Islamic Institutions in Arab States: Mapping the Dynamics of Control, Co-option, and Contention

Across the Arab world today, regimes are increasingly intervening in Islamic institutions and establishments. Broadly defined, these include religious ministries, seminaries, universities, mosques, charities, awqaf (Islamic endowments, such as financial or property assets), Sufi zawaya (religious schools, lodges, or orders that play an important social role in their surrounding communities), youth organizations, media platforms, and other entities. Undertaken through appointments, purges, new laws, administrative reorganization, financial monitoring, and other means, these processes of control and co-option are hardly new: since their creation, many modern Arab states have either expanded or continued the bureaucratization of Islam that they inherited from European colonial rule and, before that, the Ottoman Empire.¹ In some sense, then, the institutionalization of Islam has proceeded in parallel with the penetration of the Arab state into citizens’ everyday lives.

And yet, the process is hardly unidirectional. Pro-state Islamic figures and organizations often have more agency and leverage than is commonly assumed, stemming from their role as intermediaries with society. Depending on their popularity and social capital, they can sometimes negotiate a quid pro quo in exchange for keeping quiet about politics, such as retaining some authority to speak on personal and social matters (though regimes have often encroached on these issues as well). Yet religious figures who have fallen under government control also have to manage their moral authority, straddling the perception that they are serving as mouthpieces for the worldly agendas of politicians rather than focusing on matters like faith and piety.

Beyond this, the line between official and nonofficial Islam is often blurred and fluid. A range of actors with varying degrees of proximity to the state make pronouncements about Islam, ranging from trained, official clergy to judges and lawmakers to media personalities who have substantial followings but whose formal knowledge of Islamic legal matters is often shallow.² In some instances, the state has created, paid, and sustained new social and political constituencies whose role is to lobby and campaign for so-called Islamic reforms via legal and administrative changes.

This current phase of state intervention in the Islamic sphere is significant in its scope, pace, and sophistication, reflecting in part the immense political, social, and economic challenges Arab regimes have faced in the years since the 2011 Arab Spring—which have been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic. In responding to the public health crisis and its economic fallout, many states’ Islamic establishments, through control of public messaging, mosques, and distribution of welfare and services, have been mobilized as tools to burnish a government’s legitimacy in front of anxious publics and sometimes deflect culpability through scapegoating.³

State led co-option and control of Islamic institutions also stems from domestic military threats from radicalized Islamists and, especially, pressure from Western allies and patrons to tackle these threats as part of a broader rubric of countering violent extremism. This latter driver has created a useful incentive for Arab governments allied with the United States to package their oversight and regulation of Islamic institutions and discourse as reforms.

These reforms, which in some cases are targeted toward nonviolent Muslim critics of the regime, amount to a sleight of hand. Based on the faulty assumption that a supposedly incorrect interpretation of Islam is a primary driver of radical violence, the adjustments create the appearance for Western audiences of progress on counter-extremism while ignoring the more proximate sources of militancy, like Arab regimes’ human rights violations, judicial and prison abuses, and corruption—all of which have in many instances worsened in Arab states. Put differently, for Arab rulers, the promotion of an allegedly moderate Islam through institutionalization and formalization means an Islam that presents no threat to their political survival rather than, as Western policymakers hope, an Islam that defangs violent radicalism.

At the other end of the spectrum and in contrast to the interventionist policies of strong Arab regimes, Islamic institutions in conflict-wracked Arab states have either fragmented or become prizes for competing political and military factions. In Libya, Syria, and Yemen, the path of Islamic ministries, schools, youth camps, endowments, and charities has followed the state collapse and territorial dissolution wrought by civil wars in these countries. In their respective zones of control, rump governments and opposition groups have set up parallel and rival religious bodies, which are sometimes more localized and autonomous because their political overseers lack sufficient resources to co-opt them. Islamic institutions in such conflict settings are often far more susceptible to foreign economic and ideological influences, both by regional powers waging war-by-proxy and also Western states.

Western aid agencies and governments have identified that religious figures in conflict and postconflict states can be partners in mediation and community-level development.⁴ As with practices of countering violent extremism, there are complications to Western outreach to Islamic actors and institutions in conflict settings: Islamic partners are often politicized and factionalized after years of war, and their claim to speak on behalf of fractured societies or act solely as ethical and organic interlocutors may not be as strong as they claim. On top of this, additional Western attention could inadvertently inflate their role, entrench identity-based divisions, and elevate the religious drivers of civil wars to the exclusion of socioeconomic and political factors.⁵ Finally, the effectiveness of such engagement has been difficult to track.

“US [countering violent extremism] initiatives often give cosmetic focus to Islamic institutions with nary a look at outcomes,” noted a longtime U.S. development expert with more than a decade of experience in Middle East and Central Asia. “And governance-focused donor programs invite ‘local religious leaders’ in for [a] conflict resolution workshop or two, disembodied from a deeper engagement with the underlying structural causes of grievance.”⁶

How Islamic Institutions and Arab States Interact

To date, the fluid and complex relationship between Islamic institutions and Arab governance has received far less scholarly and analytical attention than Islamist party politics and Islamist militancy and extremism.⁷ The compilation of papers in this volume, covering Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Algeria, and Morocco, aims to fill that gap. Drawing on two years of research, including fieldwork and interviews with Arab officials and Islamic figures, it sheds light on the processes that define relations between Islamic institutions and governmental entities, ranging from strong formal regimes in relatively stable Arab countries to informal, substate, and nonstate political actors in conflict or post-conflict Arab states. The goal is not to present a scorecard on the balance of power or on winners and losers. Nor are there definitive predictions or policy prescriptions. Instead, the papers offer detailed context for an oft-neglected aspect of Arab governance that has ramifications for several Western policy priorities—including countering extremism, promoting conflict resolution, and, more broadly, promoting the future political, economic, and social stability of Arab states.

As interlocutors between regimes and society, Islamic actors and institutions—and the broad spectrum of mechanisms through which Arab rulers engage with them, from dialogue and co-option to contention and outright coercion—are important windows into the structural inequalities of Arab states and the legitimacy deficit of Arab regimes. Regimes that are confident in their own political and social support have historically given more leeway to Islamic actors and institutions, even if to better monitor them, while insecure, paranoid rulers have constricted the maneuverability of their religious establishments, which sometimes drives dissent underground and toward violence. Understanding such bellwethers will become all the more critical as Arab regimes confront what Carnegie scholars have called “a decade of Arab decisions,” in which declining oil prices and diminishing global demand for oil will deprive many Arab rulers of time-tested means of buying off social dissent.⁸ This dawning era creates particular challenges for relations between Islamic institutions and regimes in the so-called rentier states, in which rulers have long deployed oil revenues to secure fealty from clerics and to manage sprawling religious bureaucracies.⁹

This collection’s opening paper deals with the most consequential of these rentier states in the Arab world—Saudi Arabia, which, by virtue of its vast wealth, claim to Islamic leadership, and powerful media and proselytization machinery, has exerted an outsized influence on religious matters far beyond its borders. The purportedly reformist agenda of the ambitious and authoritarian Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman has received widespread media coverage. But Yasmine Farouk and Nathan J. Brown find that the Saudi monarchy’s much-hyped changes to religious structures amount to a remodeling rather than an abolition. To be sure, this surge of top-down policies toward clerics and Islamic institutions is significant and nearly unprecedented in the history of the modern Saudi state, yet a closer examination reveals them to be focused mostly on technical and procedural matters rather than on real doctrinal shifts. In addition, all of the changes are reversible. Even so, the long-term effects of this state-led religious intervention—on clerical loyalty and on popular perceptions of the monarchy’s Islamic legitimacy at home and abroad—remain uncertain.

Neighboring Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country and home to one of the world’s worst man-made humanitarian catastrophes in decades, has long been a recipient of Saudi religious influence via the conservative Islamic current known as Salafism. Yet Yemeni clerics and seminaries have also had a significant impact outside of Yemen, often challenging Saudi Salafist doctrine in ways that are not always recognized. In the wake of Yemen’s civil war starting in 2014 and exacerbated by the 2015 Saudi and Emirati military interventions, Islamic institutions—especially schools, institutes, and camps affiliated with Salafists, Zaydi Shias, Sufis, and the Muslim Brotherhood—have become sites of military and political contestation and foreign influence. In mapping this factional struggle, Yemeni scholar Maysaa Shuja Al-Deen avoids attributing too much weight to identity- and sect-based drivers in the war. Still, she finds that religious education in this fragmented country is widely perceived by local and foreign actors to be an important tool for ideological mobilization, socialization, and recruitment. The violent civil war, in turn, is reshaping the character of both traditional and more contemporary Islamic schools and institutes in ways that will be felt for generations.

Beyond the Arabian Peninsula, Syria has also been devastated by a long-running civil war, territorial and political fragmentation, and proxy intervention by foreign powers. The sum total of these developments, as Thomas Pierret and Laila Alrefaai show in their paper, had profound consequences for the contentious relationship between religious institutions and political actors, especially in enclaves outside the control of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Here, they identify three modes of religious governance, each with a distinctly local character reflecting the dominant opposition faction but also foreign, and especially Turkish, patronage. Meanwhile, as the Syrian regime expands its grip over more than two-thirds of the country, it is securitizing and nationalizing Sunni Islamic institutions as a governing strategy. In many respects, this continues a trend of top-down intervention in religious affairs that Assad had begun on the eve of the 2011 uprising. And, despite an initial flourishing of bottom-up self-management, even Islamic institutions in opposition areas are increasingly subject to similar heavy-handed interference by local political actors who enjoy the advantage of military force. The authors conclude that friction resulting from this imbalance is likely to be the norm in both regime and non-regime areas for the foreseeable future.

Like Syria, Libya is a war-wracked Arab state that has witnessed territorial fragmentation, institutional dissolution, and foreign meddling since the 2011 overthrow of dictator Muammar Qadhafi. My paper examines how Libya’s awqaf have become a magnet for intense and often violent competition between Libya’s Islamist currents, especially so-called Madkhali Salafists; political factions; armed groups; local municipalities; and foreign powers, whose influence has often been exaggerated. Designated at various times as a ministry or an authority, the awqaf office’s supervision of vast property assets and its role in appointing mosque imams—and thus communicating to the public—has meant that Islamists and non-Islamists alike have long viewed it as an important source of economic power and status. In tracing the turbulent path of this institution post-2011, I account for the fraught legacy of Qadhafi’s rule, which saw the appropriation of awqaf real estate holdings as part of his collectivization policies, and, further back, the Italian colonial period, which was marked by similar instrumentalization. I conclude that after more than a decade of violent rivalry, politicization, and rapid turnover in awqaf leadership, public perceptions of the institution have been irrevocably altered, offering insights into Libya’s endemic afflictions of elite contestation, corruption, and center-local tensions.

Egypt has long been an intervener in Libya’s affairs, especially in the Islamist field, in part because of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s concerns about domestic and transnational challenges to his rule from the Muslim Brotherhood. As Nathan J. Brown and Michele Dunne unpack in their paper, that fear has been one of the motives for Sisi’s expansive campaign to consolidate regime control over Egypt’s Islamic institutions, ranging from local mosques and prayer circles to the venerated Islamic scholarship center of al-Azhar. Applauded by some in the West as an exemplar of Islamic reform against violent extremism, this consolidation—undertaken with bureaucratic, legal, fiscal, and repressive tools—has had an ambiguous impact on the actual drivers for violence, given the government’s human rights abuses and worsening socioeconomic problems like unemployment and poverty. Moreover, these authors challenge the notion of omnipotent regime control over Islamic affairs: while many clerics and institutions have certainly fallen under presidential direction or been shuttered altogether, others, like al-Azhar, have been fiercely protective of their autonomy. The contest over Islamic authority is also more multisided than is commonly assumed: the Egyptian president is but one contender alongside the parliament and multiple rivals within Islamic institutions themselves. The chapter concludes that while religiosity remains an important facet of Egyptian public life, the net effect of the regime’s interventions and constriction of Islamic spaces is having a negative impact on societal trust in religious authorities, especially among Egyptian youth.

The final two papers in this collection shift to the Maghreb, addressing relations between Arab states and Sufi actors and institutions. As a historic and deeply embedded part of social, spiritual, and political life in the Maghreb, Sufism has often been viewed by outsiders in the West as a pacifist and moderate form of Islam and an ideological counterweight to militant Salafist jihadism. In their analyses of Algeria and Morocco, Anouar Boukhars and Intissar Fakir, respectively, explore how regimes in each country have been quick to exploit this perception, deploying Sufism as a resource for domestic governance and foreign policy toward the West and other countries in Africa. This utility is not wholly new: Sufis have long wielded influence in the Maghreb over temporal authorities, including colonial powers like the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Italy, presenting themselves as intermediaries and allies but also, at times, acting as military challengers.

Situating his inquiry against this historical backdrop, Boukhars finds that the Algerian regime has used economic, political, and media tools to elevate Sufism in Algerian public life, burnish its historical legacy among citizens, and co-opt it to fill a vacuum in the provision of welfare services and to counterbalance militant Salafism. In turn, Sufi institutions and figures engage in a careful calculus about the reputational trade-offs that accompany this patronage from and cooperation with the state. Echoing themes in other papers, Boukhars finds that Algeria’s movement of grassroots political mobilization, embodied in the pro-democracy Hirak movement, has presented dilemmas and choices for many Sufis, who are suffering, he argues, from their entanglement with unpopular political elites.

Regarding Morocco, Fakir examines how the ruling monarchy, which has long claimed religious and political legitimacy based on descent from the Prophet Muhammad, is undertaking similar processes of controlling, formalizing, and popularizing Sufism as a vehicle for state patronage. In many respects, this reverses a trend of Sufism’s declining social significance in Morocco and reflects, in part, the monarchy’s wish to be seen in the eyes of Western patrons as a center for the propagation of a moderate Islam, at home and across the African continent. For the latter, the promotion of Sufism acts as an important soft-power facilitator of the regime’s economic and political outreach to African states to the Sahelian south. As demonstrated in other papers, though, the balance sheet of this state-led intervention is mixed and often accompanied by legitimacy costs to Sufi institutions and actors.

When taken together, these papers reveal a complex picture of the dynamic interactions between Islamic institutions and Arab governments—one that is not solely religious in nature but rather is embedded in society, with far-reaching political and economic implications.

Acknowledgments

Research for these papers was made possible through a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. The authors collectively thank the foundation’s director of policy initiatives, Toby Volkman, for her sustained support and enthusiasm. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, important contextual research was carried out by James C. Gaither Junior Fellows Sandy Alkoutami and Jacqueline Stomski. Haley Clasen, Samuel Brase, and Ryan DeVries of Carnegie’s Communications team adroitly edited the compilation. Kerry Dugandzic and Madison Andrews provided vital programmatic support. Individual papers also benefited from careful peer review by outside scholars who are thanked by name in each paper. Finally, this research was enabled by the vital assistance of local scholars, officials, activists, and religious figures who agreed to be interviewed—either in the field or remotely. For security reasons, many cannot be named.

About the Author

Frederic Wehrey is a senior fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His research deals with armed conflict, security sector governance, and Islamist politics, with a focus on Libya, North Africa, and the Gulf.

Notes

¹ Nathan J. Brown, “Official Islam in the Arab World: The Contest for Religious Authority,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, May 11, 2017, https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/05/11/official-islam-in-arab-world-contest-for-religious-authority-pub-69929.

² For a discussion of these dynamics, see Nathan J. Brown, Arguing Islam After the Revival of Arab Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

³ Frederic Wehrey et. al., “Islamic Authority and Arab States in a Time of Pandemic,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 16, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/04/16/islamic-authority-and-arab-states-in-time-of-pandemic-pub-81563.

⁴ For an example of this approach in the context of Yemen, see Andrew McDonnell, Henry Burbridge, and Dr. Yara Zgheib Salloum, “Addressing Jihadi-Salafism in Yemen: The Role of Religion and Community in the Midst of Civil War,” International Center for Religion and Diplomacy, August 2017, https://icrd.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/ICRD-Report-Addressing-Jihadi-Salafism-in-Yemen-Final-Copy.pdf.

⁵ For a good discussion and literature survey, see Johannes Koenraad de Jong, “The Use of a Religious Dimension in Conflict Resolution by NGOs, With Case Studies From Nigeria and Myanmar” (master’s thesis), Leiden University, 2018, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/64644/Koenraad%20de%20Jong%20-%20Master%20thesis.pdf?sequence=1. The author writes, “Furthermore, making ‘religion’ the main focus of a conflict creates power relations in groups by giving religious leaders more power than they might have had before. It also creates and fortifies divisions by labeling and focusing on the differences between the groups.”

⁶ Author e-mail exchange with a U.S. development expert, October 14, 2019.

⁷ An exception is a collection of studies on religious authority in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, and Jordan undertaken by Rice University’s Baker Institute, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation, which includes unique public opinion survey data. For an overview of the project, see A. Kadir Yildirim, “The New Guardians of Religion: Islam and Authority in the Middle East,” March 2019, https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/new-guardians-religion-islam-and-authority-middle-east. Relatedly, the Brookings Institution, in partnership with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University, is running a project on the Geopolitics of Religious Soft Power that examines how Islamic actors and institutions have been mobilized for Middle Eastern states’ foreign policy. See Peter Mandaville and Shadi Hamid, “Islam as Statecraft: How Governments Use Religion in Foreign Policy,” Brookings Institution, November 2018, https://www.brookings.edu/research/islam-as-statecraft-how-governments-use-religion-in-foreign-policy.

⁸ Marwan Muasher and Maha Yahya, “A Coming Decade of Arab Decisions,” in The Day After: Navigating a Post-Pandemic World, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, September 9, 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/2020/09/09/coming-decade-of-arab-decisions-pub-82506.

⁹ Courtney Freer, “State Religious Authorities in Rentier Economies and the Management of Independent Islamism,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 41 (1), 2020, 42–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2020.1714213.

Saudi Arabia’s Religious Reforms Are Touching Nothing but Changing Everything

Introduction

Since Saudi Arabia was founded almost a century ago, the doctrines and structures of the country’s religious institutions have evolved in unusual and distinctive ways. Wahhabi interpretations of Islamic texts and teachings—pursued and enforced by bodies like the religious police, the Ministry of Education, and a judiciary trained in sharia (Islamic law) that retains general jurisdiction—have given the Saudi state a religious character with no real parallel in the region. But these characteristics are not timeless or immutable, and they may be changing.

The country’s governing structures are being centralized, remolded, and reined in. Its religious doctrine is no longer “committed blindly” to the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, or to any “certain school or scholar,” as the man championing these changes, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, stated on April 27, 2021.¹ The trend began a few years ago, even before he became crown prince, and now it is accelerating. The Saudi governance system has been undergoing a rapid and radical restructuring, perhaps the most far-reaching alterations since its formation a century ago. A combination of procedural shifts, personnel changes, bureaucratic restructurings, and changes in jurisdiction are revolutionizing the role of Islam in the Saudi state—and in public life.

But for all the potentially radical, cumulative effects, most of these changes are technical adjustments, redistributions of duties, or changes in appointment patterns. Rhetoric and tone are also shifting in ways that suggest more radical moves could come at some point. Most of the changes are not wholly new but began under the previous king, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. And because these alterations amount to reshufflings rather than redesigns, they may be reversible or may simply be the endgame in themselves. There have been some suggestions of marginalizing but no frontal assault on Wahhabi teachings; long-standing structures have survived, apparently immune and adapting to existential challenges, at least for now. Nothing is being wholly dismantled, but everything is being changed. Previously powerful actors are being overruled, and their structures are being remolded but not abolished. The consequences of these changes are affecting the kingdom itself and Saudi diplomacy abroad too.

Even as Saudi religious institutions are being restructured, their tools are being pruned, ostensibly to increase governing efficiency but likely for political reasons as well. As is usually the case in Saudi Arabia, the change started at the top. To help sell these changes to Saudi society while maintaining credibility and easing tensions, the royal family has enlisted the support of figures within the religious establishment who are open to its new political vision, whereby the monarchy-led state, not the religious establishment, defines public order.

Even as Saudi religious institutions are being restructured, their tools are being pruned, ostensibly to increase governing efficiency but likely for political reasons.

The motivations behind these changes seem clear: greater centralization of the state; removal of impediments to intended political, social, and economic changes; and consolidation of the regime. And the short-term effects are also clear. Prevailing Wahhabi (as non-Saudis call it) religious doctrine (with its strong emphasis on obedience to the ruler) and Saudi religious structures (with their wide spheres of authority and extensive bureaucracies) have evolved over decades into vital and influential parts of the state apparatus. But those same features have rendered them unable or even unwilling to resist these changes.

