faith which produced an extreme state and polity in the kingdom.

Salman said that this happened due to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in the Shia-majority Iran. He explained that as a reaction to the revolution, governments in many Sunni-majority Muslim countries tried to enforce “rigid doctrines” and that Saudi Arabia was one such country. He told The Guardian that “they (the Sunni-majority countries) didn’t know how to deal with the rise of radical Islam in Iran.”

Salman is set to become the next Saudi king. In fact, he already wields a tremendous amount of influence and power within the Saudi monarchy. So his comments not only sent shockwaves across the kingdom but also across two separate sections within the international community which hold different, binary perceptions of Saudi Arabia. One of these sections is mostly made up of observers in Europe and the US, and ‘moderate’ and ‘liberal Muslims’ in various Muslim countries. For long they have maintained that in the last many decades, the Saudi state formulated various ‘harsh strands’ of the Muslim faith. They say it did this to suppress dissent within the kingdom. They add that the kingdom then began to export these strands to other Muslim countries. It is suggested by this section that this was achieved through the power of the ‘Petro Dollar’. Consequently, this policy radicalised various Muslim states and societies which gave birth to some unprecedented forms of extremist terror. Ultimately, the move returned to haunt Saudi Arabia as well.

How will the Saudi crown prince’s push to ‘return’ his country to moderate Islam impact the politics of Muslim countries where strict Saudi ideology and faith was exported?

The other section has always defended the aforementioned policy, saying that Saudi Arabia did so to “counter-balance” the influence of revolutionary Iran which had begun to disseminate its brand of radical political Islam after the 1979 revolution. This section also claims that the formulation of harsh Saudi policies within the kingdom and their export to other Muslim countries was necessary to combat ideas such as communism, socialism and secularism in the Muslim world. Not surprisingly, a majority of those belonging to this school of thinking were (and some still are) the direct recipients of financial and political Saudi patronage.

Nevertheless, the latter narrative has now been shattered by Salman. The November 5 edition of The New York Times (NYT) reported that on November 4, Salman ordered a severe crackdown against the kingdom’s influential clerics and religious establishment. The newspaper added that members of this establishment had for years used the kingdom’s oil wealth “to promote their intolerant interpretation of the Muslim faith to the world.” The same day 11 high-ranking princes from the ruling Saud family were also arrested. NYT reported that the arrested princes had disagreed with Salman’s attempt to isolate Qatar and were accused of having links with the Muslim Brotherhood organisation.

While explaining his vision of a “moderate Saudi Arabia”, Salman has often alluded to the policies of former Saudi monarch, King Faisal Abdulaziz. Faisal was assassinated in 1975, apparently by the brother of a man who was killed by the Saudi police in 1966. The man had been a part of a rally in Riyadh whose participants were protesting against Faisal’s decision to launch the kingdom’s first television station.

Faisal is still remembered in the Kingdom as being one of Saudi Arabia’s most ‘progressive’ and ‘modernist’ monarchs. He came to power in 1964 through a ‘palace coup’ which he pulled off against his brother and the sitting monarch, Saud Bin Abdulaziz. Farzana Moon in No Islam But Islam wrote that Faisal (as prime minister) was critical of his brother for “squandering the kingdom’s oil wealth.” Faisal used the Saudi National Guards to oust Saud who had been in power since 1953.

James P. Jankowski in his book Nasser’s Egypt wrote that at the time of Faisal’s ascendance, the Middle-East in general and the Muslim world at large were awash with two modernist and left-leaning ideas — Arab Nationalism and Ba’ath Socialism. The charismatic Egyptian president and Arab nationalist Gamal Nasser, was being hailed as the “leader of the Muslim world.” Jankowski quotes Nasser describing Saudi Arabia as being “backward” and “regressive.”

In her 2011 book on the Saudi monarchy, Professor Sherifa Zuhur wrote that to counter Nasser’s influence over Arab youth, Faisal tried to rapidly modernise Saudi Arabia. He introduced television, encouraged modern education and allowed Saudi women to work alongside men in offices. Mordechai Abir, in his 1987 essay, ‘The Consolidation of the Ruling Class and the New Elites in Saudi Arabia’ wrote that Faisal soon began to face resistance from members of the country’s powerful religious establishment. As a result, Faisal blocked their entry into the higher echelons of his regime.

When Nasser’s influence began to recede after his sudden demise in 1970, Faisal rose to become a popular figure in the Muslim world, especially when he placed an oil embargo on the US and those European countries that had supported Israel during the 1973 Egypt-Israel War. This is also when Saudi Arabia began to pour money in the coffers of developing Muslim countries to earn a major say in their internal affairs.

The princes, who were arrested on Salman’s orders this year on November 4 are said to also have had links with the Muslim Brotherhood. This is interesting because Salman sees Faisal as his hero but it was during Faisal’s tenure that Saudi Arabia became a major supporter and financer of the Brotherhood. An Egyptian organisation, the Brotherhood had been opposing Nasser’s regime across the 1950s and 1960s. Many of its members, exiled by Nasser, were taken in by Faisal and allowed to study at and operate schools, colleges and universities in the Kingdom.

It is only recently that the long love affair between the Saudi monarchy and the Brotherhood began to erode. In his April 17 essay in the Middle East Eye, David Hearst wrote that Egyptian leader Abdel Al-Sisi had managed to convince the Saudis about the threat that an organised outfit such as the Muslim Brotherhood posed to the monarchy. Salman is vigorously pushing ahead with his political, social and economic reforms. It will be interesting to see what impact these changes will have on the politics and polity of those Muslim countries where the now elapsing strand of Saudi ideology and faith had been embraced and imposed.

Published in Dawn, EOS, November 12th, 2017