Some
‘Modernizer’
By Reuel Marc
Gerecht
The Weekly
Standard
November 2,
2018
The
modernizing rulers of the Arab Middle East date from the early 19th century,
with Muhammad Ali of Egypt, who forcibly indentured the peasants of the Nile
valley to farm cash crops, and Ahmad Bey of Tunisia, who in 1846 became the
first Muslim ruler to abolish slavery. (The bey was the son of a slave, a girl
abducted in a Moorish raid on San Pietro.) The allure of such despots has been
strong in the West. These pashas were both widely admired in Europe for their
efforts to introduce “progress”—more efficient economies, better schools,
better armies, elites who spoke European languages—even though their grand
ambitions nearly bankrupted their countries. A century later, Baathist, or
Renaissance, parties rose and had many Western admirers, too, leading to the
surreal situation of a New York Times columnist seeing the secular Saddam
Hussein, the first Arab Führer to use rape as a political tool, as an avatar of
social rights for women.
The
greatest and most admired of the modernizers is, of course, the real
cross-cultural trailblazer, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the Ottoman general who
saved his brethren from European imperialism and a revanchist Greek army. A
hard-drinking, intellectually curious, always natty, womanizing dynamo, Atatürk
could be lethal with his opponents. His dream of a Western nation-state,
divorced from its imperial Islamic identity and the Perso-Arabic script, which
framed the faith and Ottoman glory, had a big dose of fascism—as well as a
muted hope that Turkey could eventually evolve, under the watchful eye of the
army, into something more liberal and democratic. We do not know yet whether
Turkey’s current, Islamist-friendly president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, will
overturn Atatürk’s legacy. We do know that decades of forced secularization
didn’t immunize the Turkish people from the religious appeal of the past.
Crown
Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS), the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, surely
sees himself in this long line of absolutist rulers who pushed their countries
towards a better, more prosperous tomorrow (in the prince’s case, his
“Vision 2030”). The 33-year-old’s fears are justified: Despite its vast
wealth, Saudi Arabia is probably headed toward insolvency. Its population is too
large, too lazy, too young, and too sexually segregated to become competitive
with the West or East Asia. Its public sector is bloated, corrupt, and
notoriously difficult to motivate. Saudi Arabia’s oil and gas aren’t going
to last forever; though foreign currency accounts are again rising, Riyadh has
been steadily drawing down these reserves since 2014 to fund significant deficit
spending. Even with a sharp, sustained increase in the price of oil, the
kingdom’s long-term financial prospects aren’t good unless it can diversify
its economy and produce enough private-sector jobs for its 33 million people.
(When Saudi king Faisal and the shah of Iran orchestrated the first significant
oil price hike in 1971, Saudi Arabia’s population was around 6 million.)
In
an amusing irony, the prince shares the aspirations of an archenemy, Iranian
president Hassan Rouhani: Both want a Middle Eastern/Islamic version of the
Chinese model. Like the Iranian cleric, who was a key player in building the
Islamic Republic’s police state and at the top of the power matrix when Tehran
went on an expatriate killing spree in the 1990s, MbS doesn’t want to
introduce political freedoms into his realm; he just wants to make his domain
more economically vigorous. Some social freedom is fine if it lubricates
society—allows sufficient fun—to encourage competitiveness without igniting
the middle class or an aspiring underclass into insurrection. Like his royal
predecessors, MbS isn’t bashful about his lust for finer things: a $300
million French château, a $550 million superyacht, and the $450 million
Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci. That he bought the yacht when he was
slashing public spending and the painting while he was imprisoning many members
of the elite in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton for malversation—and coercing them
into forfeiting billions—told us that he is untroubled by inconsistency.
