Madawi Al-Rasheed

Contesting the Saudi state : Islamic voices from a new generation

The terms Wahhabi or Salafi are seen as interchangeable and frequently misunderstood by outsiders. However, as Madawi al-Rasheed explains in a fascinating exploration of Saudi Arabia in the twenty-first century, even Saudis do not agree on their meaning. Under the influence of mass education, printing, new communication technology, and global media, they are forming their own conclusions and debating religion and politics in traditional and novel venues, often violating official taboos and the conservative values of the Saudi society. Drawing on classical religious sources, contemporary readings and interviews, Al-Rasheed presents an ethnography of consent and contest, exploring the fluidity of the boundaries between the religious and political. Bridging the gap between text and context, the author also examines how states and citizens manipulate religious discourse for purely political ends, and how this manipulation generates unpredictable reactions whose control escapes those who initiated them.

Saudi regime resilience after the 2011 Arab popular uprisings

Although all Arab monarchies (Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Jordan and Morocco) witnessed varying degrees of mass protest during the Arab uprisings of 2011, none of the kings and princes has thus far been deposed. The kingdom of Saudi Arabia saw pockets of sporadic protest in many cities in the early months of 2011, but those failed to evolve into a mass protest movement across the country. This paper analyses the conditions that helped maintain Saudi stability, attributing it to a combination of domestic and regional factors. This paper highlights how the conditions that led to monarchical resilience over the last five years may result in unexpected upheavals in the future.

Saudi Arabia: local and regional challenges

The Arab uprisings posed serious challenges to Saudi Arabia at the level of society and leadership. Activists engaged in intense debates, and both real and virtual protest, to which the leadership responded by fighting for security and survival. The uprisings added to the regimes internal succession burdens as Islamists in other Arab countries won seats in elected parliaments. The regime responded by deploying tight security measures at home and adopting three strategies to contain the outcome of the Arab uprisings: containment, counter-revolution and revolution. This article examines the intersections between the local and regional challenges facing Saudi Arabia at a critical historical moment. It demonstrates that Arab revolutions and the empowerment of Islamists in neighbouring Arab countries contribute to Saudi Arabias losing its unique Islamic credentials. The regime is eager to contain the uprisings in such a way as to remain the sole Islamic model in the region.

The Quest to Understand Global Jihad: The Terrorism Industry and its Discontents

Since the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalism, later termed political Islam or Islamism, was constructed in the high towers of academia as a field of enquiry if not the field par excellence. Tens of monographs, surveys, in-depth studies and histories of the main Islamist movements appeared in all European languages. From the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood to Pakistan’s Jammati Islami, the diversity and similarities of these movements were captured. The local contexts were analysed and their ideological pamphlets were collected and interpreted. Scholars constructed the biographies of their leaders and activists. Knowledge of local languages in the Muslim world, together with vigorous in-depth fieldwork enhanced the analysis and dissemination of knowledge about one of the strongest political, religious and social trends in the world of Islam in the last three decades of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, the inability of most of these movements to reach power and take the state, with the exception of the Islamic republic of Iran, prompted scholars to announce the ‘failure of political Islam’. Others argued that Islamism has had an important long-lasting impact on Muslim societies, regardless of its ability to seize power. This impact will continue to shape the moral, political and social contexts of many countries from North Africa to Asia.

Saudi Arabia post 9/11: History, religion and security

Dependence on Saudi oil and strategic location in the heart of a volatile Arab region made this country the centre of academic interest in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia itself, the country received further attention. Researchers flooded to Saudi Arabia to investigate its history, society, religion and security challenges. Saudi history was revisited to draw lessons for the present. Its religious tradition, once regarded as a stabilizing but radical trend within Islam, was accused of feeding young minds with the discourse of confrontation, hatred, and violence against the other. Security experts outlined the country’s military capabilities to combat terrorism and proposed enhancement. Opinions were mixed. Some concluded that the country is fertile ground for radicalism that would threaten not only the oil fields and the survival of the Saudi regime but also the world in general. Others dismissed such accusations and searched for the roots of terrorism elsewhere. The three books reviewed here are a product of the contemporary fears that dominate Western thinking about Saudi Arabia. The books are concerned with the big questions: the history of Wahhabiyya and its potential for generating the discourse of terrorism by David Commins, the resilience of the Saudi regime, regarded so far as the best protector of Western interests by Tim Niblock, and the security challenges facing the regime by Anthony Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid. Commins’ book The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia is a sober historical account of the rise of Wahhabiyya in the eighteenth century and its development as a religious tradition under the rule of Al-Saud. In the first chapter, he describes the Arabian scene on the eve of the Wahhabi revival in the eighteenth century. The first two chapters describe the religious scene of Arabia prior to the rise of Wahhabiya. He situates the movement and its preachers in the small oases of Najd, thus dismissing earlier misunderstandings of the movement which often considered it a Bedouin phenomenon. Commins shows that the movement’s roots lie among the sedentary people of Najd, in particular the small urban settlements. The tribal Bedouin population were recruited as soldiers who carried its flames outside this isolated region but were never the theoreticians of its discourse. Unlike other historians of Wahhabiyya, Commins documents the schisms that the movement generated among the local population and its ulama, both resisted the totalizing Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 43, No. 1, 153 – 160, January 2007

