WILL SAUDI ARABIA SEE THE LIGHT OF THE ARAB SPRING?

Recently, it came to light that four princesses of Saudi Arabia have been detained by King Abdullah of that country for the last thirteen years because they had been outspoken about women’s rights. One of the princesses, Sahar, had appealed to US president Barack Obama to help secure their release (to which he apparently turned a deaf ear) and she has even called for a mass revolution, though it has yet to surface. An even more shocking and disturbing incident occurred when staff at a university in Riyadh allegedly barred male paramedics from entering a women-only campus to assist a female student who had suffered a heart attack and later died.

While revolts, armed and unarmed, have recently shaken the Middle East and North Africa, Saudi Arabia has not faced any major internal turmoil in the past few years. The House of Saud is the custodian of the Muslims’ two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. The regime is totalitarian (the country is ruled by a hereditary monarchy, and like every totalitarian regime, such as the one in China or even the one currently in Thailand, civil rights activists have to potentially face legal punishment), and discriminatory against women (women below 45 years of age are not allowed to travel abroad without the consent of their male guardians, which is not the case in most other Muslim-majority countries, and Saudi Arabia is indeed perhaps the only country in the world where women are not allowed to drive; in other Muslim-majority countries, barring in regions taken over by fanatic militias like the ISIS, women are allowed to drive - in the United Arab Emirates, there are women-driven family taxis, and Laleh Seddigh, an Iranian Muslim woman, is among the best car-racers globally) and non-Muslims (unlike in most other Muslim-majority countries, the regime in Saudi Arabia does not even allow the construction of places of worship for non-Muslim religious groupings in spite of a very sizable population of non-Muslims like Christians and Hindus working in that country). In Saudi Arabia, Muslim minority sects such as the Shias are also unfortunately discriminated against in the realm of religious freedom. Not only is apostasy from Islam prohibited, but atheists are actually being classified as terrorists by law! Muslims are forced to pray by the religious police, failing which they are detained, and I have heard an anecdote about a Sikh gentleman who was also mistaken to be a Muslim by the religious police owing to his turban and forced to offer Islamic prayers! Contemporary historical comparisons with the Saudi regime include the Taliban in Afghanistan and the ISIS in Iraq and Syria, though Saudi Arabia has indeed fared much better than the Afghan Taliban with no ban on music in Saudi Arabia, no legal obligation on women to wear the niqab (though it is worn by most Saudi women, given the conservative nature of the society, though it was different back in the 1950s and 1960s) and Saudi women having emerged as corporate executives, scientists and media personnel. The Saudi government is also taking steps to promote employment of women. Nonetheless, there is nothing laudable in faring better than the Taliban when it comes to human rights, and the Saudi regime is undoubtedly very backward as compared to the much of the rest of the world, including most other Muslim-majority countries, on this score.

Despite its poor human rights record, Saudi Arabia has, for decades, shared an excellent economic and strategic partnership with liberal democracies like the United States of America.

One may feel compelled to wonder as to why the phenomenon called the Arab Spring that gripped Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria has failed to make a substantial difference in a country where there has been much less liberty in many areas. There were instances of protests in Riyadh and in the Shi’ite-majority Eastern Province. Additionally, Saudi women also defied the driving ban on women supported by many Saudi men, including some clerics who argued that the ban had no basis in Islamic theology. However, we did not witness any major mass uprising, as we saw elsewhere in the Middle East.

Reasons for the Lack of Protests

A possible reason for people to refrain from protesting lies in economic factors. As well-known Fareed Zakaria has pointed out in his acclaimed book The Post-American World, Marx may have gotten many things wrong, but he was absolutely right on the point that the economy lies at the base of every socio-political development. I would put it this way – Marx’s diagnosis of society was, on the whole, excellent; his remedy was wrong. After all, what had really stirred the Arab Spring in the first place? It had started in Tunisia, with a street-vendor Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation due to harassment by the police. As noted columnist Fraser Nelson points out, referring to this episode-

“As his family attest, he had no interest in politics. The freedom he wanted was the right to buy and sell, and to build his business without having to pay bribes to the police or fear having his goods confiscated at random. If he was a martyr to anything, it was to capitalism.”

It would be necessary to understand that contrary to what very many leftist and left-leaning ideologues suggest, capitalism isn’t intrinsically anti-poor, crony capitalism wherein the state seeks to protect and promote the vested interests of some powerful elements is, but in a socialist setup, the state often itself assumes the role of the exploiter, and the corruption and inefficiency that comes in with the dearth of private competition is well-known (though this is not to suggest that I don’t support any state intervention in the economy, and I do support welfare schemes that generate public assets). True capitalist economists like De Soto from Peru (who has actually been targeted by extreme left-wing terrorists) argue for economic freedom in terms of there being virtually no legal hurdles by way of unnecessary formalities and restrictions even for the poor, like street-vendors, and wherein their ownership of private property would also be respected by way of a strong rule of law. The Arab Spring was not fundamentally borne out of a desire for civil liberties or representative governance although these definitely served as fuel to the fire of discontent, but out of a desire for economic reforms. Egypt too was coping with huge inflation under Mubarak, a sentiment which was indeed ubiquitous when I visited that country in 2008.

