New Texts Out Now: Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century

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Mar 29, 2017 Maghreb
New Texts Out Now: Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century

New Texts Out Now: Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century

By : Henri Lauzière

Henri Lauzière, The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Henri Lauzière (HL): I wrote the book in an attempt to solve a nagging problem in Islamic intellectual history. For the last three decades or so, scholars who sought to define and tell the story of Salafism always faced something of a paradox. On the one hand, a lot of the secondary literature tells us that Salafism, or salafiyya, was a movement of Islamic modernism associated with Muslim reformers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries known for their rational and progressive views, such as Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Rashid Rida, and a host of like-minded intellectuals from West Africa to Indonesia. On the other hand, in recent scholarship Salafism has a substantially different meaning, one that is more consistent with how today’s Muslims use the term “Salafi.” The literature now presents Salafism as a rigorist and purist form of Sunni Islam that condemns rationalist and progressive approaches to reform. With this alternative definition comes a series of very different narratives as well. Some scholars have suggested that Salafism dates back to the medieval period, while others have linked its emergence to Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab in the eighteenth century, and still others have argued that it originated in the 1960s. There are still other definitions and narratives of Salafism, but a fundamental problem remains: why do we have such largely incompatible understandings of Salafism and contradictory hypotheses about its origins? Should we believe that different strands of Salafism existed or coexisted at different points in history, as some have argued? Should we rather assume that ultra-orthodox Muslims coopted and thus transformed the label previously used by Islamic modernists?

Back in 2009, Bernard Haykel summed up the problem this way: “It would be useful to know why the term Salafi, which in the late nineteenth century referred to modernising and reason-minded Muslim reformist scholars, has come to be identified with the Wahhabis for whom reason-based (‘aqli) arguments are anathema.”[1] This is one of the questions I take up in The Making of Salafism—though I show that we must reformulate the problem because, in the nineteenth century, the term “Salafi” did not in and of itself refer to modernizing and reason-minded reformers. Rather, it referred to adherents of neo-Hanbali theology—that is, the more refined iteration of Hanbali theology as articulated and defended by Ibn Taymiyya. Therefore, the modernizing and reason-minded reformers who happened to be Salafi in creed were Salafis by virtue of their theological stance on questions such as God’s attributes, not by virtue of their rationalist approach to Islamic law or their desire to reconcile Islam and Western modernity. In the nineteenth century, the Wahhabis of Najd, too, already referred to themselves as Salafis from time to time to designate their theological position. And yet, they were by no means modernists.

By shrugging off some of our presuppositions about the term and paying closer attention to the way Muslim scholars themselves used the label “Salafi” in the nineteenth century, a whole new set of questions opens up. When and why did the confusion arise about the meaning of “Salafi”? Why exactly have scholars accepted and reproduced the false idea that al-Afghani and ‘Abduh were leading Salafis? When did the abstract noun “Salafism” emerge and how did Muslim scholars struggle over its definition? Is there a connection between the construction of Salafism as a concept and the changing attitude of self-proclaimed Salafis toward reform? In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, it was relatively easy for a Salafi in creed to promote reason and progressive reform in areas other than theology. By the late twentieth century, however, a Salafi could hardly advocate this flexible, “rationalist” approach without risking being accused of betraying the core principles of Salafism. Why? I wrote the book in hopes of answering such questions, but also to challenge the numerous preconceptions and misleading assumptions about Salafism that continue to skew our understanding of Islamic intellectual history.

J: What particular topics and issues does the book address?

HL: Epistemology is, of course, a central issue in this book. I wanted to explore the ways in which both scholars of Islam and Islamic scholars grapple with an abstract notion such as Salafism and how they write its history. To me, asking the question “What is Salafism?” is almost pointless at this stage. It lures us into defining and redefining the term on the basis of existing literature, and away from critiquing the received ideas embedded in that literature. Perhaps the best way to provide a somewhat satisfactory answer to this question is to renounce all historical perspective and explain the principles that contemporary Salafis now claim to follow. But as a historian, focusing on the present is not enough. I want to go further, to examine Salafism over time, and to make sense of the historical problems that we can all too easily sweep under the rug. And as I explain in the book’s introduction, the first question historians ought to ask is not “What is Salafism?” but rather  “How do we know what we think we know about Salafism?” When we truly start questioning the provenance of our knowledge, the accuracy of our beliefs, and the basis of our historical narratives, we realize how shaky our interpretations of Salafism can be. Considering that salafiyya has served as an analytical category for nearly a hundred years, it is surprising how little empirical work has been done to validate, or invalidate, some of the most basic historical claims found in the literature.

