Power and Anxiety in the Kingdom

Abstract

This book uses previously unexamined archival records to narrate the Wahhābī clergy’s role in shaping Saudi Arabia from the modern state’s founding to the Bin Salman era. Across four chapters spanning roughly 1924 through 1948, the book maps the clergy’s exercise of their traditional legal and advisory authorities in service to the fledgling Saudi monarchy. It argues that the clergy were particularly powerful and effective in this era because they possessed deep comfort with Islamic law and knew how to wield it in a traditional Muslim state context. Across the next five chapters, which span from the post-war period to the lip of the twenty-first century, the book documents the transformation in the clergy’s relations with the court as they expand their bureaucratic control yet lose their monopoly on social and political authority to other actors both inside and outside of the Saudi system. In the post-war period, as the Saudi clergy found themselves fighting for budgets, recognition, and respect, they grew increasingly dissatisfied with their diminished authority in the kingdom. In a postscript, the book examines the global ramifications of the clergy’s slow decline, including the rise of jihadist groups like al-Qaeda and ISIS, which shook the kingdom and pushed it to change its religious culture, a process accelerated by Muhammad Bin Salman.