Kingdom Pervading Borders

In a major flashback, the book beams out the past, present and perhaps the future of Saudi Arabia. The book carries out a vivisection of the Saudi hegemony that towered post 1930s. The book is a conglomeration of contributions from various discerning people from round the world edited by Madawi Al-Rasheed. She has segregated the book into three parts – politics beyond frontiers, the prospects and limits of religious expansion and the media and the multiple actors.

‘Kingdom without borders’ serves an apt name that entails seemingly innocuous ramifications to transcend the precincts of the Saudi Kingdom. An elaborate introduction apprises the readers several nitty-gritty that would ennoble them to bear an invigorating insight while poring over the book. The 1930s saw the discovering of the oil and thereafter the entire world witnessed a meteoric rise of the nation. From the servitude of the Ottomans and then the British, Saudi Arabia rose ‘into a central economic and strategic hub in the age of nation-states. Its geographical position and oil wealth have made it a key geopolitical centre for American expansion in the Middle East, Asia and Africa’. The USA during the Cold War usurped antagonistic forces in Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nicaragua and Afghanistan with the camaraderie of Saudi Arabia. The oil wealth that was accrued thereof was cycled in ‘concrete political projects’ abroad leveraging Saudi role in tandem act with American vendetta. ‘In addition to oil and location, Saudi religion was also a key factor. Saudi Arabia is home to the most cherished Islamic sites, Mecca and Medina’ thereby being hallowed as ‘the guardian of Islam among Muslims’. It thus augmented to ‘play an expansionist role beyond its borders’.

The year 1979 saw the Iranian Islamic Republic come into being and Saudi Arabia vouchsafed to monitor its religious and political ongoing. Saudi Arabia spearheaded the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981. Many British Muslims denounced Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War of 1991. ‘Petrodollar media’ was also roped in, kowtowing Saudi ‘stories, interpretations and commentaries’. In the aftermath of 9/11, Saudi Arabia hankered after impregnating the USA right from its ivory towers of ‘academia to research centers and think tanks’ among multifarious projects to elevate ‘its image among increasingly skeptical American and European audiences. ‘Saudi Arabia’s government has long been characterized by an ambivalent, if not schizophrenic relationship with the media’. 

Faisal Devji has contributed an entire chapter on how ‘Arab’ got mired in global militancy. Post World War l saw the creation of the Middle East from the smouldering Ottoman Empire that remained in cahoots with the German.  It was the conglomerate the Arab states and Israel that merely constituted the heartland of ‘this new Middle East’. But with the emergence of Muslim militants such as al-Qaeda having a global network this geopolitical unit has been redefined that is ‘to redeploy the language of Arabness outside a Middle Eastern context’. The poet philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, who was the most popular Muslim thinker of twentieth-century from South-Asia was highly skeptical of ‘Arab imperialism’. He was outright to put - ‘for Islam an opportunity to rid itself of the stamp that Arabian imperialism was forced to give it, to mobilize its law, its education its culture, and to bring them into closer contact with its own original spirit and with the spirit of modern times.’ But Faisal Devji deplores the fact that today Iqbal who is hailed as the spiritual father of Pakistan is misquoted by ‘glorification of Arabness as a moral ideal’.

This expository corroborates the fact that,’ an expansionist Saudi economy was destined to grow and flourish outside the borders of the Saudi State’. And so, ‘economic wealth and Islam’ ensured a great supply of material and symbolic religious capital to pursue an aggressive expansionist policy abroad.