Graveyard of Clerics: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia by Pascal Menoret (review)

Pascal Menoret's Graveyard of Clerics aims to rehabilitate Saudi Arabia's Islamic Awakening activist movement and Islamists generally. Throughout the concise text, Menoret draws on extensive interviews, unique fieldwork, and an interdisciplinary analytical framework to explore how the movement's young activists mobilized support and, in his eyes, revived public life in the country. Notably, he eschews doctrines and the ideas of individual thinkers in favor of studying (a) the strategies that activists used to disseminate ideas and (b) what he calls "political geography": the physical and social spaces where activists mobilized (pp. 208–9). In Menoret's eyes, his focus on "practices, not texts and doctrines" (p. 11) also helps to explain how the movement won support across society, including among those who rejected its worldview. To illustrate this point, he shares the view of one of these Saudis—a Western-educated chain smoker and "amateur of strong cocktails" (p. 4), who nonetheless regrets that Islamist activists had vanished from public life. "Without them," he explained, "we are left alone to face the Saudi state" (p. 4).

That observation reflects one of the guiding assumptions of Graveyard of Clerics: the elite, or what Menoret collectively calls Al-Sa'ud (p. 15), dominate Saudi society through an all-powerful state allied with the West. From the start, Menoret's rage toward the governing system and the West generally mirrors the tufush, or intense anger at injustice (p. 14), voiced by the activists whose words shape his book. That anger also informs the book's title, which builds on the observation of Jordanian-Palestinian Islamist 'Isam al-Barqawi (better known as Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi) that "Saudi Arabia is a graveyard of clerics and a prison of preachers." For Menoret, these words signal how Al-Sa'ud subject clerics to a form of metaphorical or actual death while desecrating countless gravesites in the name of commercial progress or ideological purity (p. 12).

Still, Menoret stresses that a graveyard is also a place "awaiting revival," a reality that helps explain why Islamists chose to call their sociopolitical movement an "awakening" (p. 12). Ironically, that movement, he notes, began with political apathy—an outlook linked to lamubala, an Arabic term for extreme indifference. That apathy liberated activists to ignore the dangers of political action. In a striking scene, an activist brazenly denounces the Saudi government during an interview held at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, which, Menoret observes, is "a quasi-government institution headed by the former director of the Saudi intelligence services" (p. 15). Nonetheless, "to him," the French scholar adds, "our interview was a political act: let the walls listen to what he had to say" (p. 15).

As reckless as that decision appeared, Menoret argues that it was the first step in a process of political mobilization that produced striking victories in municipal elections in 2005, especially in precincts located in the Kingdom's sprawling suburbs (pp. 84–96). In his eyes, those victories built on a lesson that activists learned during the failed protests held in Riyadh in 2003—namely, Al-Sa'ud had imported the American suburban model to Saudi cities because its prioritization of cars, low-density buildings, and vast avenues created an urban milieu that restricted "large public gatherings" (p. 41). For Menoret, the significance of this urban topography cannot be overstated, and the book's cover includes Paul Stallan's Los Angeles or Riyadh (2010): a black and white photograph of Riyadh where countless low-rise buildings extend far into the distance.

To organize people scattered across such a vast territory, the Islamic Awakening, Menoret argues, started small. The movement's most important activities, an interviewee notes, were groups of young men who could fit into a car and spent extensive time together guided by a teacher. Activists, he adds, also organized Qur'anic memorization groups and scholarly lectures while volunteering to address gaps in the curricula of schools and summer camps...