*
Erasmus Mundus Master of Arts
EUROCULTURE
**
Master of Arts Thesis
Euroculture
Universîty of Groningen (Home)
U niversity of Gôttingen (Host)
The Use of Social Media in thé Saudi Arabian Civil Movements since 2011:
The Eléphant in thé Room Goes Online
Submitted by:
Manon Eberhardt Student number home university: S2395444 Student number host university: 11331352 Contact détails: +33644866823 / manon.eberhardt@gmail.com
Supervisée! by:
Dr.YanaBreindl Dr. Christoph K. Lamont Strasbourg, June 1, 2014
Signature
EUROCULTURE
MA Programme Euroculture Déclaration
I, Manon Eberhardt hereby déclare that this thesis, entitled "(tït'6)"» submitted as partial requirement for thé MA Programme Euroculture, is my own original work and expressed in my own words. Any use made withîn this text of works of other authors in any form (e.g. ideas, figures, texts, tables, etc.) are properly acknowledged in thé text as well as in thé bibliography.
I hereby also acknowledge that I was informed about thé régulations pertaining to thé assessment of thé MA thesis Euroculture and about thé général completion rules for thé Master of Arts Programme Euroculture.
Table of Contents
Preface ... 1
Foreword ... 3
List of Abbreviations ... 4
List of Figures ... 5
Introduction ... 6
Chapter 1: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The Elephant in the Middle Eastern Room ... 14
1.1 On the Origins of the “Elephant in the Room” ... 14
1.2 Saudi Arabia: Modern Historical Overview ... 15
1.3 Economic Interests, Security Concerns, and Political Necessities: From Desert to Dessert ... 16
When Water and Oil Become Synonyms ... 16
Oil, Politics and Security ... 19
Terrorism ... 21
1.4 Cultural backgrounds and implications ... 23
1.5 On The “Arab Spring” ... 33
1.6 Conclusions ... 37
Chapter 2: The Saudi Arabian Media Ecology: A Modern Historical Overview .. 38
2.1 1932-1960s: Media segregation ... 38
2.2 1960s-1979: Media expansion ... 39
2.3 1979-1990s: Media restriction and friction ... 40
2.4 1990s-present: Media (r)evolution ... 42
2.5 Conclusions ... 47
Chapter 3: New Media, New Social Affordances, New Restrictions ... 48
3.1 Online Activism: New Opportunities ... 48
New media and society... 49
Social affordances ... 51
3.2 The Affordance Theory in Saudi Arabia ... 53
Access to information ... 53
Redefinition of journalism... 54
Socialization ... 55
3.3 Implications for Social and Political Mobilization ... 56
Emergence of a political culture ... 56
Overlooking borders ... 57
3.4 Sociopolitical Mobilization in Action: Saudi Arabian Civil Movements Since 2011 ... 59
Civil movements: collective actions ... 60
Offbeat mobilization: individual initiatives ... 61
3.5 Limitations ... 63
Mainmise? Internet filtering and censorship ... 64
Sanctions ... 66
3.6 Conclusions ... 68
Chapter 4: Methods ... 70
4.1 Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis ... 71
State of the field of CMC ... 71
Selection ... 73
Limitation ... 76
Method... 77
4.2 Online Survey Research ... 78
Problem identification ... 78
Target population ... 79
Limits of online survey research ... 80
Method... 81
4.3 Additional Methodological Concerns ... 84
Chapter 5: Computer-Mediated Discourse Analysis ... 86
5.1 Proceedings ... 86
5.2 Findings ... 87
Case study #1: Video on Poverty in Saudi Arabia by Firas Buqna ... 88
Case study #2: Video of Manal al-Sharif (Women2Drive) ... 94
5.3 Conclusions ... 100
Chapter 6: Online Survey Research ... 102
6.1 Proceedings ... 102
6.2 Findings ... 105
Demography ... 105
Technologies and connectivity ... 106
On the “Arab Spring” and the participation via SMTs ... 107
On the case studies ... 109
6.3 Conclusions ... 111
Chapter 7: The Elephant in the Room Goes Online: Discussion and Future Perspectives ... 113
7.1 Discussion ... 113
RQ #1: How are the Saudi Arabian civil movements and actions since 2011 being responded to on SMTs? ... 113
RQ #2: How do expatriate Saudis studying in Western English-speaking countries perceive these events and their Western interpretations? ... 114
RQ #3: How can these reactions be related to the history and status quo of Saudi Arabia and of its relations with the West? ... 115
7.2 Conclusions ... 116
7.3 Recommendations for Future Research ... 118
Bibliography ... 119
List of Appendices ... 131
1 Preface
I met Saudi Arabia on August 15, 2009, when I first went to study abroad at the University of Missouri-Saint Louis (United States). I had probably heard the name before, but as far as I could remember, I did not know anything about this country, its people, its traditions, its culture or its politics, not even its food. Yet in 2009, I came across it all, or it came across me, and all of a sudden, I knew Saudi Arabia.
It seems that I am talking about Saudi Arabia as a person, probably because my experience with Saudi Arabia is worthy of being called a human relationship. Although I have never been there, the complexity of this Kingdom, because it is so different from every single other state I have visited or lived in, caught my attention from the very first day.
Moreover, rather than perceiving international relations as abstract political and diplomatic affairs, maps and hands shaken, I see them as a variety of (successful and unsuccessful) inter-minglings, if not multi-minglings, between societies, cultures, religions, histories, traditions and much more, that are officially taken care of by heads of states and their representatives, but implicitly or unofficially largely influenced by their peoples. My beloved track-two diplomacy.
Why is it that we hear so little about this gigantic Kingdom, which is considered a key ally in international relations, the home of one of the biggest religions on earth, and the world largest producer of energetic supplies? But above all, why is it that the few we hear on Saudi Arabia is about foreign affairs, Islam and oil?
These questions are indeed among the ones that led me to conduct the present research, therefore transposing my personal experience with Saudi Arabia into an academic one.
However, my work would not be complete should I not do justice to the very persons who have inspired me, helped me, supported me in so many ways.
Considerable help has been found in my family and a handful of close friends, old
ones and new ones. Some have been particularly precious to my research process and
design, but all have shown limitless support from beginning to end. They were my key
2 allies without which I would have either literally drawn into my topic or given up on it altogether
Last but not least, two precious academic figures, Dr. Yana Breindl and Edward Curtis, have not only been helpful to my research process but have also been inspirational examples of what motivation, passion and dedication should look like in the research realm.
