Lewis Atiyat Allah is but one activist who aspires towards reformulating modernity according to his own principles. Other Saudis are eqully concerned with the same questions that torment Lewis, but their preoccupation may differ in its focus and strategy. Yet they all have one common denominator: the search for the unmediated word of God. This search is at the heart of the Saudi debate in the twenty-first century.

Previous chapters demonstrated thatofficial ʿulama, Sahwis and Jihadis are engaged in fierce intellectual battles over religious interpretation. None of these battles is likelyto go as far as openly challenging the religious discourse of the ancestor, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, or the heritage of aimat al-da ʿwa al-najdiyya. However, contesting this heritage – or at least the way it is practised, applied and interpreted by official scholars – is an ongoing intellectual preoccupation.

Traditional Saudi ʿulama regard themselves as theintellectual heirs of the reformer's heritage and as the only true Muslims. Both dissident Sahwis and Jihadis consider many contemporary official ʿulama to be latecomers who corrupted the initial original message of the reformer under the patronage of the Saudi regime. They both aspire to free religious interpretation from their monopoly. This position was particularly clear among those described previously as Salafi–Ikhwani and Jihadis. Yet not many activists openly scrutinise the interpretations of the ancestor. If they have minor reservations about the eighteenth-century message, they remain silent in the public sphere.

Official Wahhabiyya created consenting subjects. Wealth allowed the Saudi regime to consolidate aspects of religion in the public sphere while pursuing gradual but determined political secularisation. Saudi society and the public sphere were ‘Islamised’ while politics and the modern state remained an autonomous field beyond the reach of most senior religiousscholars. Official ʿulama developed a discourse that sanctioned thisschism. The Wahhabi tradition described in the last chapter ensured that politics remained in the hands of those who claim to know people's interest. The guiding principle was – and still is – ʿal-hukam aʿlam bi almaslaha' (the rulers know the public good). Official Wahhabi scholars removed not only themselves but the rest of society from political matters. They prohibited engagement in public affairs. Their religious discourse, especially that which confirmed the potential corruption and blasphemyof the umma, reinforced the marginalisation of the public and their exclusion from the political decision-making process. Under the banner of the state, official Wahhabiyya refined and consolidated a religious discourse that disenfranchised society and disenchanted politics.

This book is an ethnography of consent and contestation. It is about contemporary Saudis who debate politics and religion. Outsiders often refer to Saudis as Wahhabis or Salafis, but in the twenty-first century Saudis themselves no longer agree on the meaning of these terms and many do not accept their validity. Most Saudis believe that there is no separation between religion and politics at the level of public discourse. Yet the majority agree that in practice there is a separation between the professed religious rhetoric of the state, on the one hand, and the reality of political practice, on the other. Calls for the reformation of state and society always invoke religion and politics together in a single framework. This book focuseson what I call Wahhabi religio-political discourse, the sum total of interpretations that draw on religion to comprehend, justify, sanction or challenge politics. This discourse is rooted in the Wahhabi tradition and the intellectual heritage of its 'ulama. Wahhabi interpretations are the dominant intellectual reference point.

Some scholars claim that authoritarianism generates conceptual impotence. Others argue that authoritarian rule produces development outcomes that are either very good or very bad. In the Saudi case, authoritarianism has generated consenting subjects, incomplete projects, diverted journeys, betrayal and opportunism – but not intellectual impotence. Saudi authoritarianism has led to consent and confrontation at the same time. The regime, together with a mushrooming religious bureaucracy, created a world that insisted on complete submission to political authority while preaching total submission to God.

Lewis Atiyat Allah is a Saudi intellectual and Islamist activist, who has taken refuge in the bulletin and discussion forums of the internet because his message is today subject to censorship. He is also an al-Qaʾida supporter who has been forced to go underground. Lewis came to prominence under this pseudonym after 11 September, an event that precipitated a substantial schism within the Saudi Salafi scene. Since then, Lewis's articles, commentaries on current events and evaluations of the Saudi regime have appeared in several well-known Saudi internet websites and discussion boards. Lewis also had his own website, which was closed down by the hosting company for security reasons. It is more than likely that the virtual Lewis is currently known by his real name in the real world; he may well be a public figure. However, for fear of persecution and arrest in the country where helives, he chose an unusual pseudonym: a Christian first name, followed by a Muslim surname.

We can only speculate on why this character chose a rather unusual nom de plume.

In the twenty-first century, Saudi society is struggling over religious interpretation, which seems to be at the heart of political activism. As the struggle unfolds, it is accompanied by strife among various groups and confrontation between those groups and the state. Traditional ʿulama, Sahwi sheikhs, Jihadis and laymen debate religious interpretations; not all subscribe to non-violent dialogue. Since 1990 violence has become the dark side of the Saudi religio-political debate. Various contestants challenge each other in a desperate attempt to control interpretations of religious discourse. The debate intensi.ed after 11 September.

