Saudi Arabia

“My life? I don’t have one. Explosions, blast walls blocking the ways, no services. And because of all this my business has stopped.” –Firas Younis, an Iraqi retail store owner in Mosul, Iraq “They’re the same —Sissi and Sabbahi…[both men are] egoists who are obsessed with Nasser’s image.” –Reda Saad, a businessman in the Egyptian city of Fayoum “My brother had signs of torture on his body and it was clear he was beaten by those who arrested him…When he came home, he no longer had his long hair. Humiliated, he killed himself the next day.” –Khiati Bihaoui on how his brother was rounded up by police cracking down on crime in Morocco “We’ve been under pressure and under surveillance for a long time. I hope this is the beginning of something new.” –Muhammad, a Hamas supporter, on the Palestinian unity deal “Anybody who had any dealings with the Brotherhood was taken in…If you greeted a Brotherhood member ten years ago, you were arrested.” –Shabeeb, an Egyptian lawyer representing thirty of his fellow villagers who were recently sentenced to death “Slowly but surely, the economy is recovering. But overall it is going to take time.” –Ramin Rabii, director of a Tehran-based investment firm “Turkey is heading rapidly toward a totalitarian regime. One cannot speak of democracy in a country if there is no freedom of the press.” –Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of Turkey’s main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) “I love President Bashar and my whole family loves him…I don’t care about the other candidates…I don’t even know their names.” –Rania, a Syrian high school student “I’ve never seen people interested in hygiene like this before.” –A resident of Jeddah on the response to the MERS virus in Saudi Arabia “Life here is very hard. People are tired and they hate everything. If you don’t close your shop during prayer time you get lashes, if you smoke you get lashed, if you say one wrong thing you can be executed. Just like that. It’s that easy for ISIS.” –Abu Ibrahim, a member of a recently formed anti-ISIS group in Syria