Keeping the best for last: Euroculture has changed my life for the better, in so
many respects.
3 Foreword
Regarding the translation and transliteration of Arabic words, the present thesis uses the International Journal of Middle East Studies [IJMES] Transliteration System for Arabic, Persian, and Turkish. However, with a view to simplify and ease the reading, some commonly-used words, nouns and names have been given their common and accepted English written form (for instance, Islam). Check the IJMES website to see the complete guidelines for translation and transliteration at:
http://ijmes.ws.gc.cuny.edu/authorresources/ijmes-translation-and-transliteration-guide/
Regarding Islamic terms, unless specified otherwise, the thesis uses the definitions provided in the glossary of The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States (edited by Edward E. Curtis IV in 2008), as it provides concise yet accurate definitions. 1
1
Edward E. Curtis IV, The Columbia Sourcebook of Muslims in the United States (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2008).
4 List of Abbreviations
ARAMCO: Arabian American Oil Company BBC: British Broadcasting Corporation
CCIF: Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France
CITC: Communications and Information Technology Commission CMC: Computer-mediated Communication
CMD: Computer-mediated Discourse
CMDA: Computer-mediated Discourse Analysis CPJ: Committee to Protect Journalists
HRW: Human Rights Watch
IJMES: International Journal of Middle East Studies ITV: Independent Television
KASP: King Abdullah Scholarship Program MBC: Middle East Broadcasting Center ME: Middle East
MENA: Middle East and North Africa ONI: OpenNet Initiative
PBS: Public Broadcasting Service RQ: Research Question
RWB: Reporters Without Borders SMT: Social-mediating Technology UK: the United Kingdom
USA: the United States
5 List of Figures
Chart 1: Saudis and non-Saudis in total resident population (mid-year estimates, 1974-
2013) ... 31
Chart 2: Evolution of Internet usage in Saudi Arabia, 2000-2012 ... 45
Table 1: Social Mediating Technologies, Aims, and Functions ... 52
Chart 3: CMDA case study #1 – Distribution of sentiment according to origins ... 90
Chart 4: CMDA case study #1 – Distribution of themes (by domains) according to origins ... 91
Chart 5: CMDA case study #2 – Distribution of sentiment according to origins ... 96
Chart 6: CMDA case study #2 – Distribution of themes (by domains) according to
origins ... 97
6 Introduction
There is a shortage in the coverage of Saudi Arabia as regards the civil movements that have taken place in the Middle East and North Africa [MENA] since 2010, commonly referred to as the “Arab Spring”. 2 Conducting research on such movements in Saudi Arabia can therefore sound like an oxymoron. Indeed, major political leaders, mainstream media and even the academic world have not fully dived into the question of civil movements in the Kingdom, therefore casting doubt on their very existence. When President Obama addressed the “Arab Spring” and subsequent challenges and opportunities both for the Middle East [ME] and the United States of America [USA], 3 he did not mention Saudi Arabia at all. When visiting the online dedicated timeline of The Guardian, compared to the 89 events associated to Egypt and 151 to Libya, the Saudi monarchy only features 14 articles. Among these, 6 articles deal with the Kingdom’s neighboring countries, the succession of the throne upon the death of Crown Prince Sultan bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz, and actions taken by the government as precautions, rather than the domestic civil movements themselves. 4 Likewise, the BBC has underlined in their Trust report: “While there was at least some coverage of Yemen, reporting of some other countries was notable largely by its absence: Saudi Arabia (4 items), (…). A brief review of coverage outside of our sample period suggests that reporting of these countries was very limited.” 5 They further recognize a problem in not reporting on the Kingdom: “All these questions pale into insignificance, however, beside the question of Saudi Arabia-the proverbial elephant in the Middle Eastern room.
As our Content Analysis says (p.38): ‘Given the strategic importance of Saudi Arabia, its role as the key ally of the West in the region and its active role in both the Yemeni
2 The term “Arab Spring”, together with other phrases such as “Arab Awakening”, “Arab uprisings”,
“Facebook Revolution”, or “Twitter Revolution”, is analytically questionable (see ElMahdi, 2011). The phrase “Dignity Revolution” has been used by many protesters themselves in the MENA, however, for matters of objectivity, the terms “civil movements”, “civil actions” or “movements for change” will rather be used in the present thesis.
3
Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks of President Barack Obama--As Prepared for Delivery--‘A Moment of Opportunity,’” The White House, May 19, 2011, accessed November 21, 2013, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/19/remarks-president-barack-obama-prepared- delivery-moment-opportunity.
4
Garry Blight, Sheila Pulham, and Paul Torpey, “Arab Spring: An Interactive Timeline of Middle East Protests,” The Guardian, January 5, 2012, sec. World news, accessed September 21, 2013, http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2011/mar/22/middle-east-protest-interactive-timeline.
5
Edward Mortimer, A BBC Trust Report on the Impartiality and Accuracy of the BBC’s Coverage of the
Events Known as the “Arab Spring” (London: BBC Trust, June 2012),
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/bbctrust/assets/files/pdf/our_work/arabspring_impartiality/arab_spring.pdf,
49.
7 and Bahraini uprisings, it is notable that so little attention was paid to it.’” 6 The scholarship on the “Arab Spring” also ventures suspicion regarding its applicability to the Kingdom. The experience is simple: when generating a research in the WorldCat databases, as of February 24, 2014, the association of the keywords “Egypt” and “Arab Spring” results in 302 academic articles since 2011. The same search with “Tunisia”
offers 172 articles; while “Libya” and “Syria” respectively feature 143 and 107 articles.
For “Saudi Arabia”, only 52 articles are pulled out of academia. Interestingly, even the search with “United States” and “Europe” is more abundant: respectively 165 and 160 articles since 2011. Moreover, the results for “Saudi Arabia” are mainly articles dealing with foreign policy, security, energy supplies, and/or the role and stand of the Gulf Cooperation Council as regards the civil movements in the MENA. Would this absence suggest that such civil movements did not take place in the Kingdom, or that there is no other interest worth of a scholarly analysis except foreign affairs, security and oil in Saudi Arabia?
