Pragmatic conservatism

The death of Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, the Custodian of the Holy Shrines — the official title of the man who is virtually the king of Saudi Arabia — at the age of 90 on Wednesday, and Salman, governor of Riyadh, being named the new king, should be of concern to policymakers in the country. Unfortunately, news about the premier Muslim kingdom, which is home to Mecca and Medina, two of the most sacred places for the billion plus Muslims in the world, comes from Western sources, which are extremely tainted with ignorance and prejudice. 

Saudi Arabia, the largest producer and exporter of petroleum in the world and crucial American ally in West Asia, occupies a rather ambiguous place in the troubled world of the rising tide of global jihadi terrorism. There is strong suspicion that the Saudi government finances the extremist network and that this was because of the rigid ideological conservatism supposed to be emanating from what is considered puritanical Wahhabism. Saudi conservatism and the Wahhabi dominance are no fictions, but they are partially true at best. The Saudis, with American complicity, used Wahhabism as a tool of realpolitik even as Iran had been using its version of clerical Shi’ism to carve a place for itself on the world stage.

It is within this ideological framework that there is need for India to understand the role played by Abdullah in steering Saudi politics at home and abroad. It is the members of Ibn Saud who remain at the helm ever since the kingdom emerged in 1920 as part of the disintegration of the Ottoman empire. Abdullah and his predecessors are shrewd Arab politicians who never allow religious sentiment to shape policy. Saudi Arabia has emerged a player on the world stage because of the clout provided by petro-wealth. The ruling family modernised the country in terms of infrastructure and trading without shredding the conservative social fabric. Abdullah’s modernisation policies within the country like setting up a state-of-art technological university in Riyadh where boys and girls study together, a radical reform in a traditional country, shows how he was pushing the country towards progress with stability in an incremental fashion.

Abdullah was quite an enthusiast in improving ties with India because he looked at India as a key economy in the emerging world. The close ties between Pakistan and Riyadh did not come in the way of his view of India. Most Indian policymakers, and it is just not the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), look upon Saudi Arabia as a Muslim country which needed to be cultivated because of the more than 150 million Muslims in India. The Saudis never look at India from a Muslim perspective. That is why, the Congress’ misconception that its secular credentials give it an advantage over the Hindu-tinted BJP in reaching out to the Arab and other West Asian countries with their Muslim populations has been based on a false premise. Saudi Arabia has to be considered a Nation-state in its own right, with strategic interests of its own, which clash with fellow Arab states as well its main ideological rival in the region, Shi’ite Iran. Abdullah played his politics in this arena. He had reached out to Iran in recent years with a view to create a regional, and not an Islamic, bloc as many in the Christian West had tried to interpret.

On the face of it, Salman, 79, succeeding Abdullah would appear to remind one of the last days of the Soviet Union when Brezhnev was followed by Andropov and Andropov by Chernenko, all old men, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, until the relatively younger Gorbachev in his 50s stepped in as general secretary of the Communist Part of the Soviet Union. The Saudi ruling establishment is cloaked in secrecy as far as the foreigners are concerned. The truth of the matter is that the Saud family is playing the game of succession well enough. The one who takes over is always the relatively abler one among the many contenders. The family understands that if it chooses a man to lead for sentimental and ideological reasons, then its political power would be endangered. So, for the near future, it will indeed be a rule of gerontocracy, and in traditional Arab societies there is not much premium placed on callow youth. The experience and sagacity that come with age are valued. 

We do not know whether the general discontent simmering in Saudi society will blow away the iron grip of the ruling clique in the coming years and whether there will be the much awaited Arab Spring that was witnessed in Tunisia, Morocco and Egypt in 2011. It looks more likely that Saudi Arabia will remain politically stable for now, and Abdullah’s successor, Salman, will follow a policy of snail-paced social reforms. What holds Saudi Arabia together is economic well-being. There will indeed be problems if the Saudi government fails to provide economic security to its 20 million citizens, and that is likely to happen only when global industrial society ceases to depend on fossil fuels to power its economic engine. The possibility of a fuel-free economy is a few decades away.

Abdullah personified the traditional Arab talent for playing the political game, with its economic implications, with infinite patience and cunning. He was the man who understood the need for change but he had a clear distaste for revolutions and rebels. At one of the cantankerous Arab League meetings around a decade ago, Abdullah was reported to have shot back at the then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who was past his charismatic prime, “There are lies behind you, and the grave before you.” He was also at his pragmatic best while dealing with the prickly Palestinian issue. It can be seen in his offer to Israel to guarantee peace if Tel Aviv were to return territories occupied in the 1967 war. 

He understood and this was made explicit in his words and acts that it is possible to modernise a traditional society like Saudi Arabia through well-honed conservatism, and that there is no compulsion to unthinkingly embrace romantic liberalism.   Abdullah is not alone in thinking so. The bureaucrats of the Communist Part of China have done it in the last 35 years and more. Perhaps there is need to credit the Saud family for having done for 95 years now. As the Chinese rulers have no doctrinal illusions about communist ideology, Saudi rulers are not wedded to any kind of Islamic belief while dealing with the world. The Arabs are well-versed in the art of politics, learned the hard way through their centuries-old inter-tribal rivalries. They are hard and realistic bargainers.

The author is a consulting editor with dna