The King, The Sultan and The Caliphate, Part 1
Wake early if you want another man’s life or land.
This note was distributed to my institutional clients on 24 February 2019. To learn more about institutional subscriptions, simply reply to this email. If you enjoy reading this post, please take the time to like, comment, and subscribe as it helps immensely and is personally gratifying.
The official documents elevating MBS to Crown Prince have several distinguishing characteristics that provide insight into the political situation in the Kingdom [1]. The documents were clearly rushed and poorly vetted, indicating the changes took place outside of the normal process.
Erdoğan has had success in implementing Islamism and consolidating power, but Turkey remains a long-standing republic. For The Sultan to take the next step away from democracy and towards authoritarianism he needs something to show for his new power as President. Thus far, events have not gone in Erdoğan’s favor.
The potential outcomes in Saudi Arabia are much more variable and, because there is no voting to relieve social pressure. Mohammed bin Salman is clearly a man who wants to make his mark on the world. He wants to be remembered as his grandfather is and, as a result, sees the need to make high-risk/high-reward moves.
“Who died and made you King?”, is a question this writer was asked many times as a boy. For me, the question was a rhetorical one. But a select few in the world face a similar question in a very real way. “What is your right to power?” For those people, it is critical to have an answer (even if it’s a bad one) and resources to enforce their will to power.
Behind the headline question are at least three sub-questions that must be answered or suppressed to successfully attain and retain power. They are: ‘Who or what confers the right to power?’, ‘How should the answer to the first question be collected and interpreted?’, and most importantly, ‘What is to be done if you think the wrong person is in power?’. This note examines how the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Turkey are dealing with the above questions.
The Struggle Within
The grand contest for regional hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran gets a lot of press because it incorporates the concept of a nation-state (familiar to Westerners) with a seemingly binary struggle between competing religious sects. In the US media, the struggle is viewed in Cold War terms without any nuance. Easy to understand plus the potential for airstrikes makes for good headlines. But a much more interesting struggle is taking place between Sultan Erdoğan, (future King) Mohammed bin Salman and a wide assortment of Salafist Jihadis.
The struggle between the Kingdom, the Sultanate and the Caliphate – all three Sunni – is much more important in the near-term than the inter-sect struggle hanging over it all. The King wants legitimacy as an absolute monarch without needing the support of the religious establishment. The Sultan wants to multiply his power by combining democratic and religious legitimacy as a Caliph.
Both fear an outcome where the rising tide of populist-led fundamentalist Islam successfully lays claim to the title of ‘Defender of Islam’. The Al Saud family knows plenty about how that works because that is how the disparate tribes of the Arabian Peninsula were conquered and unified into Saudi Arabia.
Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia
European colonization expanded massively in scale and scope over the course of the 18th century. Gone were outposts for traders, missionaries and religious zealots. In came industrial-scale exploitation of natural resources and permanent population transfers. The Europeans also brought their social mores with them and imposed them on the locals. In the Middle East, a reactionary “Islamic Reformism” emerged almost immediately. The reactionary movement dictated a return to a literalist interpretation of Islam with the Quran and Sunnah as the model and guide for society.
One of the most extreme versions of Islamic Reformism was the doctrine of Ibn al-Wahhab. Wahhab was a fundamentalist preacher who had been exiled from his hometown of ‘Uyayna, near Riyadh, and was taken in by the Saud family. His doctrine sought to cleanse Islam of corrupt practices, especially “idolatry” (i.e. anti-Shia). Indeed, conflict with the Shia is embedded in the doctrine of Wahhabism[2].
Wahhab’s vision was to spread Islam by any means necessary, with no boundaries to the expansion. The sect’s doctrine also justified war against anyone who did not adopt its brand of Islam – even other Sunnis. That suited the al-Saud family leadership very well because it gave them legitimacy to conquer the rest of the Arabian Peninsula in the name of spreading “pure Islam”.
The Najd Pact of 1744 officially linked the political power of the Al Saud family with the religious legitimacy of al-Wahhab. The Pact represents an alliance between religion and dynastic totalitarianism.
