Liberal enclaves and the social control of the ulama Within the first months of Abdullahs term as king,
the Saudi government pursued a number of policies to improve the kingdoms economic profile. Saudi Arabia became a member of the World Trade Organisation, the limits were raised on foreign stakes in banking, telecoms services, and wholesale, retail and franchising sectors. These reforms answered the economic priorities of diversifying from dependence on oil revenues, finding jobs for young Saudis and opening up foreign investment. But they had another function too, one that was more obvious in one of the centrepieces of the early period of Abdullahs reign: the establishment of economic cities where, freed from the influence of the Wahhabi clerics, Saudis would live, work and study as productive members of a modern economy. The lead project was the King Abdullah Economic City, which was announced in December 2005, and three more have followed for Jizan, Hail and Medina. Though for now it is little more than an expanse of desert north of Jeddah, the King Abdullah city has been sold in publicity material as a hypermodern, eco-friendly mix of port and industrial zone, financial centre, residential quarters, luxury resort and schools and collegesa Dubai on the Red Sea coast. With images of men and women in beach wear, its developer Emaar Economic City, a subsidiary of Dubais Emaar, proclaimed in 2005 "the dawn of a kingdom in a new colour".(1) Officials let it be known in foreign media that women would be allowed to drive cars, education would be mixed, the gender restrictions in public places would be relaxed and Prince Alwaleed bin Talals entertainment firm Rotana could operate cinema houses. Housing two million people by completion around 2020, the city was to be a model of urban renewal and modern education, as well as a zone where the rules of society are put in abeyance. Though no one has said so publicly, the city was intended to be a liberal enclave in a sea of conservatism. As such, the project encapsulated the hopes of socio-economic reform that the Saudi liberal class invested in King Abdullah when the long, turbulent era of King Fahd finally came to an end. The economic city/liberal enclave innovation was part of a wider shift engendered by the hijacking of civilian airliners in the United States by al-Qaida radicals on 11 September 2001. The 9/11 attacks were a serious blow to Saudi prestige and created panic within the ruling dynasty for their future at the head of a state where they had monopolised political power since its inception. Fifteen of the attackers were Saudi, and they acted in the name of a group headed by a Saudi, and driven by an ideology shared in essence by the Saudi class of Wahhabi religious scholars, or ulama (the precepts of jihad and takfir, or holy war and pronouncing other Muslims and nonMuslims as infidels). The reformist wing of the royal family led by Abdullah seized the moment to gain the upper hand over his hawkish half-brothers Sultan and Nayef, who saw no need to upset the clerics by reducing their control over society though the mosque, education system, judiciary and their coercive apparatus, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Abdullahs calculation was that Saudi Arabia needed to offer a better image to the world if it wanted to challenge the idea fashionable among some circles close the Bush administration of toppling the rulers, as was planned for Iraq. That meant smoothing the rougher edges of alWahhabiyyah, though nothing so drastic as breaking the historical alliance with its ulama.