The
prince’s decision to assassinate a frequent critic, the contributing
Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, has highlighted again the choices and
contradictions that America has made when it comes to allied authoritarians. MbS
is determined to maintain the fiction that he didn’t order the killing, that
someone else, probably 1 of the 18 who reportedly have been arrested in
connection with Khashoggi’s killing, was the misguided, zealous mastermind of
the mission in Istanbul. The Henry II-Thomas Becket apologia isn’t credible,
of course, and it will be painful for the White House as it tries to find wiggle
room in its commentary on what is likely to be a drawn-out farce. The most
important datum about the murder: The crown prince, who is parochial but not
stupid, intended to be graphic in his handling of Khashoggi, an occasionally
free-spirited opinion journalist who had eclectically mixed support for the
Saudi establishment and sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood. Although MbS may
have been careless in how he organized the Istanbul rendezvous with the
columnist, he knew that this was not going to be a secret operation. The
defining moment for the crown prince was his decision a year ago to kidnap the
Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri and oblige him to resign. Any Saudi prince
could have grown tired of how Saudi money in Lebanon never made a dent in the
Shiite Hezbollah’s growing control of the country; only an impetuous,
delusional Sunni prince would imagine that this humiliation of a Sunni prime
minister would not redound to Shiite Iran’s advantage inside Lebanon.
In
parading the power of sudden death through their omnipresent sword- and
scythe-wielding executioners, sultans and caliphs cultivated hayba, the awe that
comes with unchallengeable control. The crown prince’s material
acquisitiveness matches his political aspirations: He is a practitioner of hayba.
Educated only in the kingdom, he has limited knowledge of the United States and
Europe. We can be pretty sure that the Saudi foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir had
no knowledge of the operation against Khashoggi since he is savvy about the
American press, about the red lines that still exist in the West’s greedy,
commercial societies. He would have warned, unceasingly, that so brazenly
killing Khashoggi would create a firestorm.
The
Middle East has been a particularly ugly place since the post-World War I
dynasties started falling to Arab military men, who within a generation or two
usually carved up their societies, leaving old-world Muslim civility and, in
some cases, hundreds of thousands of people dead. There were moments of serious
American protest: John F. Kennedy was unimpressed by the shah of Iran and
pressured him to introduce fundamental reforms. But Lyndon Johnson and
especially Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger lost interest and increasingly gave
the shah whatever he wanted, especially when it came to weaponry, with few
concerns about how Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was “modernizing” his country. The
bigotry of low expectations—the assumption that Muslim societies just don’t
have the necessary cultural and religious building blocks to sustain a
democracy—undoubtedly conditions the way many Americans, on the left and the
right, approach the morally troubling questions about governance in
Muslim-majority countries. Americans are reliably inconsistent in how we judge
tyranny, but we are usually at our most contradictory in the greater Middle
East.
The
military juntas in Algeria and Egypt—the former arrived in 1962 with the
anti-French Front de libération nationale and the latter with the Egyptian
revolution of 1952—have murdered vastly more innocent people than any Saudi
ruler. Saudi domestic sins, until now, have been, if we exempt actions
against the Shia of the Eastern Province, much more typical of hidebound
monarchs than ruthless, secular Arab nationalists. The black-clad exterminateurs
of the Algerian regime in the 1990s killed with such bloodlust and efficiency
that only the Butcher of Baghdad could rival them. Yet Democratic and Republican
administrations, like the French left and right, have had little difficulty
engaging this blood-soaked dictatorship to further their counterterrorist
missions and satisfy Europe’s oil and gas needs. If President Donald Trump’s
commentary about Khashoggi’s murder has been offensive, just go back and
look at the speeches of Barack Obama administration officials praising the
counterterrorist partnership between Washington and the Algerian government,
which in its guerre à outrance against Islamists regularly slaughtered women
and children.
Internationally,
the Saudi royal family’s proclivities have, of course, been more damaging: As
the monarchy became richer, and especially after the 1979 Iranian revolution and
the attack the same year on the Great Mosque of Mecca by Sunni millenarians, it
devoted much money to spreading its creed. Saudi Islam—Wahhabism, a barebones,
hypermasculine version of the faith at war with the color, joie de vivre, and
mysticism in Islamic civilization—gained ground among Muslims, who were
watching the cradle of their civilization, the Middle East, rot under ever more
oppressive secular governments. Perpetually insecure and scared to death of the
ecumenical appeal of revolutionary Shiism, which tapped the Islamic world’s
anger at Muslim inferiority vis-à-vis the West, the Saudi royals put their oil
and guilty consciences behind proselytism. And success bred commitment. Before
the oil embargo of 1973, Saudi Arabia wasn’t a significant religious force. By
the end of the 1980s, the Saudis were funding mosques worldwide.
