Reading Lohaidan in Riyadh: Media and the struggle for judicial power in Saudi Arabia

Along with a reported one in seven viewers across the Arab World, Saudis were glued to their television sets during 2008 watching a Turkish soap opera called Noor.[1] The show was dubbed into Levantine Arabic and broadcast three times daily during Ramadan by MBC, a pan-Arab satellite network owned by Walid al-Ibrahim, a brother-in-law of the late Saudi king Fahd bin Abdelaziz Al Saud. Starring an economically independent, unveiled female lead and her tender Casanova of a husband, Noor was so popular that it spurred a large number of Gulf Arab tourists to visit Turkey, including the Saudi first lady Princess Hissa Al-Shaalan, and its blonde and blue-eyed star Kivanc Tatlitu became a heart-throb for Saudi and other women. The drama had a particular grip on the public because, unusually, it was dubbed into colloquial rather than classical Arabic, and its Turkish milieu had a familiarity for Arab audiences that other foreign soaps lack.

The popularity of Noor prompted some Saudi ulama to warn that “secularism” was making its subversive way into Saudi society through the cathode ray. “It is not permitted to watch the Turkish series...They are replete with wickedness, evil, moral collapse and a war on virtues that only God knows the truth of,” Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh, the official voice of the government on religious affairs, said in July.[2] In this context, public comments made last Ramadan by one of the most powerful Wahhabi clerics of all, Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan, head of Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Sharia courts, seemed calculated to create the perfect storm of media controversy. Speaking on a religious radio show, Lohaidan claimed that owners of television networks who broadcast “indecent programming” could be executed if tried for their celluloid crimes.[3] Pan-Arab, self-styled liberal outlets such as MBC’s al-Arabiya and Elaph, whose owners have strong connections to the royal family, breathlessly relayed the story with the implication that Lohaidan was inciting vigilante violence against media moguls. Western media, in turn, quickly picked up the story, eager to trumpet what they framed as simply yet another case of the whacky excesses of Saudi Arabia’s puritanical Wahhabi doctrine.

By one reading, the incident marks another episode in the debate over decency in the Islamic state and the limits of expression being conducted by Saudi Arabia’s conservative clerical establishment and the secular, modernist programming broadcast throughout the Middle East by “liberal” satellite channels and their well-connected owners. It is hardly the first time the liberals and the religious conservatives have locked horns. The ma‘rakat al-hadatha, or the “battle for modernity,” as it is often referred to, dates back to the 1980s, when literary critic Abdullah al-Ghaddami, Saudi Arabia’s leading intellectual, introduced the ideas of deconstructionism that had become de mode on Western university campuses to the ultra-conservative Saudi-Wahhabi state. In 2006, al-Qa‘ida leader Osama bin Laden singled out Saudi Labor Minister Ghazi al-Gosaibi, a poet and novelist, as representing a liberal “fifth column” corrupting Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. Beyond that Wahhabism has been struggling with elements of modernity for decades, objecting, for example, to the introduction of television and radio in the 1960s and telegraph in the 1920s.

Indeed, Lohaidan’s intervention is part of this wider historical tussle between the two institutions, the Wahhabi clerics and the Al Saud royal family, that give Saudi Arabia its form and substance – a struggle over their respective spheres of influence within the state structure. His controversial comments sprung from a dispute over the future of the judiciary as the traditional preserve of the clerics and the ability of the Wahhabi religious establishment to hold on to the extensive powers it has amassed, not least since the late 1970s.
A shock to the system

The September 11 attacks were the biggest international crisis the Saudi state had faced since the oil embargo of 1973, if not since the kingdom’s foundation. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi. They acted in the name of a group headed by a Saudi dissident, and they were all a product of the puritanical and xenophobic religious milieu of Saudi Arabia – though one could argue that the pro-Western policies of Saudi leaders was an equal if not greater factor in producing the mindset that led to the attacks. Revelations emerged in the weeks following 9/11 of Saudi Arabia’s state-backed system of funding of Islamic causes, charity and proselytism around the world being exploited to funnel money to al-Qa‘ida.

When George W. Bush declared his “axis of evil” in early 2002, many Saudis were relieved they had not been included. In an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Crown Prince Abdullah faced the question in February 2002 of why Saudi Arabia had not offered a clear apology to America for the atrocity.[4] As it became increasingly clear during 2002 that the Bush administration was set on invading Iraq, the Saudi regime and the business, tribal and religious elites huddled around it worried again that the real target in one way or another was Saudi Arabia. Would the invasion end at Iraq? And if it did in a military sense, the democratic experiment there could expand and create unwelcome pressures on the royal family. Further, word leaked from Washington that Pentagon analysts were bandying around ideas of decapitating Al Saud and chopping their ever-controversial state into pieces.

The Saudi response, masterminded by Crown Prince Abdullah despite resistance from his half-brothers Prince Nayef and Prince Sultan, according to diplomats in Riyadh, was to push forward with some modernizations that would gradually roll back the influence of the clerical establishment while not tampering with the fundamentals of the relationship between Al Saud and al-Wahhabiyyah, where the royal family controls state policy while Wahhabi clerics take charge of society – the duality at the heart of the Saudi-Wahhabi polity.

