The chapter discusses how Islamic charity has functioned as an umbrella that granted legitimacy to all kinds of youth practices in contemporary Saudi Arabia. Charity here emerges as lifestyle and liberty, as a safe space that has allowed Saudi youth to test the boundaries, experiment with lifestyles, and enjoy sociability and autonomy outside of the family.

At the heart of the chapter are the Hikers, an informal organization that began in 2010 by promoting hiking, sports, and cultural events for a social cause. Like many youth initiatives at the time, it reflected a wish to bring about change and to be part of broader societal change to which it was contributing. Despite the group’s apolitical character, this public orientation put them at risk of surveillance and intervention. The "Third Sector" has become an integral part of the new political agenda of King Salman’s government. The chapter explores the ways in which the Saudi state has increasingly regulated and monitored civil society activism, through new institutions and legislation passed over the last decade, in the name of promoting the "Third Sector" in Saudi Arabia.

This chapter examines the relationships between volunteerism and religion, between youth activism and Islamic charity. During the reign of King ʿAbdallah, informal groups that advocated volunteering flourished among youth in Saudi Arabia. The rise of youth activism in Saudi Arabia is tied to the rise of social media.

At the heart of this chapter is the Young Initiative Group (YIG), an informal organization that grew out of the efforts of youth who distributed meals during Ramadan 2009. The chapter explores how the YIG negotiated alternative forms of belonging and community through charity work. The YIG embedded its volunteering practices within the religious obligation of alms and compassion for the needy. The group’s community approach was rooted in an Islamic ethics of care. This appeared to be both a reflection of the personal religiosity of some of its founders and strategic positioning vis-à-vis the authorities, given the initiative’s lack of legal status. The YIG’s rhetorical emphasis on family-like relations among volunteers, together with a critique of consumption patterns and references to Islamic norms of benevolence, created an apolitical profile of a group that promoted social reform.

The final chapter summarizes the major findings of the book along two perspectives.

First, the book shows that the study of civil society under authoritarianism needs to take a bottom-up approach that pays attention to local issues and gives a voice to the people engaged for the public good and for the local community. At its heart, the debate about civil society in Saudi Arabia is about the difference between agency and sovereignty. Saudi Arabia is a country in which the population profoundly lacks popular sovereignty. Yet ordinary men and women in Saudi Arabia – young and old; social activists, philanthropists, and social workers; Saudis and non-Saudis – do have agency.

Second, the analysis shows that where the public social welfare system of the state has failed or systematically excluded specific segments of the population, charity organizations have tried to meet some of the needs of marginalized groups. Sometimes this transgresses the policies set down by the state; sometimes they complement or occasionally work together with the state. The meaning of charity has been subject to debate and scrutiny. Charity is a constantly evolving, contested field, in which numerous actors engage – often highly critical of each other and with competing approaches.

The Majid Society, at the heart of this chapter, aspires to offer development. The development approach has not, however, replaced a religious culture of aid. Instead, the chapter explores how development can be expressed through the language of Islam and financed through Islamic charity. The chapter explores the organization’s training facility, the “productive families” approach, a program tackling illiteracy among mothers, and the use of microcredit schemes, all of which the Majid Society directed at female beneficiaries of aid.

The welfare association was established in 1998 at the initiative of Prince Majid bin ʿAbd al-ʿAziz (1938–2003). This raises the question of how far royal charity organizations can be considered part of Saudi civil society. With a focus on national development and capacity building, the Majid Society resonates strongly with the public discourse of poverty as initiated and moderated by the Saudi state. The chapter critically looks at state approaches to poverty and how the Saudi state has come to dictate the ways poverty is discussed in public. This raises the question of how far charity organizations act in support of the state, complementing state efforts rather than challenging the status quo.

On the eve of victory in the 1979 revolution, Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamists followers discussed blueprints for a new system of Islamic government. Integral to these plans was an emphasis on the new institutions of Islamic shura (local councils) to replace the secular anjumans (local associations) that existed in town and cities. The chapter details Khomeini’s call to establish elected local government in early 1979, months before the new constitution delineating the shape of the new state had been ratified, indicating the significance of the shura. I examine the tensions between the competing visions of shura within the theocratic Islamist camp, by contrasting the views of Khomeini and Mahmoud Taleghani. This chapter also discusses the aborted attempt to hold the first local government elections in the fall of 1979, a factor contributing to the new regime’s reluctance to decentralize government for another decade and a half. The chapter details the multiple and conflicting perspectives on shura during the deliberations leading to the first constitution. The ratified constitution subordinated local and national government (shura and the Majles) to the velayat-e faqih and established a settlement that shaped and constrained the future possibilities and limitations of decentralization in the ensuing decades up to the present day.

Chapter 2 describes the launching of the first nationwide local government elections amidst political contention in 1999 in Tehran, Khorasan, Fars, and Kurdistan and the institutionalization of elected local government within the parameters of the velayi regime. The chapter documents the rapid institutionalization of the new city councils throughout the country and in cities of different sizes. It reports on the impressive efforts of newly elected local representatives to carry out their new responsibilities within the limited legal powers afforded the new councils as well as depending on the social capital and trust of the local societies. Tehran City Council, for example, was initially marred by turmoil and dissolved by the central government, but stabilized over time. It has been an important bellwether of political trends elsewhere. The chapter documents the frustration of many councilors with what they perceived to be the narrow range of local powers defined by the local government law, patterns that would remain in place, part of the success of electoral authoritarianism in Iran.

Chapter 1 describes the motivations of the Islamists, who crafted what became the 1996 Local Councils Law. In the face of protests and riots in the nation’s cities, Islamist lawmakers in the fourth Islamic Majles (1992–1996) turned to political decentralization to address poorly managed urbanization and local governance as a way of easing economic stresses among lower economic classes that had spurred unrest. The chapter explores the 1996 Local Councils Law in detail, including the structure and the responsibilities of elected local government comprising three institutions: the elected Islamic city council (shura-ye eslami shahr), the mayor (shahrdar), and the municipal bureaucracy (shahrdari). The chapter goes on to explain the institutional design and structure of elected local government and its place in the intergovernmental system resulting from the decentralization reforms. It highlights the tension between two parallel vertical systems of hierarchical governance, between the top-down appointed system bureaucratic hierarchy and the bottom-up. The contradiction between the two systems results from the tension between two counterpoised systems of upward and downward accountability.