Although
a great deal is often made of the Saudi possession of the two holiest cities of
Islam, Mecca and Medina, which gives the regime prestige and an opportunity to
press its views among pilgrims, possession of al-Haramayn has not made Saudi
thought intellectually preeminent. It hasn’t gained the Saudi royal family or
the Wahhabi religious establishment spiritual deference—except where their
money has gained them some institutional leverage. Egypt’s renowned but
declining religious center, Al-Azhar, which has been poverty-stricken for
decades, gave more attention to Saudi legal views (the Hanbali school) as Riyadh
started subsidizing the institution and its personnel. With Saudi Arabia’s
rise, Sunni Islam’s other religious schools have coarsened. Poor religious
scholars everywhere—like acquisitive American academics, former officials,
lawyers, think tankers, and lobbyists—certainly have sought out Saudi favor.
Sometimes Saudi-supported mosques have become hotbeds of militancy; sometimes
they have become boring imports that relate awkwardly to young, more Westernized
locals.
The
defining themes of modern Islamic militancy developed beyond the Arabian
peninsula: Egypt’s Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, the
Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s avatar of holy war and great Koranic
commentator, Abul Ala Maududi, the Indian-Pakistani
journalist-turned-intellectual who fused Western and Islamic thought into a
thoroughly modern militancy, Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iraq’s
Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, and Lebanon’s Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. Saudi money
flowed into an intellectual landscape that was rapidly shifting, often feeding
views that were hostile to the House of Saud. MbS isn’t alone in the royal
family in appreciating this perverse situation; it isn’t clear, however, that
Saudi Arabia changing its missionary activity would have much effect on Sunni
Islamic militancy, which has wildly evolved in the last 20 years.
State-supported Saudi clergy and their foreign partners are irrelevant now to
the intellectual whirlwind that feeds the Islamic State, al Qaeda, the Taliban,
and other radical movements. The capacity of state-supported clergy throughout
the Sunni world to influence profoundly the faithful has declined for decades
for the understandable reason that as Middle Eastern regimes have become more
dictatorial and corrupt, as Western ideas about political legitimacy have
seeped, sometimes poured, into the region, the reputation of the clergy
associated with those regimes has declined. In Egypt and Tunisia, for example,
the status of the Muslim Brotherhood—a lay organization that has kept
seminary-trained, state-paid clerics at arm’s length since its
birth—significantly rose as the official clergy’s sank. Parallel,
independent religious authorities, who sometimes used the Internet to gain
followers, grew in importance. This phenomenon occurred in the Middle East and
in Europe, where unofficial mosques sprouted up all over the continent in part
because European governments, wanting to believe the immigrants would eventually
“go home,” refused to authorize the construction of mosques and religious
schools. A chaotic democracy of dueling religious authorities and imams
developed. Without a legitimate countervailing hierarchy, militants flourished.
It
is a biting irony that Saudi Arabia once subvented the Muslim Brotherhood in an
effort to counter the rise of communism and monarch-downing pan-Arab
nationalism. Until the royal family turned against the organization, Saudi
Arabia itself was fertile ground for the movement. It may still be. The
Brotherhood has become skeptical of Arab monarchies, seeing them as hopelessly
corrupt, religiously hypocritical, and dependent on Western powers. That
critique is more right than wrong. The movement’s embrace of democratic
politics in Egypt and Tunisia as a better, more legitimate vehicle to establish
a moral Islamic society also has improved its appeal in the Persian Gulf, where
absolute monarchies spend vast sums without any input from the commonweal. Much
of Washington wants to believe that the threat from the Brotherhood was
curtailed when Egyptian general Abdel Fattah el-Sisi overthrew, with
considerable public support, the democratically elected government of Mohamed
Morsi in 2013. However, the Brotherhood’s message of religious egalitarian
populism, intertwined with the idea that leadership in the umma, the community
of believers, must gain approval at the ballot box, still fits better into
modernity than kingship. (It’s an excellent bet that the movement’s ideas,
though battered and hidden, are still fertile in Egypt.) Both contemporary
Islamic militancy and fundamentalism—and the two share terrain but are not the
same—have a certain discomfort with, if not hostility towards, kingship, mulk
in Arabic, which is deeply rooted in the side of Muslim history defined by its
emphasis on virtue and the equality of believers. Orthodox Sunni Islam has
stressed obedience to power, to “those who hold the reins.” But within that
same memory of the past runs a broad channel of dissent, even rebellion, waged
on behalf of those who see leadership tied tightly to orthopraxy.
