Welcome all to this, the second session of our political pod seminar sponsored by the Middle East Centre at TheJapanese College Oxford.
It's really a pleasure to have with us today, Professor Mahdavi Rashid, Professor Pascale Minaret,
both speaking on Saudi Arabia and religion, specifically in Saudi Arabia.
My name is Basil D.G. and I'm joined by Summer and Azmi.
The both of us are convenors of the seminar. And let me just say a couple of words about how we will proceed.
Osama will shortly introduce our speakers. We will have the talks by Badawi, followed immediately by the PA. and then take questions at the end.
If you have questions, please write them in the Q&A box or in the chat box and we shall come to them.
And don't wait until the end of the talks. You can write your questions any time during them.
So much looking forward to this second session. And over to you, Osama.
Thank you so much, Faisal, and welcome everyone and especially a warm welcome to both medullary and Pasko.
Beaming in from Anatolia, of course, is a local for us and sometimes a local chorus within Oxford.
If you've come in and spent time with us quite a few times and Pascal is beaming in from the northeast of the United States,
I'm going to briefly introduce Madali. And then in them, though, you can take 20 minutes or so for your lecture.
And as you've requested, I will give you a heads up when your time is running out.
And then I will briefly introduce Pesca and take things from there.
According to the same format as Faisal has highlighted,
please do put in your questions early just so that we're able to capture them within the Q&A period.
And so that means while we're going midstream, so Moto is no stranger to us at Middle East Centre.
She's a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, then at least centre.
And she has spent a long career, a very prolific career working at institutions around the world,
including the National University of Singapore King's College.
For a period of, I want to say, about 20 years, you were a professor of anthropology of religion and also recently, well,
relatively recently you became a fellow of the British Academy amongst a whole litany of awards and prises and also a very prolific author.
Your most recent book, though his most recent book is The Sum King Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia, published in 2020 with Hearst and Opie.
But in addition to academic writings, books, journal articles, she's also very prolific in the media space.
So very much in a sense, a public humanities scholar, public, an engaged scholar, shall we say.
So with that, we look forward to your presentation on Saudi Arabia.
Thank you very much. Thank you so much, and thank you, Faisal, for organising this timely seminar.
Islamic political thought is extremely important at this specific moment in the contemporary history of the Muslim world in general.
The Arab world and specifically Saudi Arabia.
The Our Case study today, the title of my presentation is the Islamic reformist movement in Saudi Arabia,
and it is between the violence of the minority and the apathy of the majority, and I'll explain my title in due course.
But let me start by just a little definition to focus our mind when we invoke Islamic reform.
What do we mean? Who are we talking about?
And as far as I'm concerned, I regard Islamic reform as first and intellectual movement within the Muslim world in general and Saudi Arabia.
Although Saudi Arabia is not usually associated with the term reform when it comes to Islam.
But we shall see that Saudi Arabia has its intellectuals has joined the trend within
the Muslim world that somebody might say not only started with the modern reformers,
we always talk about Mohammad Abdo and Afghani, etc., but it has a very,
very long history that goes back to mediaeval times within the Islamic tradition.
So first, it's an intellectual movement. It has its ideologues and it has its discourses.
In a way. It's a debating club within the world of Islam in which participants are scholars.
Religious ulema, what we call recently also Muslim thinkers or Islamic intellectuals,
literate people who have entered the public sphere with their ideas and with their pen.
Also, this intellectual trend in modern times has its advocates, and it has its activism.
So it's not only a theoretical position, a discourse, but it's also translated into activism by engaged scholars, religious scholars or intellectuals.
So what is it so reformist and what is so modern about these?
We invoke the word modern, but I prefer to call them Muslim reformers or aslanian.
And these people take a position when it comes to interpreting the body of the Islamic tradition, which consists of the Koran,
the Hadith and also what we call the interpretive tradition,
meaning that their old texts of old Islamic scholars, which is not sacred, but it is their interpretation.
So it's a debating movement that looks at this,
this body of knowledge that Muslims have accumulated over over 14th century in order to reach in novels.
Some would say rational interpretation of these texts trying to push aside
anything that is not subjected to some kind of rational debate and discussion.
And so this is in briefly really my my talk is not going to be based on religious studies or theological arguments,
but I would like to look at the political implication of this kind of trend or movement.
So in all Muslim societies from Malaysia, Indonesia, Africa, even amongst Muslims in the West, we find this kind of reformist tradition.
And they they the scholars, the ideologues, if you like, argue against certain dominant positions within, I must say the Sunni tradition.
I'm not going to look at the Shia tradition, which has its own reformers, but this is beyond my expertise.
So in Saudi Arabia, at the this reform is strength.
Argues against an entrenched Wahhabi tradition, which had been the dominant religious tradition at the state level.
I would say since the 18th century, although Saudi Arabia had especially its different regions,
other traditions, but with the establishment of the modern state in 1932,
we the background to this Islamic reform movement is that Wahhabi tradition that is sometimes referred to as the Salafi movement,
and there is a very big debate about whether the Wahhabis are all Wahhabis are Salafis or Salafis are Wahabis.
That's another debate. We could discuss it later. And so basically in Saudi Arabia.
And what prompted me to look at this trend is when I was researching a book called
Contesting the Saudi State and I was looking at the dominant state religion,
namely Wahhabism and the offshoot that has sprung out of it.
And in the last chapter I reached and the book was published in 2007, and in the last chapter, I came across a movement that I called.
The chapter is called Searching for the UNmediated Word of God.
And this is basically what the Salafis claim Salafis claim is that we reached God through his words without the mediation of anybody,
of a religious scholar. We are all equal. If we are literate pious, we could reach their religious texts and fun and reach our own interpretation.
So but everybody does it, and everybody reaches a different interpretation, perhaps.
So this trend that started, I would say,
from the 1990s and developed in Saudi Arabia that they are called Islam and
scholarly work on this trend had labelled them as the rationalist or the liberals.
I prefer not to draw, not to rely on such labels because they are really misleading as scholars of Muslim societies and the Islamic tradition.
I prefer to invoke the words they use rather than parachute a label such as the liberal Islamist or the liberal Muslim parachutist,
and use it against use it to describe people and discourses that may or may not correspond to this so-called liberal.
So the word liberal, I don't think it travels well in other cultures,
and we have to rely on the the local conception of the self and the activity that those people are doing.
So and this trend that I would call the reformist that emerged out of the kind
of Islamism that dominated the Muslim world since probably the 1960s and
its advocates just to give you some names who have become prominent in writing about how to interpret the Islamic text within this reformist agenda.
So people like Zalman and other people like Abdul Hamid and many others.
Salman Rushdie and those people have dedicated a lot of time to write in in a way that is accessible.
So I would call some of them, with the exception probably of salmonella as more factor Islamic as intellectuals
rather than a scholastic people who had traditional training in the Islamic sciences.
But the trend combines the hammer and massacre in Islam, the intellectuals who have obviously Islamic training and knowledge.
But they work in professions such as English, Arabic literature or history, or other fields that are not specifically related to theology.
So this trend had emerged in 2008, and it had been under pressure since then.
In fact, I don't want to jump as a stages, but let me give you a glimpse of the concepts they deal with.
So as they are working against a state Wahab, Wahhabism, the state Wahhabi.
In terms of politics, they made the official language of religion of happier, insisted on certain concepts.