But the book also deals with the changing notion of Islamic reform throughout the twentieth century, because the construction of Salafism as a concept is inextricably linked to the social and political challenges that Muslim communities have experienced in the past hundred years. One chapter, for example, focuses on Rashid Rida’s efforts to rehabilitate the Wahhabis in the 1920s, which, I argue, marked the beginning of a shift among self-proclaimed Salafis away from theological tolerance. Other chapters deal with the impact of anticolonial nationalism on the relationship between Salafis and other Muslims. Only with the passing of European colonialism and the advent of independence in various countries did a majority of self-proclaimed Salafis adopt the more rigid approach to Islamic reform that has come to characterize them. Incidentally, the last chapter of the book deals with the conceptualization of purist Salafism as an all-encompassing ideology since the 1970s.

Although one would not know judging from the book cover, a thread connects every chapter: the Moroccan scholar and globetrotter Taqi al-Din al-Hilali (1894-1987) leads readers through the labyrinth of transnational Salafi networks. Al-Hilali is an intriguing character, but he is not particularly well known, even in his native country. When I first started conducting research about him in Morocco in February 2004, most of the Moroccans I met did not know who he was. Ironically, American and British converts were more familiar with him, because in the 1970s al-Hilali produced a Saudi-sponsored translation of the Qur’an into English in collaboration with with the Pakistani cardiologist Muhammad Muhsin Khan. My book is not a biography of al-Hilali per se; rather I use his intellectual journey as a springboard for further discussions about the making of Salafism in different intellectual circles. Not only did al-Hilali live in Morocco, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, colonial India, and Nazi Germany for extended periods of time, he visited several other countries and interacted with countless high-profile scholars and activists. This is why the book also deals with figures such as Muhammad ibn al-‘Arabi al-‘Alawi, ‘Allal al-Fasi, Rashid Rida, Muhammad Hamid al-Fiqi, Hasan al-Banna, Shakib Arslan, Muhammad ibn Ibrahim, Ibn Baz, Nasir al-Din al-Albani, and many others. By contextualizing al-Hilali’s experiences and those of his associates, I identify a number of historical conjunctures that contributed to the formation and transformation of the concept of Salafism.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

HL: When I wrote my doctoral dissertation, I still took for granted that a multifaceted movement of reform called salafiyya existed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that all modernist reformers à la Muhammad ‘Abduh during that period were, by definition, proponents of a modernist form of Salafism. In 2008, however, while conducting additional research as a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton, I came to the realization that my work built on received ideas that had no empirical basis. The notion of modernist salafiyya originated in the work of French scholar Louis Massignon. Because of its usefulness and apparent validity, however, both Muslim and non-Muslim scholars borrowed Massignon’s definition of Salafism and wrongly attributed it to al-Afghani, ‘Abduh, and their disciples. I first developed this argument in an article published in 2010 in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. By then, it had become clear that I could not simply turn my dissertation into a book, as I had hoped. Rather, I had to write an entirely different monograph that would reflect my new findings and supersede my previous views of salafiyya. The Making of Salafism is the fruit of these efforts.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

HL: I think anyone who is curious about the history of Salafism, or Salafism in history, is likely to engage with the book. As for its impact, I hope the book will convince readers that many our assumptions about Salafism are unfounded and that the standard narratives about salafiyya are to a large extent mythical. Therefore, I hope my book will help historicize this category and lay unnecessary conceptual and historical problems to rest.

J: What methodologies did you use in your research for this book?  