While the media indifferently refers to the “Arab Spring” when dealing with the various events occurring in the MENA since 2010, each country in the region has experienced these events in a particular way. Like many other countries, Saudi Arabia has also witnessed a series of civil movements and actions since 2011. No later than January 21, 2011, a 65-year old man died after setting himself on fire in Ṣāmṭah. 7 Street protests were later that month tentatively organized in Jiddah to point at the government’s inability to provide the adequate infrastructures and management after deadly floods in the city in 2009. 8 Other protests led by the Shiʿi minority – asking for the liberation of political prisoners and voicing discriminations that this religious community is experiencing in the Kingdom
9– erupted in the Eastern Province, where are also located the Kingdom’s oil reserves and therefore constitute a particularly tensed region. All of these protests were rapidly quelled and street demonstrations were banned
6
Ibid., 57.
7
“Man Dies in Saudi Self-Immolation,” BBC, January 23, 2011, accessed December 13, 2013, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12260465.
8
“Dozens Detained in Jeddah over Protests,” The Nation, January 29, 2011, accessed September 22, 2013, http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/international/29-Jan- 2011/Dozens-detained-in-Jeddah-over-protests.
9
Saudi Arabia: International Religious Freedom Report 2010, Report (Bureau of Democracy, Human
Rights, and Labor - U.S. Department Of State, November 17, 2010), accessed September 22, 2013,
http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2010/148843.htm.
8 in the Kingdom in March 2011. 10 Such events, and many more to this very day, constitute a series of civil movements and actions which have affected Saudi Arabia in terms of domestic politics, international relations, and state security, as well as in terms of social affairs.
There is an aspect of these movements in particular that has barely (if at all) been touched upon by politicians, the media or the academia, in the already poor coverage of Saudi Arabia: their cultural and societal implications and reverberations inside the Kingdom and in its relations with the Western societies. A particularity of these Saudi Arabian civil movements has been their primary use of social-mediating technologies [SMTs] to counter the restrictions of Saudi legislation and media ecology anchored in the history and politics of Islam of the Kingdom. The notion of “social-mediating technologies” has been preferred here over the broader and more general term of “social media”, which does not differentiate platforms like Facebook or YouTube from simple online communication via email, online messaging or chat in the wide field of Computer-Mediated Communication [CMC]. This stand is the one defended by Sutcliffe et al., who define SMTs as “technolog[ies] which provide functionalities to support the process of human social interaction” within CMC, namely technologies that support “any communicative transaction which occurs through the use of two or more networked computers. (McQuail, 2005)” 11
Moreover, this politicized use of SMTs has been partly featured in the English language, aiming therefore (sometimes even unconsciously or unwillingly) at going beyond national borders and reaching out to an English-speaking audience, who might act as a further transmitter towards the connected world at large given the global stand of English. What do SMTs convey about the state of Saudi-Western relations in the depictions and perceptions of Saudi Arabian civil movements and actions since 2011?
The main goal of this thesis is to investigate on Saudi Arabian and Western perceptions of Saudi Arabian civil movements and actions since 2011 and identify the nature(s) of
10
Berna Bayazitglu and Sergei Voloboev, “Saudi Arabia Steady Amid the Turbulence - The National,”
April 5, 2011, accessed May 12, 2013, http://www.thenational.ae/business/industry-insights/energy/saudi- arabia-steady-amid-the-turbulence.
11
A. G. Sutcliffe et al., “Social Mediating Technologies: Social Affordances and Functionalities,”
International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 27, no. 11 (2011): 1037,
doi:10.1080/10447318.2011.555318.
9 discourses being shaped on major SMTs in this regard. The timeframe (i.e. from 2011 onwards) has been chosen to best fit the general context of the so called “Arab Spring”
in the MENA, so as to facilitate the research process and analyses. One should note, however, that such movements and actions did not emerge in 2011 in the Kingdom, as will be addressed in the Chapter 1, but 2011 corresponds to the booming year of online activism in the MENA. In order to best answer this overarching question, the present research project has been guided by the following research questions [RQ]:
RQ #1: How are the Saudi Arabian civil movements and actions being responded to on SMTs?
RQ #2: How do Saudi Arabian expatriates studying in Western English-speaking countries perceive these events and their Western interpretations?
RQ #3: How can these reactions be related to the history and status quo of Saudi Arabia and of its relations with the West?
The notion of “civil movements and actions” will be used in the thesis as an alternative to what has been defined as “social movements” (see Chapter 3). This choice has been guided by the fact that, although various theories on the concept of “social movement” exist, none of them is broad enough to include the type of movements taking place in Saudi Arabia in their diversity and dealt with in the present research.
These theories indeed include the notions of coordination, collective initiatives and organization, political structures, contention, mobilization, and/or campaigning, to which some of the movements under analysis here are impervious, as will be further explained in Chapter 3. 12 In particular, even Tilly’s assessment of the great variety of actions that characterize repertoires, regimes, regime changes and social movements does not cover the particularities of Saudi Arabian movements. As a matter of fact, the Encyclopedia of Social Theory also recognizes that, since social movement theories have been modeled after the study of movements taking place in Western countries, this regional focus might explain why other forms do not fall into these theories – as of today at least, since the scholarship is growing so as to include studies of other
12
For a good overview of these theories and definitions of “social movement”, see for instance:
McAdam, McCarthy & Zald, 1996; Tilly, 2006.
10 regions. 13 The adjective “civil” has therefore been preferred to qualify these movements and/or actions related to and undertaken by ordinary Saudis or people living in Saudi Arabia (as defined in the Cambridge and Oxford Dictionaries), as individuals or as groups. The term “civil movements and/or actions” is therefore here to be understood as inclusive of all formats, activities, media, tones and outcomes, as well as of relativity in terms of longevity (of these initiatives: sustained campaigns or singled-out action) and consciousness (of the stakeholder(s) to mediate their initiatives as meaningful movements or actions).
RQ #1 initiates the research process through the analyses of selected online contents gathered from YouTube and dealing with the Saudi Arabian civil movements and actions since 2011, while RQ #2 targets a specific population so as to give an additional yet crucial viewpoint in Saudi-Western relations. Saudi Arabian expatriates studying abroad under the auspices of Saudi Cultural Missions (and in particular the King Abdullah Scholarship Program [KASP]) are entrusted with the motto “for them to know the world and for the world to know them.” Since 2005 (year when the current KASP mission and goals have been established), these students, as cultural ambassadors for the Kingdom, have also been assigned with the mission of easing relations between Saudi Arabia and the West in particular by exchanging and stimulating cultural, social, educational and scientific expertise and interchange between Saudi Arabia and foreign countries. But another goal of the KASP specifically underlines the “[strengthening of]
political, cultural and social ties between the Kingdom and the countries in which its scholarship students study” which further emphasizes the importance of this population in assessing Saudi-Western relations. 14 With the means of an online survey, the thesis shall try and give an encompassing picture of responses to Saudi Arabian civil movements by specifically targeting these expatriates, who officially represent interactions between Saudi Arabia and the West. Given the scope of the project, attention will be placed on students placed in Western English-speaking countries, namely Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom [UK] and the
13
Suzanne Staggenborg, “Social Movement Theory,” in Encyclopedia of Social Theory, ed. George Ritzer, (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 754, doi: http://dx.doi.org.proxy- ub.rug.nl/10.4135/9781412952552.