With American military power closing the gates of jihad in Afghanistan following the demise of the Taliban regime in 2001, the struggle of Saudis for the way of God came home. Many Saudi Jihadis who travelled for the second time to Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had lived between 1996 and 2001, returned to Saudi Arabia. After the toppling of the Taliban, the dismantling of al-Qaʾida training camps and the arrest or flight of Saudi trainees, it seemed to many observers that the War on Terror, led by the USA and a number of supporting countries, was proving successful. Yet several countries in the region experienced waves of violence.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Wahhabi chronicles claimed that the message of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–92) in Deriyyah aimed to revive religion by returning to the Quran, Sunna and the tradition of the pious ancestors. While the sheikh and his followers never accepted the label Wahhabis, they considered themselves to be ahl al-sunna wa ʾl-jama ʿa (people of tradition and community), or ahl al-tawhid (al-muwahhidun: the people of monotheism). In contemporary scholarship, they represent one of the Salafi trends within Sunni Islam. The return to the tradition of the pious ancestors was meant to remove religious innovations, and applythe shariʿa at a timewhen the population of Arabia was believed to have degenerated into blasphemy, corrupt religious practices and laxity. This allegedly took place mainly under Ottoman rule, whose religious traditions, particularly Sufism, incorporated interpretations and practices consideredoutside the realm of true Islam. The rhetoric of the return to the pious ancestorsand the sacred text, in addition to rejecting madhahib (schools of jurisprudence), allows Wahhabiyya to be counted as a Salafi movement.

Wahhabiyya painted an image of Arabia as the land of blasphemy and savagery.

In this study, I have examined the inclusion-moderation hypothesis – the idea that political actors included in pluralist processes become more moderate as a result of that inclusion – through a structured comparative study of two Islamist groups and find that the IAF in Jordan has become more moderate over time, while the Islah party in Yemen has not. The evidence from party documents, internal party debates, interviews, and evolving party practices suggests that the ideology of the IAF has indeed evolved from a relatively closed worldview to one that is more pluralist and tolerant of alternative perspectives. I do not claim that the IAF or Muslim Brotherhood are fully committed to liberal democratic norms and practices, but I do argue that the party has become ideologically more moderate – in the sense of being relatively more open and tolerant of alternative perspectives – than it had been prior to the 1989 political opening. In Yemen, the Islah party has not changed in a similar manner. In this chapter, I highlight several insights on democratization and moderation that emerged from this comparative study and then briefly review the three factors that explain the variation between the IAF and the Islah party. Finally, I situate these two political parties within a larger context of Islamist politics in both countries.

One observation is that much of the literature on democratization in the Middle East adopts the teleological language of the transitions literature, so we tend to emphasize progress toward democracy and use the language of stalled or failed transitions.

How do limited political openings restructure public political space, even when transition processes seem to have stalled? As argued in Chapter 2, regimes use highly controlled political openings to undermine the power of political challengers by steering them toward particular modes and channels of contestation. This form of political coercion may be accomplished through a variety of mechanisms, most obviously through such state-regulated apparatuses as legal channels of political participation and the judicial system. For example, state actors may prohibit certain targeted groups from adopting legal institutional forms (e.g., Islamist groups in Egypt, Tunisia, and Turkey, which are not permitted to form political parties) or render certain modes of political contestation illegal (e.g., publicly questioning state policy in Syria or Saddam's Iraq, or criticizing “friendly” governments in Jordan). Regimes may erect administrative obstacles such as elaborate processes to obtain required permits, or they may fail to process such permits in a timely manner. Political elite may even deem certain ideas subversive and seek to quash those debates entirely. The governments of Egypt and Syria, for example, have at times rendered political opposition organized on the basis of Islamic principles outside the boundaries of acceptable issues for public political debate (Moaddell 2002). Likewise, Leftist narratives historically have been repressed through a variety of mechanisms in countries as diverse as Jordan, Iran, Mexico, Northern Ireland, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Yemen.

Central to the inclusion-moderation hypothesis is the idea that when given the opportunity to participate in pluralist, democratic processes, political actors will, through some combination of experience, constraint, and learning, come to see the logic of continued participation. As a result, they will also become more moderate as they embrace democratic norms and practices. As argued in Chapter 1, this basic idea has a long history in a wide range of scholarly literature. But the lack of empirical evidence and a clearly specified mechanism for change seems discouraging for the inclusion-moderation hypothesis. Groups facing similar institutional constraints and incentives, for example, may not all become more moderate. Even more, how can we resolve the paradox of democracy, that is, identify when a group is feigning moderation and when it has become truly committed to democratic and pluralist practices? In this chapter, I present a framework for explaining why similar actors participating in similar processes will not necessarily become moderate, or moderate in the same way. Contrary to much of the literature, the institutional constraints of political openings are not a sufficient mechanism to produce moderation. And contrary to the literature on political learning, the accumulation of experiences does not tell us why some actors become moderate and others, gaining the same experience, do not. While I do not dispute the importance of these mechanisms, I focus on identifying changing boundaries of justifiable action and their implications for moderation.