HL: This is a good question: how does one go about writing the history of an abstract notion, or concept, that it is supposed to be indigenous to the Islamic tradition? I chose not to let the secondary literature set the parameters of my research and dictate what I should be looking for in the sources. This would have been a pointless exercise considering the problems inherent in the historiography on Salafism. Rather, I read as broadly as possible in primary documents, especially for the period stretching from the 1900s to the 1990s, and strove to interpret these texts on their own terms, without assuming the existence of a concept known as salafiyya and without reading preconceived ideas about Salafism into the historical sources. Among other things, I searched for the conscious formulation of Salafism in the works of Muslim scholars. This approach proved surprisingly instructive. As I explain in the book’s introduction, such a methodology is not without its limitations. But given the current state of research on Salafism, it seemed appropriate.

Excerpt from the Introduction:

Just as there is always a danger of reading too much into the occasional use of Salafi terminology in primary sources, so there is a risk of exaggerating its semantic range. The issue is not only that scholars commit a lexical anachronism by suggesting that past Muslims used salafiyya as an abstract noun meaning “Salafism” when they did not. They also commit a conceptual anachronism by assuming that the term Salafi conveyed layers of meaning that, in reality, have been affixed to the word only in the last ninety years or so. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the work of contemporary purist Salafis who seek to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their religious orientation. When using empirical evidence to try to convince other Muslims that Salafism is a term that dates from the medieval period, purist Salafis systematically resort to a logical sleight of hand that has major ahistorical implications. On the one hand, they use the word salafiyya as an abstract noun (maṣdar ṣināʿī), which, to grasp finer grammatical nuances, we could translate into English as “Ancestralism” instead of “Salafism.” They generally establish that this abstract noun refers to a comprehensive religious orientation—a kind of ideology—that embraces the entire gamut of Islamic beliefs and practices, encompassing theology, law, morals, and etiquette. On the other hand, contemporary Salafis are faced with the fact that no one has yet been able to find the noun salafiyya used in the sense of Ancestralism, let alone in the sense of a comprehensive religious orientation, in any source prior to the twentieth century.

To circumvent this problem, contemporary Salafis falsely imply that the terms Salafi and Salafis, as they appear in medieval texts, are nothing but derivatives of what is now known as Ancestralism. (The underlying assumption here is that the technical term Ancestralism must have existed and must be as old as the words that allegedly derive from it.) In doing so, contemporary purist Salafis commit two historical errors. First, they intimate that most salaf-related terms in the medieval period refer to a particular religious orientation, even though it is not always clear, for instance, that the adjective salafī means “Ancestralist” rather than simply “ancestral.” Second, they assume that the conceptual content of these medieval terms is equivalent to the conceptual content of today’s Ancestralism, which is all-encompassing. In other words, contemporary Salafis try to force their empirical evidence into a preconceived notion of Salafism that does not seem to have existed in the medieval period.

Historians are not immune from this kind of lapse. Similar assumptions lie behind the claim that Ibn Taymiyya and his disciples used the term Salafi to refer to a “school of thought” that informed not only theology but also law. Although premodern sources leave no doubt that Muslims sometimes used the term Salafi as a theological marker to identify themselves as adherents to the Hanbali creed, the idea that the same term played an equivalent conceptual role in the realm of the law and served to denote an originalist (e.g., non-madhhab) legal stance is empirically far-fetched. Likewise, textual evidence does not validate the widespread assumption that in the late nineteenth century the term Salafi referred to Muslims who took the salaf as role models and endeavored to reconcile reason and revelation to assert the relevance of Islam in modern society. For the most part, these interpretations derive from our tendency to inject elements of the purist and modernist versions of the concept we now call Salafism (which is relatively recent) into the term Salafi (which is much older). By imposing our habits of mind on primary sources and by failing to give due consideration to both the philological and the philosophical dimensions of the question, we condemn the historical study of Salafism to being a well-meaning but futile exercise. At best, it is tantamount to chasing a historical mirage—namely, the refracted image of a contemporary concept. At worst, we end up chasing a conceptual chimera that exists only in our modern scholarship.

