Reform (by Nasiha?) in Saudi Arabia?

In 1973, Talal Asad likened the internal debate within Islam in contemporary Saudi Arabia to similar, sometimes violent, debates which occurred in Europe in earlier times. Nevertheless, he stresses that historical circumstances are not necessarily strictly comparable. In Saudi Arabia, for example, two families, one more religious and the other more secular, have engaged in a somewhat successful partnership in a quickly modernising economy and society, which, unlike Europe, has the example of both Europe and Islam available for its edification. Despite the duality of families, he claimed, there has been no neat division between ‘Mosque and state’ in the area of politics.

He suggests that Muslim-dominated polities have always maintained a tradition of peaceful criticism of government and Muslims in general each Friday in the khutba and that this has recently been supplemented in Saudi Arabia by the traditional critics, a group of junior ‘ulama (similar to the junior clergy), and modern critics, by means of two petitions to the king, the former (from the 'ulama) in religious terms and the latter in terms of secular rights and interestingly much more deferential but both arriving at similar recommendations for the Saudi government.

The reasoning which led to the first petition was the Muslim concept of providing respectful and loving advice to the ruler as in the khutba (the Nasīha tradition I mentioned in an earlier post). In the case of this petition, the writers evidently felt they had a duty rather than a right to present it and senior ‘ulama did not dispute that duty. They did argue that the petition should not have been published (as it was), however. The junior ‘ulama responded (publicly again) that there were precedents for publishing petitions.

While we might consider this process of subjection of religion to political considerations in a modernising society a necessarily violent one as it was in the West, Asad suggested that the Saudis have been thus managing the transition (adapting ideas developed first in the West) relatively peacefully (ironically in very public discussions about the need to keep discussions private).

The Saudi reform process slowly continues relatively un-noticed in the West. It could hardly do otherwise.