14
“Study Abroad Scholarships,” Ministry of Higher Education - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, January 2011,
accessed May 16, 2014, http://www.mohe.gov.sa/en/Ministry/General-administration-for-Public-
relations/BooksList/book2eng.pdf.
11 USA – being the only official partner countries for Saudi Cultural Missions. 15 This list actually also corresponds to the list of countries that use “English as an official or de facto official language, or national language, and is the native language of the majority of the population.” 16
RQ #3 eventually delves into the Saudi Arabian modern historical context, in particular as regards relations between the Kingdom and the Western world, in order to bring in a theoretical background that shall be used to interpret these contents. By investigating on the cultural and societal levels of these online discourses and interactions triggered by the civil movements and actions under review, the thesis hopes to grasp their essence, understand the reasons behind the reactions of the Saudi Arabian and the Western societies, and offer a hopefully fruitful discussion about the implications of these reactions that will go beyond the mere political importance of Saudi Arabia in world affairs.
The thesis therefore strives to overcome the literary shortage mentioned above with an aim that is threefold. It shall first explain how the Saudi Arabian political context and its consequences on other societal spheres has shaped the format of the civil movements starting in 2011 through a politicized use of SMTs, thus giving way to online discourses and interactions within the Saudi Arabian society and between them and the Western audience. It will also tentatively demonstrate how these reactions, displayed on SMTs, reflect societal trends both in Saudi Arabia and in its relations with the West, trends that stem from politically implemented and culturally accepted discourses of sectarianism, orientalism and more recently neo-orientalism. Ultimately, it shall close the loop by discussing how SMTs vehicle these reactions and convey the complexities of the Saudi Arabian society and its relations with Western societies.
The outline seeks to reflect this process. Chapter 1 unravels the reasons behind the neglect in the coverage of civil movements taking place since 2011 in Saudi Arabia. An introduction to the modern history of Saudi Arabia first highlights the paradox that implicitly lies in the terms and conditions of the very creation of the Kingdom. From
15
“Study Abroad - Cultural Missions,” Ministry of Higher Education - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, January 14, 2012, March 3, 2014, http://www.mohe.gov.sa/en/studyaboard/subordinates/pages/default.aspx.
16
“Languages,” Central Intelligence Agency, accessed May 28, 2014,
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2098.html.
12 this paradox stems a number of political, social and cultural consequences that affect both the Saudi Arabian society and their interactions with the Western world, the latter marked by various forms of sectarianism and the former anchored in orientalist and neo- orientalist discourses. Chapter 2 focuses on one of the consequences of the Saudi Arabian paradox. The privately-owned, highly censored and self-censored media ecology has indeed – yet unintentionally – opened the way to the political use of SMTs in the Kingdom, and therefore created a virtual platform for voicing societal demands, as underlined in Chapter 3. Here lies also the main characteristic of the Saudi Arabian civil movements: because of the media ecology and the mostly repressive reactions of their government in quelling these movements, the field of action of activist citizens and their supporters has been relegated to the Internet and in particular SMTs, whose viral- beyond-borders characteristic has led to the reaching out to the Western world through the use of the English language. In order to illustrate the kind of interactions that has taken place within the Saudi Arabian society and between them and the Western societies, investigations have been conducted on SMTs and within a sample of young Saudi Arabian expatriates currently studying in Western English-speaking countries.
After introducing these research methods in Chapter 4, results are presented in the
following two chapters. Chapter 5 focuses on two Saudi Arabian civil movements – led
by Firas Buqna and Manal al-Sharif – that have reached the West through their use of
SMTs, and therefore reported by mainstream media. The content (i.e. the comments
posted by Internet users as reactions to the events) generated on SMTs (here YouTube)
by these materials has been analyzed using a computer-mediated discourse approach in
order to assess the nature of interactions taking place on these platforms. The analysis
has highlighted a plurality of reactions offering a wealth of societal perceptions and
cultural reverberations on both sides. Chapter 6 supplements the analysis with a survey
that has specifically targeted the Saudi Arabian student expatriate community in partner
English-speaking countries. Although not aiming at representativeness, the results give
a rough picture of their opinion on the civil movements taking place in the MENA since
2010, and in Saudi Arabia in particular, with a focus on the two movements under
review in the content analysis. The aim is to further investigate on the Saudi Arabian
movements and the way they have been presented and received, from the point of view
of expatriates, who constitute a significant share of the young degree-seeking Saudi
13 Arabian society. 17 A discussion in Chapter 7 eventually seeks to interpret these results in the light of Chapters 1 to 3, so as to try and answer the research questions, and offer new perspectives for future research.
17
The latest official figures available are for 2013-2014, amounting to 199,285 Saudis studying abroad,
all programs, countries and levels taken together, compared to a total of 1,555,887 Saudi Arabian students
inside the Kingdom, that is 12.8% of the total number of Saudis pursuing higher education. “ ميلعتلا تاءاصحإ
ليصفتلاب يلاعلا,” (transl. “Higher Education Statistics in Detail”) Ministry of Higher Education - Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia, May 19, 2012, accessed March 3, 2014, http://www.mohe.gov.sa/ar/Ministry/Deputy-
Ministry-for-Planning-and-Information-affairs/HESC/Ehsaat/Pages/default.aspx.
