The death of Nayef would seem on paper to open up a world of exciting possibilities for Saudi society. He was the man with the hotline to the clerics who tried to keep them in line, he viewed the Shia as a security threat, he had no tolerance for political mobilizations by liberals or Islamist. Though he had been ill for a long time, with his final demise the figure who had sat on top of Saudi society for over three decades has finally gone.
Nayef developed a dislike for the Muslim Brotherhood after the 1991 Gulf war because of their opposition to the alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein. It was the Saudi clerics who were inspired by the Brotherhood’s political activism and desire to rule – as opposed to the quietist Salafism of traditional al-Wahhabiyya – who Nayef imprisoned in the subsequent years. They included Safar al-Hawali and Salman al-Odah, who has reemerged after the Arab uprisings as a politically active cleric. How such figures with Brotherhood leanings behave in post-Nayef Saudi Arabia is one key issue to watch for. Similarly, the Islamists – not clerics – of Saudi society who have also been bitten by the Brotherhood bug (Saud Mukhtar al-Hashemi, Abdullah al-Hamed) as well as the leftists and Arab nationalists who have tried to mobilize for an elected parliament: the Jeddah reformers arrested in 2007 and sentenced in 2011, the (Matruk al-Faleh, Ali al-Dumaini). And then there are lawyers, rights activists and ordinary people who have got on the regime’s nerves over the past year (Walid Abul-Khair, Khaled al-Johani, etc.).
Salafi clerics will also feel at a loss without Nayef. It was Nayef who called them in in their hundreds in 2007 for two meetings in which he beseeched them to discourage Saudis from going to Iraq for the purposes of jihad. Nayef’s powers of persuasion and generosity were well-known to the ulama class: there was prison on the one hand and gifts of land on the other. The Shia of the Eastern Province and Najran in particular looked forward with a deep sense of foreboding to the prospect of a king Nayef. The Wikileaks documents and the interior ministry’s handling of street disturbances this year are testament to the fact that Nayef’s view of them never changed: keep them down, and keep them down again. In the good-cop/bad-cop routine of Saudi politics, it was King Abdullah who would occasionally invite their leaders over to Riyadh for coffee and condiments.
There is also the issue of the religious police. The clerical establishment is bigger than the hay’a, even if the hay’a attracts the lion’s share of liberal and foreign media attention when it comes to Saudi religious politics. It was not only Nayef who had a say when it came to the religious police too: Salman as Riyadh governor previously was influential with them, as was the king as the man they nominally answered directly to.
However, there is every reason to believe that Nayefism will outlive Nayef and that none of these groups will find their space for movement expanding or contracting with the state’s blessing simply because Nayef has gone. Nayef’s son Mohammed has been in charge of the militant file since the al-Qa’ida operations of 2003 and he became the key figure that US government officials sought out on visits to the country. Nayef’s portfolio is likely to pass to his deputy and brother Prince Ahmed. If few changes do emerge, it will say something about the dominant narrative of a reformer king stymied by the machinations of his wily interior minister and his clerical allies. This is Abdullah’s time, one would think.
The irony of this is that circumstance has presented the kingdom’s rulers with a golden opportunity to review its grip, security and clerical, on Saudi society at a time when, despite the ‘counter-revolutionary’ steps back as the struggle for power in Egypt for example intensifies, momentous changes have taken place in the region. History could look back at this time as a key opportunity, seized or lost, by Al Saud.