One of them is the total obedience to Wesley Plummer.
That is total obedience to the rightful ruler of the Muslim community, who,
whoever he is and those official scholastic religious interpretations of it have a
history within Sunni Islam in terms of forbidding a rebellion against the ruler.
And it goes back to Ghazali. It goes back to my word, the et cetera, et cetera.
And they insist that whoever is the ruler must be obeyed.
And there are conditions that justify the rebellion. And for them,
rebellion is extended to include or encompass all sorts of actions and words where whereas the original Sunni rebellion
was armed rebellion against the ruler because it creates chaos discord within the Muslim community and the reformers I,
I consulted their work and books. They argue that this obedience is limiting because it justifies the rule by conquest.
You know how camels alaba? That is, you know, if you land in the city and you conquer it, then you are the legitimate ruler and we have to obey you.
And they challenge that in their discourse.
So it mainly Abdullahi Hammond has written over 20 books in order to discuss this.
The other rebellion for the Saudi state and its Salama means that a tweet against the policies of the regime or even in the 90s affects
sent to a government bureaucracy criticising the policies of the state and a poem can be rebellion in there and in their rulings.
And the mufti of Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz l'échec epitomises this position because, for example,
Twitter was outlawed because it involves dissent and people are using it to criticise the king.
So that's another concept is Omar Omar is the Muslim community in a community of believers, et cetera, and it comes in different shades.
So for for the reformer, especially Abdullah, Mohammed and Omar is really al-ahmar, which means that Omar has,
as a body, the capacity to rule itself through the election of its representative.
And this is pretty revolutionary in Saudi Arabia, because the Omar in Saudi Arabia is only supposed to give their oath of allegiance when requested.
The bearer. And so that people would come to offer to the king obey the oath of allegiance.
And there are no elections or no representative of the Omar.
The only representatives are the king of the appointed Majlis S'assurer,
which is the council, the consultative council that the king appoints its members.
According to the official, Wahhabi views are qualify as little [INAUDIBLE] welcomed people who have the notables,
but the notables are actually appointed by the king. They have not emerged through a natural progression.
And then there is the concept of Hisbah, which is the the forbidding evil and commanding right.
So they they, as the Saudi government outlaws the demonstration or civil resistance,
civil disobedience and from the perspective of the reformer and hisbah is the community that Ummah being on guard to watch state and society relation.
It is not simply a couple, a fleet of Mattawa of religious vigilante who roam the streets in order to discipline and punish transgression.
It is to look at. How this relationship between state and society functions in an equitable way.
And just finally, the concept of jihad, which has prominent and there are thousands of books, have been written on it.
Abdul Hamid introduces something called Civil Jihad the jihad in Madani.
So he argues that yes, of course, there is defensive jihad.
When a Muslim country is invaded, it's incumbent on all Muslims able men to join.
But there is another civil jihad and maddening jihad that allows you to struggle for the betterment of your society and your governance.
So this trend has faced in Saudi Arabia the violence of the jihadis because they saw it as a threat to their discourse.
At the same time, the government, the monarchy had seen this as the ultimate challenge to its so-called Islamic State.
And because it's a discourse that comes out of the Islamic tradition,
tried to fuse it with human and civil and political rights in order to create a better political system.
So and finally, there is the apathy of Saudis in general who for centuries had been sort of given up on their own religion,
producing liberation theology, the only sort of in inverted commas.
Liberation theology that existed was the violent path of the jihadis.
And because of this, the turmoil that had happened since the 19th 1979,
quite a lot of Saudis had probably abandoned faith in any kind of emancipation within the religious tradition.
So the reformers are in prison since they were put on trial in 2009, and that went on until 2011.
They were all sentenced to long prison sentences. And unfortunately, Abdullah Hamad, one of the main ideologues, died in prison because of neglect.
So what is the future? Are we going to see a revival or a continuation of this trend?
And I think the demise. The rise and demise of this reformist trend is not finalised, especially it's sort of the repression.
And we know that within the Islamic tradition, there is probably an innate ability to rejuvenate discourse to debate.
There is no way that any Muslim community would accept that the gates of this jihad of reasoning are closed.
And because of that characteristic within Islam, we are going to see a revival when and how?
I don't know. However, and just the final warning that when a repressive state like the Saudi state represses this nascent reformist tradition,
it actually creates a void in society, both intellectual, ideological, etc.
And what we have seen recently is the new sort of shedding the Islamic tradition, pushing it away apart from the state sanctioned one.
And we are having a void at the moment in Saudi Arabia that can't be filled again by the cycle of violence.
So I'll stop here and sorry, I said before going on to apologise, I actually gave you an early warning than I was supposed to.
So you have actually concluded exactly on time, and I very much appreciate that and apologies if my sort of comments disturbed you at all.
I'll stay with you. A fascinating election.
I mean reminiscent. It reminded me of your fantastic music modernists where you discuss this.
You know, this constellation of scholars and thinkers.
And I was also reminded of the somewhat slightly tragic and poignant article that you had in the book on sectarian ization with Hashemi.
And I forget poster where you basically talk about the difficulty in a place like Saudi Arabia
is actually actualising any change that perhaps we can explore that further in the Q&A.
Thank you so much for an eye-opening reflection that covered a number of your works.
Now we'll shift to Pascale Mentally, who is at Brandeis University.
He is the renowned Leicester crown professor of modern Middle Eastern studies.
So Pascal's teaching and interests include urban anthropology, infrastructure protests and ethnographic fieldwork.
He's the author of four works, most recently with Stanford University press graveyards of clerics everyday activism in Saudi Arabia,
so very much in the same sort of space that we're thinking about.
And for this seminar, Pascal has taught at Princeton,
New York University Abu Dhabi and has conducted research at Harvard and and of course, most of your education took place in France.
It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to the session. Please take the floor.
Thank you. Thanks. Thanks very much. Thanks. Sometimes patients for the for the very kind invitation.
It's great to be with you today, and it's a very great pleasure to see you and to listen to the mother.
We are. Rashid, thank you very much for your presentation. I'm really happy to be able to be here with you.
So I'm going to start with with the fieldwork anecdotes.
When I was doing fieldwork in Riyadh in the late 2000s, I was in the French Foreign Office stipends.
This was not a lot of money. The French state was not very generous with its students.
I was I was getting roughly, you know, 700 euros a month.
But that was enough to actually make French intelligence officers think that they could invite me to work with them.
And so one night, the second counsellor of the of the French Embassy invited me for dinner,
and usually the second counsellor is the intelligence guy write in French embassies.
And that was a retired army general and you had more than a veneer of culture.
The conversation was free flowing and interesting.
He dined and wines me, and then at the end of dinner, his sidekick, a guy working with him inside, insisted to to drive me home.
And he asked if I could keep tabs on French converts living in Riyadh.
So I said no. But the story stuck with me. And basically, it leads me to my main question this morning, this afternoon in the U.K.
And the question is what's the point of studying religious activism or political activism in Saudi Arabia?
And that's a real question.
At a time when social science research has been used by states to, you know, direct or informed various forms of the of the war on terror.
And we're still living through the war on terror 20 years after its its beginning.
So I worked on mostly on Islamic activism as opposed to students.
But when I came to the U.S. as a post-doc,
I was very ill at ease with the idea that I was working there would write a book that would that might basically,
you know, help inform the war on terror. So I wrote my first first book on joyriding drug writing in Rio.