It’s
possible that MbS’s intense animus against Khashoggi was in part fueled by the
columnist’s Brotherhood sympathies and real fear of the movement’s
continuing appeal. Conversely, it may now be the strongest argument for MbS
within the Saudi royal family, many members of which no doubt would like to
superannuate the young prince: If Khashoggi becomes a martyr among Saudis, or
Arabs in general, that could lend strength to those who no longer see kingship
as halal.
Many
Western officials, columnists, and intellectuals exuberantly praised General
Sisi’s speeches against political Islam and the Brotherhood as a necessary
step in contemporary Islam’s reformation. The Saudi crown prince’s Western
supporters have seen his speeches against the militancy of post-1979 Saudi Islam
similarly. (Historically, the crown prince is on weak ground: The fusion of the
Saud family and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s creed in the 18th century never
allowed an even slightly loose, cosmopolitan Muslim society to develop in
Arabia.) But the official hierarchies in these countries, assuming they
implement the will of their overlords energetically, simply can no longer
command religious change. Their actions are more likely to prove
counterproductive.
Nearly
forgotten, the modern Middle East had a pretty profound
reformation-cum-renaissance in the late-19th to mid-20th centuries. Among elites
and even the common man, religious identities became less acute, national
identities rose in importance and affection, parliamentary politics started.
Serious Muslim scholars and liberal intellectuals advanced ideas for fusing
Western and Islamic values, providing a means for proud Muslims to borrow from
the West without shame. Traditional religious scholars and the ardently faithful
went on the defensive for decades.
But
as postcolonial Muslim states faltered, as they became meaner, as they attempted
to ram through projects aiming to transform their societies, dissent grew.
Political and cultural dissent in Muslim societies always expresses itself
religiously. The harshness of secular dictatorial Arab states naturally produced
a harshness in opposition. It’s not surprising that the Islamist/jihadist
opposition in Iraq, Syria, Algeria, and Libya has been so brutal given how the
secular Arab nationalist dictators in these lands savaged their own people.
Unintentionally,
the Saudi crown prince’s dictatorial ambitions could well spoil a felicitous
evolution in Saudi society. We know from Western history and what has transpired
in the Islamic Republic since 1979 that oppressive religious rule secularizes
society. As the conservative Iranian ayatollah Mohammad-Reza Mahdavi Kani
worried over 20 years ago, if everything is about God, then soon nothing is
about God. Saudi society, which is harder to penetrate than Iranian society
because it is less sophisticated and literate, historically less open to the
foreigner, may be much more secular than most people realize precisely because
Saudi religious rule is overbearing. Iranian society took a cultural nosedive
with the Islamic revolution, but there is a collective memory in Iran of a more
curious, open, and secular society. Saudi Arabia doesn’t have those memories
to draw on. But globalization matters. The crown prince’s popularity with the
young has been undoubtedly a reflection of the Westernization of much of the
country’s youth. (That same process of Westernization, conversely, can fortify
the appeal of contemporary Islamists, like the Muslim Brothers.) The crown
prince could blow this transformative moment by intensifying his police state.
Talk to young Saudis and they will quickly tell you how social media have become
almost entirely a vehicle of MbS sycophants. What is now a widely held sentiment
among the young for more openness, certainly for more fun, could turn into a
protest movement against a dictatorship that allows only approved thought.