Last Friday, the Saudi government declared the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, lumping the Brothers in with Jabhat al Nusra, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and al Qaeda.   The announcement was not terribly surprising.  Riyadh has proven to be Cairo’s staunchest patron since the July 3 coup d’état and both governments have led the effort to delegitimize the Brotherhood ever since.  This actually has much more to do with politics than it does with terrorism, which prompted me to tweet: “I don’t remember Muslim Brothers hijacking those planes… #SaudiArabia” This was my way of commenting on Riyadh’s rank hypocrisy and with it I was expecting to feel the wrath of at least a few Saudi tweeps, but it failed to strike a collective nerve among them.  Egyptians were a different story, however. Perhaps it is the medium. Twitter makes nuance and context hard, but I am not sure that messages like the following need much explication: “@stevenacook Maybe you met some cool MB. I assure you that they lied at you..despise you.. deliberately fooled you with a big yellow smile.”  There were numerous attempts to convince me that the Brothers and al Qaeda share the same ideology.  Again, there is nothing terribly surprising here. In the McCarthy-esque moment in which Egyptians currently exist, adhering scrupulously to the current anti-Muslim Brotherhood spirit is far more important than analytic rigor and basic historical facts. There are, of course, connections between the Muslim Brothers and terrorism. Let’s stipulate that the Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al Banna, collected weaponry and established the organization’s armed wing called al jihaz al sirri, or “the secret apparatus.” Let’s also acknowledge that the Brothers were involved in various assassinations, bombings, and other acts of violence in the very unstable 1940s and early 1950s. It is also true that after last summer’s sit-in at Rabaa al Adawiyya and the bloody crackdowns that ended the protest, the Brotherhood’s leadership employed the language of violence and martyrdom.  For many Egyptians, the significant increase in violence and terrorist attacks in the Sinai Peninsula and places like Cairo and Ismailiyya that followed the July 3 coup proves the connection between the organization and the jihadist groups like Ansar Bayt al Maqdis, Ajnad Misr, and al Furqan Brigade that are perpetrating the violence.  Yet there is no actual evidence directly linking the Brothers to these groups. To make the argument that “the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization” work, the Egyptian tweeps who responded to me seem to accept  the following formulation implicitly : Sayyid Qutb was an influential member of the Muslim Brotherhood; Qutb penned what many consider to be the intellectual framework for transnational jihadism in the voluminous In the Shadow of The Quran and Milestones Along the Way (1964), which is derivative of the longer work; through these writings and many others, Qutb garnered a significant following, who would become  the leaders of contemporary international jihadist groups; therefore the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization.  This account leaves out a few details, however. As I wrote in chapters III and IV of The Struggle for Egypt, the relationship between Qutb, the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership, and violence was complex, fraught with doctrinal differences and was shaped by the exigencies of saving the Brotherhood after Nasser’s assault on the organization as he consolidated his power: When the Free Officers took down the Brotherhood after the attempted assassination of Nasser in October 1954, Qutb was rounded up with the rest of the organization’s leadership.  He was sent to Tora prison, where he spent most of his time revising In the Shadow of the Quran and extending the ideas of the influential South Asian Islamist theorists, Mawlana Maududi and Abul Hassan Ali al Nadwi.  With Supreme Guide Hassan al Hudaybi effectively muzzled, the Brotherhood was literally adrift, left with neither ideological guidance nor leadership.  In time, Qutb and his ideas increasingly filled these vacuums.  [When Nasser] released [some Muslim Brothers] from prison in 1957 and 1958, [they] began to organize themselves into cells and looked to him [Qutb] for guidance.  When these groups merged into a subgroup of the Brotherhood, they appealed directly to Qutb to become their spiritual leader.  Given his background in education, Qutb developed a curriculum for this vanguard that would fuel its ideological ardor.  Among the works of classical Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Hanbal and Ibn Taymiyya, Qutb included his own Milestones Along the Way... …In July 1965, the authorities discovered the Brotherhood vanguardists and accused them of planning the assassination of President Nasser and the overthrow of the regime.  Given the central themes of Milestones—possession of which became a criminal offense—it is abundantly clear why Nasser sought to repress the group.  In the context of Qutb’s discussion of jahaliyya [a state of ignorance or impious society] and the absolute sovereignty of God, Egypt’s authoritarian regime—which had become the archetype for the republics of the Middle East—was clearly ripe for jihad.  The subsequent military tribunal handed down death penalties to Supreme Guide al Hudaybi, Qutb, and two of his associates, Abdel Fattah Ismail and Mohamed Yusuf Hawwash.  Like his sentence in the mid-1950s, al Hudaybi’s punishment was commuted to life imprisonment, but Qutb, Ismail, and Hawwash were hanged in August 1966. The July crackdown was critical in the future trajectory of the Brotherhood.  After the vanguard’s founding in the late 1950s, the Supreme Guide was kept apprised of the group, tacitly supporting its activities from house arrest and acknowledging Sayyid Qutb’s spiritual leadership of the group.  Al Hudaybi saw the emergence of the group in strategic terms.  With the Supreme Guide under house arrest and his organization largely in disarray, the activism of Qutb’s followers was important in keeping the Brotherhood alive during a period of great stress.  After the new round of repression, al Hudaybi was far more circumspect and ultimately distanced himself from the vanguard.  The split was intertwined in both politics and doctrine, specifically differences related to concepts such as jahaliyya, the absolute sovereignty of God and, especially, takfir (excommunication)…  Al Hudaybi well understood that the innovations in Islamist thought that Qutb extended in Milestones and the way Qutb’s followers embraced them could ultimately prove fatal to the longevity of the Brotherhood, which under al Hudaybi sought to avoid direct confrontations with the regime.  For the Supreme Guide, the primary goal was the preservation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus there was no choice but to reject what the vanguardists had come to represent.  Even as Qutb’s followers rejected accusations that jahaliyya, the absolute sovereignty of God, and takfir were central to their thought, the Supreme Guide’s decision to turn away from them had a profound and enduring effect on Islamist politics in Egypt.  To Qutb’s followers, al Hudaybi’s rejection of their group compromised the Supreme Guide’s integrity and his claim to spiritual leadership of the Islamist movement. The ideas contained in Milestones that became central to radical Islamist groups may have crystallized in the early and mid-1960s, but there was little that its adherents could do to operationalize their theological innovations… …By the late 1970s, the government and the Brotherhood developed a mutual interest in countering extremist groups like al Gama’a al Islamiyya (the Islamic Group) and Takfir wa-l Hijra (Excommunication and Exodus), which murdered the minister of religious endowments in 1977.  It is no coincidence that the same year, the book Du’at la Qudah (Preachers not Judges) was published.  Written in 1969 under the by-line of the Brotherhood’s then-Supreme Guide, Hassan al Hudaybi—though widely believed to be a collaborative effort by other leading Brothers and al Azhar scholars—the work was a refutation of both the theoretical framework that Sayyid Qutb developed in Milestones and the extremist tendencies that developed subsequently. Egypt’s experience with terrorism in the 1990s had little to do with the Brothers, though the government claimed—as it is doing now—that there was no difference between violent extremists and the Brotherhood.  Yet the leaders of al Gama’a al Islamiyya and al Jihad, which was responsible for Anwar Sadat’s assassination, were either never associated with the Brotherhood or turned away from it because the Brothers were not extreme enough. This was certainly the case of Ayman al Zawahiri and a veritable All Star list of Egyptian transnational jihadis. The point here is not to suggest that the Brotherhood is a force for democracy and pluralism in Egypt.  The organization—contrary to its public rhetoric about progressive political reform—remains consistent in its desire to Islamize Egyptian society and transform it using authoritarian means.  Perhaps scholars want to engage in a debate about different interpretations of the Brotherhood’s history and outlook, but the recent empirical record suggests that all the talk of the evolution of the organization was misplaced.  Still, this is different from being al Qaeda and Jabhat al Nusra even if the Brothers are availing themselves to Molotov cocktails, sling-shots, rocks, and even rifles in their confrontations with the police. Again, this is not to excuse violence.  Egyptian police officers and soldiers have families too.  Many of them are caught in the figurative and literal crossfire in the battle over who gets to define Egypt, but that, at its base, is a political struggle and the reason why Riyadh did what it did last week.  The Saudis took the step they did because a successful Brotherhood in Egypt is a political threat to their own Islamist and extremist worldview.

