Religious Freedom in Saudi Arabia:  Is King Abdullah Serious?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

    Perhaps the time has come to call a spade a spade in the growing crisis of Southwest Asia, because pussy-footing around will only make it worse.  Yesterday in Vienna, Austria, with much fanfare, the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, Prince Sa’ud al Faisal, inaugurated the King Abdullah Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue.  The question I have been asked is whether King Abdullah can be serious.

    From King Abdullah’s past personal and even public actions as one of the best Islamic models at the helm of any country in the world, I would say that this Vienna initiative is legitimate and not either a propaganda stunt or a clever means to impose the minority religion known as Wahhabism on the world.  Whether Prince Saud al Faisal is serious I have no idea, but I would accept his role at face value.  His support was necessary so that King Abdullah can continue to walk the tightrope between real change and assassination.

    My assessment is based on my experiences beginning a quarter century ago as a close friend of one of Prince Abdullah’s right-hand men, whose Friday majlis I attended every week for six months.  His enemies almost precipitated a real revolution when he was arrested and imprisoned a few years ago.  My background includes a very short stint as President Ronald Reagan’s U.S. Ambassador to the United Arab Emirates in 1981-82, which was cut short by Henry Kissinger.  My inside knowledge of more recent events directly relevant to the Vienna initiative includes my work arranging for Jewish representation at King Abdullah’s Madrid conference in 2008, which was preceded by King Abdullah’s private commitment to open the Kingdom for the establishment of houses of worship for Christians (I don’t know about synagogues, but logically one could not exclude them unless they were politically Zionist).

    The faux pas of naming the Center after King Abdullah might have been another of the compromises necessitated in order to get the approval of the Al Shaykh family elders.  The generation gap within this traditional religious support group is rapidly growing, so my guess is that the younger generation is winning out.  It is about as obvious as anything can be that within the next decade or so either the Arab Spring will spread to Saudi Arabia in a genuinely Islamic way or there will be a revolution ruled by the enemies of civilization, as could well happen in every Arab country, including Tunisia and Egypt, as well as perhaps even in America.

    My long-range strategic advice is to work and hope for the best in order to preempt or avoid the worst.  It would seem to be absurd, based on past performance, for the Saudi regime to advocate religious freedom, but there is no rational alternative.  Similarly, the hostility between King Abdullah and the regime in Iran is part of bedrock Saudi foreign policy, but it is totally irrational from a long-range perspective.  The only way to help Iran change its spots is to develop a rapprochement designed to undercut the paranoia that sustains the present un-Islamic regime there.  As I advised General Anwar Eshki and his advisers last year, who was Prince Sultan’s right-hand man in the Ministry of Defense, the Saudi government should work to establish a West Asian entente or even alliance as a regional power on the world stage, consisting of the four leaders, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.  An early step would be to create the Islamic dinar as a world currency, led by the Gulf countries (including Iran).  This also would help those in Iran who think that a nuclear Iran would be suicidal and who recognize that in the last analysis, as shown in the Qur’an, the history of civilizations is determined by justice, not by force of arms either in offense or defense.

    In my view, any government in the world today should take the new initiative of the Center for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue seriously only when the first Christian churches are opened in Saudi Arabia and a Vatican nuncio is welcomed as an official ambassador.  Otherwise the Saudis would make themselves into laughing stocks.  Promises to do so in order to promote an American attack on Iran would merely multiply any duplicity. 

    Since Arabs are famous for speaking out of two sides of their mouth with forked tongues, perhaps even more so than are Americans, the religious freedom initiative, known as the King Abdullah Center for Inter-Religious and Inter-Cultural Dialogue, launched yesterday, October 13th, 2011, in Vienna should be followed by appropriate action, because any inter-religious dialogue without solidarity in action, is worse than useless.  The same is true, as I have been saying in my articles on the Arab Spring and now on the American Spring, because the Occupation of Wall Street by revolutionaries without any consensus or even any comprehension of pragmatic and productive reform is a snare and a delusion. 

    The governing paradigm should be peace, prosperity, and freedom through interfaith,compassionate justice, as developed in classical Islamic thought centuries ago and equally in the classical or traditionalist thought of America’s Founders based on their principal mentor, Edmund Burke, of the Scottish Enlightenment.