In a sense, the processes underway in Saudi Arabia today are unprecedented at home, but they have strong parallels in other historical political systems (such as the Ottoman Empire and Egypt) more than a century ago. These changes are happening in Saudi Arabia not simply later but also so rapidly that judicious calibration seems unlikely. And the possibility remains that these shifts will leave strong pockets of resistance and resentment, given the leadership’s parallel strategy of holding on to some of the distinctive features of exclusionary and radical state doctrine and especially because the ultranationalist and political motivations behind some of the changes are sometimes quite clear.

This paper analyzes the changes in the Saudi state’s religious establishment by first examining its historical evolution. Second, it examines the several ministries and other structures that employ ulema (religious scholars), effectively affording their voices not merely the force of their own learning but also their own small slice of state power. Yet assessing the changes in the Saudi religious establishment requires paying attention not only to bodies that are headed by and dominated by ulema but also keeping in mind other state institutions where they play influential roles without necessarily leading.

The bulk of the paper is thus devoted to analyzing two groups of institutions: those that are supposed to shape the religious identity of the country and those that operationalize that vision. The first group includes the Council of Senior Scholars and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The second group includes the Ministry of Justice, the Committee for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, the Ministry of Education, and Islamic charitable entities. This second group also includes the World Muslim League due to the prominent role its secretary general is playing in relaying this new Saudi religious discourse overseas.

This division of labor between the two groups of institutions, however, is not that clear in practice. Political authorities often choose to bypass the first group of institutions and impose the new religious narrative through direct implementation and actions. The objective is usually to avoid direct confrontation and resistance from the first group of institutions as well as to gradually and publicly restrict their role in legitimizing public policies. As a matter of fact, the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Justice long have incrementally shaped the country’s religious identity thanks to the room for maneuvering that their personnel have inside their courts and classrooms. By the same token, the World Muslim League is nowadays more than a mere tool to disseminate and operationalize the country’s new religious discourse abroad, thanks to the closeness of its secretary general to the royal court.

In each institution, similar patterns arise: changes that are incremental and reversible but cumulatively significant.

In each institution, similar patterns arise: changes that are incremental and reversible but cumulatively significant. Lastly, the paper assesses the likely course of this incremental reform program and the ways Saudi Arabia’s diplomatic actors might position themselves in a political system that is still in flux.

Saudi Arabia’s Distinctive Path of State Formation

The twentieth-century Saudi state was built unlike most of its regional counterparts.² There was no period of European rule; Western oil companies have long enjoyed a far more extensive presence in the kingdom than any European military or diplomatic actor has. Ottoman institutions operated for a time but only in some parts of the country, and the kingdom’s territory and borders emerged as the result of contests on the Arabian Peninsula (albeit with a heavy British hand in fixing some borders, including those with Iraq, Jordan, and Kuwait). Regional and Western influence on Saudi institution building was more limited and came mostly after the discovery of oil. The centrality of Islam in crafting a unique identity for the nascent political entity not only preceded state building but also established boundaries on external influence.

That distinctive history can be traced in many different areas. Saudi bureaucratic structures, for instance, were built later than elsewhere in the region and tended to be less coherent. Centralization proceeded far more slowly. And legislative processes eschewed parliamentary bodies, with limited consultative structures only, until the current (and still consultative) Majlis al-Shura (Shura Council), formed in 1992, became impressively active. In previous attempts to build a Saudi state, religious devotees had the double tasks of convincing and even coercing Saudi people to obey the state through the assumption of official religious and civilian (and, early on, even military) tasks such as conquest, control, and policing as well as collection of tax and zakat (mandatory annual charitable donations made by Muslims).³

The founder of the current Saudi state, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, put an end to the extreme degree of overlap among various religious and state structures, yet a dialectical relationship between the clerics and the royal family continued throughout the process of state building. The strong overlap between the religious and legal realms remained the most visible sign of this interplay. The courts of general jurisdiction were staffed with judges trained primarily in Islamic sharia with no recourse to state law codes. (By contrast, while judges in Syria or Morocco might have taken a course on Islamic law in law school, the bulk of their training would have been in state-legislated law codes.) In the kingdom, public order was maintained not only by the regular police but also by the Committee for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, generally termed the religious police in English. In part, this translation stems from the fact that the committee long had strong policing powers—ones that grew over time rather than shrank, until more recently. Religion also infused almost all aspects of Saudi public life and state services from broadcasting to education.

Over the last half century, the influx of oil revenue has made possible a massive and rapid expansion in almost all aspects of the Saudi state: social welfare, education, construction, the media, and state bureaucracies.

Over the last half century, the influx of oil revenue has made possible a massive and rapid expansion in almost all aspects of the Saudi state: social welfare, education, construction, the media, and state bureaucracies. For all the magnitude and the rapid pace of this institutional and infrastructural development, Saudi state building has tended to build on past patterns rather than reverse them. There have been discontinuities to be sure, but the country never has been ruled by a self-styled revolutionary regime consciously working to undo the previous way of doing things.

It is not that Saudi Arabia remained frozen at some point in the past: the role of religion actually grew over time and took a more specific form, promoted by a range of official actors. So, while there was some general continuity, Saudi observers noticed a change—though when that change set in and what was responsible for it remain controversial. Some speak of the reign of former king Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (who ruled from 1964–1975) as a turning point, with his conservative orientation financed by growing oil revenues. But today those reveling in the very recent changes speak instead of the slowly radicalizing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood during the 1960s and of 1979 as a dramatic juncture. That is the year when the Saudi leadership, reacting to religious challenges—the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the Iranian revolution, and rising religiosity throughout the region—doubled down on its commitment to religion in public life inside the kingdom.⁴ Social restrictions increased, support for domestic religious institutions grew more generous, funding of religious activities abroad flowed more freely, and the country’s religious leaders seemed to exercise a veto over areas of public policy.

The ways that some Saudi citizens refer to 1979 as a turning point are based on a genuine shift but are also partly tactical in nature: specifying such a recent date can be meant to suggest that Saudi Arabia’s current institutions and practices are the product not of traditions deeply embedded in history and religion but of much more recent political calculations, as much external as internal. To move against these modern-day institutions and practices can thus be portrayed as a return to Saudi society’s authentic roots, which were supposedly more pluralistic, tolerant, and socially liberal.

State-Sponsored Religion in Saudi Arabia Today

When outsiders refer to the Saudi religious establishment, they often see it as a product of the Wahhabi reform movement, which was born in the Arabian Peninsula nearly three centuries ago and which has been affiliated with the Saudi political cause since its beginning. This is for good reason. Official Islam under Saudi leadership has indeed always been Wahhabi in inspiration. But the Saudi leadership’s Wahhabi character is not self-acknowledged, in part because the term Wahhabism is eschewed as inappropriate; for its adherents, Wahhabism is the only sound interpretation of Islam, not an idiosyncratic school of thought.

But whatever term is used, there are movement-like aspects to the long-dominant approach to Islam in the kingdom (anchored as it is in certain circles, regions, families, and informal networks). Wahhabism might alternatively be seen as a school of religious thought—one that insists on close adherence to original religious texts (a kind of Salafism), while also avoiding practices it sees as non-Islamic accretions (such as the veneration of tombs). While suspicious of some scholarly interpretations, Wahhabi scholars tend to follow the teachings of the movement’s founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and other major Wahhabi figures. Handsomely bound copies of his fatwas (legal opinions on a point of Islamic law) adorn many Saudi religious bookshelves.

But Wahhabism, like Saudi Arabia itself, is not an unchanging or constant force. If the religious tendency was born as a movement, the construction of the Saudi state not only greatly increased its influence but also gave it strong institutional form. What had been a school of thought was gradually woven into the fabric of an expanding Saudi state—one that became a large, complex, and often barely coherent set of structures that left religious institutions and officials with tremendous authority in many realms.

What had been a school of thought was gradually woven into the fabric of an expanding Saudi state—one that became a large, complex, and often barely coherent set of structures that left religious institutions and officials with tremendous authority in many realms.

The effect, however, was not merely to meld religion into the state and ensure its influence in many areas of public life but also to guarantee that Wahhabi Islam was presented to residents of the kingdom with the full authority of the state and to turn Wahhabi scholars and leaders into state officials. It was an offer of influence that those scholars could not—and did not—refuse. To be able to expand their geographic reach, enter new social realms, teach new generations, and place graduates in the various structures of the Saudi state was an attractive offer indeed. And this access to power gave the religious establishment enormous sway—even if it turned its members into civil servants on the state payroll.

Today, like before, rulers of the Saudi state are using the clerics’ fear of losing this privileged status to push them to evolve and to tame them according to the dictates of political survival. Wahhabi scholars take pride in the authenticity and purity of their approach, but the movement has always historically evolved through interactions with other approaches and through internal competition. Today’s changes, while instigated by the royal court, follow the same logic of political adaptation.⁵

Consequently, basic features of Saudi state structures—who reports to whom, from where various offices tend to recruit new employees, what training and qualifications they expect their members to have, and what their jurisdictions or competencies are—have been the very instruments, consciously deployed or otherwise, through which religion has shaped Saudi public life, society, and politics. Tinkering with those features of state structures and procedures, even with seemingly minor changes, could have significant religious and social effects.

In the past few years, the Saudi religious space has been undergoing a systematic recasting and rearranging of the various structures in which Islam is taught, practiced, and enforced. These alterations have not been expressed as a formal program but instead as a set of administrative measures with two clear effects: to increase central control over religion (decreasing the autonomy of religious figures) and to shift authority to less clearly religious structures that are more directly linked to the royal court.

Yet there has been no formal program of transformation beyond rhetoric and no overt changes in religious doctrine, as dozens of technical amendments under the banner of reform emerge rather than wholesale abolitions or dramatic upheaval of key institutions. The overall effects of these changes will be clear only when they are viewed as a whole—and when it becomes clearer not merely how successful but also how long-lasting the changes are. But however incremental and provisional they may be, the changes are still attracting attention.

The Disempowered Shapers of Saudi Islam

One of the keys to understanding the changes in Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment is to investigate the dynamics underway inside two institutional pillars of its religious establishment, the Council of Senior Scholars and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance (hereafter called the Ministry of Islamic Affairs). These two institutions supposedly act as initiators and diffusers of change in the religious space through several tools and affiliated institutions such as mosques and religious curricula.

The Council of Senior Scholars: An Old Body Speaks With Less Dissonance

Theoretically, some of the aforementioned changes in the Saudi religious sector, specifically those that revisit the established Wahhabi interpretations of religion, should not take place without the permission, or rather nowadays the a posteriori blessing, of the Council of Senior Scholars.⁶ The council, a committee of the country’s most senior and respected religious scholars, is at the apex of Saudi Arabia’s religious apparatus. Formed in the 1960s, it speaks collectively for the Saudi religious establishment. Presumably such an influential body would be deeply affected, even threatened, by the Saudi monarchy’s far-reaching program of religious restructuring.

But there are no signs that the council is slated for major changes. There have been extensive personnel changes to be sure, but most of the council’s new members have had conventional career paths.⁷ While the council consists of senior figures, its members are scholars who have moved up the ranks of state institutions; the dominant Wahhabi approach is to advise discreetly but also support the prevailing Islamic ruler. For such figures to denounce the country’s rulers or question the nature of the state would be almost unthinkable.

While the council consists of senior figures, its members are scholars who have moved up the ranks of state institutions; the dominant Wahhabi approach is to advise discreetly but also support the prevailing Islamic ruler.

So instead, the council has been adjusting to the Saudi leadership’s new approach. When it became clear in 2018 that the country’s political leaders were committed to allowing women to drive, for example, the council quickly issued an opinion supporting the move. Some cynical observers suggested this likely involved an almost overnight changing of minds for many council members, endorsing a step they likely would have opposed if asked, one that many of them had indeed opposed in the past.⁸ That cynicism is likely justified in part but might miss the point: the council’s place is not to be entrusted with discerning the public interest or to dictate terms to the country’s rulers but to interpret religious teachings as experts in line with the demands of leading a religious society.

Similarly, the council has taken the lead in denouncing the Muslim Brotherhood, but it has done so only when senior regime figures (and other state institutions) have made clear that the movement is regarded as a terrorist threat. More generally, the council’s own regulations suggest that its first and foremost task is to advise the ruler when requested, whereas taking the initiative to advise him proactively is a secondary concern.⁹

King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud has restored some figures that the previous king Abdullah had dismissed for their opposition to his timid program of social reforms. They include individuals like Saleh al-Luhaidan and Saad al-Shethri. Like in other areas, the Saudi leadership seems to be keeping the pillars of Wahhabism in place on the council but circumventing them to avoid any open confrontation.

Many actions support this interpretation. First, Salman continued Abdullah’s policy of including on the council scholars who adhere to the three non-Hanbali Sunni schools, broadening its composition in a limited way—while diluting its influence by asking for its advice less frequently.¹⁰ Second, inside the Wahhabi establishment itself, figures like al-Luhaidan and al-Shethri coexist with progressive figures such as Sheikh Mohammad bin Abdulkarim al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League and former minister of justice.

Third, keeping ultraconservative figures in their positions has allowed the state to maintain control of their followers. However, pushing them to reverse their old conservative narratives has damaged their credibility more than just replacing them with new figures who had never expressed opposition to social liberalization would have. Fourth, an October 2020 royal decree made the attorney general a member of the council.¹¹ While his appointment asserts the de jure centrality of religion to the kingdom’s justice system, the fact that the attorney general is there more by virtue of his position than because of his religious learnedness amounts to a de facto downgrading in importance and a sign of increasing politicization.

And, indeed, the latest round of appointments to the council perhaps demonstrates most clearly the diffuse nature of this approach. Alongside the apparent loyalist attorney general, other appointments to the council include figures from other backgrounds. One notable example is Bandar al-Balila, who was rumored to have been briefly arrested as part of a crackdown on dissident scholars in 2018.¹²

The Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance: Controlling the Narrative on Change

This pattern of using incremental changes to cement a fundamental reorientation of the Saudi religious establishment extends to the Saudi ministry that stands at the center of official religion in the country. Changes inside the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs are crystallizing this reconfiguration of the country’s religious sphere without altering its core doctrine. As is the case in other institutions, the changes started with a clear policy from the top and are now cascading down through the institutional ranks.

As is the case in other institutions, the changes started with a clear policy from the top and are now cascading down through the institutional ranks.

The reform agenda mixes the fight against extremism with political interventions and state modernization efforts, complicating any opposition to these changes that would be framed as opposition to the fight against extremism. The ministry is crucial to keeping the apolitical aspects of Wahhabi doctrine intact while actively legitimizing the implementation of the Saudi leadership’s social, religious, and political agenda, which de facto challenges the ministry’s own established interpretations.

The current minister of Islamic affairs, Abdullatif Al al-Sheikh, is one of the main figures of the new Saudi narrative on purported religious centrism. He portrays this path as one that fully conforms with Wahhabi doctrine and the “methodology of the righteous forebearers.”¹³ According to his narrative, that methodology needs to be refined after decades of encroachment by Islamists. Even before his appointment as minister, he completely adopted the Saudi political leadership’s religious discourse, adding political zeal to his dual credibility as a son of the official establishment and a member of the al-Sheikh family (of al-Wahhab).¹⁴

Nationalist social media accounts widely believed to be state affiliated have occasionally gone so far as to generate hashtags to singly thank the minister for his efforts at harnessing “good citizenship” and “patriotism,” “fighting terrorism,” and promoting state policies and overcoming bureaucratic resistance.¹⁵ For his own part, the minister does not shy away from tweeting to support state foreign and domestic policies, denounce conspiracies against the kingdom and its leadership, or reinforce to the Saudi public the idea that true Muslims leave discussions of politics to their rulers.¹⁶

The trickle-down changes inside the ministry have been quite apparent. In 2018, the minister of Islamic affairs (then newly appointed) denied the existence of a “written” black list but confirmed that those “who don’t fit with the new vision of the king and his crown prince of a moderate nation that rejects extremism” will not remain in their posts.¹⁷ As a case in point, consider how Saudi political authorities have sacked or otherwise marginalized imams who oppose social liberalization; instigate strife by praying against specific individuals, countries, and sects; or discuss politics.¹⁸

Successive regulations have been adopted to limit preaching in the kingdom’s mosques only to Saudi and full-time imams who have fallen under stricter supervision from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.¹⁹ Prior to that, the stricter implementation of the decision to standardize Friday sermons and digitally monitor them across the kingdom were among other steps taken to control the religious narratives espoused by ultraconservatives.²⁰ Official and unofficial scholars face systematic pressure to religiously legitimize the socioeconomic and political transformations underway while also doubling down on demands of absolute obedience to Saudi rulers.²¹

The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has engaged in myriad activities to aid the regime’s fight against unsanctioned political Islam and extremism.

Most importantly, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs has engaged in myriad activities to aid the regime’s fight against unsanctioned political Islam and extremism. These activities include supervising mosques, preaching, and religious lessons; overseeing Quranic and charity associations; printing copies of the Quran and religious manuals; managing the king’s special guests for pilgrimage visits; spearheading Islamic international cooperation; and organizing domestic and international public events.

Although the kingdom is supposedly going through religious reforms, the ministry is doubling down on Saudi adherence to the Wahhabi doctrine that is widely perceived among wider circles of Muslims and foreigners as exclusionary, radical, and even extremist. Despite the links between Wahhabism, as non-Saudis call it, or Salafism, as Saudis prefer to call it, and the doctrines of terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and the self-proclaimed Islamic State,²² the ministry is promoting an official narrative that denies any such links. The way the kingdom’s ulema conflate any opposition to Wahhabi doctrine with opposition to tawhid (the oneness of God) itself—and any foreign attempts to target Saudi Arabia (not just violent ones) as tantamount to targeting Islam—is also an integral element of the ministry’s narrative.

The ministry’s overseas activities also have continued, though Saudi religious proselytism is being restricted. In 2016, the ministry suspended its overseas proselytism activities while it redefined their regulatory framework.²³ Yet news about the ministry’s ongoing charity activities and events hosted by Saudi and Saudi-sponsored Islamic centers abroad indicate that overseas religious outreach has not completely stopped.

Given how Wahhabi doctrine mandates proselytism, the Saudi system created to fulfill this duty has grown too complex and sophisticated to be under the total control of the ministry or any other single part of the state. An abrupt interruption of such activities would not only cost the Saudi leadership its considerable capital of transnational influence but also could erode support for the country’s leadership within the religious establishment. Instead, the Saudi leadership is now relying on other institutions to relay its influence abroad, mixing in a new Saudi narrative that promotes ostensible moderation and openness toward others with the necessity for Muslim communities to integrate into their non-Muslim nations, while the Ministry of Islamic Affairs continues to spread the traditional narrative.

The Saudi State’s Tools for Implementing Islam

Dawa (Islamic proselytization) is heavily emphasized in Wahhabi doctrine. Wahhabism not only insists that every Muslim—including Saudi state authorities as Muslim rulers—has the duty to promote Islam and to spread correct practice but also tends to be less than pluralistic, showing great confidence in Wahhabi teachings that emanate from followers of the movement. In Saudi Arabia, dawa is not merely a doctrinal position but a state bureaucratic function. This proselytizing function is mediated through several institutions furnished with financial and regulatory tools and staffed by ulema who act as state bureaucrats tasked with putting into practice Saudi Arabia’s specific identity and what the authorities henceforth dub “moderation” into practice.²⁴

Saudi Courts: Enacting Islam in the Legal Sector

One of the most notable Saudi state structures—and perhaps the strongest bastion of the Wahhabi religious establishment’s official role—is the kingdom’s judiciary. The benches of the courts of general jurisdiction in Saudi Arabia are staffed with judges educated in Islamic jurisprudence, and these judges are encouraged to see their task as applying God’s instructions for righteous conduct. They are meant to act under the political leadership of a legitimate ruler but derive their understanding of sharia from their specialized training.

Over the decades, the role of the Saudi judiciary has evolved. Its structures have been formalized, its procedures have been regulated, and its courts have become specialized, even as other quasi-judicial bodies have joined the judicial ranks. (Some, like the Diwan al-Mazalim’s administrative courts, clearly are fully judicial in nature, but others appear just as much to be administrative bodies.)

Yet none of these gradual alterations have challenged the fundamental centrality or training of the sharia-based judiciary.