Saudi media have played a central role in this ongoing strategy. The Saudi press was given a green light to engage the liberal-conservative debate more forcefully and risk attacks on the religious police, the “committee for the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice,” one of the citadels of clerical power which retained the support of Nayef and other powerful princes. Changes were also enacted in the education curriculum to water down the focus on religion and introduce compulsory English lessons at the primary school level. But the Interior Ministry was supportive of more state monitoring of clerics at Friday prayers once Saudis who had fought in Afghanistan opened a front inside Saudi Arabia itself in 2003. These changes reflected the fact that the now-dominant Saudi crown prince and his allies agreed with the Western analysis that the discourse of Wahhabi clerics needed disciplining and that smoothing the rougher edges of al-Wahhabiyyah was key to ensuring the family and their state’s survival.

Saudi Arabia’s project to recover its international standing after the debacle of September 11 also included opening its doors to the foreign press. The word went out that major news outlets were welcome in the kingdom, not just to send correspondents in for reporting stints, but to open offices. The foreigners may not like what they see, but the more familiar they make the West with Saudi society, the less likely that Western decision-makers would entertain ideas of changing the regime. It was a reaffirmation of the theory “better the devil you know,” and mirrored the policy which Washington and its allies have followed with Saudi Arabia for decades, rejecting the dissidents who emerged in London in the 1990s and fearing the Islamist base that produced the likes of bin Laden and his famed fifteen followers.[5]

But the opening to foreign media has moved at a snail’s pace. Though Reuters established an editorial operation in 2003, the death of a BBC cameraman and injury of a BBC reporter in a shooting incident during the mini-insurgency launched by al-Qa‘ida operatives in 2004 caused many media organizations to think twice. It was difficult to find journalists prepared to work in the kingdom and the costs were prohibitive in themselves. When CNN identified an able Saudi in 2006 to establish as their correspondent in the kingdom, they preferred to send him to Atlanta to train and make use of him abroad rather than have him set up an operation inside a country where red tape, invisible red lines and a suspicious mentality make the journalist’s work extremely difficult. To date there is no BBC or CNN office in Saudi Arabia, and the number one Arabic news outlet, al-Jazeera, spent years shut out of the country because its open editorial line gave no special consideration for Saudi Arabia and its self-described khususiyya (special characteristics). Al-Jazeera stopped reporting sensitive news about Saudi Arabia in 2007 following a rapprochement between its Qatari royal owners and Al Saud, and as a result the channel hopes to open an office in Riyadh soon.


Reading Lohaidan

With domestic media outlets polarized along the conservative-liberal divide, and foreign media still lacking a firm foothold in the country, Saudi Arabia remains far from being an open book. Perhaps no incident better illustrates this than the recent controversy over Sheikh Lohaidan’s statement on the owners of satellite networks. The sheikh often speaks on a radio show Noor ‘ala al-Darb (Light on the Path) on the state-run Qur’an Station, a weekly program where senior clerics offer fatwas, or religious opinions from a specialist in Islamic law, in response to questions from listeners or the presenter directly. In an edition that aired during Ramadan of 2008, the presenter asked Lohaidan what his advice was to the owners of Arab satellite channels that air “bad” programs generally, and even in the month of Ramadan (when comedy shows air after the sunset prayer as a captive audience settles down in front of the television after breaking the daylong fast). “I want to advise the owners of these channels that broadcast programs containing indecency and vulgarity and warn them of the consequences … They can be put to death through the judicial process (qada’an),” he said. “If the evil of those who promote corruption in belief and actions cannot be held back through lesser punishments, then they can be put to death through the judicial process.”[6]

The key phrase here was qada’an, through the judicial process. For Lohaidan there was no need for him to clarify this point further in his initial comments, since for the Saudi clerics the process is all there is; they could not conceive of a moral-criminal issue in any other fashion. In classic Sunni legal thinking, followed to the letter in Saudi Arabia, God’s justice is dispensed by His cleric-lieutenants on Earth who are to be found in Sharia courts ready to pass judgment based on the divine law. The Saudi ulama have the unique privilege in the Islamic world of presiding as judges in a Sharia court system – this is the very definition of the Islamic state in their eyes. But this did not prevent Saudi-owned “liberal” media from playing-up Lohaidan’s remarks because they fit their agenda of watering down the power of the Wahhabi ulama. Before long, the story was all over pan-Arab television networks such as MBC and its al-Arabiya news channel, owned by the brother-in-law of former King Fahd, and newspapers such as al-Watan, owned by Khaled al-Faisal, son of former King Faisal and nephew of King Abdullah.

Indeed, it was the Saudi-owned television channels that were directly under attack. The main entertainment channels on pan-Arab satellite TV showing the offending material are all Saudi-owned. The MBC network, which includes al-Arabiya news channel, is owned by a brother-in-law of the late King Fahd; Lebanon’s LBC and the music channel Rotana are owned by the entrepreneurial Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and the Orbit and ART networks are also owned by Saudi citizens. Their popularity far surpasses that of the staid state television channels that fit the orthodoxy of a religiously conservative society under the eyes of Sharia court judges. They also outdo in popularity the plethora of religious channels ranged against them, many of which were set up by the same royals or royal hangers-on (viz. Alwaleed’s al-Resala) or were themselves post-9/11 efforts to tame, redirect and channel Saudi religious zealotry (such as al-Majd).

Channels and websites such as al-Arabiya and Elaph ran headlines saying the fatwa “approved killing” satellite channel owners and gave the impression that Lohaidan was encouraging vigilantes to assassinate television chiefs. Western and other Arab outlets tended to take their cue from those reports.[7] Yet the implication was ridiculous; it was hardly as if Alwaleed, King Fahd’s sister, or her family, or the manager of al-Arabiya in Dubai were seriously worried about attacks to their person. The royals live in a world apart of palaces, servants, private planes and cruise ships on the French Riviera. No one could get near them if they tried.