The use of empirical criteria in intellectual history, however, raises another question: Do ideas matter more than the words by which they come to be known? Some scholars argue, for instance, that the study of feminism should not be restricted to the period following the appearance of the words feminism and feminist in the late nineteenth century. A similar logic applies to the study of Islamism. Even though many scholars adopt the convention that a distinct form of Islamic activism emerged with Hasan al-Banna’s founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, few deem it necessary to ask whether or not al-Banna used the term Islamism. (He did in the 1940s, but the fact that this has gone unnoticed goes to show that the issue is considered largely irrelevant.) The reason anachronism seems tolerable in such cases is that the aforementioned terms, like so many others, are first and foremost categories of analysis. They denote historical phenomena that scholars define according to their needs and then choose, for understandable reasons, to call feminism or Islamism. Because these terms acquire most of their meaning from the function they serve as vehicles for thinking and speaking about abstractions, their utility trumps their historicity.

Salafism is a different case. Although scholars have now used the term as an analytical category for nearly a hundred years, the underlying justification has always been that salafiyya is a legitimate and appropriate label because it is indigenous to the Islamic tradition. Implicit in this reasoning is that the term must have one or more indigenous meanings, which scholars should try to retrieve rather than create. As should be obvious by now, the idea that salafiyya emerged as a distinct religious orientation when Muslim scholars and activists started using the terms Salafi and Salafism is still at the heart of the most serious scholarship on the topic. So even if one claims to use Salafism as a mere analytical tool (or etic term, in anthropological jargon), one will inevitably have to circumscribe the meaning of that word by relying on a body of secondary literature that considers Salafism to be an indigenous category (or emic term). Although I disagree with the various narratives of origins found in the secondary literature, I agree that the relationship between an allegedly indigenous concept and the word by which it is known deserves close attention.

Of course, this approach has its limits. It is true that focusing on the conscious formulation of Salafism poses another potential danger, “which is to discard all historical descriptions of conceptual developments if they are not coupled with linguistic ones.” But here the historian must exercise discretion, and in the present case, I believe that discarding non-linguistic conceptual developments is an acceptable price to pay for the much-needed demythologization of Salafism. Contemporary Salafis sometimes contend that their historical heroes did not need to discuss the concept of Salafism or to identify themselves as Salafis in order to be Salafis. That may well be the case, but such logic leads us nowhere. The issue is not the purported nature and origin of Salafism but its actual construction as a concept for asserting claims about Islamic thought and activism. Considering the current state of confusion, there is little academic benefit to be gained by presuming that the concept existed before the word. No doubt many intellectual features of what is today known as Salafism have existed since the medieval period, but this is tangential to the question of how and why a particular conceptual framework developed. We must acknowledge that the conceptualization of Salafism is itself the product of a historical process that deserves to be examined.

 [Excerpted from The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century, by permission of the author (c) 2016.] 

 

[1] Bernard Haykel, “On the Nature of Salafi Thought and Action,” in Global Salafism: Islam’s New Religious Movement, ed. Roel Meijer (London: Hurst & Co., 2009), 34.
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Sep 19, 2016 Lebanon
Madawi Al-Rasheed By :
Madawi Al-Rasheed

New Texts Out Now: Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle Over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia

Madawi Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (Hurst and Oxford University Press, 2015).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Madawi Al-Rasheed (MA): My interest in Islam and politics in Saudi Arabia has been ongoing for a couple of decades. The project engaging this focus started with a historical account about how the relationship gave birth to several attempts to create a state. From history, I moved to a more social science approach to look at the contemporary period. Most observers of Saudi politics assume that Wahhabiyya, the eighteenth century religious movement, was simply a pretext to establish the Al-Saud rule and grant them Islamic legitimacy. While this is taken for granted, I wanted to go beyond this and investigate how religion and state are often two totalizing regimes that do not have a smooth relationship. In a previous book, I examined the fragmentation of Wahhabiyya under state control, which led to the emergence of radical Jihadi trends, often in conflict and cooperation with the state. I identified three modus operandi between the two sides of the relationship: cooperation, appeasement and repression.

Muted Modernists was related to the Arab uprisings and their impact on Saudi Arabia. I wanted to engage with a relatively new intellectual mutation among Saudi Islamists and non-Islamists, namely the emergence of a modernist intellectual trend. This trend is labelled asrani (contemporarians), or tanwiri (enlightened). I use the term modernist to analyze the discourse and strategies of a limited number of `ulama, activists and intellectuals who are stretching the limits of interpretation of foundational Islamic texts in order to promote new thinking about politics and society.