Yet none of these gradual alterations have challenged the fundamental centrality or training of the sharia-based judiciary. And the various steps taken to curb or define its role often have been done so carefully that even the idea of codification of law proved to be too sensitive to pursue for a time.²⁵ As new judicial bodies have been added and new laws have been written and enacted, the sharia-based judiciary has marched on, resisting a regional trend for judicial models grounded in civil law and legal codes that allow limited, residual jurisdictions for Islamic sharia rather than the other way around.

The Saudi approach of subtle reorganization and rearrangement has not changed, but in the past few years the pace and boldness of previously incremental alterations have grown dramatically. Growing popular demands for a more efficient and regulated judicial sector have coincided with a political project to modernize state institutions, rein in state clerics, and fight corruption. The result is a judiciary that is no longer what it was—it remains formally unchanged but has been subdued and contained in a series of steps that have collectively remade the Saudi legal order without redefining it.²⁶

Legal codification, legislation, and judicial discretion. The Saudi state had long avoided the Arabic term tashri (legislation) until more recently, but skirmishes between sharia-based and state-based legal jurisprudence have been waged in other ways through a slow accumulation of efforts. Over some years, the Saudi Ministry of Justice began claiming the task of tadwin (compilation) rather than codification—not legislating a comprehensive code but ensuring uniformity of application by collecting, digitizing, and circulating previous court judgments to serve as models (informally but effectively as precedents) as new cases arise.²⁷ Yet in 2021, the crown prince decided that binding legislation, rather than mere compilation, will be the way forward. He then promised four new laws by the end of 2021: a personal status law, a civil transactions law, a penal code for discretionary sanctions, and a law of evidence.²⁸

As this happened, seasoned judges observed with concern that their junior colleagues would find it fairly easy to resort to meeting their caseloads by copying from such judgments and the upcoming laws, aware that if they did so, their task would be easier and their rulings were unlikely to be reversed on appeal since the reasoning would be endorsed by senior judges and officials. Even before codification was officially announced in February 2021, compilation seemed to its critics to amount to codification by stealth, though such rulings initially had no formal status as precedents or unified, established points of reference. In 2019, the minister of justice made clear that the controversial question of the legitimacy of codification had been resolved; the following year, he made known that he regarded compilation as binding, not merely advisory.²⁹ The objection that too many state-issued laws are edging out sharia has now been effectively marginalized.³⁰

While Saudi state structures avoided the Arabic term for legislation—tashri—until recently, the clearly legislative process that runs through the king through royal decrees has been ramped up over time. Consequently, large parts of Saudi law are increasingly dominated by state-issued texts rather than scholarly interpretations of religious injunctions. For instance, the abolition of the death penalty for minors or the abolition of punitive lashing were accomplished through ministerial directives, not scholarly debate.³¹

This is not necessarily a direct doctrinal challenge—the ruler, after all, is granted discretion in some criminal and many regulatory matters in dominant Sunni approaches. But this state-centered reorientation of legal texts is now occurring at a pace and scope that seem to increase each year. Since 2015, the Ministry of Commerce and Investment; the Ministry of Labor (reshaped six years ago as the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development); and the Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture, for instance, have each issued literally over 300 regulations.³²

Alongside the executive branch, the Supreme Court and the Shura Council (which forwards nonbinding decisions, recommendations, and draft codes to the king for approval) have significantly accelerated their pace and widened their scope. When developing such rules—or when launching into new legal subjects such as electronic transactions—there is no longer even an attempt to refer to any sharia-based guidance (on rules of evidence, for instance).³³ Authorities claim they are never clearly violating or negating the tradition of basing these rules on Islamic sharia, to be sure, but they clearly no longer feel bound to be seen as hewing closely to conventional Wahhabi interpretations.

In addition to incremental codification and expanded legislation, the role for judicial actors to make decisions at their own discretion is gradually becoming more circumscribed.

In addition to incremental codification and expanded legislation, the role for judicial actors to make decisions at their own discretion is gradually becoming more circumscribed. There is a growing emphasis on improving the governance of judicial institutions with a special stress on modernizing judicial structures and procedures. Reforms within the Ministry of Justice hence are coinciding with other similar projects across other state institutions as part of the ambitious Vision 2030 national strategy proclaimed five years ago and one of its objectives of increasing government efficiency.

These reforms include formulating procedures to file court cases; offering new technical trainings for judges; emphasizing the transparency of procedures, argumentation, and documentation of court decisions; and issuing decisions more quickly with a clearer division of labor between judges and administrative personnel and between different specialized courts.³⁴ New regulations have been adopted to regularize court inspections so as to “minimize differences” between them, whether in terms of the procedures for issuing a final verdict or the substance of some verdicts in a number of legal sectors.³⁵

Judicial recruitment and training. The recruitment and training of candidates for judicial posts—including for both judges and members of the judicial administrative corps—are being restructured.³⁶ Efforts are underway to make graduates from secular law schools eligible for judicial positions.³⁷ An attempt to open the door to hiring women for judicial positions has been turned back—for now.³⁸

These kinds of measures, facing judicial resistance for years, seem designed to expand the pool of recruits beyond the traditional clergy and require more competencies than just mastering sharia.³⁹ The construction of regional universities seems to offer the possibility of widening the pool of judicial job candidates to diminish the influence of al-Qasim Province, the region that has produced many of the most stalwart Wahhabi jurists. Other ancillary bodies (such as judicial support structures) also seem to be working to draw a more diverse population into the legal system.

Royal oversight on high-priority and politically charged cases. Court cases on issues that are high political priorities for the king and crown prince have also come under scrutiny, such as those related to women’s rights. The public debate on women’s employment in the Ministry of Justice, for instance, has become politicized, including the very controversial discussion of their employment as judges and the gradual increase in the number of licensed female lawyers.⁴⁰ The debate on women’s roles and issues in the ministry came under spotlight when women were appointed as criminal investigators in the public prosecution body for the first time ever in June 2020, even as stricter application of laws that protect women and children against domestic abuse was announced.⁴¹

At times, Saudi leaders have steered broad categories of cases—and not merely politically inconvenient ones—away from the regular judiciary. The tactic of shuffling jurisdiction to centralize control is not entirely new. In an earlier era, there was open executive oversight over jurisdiction in individual cases; the administrative courts were directed not to accept cases against state bodies unless the case was referred to them by the king (as head of the cabinet).⁴²

The kingdom’s current leadership seems to be working in part by lavishing attention on, widening the competencies of, and increasing the discretion of the country’s public prosecution, a structure that is more amenable to centralized direction than the judiciary has been in the past.⁴³ By increasing prosecutorial discretion—and ensuring that the prosecution’s views align with those of the leadership—the Saudi monarchy is circumscribing the role for judicial discretion without diminishing its formal independence.

The kingdom’s current leadership seems to be working in part by lavishing attention on, widening the competencies of, and increasing the discretion of the country’s public prosecution.

The ambitious Vision 2030 agenda gives special attention to the kingdom’s legal environment as essential to attracting domestic and foreign private investments and top-flight foreign residents. Codification and the institutional capacities of the Ministry of Justice play a crucial role in reaching this objective. The ministry is expected to integrate and implement an increasing number of economic laws through its commercial courts, but it also must be flexible in applying foreign arbitration and court decisions against Saudi entities. Saudi judges also are expected to accept that there will be special jurisdiction in the country’s special economic zones—such as the planned northwestern smart city of Neom, the Red Sea Project, and others—where commercial laws will answer to international, not local, standards and where social norms are supposed to be more relaxed. (One attorney involved in drafting relevant tourism legislation even acknowledged the possibility of permitting alcohol in specific areas.)⁴⁴

These changes have not always been smooth, but the trajectory is still clear. Notably, a brief confrontation between the previous minister of justice and a significant body of judges—who organized a 2013 petition of protest, mostly on administrative matters—ended with the then minister decisively punishing (and even dismissing or jailing) some of the judges involved.⁴⁵ The minister himself since has been shifted to the position of secretary general of the Muslim World League and has become a member of the Council of Senior Scholars and an influential adviser to the royal court—giving him less executive authority, perhaps, but far more visibility domestically and especially internationally. Most importantly, he has become a prominent international spokesperson for the leadership’s ideological and religious vision, practically in charge of openly promoting coexistence with non-Wahhabi Muslims and non-Muslims.⁴⁶

A new focus on training Saudi lawyers is meant to increase their numbers and further empower them within the legal system.⁴⁷ In 2017, the minister of justice inaugurated the Judicial Training Center to train “judicial and legal human resources,” albeit with fees.⁴⁸ The rules governing the work of lawyers are also expected to change, with job descriptions expected to expand into areas previously reserved for the judiciary, such as drafting and registering contracts.⁴⁹

The overall effect of all these legal and judicial changes is to remold the Saudi legal system by bypassing, diverting, and slowly remaking the judiciary. Through a host of evolutionary, indirect, and administrative steps, Saudi Arabia’s legal apparatus is losing its capacity to offer a sanctuary where clerics decide the limits of their own actions. In a sense, the country’s judiciary is becoming almost standardized, resembling other state institutions and, notably, judiciaries in other Islamic countries. This move to fold the judiciary into state structures more fully also includes arresting judges as part of the country’s wider political crackdown against dissent and in the wake of accusations of extremism and corruption.

The preambles of new regulations and legal decisions continue to assert that sharia is still the reference bedrock of Saudi regulations, and Vision 2030 still refers to the Quran as the state’s constitution. Yet a new legal doctrine seems to be materializing. As before, the public interest (as defined by the country’s rulers) will continue to govern the interpretation, application, and scope of religious teachings, but such determinations are now being made in such a way that the interpretation of sharia is effectively (though not doctrinally) defined by Saudi law.

The way political and economic authority has become more centralized over the past three years and the way political authoritarianism has increased indicate that an independent judiciary is still out of the question for Saudi rulers.

These changes, taken cumulatively, are significant but have not wholly eliminated the capacities of the judiciary, Saudi society, and even the Shura Council to resist change. These alterations also will not necessarily lead to a judiciary solely reliant on texts emanating from the legislative process or the royal court. Saudi Arabia is still far from being governed by the rule of law, and noncodified political interventions from the royal court still prevail over legal verdicts. The way political and economic authority has become more centralized over the past three years and the way political authoritarianism has increased indicate that an independent judiciary is still out of the question for Saudi rulers. But the royal family will likely leave judges a certain amount of room for maneuvering within these new political limits to avoid a violent confrontation. The anticipated laws to be issued by the end of the year might offer an indicator of such limits.

The Religious Police: From Boldly Preventing Vice to Politely Promoting Virtue

Perhaps the most striking recent change in Saudi Arabia is one that has left only the slightest formal trace: the near disappearance from public life of the once-prominent religious police—or more formally, the Committee for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice.

The committee itself is a formal body that has grown along with the Saudi state to help Saudi rulers carry out the religiously sanctioned task of religious policing in the fullest sense of the word. At its peak, the committee oversaw public conduct to ensure orderliness and righteousness, as Saudi Islamic religious tradition has come to understand those terms. The committee takes its name from verses in the Quran about guiding Muslims in general to promote virtue and prevent vice. The Saudi interpretation drew on traditions that viewed this charge not simply as an individual duty but as a special state duty for Muslim rulers. While promoting virtue and preventing vice is a traditional religious understanding of the ruler’s policing function, Saudi Arabia had been one of the few societies to devote a specific organization to that function and staff it with those willing to be trained and present themselves as stern enforcers of public morality.

And for a time, these officials did enforce Muslim religious sensibilities, often with compulsion. The committee ensured that women (and men, though with less severe strictures) were modestly dressed, that men and women did not mix socially, that shops were closed during prayer times, and that art was absent from public spaces. The committee was given a clear hierarchy and set of organizational regulations and guidance, but when it came to defining virtue and vice, its officials relied on their own religious understandings, guided by official religious scholars and convictions of their higher moral standing. They cajoled, scolded, patrolled, encouraged, and (if necessary) coerced, arrested, and detained potential rule breakers.

Then, in 2017, these last trappings of authority were taken away—or rather rerouted through other structures. Nowadays, if committee members find somebody who should be arrested or detained, they can no longer do so themselves. Instead, they are to refer the matter to the police or public prosecution—a way of seemingly harmonizing their operations with those of other state bodies.⁵⁰ But the effect in practice has been much more far-reaching.

Nowadays, if committee members find somebody who should be arrested or detained, they can no longer do so themselves. Instead, they are to refer the matter to the police or public prosecution.

Very quickly, the committee nearly has disappeared from public life. Saudi citizens report seeing fewer of their distinctive SUVs and fewer on-foot patrollers; within a year, the strictures they had been enforcing began loosening greatly in practice: gender segregation, dress restrictions, and store closures are still practiced but less rigidly enforced. And while the committee itself remains active to a degree, it seems to focus far more on promoting virtue nowadays—by distributing, for instance, copies of the Quran, holding advertising campaigns in the streets, and convening public talks—while leaving the definition and prevention of vice to other state bodies and social pressures.

As is the case with Saudi judicial reforms, efforts to rein in the religious police have taken place in waves when the role of this institution has become socially or politically problematic. The current push started under Abdullah when the state police actually arrested members of the committee for abuse of authority. The Ministry of Interior adopted a regulation as early as 2006 limiting the committee’s powers to arresting suspects who then must be turned over to the police. This inherited practice of restricting the religious police’s authority nonetheless has been pushed much further under Salman. The effective removal of religious policing from Saudi daily life has sparked widespread and broad (though not universal) public support.

Under both the current king and his predecessor, the committee’s exit from public life has been perhaps the most visible sign of social liberalization—a trend so noticeable it is easy to exaggerate. Strictures on public behavior are still extensive by regional standards. But the relative relaxation—coupled perhaps with an artistic and cultural efflorescence—has been key to sending a message both to international and domestic audiences about what is billed as the new Saudi Arabia. Domestically, moves to curtail the committee’s role have reasserted the primacy of the political over the religious, creating a sense (however contestable) that citizens have recaptured the public sphere. This primacy has been codified in the September 2019 Regulation to Preserve Public Decency, which is meant to manage the excesses of this swift social liberalization without restoring religious authority over the public sphere.⁵¹

The state has since worked on filling the void left by the committee’s absence from the public sphere in other ways too. The newly independent Ministry of Culture in 2018 along with an empowered Entertainment Authority have encroached on that social space. Public cultural events of a kind unimaginable in the past are becoming the new landmarks of the Saudi public square where public order, and repression too, are no longer defined primarily in religious terms.⁵² Reining in the religious police has turned out to be an initial step toward mobilizing support for other, more controversial and bold reforms. The committee has been called on not merely to obey the new way of doing things but to support this change by preaching the virtues of “belonging and national cohesion” and absolute “submission to the rulers.”⁵³

Islamic Charity: Funding Beyond Islamic Causes

State interventions to regulate the finances of the Saudi religious sphere are an integral part of the kingdom’s policy of standardizing the country’s religious establishment. Unlike past attempts, current efforts link those finances to the state’s project of overhauling the economy, Saudi society, and the kingdom’s international image. Islamic levies are expected to fulfill more than a religious duty and to be spent on policies that go beyond the religious sphere.

Islamic financial institutions are being restructured to better accomplish this new role and reinforce a message of subjugating the religious sphere to public order.

Islamic financial institutions are being restructured to better accomplish this new role and reinforce a message of subjugating the religious sphere to public order. This message is meant not only to convince domestic audiences but also to assuage international concerns about Saudi religious activities globally. The interplay among the religious and charitable spheres, both domestically and internationally, has always been complex, but there are clear signs that the sector is now receiving clearer guidance from the top of the Saudi state.⁵⁴

According to Vision 2030, regulations that directly and indirectly target Islamic financial resources and spending fall under the objectives of creating “a more impactful non-profit sector” by helping relevant bodies “become more institutionalized, formalized and more efficient.”⁵⁵ Regulating religious finances is also perceived to be part of improving “the legal and regulatory framework” of the financial sector and the country in general.⁵⁶

Even before the Vision 2030 strategy was announced in 2017, new regulations were adopted to tighten state control over the management and allocation of Islamic financial assets including endowments, zakat, or private charitable donations.⁵⁷ In addition to expanding nonreligious state supervision and management, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs has increased its own supervision over charitable donations to mosques and Islamic associations.⁵⁸ The state’s official policy has expanded the use of Islamic levies beyond the religious realm and according to a policy of sustainable development instead of a paradigm of solely Islamic largesse. The stated economic goal is to increase the nonprofit sector’s contributions, including those of its religious subsector, to the country’s gross domestic product under the authority of the Ministry of Finance.⁵⁹

This new approach is being applied to zakat, which the state has been treating as a tax since 1936, with a special sharia committee deciding on its allocations as defined in the Quran.⁶⁰ A 2016 royal decree modified zakat’s legal status and transformed the body overseeing it into the General Authority for Zakat and Tax, whose board of directors is chaired by the minister of finance. A series of regulations followed to “reconfigure the missions and tasks of zakat and revenue.”⁶¹ Then, in 2021, another royal decree merged the General Authority for Zakat and Tax with the General Authority of Customs.⁶² Mainly, this reconfiguration aimed to better equip the authority to more efficiently collect zakat dues, customs, and taxes to better manage and allocate this stream of the state’s non-oil revenues. Zakat is the main source of welfare assistance for less wealthy Saudis, an essential measure for sociopolitical stability whose pool of beneficiaries is being tightened.

While the Saudi state was already regulating zakat and awqaf, it has been struggling to regulate another source of Islamic spending, namely private charities.

The Saudi state is also seeking to better use the country’s untapped $14.4 billion in awqaf (Islamic endowments, such as financial or property assets, which in Saudi Arabia can be public or private).⁶³ Overseeing awqaf was an integral duty of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs for decades until a 2016 royal decree further curtailed the ministry’s responsibility for managing awqaf by establishing the General Authority for Awqaf. The ministry is still represented on the board of directors, but the new body is now directly linked to the king himself.⁶⁴ The new regulation also allowed, for the first time, awqaf investments that used to be religiously debatable under the supervision of the new body.⁶⁵ These changes embody the same logic of seeking to ensure that all financial assets in the country are managed efficiently and profitably, whether the funds are religious or not.

While the Saudi state was already regulating zakat and awqaf, it has been struggling to regulate another source of Islamic spending, namely private charities. Since 2001, charitable donations for Islamic causes inside and outside the kingdom have formed the main basis for international accusations of Saudi support for terrorism. The kingdom has adopted successive laws to regulate such donations, with a special focus on money that leaves the country to support Islamic communities overseas. Despite international recognition of progress, Saudi efforts that only have focused on regulating financial flows have not always been deemed a success.⁶⁶

In 2015, the kingdom adopted its first regulation on establishing domestic nongovernmental organizations followed by a political push for such a measure by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development. In addition to collecting donations for specific causes, the abundance of Saudi charitable contributions allows Islamic organizations to engage in dawa and religious education inside and outside the country, with curriculum that sometimes evades state supervision. The 2015 regulation also allows “non-charitable civic organizations,” further encouraging the expansion of civic activism beyond financial donations and beyond the religious realm.⁶⁷

Since then, several religious organizations have been shut down following inspections by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Development and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The latter accused them of embezzling zakat and donations from citizens, and the former refused to permit the establishment of redundant Islamic organizations.⁶⁸ The same year, the King Salman Center for Humanitarian Relief, directly affiliated with the royal court, became the sole institution allowed to collect donations and later recruit volunteers for overseas Saudi humanitarian ventures that go beyond the Islamic world.⁶⁹

As expected, some of the closed nongovernmental organizations were also accused of funding the Muslim Brotherhood and terrorist organizations, a pointed reminder that the Saudi state’s efforts are also politically driven by a desire to more tightly control civil society, including religious groups.⁷⁰ In addition to the regulation of donations, official state discourse guards against the idea that any spending for a religious cause is a good deed. Officials repeatedly remind citizens to give donations only to trusted state-registered organizations. The minister of Islamic affairs himself has criticized lavish spending on renovating mosques and building new ones where they are not needed.⁷¹ Private financial contributions to traditional rallying causes, such as support for Palestine and Muslim communities in non-Muslim countries, have landed their collectors in jail.⁷²

The Ministry of Education: Fighting Political Islam and Redefining Saudi Identity

The Saudi leadership’s changes to the country’s religious establishment have been more explicit and confrontational with respect to the Ministry of Education and the education system. This is especially true on religious issues (in ways that overlap with the duties of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs). High officials do not claim to be tinkering with minor matters here but rather are launching fundamental reforms in the name of modernizing the country, governing more efficiently, and better preparing students for the labor market.⁷³ Such reforms are encroaching on the established and mandatory centrality of religion classes, Wahhabism, and religious teachers at all levels of the country’s education system.⁷⁴

But even here, the changes afoot are presented not as a repudiation of the past but as a return to it: a way to remove alien influence, not the authentic Saudi understanding of Islam. But the expected magnitude of this shift may be far broader over time than the official rhetoric suggests. It remains unclear how far Saudi authorities want to go and will be able to go, or whether they realize the full-scale impact these changes could have as the effects trickle down.

