The Openings and Closures of Saudi Historical Revisionism
Why is Saudi Arabia's new image of cultural and religious openness, and its fight against extremism, being promoted through economic channels in areas such as entertainment, tourism, and sports?
by Sultan Alamer
On March 5, 2024, a fact-finding mission from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedoms (USCIRF) was scheduled to visit Diriyah, the birthplace of the Wahhabi movement in the 18th century. The mission was led by Rabbi Abraham Cooper alongside others from different Christian and Muslim denominations. While at Diriyah, now a UNESCO designated World Heritage Site, a Saudi official requested that Cooper remove his Kippah. The rabbi refused, and the group was asked to leave the heritage site. The USCIRF team did not only leave Diriyah but decided to cut short their mission and return to the United States.
It would be easy to use this story to show that the new Saudi project of cultural and religious openness is merely a public relations campaign and the reality on the ground remains the same, as Cooper himself hinted at after this incident. But that would be wrong. This project of cultural and religious openness is part and parcel of larger projects promoting a new Saudi identity, and economic diversification especially in areas such as entertainment, tourism, and sports. It is also a major component of the Saudi security campaign of combatting “extremism”—a term that not only includes militant groups such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda, but also others such as the Muslim Brotherhood. Although ambitious, this push towards cultural and religious openness should not be confused with political openness or transnational political solidarity.
While the Kippah incident at Diriyah was a setback, the very fact that the USCIRF was in Saudi Arabia at all by invitation of the Saudi government suggests the seriousness of this new project of openness. What the Saudi government was hoping to achieve from this visit, it seems, was the removal of its USCIRF designation as a country of concern. In addition to the possibility, however unlikely, that this designation could trigger U.S. congressional action against the kingdom, the designation in itself contradicts the Saudi government’s new projection of openness, hence the desire to have it removed. Nowhere is this desire more evident than in the statement about the incident issued by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C.—a statement made all the more remarkable by the Saudi government’s usual refrain from commentary on such events. The statement called the incident “unfortunate,” stating that it was a “result of a misunderstanding of internal protocols,” and that the Saudi ambassador spoke with the rabbi and resolved the issue, providing him with an open invitation to visit the kingdom anytime.
Two Historical Revisions
The Saudi project of cultural and religious openness rests on two historical revisions. The first revision posits that this embrace of openness is not something new, but rather a “return” to pre-1979 Saudi Arabia. The choice of 1979 is not random, of course. This is the year of the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the seizure of Mecca by a fringe militant group led by Juhayman al-Otaybi. When the 60 Minutes journalist Norah O’Donnell asked the Saudi Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman what life in Saudi Arabia was like before 1979, he replied by saying, “We were living a very normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries. Women were driving cars. There were movie theaters in Saudi Arabia.” This was the “real Saudi Arabia,” and not the “harsh… strict… intolerant” version instituted since 1979. This narrative about 1979 and its impact on Saudi Arabia is not a government invention, but rather was constructed by the Saudi liberal movement in the 1990s. We can see fragments of this narrative in the late novelist and government minister Ghazi al-Qusaiby’s So There Should Not Be Fitna (1991), the articles of the intellectual and novelist Turki al-Hamad, and The Sixth of November (Jadawel, 2013) by Aishah al-Mani and Hessah al-Shaikh—a book documenting the women’s protest movement against the driving ban in the 1990s. We also see this narrative in novels such as The Love Stories of Al-Asha Street (Saqi, 2013) by Badriah al-Bishr, Al-Warifah (Al-Mada, 2008) by Umaimah al-Khamis, and the winner of the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, The Doves’ Necklace (al-Markaz al-Takafi al-Arabi, 2010) by Rajaa Alem.
The second historical revision is that Saudi Arabia was not a Wahhabi political project. This revision erases the conventional Saudi narrative that makes the contemporary Saudi state the third incarnation of a state that was founded around 1744 out of a covenant between Muhammad ibn Saud, the grandfather of the Saudi royal family, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the religious reformer and founder of the Wahhabi movement. Now, the new origin story of the Saudi state still maintains that it is a third incarnation of a political project that started in the eighteenth century, but it erases any mention of Wahhabism. On January 27, 2022, Saudi Arabia announced a new national holiday called the “Foundation Day.” This day commemorates the foundation of the Saudi state, which took place, according to the new narrative, in 1727. Instead of starting the story of the first Saudi state with the covenant of 1744, the new story chooses the year of Muhammad ibn Saud’s ascendance to power in the small town of Dirayah in 1727. Similar to the 1979 narrative, this revised narrative is not entirely new. Instead, it was constructed by a group of Saudi social scientists, such as Khaled al-Dakhil, Turki al-Hamad, Uwaidah al-Jahany, and Abdulaziz al-Fahad, all of whom published their academic works in the late 1980s and early 1990s and disseminated their ideas through Saudi media.