The immediate trigger for writing the book was a very sad story. In 2012, Sulayman al-Rushoudi, an eighty-year-old human right activist and judge in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. According to Amnesty International, “he was convicted on charges including possessing banned articles by Professor Madawi Al-Rasheed, an academic at a UK university.” I felt a strong responsibility to understand why a Salafi judge was reading my articles and I hoped that my book will contribute to documenting the struggle of many activists who became known as the Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights (ACPRA) or HASM in Arabic.   

J:  What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MA: The book focuses on two main issues: a) the discourses that inspired the emergence of a civil and political rights movement. This included the intellectual productions of `ulama such as Salman al-Awdah and Islamist intellectuals such as Abdullah al-Hamid, and Muhamamd al-Ahmari. They were all concerned with a central question: how to establish al-dawla al-madaniyya, civil state. I also looked into the intellectual production of a younger generation of Saudi Islamist intellectuals such as Abdullah al-Maliki and Muhammad al-Abd al-Karim, both were concerned with the question of how to apply sharia and how to deconstruct the religious roots of authoritarian government. Both are critics of the Islamist movement in Saudi Arabia, although they are both a product of it.  I also wanted to map the activism of those who acted on the ideas and put them into practice. So I examined the activism of HASM and the plight of their founders and followers. By doing this I combined my intellectual history with a social scientific focus on experiences and practices.

I interviewed activists and also followed their trials in court. I found Saudi courts transformed into a theatrical performance where the discourse on human rights, civil society and democracy became strong with followers tweeting about the events and sending messages from the floor. Saudi Arabia has never seen anything like this but social media allowed this to happen. The official press had to respond and name activists and report on their trials, something that had never been on the agenda. 

I engage with the vast theoretical literature on Islamism in both the social sciences and the humanities (religious studies). I also try to critically assess the Western tradition that gave rise to the social sciences especially that which deals with religion. Our categories are sometimes not so helpful when it comes to studying Muslim society, with Islam and Muslims are still accused of being resistant to secularization. I am very skeptical about such essentialist approaches and I hope my book contributes to revising and refining such assertions.  

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MA: It was refreshing to embark on this project because I began to explore how, from within Islamic tradition, we come across serious attempts to find solutions to urgent problems that occupy people in the Arab world. My interlocutors are all a product of the Saudi Salafi-Wahhabi context, yet each one tried to infuse the tradition with modern concepts such as civil society, just government, human rights, and many other global concerns. I found a hybrid discourse that engages with Western intellectual tradition and also Arab modernist thought. While most people still believe that Saudi Arabia has only exported a radical religious tradition, namely Salafi Jihadi ideology, I found that Saudis themselves are influenced by a world intellectual heritage and history. The novelty of this research within the Saudi context was a refreshing departure from the bigoted and misogynist fatwas and opinions that I had worked on in my previous books. After writing the book, I was shocked by how threatening these modernists can be from the perspective of the Saudi government. Most of them are still in prison serving ten to fifteen years in prison, followed by bans on any travel after their release. I realized how governments oppress the most peaceful thinkers and activists, both called for peaceful mobilization, dubbed as civil Jihad, and criticized those who want to apply sharia by force after the Arab uprisings. I came to the conclusion that those modernists are more threatening than violent Jihadis, as far as government is concerned. The government does not need to justify shooting Jihadis and in fact gets the full support of society when it prevents their violence. However, peaceful activists are a different category; they provide a peaceful way out of persistent authoritarianism, and may precipitate a social movement against oppression. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MA: As all academic books, the first audience is probably the academic community of scholars and students in Middle East Studies, Religious Studies, and the social sciences. But I wrote the book in such a way to make it accessible to a wide audience, for example NGOs, policy makers, journalists and the general public. I hope the book is translated into Arabic so that it can reach an even wider audience.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MA: After the fall of several Arab presidents, some scholars began to theorize why only the Arab republics experienced severe upheavals that led to toppling presidents while monarchies are considered by some as innately immune from such upheaval. This concern increased after the Arab uprisings and started building on an earlier political science literature about the resilience of Arab monarchies. When the findings of this important literature is appropriated by Think Tank consultants and lobbyists they become hostage to other agendas, trying to project Arab monarchies, especially GCC states as islands of stability in a turbulent Arab sea. Now monarchy is reinvented as a stable, caring and not so oppressive political configuration, unlike the nasty republics of the Arab world. I want to engage in this literature and test its application on the Saudi case. I have already published working paper to see whether I am on the right path to pursue this project. 