The rhetoric is clear: the Ministry of Education has sought to root out any Muslim Brotherhood members or intellectual influence among Saudi teachers.

The rhetoric is clear: the Ministry of Education has sought to root out any Muslim Brotherhood members or intellectual influence among Saudi teachers.⁷⁵ In pursuing its reform agenda, the Saudi state defines Muslim Brotherhood influence as the source of radical religious interpretations in formal curricula and classroom instruction. This dynamic even has affected what is covered (and omitted) on nonreligion subjects. While some subjects such as philosophy, the arts, and women’s studies used to be prohibited altogether, the state still exerts great influence over how they are covered even now that they are permitted. Foreign reports and scholarship have defined such religious influence over education as Wahhabi,⁷⁶ but this is not how the Saudi authorities represent matters. By the Saudi state’s reckoning, the fight against extremism, so-called deviance, and terrorism is equated with the fight against the Muslim Brotherhood, making disobedience to the rulers and the prospect of a revolution a totally foreign idea to Saudi Arabia and the ostensibly correct form of Islam its leaders uphold.⁷⁷

Along with the shift in religious instruction is a heightened emphasis on national, and not merely Islamic, identity. Or, more accurately, there is an insistence that Saudi Arabia has to be understood as a nation rather than identified with Wahhabism. History is being rewritten in schoolbooks and reconstructed by way of cultural projects to minimize the presence and role of the founder of Wahhabism.⁷⁸ The history of the state is henceforth meant to be the history of the military conquests and Ottoman-style state formation led by the man who gave the country his family’s name, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud.

In an April 2018 interview with the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, Mohammed bin Salman initially baffled his interlocutor by suggesting there was no such thing as Wahhabism. He was not so much denying the reality of the historical figure behind the movement; rather, he was suggesting that Saudi Arabia’s past—and especially its future—should be understood in more national and religiously pluralistic terms. To that end, he said:

But our project is based on the people, on economic interests, and not on expansionist ideological interests. Of course we have things in common. All of us are Muslim, all of us speak Arabic, we all have the same culture and the same interest. When people speak of Wahhabism, they don’t know exactly what they are talking about. Abd al-Wahhab’s family, the al-Sheikh family, is today very well known, but there are tens of thousands of important families in Saudi Arabia today. And you will find a Shiite in the cabinet, you will find Shiites in government, the most important university in Saudi Arabia is headed by a Shiite. So we believe that we are a mix of Muslim schools and sects.⁷⁹

When this new image of Saudi Arabia operates in the education sector, the leadership’s shift is not just rhetorical: teachers viewed as radical are being removed from classrooms.⁸⁰ Whereas there has been only quiet winnowing of dissident voices among judges, the Ministry of Education has been quite explicit about targeting teachers who belong to suspect groups.⁸¹ But given that the Muslim Brotherhood never has had legal status or an acknowledged organizational presence within Saudi society, eliminating Brotherhood influence is not a simple matter of purging official members, since there are none. Individuals seen as informally inclined to be sympathetic to the Brotherhood have lost their jobs, but the Brotherhood is targeted as an intellectual approach that blends Islam with politics as much as it is targeted as an actual organization.

In this sense, the Brotherhood is a broad, amorphous target. It is often seen as having entered Saudi Arabia through waves of emigrants from Egypt and other Arab countries and then through local recruiting, especially in intellectual, religious, and educational circles. The result has been hybrid approaches that blend Brotherhood activism, social engagement, and a sense of political mission with Wahhabi and other Salafist juristic strains, helping to produce a major stream within the sahwa, a wave of religious revivalism and activism that began in the late twentieth century.⁸² Thus, when the Saudi state aims at the Brotherhood, it might target a few members of a clandestine organization while also engaging in a broader attack on the sahwa, in effect trying to turn back the clock to a dimly remembered (and perhaps misremembered), more pluralist past before 1979. Official efforts to stamp out Brotherhood influence seem to swing between these two poles.⁸³

The Saudi state’s approach has evolved over time. In 2015, the Ministry of Education removed books rather than teachers, eliminating writers deemed pro-Brotherhood from curricula and school libraries. It then moved against some teachers in 2018 after both the crown prince and the minister of education publicly denounced the penetration of Brotherhood ideology into the Saudi education system.⁸⁴ The Ministry of Education then announced that a committee would be tasked with suspending schoolteachers, university professors, and education officials; banning books; and modifying curricula that exhibited or promoted extremist thinking including that of the Muslim Brotherhood.⁸⁵

These actions eventually became more bluntly securitized measures like a signed memorandum of understanding with the relatively new, yet powerful Presidency of State Security to promote “intellectual security in education” by targeting extremism and promoting “positive values that reflect the image of the society.”⁸⁶ And in the past few years, the ministry has worked more broadly to relegate teachers suspected of harboring unwelcome views to administrative duty while they are investigated, a policy explicitly aimed at rooting out those responsible for “intellectual breaches.”⁸⁷

Actions taken against political Islam in Saudi Arabia’s education system have also targeted hotbeds with links to the religious establishment in the country’s Islamic universities.

Actions taken against political Islam in Saudi Arabia’s education system have also targeted hotbeds with links to the religious establishment in the country’s Islamic universities. In 2019, the king appointed a new director to the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University in Riyadh who, for the first time, did not belong to the religious establishment.⁸⁸ The dean of the Faculty of Sharia at the same university was sacked for allegedly inviting a scholar suspected of being a Brotherhood proponent to the university.⁸⁹ The politically motivated arrests of religious public figures who are accused of extremism have extended to both current and former university professors who teach religion.⁹⁰

The state’s official discourse on uprooting the Brotherhood’s influence in the Saudi education system serves to squash Islamist political activism inside the kingdom and crush any opposition from those seen as Wahhabi-professing radical teachers to the crown prince’s agenda of social liberalization, while continuing to avoid any need to directly invalidate Wahhabi doctrine itself.⁹¹

These education reforms are designed to go beyond schoolbooks and teachers. The proposed new system to hire and promote teachers and university professors emphasizes pedagogical skills and not just subject-matter credentials. Some restrictions on female students’ dress code have also been lifted.⁹² The announced integration of other subjects such as art, music, philosophy, and critical thinking into schools—and the decision to grant women access to new specialized postsecondary degrees in disciplines like architecture, political science, women’s studies, petroleum engineering, and law—de facto contradict Wahhabi doctrine and the views of its followers inside the Ministry of Education.⁹³

There is no expectation, however, that the substance of these curriculum changes will include the same intellectually stimulating debates offered in the democracies of the West or elsewhere in the Middle East. Even the teaching of Vision 2030’s pillars and expectations to Saudi citizens is still mostly done using the traditional method of rote memorization. Nonetheless, the integration of these new subjects without, for example, trying to give them a more acceptable Islamic label is in itself a challenge to the way these subjects were previously prohibited.

Meanwhile, a restructuring of the academic and financial governance of Saudi universities to make them less reliant on the state has simultaneously allowed for the opening of foreign universities in the kingdom—with the Ministry of Education still playing a guiding role.⁹⁴ It is not clear whether those universities would offer the religious education provided in national universities.

Cultural and entertainment programs hardly repudiate religion, but they have begun to emphasize artistic expression from a national, rather than religious, standpoint.

Modifying Saudi school curricula is also connected to other state policies that effectively (if not explicitly) emphasize non-Islamic components of Saudi national identity and history over Islamic ones.⁹⁵ Cultural and entertainment programs hardly repudiate religion, but they have begun to emphasize artistic expression from a national, rather than religious, standpoint. This emphasis on nationalism started under Abdullah, but the ascension of Salman to the throne led to a more aggressive push in this direction.⁹⁶ Boosting Saudi citizens’ sense of belonging and patriotism has become the subject of new textbooks, conferences, and other academic events geared toward reconfiguring Saudi identity.

In 2017, the Ministry of Education established the Center for Intellectual Awareness to promote this kind of nationalist education that reflects the “requirements of national development” and “the twenty-first century” and fights extremism both inside the ministry and in the country’s schools and universities.⁹⁷ Starting in March 2021, groups of bureaucrats known as intellectual awareness units “in all education departments and universities” are being tasked with enhancing “the values of citizenship and moderation and standing up to all forms of extremism.”⁹⁸

Reports also suggest that the Ministry of Education is scaling back the religious focus of academic curricula and schools.⁹⁹ The clear political purpose is to remind Saudis that the legitimacy of the Al Saud family does not only depend on the family’s religious credentials, especially when the religious establishment is being tamed. Education reforms are also advancing the current leadership’s credentials internationally.

Like financial flows, religious education in the kingdom continues to be a source of international accusations aimed at Riyadh for supporting terrorism, despite the changes instituted over the last two decades.¹⁰⁰ And some religious schoolbooks, academic lectures, and even master’s theses and PhD dissertations still hold religious doctrinal interpretations that resist the royal family’s preferred changes with respect to the rights of women or tolerance toward members of other faiths. The general trend is that traditional interpretations of the Wahhabi creed still retain primacy over all others, and many still equate opposition to the kingdom with opposition to Islam.

The Muslim World League: Rebranding Saudi Islamic Influence Overseas

The proselytizing duty of dawa in Wahhabi doctrine expands beyond the borders of Saudi Arabia. The political manipulation of this Wahhabi duty to expand the faith so as to garner international support and influence for the Saudi regime drew heavy international scrutiny after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. The Muslim World League was at the apex of Saudi state structures for transnational proselytism until its role was curtailed.

Like the taming of the Committee to Promote Virtue and Prevent Vice, the subversion of the Muslim World League and its transformation to advocate for “tolerance” and “centrism” has been crucial to lending credence to the Saudi political leadership’s narrative on religious reform in the eyes of the religious community, often beyond what has been achieved on the ground. Such international credibility is core to the new leadership’s national project of modernizing Saudi Arabia in ways that would draw international support for the country’s leadership.

The Muslim World League is now overshadowing the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in terms of the visibility of its overseas activities.

The Muslim World League is now overshadowing the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in terms of the visibility of its overseas activities. While the ministry still seems to be tasked with sustaining the kingdom’s transnational influence, the league is responsible for revamping the international image of this influence. (That said, the league’s leadership tends to stress its international, and not only Saudi, identity.) The ministry and the league are distinct entities but clearly have been linked in the past, sometimes informally but also because the league’s activities at times have received ministry funding.¹⁰¹

Saudi Arabia is indeed restructuring its involvement in the affairs of the umma (the collective global community of Muslims), under the guidance of the crown prince, and is using the league to reach out to what Wahhabi adherents consider their infidel enemies guided by the practices of the crown prince. For instance, Mohammed bin Salman has so far met twice with delegations of evangelical Christians, while delegations of major American Jewish organizations have visited the kingdom.¹⁰²

Since 2017, al-Issa, appointed one year earlier as the Muslim World League’s influential secretary general, has adopted the crown prince’s “shock therapy” approach.¹⁰³ He previously had already been pushing Abdullah’s reform agenda from inside the Ministry of Justice. After initially dismissing al-Issa, Salman’s royal court brought him back to pursue that same reform agenda, only now at a more aggressive pace, across state institutions and in Saudi Arabia’s international diplomatic outreach. His appointment as a member of the Council for Senior Scholars and his subsequent appointment as adviser to the royal court have amplified his influence. He certainly has emerged as an active international advocate for the country’s current official approach to religious issues—and even support for interfaith work.

The revamped Muslim World League is hosting major events aimed at public engagement with non-Wahhabis (including non-Muslims) as it publicizes its new brand of ostensibly moderate Saudi Islam. That is why al-Issa has made statements delegitimizing all use of violence in the name of Islam “including inside Israel” and has sought to unseat Wahhabism as the exclusive, acceptable form of Saudi Islam and the only authoritative basis for universal fatwas.¹⁰⁴ Notably, the crown prince surprised domestic and international audiences by stating in an April 27, 2021, interview that ibn Abd al-Wahhab would be “the first to object” if he “found us committed blindly to his texts and closing our minds to interpretation and jurisprudence while deifying and sanctifying him.”¹⁰⁵ The Council for Senior Scholars issued a statement the next day endorsing the crown prince’s statement.¹⁰⁶ Meanwhile, al-Issa has joined panels with rabbis in the United States and Europe, has visited the pope in the Vatican, and has signed a memorandum of understanding to establish a permanent bilateral committee with the Catholic Church.¹⁰⁷ In early 2020, al-Issa even made a “historic visit” to the Auschwitz holocaust memorial.¹⁰⁸

The league’s public activities inside the kingdom remained limited until 2020 when al-Issa’s appearances on Saudi television channels increased, especially his televised program during the high season of the holy month of Ramadan.¹⁰⁹ Even so, he was already playing an important role behind the scenes on domestic religious reforms due to his personal history and proximity to the Saudi leadership. The airing of his progressive views to a Saudi audience fits with the Saudi monarchy’s practice of creating parallel institutions, religious interpretations, and (in this case) religious leaders to compete with and eventually replace the old ones, without explicitly discrediting their predecessors.

More Wala and Less Bara: The Purpose of the Restructuring

The Saudi leadership’s rhetoric on its reform agenda can be very sweeping and quite general. It focuses on modernizing the country; reversing some post-1979 constraints; and developing a society that is more prosperous, advanced, educated, and tolerant. But if the rhetoric is broad, the reform efforts themselves are anything but vague. They encompass a systematic restructuring of the role of religion in Saudi politics and society. While this goal did not begin with Mohammed bin Salman, this pursuit has become more forceful and audacious since he became crown prince. The idea of al-wala wa-l-bara (which could be translated as loyalty and repudiation)—with its emphasis on drawing near to the forces of good and repelling the forces of evil—has permeated Wahhabi Islam. The country’s top leadership now seems to be tangibly and intangibly promoting the loyalty side of the equation over the repudiation side of the ledger, at the expense of limiting itself to Wahhabism only.

But if the rhetoric is broad, the reform efforts themselves are anything but vague. They encompass a systematic restructuring of the role of religion in Saudi politics and society.

In tangible terms, the program seems aimed at nothing less than the restructuring of the Saudi state.¹¹⁰ The country’s sprawling state apparatus has long been famous for being decentralized, being populated with fiefdoms and power centers—some under leading (and sometimes rival) members of the royal family—and being loosely coordinated by a monarch who is sometimes aloof. Yet the state is now being reshaped to be far more responsive to the direction (and sometimes even micromanagement) of the king.¹¹¹ Or rather, at present, it is the presumed future king, Mohammed bin Salman, who is increasingly reining in older structures and creating new ones under the much more direct control of the palace.

Intangibly, there is an unmistakable shift in how the Saudi leadership promotes Saudi identity. Religion in general, activities associated with religion (most notably the hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which is a religious duty for all able Muslims, but also many Saudi religious activities abroad), and the Wahhabi approach to understanding Islam are not by any means being repudiated. But marked efforts are being made to promote a distinctly national (not primarily religious) Saudi identity under the Al Saud family. A nationwide Saudi Character Enrichment Program was established for this purpose and is chaired by Prince Khalid bin Salman, the Saudi deputy minister of defense and a close collaborator of his brother, the crown prince.¹¹²

The Shura Council repeatedly discussed draft laws on national unity and anti-discrimination that are not based on Wahhabi doctrine and that were actually rejected by the Islamic and Judicial Committee and by the council’s most conservative members.¹¹³ The emphasis on the year 1979 implies that Saudi Arabia’s natural or historic identity is not well represented by the wave of religiosity that was supposedly launched that year. This emphasis, then, seeks to convey that the country’s shift in direction is not so much a new venture but a return to a more authentic past, a return simultaneously poised to embrace modernity and globalization.

There are, to be sure, tangible and institutional expressions of this new national identity—such as the construction of the freestanding Ministry of Culture or the assertion of a brasher brand of regional foreign policy that appears to discard an older tendency toward circumspection and consensus building. What is notable about these steps is the way that they neither repudiate religion nor try to recast it—they simply sidestep Islamic considerations, themes, and vocabulary in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade or more ago.

What is notable about these steps is the way that they neither repudiate religion nor try to recast it—they simply sidestep Islamic considerations, themes, and vocabulary in a way that would have been unimaginable a decade or more ago.

But while recast, this revamped Saudi identity is not genuinely pluralistic, at least in the religious sphere. Consider two religious groups that have posed challenges for the Saudi leadership in the past: the sahwa and Shia Muslims. The Saudi king’s newfound downgrading of the significance of religion does not make much room for either.

Though the sahwa is a loosely structured movement orbiting around specific figures, it still has found a foothold within some state institutions—certainly some universities—and there are also official suspicions that other parts of the country’s education system have been sahwa-friendly terrain.¹¹⁴ Its leading members have certainly felt the full brunt of repression, with Saudi cleric Salman al-Awda charged with a capital crime and other prominent sahwa figures imprisoned (like Safar al-Hawali) or pressured to recant or endorse regime policies (like Aidh al-Qarni and Muhammad al-Arifi).¹¹⁵

Furthermore, there have been reports that the purges of sahwa supporters have gone quite deep.¹¹⁶ The sahwa always has been fairly broad. Some figures have had a more traditional and even rigidly Wahhabi bent, and others (most notably al-Awda) have evolved considerably toward more inclusive attitudes. That being the case, and with the state’s crackdown even occasionally extending to figures calling for liberalizing reforms (like Abdullah al-Hamid, an advocate for a constitutional monarchy who died in prison in 2020), it seems that it is not so much sahwa ideas that provoke official suspicion as it is the movement’s independence and legacy of popular resonance.

The same trend is observable in the Saudi state’s treatment of Shia Muslims, who have always been in an anomalous position in the country. The Wahhabi attitude toward Shia believers historically has been divided between those who view them as mistaken and those who view them as apostates, but state policy has never gone to such extremes.¹¹⁷ Areas where Shia Muslims are prevalent complain with reason that they have been overlooked and discriminated against in the allocation of infrastructural development and social services. But Shia believers do have their own courts for personal status matters, with a promise to further develop and expand them, allowing a measure of religious pluralism in practice.¹¹⁸

The trend in the past few years seems to have been to leave matters unchanged on Shia Islam, especially when it comes to institutions and structures. To be sure, there have been some shifts in tone (such as the crown prince’s boast to Goldberg quoted above about Shia figures in leadership positions), but hardly any overtly more friendly policies toward adherents of the Shia faith have materialized.

In short, Saudi Shia believers may now officially be regarded less as a religious challenge than a security concern. The continuation of personal status courts and other communal structures—but the absence of Shia figures from the Council of Senior Scholars and many other general state bodies concerned with religion—is unchanged, but any activism on political or social issues still draws a harsh response indeed. Bearing this in mind, it was likely political, rather than doctrinal concerns, that led the regime to execute the prominent Shia religious figure Nimr Baqir al-Nimr in 2016.¹¹⁹

Over the short term, then, the effects of the Saudi state’s new approach are profound and potentially radical, even though they do not entail upending institutions, genuinely embracing pluralism, or repudiating Wahhabi doctrine but rather focus on containing, bypassing, or rearranging established ideas and institutions. The long-term effects of these changes are harder to discern, however, in part because of how they combine far-reaching measures with the apparent maintenance of the broad outlines of existing arrangements and doctrines.

Measuring the Success and Effects of Saudi Reforms

The short-term effects of the Saudi state’s extensive if bounded reform program are difficult to contest—quite literally. Those who might be expected to be the most conspicuous losers, the country’s religious leaders, are not in a position to lead any opposition movement. First, on doctrinal grounds, they are so deeply invested in a view of the Saudi ruler (and sometimes implicitly the state)¹²⁰ as the wali al-amr (the ruler or leader of a community) that they are constrained from doing much.

Those who might be expected to be the most conspicuous losers, the country’s religious leaders, are not in a position to lead any opposition movement.