14 Chapter 1: The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: The Elephant in the Middle Eastern Room
1.1 On the Origins of the “Elephant in the Room”
“Followed them two miles east without result; think elephant went west.” 18
In his detective mystery, Mark Twain tells the story of a white elephant sent from India as a gift to the British Queen and lost on its way in New Jersey. Throughout the investigation, this massive 19-feet high white elephant is seen by a lot of witnesses, yet will never be found alive again by the crew of detectives in charge, to the bitter displeasure of the narrator. This story seems to be the starting point of the phrase “the elephant in the room”. Although the phrase was not used as such until the middle of the twentieth century, Twain’s story already set its meaning in The Stolen White Elephant published in 1882, as Hasan, this obvious elephant, wanders around and causes a lot of troubles, yet remains, for the investigators, out of grasp and even out of sight. Since its first acceptation in the 1950s, the phrase refers to “a major problem or controversial issue which is obviously present but is avoided as a subject for discussion”. 19 A famous alternative, “the elephant in the living room” is mostly used in the field of political science.
It is hard to trace and date the first use of this phrase in reference to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but the association seems fruitful, as can be seen through a very basic Google search. Indeed, the first fifty results to say the least are not only directly linked to the Kingdom, they also cover a large variety of topics, from domestic politics to international affairs, from the Kingdom’s rentier economy to its dependence on foreign workforce, from religious to societal issues, and so on and so forth. All these entries have one thing in common though, beyond the fact that they deal with Saudi Arabia:
they all point at the ability of both the Kingdom and the outside world to put aside or ignore obvious issues that the former is experiencing, in order to comfort their other goals and aspirations. This is exactly why the phrase “the elephant in the room”
18
Mark Twain, The Stolen White Elephant (Seaside, OR: Watchmaker Publishing, 2010), 9.
19
Oxford University Press, “The Elephant in the Room,” Oxford Dictionaries, 2014, accessed March 10,
2014, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/the-elephant-in-the-
room?q=the+elephant+in+the+room.
15 resonates in dealing with Saudi Arabia, both domestically and in its foreign relations, as will be tentatively explained throughout this thesis.
1.2 Saudi Arabia: Modern Historical Overview
The history of Saudi Arabia is very often simplified as an agreement concluded in 1932 between the political leaders, known as the Al-Saʿūd (or House of Saud, founded in 1744 and represented today by Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, officially King of Saudi Arabia since 2005), and the Al-Shaykh (or House of Shaykh), the leading religious family descending from Wahhābiyyah (or Wahhabism, a religious movement initiated by Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century, later on reaffirmed as a revivalist branch of Islam calling for a return to the earliest sources of belief that are the Qurʾān 20 and the aḥadīth 21 without the cultural and traditional customs that had perverted, in their view, the purity of Islam since its birth). However, as Asad emphasizes in his Genealogies of Religion, this politico-religious alliance was not so neat. 22
In theory, the alliance (which can actually be traced back to the eighteenth century, although not covering the entirety of the present-day territory) was meant to enact a complementarity between power through politics and reason through religion, enabling the establishment of a wide yet poor Kingdom in the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire provoked by the Entente Powers (Russia, the UK and France) during World War I.
The Saudi Arabian economy was then based on pilgrimage revenues. The Kingdom is indeed the home of Islam: the Qurʾān revealed in Arabia, starting in the city of Mecca. The very basis of the historical alliance between these two families in 1932 was therefore of differing interests: the House of Saud aimed at political development and stability through economy, while the House of Shaykh intended to propagate their
20
“Literally the ‘recitation,’ revealed to the Prophet Muhammad [Peace and Blessings be upon Him] of Arabia from approximately 610 to 632 CE, later collected and put into one volume. For most Muslims, [it] is the word of God sent to guide all humankind.” (Curtis, 428)
21
The “reports of the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions [peace and blessings be upon them all].” (Curtis, 424)
22
Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 87.
16 religious doctrine based on traditionalism and a puritanical interpretation of Islam. In these terms, their union is more of a “marriage of convenience” in which the latter
“represents the kingdom’s clerical establishment and takes care of Wahhabiyyah indoctrination and propagation [and the former] rules politically so long as it upholds Wahhabism’s fundamentalist Islamic norms.” 23
In addition, with the discovery of oil in the Eastern part of Saudi Arabia as early as the 1930s, divergences started to grow deeper between the two Houses, reaching a first climax in 1976 when the Kingdom became the largest producer of oil in the world:
the promotion of an exclusivist and intolerant interpretation of Islam began to – and still does today – clash with the ostentatious and hedonistic lifestyle some of the members of the royal family were leading in contradiction with the religious discourse. 24 This clash seems to be the instigator of many paradoxes that exist in Saudi Arabia, from both an external and internal perspective, as it materializes and has consequences on all spheres of the Saudi Arabian society, including in its interactions with the outside world. Each of these spillovers could by itself be considered an elephant.
1.3 Economic Interests, Security Concerns, and Political Necessities: From Desert to Dessert
When Water and Oil Become Synonyms
The territory that composes Saudi Arabia today has mainly been left aside by external powers until the twentieth century: its large desert offered but a hostile environment even for its inhabitants, who were organized in tribes and answered to the Ottoman Empire until World War I. Tribal rules and traditions are still prevalent today in some parts of the Kingdom, including in the way the ruling family organizes its power through the holding of formal and informal gatherings called majālis. 25 In 1916, Western powers (meaning the UK) stepped in the history of Saudi Arabia for the first time in terms of politics and security, aiming at the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Two
23
As’ad Abukhalil, The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), 36.
24
Ibid.
25
Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 2nd Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 77.
17 years after the Sykes-Picot Treaty, which secretly gave authority of the British, French and Russian over some parts of the ME, another treaty between the UK and the House of Saud was signed: the British recognized the authority of the House and further promised the independence of their Arab nation in exchange of their help in overturning the Ottoman power, a goal that was fulfilled by the end of the War. 26 Yet the interests of Western powers in the Saudi Arabian territory were then limited: rather, the British as well as the French were looking to have control over countries like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Palestine and the Transjordan. 27
After the official creation of the Kingdom in 1932, geological researches were offered by Americans who had already found oil and gas in neighboring countries.
From then on, the interests of Western powers in Saudi Arabia started to grow exponentially. 28 Historical accounts diverge on this point: some claim that the initial goal of these geological researches was to find water, which the Kingdom was in desperate need of, while others only mention the search for oil, although many geologists at the time had doubts that there could be oil reserves in this area. According to al-Rasheed, these historical divergences probably come from the fact that the King himself (then ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Saʿūd) presented this geological initiative as a way to find water to cover the needs of the population, although he was aware that the idea was to find oil. 29 What is clear however from these divergences is that water was most certainly an issue for Saudi Arabian rulers, and Americans were positive enough on the possibility of finding financially-interesting raw materials to generously offer the King a geological survey, at a time when both sides were suffering from the deep recession of 1929.
