Islam is the state religion of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom is called the "home of Islam" as it was the birthplace of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, who united and ruled the Arabian Peninsula. It is the location of the cities of Mecca and Medina, where Muhammad lived and died, and are now the two holiest cities of Islam. The kingdom attracts millions of Muslim Hajj pilgrims annually, and thousands of clerics and students who come from across the Muslim world to study. The official title of the King of Saudi Arabia is "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques"—the two being Al-Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Al-Masjid al-Nabawi in Medina—which are considered the holiest in Islam.
In the 18th century, a pact between Islamic preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab and a regional emir, Muhammad bin Saud, brought a revival of Islam (Salafism - that is, following the Quran and Sunnah in light of the interpretation of ‘As Salaf As Salih’) of Sunni Islam first to the Najd region and then to the Arabian Peninsula. Referred to by supporters as "Salafism" and by others as "Wahhabism", this interpretation of Islam became the state religion and interpretation of Islam espoused by Muhammad bin Saud and his successors (the Al Saud family), who eventually created the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The Saudi government has spent tens of billions of dollars of its petroleum export revenue throughout the Islamic world and elsewhere on building mosques, publishing books, giving scholarships and fellowships,Kepel, Gilles (2002). Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam. trans. Anthony F. Roberts, p. 72 hosting international Islamic organisations, and promoting its form of Islam, sometimes referred to as "petro-Islam".Kepel (2002), pp. 69–75
The mission to call to Islam the way the Salaf practiced it has been dominant in Najd for two hundred years, but in most other parts of the country—Hejaz, the Eastern Province, Najran—it has dominated only since 1913–1925. Most of the 15 to 20 million Saudi citizens are Sunni Muslims, while the eastern regions are populated mostly by Twelver Shia, and there are Zaydi Shia in the southern regions. According to a number of sources, only a minority of Saudis consider themselves Wahhabis, although according to other sources, the Wahhabi affiliation is up to 40%, making it a very dominant minority, at the very least using a native population of 17 million based on "2008–09 estimates". In addition, the next largest affiliation is with Salafism, which encompasses all of the central principles of Islam, with a number of minor additional accepted principles differentiating the two. In a 2014 survey, conducted for the Boston Consultancy Group report on Saudi youth, it was found that 97% of the young Saudis consider Islam "as the main influence that shapes their identity."
Public worship and proselytising by non-Muslims, including the distribution of non-Muslim religious materials (such as the Bible), is illegal in Saudi Arabia.World Report 2018: Saudi Arabia . Retrieved February 3, 2018. Non-Muslim foreigners attempting to acquire Saudi Arabian nationality must convert to Islam.
Starting in late 2017, under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, dramatic changes have been made in religious policy, including the elimination of the power of the religious police, the lifting of bans on amusement parks, cinemas, concert venues, and driving of motor vehicles by women.
History
Muhammad was born in Mecca in about 570. From the early 7th century, Muhammad united the various tribes of the peninsula and created a single Islamic religious polity under his rule. Following his death in 632, his followers rapidly expanded the territory under Muslim rule beyond Arabia and conquered many parts of Asia, Africa and Europe conquering huge swathes of territory. Although Arabia soon became a politically peripheral region as the focus shifted to the more developed conquered lands, Mecca and Medina remained the spiritually most important places in the Muslim world. The Qur'an requires every able-bodied Muslim who can afford it, as one of the five pillars of Islam, to make a pilgrimage, or Hajj, to Mecca during the Islamic month of Dhu al-Hijjah at least once in his or her lifetime.Farah, Caesar (1994). Islam: Beliefs and Observances (5th ed.), pp. 145–147
From the 9th century, a number of Shia sects developed particularly in the eastern part of Arabia. These included the Qarmatians, a millenarian Ismaili sect led by Abū-Tāhir Al-Jannābī who attacked and sacked Mecca in 930.
Al Saud and ibn Abd al-Wahhab In 1744, in the desert region of Nejd, Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the Al Saud dynasty, joined forces with the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was the founder of the Wahhabi movement, a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam. This alliance formed in the 18th century provided the ideological impetus to Saudi expansion and remains the basis of Saudi Arabian dynastic rule today. The first "Saudi state" established in 1744 in the area around Riyadh, rapidly expanded and briefly controlled most of the present-day territory of Saudi Arabia,"Reining in Riyadh" by D. Gold, 6 April 2003, NYpost (JCPA) but was destroyed by 1818 by the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha."The Saud Family and Wahhabi Islam ". Library of Congress Country Studies. In 1824, a much smaller second "Saudi state", located mainly in Nejd, was established in 1824, but by 1891 its Al Saud rulers were driven into exile in Kuwait.
At the beginning of the 20th century, a third attempt was made to conquer this territory by another Al-Saud, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. He gained the support of the Ikhwan, a tribal army inspired by Wahhabism and led by Sultan ibn Bijad and Faisal Al-Dawish, which had grown quickly after its foundation in 1912. With the aid of the Ikhwan, Ibn Saud captured al-Hasa from the Ottoman Empire in 1913.