Probably the most they can do is offer advice (a course followed in the 1990s in public form but one that seems too risky to apply today).¹²¹ It would be theoretically possible for marginalized religious figures to reject the religious credentials of the Saudi regime, but to do so would be a radical step. Some radicals indeed took this step in the 1990s and early 2000s, going beyond the advice offered by their tamer colleagues and engaging in strident opposition—with far-reaching results that today’s high-level clerics are likely to regard as painful memories.

And indeed, these religious clerics’ high-level status is precisely the issue. Like the Ottoman religious establishment in the empire’s waning years, Saudi religious leaders are so deeply ensconced in powerful and well-funded state structures that they generally fall in line when the state draws a clear line to follow. And there are multiple signs that is precisely what is occurring now. The decision to allow women to drive was endorsed by a majority of the Council of Senior Scholars as soon as it was announced—a position that most members likely would have opposed had Saudi rulers not so clearly supported it. The career of al-Issa, a figure with thorough training and a sterling pedigree in the Saudi religious establishment, shows how a religious scholar can get along by going along. He has attained a variety of positions in which he has made personnel changes and advanced public positions in a manner that thoroughly advances the Saudi leadership’s objectives.

On only a few points has there been public conflict, and most of the time—on issues such as permitting certain entertainment events or allowing women to drive—the religious establishment has accepted clear leadership decisions. But if there is no significant overt resistance from the leaders of the religious establishment—and indeed, because of the technical, incremental nature of the Saudi state’s efforts, there have only been a few such instances—there are two large sets of questions about the long-term impact of the kingdom’s reform program.

First, because these reforms are based on seemingly procedural changes and involve no doctrinal changes, most of them are reversible. The Committee for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice, for instance, could be called back to play a more forceful institutional role. The nonpluralistic elements of Wahhabism could similarly be restored. Because the changes involve matters of emphasis and chains of command, they might be much easier to rearrange again. The lack of open confrontation means that nobody has been defeated. And actually, the increased centralization will make such a reversal easier to pull off (though hardly likely). The changes cumulatively look significant indeed, but it might take a generation of gradual personnel changes before they seem fully secure.

The lack of open confrontation means that nobody has been defeated. And actually, the increased centralization will make such a reversal easier to pull off (though hardly likely).

But second, if the changes are indeed sustained—as now seems more likely—they may have unintended effects, both internationally and domestically. Internationally, the new direction may cost the kingdom some soft power in the Islamic world. And as Saudi international religious activities continue doctrinally unchanged but are being made to accommodate a set of policies and a worldview that are explicitly political rather than religiously motivated, Saudi religious activism overseas might seem either hypocritical or vacuous.

Domestically, there may be similarly alienating effects. Even those who profit from the new atmosphere of openness—artists or those interested in popular culture or entertainment from foreign countries—might come to see the regime as prioritizing attempts to impress Western audiences rather than satisfy local demands. Cultural expression might be more open, but those taking advantage of that openness might encounter sharp political limits. Religious figures may come to see official religious doctrine as emptied of all content, perhaps leading not so much to high-level opposition as low-level alienation. Parts of Saudi society that staffed the religious establishment might find other ways to pursue their pious inclinations.

Overall, cultural and socioeconomic liberalization with incomplete doctrinal change or without political liberalization may be an uneasy mix, creating constituencies that cannot be controlled and generating fears that the Saudi state is courting the West rather than meeting the organic demands of domestic constituencies. Managing expectations of conflicting groups may eventually require the kinds of subtle political management of social groups that has not been the hallmark of the current leadership’s approach.

Taking Notice Without Taking Sides

Saudi Arabia is a significant and increasingly active regional and global actor in terms of economics, politics, and security. For those who work with, depend on, or encounter the kingdom—whether its political leadership or its religious establishment—are these changes good news or bad?

That is an understandable question, but it may not be a helpful one. The changes afoot are potentially quite significant. Yet recent moves are not merely based on individual whims but are related to long-term changes in Saudi Arabia’s politics, society, royal family, regional and international security environment, and long-term economic outlook. The question may not be whether to root for these reforms or resist them but to understand and be prepared to react to them since their ultimate shape and direction are still unclear.

The question may not be whether to root for these reforms or resist them but to understand and be prepared to react to them since their ultimate shape and direction are still unclear.

Two underappreciated aspects of the changes stand out. First, social liberalization and political liberalization do not go hand in hand. Up until now, just the opposite has occurred. Political control is growing more centralized not only in terms of the wider state apparatus but also within the royal family. It is not just a matter of an audacious and ambitious crown prince making bold moves, but a remarkable restructuring of governance as well as social and political life.

Second, while the changes are potentially far-reaching, their ultimate direction is uncertain. Most are individually minor (and few are wholly unprecedented), and they remain quite reversible. And while state structures and officials have accepted and even applauded the moves, some social resentment and resistance is still possible—and unintended consequences might still materialize. Many small, incremental steps do not amount to an integrated and coherent vision but instead an audacious leap that may bring unknown results—or may lead to an eventual retreat.

For those who deal with Saudi Arabia, it makes sense to spend less time trying to identify winners and losers or good and bad actors. Instead, other actors must be prepared to deal with the country in ways that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago and are difficult to anticipate fully today.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Peter Mandaville for comments on this paper, as well as Sultan Alamer, Abdullah Alaoudh, and Kamel Alkhatti for their feedback and review. Nesrine Mbarek, Gardner Fellow and research assistant in Carnegie’s Middle East Program, provided valuable research assistance.

About the Author

Yasmine Farouk is a visiting fellow in the Middle East Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Nathan J. Brown is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, a distinguished scholar, and author of six well-received books on Arab politics.

Notes

¹ “Full Transcript: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Interview With Saudi Journalist Abdullah Al-Mudaifer,” Arab News, April 28, 2021, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1850146/media.

² For a long time, scholarship on Saudi history was fairly thin, since the area did not seem rich in reliable historical sources. But that has emphatically changed over the last two decades, with a large body of work now available in English based on rich research and innovative analysis. See, for example, Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (London: Verso, 2009); Madawi Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Nabil Mouline, The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014); Stéphane LaCroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Steffen Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats: Oil and the State in Saudi Arabia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010); and Rosie Bsheer, Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2020).

³ Ghassan Salame, The Foundations of the Arab State (New York: Croom Helm, 1987).

⁴ Abdullah al-Gharsan, “The Minister of Islamic Affairs, in an Interview With ‘Riyadh’: 200 Tons of Dates Are King Salman’s Gift to Muslims in 24 Countries” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, May 15, 2020, https://www.alriyadh.com/1821250.

⁵ The nature of the Wahhabi movement often provokes strong reactions among those who analyze its history and doctrine. A set of scholarly approaches to religion in Saudi Arabia can be found in Bernard Haykel, Stéphane Lacroix, and Thomas Hegghammer (eds.), Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). A general history can be found in David Commins, Islam in Saudi Arabia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015).

⁶ Wahib Al-Wehaibi, “The Council of Senior Scholars Takes Note of the Contents of the Crown Prince’s Speech” (in Arabic), Al-Jazirah, April 30, 2021, https://www.al-jazirah.com/2021/20210430/ln8.htm.

⁷ “Saudi Arabia: Royal Orders to Reform the Council of Senior Scholars and the Shura Council”

(in Arabic), Al Arabiya, October 18, 2020, https://www.alarabiya.net/saudi-today/2020/10/18/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-.

⁸ Counselor Abdullah Al-Manea, (@be4after), “Before and After the Decision Allowing Women to Drive” (in Arabic), Twitter, March 31, 2019, https://twitter.com/be4after/status/1112429352354906112.

⁹ “Organization of the Council of Senior Scholars and a Regulation on the Functioning of the Council of Senior Scholars” (in Arabic), Nezams, https://nezams.com/%D8%AA%D9%86%D8%B8%D9%8A%D9%85-%D9%87%D9%8A%D8%A6%D8%A9-%D9%83%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1/.

¹⁰ “The King Reconfigures the Council of Senior Scholars From the Four Sunni Schools of Thought” (in Arabic), Al-Iqtisadiya, February 15, 2009, https://www.aleqt.com/2009/02/15/article_196270.html.

¹¹ Ihsan Al-Faqih, “What Does the Renewal of the ‘Council of Senior Scholars’ in Saudi Arabia Mean?” (in Arabic), Al-Quds Al-Arabi, October 22, 2020, https://www.alquds.co.uk/ماذا-يعني-تجديد-هيئة-كبار-العلماء-في-ا/.

¹² “Saudi Arabia Detains Mecca Grand Mosque Imam, Rights Group Says,” New Arab, September 17, 2018, https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2018/9/17/saudi-arabia-detains-mecca-grand-mosque-imam-rights-group; and

“‘Friends of Al-Sharif Al-Rajhi’ Forum Congratulates Sheikh Dr. Bandar Belaila on the Issuance of the Royal Order About His Appointment as a Member of the Council of Senior Scholars in a Ministerial Rank” (in Arabic), Al Hadath, October 19, 2020, https://al-hadth.com/?p=265840.

¹³ Abdullah Al-Dany, “Islamic Minister: Hijackers Presented Islam That Contradicts That of the Forebearers” (in Arabic), Okaz, August 7, 2019, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwj8l8v29NXvAhXhEFkFHYTOB4cQFjAAegQIBRAD&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.okaz.com.sa%2Farticle%2F1740794&usg=AOvVaw0xwRit1J73Ljeli66WHvzw; and Salim Ayduz and Caner Dagli, Oxford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Science, and Technology in Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Oxford_Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy_Sc/or-6BwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=al-salaf+al+salih+oxford+encyclopedia&pg=PA56&printsec=frontcover.

¹⁴ “New Saudi Islamic Affairs Minister Expert in Jurisprudence With Moderate Social Views,” Al Arabiya, June 3, 2018, https://english.alarabiya.net/features/2018/06/03/New-Saudi-Islamic-affairs-minister-expert-in-jurisprudence-with-moderate-social-views.

¹⁵ “# Thank you_ Minister of Islamic Affairs” (in Arabic), Twitter, https://twitter.com/hashtag/%D8%B4%D9%83%D8%B1%D8%A7_%D9%88%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B1_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%A4%D9%88%D9%86_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%87?src=hashtag_click;

and Monther al-Sheikh Mubarak (@monther72), Twitter, May 29, 2020, https://twitter.com/monther72/status/1266447841527988231.

¹⁶ Abdul Latif al-Sheikh (@Dr_Abdullatif_a), Twitter, August 14, 2020, https://twitter.com/Dr_Abdullatif_a/status/1294226855277592576?s=20; and

Al-Sheikh, Twitter, August 14, 2020, https://twitter.com/Dr_Abdullatif_a/status/1295398356685070336.

¹⁷ “Is There a Blacklist in the Ministry of Islamic Affairs?” (in Arabic), YouTube, posted by Belmokhtasar, September 14, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8rYPZTauPI&ab_channel=%D8%A8%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%AE%D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%B1.

¹⁸ Qahtan al-Aboush, “Saudi Arabia Is Investigating a Mosque Imam Who Used the Friday Sermon to Talk About His Murdered Brother” (in Arabic), Irm News, October 29, 2017, https://www.eremnews.com/entertainment/1046403.

¹⁹ “His Excellency the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Dr. Abdul Latif Al Sheikh, in an Exclusive Interview With Bassam Al-Dakhil” (in Arabic), YouTube, posted by MBC in a Week, August 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MLasxXpQx0&ab_channel=MBCinaWeek-%D9%81%D9%8A%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%A8%D9%88%D8%B9MBC; and

“With Advantages and Conditions, the Ministry of Islamic Affairs Announces an Initiative to Appoint 25,000 Imams and Muezzins” (in Arabic), Al-Ahsa News, January 2, 2020, https://www.hasanews.com/6616533.html.

²⁰ “His Excellency the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Dr. Abdul Latif Al Sheikh, in an Exclusive Interview With Bassam Al-Dakhil” (in Arabic); and

“Saudi Arabia: Friday Sermon Unification in Mosques in the Kingdom Ahead of Ramadan” (in Arabic), Arabian Business, May 22, 2016, https://arabic.arabianbusiness.com/society/culture-society/2016/may/22/413935; and “The Launch of the ‘Smart Mosques’ Project in Medina” (in Arabic), Okaz, November 13, 2018, https://www.okaz.com.sa/local/na/1685546.

²¹ Adel Al-Kalbani, “Entertainment Channels” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, August 16, 2020, https://www.alriyadh.com/1836876 .

²² Cole Bunzel, “Wahhabism, Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic State: ‘Abdullah ibn Jibrin and Turki al-Bin‘ali,” in Madawi al-Rasheed (ed.), Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 183–196.

²³ Fatima al-Oufi, “The Halting of the Activities of Advocates Abroad” (in Arabic), Makkah News, September 4, 2016, https://makkahnewspaper.com/article/189809.

²⁴ Ahmed Al-Rudhaiman, “The King Was Right: Saudi Arabia Has a Specificity” (in Arabic), Al Watan, July 19, 2019, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1016571.

²⁵ Nathan J. Brown, “Why Won’t Saudi Arabia Write Down Its Laws,” Foreign Policy, January 23, 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/23/why-wont-saudi-arabia-write-down-its-laws.

²⁶ Nathan J. Brown and Abdullah Alaoudh, “Full Court Press,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Diwan (blog), January 8, 2018, https://carnegie-mec.org/diwan/75155.

²⁷ “Minister of Justice: 85 Development Projects Are Under Implementation . . . and the Codification of Judicial Rulings Is a Settled Matter” (in Arabic), Saudi Press Agency, October 2019, https://www.spa.gov.sa/1911250.

²⁸ “Crown Prince Announces 4 New Laws to Reform Saudi Arabia’s Judicial Institutions,” Saudi Gazette, February 8, 2021, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/603353.

²⁹ Abd al-Hakim Shar, “Minister of Justice: the Judicial Code Will Be Issued Soon and Will Be Binding . . . Courts and Judges Must Implement It” (in Arabic), Sabq, February 3, 2020, https://sabq.org/LZqXxP; “Code of Judicial Precedents for Judgements of the Office of Administrative Grievances Available Electronically and on Paper” (in Arabic), Saudi Press Agency, April 11, 2020, https://www.spa.gov.sa/2072644; “Minister of Justice: 85 Development Projects Are Under Implementation . . . and the Codification of Judicial Rulings Is a Settled Matter” (in Arabic), Saudi Press Agency; and “Minister of Justice: The New Judicial Code Is Binding and Not Advisory” (in Arabic), Saudi Press Agency, April 2, 2020, https://www.spa.gov.sa/2030251.

³⁰ Asil Alja‘id, “The State of Saudi Law” (in Arabic), Al Watan, June 14, 2020, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1048440.

³¹ “Abolition of Death Penalty for Minors Covers Terror Convicts: HRC,” Saudi Gazette Report, April 29, 2020, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/592440; and “Saudi Arabia Informs Its Courts of the Cancellation of the Discretionary Flogging Penalty” (in Arabic), Asharq Al-Awsat, May 19, 2020, https://aawsat.com/home/article/2292576/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%8F%D8%A8%D9%84%D8%BA-%D9%85%D8%AD%D8%A7%D9%83%D9%85%D9%87%D8%A7-%D8%A8%D8%A5%D9%84%D8%BA%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%B9%D9%82%D9%88%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B9%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9.

³² “Saudi Law” (in Arabic), https://saudi.law/ar.

³³ “Electronic Transaction System” (in Arabic), Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers, March 3, 2007, https://laws.boe.gov.sa/BoeLaws/Laws/LawDetails/6f509360-2c39-4358-ae2a-a9a700f2ed16/2.

³⁴ “Al-Adl Al-Shura Council: Trained Judges on Contemporary Issues and Modern Judicial Developments” (in Arabic), Okaz, September 25, 2018, https://www.okaz.com.sa/local/na/1674041.

³⁵ Mubarak al-Akash, “Electronic Judicial Inspection Reduces Margins of Errors and Straightens the Workflow in Courts” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, July 29, 2018, https://www.alriyadh.com/1695533.

³⁶ “The Shura Council Holds Its Fifty-Second Regular Session for the Second Year of the Seventh Session” (in Arabic), Shura Council, September 25, 2018, https://www.shura.gov.sa/wps/wcm/connect/shuraarabic/internet/news/1501144004; and

Abdul Salam Al-Balawi, “Legislative Amendment in Favor of Appointing in the Judiciary Graduates of Law, Regulations, and Rights” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, January 1, 2020, https://www.alriyadh.com/1796543.

³⁷ Abdul Salam Muhammad Al-Balawi, “Shura Council Opens the Way for Law and Regulations Graduates to Judicial Positions” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, December 6, 2019, https://www.alriyadh.com/1791775.

³⁸ Souad El Yalla, “For These Reasons, the Shura Council Refused to Appoint a Woman as a Judge in Saudi Arabia” (in Arabic), Independent Arabia, June 19, 2020, https://www.independentarabia.com/node/128216/%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%B3%D8%A9/%D8%AA%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%B1/%D9%84%D9%87%D8%B0%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%A8-%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%B6-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%A3%D8%A9-%D9%82%D8%A7%D8%B6%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9.

³⁹ Fatimah Al-Debis, “Sources to Okaz: The Shura Council Rejects a Recommendation Calling for Non-Discrimination in Appointing Judges” (in Arabic), Okaz, February 19, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/news/na/2011153.

⁴⁰ “Despite the Bias of 58 Members, the Shura Council Drops Again the Recommendation to Appoint Female Judges” (in Arabic), Okaz, June 17, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/news/local/2028884; and Latifa Al-Zahrani, “Saudi Arabia Increases the Number of Women Practicing Law” (in Arabic), Sou‘oudiyat 2030, April 5, 2018, http://women2030.com/ar/node/254.

⁴¹ Ibrahim Al Hussein, “Public Prosecution: 53 Women Were Appointed to the Judiciary” (in Arabic), Al Arabiya, June 3, 2020, https://www.alarabiya.net/saudi-today/2020/06/03/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A8%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86-53-%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%A3%D8%A9-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D9%84%D9%83-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%B6%D8%A7%D8%A6%D9%8A;

and Diab Al-Shammari, “The Public Prosecution: The Penalty for ‘Harming’ Is Imprisonment for Up to One Year and a Fine of 50,000 Riyals, or Both” (in Arabic), Sabq, August, 14, 2020, https://sabq.org/3rFQ6f.

⁴² Maren Hanson, “The Influence of French Law on the Legal Development of Saudi Arabia,” Arab Law Quarterly 2, no. 3 (1987): 287.

⁴³ Areej Al-Juhani, “An Admirer to Okaz: Soon There Will Be an Alternative Prison Penalties Project” (in Arabic), Okaz, August 24, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/news/local/2038439.

⁴⁴ Author’s interview with an attorney familiar with the proceedings, Riyadh, October 2017.

⁴⁵ Brown and Alaoudh, “Full Court Press.”

⁴⁶ “Mohammad bin Abdulkarim Al-Issa Biography,” Muslim World League, August 31, 2016, https://themwl.org/en/SG2019.

⁴⁷ “A Draft Amendment to Article 18 of the Advocacy Law” (in Arabic), Al Watan, June 9, 2020, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1048022.

⁴⁸ “Training Programs Provided by the Judicial Training Center” (in Arabic), Saudi Bar Association, December 23, 2018, https://sba.gov.sa/%D8%A8%D8%B1%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%AC-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%82%D8%AF%D9%85%D8%A9-%D9%85%D9%86-%D9%85%D8%B1%D9%83%D8%B2-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%AF%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A8;

and “The Minister of Justice Inaugurates the Building of the Justice Training Center and Launches the Lawyer Diploma” (in Arabic), Okaz, August 3, 2017, https://www.okaz.com.sa/local/na/1562696.

⁴⁹ “A Draft Amendment to Article 18 of the Advocacy Law”;

Majid Mohammed Karoub, “Thank You, Mr. Minister” (in Arabic) Okaz, April 17, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/articles/authors/2019971; and

SAB Association (@SABAssociation), “The Saudi Bar Association Announces the Formation of Committees to Reformulate the Legal System” (in Arabic), Twitter, June 9, 2020, https://twitter.com/SABAssociation/status/1270326976973361152.

⁵⁰ Nathan J. Brown, “Saudi Arabia Is Moving to Rein in Its Religious Police. Sort of.” Washington Post Monkey Cage (blog), August 16, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/08/16/saudi-arabia-is-moving-to-rein-in-its-religious-police-sort-of.

⁵¹ “Regulation to Preserve Public Decency” (in Arabic), Bureau of Experts at the Council of Ministers, September 4, 2019, https://laws.boe.gov.sa/BoeLaws/Laws/LawDetails/3b96a591-47c8-4469-9abb-aa4700f1aa52/1.

