Political protest in Saudi Arabia … an inside look

The book “Clergy Cemeteries: Daily Activities in Saudi Arabia” (Stanford University Press – 2020) tells the inside story of political protest in Saudi Arabia. On the ground and in the suburbs, and in the face of increasing state repression, it is about the presentation and analysis of two global phenomena closely related to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: urban sprawl and religious activity. The writer, Pascal Minoret, obtained a professorship at Princeton and Harvard Universities and a professor at Brandeis University in the United States, says: “The Saudi suburbs appeared after World War II when citizens fled towards them from crowded cities. . The suburbs developed to encourage a community of obedient and isolated citizens, but instead opened new spaces for political action, as religious activists in particular turned homes, schools, mosques and summer camps into resources for mobilization. With the support of grassroots networks in the suburbs, the activists won local elections and found opportunities to protest against the government’s measures until they faced a new wave of repression under the current Saudi leadership.

The writer, who spent four years in the Kingdom of Saud in the places where Islamic activism first appeared today, recounts, as an eyewitness, the stories of people actively confronting the Saudi state, shedding light on how people are organize and protest even amid increasing police repression.
Pascal Minoret divided his work into four parts: the Islamic awakening, the Saudi suburbs, awareness groups and summer camps, leaving Islamic activism behind, and the parts together comprise 24 chapters.
This book changes the way we view religious activism in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and provides a warning: ongoing repression by Saudi elites, often with the complicity of the international community, leads to suppression of movements. popular politicians with serious consequences for the country and the world. That is why he says: We need to better understand the complex relationships between activism, reform and repression. So my project is to examine the inseparable ambiguities and contradictions of everyday life for ordinary activists. But to say that Saudi Arabia is a graveyard for clerics not only means that the state, by establishing an official religion, has forced its clerics and preachers to wear tight-fitting robes, it also means that there is an intimate relationship between the nation and the cemeteries. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was born through the process of destroying the tombs of saints, prophets and martyrs in the 1920s. After Abdul Aziz invaded the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, his army demolished the city of death in Al-Baqi ‘, which are cemeteries in which the relatives of the Prophet Muhammad were buried. The devastation was total. The tombs were not “accidentally destroyed, but they were razed from their places and their land is small, and Saudi Arabia was turned into a graveyard of graves,” as written by a European traveler who passed through Medina in 1926.

Saudi Arabia was born through the process of destroying the tombs of saints, prophets, and martyrs in the 1920s.

Modern graves in Saudi Arabia are surrounded by walls and empty: there are no headstones or inscriptions. Only gravel, sand or earth, and to mark each grave, there is a bare stone. In some cities, municipal services “clean” cemeteries every two years to make way for new structures; In Mecca, bodies are set aside and mixed with older bones each year, and burial near the Great Mosque has become as valuable as the surrounding cities. Cemeteries in Saudi Arabia are fleeting and subject to market prices.
A cemetery is where the dead are thrown and pushed towards the periphery of the city. But now the growing cities surround the tombs and the periphery has become the center. The fact that Saudi Arabia is a clergymen’s graveyard means that clerics are also constantly at risk of figurative or actual death. The state detained them in a state between life and death, and declared them “undead.” It also means that the place is waiting for a revival and that its politics must be enchanted. It is not surprising that the main social and political movement in the country called itself the “Awakening”. There was a lot to awaken in the world of death established by the Al Saud family, starting with the very streets of Riyadh that were destroyed by princes, planners and developers.
The author claims that Islamic activism, in the Kingdom of Saud or elsewhere, cannot be seen as a temporary act halfway between tradition and modernity, or as a compromise that would dissolve with the rise of liberal rationalism. And it concludes that Islamic movements are not remnants of old political traditions, that they are about to be swallowed up by a democratic wave that makes them obsolete or undermined by an authoritarian state that arrests, tortures and buries them. And the Islamic movements are not the latest popular rattle of a persecuted creature. “Saudi” Islamist activists have resisted their country’s violent integration into the US empire, from the global oil trade to the global arms trade and from the Cold War to the war on terror. In the face of this sheer violence, state capture was never an option. The organization was in its cracks, which means that the Islamic awakening may not have died, but it is interrupted and may rise to the surface when the conditions strike.

Clergymen’s Cemetery: Everyday Activism in Saudi Arabia

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