And it was partly to pursue the kind of university intelligence pipeline that that you see in France, in the U.S., and I'm sure in the UK as well.
And then a couple of years ago, I published graveyards of clerics almost reluctantly.
I made it as ethnographic as possible and as I would say, politically toothless, that's possible not in a bad way,
but but, you know, in order not not to not to be informing that kind of, you know, kind of global war.
And so the book came out during the pandemic with a title that was not very inviting.
You know, who wants to buy a book called Graveyard during COVID 19?
So the book is kind of a dud, which is exactly what I hope for.
So but basically, what I want to do is to to in response to that question, by studying Islamic movements in Saudi Arabia.
I want to I want to draw, you know,
a broad landscape of of three types of study of Islamic movements three styles of study Islamic movements in Saudi Arabia.
The first style is basically what I would call the War on Terror Scholarship.
And it's it's a style of studying Islamic movements in Saudi Arabia that portrays them as anti-liberal and therefore the enemy, right?
And I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to be very brief about this because it's pretty well known.
You know, you have scholars such as Jill Caple in France, Joshua Teitelbaum in Israel.
In some ways, eg hammer in in in Norway have been examples of this trend, right?
I mean, and the idea here is to study the most egregiously violent Islamic activists and to foreground the
study of texts and political theology and to turn that scholarship into an instrument of war.
This is pretty mainstream, and I don't need to spend much time discussing it.
The second style of studying Islamic movements and reform movements in Saudi Arabia has been what I would call the democratisation scholarship.
And basically its main tenet is that Islamic movements in Saudi Arabia represent a step on the road towards political reform and democratisation,
despite their sometimes anti liberal leanings.
And so the idea here is that, too is to say that through Islamic activism,
larger shares of the population have gotten access to the public space and in particular to political spaces, right, including the political sphere.
So, you know, I mean this in this trend, you find the well, you know,
stiffening acquires Islamic liberalism thesis writing disease emphasis on on some
of the reformers that mother we Rashid is studying and and under liberalism.
But you also find some of my work, I mean, belongs definitely to that,
to that democratisation or that almost transition from the what's the word Transito largest thesis.
You know, I worked a bit on the the 2005 municipal elections in Saudi Arabia, and I analysed the connexions between Islamic activities,
Islamic everyday activities in in schools, in local mosques and as as a as a resource,
as a political resource to organise and guide electoral participation.
And in particular, I was fascinated by the way electoral campaigns were modelled after summer camp events
that had been organised by Islamic activists for for a very long period of time.
So that that that connexion was very strong. The third type of scholarship is what I would call postcolonial scholarship.
And here, you know, you could call it the $10 at school or in some sort of way.
And it basically says that position one and position two so that the, you know,
the jihad the largest and then the transit geologists are basically still Eurocentric.
Right. They take Western liberalism as their point of reference.
And I think your mother is worth really belongs to that. I mean, some of Malawi's work belongs to to that to the third orientation.
And I'm also trying to to to to to work more toward that third orientation myself in my work.
So basically, it is to say that jihad ologist and transito interests are still taking Western liberalism as their point of reference.
And here the idea is to read Saudi activism Saudi's Islamic reformism in its own terms.
Right? And it's realising that, like the jihad allergists, most reformers in Saudi Arabia are not liberal.
And here I totally agree with with the way that we just presented their thoughts.
And but like the transit zoologists, it's it's also in a way, it's a way to saying that, to say that it's not because they're not liberal,
that that this is necessarily a bad thing for political perspectives and for the political future of Saudi Arabia.
And you're, you know, the reference to terrorist comes with that that short piece that he wrote think back in the in the early nineteen nineties,
and it's called the limits of religious criticism in the Middle East.
It's a fascinating piece of 30 40 pages a piece, which is based on a comparison between Immanuel Kant and Sayyid Ben Zygier,
who is one of the of of the pioneers of Islamic reformism in Saudi Arabia and also one of the one of
the veterans of political prisons in the country who's been in prisons for the longest period of time.
And hear what Stalinism does is that it takes basically sums up political liberalism according to counts,
as followers write, argue as much as you like, but obey. Right?
So you have the conjunction of free speech and punctual obedience.
And so liberalism is based on the refusal of direct action, right?
Enlightenment led to strengthening Western states and to I mean,
we also know that enlightenment is is is connected with colonialism and with systemic racism in a very narrow manner.
So and also that the Enlightenment with was better in some sort of way better than absolutism that's making state authority convincing, right?
So here what's the Ben Zygier is doing?
It is in is in his work and in his spoken word,
because here that al-Assad relies on the sermon on the on the taped sermon given by my side, the entire,
I believe at the end of the 1980s basically say it's either Ben Zygier saying, well,
according to the Enlightenment, there is a right to criticise the ruler and a duty to obey.
According to us, there's a duty to criticise and maybe also a duty to not obey in certain circumstances.
So criticism is a duty. It's not optional. And you know, this goes back to the Hadith.
If you see evil, you know, change it by your hand if you can't change it by your tongue, if you can change it by your heart, right?
And so Islamic action here, too.
I mean, this is where I connect my my works to the work of Talal Assad.
The Islamic action is direct action, right? And so Talal Assad analyses Nasrallah in his, in his,
in his work and basically mean there are a lot of implications to to to to to his analysis of Simon Zygier's positions.
And I see her i.e., you know, the duty to advise the ruler in matters of public affairs.
And there are two conditions of resistance to performing the CIA.
The first one is to be knowledgeable. And the second one is to be kind.
But kindness and knowledge are basically the preconditions to accessing the public sphere.
So. I mean, this this opens this postcolonial direction,
opens a lot of really exciting prospects and really exciting theoretical avenues and perspectives.
You know, there are a few pages about the notion of slavery to God as a model of political persona and a model of political style.
And here, you know, I mean, you could reconnect. Also, some of Muhammad's work through to that, to the direction of thought slavery,
to God as a as a political model here is definitely opposed to mastery, which is the liberal ideal of a political agency autonomy.
Right? So. In my own work in here, basically, how am I doing in terms of time, I have roughly about six seven minutes.
Perfect. So in my own work and this is this is my fourth point, if you will,
what I've been doing in my in my field work is that I've been looking because of the difficulties
of conducting ethnographic fieldwork and political activism in the conditions that we are.
She just summed up for us.
I've been looking at politics through the prism of urban change and urbanism and and basically I've been looking at the urban fabric as a,
as a, as a gates towards understanding the political sphere.
And in particular, I've been looking at the movements from informal urbanism to form the formal urbanism as a movement of destruction,
as everybody who's looked into urban renewal operations in the UK or in the US knows.
And I've been looking also at suburbanisation as the making of, you know what Michel Fuko would call a disciplinary space.
It's a place that has been ordered and organised and in which each individual basically is put in their own
small corner and asks to be predictable and to engage only in certain types of very limited activities.
So my main question has been how do you subvert a disciplinary space?
How do you deprogram the infrastructure right? And so enjoy writing in Riyadh have been looking at, you know,
joy writers and move a cartoon as those people who use speed as the main way
to deprogram the infrastructure of roads and cars in graveyards of clerics.
