What is striking about Osama Bin Laden’s extrajudicial execution – let’s be precise – is how insignificant the man’s movement had become in much of the region. The threat to Arab regimes has moved on from the violent revolt of al-Qa’ida to the peaceful civil disobedience of the Bouazizi uprisings. The call for democratic reform is far more troubling to Al Saud than the rather weak mobilizations of Al-Qa’ida. The group was a serious problem between 2003 and 2006. It staged spectacular attacks on several residential compounds, government buildings and even an Aramco oil refinery in the Eastern Province. Its “greatest hits” included beheading an American in 2004. But Al-Qa’ida increasingly became a has-been. The security forces crushed the group, which was reduced to desperate stunts orchestrated from its new base in Yemen, such as sending a believer to Jeddah in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his anus in a bid to assassinate the deputy interior minister Mohammed Bin Nayef. Crushing the group was easy for the government, which was genuinely frightened by the jihadist stream of thinking within the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. But combatting Al-Qa’ida on the ground and its ideas became a happy distraction for an antiquated monarchy engaged in a protracted succession struggle among its senior princes that has been unwilling and unable to engage in the kind of reforms the country needs. Indeed, the death of Bin Laden offers little political benefits for Al Saud. The only person who will reap rewards is the US president Barack Obama who has successfully hunted the head long demanded by the American public for the atrocity of 9/11. But for the Arab countries Osama Bin Laden passes away at the moment when his relevance dwindled to its lowest. It may have been Al-Qa’ida in the Maghreb that attacked tourists in Marrakesh last week, but it’s not Al-Qa’ida in the Maghreb that can mobilize people on the streets to press for changes in how the country is run.  

Radical Islamist thought still exists in Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia is a diverse body. There are those religious scholars coopted by the authorities through official bodies such as the Council of Senior Clerics or the World Muslim League and regular spots on state radio and television, and there are those who carve out an independent base and garner respect among the populace for that independence. Since the kingdom was formed in the early 20th century, one major aim of coopting the clerics has been to control the Wahhabi tenet of jihad, to maintain a concensus that Saudi Arabia is the Islamic Utopia with no need for violent propagation of the message either within or without its territory. King Abdelaziz fought and defeated the Ikhwan movement of Wahhabi warriors in 1929-30 in order to establish that principle.  But since the 1980s a kind of neo-Wahhabism developed, often referred to as the Sahwa (Awakening) movement, which was concerned with three things: further Islamisicing the Saudi state, a foreign policy that does not kowtow to the United States, and representative government. It was this new thinking within Saudi Islam that led to the Memorandum of Understanding presented to King Fahd in 1991. The government responded by arresting the major figures and the movement went nowhere.

The convergence of liberals and Islamists over the call for democratic reforms has been a major headache for the ruling family. It is this call which presents the real threat to their monopoly on power. Following the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, some Sahwa clerics allied with liberals in presenting petitions for reform but the government acted quickly to nip the development in the bud. Three reformists were arrested and tried in 2004-5 and the government busied itself with the Al-Qa’ida interruption. The ascendance of King Abdullah and his pro-reform rhetoric created an atmosphere of expectation that was never fulfilled. Now the question of democracy is back on the table thanks to Bouazizi. The Bouazizi uprisings have exposed the hollow nature of the government’s reform discourse. Princes, clerics and police were all mobilized by the family to stop Saudis taking to the streets to demand their rights. To make sure they didn’t, the king announced an incredible spending spree, which has been valued by a Saudi Fransi Bank analyst at around $140 billion, lavishing money that was suddenly available on almost every sector of society, including police, military, religious establishment, civil servants, house buyers, students and the unemployed. The clerics were confused. Some were coopted, but some were inspired. The Grand Mufti, who heads the Council of Senior Clerics, said protests and petitions were un-Islamic and spoke out against the uprisings elsewhere. Sheikh Saleh al-Lohaidan suggested revolt in Libya was acceptable because Gaddafi is an infidel. Salman al-Awda, however, one of the Sahwa clerics jailed for the reform demands of 1991, made clear comments in praise of the uprisings. His weekly show on MBC1 – one of the key Saudi-owned pan-Arab television channels – was promptly taken off the air as a result. He recently appeared on Al-Jazeera instead. Who knows – maybe he will take over there on the al-Sharia wal al-Hayat show from Yousef al-Qaradawi some day soon.