⁵² Taylor Luck, “Art in the Forbidden Zone: Inside the Saudi Cultural Awakening,” Christian Science Monitor, May 27, 2020, https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2020/0527/Art-in-the-forbidden-zone-Inside-the-Saudi-cultural-awakening.

⁵³ Abdullah al-Rajhi, “Al-Sanad: Love for the Homeland Is Innate and One of the Greatest Bonds Approved by Sharia” (in Arabic), Sabq, December 10, 2019, https://api.sabq.org/Xj73m4; and

“National Affiliation and Cohesion” (in Arabic), Al-Wiam, March 31, 2019, https://www.alweeam.com.sa/582926/%D8%B9%D8%A8%D8%AF%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B1%D8%AD%D9%85%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%8A%D9%83%D8%AA%D8%A8-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AA%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D8%AD%D9%85.

⁵⁴ Nora Derbal, “Saudi Arabia, Humanitarian Aid and Knowledge Production: What Do We Really Know? #Muhum,” Allegra Lab, July 5, 2019, https://allegralaboratory.net/saudi-arabia-humanitarian-aid-and-knowledge-production-what-do-we-really-know-muhum-5/#:~:text=Nora%20Derbal%20is%20a%20Visiting,from%20Freie%20University%20in%20Berlin.

⁵⁵ Government of Saudi Arabia, “Vision 2030: An Ambitious Nation . . . Responsibly Enabled,” https://www.vision2030.gov.sa.

⁵⁶ “Transcript: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Full Interview on Vision 2030,” Alarabiya, April 27, 2021, https://english.alarabiya.net/News/gulf/2021/04/28/Transcript-Saudi-Crown-Prince-Mohammed-bin-Salman-s-full-interview-on-Vision-2030-.

⁵⁷ “Saudi Islamic Affairs Body Launches Endowment Investment Funds Project,” Arab News, June 11, 2018, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1319296/saudi-arabia.

⁵⁸ Abdullah Al-Dani, “Minister of Islamic Affairs: Beware of the ‘Brotherhood’ Exploiting Zakat . . . We Discovered 22 Fake Charitable Societies” (in Arabic), Okaz, April 28, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/news/local/2021701.

⁵⁹ “About the Authority” (in Arabic), General Authority of Zakat and Tax, https://gazt.gov.sa/ar/AboutUs/Pages/AboutGazt.aspx.

⁶⁰ “The Minister of Finance Inaugurates the Activities of the Zakat and Income Conference in Its First Session in Riyadh” (in Arabic), Ministry of Finance, November 13, 2019, https://www.mof.gov.sa/mediacenter/news/Pages/News_13112019.aspx;

“About Gazt,” General Authority of Zakat and Tax, https://gazt.gov.sa/en/AboutUs/Pages/AboutGazt.aspx;

“Members of the Sharia Committee,” General Authority of Zakat and Tax, https://gazt.gov.sa/en/AboutUs/ShariaMembers/Pages/default.aspx; and

Mohammed bin Abdullah al-Nafisa, “Zakat Authority: The National Economy Tributary” (in Arabic), August 2016, https://gazt.gov.sa/ar/MediaCenter/Magazine/Documents/Zakat_49.pdf.

⁶¹ “The Minister of Finance Inaugurates the Activities of the Zakat and Income Conference in Its First Session in Riyadh.”

⁶² “7 Goals to Merge the General Authority for Customs With That of Zakat and Income” (in Arabic), Al Watan, May 5, 2021, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1075345.

⁶³ “The General Authority of Endowments Receives Assets Worth 54 Billion Riyals” (in Arabic), Waqef, August 14, 2017, https://waqef.com.sa/livenews_show.php?show=64.

⁶⁴ The separation of the awqaf from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs started under King ‘Abd ‘Abdullah in 2010 then transferred to an independent entity under King Salman. See “The System of the General Authority for Awqaf,” (in Arabic), General Authority for Awqaf, September 20, 2018, https://www.awqaf.gov.sa/sites/default/files/2019-07/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87%D9%8A%D8%A6%D8%A9%2022_2.pdf; and “Overview” (in Arabic), General Authority for Awqaf, https://www.awqaf.gov.sa/ar/about-authority.

⁶⁵ “The Endowment Authority Establishes Its Investment Branch to Diversify Sources of Income” (in Arabic), Okaz, September 12, 2019, https://www.okaz.com.sa/citizen-voice/na/1746138;

Ahmed Hassan al-Naggar, “Waqf Investment Funds in GCC Countries: A Case Study on Saudi Arabia,” Islamic News, December 2019, https://kantakji.com/files/sZNOyEPP.pdf;

“The System of the General Authority for Awqaf” (in Arabic), General Authority for Awqaf, 2019, https://www.awqaf.gov.sa/sites/default/files/2019-07/%D9%86%D8%B8%D8%A7%D9%85%20%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%87%D9%8A%D8%A6%D8%A9%2022_2.pdf; and

Ali Mohieddin al-Qurra Daghi, “Investing in Endowments and Its Ancient and Modern Methods” (in Arabic), https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/58/58DC8FD9BA5DF0CF9CED11C747223C7B_%C6%92%C2%BD%C3%B3%C3%BA%CE%A9%C6%92%E2%8C%90%20%C6%92%CE%98%CF%86%CF%84%CF%83%20%CF%86%C3%9F%E2%8C%90%CF%84%E2%88%9E%20%C6%92%CE%98%CF%84%C2%BA%E2%88%A9%CE%A9%C3%AD%20%CF%86%C6%92%CE%98%C3%91%C2%BA%E2%88%A9%C3%BA%C3%AD.pdf.

⁶⁶ “Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Terrorist Financing Measures—Saudi Arabia, Fourth Round Mutual Evaluation Report,” FATF-MENAFATF, 2018, https://www.fatf-gafi.org/media/fatf/documents/reports/mer/MER-Saudi-Arabia-2018.pdf.

⁶⁷ Nora Derbal “Humanitarian and Relief Organizations in Global Saudi Da'wa? (working title),” in Wahhabism in the World. Understanding the Global Impact of Saudi Religious Influence, Peter Mandaville (ed.), Oxford University Press (forthcoming).

⁶⁸ “Al Watan Newspaper Number 7210,” Al Watan, July 22, 2020, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/uploads/pdf/2020/07/22/watanksa-20200722.pdf?1595502867.

⁶⁹ See the website of the King Salman Center for Humanitarian Relief. “Our Achievements,” King Salman Center for Humanitarian Relief, https://volunteer.ksrelief.org.

⁷⁰ “22 Fake Associations . . . Minister of Islamic Affairs: The Brotherhood Steals State Funds” (in Arabic), Alyaum, April 28, 2020, https://www.alyaum.com/articles/6252258/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%85%D9%84%D9%83%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%88%D9%85/22-%D8%AC%D9%85%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%88%D9%87%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%88%D8%B2%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D8%A4%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%85%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86-%D9%8A%D8%B3%D8%B1%D9%82%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A3%D9%85%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B2%D9%83%D8%A7%D8%A9.

⁷¹ Munther Al Sheikh Mubarak (@monther72), “When the Official Comes Close to Everything” (in Arabic), Twitter, May 29, 2020, https://twitter.com/search?q=%20الإسراف%20في%20سجاد%20المساجد&src=typed_query.

⁷² Author interview with a member of the Palestinian community, Riyadh, November 2019.

⁷³ Abdullah al-Gharsan, “On the Application of an Educational Job List in November” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, May 18, 2020, https://www.alriyadh.com/1821807.

⁷⁴ LaCroix, Awakening Islam.

⁷⁵ “Saudi Arabia Strives to Roll Back Muslim Brotherhood Influence in Education,” Arab Weekly, May 15, 2020, https://thearabweekly.com/saudi-arabia-strives-roll-back-muslim-brotherhood-influence-education.

⁷⁶ See, for instance, Kimberly Dozier, “Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration’s Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools,” Time, February 10, 2020, https://time.com/5780130/saudi-arabia-hate-speech-schools.

⁷⁷ See, for instance, “Controversy in Saudi Arabia Over Images Showing the Change of the ‘Ottoman Caliphate’ in New Curricula to the ‘Invading State’” (in Arabic), BBC, August 23, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/arabic/trending-49450355.

⁷⁸ Ziad Al-Fifi, “Saudi Curriculum: How It Was and How It Changed in 30 Years” (in Arabic), Independent Arabia, August 23, 2019, https://www.independentarabia.com/node/50666/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A3%D8%AE%D8%A8%D8%A7%D8%B1/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%B1%D8%A8%D9%8A/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%86%D8%A7%D9%87%D8%AC-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AF%D8%B1%D8%A7%D8%B3%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81-%D9%83%D8%A7%D9%86%D8%AA-%D9%88%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81-%D8%A3%D8%B5%D8%A8%D8%AD%D8%AA-%D8%AE%D9%84%D8%A7%D9%84-30-%D8%B3%D9%86%D8%A9.

⁷⁹ Jeffrey Goldberg, “Saudi Crown Prince: Iran’s Supreme Leader ‘Makes Hitler Look Good,’” Atlantic, April 2, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/04/mohammed-bin-salman-iran-israel/557036.

⁸⁰ Najah al-Otaibi, “Vision 2030: Religious Education Reform in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies, September 2020, https://kfcris.com/pdf/cc53a3201f65554c400886325b5f715e5f577d35934f7.pdf.

⁸¹ Khaled Abbas Tashkandi, “How Did the Saudi ‘Brotherhood’ Ideology Penetrate to Sabotage and Corrupt Education?” (in Arabic), Okaz, December 23, 2018, https://www.okaz.com.sa/investigation/na/1694313;

Rashid al-Sakran, “Al-Issa: The Brotherhood’s Penetration Into Education Is a Fact That Cannot Be Discussed” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, March 21, 2018, https://www.alriyadh.com/1670087; and

“Saudi Arabia Ends the Last Tools of the Brotherhood’s Influence in Education” (in Arabic), Al Arab, May 16, 2020, https://alarab.co.uk/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%86%D9%87%D9%8A-%D8%A2%D8%AE%D8%B1-%D8%A3%D8%AF%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AA-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%A3%D8%AB%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D8%AE%D9%88%D8%A7%D9%86%D9%8A-%D9%81%D9%8A-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%8A%D9%85.

⁸² LaCroix, Awakening Islam.

⁸³ “Saudi Clerics Detained in Apparent Bid to Silence Dissent,” Reuters, September 10, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-security-arrests/saudi-clerics-detained-in-apparent-bid-to-silence-dissent-idUSKCN1BL129.

⁸⁴ Norah O’Donnell, “Saudi Arabia’s Heir to the Throne Talks to 60 Minutes,” CBS News, March 19, 2018, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/saudi-crown-prince-talks-to-60-minutes;

al-Sakran, “Al-Issa: The Brotherhood’s Penetration Into Education Is a Fact That Cannot Be Discussed”; and “Saudi Arabia Ends the Last Tools of the Brotherhood’s Influence in Education.”

⁸⁵ Muhammad Al-Srei’i, “We Excluded the Muslim Brothers, and Our Decisions Are Far From ‘Malicious’” (in Arabic), Okaz, March 25, 2018, https://www.okaz.com.sa/local/na/1626618;

and al-Sakran, “Al-Issa: The Brotherhood’s Penetration Into Education Is a Fact that Cannot Be Discussed.”

⁸⁶ Neil Patrick, “Saudi Defense and Security Reform,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Sada (blog), May 31, 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/sada/76487; and

Hamad bin Mohammed al-Sheikh (@minister_moe_sa), “Memorandum of Cooperation in the Field of Intellectual Security in Education,” Twitter, January 2, 2020, https://twitter.com/minister_moe_sa/status/1212798618131980289.

⁸⁷ “Saudi Arabia Strives to Roll Back Muslim Brotherhood Influence in Education,” Arab Weekly, May 16, 2020, https://thearabweekly.com/saudi-arabia-strives-roll-back-muslim-brotherhood-influence-education.

⁸⁸ “Who Is ‘Ahmed al-Ameri’ Director of the New Imam University?” (in Arabic), Al-Marsad, 2019, https://al-marsd.com/%D9%85%D9%86-%D9%87%D9%88-%D8%A3%D8%AD%D9%85%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B1%D9%8A-%D9%85%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%B1-%D8%AC%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%A5%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%85-%D8%A7.

⁸⁹ “For This Reason, the Dean of the Faculty of Sharia at Al-Imam University Was Fired” (in Arabic), Okaz, February 19, 2020, https://www.okaz.com.sa/news/local/2011243; and

Aya Rada, “The Firing of Jameel al-Khalaf to Preserve the Honor of the Imam Mohamed Bin Saud University and the Appointment of Saleh Al-Wasil as Dean of the College of Sharia,” Sunnews, February 19, 2020, https://www.sunnewsnow.com/2020/02/%D8%A7%D8%B9%D9%81%D8%A7%D8%A1-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%8A%D9%84-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AE%D9%84%D9%81-%D8%A8%D8%B3%D8%A8%D8%A8-%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%86%D9%8A%D8%B3%D8%A7%D9%86.

⁹⁰ Prisoners of Conscience, (@m3takl), “The Arrest of Sheikh Dr. #Omar_al_Mokbel,” Twitter, September 10, 2019, https://twitter.com/m3takl/status/1171508529573662720?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1171508529573662720%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.watanserb.com%2F2019%2F09%2F10%2FD8AF-D8B9D985D8B1-D8A7D984D985D982D8A8D984-D8A3D8B3D8AAD8A7D8B0-D8A8D8ACD8A7D985D8B9D8A9-D8A7D984D982D8B5D98AD985-D8A7D8B9D8AAD982%2F;

Mohammed Ayesh, “Arabic Press Review: Saudi Arabia Arrests Clerics in New Crackdown,” Middle East Eye, September 4, 2020, https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/arabic-press-review-saudi-arabia-arrests-clerics; and

“Reports of the Arrest of Conservative Cleric Nasser al-Omar in Saudi Arabia” (in Arabic), BBC, August 12, 2018, https://www.bbc.com/arabic/middleeast-45161308.

⁹¹ Al-Otaibi, “Vision 2030.”

⁹² Al-Otaibi, “Vision 2030.”

⁹³ “PNU to Launch Master’s Program on Women’s Studies,” Saudi Gazette, August 30, 2020, https://saudigazette.com.sa/article/597306?utm_source=m.saudigazette.com.sa&utm_medium=long_story; “Nora University Transforms the Department of Systems Into a College of Law” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, August 12, 2020, https://www.alriyadh.com/1836287; and “For the First Time in Its History, King Fahd University of Petroleum Receives Female Students” (in Arabic), Al Watan, April 26, 2021, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1074581.

⁹⁴ “International Agreements” Ministry of Education, https://www.moe.gov.sa/en/knowledgecenter/DecisionsAndPartnerships/Pages/InternationalAgreements.aspx.

⁹⁵ Eman Alhussein, “New Saudi Textbooks Put Nation First,” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, October 17, 2019, https://agsiw.org/new-saudi-textbooks-put-nation-first; and

Doaa Sweidan, “The ‘New’ Saudi Arabia: ‘Light’ Wahhabism!” (in Arabic), Al-Akhbar, September 14, 2019, https://al-akhbar.com/Arab_Island/276309.

⁹⁶ Rosie Bsheer, “Archive Wars: The Politics of History in Saudi Arabia (Interview),” Jadaliyya, September 24, 2020, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/41757.

⁹⁷ An example of this kind of activity is a 2017 conference by Al-Imam University College of Fundamentals of Religion. See “Duty of Saudi Universities in Protecting Youth From Organizations and Parties, and Deviationism,” Al-Imam University College of Fundamentals of Religion, https://imamu.edu.sa/en/announcements/Pages/DSUPYD.aspx.

⁹⁸ “Saudi Arabia Confronts Extremism With Intellectual Awareness” (in Arabic), Asharq Alawsat, March 16, 2021, https://aawsat.com/home/article/2862201/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%AC%D9%87-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D8%B7%D8%B1%D9%81-%D8%A8%D9%80%C2%AB%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AA%D9%88%D8%B9%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%81%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%8A%D8%A9%C2%BB; and

Saudi Arabia, (@Alarabiya_KSA), “The Advisor to the President of Imam Mohamed Ibn Saud University” (in Arabic), Twitter, March 16, 2021, https://twitter.com/AlArabiya_KSA/status/1371936174000979975.

⁹⁹ “Saudi Arabia Abolishes the Subject of ‘Islamic Awareness’ in Schools” (in Arabic), Al Jazeera, July 15, 2018, https://www.aljazeera.net/news/arabic/2018/7/15/السعودية-تلغي-التوعية-الإسلامية-في; and al-Otaibi, “Vision 2030.”

¹⁰⁰ Dozier, “Saudi Arabia Rebuffs Trump Administration's Requests to Stop Teaching Hate Speech in Schools”; and al-Otaibi, “Vision 2030.”

¹⁰¹ On the Muslim World League’s position in the Saudi state, see Sarah Feuer, Course Correction: The Muslim World League, Saudi Arabia’s Export of Islam, and Opportunities for Washington (Washington: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2019), https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/852.

¹⁰² “US Christian Evangelical Delegation Meets Saudi Crown Prince,” Gulf News, September 11, 2019, https://gulfnews.com/world/gulf/saudi/us-christian-evangelical-delegation-meets-saudi-crown-prince-1.66353621; and

“In First, US Jewish Umbrella Group Sends Delegation to Saudi Arabia,” Times of Israel, February 13, 2020, https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-first-us-jewish-umbrella-group-sends-delegation-to-saudi-arabia.

¹⁰³ David Ignatius, “The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Is Giving His Country Shock Therapy,” Washington Post, February 27, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-crown-prince-of-saudi-arabia-is-giving-his-country-shock-therapy/2018/02/27/fd575e2e-1bf0-11e8-9de1-147dd2df3829_story.html.

¹⁰⁴ “Two Saudi Officials Visit a Synagogue in Paris” (in Arabic), Euronews, November 11, 2017, https://arabic.euronews.com/2017/11/23/two-top-saudi-officials-visit-paris-synagogue; and

“The Charter of Makkah,” Saudi Embassy, May 27–29, 2019, https://www.saudiembassy.net/sites/default/files/Charter%20of%20Makkah-%20Unofficial%20Translation.pdf.

¹⁰⁵ “Full Transcript: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Interview With Saudi Journalist Abdullah Al-Mudaifer.”

¹⁰⁶ “The General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Scholars: His Highness the Crown Prince’s Affirms That the Kingdom’s Constitution and Its Permanent Approach Are From God’s Book in the Foundations on Which the Kingdom Was Built” (in Arabic), Saudi Press Agency, April 29, 2021, https://www.spa.gov.sa/2223607.

¹⁰⁷ Osama Al-Jamaan, “A Cooperation Agreement Between the Muslim World League and the Vatican to Achieve Common Goals” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, April 22, 2018, https://www.alriyadh.com/1676637.

¹⁰⁸ “Islamic Leaders Make ‘Groundbreaking’ Visit to Auschwitz,” PBS, January 23, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/islamic-leaders-make-groundbreaking-visit-to-auschwitz.

¹⁰⁹ Iman Al Hussein, “Centrism as a State Project in the Arab Gulf States” (in Arabic), Thamanyah, August 24, 2020, https://thmanyah.com/8202.

¹¹⁰ Nathan J. Brown, “The Remaking of the Saudi State,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 9, 2017, https://carnegieendowment.org/2017/11/09/remaking-of-saudi-state-pub-74681.

¹¹¹ Hertog, Princes, Brokers, and Bureaucrats.

¹¹² Kristin Smith Diwan, “Max Weber in Arabia: Saudi’s Character Enrichment Program,” Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, May 12, 2020, https://agsiw.org/max-weber-in-arabia-saudis-character-enrichment-program.

¹¹³ Turki al-Sahil, “Shura Members on Dropping the National Unity Project: This Is Democracy” (in Arabic), Al Watan, June 25, 2015, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/265814;

“Why Did the Shura Council Reject the National Unity Project?” (in Arabic), Rotana, https://rotana.net/%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B0%D8%A7-%D8%B1%D9%81%D8%B6-%D9%85%D8%AC%D9%84%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B4%D9%88%D8%B1%D9%89-%D9%85%D8%B4%D8%B1%D9%88%D8%B9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%88%D8%AD%D8%AF%D8%A9-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%88/;

and Abdul Salam Muhammad Al-Balawi, “In the Corridors of the Shura Council . . . Legislation Aimed at the Fairness of Regulations and the Freedom of Opinion” (in Arabic), Al Riyadh, May 2, 2021, https://www.alriyadh.com/1883465.

