In the study of Saudi Arabia many scholars discuss and analyze the economic, social, and political effects of oil, but they say curiously little about the place of oil in Saudi political debates and discourse. Lying at the core of the dramatic transformation that the country has witnessed since the mid-twentieth century, oil has not been analyzed in the ways the commodity itself is invoked and used by the state to garner legitimacy nor as a topic in contesting the regime by its various critics and opponents. Yet it features prominently in cultural and political debates. Most studies treat oil from the perspective of the political economy, namely, in which ways it structures governance and political life, and more specifically how revenues accruing from its production allow the state to buy social peace through co-optation of dissent and the creation of a generous system of entitlements. What often ensues from such approaches is a discussion of the so-called resource curse that plagues rentier states and whether the price of oil is sufficiently high to enable the state to persist in its entitlement policies or whether a political crisis is in the offing because the price is too low and therefore the entitlements are unsustainable. In other words, the question of the survival and longevity of the Saudi regime is often the central question, and this is invariably tied to the projected reserves and price of oil.

March 11, 2011, was declared on Facebook a “Day of Rage” in Saudi Arabia, in imitation of the various popular uprisings that were taking place throughout the Arab world in the spring of that year. By this time two Arab dictators had fallen in Tunisia and Egypt and unrest was spreading to Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen. Several online petitions also were urging political reform, and some Shiite demonstrations were taking place in the Eastern Province. Many predicted that Saudi Arabia was not immune to revolution and that the regime would succumb to the same forces that had effected change elsewhere. However, no mass protests or mobilizations occurred, and over the following months the Saudi government was able to contain and ward off any significant opposition.

This is not the first time that observers had wrongly predicted the demise of the Al Saud, the royal family that has ruled all or parts of the country since the eighteenth century. In the 1960s, Arab nationalism under the leadership of President Nasser of Egypt was expected to sweep the royals away. Later in 1979, with the Iranian revolution and the uprisings in Mecca and those of the Shiites in the Eastern Province, the Saudis were again given a short lease on life. In the early 1990s, an indigenous Islamist movement called the Sahwa was again challenging the regime. And in the early 2000s al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula stoked fears of instability through a series of violent attacks and muscular propaganda. In each of these cases, the Saudi regime weathered the storm through a complex set of policies and tactics that today are being deployed again.

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.

Introduction

Our knowledge of the political, social and intellectual history of the Ḥijāz and the Yemen during the ‘first’ Ottoman period (c. 923–1218/1517–1803) – that is during the reign of twenty-one sultans, from Selīm I (r. 918–26/1512–20) until the conquest of the Ḥijāz by the Wahhābīs in the reign of Selīm III (r. 1203–22/1789–1807) – remains fragmentary and has to be constituted mostly from primary sources such as local chronicles, biographical dictionaries, travellers’ accounts and the Ottoman and Arabian archives. The secondary literature, on the Ḥijāz in particular, consists of long and detailed lists of discrete events such as battles, floods and the internecine disputes between branches of the local ruling families as well as struggles with Ottoman administrative and military officials. A systematic and analytically informed history of the Sharīfs of Mecca and Medina in the Ottoman period has yet to be written and many lacunae persist. We know very little about the internal politics of the various branches of the family of Sharīfs, their relationships with the Yemeni imāms or the tribes of the Ḥijāz and Najd or even with their Ottoman overlords. We know even less about the social and intellectual history of the two Holy Cities and the tribal hinterland of the Ḥijāz. For instance, the fact that Shīʿī sentiment, and perhaps outright sectarian affiliation, remained predominant among many of the Ḥijāzī tribes (e.g. Ḥarb, Juhayna) until the arrival of the Wahhābīs in the late twelfth/eighteenth century is virtually unknown.