I've been looking at every day religious activism as a way to politicise suburban spaces,
as a way to use suburban institutions, the mosque, the school,
the summer camp and the commute itself,
right as the one central suburban institution writes the invisible institution of the time you spend in your car.
So basically, they've been using these suburban institutions as pieces of organising and activism.
So I could give you, you know, I can give you a few examples. Commute time could be a. Time.
Right?
It could be the very image of the ization of society of its atomisation at the hands of the state and of, you know, of the corporate state as well.
But for Islamic activists, this time is not lost time.
It's actually time regain. It's made plain and full by using the car as a political vector.
So in Saudi Arabia, the car the Sahara becomes the smallest unit of the Islamic Movement.
And that unit is called al-Nusra. You know, in the in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, the family in Saudi Arabia,
in the Saudi Muslim Brotherhood and in Saudi Sahwa movements, the the Islamic Awakening movements there is that notion that to make an aura,
you need several sirens to actually bring people toward that that place and that
the suburban space and the commute time themselves are political resources.
Same goes with school breaks. Right? That's cool. These are not empty times, but there are.
There are loads of time to be used on invested political capital in waiting for summertime.
Same thing with the summer camps organised by Islamic activists since the 1970s.
Not empty time, but time regains time. Politicised here.
You know, basically,
summertimes are those pieces where you learn all kinds of political organisational moves and tactics that are recoverable in the public sphere.
Once the conditions become ripe, ripe for for for collective action.
So basically, Saudi Islamic activism that that's the crux of what I've been doing in graveyard of clerics have been re re,
you know, reawakening the graveyard.
I mean, the Sahara, the Sahara, as you know, the political awakening the Islamic Awakening movement happens within the graveyard of clerics, right?
Grandma and the graveyard of clerics is what exactly what's what Mugabe has been describing with,
you know, Wahhabism is the graveyard of clerics, right?
It's it's that notion that clerics are put under a lid and that they're forbidden from engaging in in basic public activities.
So and maybe I'll take a I'll take a minute to answer the question I was asking in the beginning if I still have one or two minutes.
But what's the point of studying Islamic activism? It's only now a year after starting this project that I start to see the meaning of all this.
And here I'm going to. I'm going to kind of zoom out and change the perspective a bit.
I believe that Saudi political and religious activists bring some responses to a very pressing question.
And the question is, how can we imagine life in the ruins of petrol capitalism and of racial capitalism
in the ruins created by the domination of oil over the Saudi environment,
Saudi political environment, the Saudi natural environment in the ruins created, for instance, by Saudi bulldozers in Riyadh and Jeddah?
I mean, the parts of Jeddah are being demolished as we speak.
You know, following the logic of urban renewal that have analysed in some of my work or in the ruins created by the Saudi army in Yemen,
the same dynamics, the politics of the void. Right.
So the global economic system is based on the fiction of infinite growth, which is itself predicated on the fiction of a cheap supply of fossil fuels.
And so looking at the Anthropocene and looking at Saudi Arabia is actually it's actually very easy to be
totally pessimistic and to read in oil the collapse of ecosystems and of the global financial systems.
And so what the angle and I'm looking at Saudi activism from is basically to say that the fossil apocalypse apocalypse is not a future events, right?
It's already happened in Saudi Arabia. How did Saudis survive it?
What can we learn from Saudi activists? There are two. I mean, there are too many accounts of Anthropocene as impending death.
And basically, what I propose is to look at instead how people already living through the apocalypse are organising within the ruins, right?
And so that, you know, I'm starting to think about the notion of the optimist, you know, the petrol optimists, and it's based on Emile Habibie.
So, you know, it's a on Emil Habibie is a very famous optimist figure.
So I'm looking at Islamic activists in Saudi Arabia as bitter optimists.
They live through the political and economic apocalypse and found ways to organise in its ruins.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much for both really fascinating talks.
So again, to the audience, do you type in your questions in the Q&A or will the chat box and I have a couple, but I know Osama has one as well.
Do you want to begin Osama? I'd be happy. I've got a lot of questions for, you know, two outstanding scholars in Saudi Arabia.
And so I actually lived in Saudi Arabia for a period as well. So I have an abiding interest in Saudi Arabia.
Perhaps I can ask something which has sort of straddles both of your talks to a certain extent,
this discourse on rebellion and the notion of obedience.
So you've both basically said that this can be anchored within the Islamic tradition and is,
you know, weaponized in different ways by different actors.
The states want to, you know, emphasise the absolute necessity for obedience, and the people like Abdel-Hamid or other activists will point out no.
Actually, Islam legitimates sort of activism and analytical model.
And I just wanted to ask both of you if you thought that that had settled a particular position or is it constant contestation?
And if you willing to perhaps prognosticate in the direction of travel for the ideas about obedience vs. a marathon, he had a point of contest.
Thank you, Osama, and thank you, Pa., for a very,
very inspiring presentation that sums the study of Islamic and Islamic or Islamist movement from the time it started.
But just to respond as you were talking about how you came to study Saudi Arabia and the Islamic extremism,
I think I have a different story because for me, it's very personal.
As I grew up in Saudi Arabia, I was introduced and indoctrinated in the official religious curriculum.
So for me, it's not only about democracy, about jihad, about fist, but about the war on terror.
It's about little fact was that I remember I was supposed to abide by.
So for example, I mean, if it moves to the absurd, as a young person living in Saudi Arabia, you are told how to comb your hair as a woman.
So we can't comment on the sides or have a parting on the side.
And this is a fatwa in in the the big manuals.
If you like that, if you put your hair on on the side, it is called the shape of fire.
We are imitating the infidels and it goes down to the minor details of your life.
So I was fascinated by this and obviously as a child, you don't.
You think about it. But as I grew up, I wanted to explore the meaning of this and what it does to disciplining the body,
disciplining your mind and also instigating obedience and mitigating against rebellion.
So it is actually it starts at the level of disciplining the body, and that is the official religious curriculum.
And then there is as you grow up, you are introduced to the 12 year old AMR,
not in school every morning, but also on television when television started in the 60s.
And now you get you get it in mosque sermons, you'll get it everywhere,
you'll get it in tweets as well as the mufti, what with Twitter used to tweet and many others.
So basically, yes, between rebellion and obedience, there is a spectrum of activities that people could do.
And I mean, Pascal focuses on these these rebellions that if you look at the grand revolutionary scenario, they are not.
But they are ways for people to break the constraints of the heavy going discourse of obedience and sanctions against digression.
You can't. And therefore, the rebellion, as the Islamic classical scholars theorised it within the Sunni tradition.
There are different views. But the Saudi position now builds on the Wahhabi position, which itself started as a rebellion.
So, so basically, these are cycles in the 18th century,
and Hamad bin Abdulwahab called for jihad to establish the Islamic State and called for a rebellion against
the Ottoman sultan in Istanbul because the Ottoman state was described as Dowdall Kafr al-Mukhtar zero,
which means they are the infidel state that has innovations mainly because they were Sufis or encouraged Sufism in the Ottoman Empire.
So the original rebellion of Muhammad had been Abdulwahab was armed rebellion.
It was called a jihad against the unbelievers, and the unbelievers were not the Christians and Jews.
As many people would tell you, they are other Muslims and they are not even the Shia.
They are Sunni Muslims. That's the beginning of the Saudi jihad against Sunni Muslims in the Hejaz.
