The cornerstone of the Islamic revolution, which late Imam Grand Ayatollah Khomeini led and swept away the more powerful and pro-American hereditary rule of the Shah of Iran, was the central idea in his book, "Vilayat-e Faqih" (The Islamic Government: Governance of the Jurist), that there is no hereditary government in Islam.
"Anyone who has some general awareness of the beliefs and ordinances of Islam" would "unhesitatingly give his assent to the principle of the governance of the faqih as soon as he encounters it," the late Iranian leader wrote.
Although it is public knowledge that there is no priesthood in Islam, the "elected" government reports to the "male" faqih who is "elected" from a pool of religious hierarchical elite in a somewhat Islamic copy of the Catholic process of electing the Vatican pope.
The Iranian electoral message is a clear threat to the hereditary "royal" court of the Saudi ruling family to whom a similar religious Wahhabi "priesthood" report instead vice versa like in Iran.
This same elected-versus-hereditary argument explains the Saudi U-turn against the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), whom the Saudi royals had nurtured financially and politically, and are still nurturing in Syria, against Pan-Arabism and communism until the end of the last millennium. For ideological reasons, the MB has a very longstanding opposition to hereditary monarchies.
As long as the MB was not in power and targeting only Pan-Arab and left-oriented "republican" Arab ruling regimes and political movements, the Saudis perceived no MB threat, but when the so-called "Arab Spring" brought them to power in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, in alliance with their ruling MB brethren in Turkey, their threat became more realistic than hypothetical, to the extent that Saudis risked public disagreements with both their US and Turkish longstanding allies over their removal from power in Egypt, a Saudi- Egypt disagreement over Syria as well as the Saudi-Turkey war by their respective proxies among the armed gangs who are fighting the Syrian government.
However, the burgeoning liberal pluralistic modernity as is unfolding in the "republics" of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria, as well as in the "monarchies" of Morocco, Jordan, and Kuwait, represents a more challenging threat to the Saudi hereditary monarchy and the pre-medieval closed society it hopelessly rules to maintain as such for as long as possible.
Legitimacy Questioned
For this purpose, Saudis succeeded in posturing as the leaders of the counterrevolution fighting both the rival Islamic and the liberal challenges in a lost battle to reverse the irreversible course of history.
Adding to the Saudi vulnerabilities, both challenges are weighing in heavily on the legitimacy of the ruling family, whose title to the throne of Saudi Arabia is de facto, not de jure.
Voices that are marginal but loudly heard nonetheless are demanding the Islamic holy places in Mecca and Madina be declared a Vatican-like status free for the Hajj for all Muslim believers because the Saudis have no legitimate title from the Sharia to be their guardians and because they have politicized the Islamic ritual as manifested by banning the Syrians from the Hajj for political reasons.
Resorting to their abundance of petrodollar wealth accumulated from their depleting oil resources could buy mercenaries disguised as Islamic "Jihadists" for the cause of their brand of Islam to confiscate legitimate popular expressions of political and economic grievances in Syria and elsewhere, could bribe their people as well as their Bahraini and Omani brethren out of any integration with the popular protests known as the "Arab Spring", and could abort popular revolts in surrounding Arab countries, but only for a while. Change is inevitable both inside and around the country.
Their only hope for survival ironically lies in following in the footsteps of their bitter foe in Syria, where President Basher al-Assad wisely chose "to lead" the change and reform.
Still better, they could make a U-turn in their regional policy to limit their political isolation in the region by reviving the trilateral axis with Egypt and Syria, which stabilized the region and established a solid basis for a minimum defensive Arab solidarity vis-a-vis Israel since the kingdom joined both countries in their war to liberate their Israeli-occupied lands in 1973; in such a scenario, Iran would be an added value and not "the enemy" as pronounced by Riyadh now.
The alternative is waiting for change to come sooner or later to the Saudi doorsteps; it's a matter of time only.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Email address removed
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