Ammar Abdulhamid looks at the consequences of U.S. inaction in Syria and elsewhere. Maged Atiya remembers his first Thanksgiving. Brian Whitaker on the underreported expulsion of foreign workers in Saudi Arabia.

The newest boom sparked by rising U.S. oil and gas production appears to be in articles about the troubled U.S.-Saudi relationship. The latest installment, provoked by the Iran nuclear deal over the weekend, ran today on A1 in the New York Times. “When you look at our differing views of the Arab Spring, on how to deal with Iran, on changing energy markets that make gulf oil less central,” Greg Gause tells the Times, “these things have altered the basis of U.S.-Saudi relations.” “New sources of oil,” the Times informs us, “have made the Saudis less essential.” The chart at the top of this post ought to put this myth to rest. U.S. imports of oil from Saudi Arabia in August 2013 (the last month for which data is available) were 1.332 million barrels a day. That is higher than for 251 of the 479 months that have passed since the October 1973 oil embargo. Most of the time in which U.S. imports were lower was during the 1980s and 1990s – a period when the U.S.-Saudi relationship was generally solid. In August 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and set off U.S. panic about the potential threat to Saudi oil – ultimately leading to the first Gulf War – the United States imported 1.189 million barrels a day from the Kingdom. That’s less than it does today. To be certain, the United States does not “depend” on shipments of Saudi oil in the way that many imagine, with a devastating embargo possible at any moment. And the precise volume of Saudi sales to the United States, whether high or low, shouldn’t matter much. That’s not because of the U.S. oil boom; it’s because global markets are well integrated. But, like all consumers, the United States depends on the continued flow of Saudi oil into the world market to keep prices at the pump manageable. It also depends on Saudi use of its spare capacity to moderate volatility in the global oil market. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is going through a difficult time. U.S. policies toward Egypt, Syria, and now Iran are worrying leaders in Riyadh. That’s coincided with a boom in U.S. oil production. But it would be wrong to confuse correlation with causation in this case.

Samia Errazzouki examines Morocco’s new cabinet, and argues that authoritarian politics remains the dominant trend in the country. Maya Gebeily discusses the irony of Saudi Arabia’s decision to sit out its turn on the UN Security Council. Syria Deeply does a Q&A with analyst Gokhan Bacik, exploring the question of whether Turkey’s stance on Syria is shifting.

