Religion and Politics in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism and the State (review)

The stated purpose of this book is to “unravel the myths that have led to equating Wahhabism with Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism” (p. 2). To do that, it addresses three objectives: to place Wahhabism in a specific time and place — 18^th century Arabia; to analyze it as a religio-political ideology legitimizing the rule of the House of Saud that has been interpreted by different people at different times; and to analyze its influence on Saudi-US relations.

In Part One, entitled “Wahhabism: Religious Movement and Political Ideology,” the opening essay by Natana DeLong-Bas does an excellent job of placing Wahhabism in a specific time and place. She accurately identifies Wahhabism as:

a revival and reform movement founded in central Arabia [Najd] in the mid-eighteenth century by scholar and jurist Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Although ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself did not seek to found an overtly political movement, the political implications of his movement calling for belief in God’s unity (tawhid) and the unity of the Muslim community clearly became clear to local political leaders who sought to unite the fragmented tribes

(p. 12).

This definition is the key to analyzing the relationship between Wahhabism and latter-day militant Islamist jihadism. Wahhabism was founded as an intellectual, puritan, fundamentalist, Islamic reform movement to purge Islam of all heretical “innovations” that had appeared since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, not as a militant political ideology calling for holy war. The other two essays in Part One, “Wahhabism and the Saudi State” by Khalid al-Dakhil and “Contestation and Authority in Wahhabi Polemics” are quite informative but more on a highly intellectual than a political level. Both drift fairly far from editors’ stated goal of unraveling the myths of linking Wahhabism and jihadism.

In Part Two, “Wahhabism and Saudi State,” the first two chapters are basically descriptive historical narratives of the evolution of the Saudi state and the annexing of the Hijaz. The remaining two chapters are essentially interpretive essays on various aspects of the contemporary challenges posed to the legitimacy of the regime by various radical Islamist elements. While these subjects are important, however, their individual topicality strays a bit from focusing on the entire evolution of the Saudi state and the role of Wahhabism in that process.

Part Three, “Saudi-US Relations,” also contains some interesting analysis, but the topic itself strays even further from the stated purpose of the book. One needs only look at the apt subtitle of Thomas Lippman’s essay, “Placing Interests over Ideology,” to see why. All political ideologies, as the term implies, seek to acquire goals based on self-interests by evoking some high moral justification for launching specified forms of political action. Mutually perceived mutual self-interests, not mutually shared ideological values, are the primary determinant of all cooperative bilateral relations, including those between Saudi Arabia and the United States. Islam has always played an important role in Saudi foreign policy, but it has never foreclosed on relations with non-Muslim states when it was in the Saudi national interest to do so.

In the final essay, “The Impact of the Wahhabi Vision,” John Voll reconfirms the basic assumption stated in the early chapters: that Wahhabism is a conservative, intellectual Islamic reform movement and not a militant political platform in support of lethal, violent jihadist terrorism. He concludes that the use of the term Wahhabism to apply to militant and often violent (political) activism complicates the task of assessing the impact of the Wahhabi tradition, “since many (if not all) groups who are called ‘Wahhabi’ have little or no connection with the historical movement” (p. 164).

There was one topic that was all but overlooked and that the reviewer believes should have been the topic of a separate essay. That is the influence on the Saudi state of the Hanbali school of Islamic jurisprudence, the most conservative...