In the other villages, always. So the act of rebellion of 18 of the 18th century was justified.
But then, once the rightful Muslim leader got established, they also would then rebellion has to be outlawed and then rebellion only.
In the Wahhabi tradition, we see that this word rebellion is overstretched to include peaceful action.
Peaceful. Giving your opinion a civil disobedience.
So, for example, demonstrations are banned in Saudi Arabia, but people like Abdul Hamid use the concept of Rahab Group of People.
So and he gives examples from the Islamic tradition.
So if you have something to say to your ruler or leader, you don't go on your own because you are lost.
Some of you are weak. You bring a lot of people and you all go together because there is strength in numbers.
And this, he calls Iraq, is actually a demonstration.
And in modern day. So there is quite a lot of fusion with the old Islamic traditions that relate to obedience and rebellion and modern terminology.
But that doesn't justify calling them the Islamic liberals or the, you know, using these kind of words, as Pascal said.
We have to understand them within their own context and within their own terminology.
Thanks very much. Although Pascal, I I had the same sort of question for you, but I don't know if you would like to add to that.
I mean, I think we should move on to two more questions. Okay, that's fine.
So I have to the audience. Do you know, either raise your hand or write your question?
We have one. I have a couple. For both.
But let me begin with you, Pascal, which is, you know, this what you say, site from the al-Assad.
You know, it's fascinating because. If one were to put the argument is not the way it would be.
anti-Liberal, insofar as this is a vision of criticism or what you want to call it, that's not based on rights,
but on duties that your absolute duty to criticise, rather than simply the freedom to criticise.
And as you were speaking, I was reminded of, you know, some of the work I'm doing on Gandhi,
where obviously very different kind of context and part, but nevertheless there too,
you have a kind of deliberate critique of Wright's language and linked to freedoms that you know, you have the freedom to do something,
but you don't have to do it and a resort to the language of duty where you are actually impelled to do something, you must do something.
And that's what makes it a moral act as opposed to simply being free to do something.
And I was just wondering whether. It's clearly not.
It's clearly not liberal in that sense. But whether, you know.
There is any engagement at all with the opposite.
You know, and this goes to my doorway as well, you know, I totally agree with you.
But we shouldn't simply loosely call people liberals for foot for this and other reasons.
But it struck me that the departure that you that the intellectuals you're looking at represent is actually
quite startling because if you go even to the 19th century and sort of Muslim reformers of the 19th century,
you know, they're constantly engaging with liberal and other European categories, notions, ideas, narratives.
And here you seem not to see that at all. So it's actually detached even from this earlier Muslim reformist tradition, as far as I can tell.
And I just wondered whether surely it must be a deliberate choice, the must know some of this tradition.
Reformist and liberal, and, you know, why do you think that is and what's going on, you know,
is it a direct invocation of or derivation from the kind of Wahhabi vision that they come out of and against which they speak?
This seems to have been the decision not to actually draw on this by now vast corpus of reformist themes and narratives and terms and categories,
which would actually make these figures much more easily understood not just by the West, but by other kinds of Muslim movements.
So it's the the deliberation of that refusal that I find fascinating.
And for PA. again, just the.
You know, if there's anything that could be said about the explicitly anti-liberal nature and not just that they don't happen to be liberals,
but they actually have an argument against it insofar as, you know,
there is a critique of the idea of rights and freedoms and a much more since you mentioned call for collodion type ideals.
You know, when he writes about partition and the beauty to dissent,
even if it is at some risk to herself and that she draws because like Gandhi as well.
So there's an alternative tradition, which is clearly in some ways, egalitarian and clearly rebellious, but it doesn't go down the liberal road.
Sorry for rather mixed up, but question to you both.
Well, I think, Faisal, you put your finger on a very, very important point.
And first of all, you know, the context of Mohammed Abdo and the others is different.
They were trying, in my view and in the view of many of the Saudi reformers to make Islam palatable.
Also, they palatable to a west that was aggressive, that was occupying Muhammad Abdullah and the British.
And so instead of saying, yes, we are going to be all liberal like you, we have some kind of Islam that can be adapted to your liberalism.
In this context of Saudi Arabia in the tent, late 20th century is completely different.
So basically, yes, all the reformers are aware of Mohammed Abdul of the others of Afghani and all of them, but it is a completely different context.
We have Wahhabi state in Saudi Arabia and they like me, they were indoctrinated in the tradition of their were happy.
And in fact, they mastered, you know, that language, the discourse.
But they were able to emerge out of that tradition rather than an attempt to please some kind of colonial power and say,
and also for Mohammed Abdo and the others.
The biggest question is the the colonialism, the of the occupation of Muslim land and the introvert sort of looking inside your tradition to say why?
What happened to us? What how have we failed? Why are we in this city or situation in Saudi Arabia?
It's a completely different context, like 100 years later. You know, if you have the power of an Islamic tradition called the Wahhabi tradition,
whether it's Salafi or not sitting and and perpetuating injustices.
So in terms of the duty? Yes. I mean, I wouldn't even go as far as, for example, calling them the post Islamism of,
for example, Asif, but yet that he observed in Iran amongst the reformers there.
I don't think it's a time. It's a discursive tradition that can go in cycles and it's not like, Oh, now we're finished with Islamism,
we're moving to a post Islamism because those people are talking about rights rather than duties and a duty to obey.
But I think it is an intellectual mutation that is local, and that's the difference between them and reformers,
such as the one that emerged towards the 19th century end of the 19th century in places like Egypt, Syria and India and Indonesia and everywhere.
So that might mean if I might just interject here, Badawi, that.
You're right, of course, that these are not figures who are arguing against colonialism and but in a way what their
emergence then tells us is that the post-colonial moment in the way of thinking about,
you know,
what Pascal was describing of Islamic reformist or whatever you want to call them in colonial or post-colonial terms simply doesn't apply here.
You know, this is not an issue, and it's. I find that a quite important suggestion that even though in the Western Academy,
we are inundated with talk about empire and colonialism and either opposed to decolonial stuff.
In fact, it might be the case that the figure of the colonial, it's just not part of these debates at all.
Even in some accentuated way, you know, like American Empire or something like that, and that actually is quite it's a kind of fascinating.
It's more interesting that as if my model of post everything post, you know, post Islamist as opposed to,
as you know, in comparison to post-colonial postmodern or post whatever it is.
Yeah. Well, I mean, as you said,
there is an awareness of global power and inequality and also of domination in the writings of Abdullah Mohammed and the others.
But the focus is really on and they are arguing against a hegemonic Wahhabi tradition that
had deprived people of their rights and inscribed certain duties that they objected to,
basically. But yes, it would be an interesting case because, you know, I mean,
when you talk about colonialism in the context of Saudi Arabia, it's different from, you know, the direct colonialism.
We don't want to go into that. But I mean, the domination, that hegemony, American hegemony in Saudi Arabia, that that is, you know, fell to reality.
They can't escape it. Those reformers. Can I interject on this sort of Saudi, in a sense,
a different set of circumstances that you're thinking about when it comes to the colonial condition?
So I mean, it's true that Saudi Arabia obviously hasn't experienced colonialism in the way that many states,
Egypt or, you know, South Asian states have.