Response to Reviewers: Muted Modernists: the Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia, by Madawi Al-Rasheed, Hurst and Company, London, 2015, vii + 199 pp., £28.00 (Hardcover) ISBN 978-1-84904-586-5

This manuscript presents highly reversible Zn-deposition/stripping cycling by in-situ formed solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) originated from decomposition of complex of [Zn-TFSA(acetamide)n]+ whose coordination environment was analyzed using Raman spectroscopy, FT-IR, and mass spectrometry. DES electrolyte consisted of Zn(TFSA)2 and acetamide with molar ratio of 1:7 dramatically improved cyclability of Zn electrode without dendrite morphology, whereas routine electrolyte of 1 M Zn(TFSA)2 showed poor cycling performance with tangle deposition morphology. The obtained high performance comes from ZnF2-rich SEI with mechanically rigidity and Zn2+permeability. The decomposition potential of the SEI was controlled by solvation state so that the SEI was formed at higher potential than that of Zn deposition. The authors achieved a reversible capacity pf 51 mA h g-1 in V2O5/Zn cell under extremely high current density of 600 mA g-1 even after 600th cycle with a capacity fading of only 0.0035% per cycle. This manuscript includes basic and application studies, and the results and discussions are well summarized and arranged systematically, showing new findings and valuable conclusion. Therefore, the reviewer basically recommends publication of this manuscript, but some revision and consideration should be required before publication.

A Narrative of Liberal Anxieties

bia, or religious intolerance as the essence of Islam, they are simultaneously fighting against a politically diverse West, desperately attempting to craft – beyond the representational level – the monolith so paramount to establishing their claim to civilizational supremacy. If Foucault could be thought of as tracing the birth of a liberal biopolitics through the deployment of race in a context of competing nationalisms, Massad’s achievement would be to have unearthed the birth of a liberal monopolitics through the deployment of Islam in a context of competing universalisms. ‘TheWest’ – as a self-styled supremacist universalist monolith – demands the racial silencing of political disagreement, as much as the ‘Wests’ – weakened by disunity and poststructuralist plurals – could have never achieved global dominion. ‘Unite and Rule’: It is in the production of this monolith that Islam had to be deployed so insistently, to draw away and dismiss the white enemies of freedom – making them into security threats and racial traitors. In place of a conclusion, I would like to ask a question: Does liberalism need saving? The end of the 30-year class-war truce – the welfare state – bought at the expense of brown blood, and the waning of Western economic power signal a moment of crisis – ‘Islamo-fascism’, liberalism’s allergic right-wing reaction to diversity – when a faltering West seeks to prop itself up by its Islamic bootstraps. Liberalism appears constitutionally incapable of dealing with dissent without race. Perhaps even worse, Islam in Liberalism suggests that liberalism – as an exceptional Christian universalism – could not even survive in the absence of its supplementary internal enemy. The miraculous West is addicted to Islam. In that regard, rather than the Muslim, it is the Liberal who needs saving. Massad might not provide a clear treatment for this specific political disease, but at least he’s diagnosed the pathology.

Deconstructing Nation and Religion: Young Saudi Women Novelists

The cosmopolitan woman that both state and sections of Saudi society strove to locate and highlight after 9/11 has found expression in the fiction of the young generation of Saudi women novelists.1 These young women are urban, educated, sophisticated, and conversant in many languages. They belong to the emerging middle class that has benefited from oil wealth, education, and, since the late 1990s, the free market economy that opened up business and investment opportunities and also the media in its old and new forms. The new novelists are extremely young — for example, Raja al-Sani was 24 when she published her first novel Banat al-Riyadh (Girls of Riyadh), in 20052 Others are in their early 30s. Their heroines are immersed in a cosmopolitan fantasy, portrayed as cappuccino drinkers, shisha smokers, and globe-trotters. They move between home, college, private business, and shopping center like aspirant, privileged youth anywhere today. These new novelists know only the local modern high-rise shopping center, the cafe culture, and their equivalents in famous world capitals. Above all, they are “connected” through family networks, the virtual world of the internet, and regular travel. Their language is a mixture of Arabic and English, peppered with the idioms and abbreviations of e-mail, Yahoo groups, Facebook, and Twitter.