Ibn Saud defeated a rival ruling family and took the title Sultan of Nejd in 1921. By this time the Ottomans had been defeated in World War I, and Ottoman suzerainty and control in Arabia was no more. With the help of the Ikhwan, the Hejaz was conquered in 1924–25. Following this victory however the Ikhwan clashed with Ibn Saud. He opposed their raiding the British protectorates of Transjordan, Iraq and Kuwait, to expand of the Wahhabist realm, and they opposed his policies of allowing some modernization and some non-Muslim foreigners in the country. The Ikhwan were defeated and their leaders executed in 1930 after a two-year struggle. In 1932 the two kingdoms of the Hejaz and Nejd were united as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
Era of oil exports Commercial quantities of oil were discovered in the Persian Gulf region of Saudi Arabia in 1938, and the kingdom's oil wells eventually revealed the largest source of crude oil in the world. For the king, oil revenues became a crucial source of wealth since he no longer had to rely on receipts from pilgrimages to Mecca. This discovery would alter Middle Eastern political relations forever.
During the 1960s and '70s, religious authorities allowed some practices that had previously been forbidden (haram). At the urging of the government and after vigorous debate, religious authorities allowed the use of paper money in 1951, abolished slavery in 1962, permitted the education of females in 1964, and use of television in 1965.
By the 1970s, as a result of oil wealth and government modernization policies, economic and social development progressed at an extremely rapid rate, transforming the infrastructure and educational system of the country; in foreign policy, close ties with the US were developed.
By 1976, Saudi Arabia had become the largest oil producer in the world. The power of the ulema was in decline.
However, in the 1980s and 1990s, this trend was reversed. In 1979, the modernizing monarch of Iran, despite his oil revenues and apparently formidable security apparatus, was overthrown by an Islamic revolution. The new revolutionary Islamic Republic was across the Persian Gulf from Saudi oil fields and across from where most of Saudi Arabia's minority Shiites—co-religionists of Iran who also often worked in the oil industry—lived. There were several anti-government uprisings in the region in 1979 and 1980.
Also alarming to the government was the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist extremists. The militants involved were in part angered by what they considered to be the corruption and un-Islamic nature of the Saudi government, proclaimed the return of the Mahdi. The takeover and siege of the mosque lasted for nearly two weeks, during which the mosque was severely damaged and several hundred militants, soldiers, and hostages were killed.
In response, the royal family enforced much stricter observances of traditional religious and social norms in the country and gave the Ulema a greater role in government. At first, photographs of women in newspapers were banned, then women on television. Cinemas and music shops were shut down. School curriculum was changed to provide many more hours of religious studies, eliminating classes on subjects like non-Islamic history. Gender segregation was extended "to the humblest coffee shop". The religious police became more assertive.
Greater emphasis was put on religion in the media (increased religious programming on television and radio, and an increase in articles about religion in newspapers), in individual behavior, in government policies, and in mosque sermons. In 1986 King Fahd replaced his title "His Majesty" with "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques". The ulema's powers and financial support were strengthened in particular, they were given greater control over the education system and allowed to enforce stricter observance of Wahhabi rules of moral and social behaviour. These policies did not succeed in dampening the growth and strength of religious conservatives dissatisfied with the royal family.
Saudi Islamism gained momentum following 1991 Gulf War. The presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil from 1991 onwards was deeply unpopular with conservative Saudis and one of the major issues that has led to an increase in Islamist terrorism by Saudis inside and out of Saudi Arabia, (the 9/11 attacks in New York being the most prominent example).
Islamist terrorist activity increased dramatically in 2003, with the Riyadh compound bombings and other attacks, which prompted the government to take much more stringent action against terrorism. The king (Abdullah) has also taken steps to rein back the powers of the ulema, for instance transferring their control over girls' education to the Ministry of Education. Some have complained that the king's dominance over the ulema has weakened the traditional Islamic legitimacy of Saudi throne.
However, Saudi Arabia continued to finance and export Wahhabism to mosques, Islamic colleges abroad, often through charities with known links to Al Qaeda. Three of the terrorists involved in the 2015 Paris Attacks were connected to Wahhabi mosques in Belgium and France. In 2017, the Henry Jackson Society published a study showing that Riyadh invested more than USD 86 billion in exporting Wahhabism abroad. Increased awareness of Saudi Arabia's ambivalent posture regarding Islamic extremism, led Western countries to pressure Riyadh to suppress radical forms of Islam.
Pre-MbS era Role in the state and society
Islam plays a central role in Saudi society. It has been said that Islam is more than a religion, it is a way of life in Saudi Arabia, and, as a result, the influence of the ulema, the religious establishment, is all-pervasive. Article one of the 1992 Saudi "Basic Law of Governance" states, The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a sovereign Arab Islamic State. Its religion is Islam. Its constitution is Almighty God's Book, The Holy Qur'an, and the Sunna (Traditions) of the Prophet (PBUH). Arabic is the language of the Kingdom.