There are other liberal zones where Wahhabi social control is relaxed. They include some parts of the city of Jeddah where some restaurants play music and allow unrelated men and women to sit together, on the assumption that the religious police will not drop by. Jeddahs summer festival has included a cinema section since 2006 and concerts featuring rappers, reflecting the more liberal social attitudes of the Hejaz region compared to the Najd. The religious police generally avoid the diplomatic district in Riyadh and the town of Dhahran that houses state oil firm Aramco. They maintain a light presence in the Gulf coast city of Khobar, but a strong presence in the more conservative neighbouring city of Dammam. This year the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) was inaugurated at a lavish ceremony north of Jeddah next to the economic city, the latest addition to the small set of liberal enclaves. KAUST has been feted in Western media as one of the final gambles of an octogenarian monarch in his twilight years to outflank the repressive clerics.(2) KAUST breaks with tradition on many fronts. It is run by state oil firm Saudi Aramco, widely seen as the country's most efficient and modern corporate institution. It has a foreigner, from Singapore, as its president and faculty hired from around the world at immense expense. It opens with a huge $10 billion endowment said to be from the kings own pocket. Its curricula are designed by Western consultants rather than the education ministry where, despite the hype, Wahhabism still reigns. There is no question of religious police marauding the premises to impose gender segregation. It is not unlikely that this will be fate of the King Abdullah Economic City. Domestic media has never presented the King Abdullah economic city in the way it has been described to foreigners. When foreign media used the phrase liberal enclave in 2008, there was a visceral reaction from conservatives.(3) There has been not even a hint that subsequent economic cities announced, Hail, Jizan and Medina, will be liberalized zones. Religious conservatives have consolidated their position after the period of intense Western pressure for reform and brief sense of empowerment that liberals enjoyed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. The maneuvering of Interior Minister Prince Nayef to secure the succession while Crown Prince Sultan wrestles abroad with intestinal cancer has further emboldened the conservatives. Nayef is the main backer of the religious police and declared in June 2009 that they were on a par with the security forces in his eyes. "The Commission completes the security forces and the security forces complete the Commission," he said in comments carried by the state news agency SPA.(4) Abdullah removed the chief of the morality police in February 2009, in what was interpreted at the time as a sign of the reform king pushing his agenda further. The Commission was embroiled in a number of publicity embarrassments in 2007 and 2008, including the death in their custody of two men. The family of one of them, Salman al-Huraisy, say they witnessed him being beaten to death. The king also appointed a new minister of justice and removed Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan from his post as head of the Sharia courts, moves that were interpreted as a boost to Abdullahs plans for judicial reforms in line with WTO membership that have aroused clerical suspicion. But on the ground events spoke of a different trend. The Jeddah film festival was inexplicably cancelled at the last minute in July and clerics involved with the morality police used the press to attack other fixtures of the Jeddah summer festival that were also stopped.(5)
Liberals and conservatives have been locked in fierce debate since the 1980s. Although at the level of elites his debate is unresolved, religious conservatives are by far the dominant force in society (as the results of limited municipal elections in 2005 demonstrated). Generally, they are the dominant force because of the fundamental structure of the state, a division of power between the ruling dynasty which controls state policy and the Wahhabi clerics, who control society. But more specifically, they are dominant because the convergence of three eventsthe Iranian Revolution, Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizing of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Wahhabi zealots opposed to the royal familycaused a panicked Al Saud to retrench and reinforce the social control mechanism by further empowering the forces of alWahhabiyyah. Saudi society as a result went through a kind of re-Islamization in the 1980s after a period of laxity in the 1970s when the regime felt secure in the wake of secular Arab nationalisms discrediting in the 1967 Arab-Israel war, though of course it was not enough for the so-called Sahwa clericssubsequently arrested for their dissent in the 1990swho wanted still more. Rather than tackle the unresolved debate between liberals and conservatives, modernizers in the regime have promoted bubbles of modernity as an alternative. Yet even these liberal enclaves are coming under pressure. Many of the liberals, a term that embraces a loose collection of leftists, Arab nationalists, human rights activists and Western-oriented elites, have crowded around their patrons among Al Saud for protection and solace. Thus, editor Jamal Khashoggi, who served as Prince Turki alFaisals media advisor at the Saudi embassy in London and Washington, attacks the ulama for their extremism from his pulpit in al-Watan, the paper owned by Prince Turkis brother Prince Khaled where Khashoggi is editor-in-chief. Thus, Ibrahim alMugaiteeb, a rights activist who has suffered for his efforts to catalogue and publicise Interior Ministry abuse, says he looks to the royal family as a safety valve.