When oil was found in the early 1930s, the King had to handle the question of the concession. On the one hand, besides the fact that Saudi Arabia had no expertise in oil extraction and refining, the Kingdom’s financial situation (especially at this time of recession during which even the revenues from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca were dropping) would not allow the nationalization of such a massive investment. On the
26
Sherifa Zuhur, Saudi Arabia, eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) (Santa Barbara, California:
ABC-CLIO, 2011), 19.
27
Ibid., 44.
28
Ibid, 46-47.
29
Jihan El-Tahri, House of Saud, PBS Frontline, 2005.
18 other hand, the King had to deal with the religious leaders, who represented the other half of the Kingdom’s power. The main concern of the clerics was the selling of the oil concession to a foreign power, as it would mean a foreign presence and relations with most likely non-Muslims, which would be detrimental to the promotion and protection of what they defined as a pure Islam. 30 As a result, when the Americans won the concession in 1933 against the British, as they were offering more money and more guarantees, the King made sure that contacts between the Saudi Arabian population and the foreigners would be limited by establishing their settlements in areas where the density of population was very low or inexistent. Moreover, the King also insisted on having aʾimmah (the plural form of imām, i.e. “the leaders of Islamic congregational prayers” 31 ) in the masājid (or mosques) giving sermons on divergences between Muslims and non-Muslims so as to dissolve any potential appeal of Saudis to mingle with non-Muslims. 32
Relations between Saudi Arabia and the USA were therefore built on purely economic interests. Saudi Arabia was first dependent on the USA for extracting and refining the oil, but in turn the USA and Western European countries quickly began to rely heavily on Saudi Arabian oil which strategically guaranteed low prices. In 1976, Saudi Arabia became the largest oil producer in the world and its economy started to be based mostly on its oil industry, with 75% of government revenues and 90% of export earnings in 2003. 33 From an economic perspective, oil revenues calmed down the water problem in Saudi Arabia, as it could be more easily imported. The increasing wealth of the Kingdom also allowed for growing investment opportunities, especially in terms of infrastructures, which reversely attracted foreign investments. However, oil was only the first of a series of other mutual interests between the Kingdom and the West. With the outbreak of World War II and especially during the Cold War, other stakes and concerns started to spill over this initial business.
30
Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia, 87.
31
Curtis, 254.
32
Al-Rasheed (2010), 92.
33
James Wynbrandt, A Brief History of Saudi Arabia (New York: Infobase Publishing, 2004), 242.
19 Oil, Politics and Security
While Europe was slowly recovering – thanks to the Americans – from the atrocities and massive destructions of World War II, the USA started to engage in yet another war, against communism, which was rapidly spreading in Eastern and Central Europe, but also in the ME. At the time, and to this very day, Saudi Arabia and Israel constitute the main (if not the only) allies of the West in the ME, with the exception of France, which has from time to time turned towards the Palestinian cause. This paradoxical situation of being astride Jews and Muslims and/or Arabs has forced the West to act cautiously with the ME (especially from the 1950s onwards as Saudi Arabia started to look beyond its borders and worry about the lot of their Palestinian brothers), as both sides constitute valuable assets in their foreign policies and economic interests in the region. As communism started to spread and enter the ME, the USA found support in Saudi Arabia as the King saw in it (as well as in Arab nationalism) a threat against Islam, which the Kingdom was based on. Economic interests thus evolved into security concerns and political alliances. As a matter of fact, the year 1957 marked the very first time that a Saudi Arabian King would visit the USA. This visit was also used to affirm a closer relation with the USA and to show opposition against the UK and France who were responsible for the Suez crisis in 1956 in Egypt. The USA had indeed refused to assist them militarily, rather advocating for the creation of a peacekeeping force in the region, in order to deal with President Nasser’s collaboration with the Soviet Union. 34 However, oil also became a means of pressure for the Kingdom on dependent countries. For instance, the embargo in 1973 was implemented by King Faysal against the USA and Western Europe, as they had been supporting Israel in the Six Day War in 1967, and maintained their support during the 1973 Ramadan War. 35 After the embargo was lifted, oil prices rose significantly. The intricacies between economy and politics became obvious.
Inside the Kingdom, the wealth brought by oil revenues did not benefit the entire population, which started to create internal dissent. Opportunities were limited to the elite, mainly the royal family and their chosen beneficiaries. Corruption emerged at the
34
Joseph S. Nye (Jr.), Understanding International Conflicts. An Introduction to Theory and History, Seventh Edition (New York: Longman, 2009), 187.
35
Zuhur, 152.
20 same time as the modern social class divisions. 36 While the well-off could travel, get education in Western countries and equip themselves with the latest technologies, others were facing poverty. This situation did not escape from religious traditionalists and conservatives, who saw in this consumerist behavior a threat to Islam – as it opposes Islamic teachings – that had been brought by the West and thus by the discovery of oil.
These tensions reached a first climax in November 1979, when al-Masjid al-Ḥarām in Mecca (the Grand Mosque, also called the Sacred or Great Mosque) was sieged by a group of at least 200 well-armed radical militants (some accounts mention up to 1,500) in a demonstration of opposition against the royal family: exuberant lifestyles, corruption, modernization, but most importantly, the foreign influence on the Kingdom (especially that of the USA) were highly criticized. 37 As a consequence, King Khalid, who had just succeeded to the assassinated King Faysal, had to realign domestic affairs on an Islamic ideology, at least in appearance (since the lifestyles of the royal family have not fundamentally changed to this very day) in order to answer the demands of this growing group of traditionalists. The 1980s saw the blossoming of universities with Islamic studies programs managed and taught by traditionalists or fundamentalists.
Young Saudi Arabian men were also encouraged to go to Afghanistan to fight alongside their Muslim brothers against communism, which was also serving the interests of the USA and was intended to release the pressure inside the Kingdom. This strategy would have very negative effects later on, as many young people who came back from Afghanistan had been enlisted in terrorist groups and attacked their own country in the early 2000s, specifically targeting Westerners living in Saudi Arabia (see next section).
In addition, the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at the end of the 1980s led to complications in relations between Saudi Arabia and Western powers, who were supporting Israel. However, peace-building informal talks were being initiated in 2001 between King Abdullah and then USA President Georges W. Bush. In a letter, the former was asking the latter for a fairer treatment of the Arab world. The American response was positive and suggested the establishment of a distinct Arab state to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a suggestion that was supposed to be made public in the
36
Al-Rasheed (2010), 139.