But it's kind of experienced something almost the opposite where the Wahhabi sort of regime, which is thoroughly Islamic of a kind of Islam,
obviously is not sort of I'm not suggesting that there's one kind of Islamist Wahhabi Islam,
but that was actually propped up by U.S. power and those intimate relations based on the fact that there was so much oil there.
So there is a kind of a liberal underlining or a liberal underwriting, you could say, of the Wahhabi project in an ironic sense, which, you know,
I think about sometimes when we think about sort of a post liberal space liberalism as
it aim and others have observed is intimately integrated into empire building as well,
right? Historically speaking, and scholars talk about the liberal colonial state, and this is just a subtle alternate form of colonial domination,
potentially where the Wahhabi state, which is the proximate interlocutor for these activists,
it may be seen as a an extension of a liberal project, potentially.
But for these people that, you know, secondary sort of like hegemon is not the proximate cause of their suffering.
And so that's why I don't know if that's a useful way of framing this situation.
Well, I mean, you're right, they were happy. Tradition is actually became very useful to the so-called liberal state, the United States, Britain.
I mean, it was. But you know, the interesting thing is, is the militant part of the Wahhabi tradition that was that endeared itself in the
Cold War as a force amongst Muslims to fight other social and political movements.
And that is from from the 1960s, it was it.
But it wasn't only the Wahhabi tradition. We see it also like evangelical Protestant groups who benefited from that Cold War period,
and they were seen as a counter current to, for example, you know, leftists, et cetera, nationalist.
So it wasn't. It was the, you know, weaponization of religion in during the Cold War that made the Wahhabi extremely useful for colonial or imperial,
whatever you want to call it, project. But yes, I don't know how a PA. perhaps has an take on this.
Yes. You know, I'm reminded of some of your work on the separation of religion and state in Saudi Arabia, and I was going to say, you know.
Wahhabism, in a way, is coterminous to liberalism in the sense that it lends itself to that sort of slippery sheep, right,
and to the division of labour between between the princes and those who have subjected themselves to to the palace.
And we've we've seen that, you know, that separation taking different shades since like roughly the 1950s.
And, you know, at the time when when the Mohammed bin Ibrahim was was was Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia.
So until 1969, it definitely took a different kind of colouration than after Mohammed bin Ibrahim's death.
You know, during Mohammed bin Ibrahim's time, it was more like a separation district's separation.
And then after that began more subjugation of the religious sphere to the to the political sphere.
And then I would say, you know, after after after the the Gulf War in 1990, it became a kind of more direct repression in the religious sphere.
He came under attack in in several, several very direct ways.
So in that sense, why Buddhism to me is, is, you know, is I'm not going to I'm not saying it's a form of liberalism.
I'm saying it's coterminous to liberalism. It lends itself to to the kind of division of labour and overrules that liberalism entails.
But you know, it's come to come back to to Faisal's question about about rights and duty.
I think that that's from my perspective as as an outsider, as somebody who came to Saudi Arabia by chance.
So I and who, who who was absolutely willing to I mean, I had been studying Arabic for a very long time.
I come from Marseilles, which is a which growing up was a bilingual city, is still, in many ways, a bilingual city.
And I really wanted to speak the other language and to understand the other language of the city.
So, you know, I come from some of the deep curiosity and commitment to be involved in, in all things, Arab and Islamic.
But but I came to Saudi Arabia by chance, right? It could have been elsewhere.
But what what I take away from from my study of Islamic activism in Saudi Arabia is really a set of very radical and very interesting,
very intriguing ideas. I mean, the notion that that that there would be a duty to engage in political affairs is something
that is absolutely a radical right radical because of its implications for everyday life.
I mean, if we think of what would the duty to vote mean in such a place as the United States, for instance?
I mean, that would be a sea change, right in politics.
Of course, the United States, especially right now, is deeply involved in doing the opposite and restricting the right to vote.
But it's also it's also right because theoretically right, not only in everyday politics.
This idea that basically until the idea that autonomy is no longer the the crux of political self-definition,
right, or self-questioning, it's had their. Right. You take your orders from somewhere else, right?
So you you no longer base your persona, your political persona on that notion of self-mastery rights,
which is definitely I mean, since the age of the Enlightenment based on the idea that you're a master or a slave.
Right? So it's based on the basically the deep, the deep connexion between the Enlightenment and slavery as a global institution.
And in that sense, liberalism is absolutely problematic so that that, you know,
the notion of the enemy should be should be at the crux of political life is absolutely fascinating.
Does it mean that we are dealing with a reactionary thought?
I don't think so, and that's that's that's another part of that's another facet of that fascination I have for these movements and for their theories.
Basically, what comes first for Islamic activists in Saudi Arabia is never the states rights, and that's that's in that sense.
It's not conservatism or reactionary.
You know, actually, what comes first is the inviolability of the body, it's the sacredness of the private sphere, and the state comes second after.
That's right. I mean, the Enlightenment again was, by the way, I mean, Tocqueville as as very, you know, convincing pages about that.
The Enlightenment was a way to make the absolute state even more absolute than it was before the French Revolution, right?
Because what's more,
absolutes than the idea that you yourself as a as a self mustering individual are actually participating in you're in the making of the state.
So in that sense, Islamic activists in Saudi Arabia come from very different, different grounds.
I mean, there are there are many other topics. The notion of the post-colonial might have a slightly different perspective on this.
You know, I mean, again, I could quote, I could quote you Mahdavi in your work, right?
I mean, you basically. In your history of Saudi Arabia, I mean, back in 2002,
was it 2001 you criticised that idea that the notion that Saudi Arabia hasn't been colonised, right?
I mean that there has been a British protectorate in 1915 in that sense.
You know, I mean, it's it's not that much different from what was going on around the Gulf at the same period of time.
It's it's it's a matter of length of time. But but the operations are very similar.
And then the 1933 oil concessions are absolutely key in the making of of contemporary Saudi Arabia.
Right. And so and this this is some of some of what I've been.
I've been working on very, very closely on the, you know, the the the unmaking and remaking of Saudi Society of Saudi Special Special.
Some of the urban spaces and Saudi spaces themselves through through us presence and influence is is absolutely key.
And here my mind, my slight difference is that I look and I look at everyday politics.
So I look at those activists who are inspired by, I would say, mainstream Sahwa discourse and not necessarily the most reformist amongst them.
And I would say, you know, mainstream Sahwa is very much preoccupied with the idea of the post-colonial,
and it's very much preoccupied with the notion that Saudi Arabia is a quasi colony of the United States and it needs to be liberated.
Right? I mean, when you when you when you read or listen to, you know, sermon order in the 1990s so far,
how early in the 1990s Nasser Omar, even even very recently, Mohammed for the age.
I mean, these these activists are all committed to the notion to that to a notion of decolonial activism as well.
So thanks, PA. We have two questions, and I just want to say both from Badawi.
But before I read them, I just want to say that.
On the question of colonialism, of course, even where it happens and it happens, most places directly or indirectly,
you know, it's a question of at what point does the category cease to be analytically and politically viable?
You know, so you know, I've been looking recently at the font the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971.
It is, in my view, it, you know, if 1947 is the beginning of the post-colonial state,
with India and Pakistan the first to be colonised countries 1971 with Bangladesh, you have the end of the post-colonial moment.
All the states have that were once colonial have formally at least become independent.
But Bangladesh is a new kind of emergence because it emerges against the post-colonial state, not against it.
It's not, you know, its enemies, not the colonial state.
