Is the Sunni Saudi Kingdom Next?
- Every nation bordering Syria—Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey—is being drawn into the conflict there. The leaders in these countries are worried, to say the least. But why is Saudi Arabia in a panic?
- None of the Syrian warfare is spilling over into Saudi Arabia. Iraq and Jordan serve as buffers. Still, hundreds if not thousands of Saudis (nobody’s counting) are pouring into Syria to fight with one or another of the factions trying to unseat Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. And that has Saudi leaders terrified.
- Saudi Arabia’s most important cleric, Grand Mufti Sheik Abdulaziz al-Sheik, recently warned that there was no religious reason for Saudis to join the Syrian war.
- “The situation in Syria is chaotic due to the proliferation of armed groups that do not fight under a unified banner,” he said. “This is not considered jihad, which must be approved by rulers.” Among those rulers he seemed to be including himself. And a year ago, Saudi Arabia’s Council of Senior Ulema, the state’s highest religious authority, issued a fatwa prohibiting fighting in Syria without permission from the authorities.
- King Abdullah also warned Saudis to stay out of it—as have many other Saudi government officers over many months—to no good effect.
- Why are they so concerned? Well, all of them remember well what happened almost ten years ago when thousands of Saudis joined the jihads against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan and then came back and turned their weapons on Saudis and foreigners who lived there. Hundreds died.
- I was working there as a journalist then, and General Mansour al-Turki, the Interior Ministry spokesman, told me that many of the domestic attacks were by men who came back to the country after fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
- Drawing on interviews with arrested “terrorists,” as he called them, Turki said: “They were angry that their dream,” a fundamentalist Islamic state, “had been killed by America. They wanted to spread their war against the United States and found that doing this was easier in their own country. But it wasn’t until the invasion of Iraq that they could convince others in the country to share their goals. For that reason, the invasion was very important to them.”
- Well, today most of the Saudi men fighting in Syria have joined the Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate—giving further worry to Saudi leaders.
- But at the same time, as Saudi leaders fear the problems their own people may face when those jihadists return home, they are also at the forefront of the nations calling for Assad’s removal from power. (Saudi Arabia, after all, is the protector of Sunni Islam, and Assad is Alawite, a branch of Shia Islam.)
- A couple of weeks ago, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal formally proclaimed that Assad had no right to attend the proposed Geneva peace summit, intended to bring a negotiated end to the war.
- “It is impossible for Assad, his regime and its affiliates to play a role in the future of Syria,” the minister told reporters in Jeddah—bringing howls of complaint from Damascus.
- It seems unlikely Saudi Arabia can succeed at having it both ways.
- This post has been revised to specify President Assad’s religion.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia's Big Adventure
- It was bound to happen sooner or later, and the Middle East decided on sooner: Saudi Arabia is bombing Yemen, and Egypt is prepping a ground invasion.
- Why was this bound to happen? Because Yemen's Iranian-backed Shia Houthi movement is sweeping across the country in force. And if any two countries in the Sunni Arab world are going to get involved in that fight it will be Egypt and Saudi Arabia, partly because they're Yemen's neighbors and partly because that's how they roll. Egypt fought a long war in Yemen from 1962 to 1967 and the Saudis invaded Bahrain in 2011 to put down a Shia rebellion against the Sunni ruling house of Khalifa.
- Iran has been a regional power since the time of the Persian Empire, and the current revolutionary regime that swept away the Shah in 1979 wants to restore Iran's place as a regional superpower. It's tricky, however. The overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population is Sunni and Arab while Iran is Shia and dominated by Persians. These ethnic and religious differences mean little to us in the West, but they mean everything in the Middle East.
- Much of the Arab world is fractured along ethnic, sectarian, and tribal lines, but Iran, despite its patchwork of Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Baluchis, and Arabs, has long been a coherent nation-state. It rests atop the region's relatively temperate highlands and can easily project power down to the hot Arab lowlands below. Its preferred method these days is divide-and-conquer rather than direct confrontation, and it has been perfecting the art of sectarian proxy war since its Revolutionary Guard Corps founded Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1982.
- Yemen's Houthis are its latest project, and the neighbors are not going to stand for it. They'd rather have Al Qaeda take over the country, not because they swoon over Al Qaeda—they don't—but because sect in that part of the world, as ever, trumps ideology.
- It's not just that the Houthis are at war with the Egyptians' and the Saudis' fellow Sunnis. Every Arab government in the region aside from Syria's and Iraq's fears and loathes the rise of Iranian power.
- Egypt’s megalomaniacal former president Gamal Abdel Nasser got more than 20,000 Egyptian soldiers killed in his ludicrous bid to overthrow Yemen’s monarchy in the mid 1960s. “In this terrain,” Patrick Seale wrote in The New Republic in 1963, “the slow-moving Nile Valley peasant has proved a poor match for the barefoot, elusive tribesmen armed only with rifle and jambiya--the vast, curved, razor-sharp dagger which every male Yemeni wears in his belt.” But that disastrous doesn’t register as a loss any more than the disastrous war against Israel in 1973—which Egypt claims to have won—registers as a loss.