---
The ulama (senior Islamic scholars) and umara (rulers) have a special relationship in Wahhabism. The role of the government is to safeguard sharia law and ensure it is carried out. To further this objective, absolute obedience to the ruler is required. In return, the ruler is expected to consult the ulama when it comes to matters of sharia. A ruler may be disobeyed only if his orders violate sharia and even in such a case rebellion is not permissible. The ruler should be advised discretely by the senior clerics and regular citizens should take no action. This rule holds even if the ruler is considered unjust and oppressive. In this system religion remains necessary to power, but power controls religion.
The Modern Kingdom
The first Saudi-Wahhabi state lived fast and died young. Conquest of the entire Arabian Peninsula was achieved in the first decade of the nineteenth century, but the Kingdom was destroyed by an Egyptian Ottoman army in 1818 after seven years of war. The second Kingdom lasted from 1824 to 1891, but remained small and inconsequential.
The third Saudi Kingdom began when Ibn Saud captured Riyad in 1902 and launched what would become a twenty-year campaign to conquer the peninsula. Initially, the third kingdom looked a lot like the first. The justification for aggressive expansion was presented in religious terms and unity among the various Arab tribes was achieved by conspicuously applying Islam to all aspects of public policy.
In 1927, rather than following success in the Arabian Peninsula with a conquest of Iraq, Ibn Saud called off jihad. In response the Ikhwan rebellion of 1928 began[3]. The rebellion was a serious threat to the Saud family because it called into question their religious legitimacy. The religious establishment stuck with Ibn Saud and his forces put down the rebellion.
The discovery of oil created a massive new administrative state that allowed the government to bureaucratize the ulama to limit their political independence and influence. The “establishment” ulama are scholars on the government payroll acting in the best interests of the Saud family.
The establishment ulama in Saudi Arabia have historically been given significantly more authority than their counterparts in most other Muslim countries. On matters of criminal law, the government generally defers to the clerics and matters of corporate law are left to the government technocrats. The ulama are aware of their diminishing role in a technocratic society and limit themselves to being guardians of public morality.
The Rise and Fall of the Ulama
The power of the ulama in Saudi Arabia has waxed and waned with the Saud family’s need for fatwahs of support. The royals looked to the clerics for help during the anti-monarchy coups of the 1950s and 1960s. The overthrow of the monarchy in Libya was particularly worrisome and senior Saud family members feared it would spark revolution in the Gulf monarchies.
After only five years of rule, Ibn Saud’s son King Saud (r. 1953-1964) who was known for opulent spending and leading an openly un-Islamic lifestyle had offended the clerics and nearly bankrupted the kingdom. In 1958, with fatwahs in hand, Prince Faysal and other senior members of the family forced King Saud to relinquish most of his power. Saud abdicated in 1964 and King Faysal was elevated under a banner of pan-Islamism and modernization.
Faysal implemented controversial reforms that rolled back religious restrictions, but he remained popular because of his success as an executive. However, even Faysal needed the support of the ulama. When Faysal introduced education for girls in the 1960s over the protests of the ulama, riots ensued. Faysal backtracked by keeping education for girls but putting the clerics in charge of curriculum.
The power and prestige of the ulama reached its apex in the wake of the events of 1979. The Iranian Revolution was no doubt a concern because Ayatollah Khomeini was actively working to export Islamic Revolution around the Muslim world. However, the potential for a theocratic revolution was very low in the Sunni world.
Of much greater concern that year was the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamic militants declaring themselves the reincarnation of the Ikhwan. King Fahd needed the support of the ulama to ride out the uprising because it was directed firmly at the Saud family and harkened to the Ikhwan uprising of 1928. The establishment ulama issued fatwahs supporting the King and no mass uprising occurred. In return for their loyalty and support, Fahd provided the ulama with the political leverage and government resources to ratchet up social controls. Religious control over education was greatly expanded and the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice (i.e. the religious police) was created and given the power of arrest.
The ulama again came to the family’s aid when, in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, the Saudis invited U.S. troops into the Kingdom. But the power of the clerics never returned to the level they enjoyed in the 1980s.