And to this day, when you look at its national narratives, it's nothing to do with colonialism, even though of course, it's a product of colonialism.
It's, you know, it has come about by destroying the post-colonial state.
And that's what I find interesting that, you know, in that kind of situation.
You know, you seem to have the beginning of a new logic, political logic coming not out of anti-colonial movements and independence,
but out of civil war, a civil war fomented within the post-colonial state itself and clearly the links back to empire evident.
I mean, who's to argue against them, but at a certain point that the term and the idea seems to be viable?
And I find that quite interesting. You know how and why that happens and where it happens obviously doesn't happen everywhere.
But you know, that was the thing. And I also agree with, you know, the idea that you move from a situation of slavery as it were, you know,
you're compelled to do something with slavery, becomes the site of, if you will, freedom because you have a duty to resist.
In both cases, your being in one case, you are being in the way that Mugabe was describing it.
You have to obey the king or, you know, I mean, it's drilled into you.
In the other case, you're still obeying, but you're obeying something else yourself or God or, you know, whatever.
It's interesting that these you still have the language of the obedience that structures both these forms, but very differently conceived.
So but let me go to the just a little comment.
Pascale, you know, it's obviously colonialism comes in different shapes, but you know,
in the Sahwa movement, as much as the nationalist or the leftist movement in Saudi Arabia from the 1950s.
I mean, there was an awareness, a strong awareness of the subservience or the domination of Saudi Arabia,
by the United, by Britain first and the United States later.
And for example, you know, if you look at the work of a Kuwaiti now, how come the theory he calls them the devil and what they fear?
Like the states, the Gulf states as states to perform a certain function in the service of bigger powers.
So I mean, 1990, the biggest crisis was the invitation of the U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia to defend,
to defend the country against the possible invasion by Saddam Hussein.
So that is the critical moment. But, you know, to think that in response to Faisal's comment about, you know,
Mohammed Abdo and the modern, the reformist trend within within the Muslim Arab Muslim world,
I don't see the reformers in Saudi Arabia arguing was wanting to make Islam
palatable to a western power that is occupying them with troops on the ground.
I think that's that's what I meant.
But the awareness of their subservience, I mean, with the jihad mandate be, you know, even the one who occupied the mosque in nineteen seventy nine.
And the first thing is that the Saudi king breached one sacred, you know, injunction and that is his subservience to the West.
So there is an awareness, but I mean, to invoke this post-colonial or post Islamist, is this very problematic?
I think, you know, we probably need another hour to discuss their applicability across countries.
Do you mind if I interject briefly and just ask, I understand we have a couple of questions in the Q&A.
This is kind of more for Pascal, but it echoes what you're saying about as well.
I mean, I very much agree with both of you that in a sense, you know,
using the the liberal lens as a kind of maria, as a as a yardstick for assessing the quality of the sentence.
I did. I mean, I'm reminded of Albert Hirani's, you know, a book and very important book, obviously, for his time.
But in a sense, talking about these thinkers, that kind of second rate thinkers, they're not really, you know, the very best.
But because he's assessing them against kind of a liberal tradition, which he sees as sort of mature.
But that maturity is part of the colonial sort of context naturally.
And I think in some respects and both of you seem to be, you know, invested in a kind of a, I mean, you've described it as post-colonial.
Some of you view the decolonial sometimes that I like Raymond Gross.
Fogell at Berkeley talks about the fact that, look, you know, these all of these decolonial discourses that he's he himself is so invested in,
he considers them to be completely independent of the sort of like the post-colonial ideas of people like fuko.
I mean, they've have been derived from two cultures by side or by others. And in a sense.
I think there's an importance to giving value to these thinkers in their own contexts,
recognising that they are inevitably going to be reacting to global hegemonic forces.
But they deserve the same kind of respect that we would give a roles or account or whatever and that sort of context.
And I think that's very worthwhile as an enterprise personally for what it's worth.
Well, I mean, one thing just a quick note, IRA Evans-Pritchard from Oxford, when he went to study the newer and newer religions,
he came across something or somebody or a figure or a spirit thought couth, and he was struggling to translate it to a Western audience.
So he called it the new word of God.
Although the idea, the concept of a god for the newer in the southern Sudan doesn't exist, but this is the problem of translation.
This doesn't mean that we rule out any kind of engagement with world universal concepts.
There might be, but to think that we could come across something in the Islamic tradition and label it for a political reason.
As Pascal told Al Jazeera, there's the jihad, the allergy industry.
Then there is the sort of transitional advocates like, Oh, well, if we want to see democracy in the Arab world,
we really need to promote those or support those liberal Islamists.
And this is a political project for a Western audience.
It's not possibly the main concern of the reformist I talked about.
They're not trying to make themselves, you know, liked or appreciated by a Western audience.
Although Muhammad Ali Mohamed Panopto did and was forced to do that because of the crisis of Egypt, of the Muslim world,
and then he was dealing with a British administration on the ground, changing the law of Sharia, et cetera, et cetera.
Introducing Constitution. All these kind of things are not there in Saudi Arabia, although now they are beginning to manifest themselves.
Thank you. Yeah. No thanks.
It almost seems as if the the it's the Saudi state that has actually turned back to the 19th century in its attempts to both.
Yeah. Well, I mean, my question to Pascal, how does he see the the changes that had taken place in the last six or seven years,
affecting the activism of of of the Islamist movement?
Because, you know, you are very close in understanding and engaging with them.
And I remember reading your book and I got to the last chapter and I was thinking, Oh, so what's happening now?
So maybe now is the time to tell us. Well, I mean, what's happening now is not is not very.
It's not. These are not happy times, right? I think.
I mean, there are there are many things to say about about the post 2015 2016 moment.
One of them is that Mohammed bin Salman is definitely taking some of his lessons from an Islamic book,
and that book is the book of the Muslim Brothers using leisure as a way to organise youth.
And so by foregrounding leisure as as one of the, you know, I mean, leisure has been a political object in Saudi Arabia since the 1970s.
You know, I mean, there was a general presidency for what was its family.
You remember that for fun? Yeah, for fun.
But it was it wasn't called fun. It was really something.
Anyway, it's going to come back. It's the general presidency of youth.
I think that's that area I have to say about for the for the, uh, for the I was going to say that domestication of.
But I have to sum up for the care towards you. Right.
So that that dates back to the 1970s, but it was just a, you know,
a general presidency lost in the administration having bin Salman has made leisure and fun.
One of is one of the the headers of his agenda, and that speaks to some sort of way.
He's actually also inspired by the Muslim brothers, right? That's a very Muslim brother thing to do.
My my second remark about what's going on since 2015 is that, you know,
you just said he's going back to the 19th century and that's that's there is there is a lot of truth to that.
And Mohammed bin Salman, as you has to, I mean, I think he or his advisers have realised the very unstable ground on which.
The Wahhabi movement is basically putting the states on that unstable ground is
exactly what you are describing when you were talking about obedience to and and and,
you know, forbidding rebellion. Obedience is limited because it justifies the rule by conquest, says Abdul Hamid.
But that's precisely the I mean, the rule by conquest is precisely what the Saudi state is based on, right?
So by basically limiting rebellion,
the Saudi state and its Wahhabi iteration is opening the gates to rebellion by limiting all sorts of political engagement,
all sorts of peaceful engagements with the public sphere. It's actually leaving no other choice to activists but to take arms, right?
