Guest Contributor

Courtney Freer, Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, London School of Economics and Political Science

As tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran continue to rise, with the Iran-backed Houthis having claimed responsibility for an intercepted missile attack on Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura port on 7 March (Nereim and Khraiche, 2021) and with reports emerging a week later about another attempted attack (Gulfnews, 2021), it is worth revisiting the role of sectarianism in Saudi domestic politics. I argue that sectarianism sustains the kingdom’s continued authoritarianism, which is further underpinned by a rentier economy financed by hydrocarbon wealth. The Saudi government is therefore uniquely placed to manage a Shii population which it has increasingly come to see as an Iranian fifth column, particularly as regional tensions with Iran mount.

I make three primary claims related the Saudi Arabia’s unique blend of sectarianism, authoritarianism, and rentierism. First, governing with a sectarian ideology makes the advancement toward broad-based political reforms more difficult, since it discourages cross-sectarian cooperation by attacking and scapegoating the sectarian outgroup, in this case the Shii minority. Any demands for reform from that segment of the population can thus quickly be dismissed as part of a broader Shii-specific agenda. Aiding in this isolation of the Shii population is the fact that the al-Saud ruling family has since 1744 been aligned with the Wahhabi ulama who are part of the state bureaucracy and claim to represent the “true” Islam. Since the country houses Islam’s holiest sites, the Saudi political leadership is under pressure to demonstrate its religious credentials, and, in backing the Wahhabi ulama who see Shii Islam as religiously illegitimate, it has become a decisively sectarian actor rather than standing above the fray; this sectarianism alone, however, does not necessarily produce authoritarian political structures.

Second, a multi-sectarian environment allows the Saudi regime to use divide and rule tactics to sustain its authoritarianism. In terms of authoritarian structures, political parties are outlawed, and civil society and the media are seriously restricted. Saudi Arabia has housed elected municipal councils since 2005 (one-third of seats remain appointed), yet these councils are mainly meant to manage citizen complaints about municipal, not political, issues. Indeed, there are no formal legal checks on members of the al-Saud ruling family, who dominate positions in the cabinet. The king appoints members of the state’s 150-member Consultative Council, which is charged with giving the government non-binding advice on legislation, and power has increasingly become centralized in the hands of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman since he came to power in 2017 and has successfully sidelined potential political competitors from the al-Saud family.

Further, members of the Wahhabi ulama are given platforms through which they have supported the political leadership through their sermons, emphasizing the importance of loyalty to the political leadership and discouraging political protest. By fueling, or at least not discouraging, anti-Shii rhetoric, the government makes it unlikely that Sunni actors in favor of reform will ever partner with their Shii counterparts. The two segments of the population also remain divided geographically and socially, further complicating potential cross-sectarian collaboration. There exists in Saudi Arabia what Justin Gengler has described in the Bahraini context a “two-tiered system of rentier benefits” depending on sect (Gengler, 2014, 94). When the state monopolizes political power and welfare provisions, it can selectively include or exclude segments of the population on any basis, but it has often chosen to do so based on sectarian affiliation. Indeed, in Saudi Arabia, members of the Shii population are largely excluded from employment in the security services, as well as in clerical and educational jobs and in the higher echelons of government, thereby institutionalizing sect-based segregation through the selective granting of state employment and other rentier benefits.

Third, despite the authoritarian and rentier tools at its disposal, the Saudi government has not always chosen to exclude its Shii minority and instead at times has included it in rentier or political arrangements to a limited extent, depending on the level of concern about the role played by Sunni Islamists (al-Rasheed, 2011, 515); for instance, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Shias were invited into political dialogue, as violent Sunni Islamists came to be seen as the primary danger to the Saudi state and to the region more broadly. With the ability to at least attempt to buy off segments of the population, the government does not always elect to use repression, which is also quite costly, and so often uses different tactics towards different sectarian populations depending on which is considered a more serious political threat. Since 2017, the government has increasingly placed focus on managing both Shii and Sunni sources of political opposition, as a means of increasing the centralization of political power in the hands of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

I conclude that the Saudi government’s authoritarianism, rentierism, and sectarianism sustain one another, as the state can use its authority as a sectarian actor to grant specific rentier or political benefits to different sectarian groups at different times. In that way, the government is able to balance actors from either side of the sectarian divide who are considered potentially challenging to its rule and maintain its role above all.

I think it is also worth considering the extent to which such domestic policies towards the Shii minority and Sunni Islamists are influenced by foreign partners or foreign policies of other states in the region. Indeed, it was after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that Sunni states became particularly attuned to the potential political consequences of housing substantial Shii populations. And with the advent of the Arab Spring, Saudi Arabia became acutely aware of the political potential of Sunni Islamists to challenge regime authority, leading to a focus on isolating them in the early 2010s. Today, Saudi foreign and domestic policies seem aligned in attempting to sideline Islamists from either sect and using the curtailed power of the Wahhabi ulema to justify these actions.