Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo

World News

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Saudi Arabia’s Culture Wars Strain the Kingdom

The Saudi stereotype is bleak. Environmental desolation is mirrored by a cultural desert. Religious police meander between buildings, looking for victims. Women hurry between shadows behind their male guardians. The strict interpretation of Najdi Islam dominates nearly every aspect of life. It is a quiet, bleak place, with the only civic engagement at the mosque, whose loudspeakers are the only music the kingdom ever hears.

It’s stark, and it sticks in the mind. It is, of course, not totally true.

Saudi Arabia’s approximately 20 million citizens may be dominated by those who wish the kingdom to look like that. Those in power have been controlling the kingdom’s image. Yet beneath the surface, discontent stirs.

Reuters reports: “When senior Saudi cleric Abdulaziz al-Tarifi told his almost one million Twitter followers that musical instruments were ungodly, it helped spark a hashtag among like-minded Saudis that ‘the people reject music academies.’”

The hashtag, echoing the language of Arab Spring revolts elsewhere, captured the hostility to reforms such as introducing entertainment events from rock concerts and comedy shows to kick-boxing into the conservative kingdom.

Even having the controversy feeds the monolithic Saudi stereotype: with bearded clerics lambasting modernity and innocuous pursuits.

But simply having the debate is proof of strains within the kingdom. Saudi Arabia has embarked on an ambitious program of modernization on as many levels as it can handle. It has set the artificial deadline of 2030 to get most of them done. For the sluggish Saudi state and the stubborn cadre of clerical conservatives that dominate much of it, this is a huge task.

The widening cracks of Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia is a 19th century state with 20th century institutions lording over a divided and dividing society. When Saudi Arabia was first founded during the post-Ottoman 1920s, its founder, Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman, fought a very 19th-century tribal war, as sheikhs had for centuries throughout Arabia. He was the state; institutions were fellow sheikhs who commanded different portions of his conquered kingdom.

This lasted until the 1950s, when, after World War II, oil money began to flow in. This coincided with Western, especially American, technology. To support all this, the Saudis built a 20th century state with influences from the post-war West. Ministries sprung up, tribal levies were organized into battalions, passports were issued, etc.. The trappings of a 20th century state took hold. Yet the powers that remained were distinctly 19th century: sheikhs and princes elevated by blood dominated the top echelons of power, stuffing the ministries with family and friends. Many of them were, predictably, not very competent nor motivated.

When development was merely a matter of writing checks to get foreigners to build things, this did not produce overt complications: building a highway, or an office tower, is a relatively straightforward affair.

But to get people in that office tower to run profitable businesses? That is a much harder job.

Getting Saudis to work – and work meaningfully – is already a massive challenge in the most classical rentier state in history. But there are also generational, regional, sectarian, and political conflicts.

There is a massive youth bulge. Normally, that’s an opportunity for a country. But Saudi Arabia is scarce in every resource but oil, and oil, right now, is cheap. Providing jobs is tough; what’s worse, the 19th century patronage-heavy character of the state means most Saudis expect their government to invent jobs for them, not for citizens to create jobs for themselves.

It doesn’t help that the conservatives would call just about any job but prayer sinful.

Unemployed youth tend to channel their restless energy into crime, terrorism, protests, and anti-state activities. They drove the Arab Spring: they marched into Syria’s and Libya’s civil wars. Direct cash transfers from Saudi Arabia’s still-considerable sovereign wealth reserves can buy many off for now, but that fund will dry up should oil prices remain low much longer.

Then there’s the issue of regionalism. Saudi Arabia’s cultural heartland is its Nejd Province, the conservative core that conquered the rest. Yet western Hijazis, Eastern Province citizens, and its southern provinces along the Yemeni border do not wholly buy into their overlords’ worldview. People from Jeddah, near the holy city of Mecca, are quick to point out their modernity; people from Qatif, in the Eastern Province, openly call for the overthrow of the king.

Meanwhile, the southern provinces have been forced to duck and cover from Houthi bombardment, something sure to cause resentment.

That Eastern Province, by the way? Full of Shi’a, remnants of the days when the Persian Gulf was very much Persian. Like their counterparts in Bahrain, they choke under Sunni rule. Yet to focus on the Shi’a-Sunni divide leaves out the diversity of Saudi Arabia’s Sunnis, who may profess they are all one religion but have a vast diversity of religious opinion. Some mumble favorably about the dying Islamic State; others scheme for veil-free weekends in Dubai. In between are a gamut of opinions on religion and life. This diversity is strictly controlled by powerful kings; Saudis are used to being told what to do, even if they don’t agree with the decision. The danger is that soon they will have no strong leader to command them.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia’s shaky political contract is being stress-tested by a quagmire in Yemen, stagnating economic growth, and glaringly obvious corruption.

Corruption Saudis could endure so long as their cradle-to-grave welfare state provided them with easy cash. But Saudi is suffering a housing crisis, cutting bonuses to state employees, and is suffering a stagnating GDP. If the state cannot bribe, it cannot endure. Saudi Arabia and its allies are not winning the war in Yemen, and the bodies are piling up. Dead soldiers coming home from a less-than-essential war is always a recipe for blowback.

In democracies or republics, anger would be channeled into electoral politics; new elites would swap out with old ones peacefully. But Saudi Arabia’s 19th century state has no such mechanism: old King Salman has neither checks nor balances to his power. His brutish security forces are reliable for now. How they feel about all of Saudi Arabia’s multiplying problems remains a matter of speculation.

The culture wars are just the most overt sign of the Saudi geopolitical bomb ready to go off. Bet on crisis in the next decade.