Yesterday’s post about Saudi Arabia’s Senior Ulema Council [“Saudi Religious Leaders Issue Tough Terrorism Denunciation”] inspired these comments from Council on Foreign Relations Adjunct Senior Fellow Thomas Lippman. He is author of “Inside the Mirage: America’s Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia,” and the forthcoming, “Saudi Arabia on the Edge: the Perilous Future of an American Ally.”
David Ignatius’s Sunday column ["A Saudi Fatwa for Moderation"], about a fatwa from the senior religious authorities in Saudi Arabia condemning terrorism and the financing of terrorism, is valid as far as it goes but it ignores one crucial point. In Saudi Arabia, as in most Sunni Muslim countries, the ulema, or religious leaders, are employees of the state. They have to say what the rulers want in order to keep their jobs. To the extent that extremists criticize the state itself as illegitimate or un-Islamic, the ulema can be dismissed as its lackeys and their pronouncements rejected as state propaganda. This was exactly the approach taken by Osama bin Laden in his denunciation of the fatwa that validated the Saudi rulers’ decision to invite American troops into the kingdom after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. That fatwa is still unpopular with many Saudis, who understood that it was issued under royal pressure. Thus the fatwa reported by Ignatius, however welcome, may not have the impact he attributes to it.