¹¹⁴ Saeed al-Suraihi, “Al Sahwa and the Penetration of the Education System” (in Arabic), Al Watan, May 7, 2020, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1045362.

¹¹⁵ Raihan Ismail, “How Is MBS’s Consolidation of Power Affecting Saudi Clerics in the Opposition?” Washington Post, June 4, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/04/how-is-mohammads-consolidation-power-affecting-oppositional-saudi-clerics; and “The Preacher ‘Al-Arifi’ Breaks His Silence and Comments for the First Time on the Qatari Crisis” (in Arabic), Al-Marsd, 2017, https://al-marsd.com/%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%af%d8%a7%d8%b9%d9%8a%d8%a9-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%b9%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%81%d9%8a-%d9%8a%d8%ae%d8%b1%d8%ac-%d8%b9%d9%86-%d8%b5%d9%85%d8%aa%d9%87-%d9%88%d9%8a%d8%ba%d8%b1%d8%af-%d9%84%d8%a3.

¹¹⁶ Khaled al-Khalidi, “Two Years After the Oppression of the Saudi ‘Awakening Movement:’ The King Supported Them and His Son Crushed Them” (in Arabic), Al Araby, September 24, 2019, https://www.alaraby.co.uk/%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%85%D8%A7%D9%86-%D8%B9%D9%84%D9%89-%D9%82%D9%85%D8%B9-%22%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B5%D8%AD%D9%88%D8%A9%22-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B3%D8%B9%D9%88%D8%AF%D9%8A%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D9%84%D9%83-%D8%AF%D8%B9%D9%85%D9%87%D9%85-%D9%88%D8%A7%D8%A8%D9%86%D9%87-%D8%B3%D8%AD%D9%82%D9%87%D9%85.

¹¹⁷ “They Are Not Our Brothers: Hate Speech by Saudi Officials,” Human Rights Watch, 2017, https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/saudi0917_web.pdf.

¹¹⁸ Hassan Al-Mustafa, “Vision 2030 Creating an Inclusive Saudi Identity,” Arab News, May 3, 2021, https://www.arabnews.com/node/1853086.

¹¹⁹ “Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr: Saudi Arabia Executes Top Shia Cleric,” BBC, January 2, 2016, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35213244.

¹²⁰ Nathan J. Brown, “Who or What Is the Wali al-Amr: The Unposed Question,” Oñati Socio-Legal Series 10, no. 5 (2020), 985–1000, http://opo.iisj.net/index.php/osls/article/viewFile/1095/1269.

¹²¹ Ahmed Al-Radiman, “This Is My Answer, Algerian Brother” (in Arabic), Al Watan, August 27, 2020, https://www.alwatan.com.sa/article/1054482.

Yemen’s War-torn Rivalries for Religious Education

Introduction

In 2014, Yemen’s worsening socioeconomic, political, sectarian, and center-periphery tensions erupted into civil war. As the war expanded, religious education became an important tool for mobilization, socialization, and indoctrination among the warring Yemeni factions and their foreign backers.

A Zaydi movement supported by Iran, called Ansar Allah but better known as the Houthi movement, seized Sanaa in 2014. The next year, a Saudi-and-Emirati-dominated military coalition intervened against them, seeking out religious partners on the ground in Yemen such as Salafist groups and, for Saudi Arabia, the Muslim Brotherhood. These sectarian dynamics have increased the importance of religious allegiances into key drivers of the Yemeni conflict.

Notably, instrumentalization of religion in Yemen far predates this war, stretching back at least as far as the country’s Cold War–era division into north and south. In the late 1960s, the north fell broadly into the capitalist camp while the south’s government was communist. North Yemen’s struggle against communism saw the creation of a string of religious institutes and the politicization of religion, which peaked after the country’s 1990 unification. Then came the country’s 1994 civil war between the Socialist Party in the south and the Sanaa government in the north. Sanaa’s government used religious propaganda against the Socialist Party, issuing ifta (singular, fatwa, or a legal opinion on a point of Islamic law), declaring that supporters of the socialist government in the south were no longer Muslims.¹

But today, the growing use of religion in a political battle coincides with a broader sectarian escalation in the region. In this context, religious schools and institutes are playing an important role in political and military mobilization in Yemen, where sectarianism is a powerful driver of military recruitment.

Overlapping Sectarian and Regional Identities

When it comes to the sectarian division in Yemen, it is important to understand that the division is predominately along regional-tribal lines. Yemenis largely fall into two sectarian groups: Shafi’i Sunnis, who make up roughly two-thirds of the population, and Zaydi Shias, who make up the rest. This division predated the arrival of Islam itself in Yemen.

The sectarian division in Yemen is predominately along regional-tribal lines.

Zaydi Shias live, by and large, in what is known as upper Yemen: the region between Jabal Samara, which is around 165 kilometers (100 miles) south of Sanaa, and the Saudi border. This area includes the territories of the Hamdan tribe, which in turn is divided into the Hashed and Bakil groups. Sunnis of the Shafi’i school dominate the rest of Yemen, including the coastal areas and most of the center, east, and south of the country. Residents of these areas include members of a larger tribe, the Madhag, which has numerous branches—most notably the Murad in Ma’rib Governorate and the Awaliq in Shabwa Governorate. There is also the Kinda tribe in Hadhramaut Governorate, but tribalism is less prevalent in coastal and central areas, which are less isolated and have more fertile land.² These factors helped to stabilize the societies in the central, western, and some of the southern parts of the country, so they became less tribal and submitted more to the state. In contrast, the tribal structure remains relatively strong and dominating in the country’s east, in areas north of Sanaa, and in parts of the south.

Tribal and regional identities clearly overlap and have been at the core of struggles for political power in Yemen for decades. More recently, sectarian factors have become more pertinent, and religious education has played a growing role in political conflicts. This results both from interventions by foreign states in the region and from local actors’ growing and open use of religion as a mobilizing force. All this has given rise to new, unprecedented forms of religious education for military and political purposes.

Yemen’s Conflicts and Defining Identities

Development of Zaydism

It is important, therefore, to understand the history of regional conflicts in Yemen, which have had elements of sectarianism since the rise of Zaydism. Zaydism is an offshoot of Shia Islam. It was established by Imam al-Hadi Yahya bin al-Hussein in Yemen in 896 CE. Al-Hadi settled in Saada in Yemen’s northwest and established the first Zaydi state, a short-lived entity ending with his death in 911 CE. Despite its Shia roots, Zaydism does not differ markedly in doctrine from Sunni Islam. Some scholars view it as the fifth school of Sunni jurisprudence, and it is often seen as a crossover between Sunnism and Shiism.

Zaydism developed and survived in isolation, surrounded by Sunni-majority areas, without evolving its own doctrinal personality independent of Sunni schools.

Zaydism developed and survived in isolation, surrounded by Sunni-majority areas, without evolving its own doctrinal personality independent of Sunni schools. Fundamentally, the most distinctive feature of Zaydi thought is its view of government. Similar to other sects of Shiism, Zaydis see the political ruler as an imam, a religious term meaning the leader of prayer, and add the condition that this imam must be Ahl al-Bayt or Hashemite (terms designating lineage from the family of the Prophet Muhammad). Different, however, is that Zaydism sees battle as a legitimate route to power and is the only school of Islamic thought that rules in favor of waging war against an unjust ruler.

This Zaydi militancy has meshed with the tribal nature of northern Yemen, especially given the paucity of the region’s natural resources compared with other areas of Yemen. For example, the tribal regions of northern Yemen receive less than 250 millimeters (10 inches) of rain per year, while central and western Yemen receive between 600–800 millimeters (24–32 inches).³

Zaydism spread to several other regions, and its followers established a number of states throughout the Middle Ages. But it has only survived into the modern era in northern Yemen, where a succession of Zaydi imams proclaimed their rule over Saada and parts of the surrounding area, in a form of government known as an imamate. By the seventeenth century, they had managed to establish a state that controlled Sanaa and dominated the rest of Yemen for almost a century, until the south seceded.⁴ The imamate state remained in control of what became known as North Yemen until it was overthrown and the Republic of Yemen was founded in 1962.

The Yemeni revolution of September 26, 1962, started as a military coup. Staged by a group of officers from the Zaydi-dominated Yemeni army, it aimed to sweep away the imamate and establish a republic. Egypt backed the republican rebels against the imamate, which in turn was backed by Saudi Arabia, in a civil war that lasted for over seven years.

This conflict, between republicans and the imamate, was largely confined to Zaydi-majority areas between Sanaa and Saada. Both the elite and the masses in other parts of the country, dominated by Shafa’i Sunnis, enthusiastically joined the revolution.

Republican Yemen

Although the 1962 republican revolution in the north put an end to the Zaydi imamate, all five republican presidents who ruled were Zaydis. Accordingly, Zaydi hegemony in the military and security forces has remained even after the fall of the imamate. However, during the early years of the republic, Salafists began their activities in northern Yemen, backed by Zaydi—rather than Sunni—presidents. Two factors help explain this: firstly, the Zaydi principle of the imamate that required Hashemite origins for ruling imams threatened the legitimacy of the republican presidents, who were not Hashemites. Secondly, Saudi Arabia had immense influence over northern Yemen, which formed something of a buffer state between the kingdom and the communist People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south. Even after Yemen’s unity in 1990, Zaydis maintained power, excluding the Socialist Party after its 1994 defeat and cementing Zaydism as a regional, rather than a sectarian, identity.

Accordingly, Zaydi hegemony in the military and security forces has remained even after the fall of the imamate.

The Zaydi dominance of northern Yemen continued until a 2011 uprising that overthrew president Ali Abdullah Saleh in February 2012. Saleh was followed by President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, who was the first non-Zaydi to rule Yemen from Sanaa. Though he still formally holds his title, Hadi’s rule did not last, as a Houthi-Saleh coalition toppled him in January 2015, and he fled from Sanaa in February 2015.

In spite of Saleh’s reliance on his tribe during his long presidency (1978–2012), his rule witnessed massive social changes, most prominently the weakening of the tribal system. This was for many reasons. First, Saleh attempted to monopolize power, so he tried to control and weaken all the political and social entities that could compete for his authority. Therefore, he used the money and authority of the state to weaken traditional tribal elders and foster others who were loyal to him. Second, the modernization and development of Yemen only extended to the main cities, where tribal elders lived in comfort, disconnected from fellow tribesmen who remained in remote areas lacking basic services such as electricity and water. This divide weakened the tribal system, under which tribes had pragmatically eschewed ideological approaches to conflicts. Over time this proved to boost religious groups.

Traditional Schools of Islamic Thought

Historically—apart from small Ismaili, Baha’i, and Jewish communities—Yemenis have followed three main schools of Islamic thought: Shafi’ism, which is associated with Sufism; Zaydism, which is generally associated with Shiism; and Al-Shawkani, which is primarily Sunni but with Zaydi roots. Each one has used traditional ways of teaching centered on study circles, where a teacher would deliver a lesson and discuss the school’s founding texts, such as the Shafi’i Kitab al-Um or the Zaydi Kitab al-Azhar.

The Shafi’i school, one of the world’s major Sunni doctrines, was the most widespread in Yemen. Zaydism ranked second, but it only survives in northern Yemen. Only a small Zaydi community lives outside the country.

The Al-Shawkani school is a strand of Sunnism with Zaydi roots, marked by an open attitude toward other schools of jurisprudence. As early as the fifteenth century, a trend emerged of Zaydis adopting Sunnism, a tendency that peaked with the rise of al-Imam al-Shawkani (who lived from 1759 to 1834). From then onward, his followers supported successive leaders. Unlike traditional Zaydism, al-Shawkani’s teachings did not encourage permanent struggle by pretext of calling for rebellion against unjust imams.

Since the 1970s, these traditional schools have almost disappeared, as Al-Shawkani schools did, or have been marginalized, like Sufi, Shafi’i, or Zaydi schools have been. Instead, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist schools have flourished.

Since the 1970s, these traditional schools have almost disappeared, as Al-Shawkani schools did, or have been marginalized, like Sufi, Shafi’i, or Zaydi schools have been. Instead, Muslim Brotherhood and Salafist schools have flourished. Since 2000, a new Zaydi teaching connecting to the political doctrine of the Houthis has also emerged.

The following sections will examine each of these schools of thought and the changes and transformations they have undergone.

Sunni Schools

The Shafi’i school of jurisprudence in Yemen, which is Sunni, has also been associated with Sufism since the thirteenth century. More recently, this linkage has developed to the point where it is nearly impossible to find a Shafi’i school in Yemen not linked with Sufism. The main Shafi’i teaching centers are in Zabid on the northwestern coast, Al-Baydha in central Yemen, and Tarim in the Hadhramaut valley in the south.⁵

The Al-Shawkani school has retained its special status in Yemen, where it enjoyed extensive political clout thanks to official support. This continued even after the fall of the imamate and the founding of the republic. North Yemen’s second president, Abdul Rahman Yahya al-Eryani (who ruled between 1967–1974), was educated at an Al-Shawkani school, as were the republic’s first two muftis, Mohammad Zabrah and Mohammad al-Amrani.⁶

The influence of the Al-Shawkani school had started to decline by the mid-1970s as the Yemeni government began to support the Salafist school. Thus, the role of the traditional schools declined, with the exception of a few individual Sufi and Zaydi schools, while Salafism has dominated in Yemen ever since. This was due to the instrumentalization of religion in the conflict sparked by the birth of the republican regime in the north and the Marxist regime in the south in the 1960s.

Scholastic Institutes

The first modern religious schools in Yemen were the ma’ahid ‘ilmiya (scholastic institutes) created by the state in the north in 1974. It is important to note the political context of this decision, which followed the end of the civil war in 1969. Yemen was divided into two states: the Yemen Arab Republic in the north, created in 1962, and the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen in the south, established after the end of British rule in 1967, which adopted a Marxist social, political, and economic system in 1969.

The rise of the first communist regime in the Arabian Peninsula meant North Yemen became a buffer against the spread of communism elsewhere in the region. This made the northern republic important to other Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia, which quickly formed close ties with northern leadership.

The danger of communism threatened the northern republic, which faced a leftist armed group known as the National Liberation Front. Backed by South Yemen, the National Liberation Front staged an uprising in the country’s central regions in the early 1970s. This resulted in successive North Yemeni presidents backing various religious groups, seeing them as the most effective ideological weapon against communism. Saudi Arabia supported this official policy and started to fund the different religious groups. The state in 1982 finally crushed the armed leftist group, with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated militia known as the Islamic Front.⁷

Amid this political tumult, the first of these scholastic institutes for religious education was established in the Zaydi-dominated Khawlan region north of Sanaa in 1972, although the state did not officially recognize such institutes until two years later. Then, the number of institutes grew rapidly, with 500 such schools in operation by 1982. Two decades later, Yemen had 1,200 theological institutes with some 600,000 students.⁸ Despite their popularity, they were shut down in 2001 after the government decided to centralize the public education sector following the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Aden’s harbor and the beginning of the so-called U.S. war on terror.⁹

The ma’ahid ‘ilmiya formed a parallel education system that was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and became one of the group’s key recruitment tools.

The ma’ahid ‘ilmiya formed a parallel education system that was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and became one of the group’s key recruitment tools. They covered all stages of primary and secondary education, with additional courses on the Arabic language, Islamic studies, and the Islamic history of Yemen. They did not teach the philosophy curriculum at secondary level but did cover all schools of Sunni thought, including Zaydism, focusing on the Shafi’i doctrine.¹⁰

These schools were administratively and financially independent from the Education Ministry, although they received huge amounts of funding from a range of sources, including the North Yemen state, the Saudi government, and private donors. A former Yemeni official said that “the Yemeni state was at one point spending six times more per student” at these institutes than at public schools.¹¹ The ma’ahid ‘ilmiya hosted some 13 percent of the total public school student population.¹²

Opponents of the schools were multiple, including leftists, liberals, and Zaydi scholars and figures. Such groups saw these institutes as dens of recruitment for the Muslim Brotherhood and as part of a Saudi effort to spread Salafism and extremism in Yemen. But their supporters saw them as an ideal way to overcome sectarian differences and unify Yemenis under a common religious framework.

Yet the claim that the schools were conduits for recruitment into the Muslim Brotherhood was not far from the truth. At morning assemblies, the national anthem and cheers for the republic were replaced with songs of the Brotherhood, such as the song “Wal-haq Yahshudu Ajnadahu” (“the rightful path mobilizes its soldiers”¹³) by the movement’s leader Sayyid Qutb, and the cheering of Brotherhood slogans, such as “Allah is our purpose, the Prophet is our example, the Quran is our constitution, [and] death in the service of Allah is our desire.”

The schools, along with summer camps for male students, placed great emphasis on concepts of dawa (Islamic proselytization) and jihad. For example, they included lectures on the stages of the Prophet Muhammad’s life and revelation. There were also lessons on the history of jihad and prominent Islamic fighters, as well as a focus on Sunni concepts such as loyalty to al-jama’a (the Islamic community) and obedience to the ruler.¹⁴

These theological institutes accepted Muslim Brotherhood–exiled individuals from Egypt, Sudan, and elsewhere as students, teachers, and administrators. There is little doubt that the schools had links with the Muslim Brotherhood and were transformed into recruitment centers for the movement, something confirmed by a former student.¹⁵

The curricula invariably followed hardline teachings close to those of Salafism.

The curricula invariably followed hardline teachings close to those of Salafism. For example, these schools banned music and imposed complete segregation between the sexes, from students to teachers to administrative staff. If there was a shortage of female teachers for the girls’ schools, as was frequently the case in the countryside, this gap would be filled by older men.¹⁶

The schools were highly popular during the 1980s and 1990s, especially in rural areas, due to the long, difficult journeys involved in reaching public schools in rural areas or villages. The ma’ahid ‘ilmiya even provided food and boarding facilities to male students from remote areas. They also had a good reputation for the moral discipline and behavior of their students, as well as their heavy emphasis on physical activities for boys, including activities as tough as mountain climbing, as well as theater and singing of anashid (religious anthems).¹⁷ Girls’ activities included handicrafts, cooking, anashid singing, and dawa, but no sports.¹⁸ All of these facilities, reputations, and activities encouraged more students to enroll in these schools.

It is worth mentioning that graduates of these religious schools were not accepted into public and private universities. However, they could enter the High Institute for Teachers and earn a primary school teaching degree. This meant the influence of the ma’ahid ‘ilmiya extended to public schools via former students who disproportionately became teachers.¹⁹

This was one of Yemen’s most significant experiments in religious education in terms of the numbers of students involved; the duration of the practice (from 1974 to 2002); and the material, organizational, and administrative resources involved, which resulted in hundreds of schools across North Yemen. Furthermore, after Yemen’s unification, the religious education experiment extended to the south. The schools not only bequeathed a generation of teachers, who continue to spread their ideas via Yemen’s public and religious schools, but also deeply influenced a whole generation with the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Salafist Education

The first Salafist institute in Yemen was founded by Sheikh Muqbil bin Hadi al-Wadi’i after he returned to the country in 1979, having been released from prison in Saudi Arabia. He had been held on charges of taking part in Juhayman al-Otaybi’s seizure of Mecca’s Grand Mosque earlier that year. Al-Wadi’i, widely recognized as the founder of Salafism in Yemen, was a Zaydi religious teacher from the Wada’a tribe in Saada. He had settled in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s, where he became Salafist after coming to oppose the fact that Zaydi doctrine distinguishes between the descendants of Banu Hashim (the clan of the Prophet Muhammad) and other tribesmen.²⁰

Upon his return, al-Wadi’i set up an institute called Dar al-Hadith, in the village of Damaj, in the lands of his tribe in Saada Province, the heartland of Zaydism. Due to the anger of traditional Zaydi authorities, he sought and obtained tribal guarantees of protection.²¹

The institute’s name was significant. Salafist thought leans heavily on the hadith, the sayings of the Prophet, as well as al-jarh wal ta’dil (assessments of the reliability of those who memorized and passed along those sayings). Salafists apply similar assessments to people alive today, a tool they often weaponize against their opponents.