(6) And thus a Saudi prince could say: (Saudi Arabia) is one of the rare cases in the world with a liberal government and a conservative population and society.(7) Those who have sought a clear programme of political reform that could offer a way out of the impasse have been thrown in jail or put on trial. Thirteen were arrested in 2004 after presenting a petition for a constitutional monarchy, three of whom were put on trial, and nine including three who wrote another petition were detained without trial in 2007. But influential clerics who involved themselves in previous calls for reformindeed they led the movement of dissent during 1991-4have been silent. And why not? Their system of social control remains intact, despite the half-hearted attempts to challenge them. As Sahwa preacher Mohsen al-Awajy says bluntly: "This country was set up on religious bases and it will stay that way forever. It can never change."(8) Notes 1. Saudi to get $26 bln makeover with tourism project, Reuters, 20 December 2005. 2. This might just be the last chance the king gets to institutionalize his progressive legacy and improve the future of his troubled land.seem, Newsweek wrote; The King Versus The Radicals, Newsweek, 26 May 2008. 3. The author of this article was the subject of the attack. News website sabq.net ran several stories including sahafi reuters hammond yuwasil talfiq al-akhbar 'an al-
saudiyya. Note the comments that followed in the web forum: www.sabq.org/inf/news-action-show-id-8281.htm. 4. Key Saudi prince gives backing to religious police, Reuters, 17 June 2009. 5. See Saudi religious police crack down on summer festivals, Reuters, 26 August 2009. 6. Without them I don't know what could happen to this country, Mugaiteeb said; interview with author, xxxx 2009. 7. Interview with Prince Bandar bin Saud bin Khalid Al-Saud, March 2006. 8. Interview with author, August 2008. Andrew Hammond was Reuters bureau chief in Riyadh from 2005-8 and is the author of Popular Culture in the Arab World and What the Arabs Think of America. Liberals, who have largely no one but themselves to blame, fear for the future. I am really concerned that these people have become stronger than we think they are and it will be virtually impossible to change the situation, said Abdullah al-Alami, an education expert from Khobar who relocated in Bahrain in 2008 because of pressure from conservatives unhappy about his views. Liberal enclaves have formed in the absence of a resolution of the debate between liberals and conservatives in Saudi Arabia. They engaged a fierce campaign against liberal intellectuals. Abdullah al-Ghaddamis work on cultural criticism, applying the ideas of deconstruction that were fashionable in the West to the Saudi context, became the lighting rod for the conservatives. Friday sermons and casette tapes condemned the modernisers in what became dubbed marakat al-hadatha (the battle for modernity) and in the wake of Ghaddami's work, writers such as Ghazi al-Gosaibi, Turki al-Hamad and Abdo Khal began publishing novels in the 1990s, bringing new names and faces to the battle in what was a developing genre for Saudi Arabia. But so strong are the forces of conservatism and religion in society at large that bubbles of modernity is the only way the liberals have been able to advance their agenda. The economic cities project, meanwhile, has run into problems. Progress has been slow at the King Abdullah City, the showpiece development, and Emaar went through three chief executive officers in the space of three years. Three sister developments announced since 2005 for Hail, Jizan and Medina have been met with increasing scepticism by economists and diplomats. "They are white elephants and not economically sustainable without huge subsidies," one ambassador put it. It's hard to find serious economists who aren't in the pay of the Saudis who think it is sustainable." Saudi Arabia has seen universities with lofty aims before: the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology was set up in Riyadh in 1977 but has succumbed to inertia and triviaits geneticists, for example, have spent seven years trying to map the genome of a camel. Really reforming?
nexus of clerics, the Commission and volunteer zealots who work alongside its members have managed to Mecca governor Khaled al-Faisal ensured that a full-length comedy film made by Rotana was shown to the public at culture centres in Taif and Jeddah in December 2008. The religious police were obliged to back down and remove their initial objections and the head of the body, Ibrahim al-Ghaith, was removed by the king a few months later. But the Jeddah film festival, which had run for three consecutive years, was stopped by the Interior Ministry in the summer of 2009. The rationale was never publicly explained but most likely involved fear that religious police and their supporters would cause disturbances and a general deference to the wishes of the religious establishment, which for the most part is resolutely against cinema and drama. The king goes to parliament to talk about the need for women to participate but it's all nonsense. The king has good intentions but when it goes down to lower levels there is resistance," says He cited continued insistence on gender segregation in the workplace, schools and universities, consolidating their control in return for the concession of the liberal zones. While there is a national debate over whether women should drive, "we cannot even discuss the issue of women occupying any executive or administrative positions. There no ambassadors," he says.