Saudi Arabia, based on its per capita income (in 2013, it was US$ 25,851.6), as per the World Bank, is a high-income country without any serious burden of taxation. The people of Saudi Arabia not having any serious economic grievance is a major reason for them to, by and large, not stand up against the monarchy. The people’s economic prosperity in itself creates a sense of inertia with respect to combating the regime, and prevents them from putting at stake the economic resources they have at their disposal, unlike many economically backward people in other Arab countries who did not have much to lose. This is the moot point I wish to make in this article. The “rentier state” theory, which suggests that the governments of countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar, based on their incomes from oil revenue, do not take direct taxes from their people and instead give them money in return as “rent” to prevent an uprising, does seem interesting, even if it does not explain the whole picture. The following statement by Montesquieu is relevant in this regard –

“In moderate states, there is a compensation for heavy taxes; it is liberty. In despotic states, there is an equivalent for liberty; it is the modest taxes.”

Here, one can actually replace ‘modest taxes’ with let’s say, ‘rent’!

In fact, in this context, it would be interesting to note that the Saudi regime increased expenditure on social welfare after the uprisings in other Arab countries.

Viewed from a modern human rights standpoint, many of the issues that exist in Saudi Arabia, possibly barring the non-democratic character of the state, are indeed rooted in their own hard-line version of an Islamic state, and Fareed Zakaria, a Muslim, has described the Saudi regime as “mad” (to suggest that the fact that the Wahabi sect of Sunni Islam predominates in Saudi Arabia can alone explain this would be erroneous, for the much more liberal Qatar is also a Wahabi-majority country, and so is the United Arab Emirates). Perhaps, if there is a decline in the Saudi economy, one would see a rebellion against the monarchy. maybe with the emergence of democracy (and democracy is arguably stipulated by Islam, given the concept of shura in the Quran), questions of the nature of the regime being secular, moderately Islamist or hard-line Islamist, would arise, and hopefully, the last option would be eliminated, given that democracy, by its very nature, is usually much more libertarian. After all, in Tunisia, which offers an impressive example of democracy for the Arab world to emulate, the Muslims supporting secularism and Muslims supporting theocracy have clashed, and the constitution finally ratified affirms the right to freedom of religion, with Tunisia now signing and ratifying the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) without any reservations, which is not even the case with the United States! The battle for reforming the practice of religion to confer equal rights to all sections of the society has taken place in all major religious groupings, including Christians, Jews and Hindus.

If Saudi Arabia were to undergo such a remarkable metamorphosis from within, being the land of Mecca and Medina, it would definitely send out ripples across the Islamic world and help to weaken extremism.

The Likelihood of Change

What circumstances would bring about regime change? As we have discussed earlier, that would happen only when Saudi Arabia experiences a serious economic decline. Based on a very cursory analysis, one visualizes that the Saudi economy would decline only when they exhaust their oil reserves. Speaking of this possibility, it is not as though the regime has not been far-sighted enough to not foresee that oil is non-renewable and to not explore alternative trajectories of economic development. This is clear from their emphasis on fighting unemployment so as to ensure that in the years to come, the economy can progress even without dependence on oil, but their recent strategy to have an “unemployment insurance” again brings us to the rentier state theory that conceptualizes the state paying the people as an appeasement policy to prevent an uprising. To base the economy on tourism or real estate, as is the case with the United Arab Emirates, for instance, would require having a more open and tolerant society.

Until then, even if a mass stirring somehow does take place, it is possible that it would fail like the one that took place in Bahrain did, since the United States, which still remains the most powerful force in geopolitics, would not be interested in coming to the people’s rescue, owing to its own considerations of realpolitik, which is indeed ultimately the touchstone of the foreign policy of any country, as much as some Muslim rightists and left-liberals may particularly want to vilify the United States. Ronald Regan stated unambiguously in 1981 that the US government “will not permit” any revolution in Saudi Arabia. Then again, even Hosni Mubarak was a long-time ally of the US government, but the US did not come to his rescue, and they may want to adopt a non-interventionist wait-and-watch policy in Saudi Arabia too, so as to not unnecessarily antagonize the local populace. However, they would, in all likelihood, abstain from inciting any armed aggression against the Saudi monarchy, also for fear of instigating terrorism against themselves. Already, the approach of the United States in the context of the Syrian civil war and its warming up to Iran have strained US-Saudi relations. That said, the fact that discontent in Saudi Arabia has come to the fore, in the form of street protests and women defying the driving ban, is certainly a positive sign and is hopefully an indication of a brighter future.

The author would like to profusely thank Mr. Manuel Langendorf and his (Karmanye’s) friend Saira Syed for their inputs as also Mr. Devender Dhyani for his help, and even Dr. Subroto Roy (a respected social scientist, not to be confused with the businessman associated with the Sahara group) for having shared Montesquieu’s quote, albeit in a different context, in his Facebook group ‘Kashmir and World Politics Seminar’.

Karmanye Thadani