Since the 1990s, the power of the ulama to enforce social morality has been diminished by the monarchy. King Abdullah (r. August 2005 – January 2015) was particularly active in limiting the power of the ulama. In the early 2000s he secularized education and implemented a program to send more Saudis to Western universities. In 2010, Abdullah ruled that only government ulama could issue fatwahs. In April 2016, the religious police were stripped of their power to arrest and, soon after, concerts, mixed-gender events and movie theaters all became legal again.
The de-Wahhabization drive championed by King Salman and the Crown Prince has been controversial among the Saudi public and the royal family. A key question now is: Could an opposition force, with the support of establishment ulama, unseat a deeply unpopular king? The overthrow of Saud by Faysal being the prime historical example. However, beginning with the changes to the succession process in the 1990s, power has been shifting away from the family and towards the king.
Saud Family Power Struggles
The Basic Law, among many other things, codified the succession process to avoid a power vacuum. Prior to the Basic Law, the throne had passed from half-brother to half-brother and the choice of who became king was based on seniority and family consensus.
Article 5(b) of the Basic Law opens the position of King and Crown Prince to grandsons of Ibn Saud as well as his sons. The law set selection criteria for Crown Prince as “suitability” with experience and morality being considered the most important factors. The King was given the prerogative to choose any Crown Prince he wanted and could change the designation at any time.
In 2006, King Abdullah amended article 5(c) to create a senior council of clerics (the “Allegiance Council”) who vet nominations for Crown Prince and provide approval. With the “Allegiance Council” available to provide a rubber stamp for the King’s choice of Crown Prince, he has much less reason to consult the family.
King Salman and Crown Prince Muhammed bin Salman (“MBS”) have been very assertive in concentrating power in one sub-branch of the family, the Sudairi. MBS was elevated to Crown Prince over members of the family with more seniority. In an unprecedented concentration of power, succession to the throne was set as father-to-son rather than half-brother-to-half-brother. The King and the Crown Prince have put loyalists in key positions rather than spreading responsibility (and resources) among the various branches.
The official documents elevating MBS to Crown Prince have several distinguishing characteristics that provide insight into the political situation in the Kingdom [4]. The documents were clearly rushed and poorly vetted, indicating the changes took place outside of the normal process. MBS was elevated to Crown Prince and the next day Article 5(b) was amended to prohibit a King and a Crown Prince from being from the same branch of the family. Future kings are barred from naming their sons as their successor, unless they issue a royal decree.
The text contains some readily apparent grammatical errors that would not happen if the senior clerics were involved. The scholars are sticklers for perfect Arabic and even set up the ‘Council of Experts’ to handle the writing of religious and political decrees. It is also noteworthy that the “rubber stamp” Allegiance Council gave MBS only 31 of 34 votes of approval.
The arrests of powerful Saudis in November 2017 indicated MBS was willing to openly threaten members of the Saudi elite. The goal of the arrests was to eliminate the autonomy of the education and judicial branches of government. Branches of the family control different parts of the government bureaucracy, which has divided the government into a collection of fiefdoms. This made it hard to implement changes or programs that required cooperation among the various groups. It also meant that power was distributed among the family to provide checks and balances. MBS concentrated control over key agencies in the hands of people loyal to him. The Prince did not initiate the concentration of power, but he has aggressively advanced the cause.
What do you think, since this note was issued in 2019, has the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia overcome the conservative religious establishment and achieved legitimacy to rule? Please leave a comment, open to all.
To Be Continued…
[1] See: “’Riyadhology’ and Muhammed bin Salman’s Telltale Succession” by Chilbi Mallat in Lawfare
[2] Wahhabism is generally not a self-applied term. Wahhabis classify themselves as Salafi and are marked by the use of particular words and association of concepts.
[3] The Ikhwan were originally Bedouins who Al-Wahhab had indoctrinated and converted from nomad raiders to soldiers for Islam. By the 3rd Kingdom the Ikhwan were a unit of elite mounted Wahhabi zealots.
[4] See: “’Riyadhology’ and Muhammed bin Salman’s Telltale Succession” by Chilbi Mallat in Lawfare