And so I guess it's that very unstable ground that that that Saudi elites right now are trying to to to to to to stay away from or to to transform.
It's very unclear to me on what book, what book they read.
I mean, they read stuff that definitely comes from here, from Boston, Massachusetts, and from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They're pretty much certainly inspired by, yeah, I mean, the Boston Consulting Group, the Harvard Kennedy School.
I mean, there are, you know, there there has been a back and forth of experts between these different institutions since the 1950s and 1960s,
but it's become even more prominent. So they read from the neo liberal book. But I don't see this as becoming a political project, right?
So I, you know, my sense is that the ground they're trying to to stay on is actually as unstable, if not more unstable than the ground.
You know, the state of Emily Campbell was, was was, was based on and the last thing is, is is about political repression.
Right? I mean, repression has been extremely intense and severe in the past six years.
It was it was already presence and and not not much publicised.
I remember. I remember. It's really pretty difficult to find, you know, reliable figures.
That's where agreed upon to to describe the state of political repression in my own work.
Right. So it's become even worse.
And I think one of the things that that comes back very often when you talk to activists and activists in the billions, right?
I mean activists waiting to come back to the to go back to the fore because right now, I mean, nothing is really going on inside the country.
But one one one item that comes back pretty often is the fact that you used to know where the red lines were during King Abdullah's rule.
Now the red lines are still there, but you no longer know whether there are right.
And so it's become way more difficult to actually engage in political action because or in public,
in the public sphere, because every single movement is actually being criminalised right now.
Yes, but I can see the kind of resistance that is being staged already to this situation.
You know, if we're thinking, Oh, well, they're going to do mosque sermons or distributed online, et cetera, that's not what is going on.
But you could see every leisure activity and fun and concert is marred by one important and sad thing,
and that is sexual harassment of women every single, you know, it's not.
Suddenly, the government discourse is that all of this you have never seen this before, and it's the first time.
And that's why. And you, you know, they are engaging in this kind of activity.
And then there's the there's a state run press talking about Saudi youth as basically animals or criminals.
But at a different level, it could be, you know, a sabotage as sabotaging that kind of leisure atmosphere that is staged.
And unfortunately, women will pay the price of this simply because, you know,
there is no mosque imam who could fire her words against the illegitimate ruler or the fear or,
you know, sermons or summer camp where they could tell the youth, you know, this is not the right for the outlet or hate the state of monotheism.
But now it's it's appearing in different ways. Which reminds me of what happened in Egypt in 2011, when women, you know,
if they participated in them in political activism, they got punished in Saudi Arabia.
Now, if they participate in state sponsored leisure and fun, they are participating.
They are punished because those men can't get to the state in the traditional resistance that we have studied and in a.
So it's a new phase that could be dangerous, and it is actually.
And, you know, it is touching now the fabric of society rather than the intellectual activist
political field that really fascinating both both these comments come in.
But let me go through in the time remaining the questions.
So they are two for Badawi and then two or one in two parts for Pascale Badawi, and he has asked for names of famous reformist al-Ahmar.
The second, an anonymous attendee,
is asked about how do you see the future of the senior Ulema Council in Saudi Arabia in relation to MERS if the current mufti passes away?
What are the characteristics that NBS would look for in a future mufti and for PA.?
How can we use what we have learnt with the three ideal type of studies of Islamist activism in Saudi
Arabia and their relation to the state to help us think about the Anthropocene crisis you mentioned?
Meaning how do people organise in this environmental crisis and the relation to the green initiative of the state, for instance?
And then again, a small addition. Will the future mufti be another typical Wahhabi Hanafi or something else?
So two questions about the future of the Badawi?
Do you want to begin? Yeah, I mean, names of famous reformists in Saudi Arabia who are not recognised intellectuals or Islam ologist.
I'm not sure you know where and who is being referred to, but I mean,
the people that I talked about and they are not necessarily all of them are famous all over who are trained and if they're in issuing fatwa.
So, for example, young Abdullah al-Maliki or Mohammed Abdulkarim, these are regarded as Islam Islamic intellectuals who are not issuing fatwas,
but they are writing about the texts and the Islamic texts in ways that make them fit the definition of Islamic reformers.
As I said earlier, not necessarily the religious scholars who dominate the field, but there are other voices now.
And then the second question see the future of senior counsel in relation to MERS.
I mean, it is completely like toothless, and they are meant to just issued a fatwa and this has been going on even before.
And this, you know, from the nineteen sixties. I mean, for example, when King Sound was dethroned and you know,
the council was forced to issue a fatwa to say that King Faisal is the legitimate king and the previous king king, so it should abdicate.
So there's a long history of this kind of subjugation.
But no, they don't actually make the sound waves.
There is a complete sidelining of of the own and the council.
I mean, there you get the image and the occasional image of the mufti coming to see and Hamad bin Salman.
But that said, really, it's all there. What Pascal described as the Boston consultancy and basically the management consultancy
groups that make the Saudi Arabia even in the sense of designing a Saudi nation,
a management consultancy firm would be given the job, you know, to to construct a Saudi nation,
to detach it from its previous, you know, from the previous discourses on religious nationalism or Islam.
Yeah, I think these are the two forms is one for you.
So we, we we don't learn much from these three styles of study in terms of, you know, environmental thought, I think.
And that's, you know, that would be a new direction in studying activism.
I mean, my way of studying activism has been to has been to study it in its environments,
and it's in the broad sense of the of the word so in its urban environments and spatial environments.
I'm moving on towards environmental anthropology more and more.
And but no longer studying Saudi Arabia more. I think I'm studying Yemen now.
And so that's that's a new that's a new project.
But as a as a as a response to your to your question, there has been a lot of work done over the past 30 40.
Two years about Islamic tools, environmental conservation, which which is absolutely fascinating, some of it has been conducted in Saudi universities.
There is that notion of Alabama, which which is the, you know,
the grazing system that that is embedded in Islamic tenets and and is a management of an environmental management system that is extremely effective.
And that goes absolutely against the grain of the developmental discourse that the states as adopted very often in Saudi Arabia,
which has consisted of saying, you know, the Bedouin are culprits for the degradation of their own environments.
If we have desertification, it's because of the Bedouin, which is a rich.
I mean, going back to the notion of colonialism, I mean, this is definitely a colonial discourse that the Saudi state, as embraced in some ways,
in some other ways, the Saudi state has also, you know,
favoured studies of over land alignment of traditional ways of, you know, preserving the environment.
So. So yeah, there are civil responses to this question.
It's a very it's a very multifaceted question. And I don't have much to say about the green initiatives of the of the states right now.
I mean, that sounds much of it sounds like like greenwashing to me.
I'm not not very serious ecological thoughts.
Yes, thanks. I'm going back to middleweights of the McKinsey model of Saudi nationalism.
We have to close. I see. Suddenly, we have started to get more questions, but I'm afraid we are out of time.
And Osama, do you want to? I just want to thank all of you for really what both of you for eye opening insights
and allowing us to interrogate you for the last hour and a half and learn so much.
And I hope we can stay in touch. I personally am quite interested in your latest book.
Thank you very much. You're wonderful to see. Thank you very much for the invitation.
It was a pleasure. Thanks. We hope to see you in person as well.
Yes. By.