A-Brief-History-of-Saudi-Arabia

A Brief History of Saudi Arabia
replace the pro-American monarchy with a more authentic, Islamist
government similar to that of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The House of Saud steadily recognized that the religious hard-liners
could no longer be mollified or persuaded to stop their incitement of
the disaffected youths: Al-Qaeda’s supporters and followers were waging
jihad (blessed war) for the heart and soul of Islam, for the control
of the Saudi state, with no compromise. The official Saudi-American
connection is just one in their litany of grievances. Saudi rulers now
believe that neither the withdrawal of American troops from the
kingdom nor the severance of the Saudi-American connection would
appease the religious hard-liners: Nothing short of a change of leadership
in Riyadh will do.
It was against this backdrop that King Abdullah was crowned in
2005. A moderate conservative, he has injected new blood into the
kingdom’s veins and accelerated the process of reform. The new king
intensified the crackdown against al-Qaeda, not only by attempting to
starve it financially, but by denying it theological refuge. He succeeded
in fueling a revolt against al-Qaeda from within, with key Muslim clerics,
civil society leaders, and even former militants rejecting al-Qaeda’s
gratuitous violence and stressing the ethical and moral foundations of
the institution of jihad. Some prominent Saudi clerics publicly questioned
bin Laden’s theological legitimacy and accused him of violating
Islam’s laws and rules.
Today heavyweights of the bin Laden group blame him directly
for the turmoil engulfing the Muslim world and publicly call for his
quarantine. In an open letter written in September 2007, one of his
prominent Saudi mentors, the preacher and scholar Salman al-Awdah,
publicly reproached bin Laden for causing widespread mayhem and
killing. “How many innocent children, elderly people, and women were
killed in the name of Al Qaeda” asked al-Awdah. He asked a similar
question on MBC, a Middle Eastern television network, “How many
people were forced to flee their homes and how much blood was shed
in the name of Al Qaeda?”
The significance of this admonition can be fully appreciated only in
the context of al-Awdah’s position within Islamic orthodoxy. He is an
influential Salafi preacher with a large following in Saudi Arabia and
abroad. In the 1990s the Saudi regime imprisoned al-Awdah, in addition
to four other leading clerics, for criticizing the kingdom’s close
relationship with the United States, particularly the stationing of U.S.
troops there after the 1991 Gulf War. That decision—posting forces in
Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam—was the catalyst that drove bin
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