The kingdom is facing strange times

Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz of Saudi Arabia is a strange man, and I don't mean this in a disrespectful way. He has been in power for a long time, mostly due to the fact that his half brother, Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz had fallen into a coma for ten years before passing away in 2005. As Crown Prince, Abdullah had been commander-in-chief in all but name only. So when he graced the funeral of the Sufi teacher Syed Mohammad Alawi Al-Maliki in 2004, it was a premonition of things to come when he would one day be Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

Bad news for the religious establishment who regulate Islam in the kingdom, of course. Syed Alawi is reviled by those who inherit their intellectual and even genealogical lineage from the eighteenth-century preacher, Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. The latter, whose line of descendants are known as ahl-al-sheikh, had been instrumental in the initial expansion of the al-Saud tribe into a full-fledged kingdom and the subsequent repression of many traditional aspects of Islam, including Sufism. According to a Saudi Institute report on religious freedom,

Several government-financed books were written by Hanbali clerics to attack Syed Alawi accusing him of Sufism and apostasy. Algerian-born Shaikh Abu Baker Al-Jazairi, who worked as a speaker at the Prophet's mosque and a teacher at the Islamic University in Madina, attacked Syed Alawi in several speeches and in at least one book.

Shaikh Abdullah Bin Manee, a high ranking judge and a member of the Council of Senior Uluma, wrote a book calling Alawi an apostate and a religious deviant. The late Grand Mufti, Shaikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, wrote the book's forward.

It's a misnomer to characterize the kingdom's scholars as Hanbali, since whatever they take from that particular Madhhab (school of thought) invariably filters through scholars like the thirteenth-century Syrian scholar ibn Taimiyya, who spent his last years in prison for alleged deviancy. As this refreshing website attests, however, the Hanbali Madhhab is very different from the face that emanates from modern movements that claim affiliation with the school of thought. Note the sections on following Madhhabs and even the ruling on the celebration of Mawlid (the Prophet Muhammad's birthday), which a vocal minority condemns as being a blameworthy innovation.

Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz's presence at the funeral of a Sufi sheikh has an air of deliberation about it. He is either trying to bridge the ideological divide between Saudi Salafists and Sunni Muslims, or else, attempting to emasculate the more intolerant of the two. In 2005, he pushed for the kingdom's clerics to sign on the seminal Jordan Initiative, even though many of the groups that were declared by the Initiative to be valid expressions of Islam are actually excommunicated by conservative Salafists. In the long-run, though, the Initiative is a strategic imperative. By officially acknowledging the diverse sects and movements in Islam, Muslim governments hope to destroy the very same tactic of excommunication that Muslim radicals use to justify doing violence on fellow Muslims.

Are we witnessing the demise of the ideology that has been the mainstay of the Islamic discourse for the past two hundred years, so much so that popular movements like the Indonesian Nahdlatul Ulema were formed specifically to counter its vigorous and often tumultuous spread? Did the Jordan Initiative start something good, after all?

Stay tuned!