Pune, India--My last two posts from India looked at the mistrust with which many Indians view the United States and the way in which the Palestine issue plays out here.  There is no consensus on these issues, though.  My meetings in Mumbai and Pune over the last few days have made it abundantly clear that along with those who are wary of American foreign policy, there are strong advocates of close U.S.-India ties.  In addition, there are Indians who see the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms far different from my interlocutors in Lucknow and Chennai.  As one academic specialist in international relations told me today, “India is Israel’s only true friend in Asia.”  Yet there seems to be one country that has brought Indians across the country’s boisterous political spectrum together in shared enmity.  If you guessed Pakistan, you would be correct, but that Indians generally despise Pakistan is a given—a lay-up for anyone who has ever glanced at a newspaper every now and again.  Besides Pakistan, which is widely regarded as a rogue, terrorist state here, Indians have expressed a deep and abiding dislike for Saudi Arabia. The sources of the India’s collective Saudi neuralgia lie in three areas: 1) There are 1.5 million Indian workers in Saudi Arabia—the largest number of expat workers in the country.  Needless to say, the Saudis do not have the best reputation for treating the people who make the country run with much in the way of respect. 2) The Indians regard Saudi Arabia (and the United States) as the primary funder, political supporter, and diplomatic defender of Pakistan.  To Indians, this support makes Saudi Arabia culpable in part when Islamabad-supported terrorist organizations target Indian security forces in Kashmir like today’s attack that killed 12 at a military base in Srinagar.  They also hold Riyadh to blame for the regular skirmishes between the Pakistani and Indian militaries.  Of course, the Saudis have significantly less influence with the Pakistanis than many Indians believe, but as always, perception matters and in the Indian view Saudis play a critical and malevolent role in the tense relations between Islamabad and New Delhi. 3) I did not understand it when I was in Lucknow and two Urdu-language journalists were quizzing me about Saudi Arabia and Hillary Clinton’s alleged role in supporting Wahhabism.  Besides the sheer ridiculousness of their claims concerning Secretary Clinton, I did not quite grasp the paranoia about Saudi Arabia.  It all came together yesterday when a number of Mumbai-based analysts clued me in to the fact that Indians are quite concerned about Saudi efforts to propagate Wahhabism on the sub-continent.  They are also worried about all those expats who might return to India carrying a Wahhabi worldview and who might, in turn, inculcate fellow Indian Muslims with that brand of Islam.  My friends in Mumbai explained that this is a grave threat to what they called “integrative Indian Islam.” Unfortunately for India, it is stuck with Saudi Arabia.  Of the 63 percent of oil that it imports from the Persian Gulf, 19 percent comes from Saudi Arabia.  Even if India begins a crash effort to develop alternative sources of energy—the government just announced an initiative to explore for shale gas—it will be a very long time before it could possibly wean itself from Saudi crude.  The Kingdom is also a source of employment for some of India’s excess human capital even if the number of Indian workers in Saudi Arabia is small compared to India’s overall population of 1.2 billion.  There is no place else in the Gulf that can accommodate that many Indian expats.  This leaves the Indians in the infuriating position of having to depend on a country that many believe will ultimately do their own country a great deal of harm. Hyderabad is next….  

Thanassis Cambanis claims that Lebanon’s Hizballah and the clerical regime in Iran are now fully vested factions in Syria’s civil war. Hicham Mourad discusses the uneasy relationship between Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and the leaders in Saudi Arabia. Angie Balata explores the history of rock music in Egypt.

Brent Sasley compares former Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to the newcomer in the position, Moshe Ya’alon. The Saudi Twittersphere is stirring in reaction to the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA) Trial. The Muslim Brotherhood’s statement regarding the UN’s attempt to ratify an “End Violence Against Women” declaration.

An interview with anonymous Twitter user @Mujtahidd, who has been tweeting provocative things about Saudi Arabia’s rulers. An article from Muftah, discussing the declining credibility of Tunisia’s Ennahda party. Arun Kapil takes a hard look at Tariq Ramadan’s most recent book.  

Nour Youssef on The Arabist offers her thoughts on the recent dialogue held between Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef and al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya member Nageh Ibrahim. Mohammad Azeemullah wonders if the Libyan revolution has achieved its goals on the day before its second anniversary, and reflects on Libya’s greatest challenges going forward. Fahad Nazer writes that the "Saudi code" will prevent a repeat in the Kingdom of what took place in Egypt.