Dimensions of Openness
Within this revised historical narrative, the new cultural and religious project is designed to reshape many aspects of life in Saudi Arabia. I focus here on three dimensions: identity, economy, and religion. One of the initiatives of the macro project aimed at restructuring Saudi Arabia, Vision 2030, is called the Human Capability Development Program. The slogan of the program is to transform Saudis into “globally competitive citizens.” This transformation is not restricted to skills and education, but also includes cultural, religious, and behavioral changes. The first goal of the program is to “strengthen Islamic values and national identity,” and its main values are national belonging, tolerance, and moderation. To achieve such goals, the program coordinates the efforts of multiple ministries and government agencies, including the ministries of education, human resources, economy, and others. Schools play a central role in this program, as they are tasked to “instill moderation and anti-extremism values” through “inculcating the principles and teachings of moderate Islam religion [sic] in the minds of youth and raising awareness on the implications of extremism.”
The hope is that cultivating tolerance and openness to others will help diversify the economy away from its dependence on oil. The main sectors in which the government is investing, in hopes of generating non-oil revenues, include tourism, entertainment, and sports. To achieve this, the government launched the “Quality of Life” program to transform Saudi cities from cultural, sports, and entertainment voids into vibrant “global” cities that compete with other international destinations in attracting tourists, investments, and talents. Before 2017, living conditions in Saudi cities were lower than countries with similar GDP levels. This prevented money from coming in from abroad through tourism and investments and instead encouraged its outflow in the form of outbound tourism. In 2015, per capita tourists from Saudi Arabia ranked 17th globally and first in the Middle East, with 16 million travelers spending $20 billion. Remittances were also a significant outflow, reaching $49 billion in 2015. To reduce the amount of money leaving the country and increase the money coming in, the Quality of Life program coordinates the efforts of many government institutions, such as the ministries of culture, tourism, and sport, as well as the Commission of Entertainment. This program aspires to “develop and diversify entertainment opportunities to meet the needs of the population” in part by “upgrading the quality of services provided in Saudi cities” and “achieving excellence in several sports regionally and internationally.”
To achieve these economic, security, and cultural goals, the Saudi government has realigned its religious institutions with the new discourse of moderation, tolerance, and openness. Domestically, the once-prominent enforcer of conservative Islam, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, has been curtailed. The updated vision of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs promotes “a moderate Islamic environment and innovative and sustainable services,” and the third of its six strategic pillars is “moderation and tolerance.” This trend also includes internationally-oriented institutions such as the Muslim World League (MWL). In 2019, the MWL invited more than 1,200 Islamic figures to attend a conference in Mecca. The conference approved a document titled the “Charter of Mecca,” the principles of which reflect the same emphasis on common humanity and openness to other religions and cultures. They include that “all people, regardless of their different ethnicities, races, and nationalities” are equal under God, and that religious and cultural diversity is part of “God’s will and wisdom” and “never justifies conflict.”
Cultural and Religious Openness, Political Closedness
Cultural and religious openness in Saudi Arabia does not translate to political openness. To the contrary, it seems that policymakers think these two kinds of openness are incompatible. This is because political openness will allow perceived conservative and extremist elements in Saudi society to voice their opposition to the government-led project of cultural and religious openness. According to this logic, for cultural and religious openness to succeed, political openness must be suppressed. Indeed, the limited openness of the Saudi public sphere during the 1998-2015 period has all but disappeared, shattered by a series of crackdowns on Sunni and Shiite Islamists, intellectuals, constitutionalists, human rights activists, and feminists. The common denominator of all these groups is that they were politically active and had the capacity to challenge, criticize, or question the government. In addition to these crackdowns, anti-terrorism and cybercrimes laws have been widely used to silence unwanted voices on Saudi social media. It is important to note that the government did not only rely on crude tools to control the Saudi public sphere but has also pushed its own narrative through the development of sophisticated social media strategies in which it enlisted influencers, bots, and trolls.
The project to cultivate a citizenry accepting of different cultures and religions should not be confused with one promoting transnational solidarity. Before 2015, the Saudi government legitimized itself primarily as a Muslim and Arab country. This implied showing solidarity with other Muslim and Arab peoples—not just Palestinians, but also Afghans and Lebanese in the 1980s, Bosnians, Somalis, and Chechens in the 1990s, and Iraqis and Syrians in the 2000s and 2010s. The government thus provided a space for Islamists and other groups to build transnational solidarity with other groups. However, the September 11 attacks, and the scrutiny of the Saudi charity and financial sectors that followed, pushed the government to centralize all forms of solidarity. This has changed somewhat with the new policy of cultural and religious openness, which envisions a Saudi identity at once tolerant of others and politically confined to the territorial borders of the Saudi state.
Some might consider this project of cultural and religious openness to be a form of social liberalism, but, as intimated earlier, this would be wrong. Individualism, the fundamental tenet of liberalism, is absent here. For example, while the Charter of Mecca adopts the language of humanitarianism and openness, it falls short of adopting an individualistic human rights approach. The unit of analysis in the new project is collective culture and not the individual, and this culture is treated as something that needs to be acted upon and reformulated to become compatible with and supportive of the security and economic core of the project.