The government's exhortations to imams leading Friday prayers have been largely ignored, and an effort to enlist clerics in the campaign to stop Saudis going to fight for jihad abroad in time provoked a concerned response from the government itself. Sahwa clerics endorsed jihad in Iraq in November 2004 during the siege of Falluja; Prince Nayef told a gathering of hundreds of ulama in June 2007 that Saudis in Iraq were instruments of murder exploited by others. (Saudi warns clerics over militants in Iraq, Reuters, 20 June 2007) Problems; The King Abdullah City will be the jewel in the "economic cities"' crown and the idea of liberal enclaves where the rules of society outside will be put in abeyance (a grand gate bearing the king's image and words "the vision of our leader has embodied our dreams" stands virtually alone in an expanse of desert covering over 388 square km, or 150 square miles). As well as a place where the grip of the religious establishment on education itself is loosened, the city
"Saudi Arabia today doesn't offer the kind of services that are required. There is a lack of infrastructure and basic urban aesthetic beauty is also missing," says Fahd AlRasheed, chief executive of Emaar Economic City, the City's developer. "We have 60 percent of our population under 30 and these people need places to live. So we are
going to create the educational opportunities of them to come, study and workWe looked at so many cities. There was Brasilia and Canberra but these were planned by governments and there was no economic plan. Ours was developed based on economics -- what are the industries and services we can bring -- and then do a masterplan based on that." You cannot build a city based on luxury resorts. Even at luxury resorts you have people that have to work who need housing ... Our business plan includes building housing across the board from high-end all the way to labour housing," he says. (Interview with author, July 2008) These cities will still have trouble attracting global or even Saudi interest, given the ease of living and working in neighbouring cities like Dubai where there are, for example, no religious police on the streets. The bureaucratic red tape and the reign of clerics in society at large could be enough to discourage many foreigners, including Arabs, from living and investing there -- particularly in underdeveloped Jizan near Yemen, and the desert town of Hail. The Knowledge City in Medina, closed to nonMuslims, will aim to attract Muslim information technology experts from Asia. The government has never said publicly that King Abdullah Economic City will have the more liberal atmosphere, and Islamists have reacted furiously to the idea. (I was attacked by name on one news website for writing stories using the name "liberal enclave"; DETAILS)
By Souhail Karam 20 December 2005 IYADH, Dec 20 (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia will build a $26.7 billion Red Sea resort, port and financial centre to help boost tourism and trade in the conservative kingdom, its developers said on Tuesday. "King Abdullah City" is the latest multibillion dollar development in the booming Gulf Arab region, where some governments are using record oil revenues to diversify their economies with ambitious tourist projects. The complex is being developed by a consortium led by Emaar Properties, which is behind several mega-projects in the United Arab Emirates' tourism hub of Dubai. The other parties are private Saudi firms Assir Group and Bin Laden Group. Thirty percent of the consortium's capital will be floated, though no date was set for what could be one of the Middle East's largest public share offerings. The 55 square km (21.2 square miles) site, north of the tourist and commerce centre of Jeddah on the Red Sea, is due to be completed in two to three years, officials said. Situated near the town of Rabigh, it is an hour's drive from Muslim shrines in Mecca and Medina, visited annually by millions of pilgrims. Officials said some 500,000 pilgrims could use the facilities, including 3,500 hotel rooms, marina and golf course. Publicity material suggested the resort will also try to attract the kind of tourism not normally associated with Saudi Arabia, where the authorities enforce a strict form of Islam involving gender segregation in public and banning alcohol. A video unveiled at a press conference on Tuesday, offering an image of male tourists in shorts, proclaimed "the dawn of a kingdom in a new colour". "We are honoured to stand here at this historic moment and witness together the start of a new era in the history of the (Saudi) kingdom," said Emaar's Chairman Mohamed Ali Alabbar. The ceremony was attended by King Abdullah, who has taken cautious but unprecedented steps since ascending the throne this year to improve Saudi Arabia's image after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, carried out by mainly Saudi hijackers. Amr bin Abdallah Dabbagh, the head of the Saudi investment authority (SAGIA), said the complex aimed to be the "biggest economic hub in the Middle East". He said it will create some 500,000 jobs. Covering 35 km (21.7 miles) of coastline, it will include one of the world's 10 largest ports, an industrial zone, a financial centre and training facilities to provide companies with a skilled work force, a statement said.
The deal signalled a change in the fortunes of Emaar, which a Saudi court banned in June from investing in real estate for failing to fulfil obligations to a multibillion dollar joint-venture contract signed with Saudi firms, papers said.
