Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (review)

While also a social history of the Saudi Islamist movement, Stéphane Lacroix’s Awakening Islam examines the origins of a failed “insurrection” in the early 1990s against the Saudi state by an Islamist movement it had earlier nurtured. Lacroix is a political scientist who successfully uses the historical perspective to better understand the social origins of Islamist politics in Saudi Arabia. Blending data from interviews with written sources in Arabic, French, and English, he examines its local, regional, and international dimensions, grounding the Sahwa in a broader historical narrative. Some prior knowledge of Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology will aid the reader as it informs the study throughout, particularly his concept of the “field.” It is to better understand the fields—these competitive spheres of the social and political landscape—that Lacroix mobilizes the historical perspective.

The Sahwa originated from the convergence of Muslim Brotherhood refugees from Egypt (and to a lesser extent Syria and Iraq) with local Saudi Wahhabis. They were fleeing repression by secular dictators like Nasser of Egypt from the 1950s, and Saudi Arabia welcomed them. They were best placed to counter Nasser’s ideological attacks on the Saudi rulers, described as agents of imperialism for their close relationship to the West. In the 1960s the kingdom embarked upon its “Islamic modernization.” Modernization was a legitimizing ideology of the ruling family and funded by oil wealth. The Brothers, better educated than the local Wahhabi clerics and trusted more than the Saudi intelligentsia, were enlisted to modernize the Saudi educational system. The Brothers permeated it at every level, affecting society as teachers and reconfiguring its curricula. The generation that they produced was committed to social activism guided by a fusion of Brotherhood and Wahhabi doctrines.

Oil revenues dropped in the 1980s and recession ensued in the kingdom; few opportunities for this new generation of Sahwi graduates existed. This compounded their resentment of the secular modernizers directing the state bureaucracy. Before the recession, Sahwi’s attention was focused on acquiring larger allocations of state resources than rival Islamist groups. After the recession, their attention moved toward opposing a regime whose legitimacy they had come to doubt. When, in 1990, the Saudi government requested protection from the U.S. military against a possible invasion by Iraq, it acted as a catalyst for diverse forms of discontent that had been germinating for some years.

The Sahwa “insurrection” began in 1990 but fizzled out. It lacked the mobilizing structures on the ground needed to sustain popular protest. That is why, Lacroix explains, it was doomed to failure even before the government easily repressed it in 1994. The meaning of the Sahwa movement remained an item of contention amongst its self-proclaimed heirs. Some failed in later mobilizations against the state in the late 1990s. Others were co-opted by a ruling elite that had regrouped and tightened its control of the religious and social fields. Despite the Sahwa movement’s failure, Lacroix believes that it has become an indispensable framework of reference for all social movements in the kingdom.

This is a detailed study of the movement but only two pages are dedicated to the methodology (279–280). Lacroix conducted the fieldwork between June 2003 and May 2007 in Saudi Arabia mainly, but also in Kuwait, the UAE, Egypt, Jordan, and the U.K. Lacroix conducted a total of fifty long interviews with participants involved at various levels of the Saudi Sunni Islamist movements. He mentions them in the chapter notes but some more information would have been interesting. He explains that these meetings required a lot of preparatory work and that “it was necessary to put together a social network that could be relied on to meet the activist in question” (279). He made acquaintance with many of the foot soldiers of the Saudi Islamist groups, rank-and-file or former members who were the backbone of the movement. Lacroix also spoke to...