In the Time of Oil: Piety, Memory and Social Life in an Omani Town

instead, the author relies on the work of documentary historians. Finally, one should address the central thesis of this book, which is the contention that there is a deep, long-term continuity of tradition in Arabia that links Neolithic practices with those of the present day. The author is at pains to point out that this does not mean a return to the concept of the “Unchanging East,” as epitomized in portrayals of biblical Palestine. However, one of the problems of this approach is the selectivity of the data that see Arabia as based on nomadism and pilgrimage while the area to the north (Syria, Palestine Anatolia, and Mesopotamia) is based on sedentism and households (see p. 233). The risk in this approach is that particular ethnic groups are seen as rooted in specific landscapes and regions, with little capacity for either long-distance movement or social change. Written accounts certainly indicate considerable movement of people over long periods throughout history and, in the case of southern Arabia, influences from both Africa and India, as well as from farther north. Similarly, one can find evidence for long-term use of pilgrimage sites farther north in Palestine and elsewhere. Even in Wales one can cite the example of the Neolithic megalithic structure at Garn Turne (Cummings and Whittle 2004:148), which continued to be of sacred significance in the twelfth century AD, when it was used as a location for rituals by the bishop of St. Davids. The problem is the classification of pilgrimage as something inextricably bound with either Arabia or pastoral nomadism—which is clearly not the case. In spite of these criticisms, this is a very significant book for understanding the longterm history of the Middle East, and it does an important job in forcing prehistorians to look at their work within the context of written history while reminding historians of the deeper roots of Middle Eastern culture.

Women’s Piety in Egypt and Mexico

Mahmood’s Politics of Piety and Lester’s Jesus in Our Wombs are concerned with female religious experience in two seemingly different religious traditions and societies. The apparent differences do not, however, obscure their common features. Muslim Egypt, the fieldwork site of Mahmood’s book, and Catholic Mexico, the site of Lester’s monograph, are similar in many ways. Both Egyptians and Mexicans subscribe to notions of gender that confine women to specific female roles, and these notions are often anchored in religious interpretations. Both economies are developing but still unable to absorb rapid population growth. Both are struggling with the assertion of national autonomy against a background of increasing globalization that is often seen as a threat to cultural authenticity and tradition. Through the prism of new female religiosity, it appears that both societies are in the process of defining ways of responding to the challenges of modernity, increasingly seen as coming from outside. Egyptian and Mexican women respond to these challenges by delving into their “authentic” tradition to find empowerment in contexts in which they are normally held responsible for preserving the religious and cultural authenticity of their nations. It is through this new religious experience that women in both countries contribute to achieving not only their own autonomy but also that of their societies. Politics of Piety is an ethnography of new manifestations of female piety among women of different backgrounds and classes in the busy and overpopulated Egyptian capital. The piety movement is centred in mosques and religious instruction meetings run by women for women. A circle often has a female leader and a substantial number of followers who gather regularly to discuss religious texts and offer interpretations while conducting various routine rituals. Such meetings are novel arenas in which women assume positions of authority by virtue of their command of the religious texts and their ability to recite and interpret a diverse tradition. Mahmood poses a question that has long occupied anthropologists and feminists in particular. Are these female mosque circles platforms for challenging traditional gender roles? In other words, are they the new resistance sites where women subvert their subordination to male authority and domination? Mahmood argues that, while it is possible to read female Islamic revivalism as undermining the authority of a variety of dominant norms, institutions, and structures, much of the resistance seems to be directed towards challenging secular liberal norms. Her main contribution in this volume is demonstrating that there is much more to the mosque movement than simply resistance or subversion or even reaffirmation of the moral order. She introduces a new understanding of agency that requires an exploration of traditions of inequality in relation to the practical engagements and forms of life in which they are embedded. The ethnography captures these practical engagements that require negotiation and transgression of established norms. Mahmood calls for detaching the concept of agency from the trope of resistance, an exercise that requires considering a documentation of engagement that requires the retraining of the body, sensibilities, affect, desire, and sentiment. Mahmood explores the underlying ethical dimensions of ritual observance, seen as an important aspect of Islamic revival. She argues that the bodily practices that are associated with piety, prayer, fasting, and other ritual observance, both physical (for example, dietary regimes) and discursive (for example, meditation), are not simply part of the new identity politics but “spiritual exercises.” They craft a “subject” that helps explain the relationship between social authority and individual freedom. She is critical of liberal and communitarian philosophies, especially assertions that conceptions of the individual depend on social milieus, and proposes an analysis that calls into question the distinction between the individual and the social. While this study offers insight into a growing phenomenon not only in Egyptian culture but in the Muslim world in general, it is overloaded with theoretical discussion that may not appeal to the novice. The introductory chapter consists of 39 pages of theoretical discussion that Mahmood returns to regularly in each subsequent chapter. Rather than bringing out the details of pious Egyptian women’s experience, she seems to be more concerned with deconstructing the anthropological and philosophical literature. Her continuous dialogue with others’ arguments can sometimes be tiring and counterproductive. The theoretical sections in each chapter interfere with the enjoyment of what could have been a rich and complex ethnography. The book cannot be recommended for undergraduate students of anthropology and the Middle East, but it may have an audience among scholars and postgraduates who are already familiar with the vast literature cited. Jesus in Our Wombs is more accessible. Lester explores what motivates young Mexican women to join the Siervas convent in Puebla de Los Angeles when they now have so many opportunities not open to their mothers. The experience of the convent allows women, through religious vocation, to articulate personal and political concerns about the consequences of modernity. While joining the convent is a personal deci-