A Fragmented Islamist Field
The question of what constitutes political Islam and "Islamists" in Saudi Arabia is rather difficult
to answer. Unlike in most other Arab countries, Islamic scholars do wield a considerable amount
of power in the political system and hold key positions as judges, ministers, and officials in the
religious police. In most other Arab states, Islamists largely confront ostensibly secular, often Arab Nationalist, regimes. The Saudi case is more nuanced, however.2 Saudi Arabia does some
things that Islamists want to see implemented in an ideal Islamic state, for example the public
enforcement of morality, dress codes, the closure of shops during prayer times, gender
separation, the collection of zakat, Daawa at home and abroad, and the role of sharia in
jurisprudence. So the "Islamist" field is extremely complex and hybrid, and many key Islamist
figures are employed by the state. Others outside the formal state apparatus overlap with
government-controlled institutions in many arenas, for example in mosques, charities and mass
media.
Broadly speaking, one can classify the Islamist field as follows: Firstly, there is the official
Wahhabi tradition. These are the clerics on the Council of the Committee of Senior ʿUlamaʾ and
the ʿulamaʾ in the judiciary, the religious police as well as in parts of the education sector.3 By
and large, these clerics endorsed the kingdom's response to challenges at home and its role in
the Arab counter-revolution. The Saudi grand mufti Abdulaziz al-Shaykh, who stems from the Al
al-Shaykh clerical family that are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the
founder of the Wahhabi doctrine, for example, said that protests were against Islam, forbidding
them in other Arab countries (such as Egypt) as well as in Saudi Arabia. He then endorsed the
2013 coup in Egypt (even though the justifications of the coup in Egypt heavily depended on the
mass protests of June 30). The mufti also endorsed the crackdown on dissent and public
protest, particularly from the Shiite, inside Saudi Arabia. He also denounced IS as being unIslamic
and supported the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.4
A second group, and an important one, is what one could loosely call the "Sahwa" or postSahwis,
those people who were involved in the movement termed the Islamic Awakening (alSahwa
al-Islamiyya) in the early 1990s, which had challenged the political dominance of the
ruling family. The Sahwa is an umbrella term for a group that was heavily influenced by Muslim
Brotherhood networks in the kingdom and fused Muslim Brotherhood ideology with the local
Wahhabi tradition. It is worth remembering, however, that political parties are banned in Saudi
Arabia, and all these networks are operating clandestinely. They therefore have a less formal
structure than in other countries in the region.
These people, who were broadly speaking associated with the Muslim Brotherhood trend,
supported the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in Syria and Yemen, and welcomed
the Muslim Brotherhood coming to power in Egypt. They and their supporters visited Egypt,
helped their "brothers" there, established media outlets, and invested in the country. These people have connections to individual Saudi princes and may be employed by the state
bureaucracy. But by and large they were rather critical of the Saudi handling of the Arab
uprisings. Some of them, such as the popular cleric Salman al-Awda, signed a petition calling
for political reforms in early 2011.5
Indeed, in 2011 and 2012 there was some interaction
between Sahwa Islamists, liberals and political reformers of various persuasions. Together they
unsuccessfully tried to push for democratic reforms in the country. One of the key groups behind
this alliance was the the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA), known in
Arabic as HASM (Jamiyyat al-Huquq al-Siyasiyya wa al-Madaniyya), most of whose leaders
have since been imprisoned for their activism.6
Salman al-Awda also published a book in which he praised public protests and the Arab
uprisings in general.7 He reaffirmed his position in an open letter to the government on March
15, 2013. In the letter he warned of a socio-political explosion if political prisoners were not
released and reforms were not enacted immediately.8
So for most of the period from 2011 to 2014, Sahwa clerics and their supporters were more or
less in disagreement with the Saudi government over the handling of regional challenges (with
the partial exception of Syria, where both supported the opposition, even though there were
disagreements about which groups to support, as well as Bahrain, where both supported the
crackdown on the opposition).9 But the emergence of IS and then the Houthi takeover of
Yemen's capital Sanaa in September 2014 posed severe challenges to Saudi Arabia, and
caused a temporal realignment between these Sahwis and the Saudi regime, in particular since
Salman took to the throne in early 2015.
The jihadis are another distinct strand of political Islam in Saudi Arabia even though they have
emerged out of the above mentioned Islamist traditions.10 They were mainly active in Iraq and
Syria, where the foreign policies of the Saudi state, and its support for the armed opposition, in
many ways overlapped with the short-term aims of the jihadis. But the successes of IS, the
declaration of the caliphate, and IS's increasingly anti-Saudi rhetoric undermined this