Geopolitics and Reforms in Saudi Arabia: Muhammad Bin Salman’s Quest for Legitimacy and Power

The Saudi Crown Prince, who as the defence minister of the country launched a military
campaign against Shi‘ite Houthi rebels in March, 2015, has been upbeat in confronting the
enemies of the kingdom, and determined to re-invent the legitimacy of the Saudi monarchical
rule, after it managed to survive the political shockwaves of Arab uprisings. In a major global
investment event in Riyadh, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS) made headlines when he argued
that the ‘Saudis want to return to a moderate Islam that had existed in the country prior to
1979.’ His statement that it was since 1979, the year of the Islamic Revolution in Iran that the
contagion of extremism emerged and spread in the region was in keeping with the kingdom’s
strategy of portraying the Islamic Republic of Iran as a destabilising power promoting
extremist ideas in the region, while projecting Saudi Arabia as a stabilising force and a
valuable Western ally in the fight against terrorism. However the Crown Prince’s ‘historical
words’ about return to ‘moderate Islam’ seem misleading since the very foundation of Saudi
rule is entwined with Wahhabism, the ultraconservative Islam which has been intolerant if
not downright hostile towards Shi‘ites.
Madawi-al Rasheed, a Saudi scholar based in London School of Economics argues, “it is the
combination of da‘wa (call) and dawla (state) which defines statist Wahhabiyya in Saudi
Arabia. The state expanded in Arabia under the pretext of purifying faith from innovation and
applying Islamic law.” Wahhabism, a legalistic and conservative form of Islam has been
exclusivist and anti-Shi‘ite from the outset and has as such formed the worldview of the
kingdom. The blaming of Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood for spreading extremism in the
region, and idealising Saudi society before 1979 as an apostle of moderate Islam by the
Crown Prince – whose kingdom leads the conservative, counter-revolutionary bloc – is part
of a wider post-Arab uprising strategy of reviving the legitimacy of Saudi monarchy as a
force for moderation and social progress, while cracking down on the Muslim Brotherhood
and the Sahwa movement opposed to Saudi authoritarianism and state-affiliated religious
establishment. The Kingdom played a key role in overthrowing the Muslim Brotherhood
government in Egypt and in order to crackdown upon Saudi Islamists who have ideological
sympathy for MB, designated the organisation a terrorist group. The Crown Prince,
emboldened by Trump’s support has taken the push against Muslim Brotherhood further by
confronting its GCC neighbour Qatar, which has hosted the group’s leadership after it left
from Syria.
It must be noted that socio-economic reforms led by MBS are not engaging the home-grown
movement for greater freedom and civil liberties; instead the objective is to legitimise
authoritarian centralisation of power into his own hands. By pledging the kingdom’s ‘return
to moderate Islam,’ and destroying extremist ideas at once, the Crown Prince has got a ticket
to root out religious opposition and repress his domestic critics. Simultaneously announcing a
brand-new futuristic city at an event dubbed as ‘Davos in Desert’ by the western media,
Muhammad Bin Salam – colloquially called MBS – was seeking an image makeover of the
kingdom as the symbol of 21 st century technological achievement and re-develop its identity
in terms of a socially progressive society. Talking to a global audience, the American

educated Saudi hosts projected a new image of Saudi Arabia – demographically young,
vibrant, dynamic and changing. An effusive western media has hailed MBS as beacon of
change, a Saudi Gorbachev, overseeing tectonic changes while grappling with domestic
opposition to reforms. According to the proponents of reforms, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,
owing to its strategic location and the leading Arabic and Islamic role it has played over the
past decades, would now assume a new role of the powerhouse of investment and growth in
the region.
Saudi Arabia under King Salman and his protégé Muhmmad Bin Salman has embarked on a
twin strategy of taking on the role of Middle East ‘policeman,’ leading a conservative
military alliance of Islamic countries – a bulwark against domestic uprisings and Iranian
geopolitical ascendancy – in the name of combatting terrorism, while also spearheading a
process of economic and social reforms in the kingdom with the intention of rooting out the
conditions that allow domestic opposition and externally supported insurgencies to fester.
Since the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Saudi Arabia has sought to carve a greater
regional role for itself on the pretext of countering Iranian regional influence while turning
sectarian divide into a geopolitical fault-line, a strategy which resonated with most Sunni
Arab rulers in the region. This sectarian discourse was further propagated by Sunni Arab
regimes as a counter-revolutionary strategy to at once delegitimize popular uprisings as
manipulation of religious sentiments of minorities by Iran and to justify the state’s use of
force and other repressive measures against the population. Given that Iran, because of the
key role it has played in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria has gained enormous
influence in the Arab world, Saudi kingdom seems to be once again redefining its historical
cultural identity as the basis of its geopolitical strategy. The discourse about return to
‘moderate Islam’ and the signs of rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iraq, manifested
in the meeting between Saudi King and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi at the behest of
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson indicate that MBS’s new geopolitical gambit to
counterbalance Iran might be centred on reviving Arab solidarity rather than Sunni Islam.
Additionally, MBS has successfully used a confrontational geopolitics as a smokescreen to
eject his rivals in the Saudi royal power-play, consolidate his hold on the kingdom’s security
apparatus and mobilise public sentiment in his favour. Despite the ongoing debacle Saudi
intervention in Yemen and with the United States backing diplomatic resolution of blockade
against Qatar, it looks certain that MBS is going to rule a regionally assertive Saudi Arabia
leading the American efforts of rolling back Iranian influence in the Arab world and
reconfiguring the balance of power in the region.
Deepika Saraswat
12/3/2017