37
Zuhur, 59-60.
21 next few days. 38 Yet the public statement never took place and the whole project collapsed on September 11, 2001, as 15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked the USA were reported to be Saudi Arabian citizens. 39
Terrorism
The year 2001 marked a new turn in Saudi-Western relations. Suspicion but also growing cooperation in order to fight terrorism paradoxically increased exchanges between the two sides. The Kingdom allowed USA troops on its soil on various occasions, not only for command and control operations in the war against Afghanistan, but also for bombing missions in the case of the war against Iraq. This open door to foreign presence on Saudi Arabian soil participated in triggering the wave of terrorist attacks inside Saudi Arabia in the 2000s. Between 2003 and 2005, more than 100 people were killed, mostly Americans living in Saudi Arabia as business persons, soldiers, or visiting the country as journalists. 40
Terrorism was eradicated in the Kingdom in part thanks to the help of the West.
The USA in particular had started training the Saudi Arabian National Guard in the 1960s, at the request of then King Faysal, who wanted to develop military power.
Intelligence channels from Europe were also extensively used in order to detect and dismantle terrorist groups inside the Kingdom.
Once terror was behind them, Saudi Arabia, under King Abdullah, started to aim at enhancing relations between his Kingdom and the rest of the world, and in particular the USA and Western Europe, by encouraging young Saudis to study and earn a degree abroad. This support was not only of words but also finances, as the KASP was implemented in 2005 to cover all tuition fees, housing expenses, and health coverage, and provide the students with an additional monthly stipend. This kind of initiative was not something really new in the Kingdom: as early as 1927, emphasis was placed on the importance of education abroad as a means to open up to the world and bring home new
38
“Context of ‘August 2001: Crown Prince Abdullah Warns Bush Against Pro-Israeli Stance in Letter,’”
History Commons, accessed April 14, 2014,
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_2847.
39
Zuhur, 23.
40
El-Tahri, 2005.
22 competences and innovation. 41 In the 1960s, the main destinations were already the USA and the UK. 42 However, these opportunities were, again, limited to the elite, and mostly the royal family only. In addition, the terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001 and on Western European capitals in the following years jeopardized such exchanges. The KASP was therefore specifically reframed in 2005 to rebuild trust and exchanges between Saudi Arabia and the West, and the USA in particular. Based on an agreement with President Bush in 2005, the KASP aims to “increase the number of Saudi students in the U.S.”, 43 but also targets other countries in the world. As of 2012, the network includes bilateral agreements in Asia and Oceania (19 partners), Europe (6 partners), Africa (6 partners) and North America (2 partners). 44 The fame of Western destinations has yet not faded away: for the academic year 2012-2013, 53.6% of all Saudis studying abroad are in the USA, and another 14.4% are in European countries (i.e. Austria, France, Germany, Ireland – a new partner since 2011, Italy, Spain, and the UK). 45 The necessity of creating such a program carrying the motto “for them to know the world and for the world to know them” highlights the fact that, even though Westerners had been present on Saudi Arabian soil since 1916 and reversely Saudis had been visiting the West, there had been barely any inter-mingling between these two groups at the societal level. Exchanges between the two worlds had been limited to their officials and elites, while the rest of both societies had not been able to get to know each other on a cultural level. This situation is not a mere coincidence: it is the result of cultural and political discourses and streams of thought that are officially held or simply accepted both in the West and in Saudi Arabia. These trends stem from divergences in and interpretations of societal norms and traditions that have shaped both societies and affect their relations, as will be seen in the next few sections.
41
“Study Abroad - Cultural Missions.”
42
Zuhur, 237.
43
“King Abdullah Scholarship Program,” Ministry of Higher Education - Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, August 4, 2010, accessed October 12, 2013, http://www.sacm.org/ArabicSACM/pdf/education_web.pdf.
44
“Study Abroad - Cultural Missions.”
45
“ليصفتلاب يلاعلا ميلعتلا تاءاصحإ,” (transl. “Higher Education Statistics in Detail”).
23 1.4 Cultural backgrounds and implications
Orientalism and Neo-Orientalism
With the development of trade and the booming of discovery and educational travels from Western Europe to other parts of the world starting in the seventeenth century, the East – or “Orient” as it is often referred to in the West, which broadly covers Africa, Asia and everything in-between – has become an ism mainly in artistic fields, thus giving way to orientalism, or the depiction of Eastern (and specifically Middle Eastern) traits in all forms of arts: paintings, sculptures, architectures, plays, pieces of music, and writings, as well as movies. 46 Due to French and British imperialist activities, many artists have been able to travel to colonies and offer a plethora of artistic works that still constitute today a large share of British and French (and American to a lesser extent) heritage. These works can all be described as orientalist as they depict scenes of what was thought to represent daily life in the East: hammām or Turkish baths, harem scenes, but also tribal battles and Western European expeditions to the Middle East are common examples of orientalist artworks.
Orientalist art and studies started to be questioned when the de-colonization process started in the Middle East, in the mid-twentieth century. From the 1950s onwards, as European powers were leaving the Middle East and the USA started to take their place, experts on the “Orient” were needed so as to best address issues and fulfil interests in the region. Oriental Studies departments in the US, the UK and the Soviet Union began to be rethought and further funded as Middle Eastern Studies departments so as to encompass more objective disciplines than only religion and the arts, to cover also economic, cultural, but also cross-cultural concerns. 47 Criticism in political terms was clearly articulated in 1963, when Abdel-Malek, an Egyptian-French political scientist, published an article pointing at the Western “essentialist conception of the countries, nations and peoples of the Orient under study.” 48 He further underlined the hegemonic, anthropocentric, and specifically Eurocentric characteristics of orientalist
46
Nicholas Tromans and Rana Kabbani, The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting (London: Tate, 2008), 6.
47
Baber Johansen, “Politics and Scholarship : The Development of Islamic Studies in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Middle East Studies: International Perspectives on the State of the Art, ed.
Tareq Y. Ismael (New York: Praeger, 1990), 71.
48
Anouar Abdel-Malek, “Orientalism in Crisis,” Diogenes 11, no. 44 (December 1963): 108,
doi:10.1177/039219216301104407.