 Excerpt from Chapter One:

The Arab uprisings pushed many reformers to start a second round of petitions, hoping that the king would respond under the pressure of the turbulence in the region.

In February 2011, several new petitions were circulated online, calling for political reform. The regime moved very quickly to censor the sites but hundreds of new young activists and old reformers whose names had been associated with previous political mobilisation rushed to circulate them and increase the number of signatories.  Three petitions were focused on political reform and youth issues, and a fourth one had obvious traditional Salafi orientation.

The first 2011 petition called ‘The Declaration of National Reform’ demanded the gradual evolution of the regime to constitutional monarchy echoing earlier petitions in 2004. The 119 signatories aspired towards a federal political system that would free the various Saudi regions from Riyadh’s centralised political and administrative control. Those who prepared the petition clearly reflected fears that in light of the Egyptian revolution, the Sunni Islamist opposition, especially that based in London and the new ones emerging in Saudi Arabia, would take the initiative and dominate the Saudi street. The petition was counted as a liberal document calling for gradual political reform.

The petition contained twelve points demanding fundamental political, economic, social and judicial reforms. It insisted on the urgency of implementing the rule of law, equality, the protection of civil and human rights, political participation, equitable development, eradication of poverty and corruption, and national election to an assembly. Most importantly, petitioners wanted a written constitution, real independent civil society, and elected local government in the provinces. While the first demand was not knew, the second indicated that in the minds of the reformers the existing organisations such as the government appointed human right associations are simply bureaucratic governmental agencies. The third demand indicated that regional autonomy is desired, especially after corruption scandals related to land development and confiscation, in addition to mismanagement of development projects led to serious flooding and deaths in several Saudi cities. In February 2011, Jeddah was the most affected by flooding resulting in rainwater and sewage creating stagnating lakes where ten people drowned and hundreds of houses were swept away. The petition concluded by asking the king to announce his intention to start political reform, release all prisoners of conscience from prison, lift the ban on travel imposed on reformers, and reinstate freedom of expression.

Immediately after this petition, a second document was released in February 2011, this time reiterating commitment to Islamic principles and without openly calling for constitutional monarchy or regional government. This petition was the work of Islamist reformers who wanted to avoid the controversial “constitutional monarchy” in order to appeal to a wider circle among those associated with the Islamic Awakening. The new petition entitled nahwa dawlat al-huquq wa al- muasasat, “Towards a State of Rights and Institutions” asked for an elected national assembly, separation between the office of king and prime minister, end to administrative corruption, freedom of speech, independent associations, release of all political prisoners, and lifting the ban on travel imposed on activists. Within days, this petition attracted over 9000 signatories, thus reflecting a growing Islamist trend that is equally calling for political reform with specific demands. The wide circle of signatories reflected a strong Islamist constituency and included famous Sahwi names such as sheikh Salman al-Awdah, judge Suleiman al-Rushoudi, Muhammad al-Ahmari and Abdullah al-Maliki, discussed later in this book. This petition was the first in Saudi recent times to move beyond important activists and reach a large number of ordinary Saudis. The petition benefitted from online activism that made it accessible to people despite government efforts to censor the sites on which it was posted. The two petitions were clearly the work of well-established activists, intellectuals and religious scholars.

