Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (Cambridge Middle East Studies)

Hardcover, xxi + 308 pages, NOT ex-library. Clean and bright contents with unmarked text, free of inscriptions and stamps. Faint marks on outer page edges; slightly leaned spine. Torn dust jacket with creases on the spine. -- This study by Madawi Al-Rasheed, then Professor of Anthropology of Religion at King's College London, examines the contested meanings of Wahhabism and Salafism within Saudi Arabia itself, challenging the external tendency to treat these terms as interchangeable or monolithic. Drawing on classical religious sources, contemporary writings and interviews, the book presents an ethnography of consent and confrontation, tracing how Saudi citizens debate religion and politics in both traditional and novel venues, often violating official taboos. The analysis traces the historical compact between the Al Saud ruling family and the Wahhabi religious establishment from its eighteenth-century origins, showing how this alliance created a system demanding complete submission to political authority while preaching total submission to God. Al-Rasheed highlights that while the state uses religious nationalism to maintain power, many Saudis are well aware of the contradictions between official rhetoric and lived reality. Subsequent chapters examine how mass education, printing, new communication technologies and global media have fractured the religious establishment's monopoly on interpretation, producing a spectrum of voices ranging from quietist loyalists through reformist critics to violent jihadists. A significant portion of the work provides a detailed analysis of internet exchanges involving jihadist intellectuals, such as the "takfiri" thinker Nasir al-Fahad, whose works illustrate the intellectual dimensions of modern jihadism. A central argument concerns the unintended consequences of state manipulation of religious discourse: the Saudi youth who were celebrated and supported as Islamic vanguards during the Afghan jihad of the 1980s became the dangerous, evolving threat of the 1990s and beyond, as returning veterans turned their ideology against the state itself. The book examines how this dynamic generated both the Sahwa (Awakening) movement and its more radical offshoots, producing debates whose trajectory escaped the control of those who initiated them. Listed by Choice magazine as one of the outstanding academic titles of 2007, the work remains directly relevant to understanding the religious and political tensions underlying Mohammed bin Salman's post-2017 reforms, the ongoing redefinition of Saudi national identity, and broader debates about the relationship between state power and religious authority across the Muslim world.…