Jihad in Saudi Arabia: Violence and Pan-Islamism since 1979 (review)

Intelligence personnel everywhere have grappled and continue to struggle with one of the most enigmatic searches in contemporary affairs — profiling "terrorists" — that would, presumably, help identify and, hopefully, prevent contemplated violent actions. For most, Saudi Arabia remains the heartland of radical "Islamism," a boom for security agencies anxious to figure what is beyond their reach. Nearly a decade after 9/11, few have figured out how to predict with any reasonable accuracy why a young Saudi becomes a militant. Thomas Hegghammer, a Senior Fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (Forsvarets forskningsinstitutt, FFI), makes a significant contribution in this useful book, relying primarily on Islamist sources. As such, the unclassified study highlights post-1979 Saudi jihadism, and offers a variety of explanations for its rise and fall. It is jam-packed with names and events, based on a database that "contains 539 unique biographies of Saudi militants active between 1980 and 2006," and which will stand as a reference guide (pp. 13, 239).

Hegghammer's "Introduction" presents a very ambitious theoretical framework that aims to decipher the Jihadi iceberg by focusing on its hidden parts. His primary assertion is that the "movement in Saudi Arabia differs from its counterparts in the Arab republics in being driven primarily by extreme pan-Islamism and not socio-revolutionary ideology" (p. 1). He painstakingly demonstrates how the conflicts in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Bosnia, and elsewhere — that raged with a vengeance throughout 1980s and early 1990s — motivated hundreds of young Saudis to sacrifice themselves in defense of Islam (pp. 38-58). Importantly, most Afghan-bound holy warriors were not propelled by anti-Americanism, reveals Hegghammer. Rather, clever recruiters tricked them into service by promising glory as they liberated occupied Muslim lands (pp. 133-138).

Hegghammer further avows that commonly used theological descriptions "in the literature on Islamism, such as salafi, wahhabi, jihadi salafi, and takfiri, do not correspond to discrete and observable patterns of political behaviour among Islamist" (p. 5). His preferences are for three new terms, namely "socio-revolutionary Islamism," "classical jihadism," and "global jihadism" (p. 7). These classifications are geared to buttress Hegghammer's hypothesis, namely that Saudi pan-Islamism is "a macro-nationalism, centred on the imagined community of the umma (global community of Muslims)" (p. 8), which must be a, if not the, primary explanation for the short-lived outburst of violence in Saudi Arabia between 2000 and 2006.

Still, Hegghammer is highly critical of successive Saudi governments, ostensibly because Riyadh oscillated between soft and harsh policing methods that bordered on schizophrenia. His belief that Saudis failed to understand how to handle pan-Islamism is telling. Presumably, after the oil boom of the 1970s, Saudi leaders expressed sympathy with the suffering of other Muslims, and encouraged their subjects to dole out large sums of cash to provide sorely needed assistance. Ironically, this was meant to buttress Saudi legitimacy and, allegedly, was a wonderful model as long as the burgeoning jihadists operated outside of the Kingdom. When jihadists went after expatriate workers inside the Kingdom, Saudi security forces mobilized, tracking down and killing leading militants. Naturally, when dissidents were tortured, this further radicalized survivors as the actions and reactions swirled into a pattern.

One could argue the points that the fate that befell Muslims around the world — the unfolding events after 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and the open-ended variety against "terror" — all stimulated whatever disenchantment existed among radical elements. Nevertheless, against a rising level of violence, complacent and poorly-trained authorities were pointed at with indignation after they embarked on massive manhunts in 2003 when Saudi jihadi violence burst out in the streets of Riyadh. At the time, a residential compound was targeted where 35 individuals were killed and, over a short period of time, a series of suicide bombings claimed more than 300 additional [End Page 671...