In response to the Arab Spring uprisings, the Saudi government has taken several unprecedented and rushed decisions that break with its traditional policy approach of cautious deliberation and understatement. These include the following: promising hundreds of billions of riyals to its subjects in the form of various entitlements, vastly expanding the internal security services, massive procurements of weapons systems, calling for a union with Jordan and Morocco as well as a closer union of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, abruptly turning down a seat on the UN Security Council, recalling Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Qatar, pursuing an open proxy war with Iran in Syria and Yemen, mobilizing its armed forces and later displaying these in a grand military parade, and providing unqualified support for the July 2013 military coup in Egypt and then offering billions of dollars in aid to the new regime. Although these decisions have been quite dramatic in terms of speed and purposefulness, perhaps the most politically significant policy has been to declare in March 2014 the Muslim Brotherhood to be an illegal terrorist organization.

As a number of scholars in this volume have shown, the Brotherhood was once a close ally of the Saudi ruling establishment. Saudi Arabia had given safe haven to the Brotherhood since the 1950s, when beginning at that time many of its members staffed the bureaucracy and teaching institutions of the kingdom. The Brotherhood played an important role in projecting Islamism as a countervailing ideology to Arab nationalism and socialism, and in so doing helped fend off the menace posed to Saudi Arabia by these ideologies and their supporters. Yet, over the decades, the Brotherhood’s efforts also produced a politicized generation of Saudi activists and oppositionists.