However, a third call originated in 2011 among unknown youth and was certainly triggered by the Arab uprisings.  A long document entitled matalib al-shabab al-saoudi, (Demands of the Saudi Youth) attracted more than 10,000 signatories and included 14 points. This detailed petition focused on concrete economic and political demands. The youth introduced themselves as educated voices belonging to various Saudi provinces. They claimed that their demands reflect those of the majority of youth. The petition requested the government to deal with unemployment as a matter of urgency, and increase unemployment benefits to 5000SR and minimum wage to 7000SR. Housing, inflation, and supporting the private sector were considered a priority to empower the youth. On political reform, the petitioners demanded lifting the ban on independent associations, reforming the judiciary, and freeing political prisoners. They also demanded an elected national assembly that would form future governments and elected provincial local councils in ways that return local government to the people.  Empowering women, reforming the educational system and eradicating crimes that undermine social security were also mentioned.

In contrast to the above mentioned three petitions, signed by a mixture of lay reformers, religious scholars, and youth activists, a forth petition called bayan dawah lil-islah (Call for Reform), was predominantly signed by sixty five Salafi religious scholars including famous Sahwi Salafi sheikh Nasir al-Omar. The petition was framed as traditional nasiha, advice to the ruler and reminded the Saudi leadership of the pact between the founder of the first Saudi state, Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth century founder of Wahhabiyya. The demands centred on fighting corruption, freeing political prisoners, dealing with unemployment, protecting property and lives, and ridding Saudi media of secularists and those who corrupt public and private morality.  Unlike the previous petitions, this overtly Salafi document does not call for major transformation of the Saudi state into a constitutional monarchy or national elections. Moreover, it is concerned with returning the Saudi polity to the original model of the first Saudi state, established in the eighteenth century and the alliance between the Wahhabi founder and the Saudi rulers. The petition clearly considers the current state to have deviated from applying sharia as it introduced new laws and decrees, all considered to have deviated from the historical Saudi-Wahhabi state model of the eighteenth century and calls upon the leadership to honour its commitment to Islamic principles.

While the above petitions and online activism were primarily concerned with local Saudi issues, regional concerns were expressed in a new document that denounced the removal of elected Egyptian President Muhammad Morsi by the military in July 2013. The petition ‘Saudi Intellectual Support for the Egyptian People’ attracted 1700 signatories. It was meant to denounce Saudi government’s alleged intervention to remove the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood from power. While the petition did not mention the Saudi government by name, it clearly stated that it denounces foreign intervention in local Egyptian affairs. After the Egyptian coup in July 2013, the Saudi government offered generous economic subsidies to the Egyptian military that ousted Morsi.

The petition started by citing Quranic verses encouraging believers to lend each other mutual support and cooperation. In this spirit, the petitioners insisted that the Saudi people respect the legitimate elected Egyptian government, denounce shedding the blood of anti-coup protestors, reject foreign governments’ intervention in Egypt, support the protestors in Rabaa Square where Muslim Brotherhood activists gathered, and condemn the suppression of freedom of speech in Egypt following the coup. After the circulation of this petition, the Saudi authorities called several Islamist activists, including well-known sheikh Muhsin al-Awaji, who was believed to be one of the main organisers of the petition, and Muhammad al-Oraifi known for his support for the ousted Egyptian government for questioning. The latter was banned from travelling to Qatar to deliver sermons and al-Awaji was released after several days in prison.

It is worth mentioning that all petitions invoked the Arab uprisings as the context that should encourage the leadership towards implementing serious political reform. With the exception of the Salafi petition and the petition concerned with Egyptian matters, the documents included a list of political and economic demands that had already been articulated in the first round of post 11 September petitions. The petitions did not call for the overthrow of the regime but they pointed to serious shortcomings and disappointment with the government. Nowhere was there a call in these petitions for peaceful demonstrations along those that had already started in Arab capitals. The authors and signatories made sure that opposition outside Saudi Arabia was not openly involved in the preparation of the documents in order to avoid direct confrontation with the regime. In private conversation with many reformists, it was clear that they refrained from taking a radical stance to avoid arrest and accusations of causing chaos and coordinating their efforts with ‘outside agents’. Signatories insisted on previous reform agendas expressed throughout 2003-8 and pledged allegiance to the Saudi king. In fact most of the activists were either well-known old veterans of reform such as Muhammad Said al-Tayib and Abdullah al-Hamid, or new shabab, young netizens, who played an important role in organising the dissemination of the petitions and publicity on Facebook and Twitter.