24 works and discourses, which had been revealed by the end of the colonial era, thus showing how the West had transformed the Orient into an alienated object of knowledge and domination. Abdel-Malek reasserted this criticism at a conference in 1976, charging so-called Middle-Eastern experts with keeping “the Orient” trapped into the idea of a civilization that is “lagging behind”, trying to “[bridge] the gap” that separates them from the West by means of modernization, while Arab nations are, he said, experiencing a revival that the West is in desperate need of. 49 However, it was only in 1978 with the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism that the critique reached a decisive momentum.
Politically engaged in the 1970s in issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Said started to reflect on the orientalist discourse that had emerged in the West. As explained above, Said was not the first one to highlight the misrepresentations of the Arab world that this official discourse was bringing about. 50 He is nonetheless considered to have highlighted the core of the controversy lying behind the orientalist discourse and to have gathered immense support as well as vivid counter-criticism. 51 Most importantly, because he used a more vulgar language and detached himself from complex theoretical explanations, he was also able to reach a wide non-academic audience, thus allowing his book to be highly mediatized. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse, Noam Chomsky’s instrumentalist approach in his analysis of the Vietnam War, and Antonio Gramsci’s recommendation of generating inventories based on one’s own experiences of history, Said has sought out, with Orientalism, the origins and coherence of descriptions of the “Orient” in Europe from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, as he had noticed in the arts a change in the way it was represented. Said offers multiple definitions of orientalism throughout his book, giving a wide (sometimes confusing) array of perspectives. Orientalism, he argues, is a discourse deliberately chosen by European-Atlantic powers as “a political doctrine willed over the Orient,” “a cultural apparatus [that] is all aggression, activity, judgment, will-to-truth, and knowledge,” an established system that goes beyond innocent
49
Anouar Abdel-Malek, “East Wind: The Historical Position of the Civilizational Project,” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 1, no. 1 (1977): 59.
50
See for instance the early historical chronicle of Abd-al-Rahman al Jabarti on the French expedition and occupation of Egypt (1798), or later scholarly contributions: Victor G. Kiernan (1963), Bernard S.
Cohn (1969), and Anwar Abdel-Malek (1987).
51
Zachary Lockman, Contending Visions of the Middle East. The History and Politics of Orientalism,
2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 184.
25 misrepresentations and “operates (…) for a purpose, according to a tendency, in a specific historical, intellectual, and even economic setting.” 52 Lockman has summarized these thoughts by defining orientalism as a discourse that is to be understood “as a form of knowledge which authorized and justified the assertion of Western power over the predominantly Arab and Muslim lands of Western Asia and North Africa”. 53 He further explains that, like a pair of eyeglasses, 54 the orientalist discourse (in Said’s words) is triggering misconceptions of the Arab world, and is in this sense a distorted construction that the West had imposed regarding the reality of the MENA in political, sociological, military, ideological and scientific terms. 55
Since the 1990s, with the increasing fear of terrorism, the wars waged in the Gulf, Iraq, or Afghanistan and the issues over energy resources located in the ME, the orientalist discourse was further asserted in the USA and Europe where the Arab world has only been increasingly reduced to either rich oil shuyūkh (in the singular form:
shaykh, which can designate a village elder, religious scholar, head of a religious organization, judge or preacher, 56 but is commonly understood in the West as a religious scholar) or religious fundamentalists and extremists. 57 In fact, the war on terror launched by the USA in the aftermath of 9/11 and which specifically targeted countries in the Middle and Far East was shaped by ambiguous statements and actions that mostly led the public opinion in the West to believe that the war was waged against Islam or against Arabs. 58
Influenced by these ambiguities and by 9/11, the orientalist discourse has started to evolve into what has been called neo-orientalism. Indeed, as Tuastad explains, while the orientalist discourse mainly looked down at Middle Easterners as being backwards and weak, neo-orientalism rather looks at them as too strong, too dangerous, and as
52
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 6, 204, 273.
53
Lockman, 189.
54
The comparison to a pair of eyeglasses is suggested by Lockman, 185.
55
Said, 3.
56
Curtis, 429.
57
Edward Said, “Islam Through Western Eyes,” The Nation, January 1, 1986, accessed November 19, 2013, http://www.thenation.com/article/islam-through-western-eyes?page=full# (Published in the print version of The Nation on April 26, 1980).
58
Doeko Bosscher, “Is The Best Yet To Come? - Obama’s Future Foreign Policy” (Conference presented
at the The Netherlands Society of International Affairs, Groningen, November 29, 2012).
26 representing a serious threat to the West and democratic principles. 59 This new perception has been growing since the 9/11 attacks especially, and is particularly present in the American scholarship on Saudi Arabia. Based on the orientalist recognition that cultural traits shape human progress, neo-orientalists have designated the incapacity of Arab states to establish democratic values as a result of their inclination to kinship-based organization and their submission to the divine, which are seen as incompatible with advanced democracy and is sustained by the affirmation that
“Muslim countries have the most terrorists and the fewest democracies in the world.” 60 Tuastad explains that the shift from orientalist to neo-orientalist discourse is a continuum from the perception that Arabs are too weak, to the idea that they are too strong.
Theses discourses, as a system of knowledge and representations of the so-called Orient, is especially sound to consider when analysing the relationship between Saudi Arabia and the West, as emphasized by Abukhalil:
There is no question that Saudi Arabia arouses the interest of Western media and academia. To most in the United States and elsewhere in the West, Saudi Arabia’s political system and fundamentalist ideology seem bizarre and extreme, and thus only reinforces the sense of the exotic that has long attracted Orientalist interests.
That there are more biographies of Bin Laden and Abu Nidal in the West than there are of Arab artists, architects, and thinkers demonstrates Western fixation with the violent and fanatical [coined neo-orientalism]. The Orientalist paradox is that such writings claim concern for the plight of human rights in Saudi Arabia, yet many Western writings (especially in popular culture) about Saudi Arabia reek ignorance and contempt for Saudi people. 61
Orientalist and neo-orientalist discourses, although largely criticized, have impacted relations between Saudi Arabia (and the MENA at large) and the West, especially at the societal level, as these discourses have been instilled, consciously or not, into politics and relayed by the media. Best-sellers such as Samuel P. Huntingon’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order illustrate this tendency among Western societies and participate in widening the gap between Saudis and Westerners.
59
Dag Tuastad, “Neo-Orientalism and the New Barbarism Thesis: Aspects of Symbolic Violence in the Middle EAst Conflict(s),” Third World Quarterly 24, no. 4 (August 2003): 594.
60
Ibid.
61
