Mick Hartley

Since 15 of the 19 9/11 terrorists were Saudi, and since Saudi money has been paying for the spread of hard-line Wahhabi-style Islam across the Muslim world, what happens in the Kingdom, and who rules it, is of no little concern. Under King Abdullah, as Stephen Schwartz reports, some progress, at least by Saudi standards, had seemed possible, with the setting up of a department for women's education, the King's attendance at the interfaith meeting in Madrid last year, and, most importantly, the reining in of the power of the dreaded mutawiyin, whom Schwartz characterises not as religious police but as a paramilitary body, akin to Iran's Basij.

…in March 2009 the Saudi clock began running backward. Prince Nayef bin Abd Al-Aziz, half brother of Abdullah and interior minister, became second deputy prime minister. Nayef is the embodiment of Wahhabi obscurantism; to cite the most famous example of his extremist behavior, he was the first prominent Saudi to accuse Israel of carrying out the atrocities of September 11, 2001. When it appeared that the mutawiyin would be called to order for their thuggery, Nayef challenged Abdullah by insisting that the Wahhabi militia was a pillar of the state and must not be touched. 

Nayef’s full brother, defense minister and Crown Prince Sultan, is the official successor to Abdullah. Sultan is the father of the long-established Saudi bagman/ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar. Abdullah is 84, Sultan is a year younger and was ill enough to require hospital care in New York earlier this year, although official sources insist on his good health; Nayef is in his late 70s. Reformist Saudis are deeply fearful that if Sultan dies before Abdullah, Nayef could become king – seen as a real possibility as bulletins about Sultan’s fit condition are immediately discounted as untrue. 

Nayef’s inheritance of monarchical authority could have devastating consequences for Saudi Arabia, the world’s Muslims, and the West. The appointment of Nayef to a higher ministerial post had been interpreted less as a sign that Abdullah was weak than that the anti-reform forces in the kingdom were preparing for a serious conflict in which they would attempt to preserve their power. Recent observations by Saudi progressives and visitors to the holy cities confirm that, with Nayef’s increased power, the Wahhabi bigots have resumed their aggressive behavior, and appear poised for a rampage. 

Thus, the Cairo-based Arab Human Rights Information Network announced on July 13 [here] since he took up this post, Nayef has imprisoned reformists without trial, pushing the officials of the kingdom to expand their activities, sending innocent people to jail, without distinction between Saudis, Arabs, Asians, or Africans.” Wahhabi rage inside the kingdom, legitimized by Nayef, means a higher level of Al-Qaida and Taliban terror outside its borders, a new wave of which may be visible in the latest bombing in Jakarta. 

Jeddah, the commercial capital of the Saudi kingdom, had come to be known as the center of Saudi nonconformism, where women, who never covered their faces in the territory of Hejaz, which includes Jeddah, Mecca, and Medina, before the Wahhabi takeover in the 1920s, had increasingly, of late, cast off the niqab, the face-veil. The mutawiyin were confronted and even beaten in Jeddah’s streets, and for some time lay low there. But in Jeddah, the mutawiyin are back, with Nayef’s blessing….

Discontent with Wahhabi fanaticism and state tyranny has yet to reach the levels seen after the stolen election in Iran. But fear of Nayef, the revived vexations of the mutawiyin, and the sense that their country is moving backward, rather than forward, could drive Saudis to a new path.