The name of the institute is also linked to two other Salafist concerns. Firstly, Salafism bases all its rulings from previous religious writings or rulings by al-salaf al-saleh (the early Muslim community). The hadith thus broaden the scope of the texts considered sacred. Beyond this, any deductions or judgments by personal reasoning are prohibited, as the human mind is prey to passions. Salafists reject all forms of Islamic jurisprudence such as qiyas (analogies), ijtihad (independent reasoning in jurisprudence), and anything not based on a literal reading of these fundamental religious texts. The second Salafist concern is with purifying Islam and distinguishing between so-called real Muslims and non-Muslims. Thus, Salafists are inclined to rupture relationships and denounce those who cross redlines. Due to this rejection of difference, the sect quickly gives rise to disputes and rivalries, even among its own members.

Thus Dar al-Hadith, the institute created by al-Wadi’i, became one of the most important religious centers in Yemen.

Thus Dar al-Hadith, the institute created by al-Wadi’i, became one of the most important religious centers in Yemen, attracting students not only from across Yemen but also from Africa, the Americas, Indonesia, Western Europe, and Arab countries, mainly Egypt and Algeria. For example, by the mid-2000s, more than one hundred French citizens were studying there.²² The center also offered accommodations and food for some students.

Most of the institute’s teachers had studied at universities in Saudi Arabia and relied heavily on Saudi textbooks such as those of Ibn Baz, Ibn ‘Uthaymin, al-Fawzan, al-Lahaydan, and Rabi’ al-Madkhali.²³ The institute also received money from Saudi preachers close to Saudi Arabia’s ruling family, including al-Madkhali himself.

This particular strand of Salafism urged its adherents to abstain from politics and focus their efforts on proselytization. It adhered to what it called as-salafiya al-’ilmiya (roughly translated as academic Salafism), which frowns on political party activity and promotes the Sunni concept of ta’at wali al-amr (obedience to the ruler or leader of a community). It strongly opposed jihadists on the basis that jihad was only to be waged on the orders of the ruler. Its opponents referred to this school of Salafism as Madkhaliyya, after al-Madkhali.

The institute enjoyed good relations with the Yemeni government during Saleh’s rule between 1978 and 2012. The state did not interfere in its curricula and ignored a complaint against it by Zaydis, who Salafists see as an aberrant sect. The government instead committed to protecting the institute.²⁴ Accordingly, al-Wadi’i’s students soon founded their own institutes on similar lines, such as Dar al-Hadith in Ma’rib (built by Abu al-Hassan al-Masri or Al-Ma’ribi); Ma’had Ma’bar in Dhamar; and Ma’had al-Afyush in Aden (run by Abdulrahman al-Adeni).

After the death of al-Wadi’i in 2001, and despite a dispute over who would take his place, Dar al-Hadith continued its work—until the Houthis laid siege to the village of Damaj in late 2011. Damaj not only hosted an Islamic studies institute but also gave birth to a multinational community with austere and extreme religious leanings. Both Yemenis and foreign citizens resided in Damaj because of the strength of its educational institution. When the Houthis laid siege to the village, they used the presence of so many foreigners as a pretext for the siege and demanded their departure. This initial siege was followed by another onslaught in late 2013, enduring into January 2014, until the roughly 15,000 residents of the village had been evacuated.²⁵

Hence, Saada was not the only place where the presence of Salafists created frictions, as it is the stronghold of Zaydism in Yemen. After the unification of Yemen in 1990, the Salafists also became active in the town of Tarim and in Hadhramaut Governorate, the latter of which is also a stronghold of Sufism. They set up their activities in several of the towns’ mosques (including Al-Tawhid wal Sunna, run by al-Ma’ribi, a student of al-Wadi’i). This created more friction, as the Salafists believe that Sufis are misguided or even polytheists.²⁶

Throughout the 1990s, Salafists were active throughout Yemen, distributing books and recordings. Some strands of the movement were particularly active, such as the Hikma Association in Taiz, a city in western Yemen where al-Wadi’i had refused to carry out charitable work, seeing it as a form of hizbiya (factionalism). The Hikma Association began receiving money from the Kuwaiti foundation Ihya’ al-Turath al-Islami (Revive Islamic Heritage), run by cleric Abdulkhaleq Abdullah. The Hikma Association then split in two with the 1992 founding of its southern branch in Hadhramaut Governorate, the Ihsas Association, which received funding from Qatar.²⁷ The main impact of these associations was their charitable work at Quranic schools such as the ‘Asim and Manar centers in Sanaa. The founding of institutes and mosques such as Al-Furqan, in Taiz, and Al-Baihani, in Ibb, bolstered the spread of Salafism across the rest of Yemen.²⁸

The early 1990s also saw the founding of Salafist universities such as Al-Eman University in Sanaa, headed by Abdulmajid al-Zindani, which teaches sharia studies and law, though graduates could not become practicing lawyers.²⁹ Ahgaff University in Hadhramaut Governorate was founded in 1994, teaching engineering and computer science as well as sharia studies.³⁰ As was the case with the other Salafist institutes, these universities received funding and support from Saudi associations and clerics, and some were able to offer accommodation and food.

Salafists’ relations with Saudi Arabia. Yemen’s Salafists have had strong relationships with Saudi Arabia since the beginning of their activities in Yemen near the end of the 1970s. Most have received funding from Saudi religious leaders, and the majority of their institutes rely heavily on books by Saudi scholars. But this has not always guaranteed Yemen’s good political relations with Riyadh or detached Yemeni Salafists from fluctuations in the relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

Yemen’s Salafists have had strong relationships with Saudi Arabia since the beginning of their activities in Yemen . . . . But this has not always guaranteed Yemen’s good political relations with Riyadh or detached Yemeni Salafists from fluctuations in the relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

For example, al-Wadi’i had tense relations with the Saudi government after it expelled him on suspicion of writing the statements issued by al-Otaybi during his seizure of Mecca’s Grand Mosque in 1979. Al-Wadi’i continued to describe the country as ardh al-haramayn wa najd (“the land of the two holy sanctuaries and Najd”), rather than Saudi Arabia, implicitly questioning the Al Saud family’s legitimacy to rule.³¹ Yet he continued to receive money from Saudi scholars including al-Madkhali and Abdulaziz bin Baz, both of whom were close to the ruling family, as well as the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which was founded in 1988 and shut down in 2004 on suspicion of funding terrorism.³²

These worried ties—between the Yemeni Salafists in general and al-Wadai’i in particular, on one side, and Saudi Arabia on the other side—were also affected by the unstable relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In 1990, after Yemen backed former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in the Gulf war, a million Yemenis returned home from Saudi Arabia just as the authorities had to restrict the regulation of Yemeni residency. This left great bitterness among many Yemenis, especially in border areas such as Saada, where, for a period, thousands were returning every day with their modest possessions and little money despite their many years working in Saudi Arabia. This may have been a reason that al-Wadi’i accused former Saudi king Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and the Saudi royal family of creating enmity with Yemen by unfairly hoarding their wealth.

Relations between Yemen and Saudi Arabia deteriorated further with the Yemeni civil war in 1994, when Riyadh opted to support southern Yemeni Socialist Party separatists. Al-Wadi’i accused Saudi Arabia of backing communists in the south and Zaydi tribes in the north. However, when al-Wadi’i fell ill at the turn of the millennium, he was allowed to receive treatment in Saudi Arabia. It was his first visit to the kingdom since he had been expelled in 1979. He met former crown prince Naif bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, and Saudi Arabia covered the costs of further treatment in Germany and the United States (despite al-Wadi’i’s view, even after his treatment there, that the United States was a den of sin and corruption).³³

Al-Wadi’i then returned to Saudi Arabia, where he died in 2001 and was buried in the same Mecca cemetery as the most senior Saudi clerics, including bin Baz. Al-Wadi’i had by this time urged his students to throw away all recordings in which he criticized Saudi Arabia and instead called on them to stand with Saudi Arabia against its enemies.³⁴

It is hard to imagine a complete separation between Yemen’s Salafists and Saudi Arabia. But this is not to say that Salafists have been immune to the sensitivities and complexities of the relations between the two countries’ governments, which have influenced their rapidly shifting views of Saudi Arabia, from affection and criticism to admiration and resentment—often simultaneously.

Salafists in flux. Salafism is a movement in flux. It has spread widely in Yemen due to its simplicity and directness, but it is in no way organized. Salafists’ unbending adherence to the principle of ta’at wali al-amr meant they did not become meaningfully engaged in political opposition to Saleh. Indeed, Saleh instrumentalized them at times, such as during the 1994 war or during his war in Saada against the Houthis.

The 2011 uprising prompted opposing reactions among Salafists. While the overwhelming majority were opposed to the uprising, it was backed by the Ehsan Association and, to some extent, the Hikma Association in Taiz. This gave rise to an alliance between the two associations, known as the Ehsan Islamic Alliance.³⁵

Post-2011, Salafists in Yemen faced another split, this time over participation in politics and the forming of political parties. It is notable that the first Salafist party was Hizb un-Nahdha al-Islami (Islamic Renaissance Party), which was formed in 2011 and called for South Yemen’s secession.³⁶ This was followed by the March 2012 creation of the Al-Rashad (Integrity) Union, most of the founders of which belonged to the Ehsan Association, and the Silm wa Tanmiya (Peace and Development) Party, drawing on Hikma Association members.³⁷

Post-2011, Salafists in Yemen faced another split, this time over participation in politics and the forming of political parties.

After the war began, the intra-Salafist divide deepened and dragged in new players. The United Arab Emirates allied with Salafist fighters such as Hani Bin Breik, a student of al-Wadi’i who has since become a leading figure in the Southern Transitional Council. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, has backed other Salafists such as al-Ma’ribi—also a student of al-Wadi’i. Qatar has supported still others, such as the Ehsan Association in Hadhramaut Governorate. Even the Houthis managed to win over some Salafists, including Mohammad Taher Ana’m of the Al-Rashad Party and Mohammad ‘Izzudin al-Hamiri of the Slim wa Tanmiya Party.³⁸

The Houthis have allowed some Salafist institutes to continue operating, such as Dar al-Hadith in Damaj, which still provides its services but only to students from the area, especially those from al-Wadi’i’s tribe the Wada’a.³⁹ The Ma’bar Institute in Dhamar is another example. These institutes have continued after they accepted the Houthis’ conditions, such as that they cannot accept students outside of their area, which limit their activities, adding to other strict regulations.

This Houthi policy toward Sunni institutes (despite the fact that Houthis closed Zaydi ones and banned Zaydi study circles in mosques), can be explained by the Houthis’ pragmatism as a ruling group toward the Sunnis, who make up much of the population of areas under its control. It also helps the group portray itself as nonsectarian and open to others.

Sufi Institutes

Sufism has become the last major stronghold of the Shafi’i doctrine in Yemen. Sufism is not an Islamic school in itself but rather a school of behavior and discipline that focuses on the spiritual aspects of what is known as al-ihsan wa al-tazkiya (roughly translated as “good deeds and self-purification”) in Islam.

Sufi schools are still operating in some parts of Yemen, including Tahama, Taiz, Al-Baydha, Aden, and Hadhramaut. The city of Tarim in the Hadhramaut valley is the stronghold of Sufism in Yemen. Sufi schools in the south, particularly in Hadhramaut and Tarim, were in many cases closed, and some of their teachers were imprisoned or even killed during the Yemen Socialist Party’s 1969–1990 rule. Many of their shrines were destroyed between 1994 and 1995 by Islamist militias aligned with Sanaa in its war against the socialists.⁴⁰

Strikingly, many Sufis allied with the Socialist Party in 1994, despite previous mistreatment.⁴¹ Some have suggested this reflected a bias toward Saudi Arabia, which backed the southern side. It could also be because most of the separatists during this war were from the Banu Hashim clan from Hadhramaut Governorate, including such important figures as Ali Salim al-Baydh, Haydar al-Attas, and Abdulrahman al-Jafri.

Following the 1994 civil war, Sufis became more active in Yemen.

Following the 1994 civil war, Sufis became more active in Yemen. A Sufi school called Dar al-Mustafa was founded in 1996 by a group including Al-Habib Ali al-Jafri, the son of Yemeni political figure Abdulrahman al-Jafri who was head of the Al-Rabita Party, a Saudi-backed southern separatist group. The younger al-Jafri was born in Saudi Arabia and spent some of his life in the UAE. Another cofounder of Dar al-Mustafa was Al-Habib Umar Bin Hafiz. His father was killed by socialists in 1972, forcing his family to flee to Baydha in North Yemen, where Bin Hafiz was taught by noted Sufi Sheikh Hussein Mohammad al-Haydar.⁴²

Bin Hafiz became the key figure heading Dar al-Mustafa, which became a world-renowned center for Sufism with thousands of foreign students of over forty nationalities. It was the focus of some opposition from traditional Sufis for revamping curricula and teaching methods, but it has been a major success and continues teaching to this day. Sufi schools generally receive funding in the form of donations from the Hadhrami diaspora in the Gulf and east Asia.⁴³

After the end of the 1994 war, Saleh had beaten his socialist enemies in the south and began to give more space to other religious schools to counterbalance and weaken those of the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah) left the government in 1997, the state’s warming ties with the Sufis became more apparent. Sufi Sheikh Mohammad Ali Mira’i became a member of Saleh’s General People’s Congress, and in 2000 he founded the College of Sharia Studies in Hudayda. Some Muslim Brotherhood members have claimed that graduates of the college were given preferential access to public sector jobs, showing that they were backed by the government.

From 2002 onward, Saleh began paying visits to Dar al-Mustafa, while its founders Al-Habib Ali al-Jafri and Al-Habib bin Mahfouz began appearing on state television. In the 2003 parliamentary elections, Sufi elders in Hadhramaut Governorate and elsewhere voiced support for the General People’s Congress. It became clear that the Sufis in Yemen were on the rise. In the center of Tarim, Salafist centers such as the Mohammad bin Abdulwahab bookshop were forced to turn off their speakers every Monday out of respect for the gathering of Sufi elders at Dar al-Mustafa.⁴⁴

The Sufis in Yemen—unlike the Zaydis who were isolated in Yemen and the relative marginalization of the Salafists in Yemen—had a number of influential members with followings outside Yemen, such as Al-Habib al-Jafri and al-Hafiz. Sufi schools, meanwhile, attracted thousands of students from East Asia and Africa.

The Sufis in Yemen had a number of influential members with followings outside Yemen.

When violence escalated again in 2015 with the Saudi-led intervention, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) announced it was in control of Mukalla, the capital of Hadhramaut Governorate, as well as other areas of the valley. It proceeded to destroy a number of Sufi shrines. Notably, many Salafists were in harmony with AQAP. Yet there was no violent reaction from Sufi religious authorities. Sufis have historically eschewed violence, in accordance with their dictum: “Hold the tongue from censure; hold the hand from drawing blood.”⁴⁵ In April 2016, Yemeni government forces backed by the UAE-and-Saudi-led coalition were able to force AQAP to withdraw from Hadhramaut Governorate, and the Sufis regained their influence in politics and society.

As fighting intensified in the south and calls grew for secession from the north, some in Hadhramaut, Yemen’s biggest governorate, began to fear for the region’s existence as a social entity and a large territorial unit with its extensive oil wealth. This pushed Sufis, Salafists, and other Hadhramis to take part in the Hadhramaut Inclusive Conference in April 2017. Prominent delegates included Sufi Sheikh Abdulrahman Ba’abad and Salafi Sheikh Saleh al-Sharafi. One Hadhrami journalist said the desire to stabilize the situation in the region and unify it toward its residents’ goals of greater independence and power led to calm between Salafists and Sufis, under the logic that “we are all Hadhramis.”⁴⁶

One of the most prominent Sufi figures in the Islamic world is a Hadhrami Sufi, Al-Habib al-Jafiri, who has enjoyed positive media coverage for many years. The UAE backed him by funding the Tabah Foundation, which he set up in 2005 and which is active in many countries, most prominently Egypt.⁴⁷ More recently, al-Jafri has publicly adopted controversial political positions, such as visiting Jerusalem in 2012 and backing Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.⁴⁸ However, when the UAE stepped up its support for separatists in the south of Yemen, creating divisions over its policies and those of its allies, al-Jafri turned from a Sufi notable who stayed out of the fray into a controversial figure among Sufis in the Islamic world and in Hadhramaut Governorate, in particular.

Some say that al-Jafri has lost much of his popularity and credibility because of both the financial support he receives from Abu Dhabi and his political activities, which many Sufis see as unacceptable.⁴⁹ Others, however, believe he has maintained his status and stayed out of controversial political causes. They argue that the popularity of the Emirates and their ally, Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council, remains high on the Hadhrami coast even if the same is not true in the valley.⁵⁰

Hence, an individual’s position and opinion toward al-Jafri varies according to their stance toward the UAE’s policy in the south or their opinion toward religious scholars’ interventions into politics in general.

In sum, the Sufi school largely remains far from politics, but this does not mean that all Sufi scholars are committed to this general position of nonintervention in politics.

In sum, the Sufi school largely remains far from politics, but this does not mean that all Sufi scholars are committed to this general position of nonintervention in politics. The future of the Sufi school and its involvement in politics will face huge challenges because of increasing regional intervention in the south, especially in Hadhramaut Governorate, as regional powers like Saudi Arabia and the UAE heavily used religion in their political intervention.

Zaydi Religious Schools

The Zaydis have had a presence in northern Yemen for more than 1,000 years. Zaydi doctrine was taught in traditional ways in mosques and religious schools right up until the revolution against the imamate. The revolution placed pressure on Zaydi scholars, especially as most of those with Hashemite roots supported the imamate against the republican regime, leaving the latter suspicious of them. Some were killed or imprisoned during the 1962 to 1970 civil war.

As mentioned above, the 1970s saw growing Sunni and Salafist activity across northern Yemen, including in Zaydi areas, supported by the Yemeni government and funded by Saudi Arabia. The Zaydis struggled to adapt to this and remained limited to study circles in mosques, especially in the Imam al-Hadi mosque in Saada and the Great Mosque in Sanaa.

One key feature of the Zaydis as a religious group is their reliance on logic, stemming from their roots in the mu’tazila (an early rationalist school of Islamic theology). But the sect did not have its own, independent character in terms of Islamic jurisprudence and was influenced in one way or another by various Sunni schools, particularly the Hanafi school. Zaydism does not rely heavily on the hadith but uses those that align with the Quran, as well as being open to ijtihad. Many therefore see Zaydism as simply a political philosophy of government that justifies overthrowing unjust rulers and gives preference to rulers descended from the Prophet.

The political nature of Zaydism made successive Yemeni republican governments nervous about any activity by its adherents. Salafists, on the other hand, increased their presence, creating worry and anger among some traditional Zaydi elders, who are mostly Banu Hashim clansmen. They voiced these concerns with the opening up of public and political life, including the creation of political parties, when Yemen was unified in 1990. This opening saw the creation of a large Sunni political party, the Yemeni Congregation for Reform (Islah) and two Zaydi Islamist parties, Al-Haq and the Union of Popular Forces.

Al-Haq brought together most of Yemen’s key Zaydi figures, including the sect’s most prominent scholar since the 1962 revolution, Sheikh Majd al-Deen al-Mu’ayyidi, the teacher of Sheikh Badr al-Deen al-Houthi. In a key statement at its founding, the party announced that it would fight American imperialism, which was manifested in Saudi Wahhabism.⁵¹

There were changes not just in politics but also in education, with the establishment of a number of Zaydi institutes, most prominently the Samawi Institute in Saada and Sheikh Murtada’s Badr al-Mahtouri Institute. These institutes tried to mimic the Muslim Brotherhood by setting up summer youth camps, the Shabab al-Mu’min (Faithful Youth) camps. The sons of Badr al-Din al-Houthi—Hussein, Mohammad, and Hamid—had all previously studied at Saada’s theological institute. Despite the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood runs this institute, it is the only institute in Yemen teaching a Zaydi religious curriculum due to the particularities of the city.⁵²

To counter the Salafism and Sunnism spread in the Zaydi areas, a few Zaydi scholars and figures started establishing Zaydi religious camps beginning around 1993.

To counter the Salafism and Sunnism spread in the Zaydi areas, a few Zaydi scholars and figures started establishing Zaydi religious camps beginning around 1993. The first one was in the Al-Hamazat region of Saada. Al-Hamazat is a hijra (an area reserved for those learned in religious matters), protected by Yemen’s tribes and off-limits for fighting. The camps hosted some 10,000 to 15,000 students in 1994 and 1995, then began spreading into other governorates such as Amran, Hijjah, Al-Mahwit, and Dhamar—even Shafi’i-dominated areas such as Ibb and Tai