- Egypt's current ruler General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi wouldn’t care either way. He's basically a 21st century version of Nasser, minus the latter's regional popularity. Throngs of Arabs outside Egypt aren't clamoring to be annexed by Cairo as they did during the 1950s, but Sisi is nevertheless as puffed up and full of himself and eager to restore Egypt as the rooster of the Arab world regardless of what anyone else over there thinks about it. Pulling a Nasser and stomping the Shias of Yemen wasn't inevitable when he seized power from the Muslim Brotherhood last year, but it became almost inevitable when the Gulf region cried out for help against Iranian malfeasance on the peninsula.
- The Saudis, meanwhile, are Iran's bitterest enemies in the Arab world, and they share a border with Yemen. Saudi citizens on their own side of the border have long been linked to Yemen in the same way Vancouver, British Columbia, is more linked to Seattle and Portland than to Quebec. Riyadh is simply not going to tolerate Iranian adventurism so close to home in a region that overlaps with its own territory. If Iran succeeds in Yemen—and it might—there's nothing stopping Tehran from backing a Shia insurgency against the Saudi crown and the fanatical Sunni Wahhabis.
- So here we are with yet another Middle Eastern civil war that's sucking in regional powers. The United States can stay out of it. The United States is going to stay out of it. The United States is less involved in Yemen right now despite the internationalization of the conflict than when the country was kinda sorta “stable” before the Arab Spring blew through the place and knocked everything sideways.
- You might think from Western media coverage of the region that the Israelis are the only ones concerned about Iran's expansionist foreign policy and its nuclear weapons program, but that's only because Arab governments make less public noise about it in public. Look at what Arab governments are doing, however. While the Israelis groan about it on television and in Congress, the Arabs are going to war.
- By Judy Bachrach on 28 October 2013
- “This is not a revolution,” Madiha al-Ajroush told the New York Times when, unaccompanied, she decided to go for a drive. “And it will not be turned into a revolution.”
- Of course she’s dead wrong, and the Saudi psychologist knows she’s wrong. Her decision to try to get behind the steering wheel (she failed in that attempt) was joined by a few dozen other female Saudis who were more successful in their pursuits. And make no mistake: despite their small numbers, what those women did is definitely a revolution. Saudi Arabia’s social code prohibits women drivers. Those female citizens who need transportation also need a male driver. Without the latter, the lone woman who chooses to defy convention can find herself deprived of her liberty, her job, or both.
- But to examine why it is that Saudi Arabia prohibits this seemingly minor stab at independence, we first have to analyze what kind of threat driving can pose to its society. Ajroush insists that the answer is anodyne, obvious, and purely pragmatic in motive. Behind the wheel, she said, she might do “something as small as get myself a cappuccino or something as grand as taking my child to the emergency room.” But frankly, despite such protests, the threat of these solitary excursions to the society she lives in is massive. One cleric, Sheik Mohammed al-Nujaimi, called the driving campaign a “great danger,” one that would lead, he said, not simply to “the spending of excessive amounts on beauty products,” but also to divorce, a low birthrate, and, yes, adultery.
- And guess what? Beauty products aside, I think the sheik has it absolutely right. There’s no telling what a woman might do when she finds herself driving. Or rather, there is. Those automobile gadgets in the front—they’re not called “controls” for nothing.
- Here’s what a liberated Saudi woman driver might do if fully empowered—besides snagging a cappuccino:
- She could drive herself to the nearest airport, from which she might try to fly to another city. Flight from one Saudi city to another can be grounds for divorce since, as a prominent cleric recently concluded, “Such a wife is suspicious because she insisted to travel alone…”She might flee a male relative who insists on her marrying the man of his choice; and she might flee the prospective groom as well.She might find a job without consulting a male relative—and then drive to and from it, also without his consent.She might conclude that because the unbearably slow court system of her own country practically guarantees that women will be elderly before they can get a divorce from, say, an abusive spouse, she should try to end her own marriage elsewhere.She might meet with someone more appealing than her husband, although preferably alone and without observers, since married women adulterers can get stoned to death in Saudi Arabia, if either four males or eight women actually witness the sexual encounter.
- In any event, you can see for yourself where all this driving is leading. The impotent Saudi clerics who warn darkly of momentous upheavals in male hegemony and consumer spending, the impotent Saudi government which arrested and fined 16 of the rebels, the impotent Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman who told Agence France-Presse that “laws will be applied against violators,” and of course the bold Saudi rebels themselves, who defiantly posted their driving videos on Twitter—they all know where this is leading.
- It’s a revolution, all right. And it’s too late to stop it.