It
is always good to recall the Iranian pre-revolutionary experience: The protest
movement in the beginning was not explicitly religious. The secularization of
Iranian society—especially the middle and upper classes—was profound. And
yet the religious critiques gained ground as they tapped into deep historical
roots and modern anxieties. The charismatic force of Khomeini and his clerical
allies finally united the disparate strands of protest into an explicitly
Islamic revolution. There is not, and probably cannot be, any equivalent to
Khomeini in Saudi Arabia. But the opening for serious protest against an
increasingly ruthless prince, who tramples simultaneously Westernized youth,
Westernized and religious intellectuals, the religious establishment, and his
own family, shouldn’t be discounted. It’s an excellent bet that if MbS
cannot check himself—and odds are if he survives the current turmoil, his
embrace of hayba will tighten—the positions he advocates will sour with the
public and the royal family. In other words, his pro-American, pro-Israel, philo-Semitic
bent, and the hugely expensive Vision 2030 plan, could all become toxic. The
crown prince’s anti-Iranian determination might remain since those sentiments
appear immovable within the society and the royal family (the Shia of the
Eastern Province live on top of most of the oil; the clerical regime really
would like to wipe the royals out; Wahhabis see the Shia as one small step above
infidels), but elsewhere MbS could easily produce the opposite of what he
intends.
MbS
should have known what Iranian revolutionaries have always known: Don’t kill
your opponents on your own diplomatic grounds. Tehran has frequently sent forth
its murderous missionaries to kill in Turkey, but the dirty deeds have been done
mostly in private. The Iranians have been outrageous elsewhere, most recently in
an attempt to bomb an oppositionist rally in Paris where Rudy Giuliani and other
Americans were speaking. But the clerical regime knows that the Western penchant
with them is to forget if not forgive. Tehran benefits enormously from how
Iran’s internal politics—the factions within the ruling elite—always get
interpreted to cast blame on the “hardliners,” whoever they may be at any
given time.
The
crown prince won’t be so lucky. Killing a Washington Post columnist plugged
into the matrix of Western elites was rash as well as immoral. The American left
and much of the right is in high dudgeon. The president’s transactional
approach to foreign affairs looks particularly unpleasant. And MbS will have an
impossible time using the Thomas Becket defense given that he had already purged
the police state’s upper echelons. And if the young prince dares to kill any
of those reportedly arrested for Khashoggi’s murder, he could actually create
a disloyal cadre within his own circle. Henry II didn’t touch the four knights
who dispatched Becket, allowing the men, after the pope excommunicated them, to
sail off to the Holy Land to pray and fight.
MbS
has to be hoping that Erdogan doesn’t really have audiotapes from Turkish
intelligence bugs inside the Saudi consulate or chooses, for whatever political
or financial calculations, not to release them to the public. If they exist and
he releases them, if they leak from a Western intelligence service (it’s
unclear whether the CIA has a copy of a recording), and we can hear MbS’s
minions chopping up Khashoggi’s body, if we can hear them cutting off body
parts when the columnist is still alive, then the Western penchant of forgetting
the heinous crimes of consequential heads of state may falter. This time round
greed, fear, and allegiance to a grander cause—the usual reasons for
realpoliticians to look beyond gut-churning messes—may not be sufficient.
Washington’s increasingly vicious political divisions are aligning along the
crown prince’s mistake. “He is a bastard, but he is our bastard” is an
argument best made within the confines of Washington’s Metropolitan Club
without an accompanying soundtrack of bones being sawed.
If
MbS survives, which is still likely, the United States will confront the
distressing fact that the Saudi ruler is “modernizing” his country in ways
that could well prove tumultuous. There is little to love in the Saudi royal
family. There is nothing to like about what has happened since the Saudi-Wahhabi
fusion in 1744. But there is something to be said for consensus within a deeply
conservative society trying to change. The Muslim Middle East is littered with
the wreckage of strong, oh-so-modern men exercising their wills. Saudi Arabia is
a potentially explosive laboratory where cautious men need to prevail.