De-Theocratizing the State? The Debate over the Civil State (Dawla Madaniyya) Model in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Since the Arab uprisings, the ambiguous notion of a civil state (dawla madaniyya) has been gaining a foothold in many Arab states as the ideal state model, at the official and popular levels. Even Saudi Arabia has heard voices advocating a civil state. Whereas such voices were evident in critical newspaper columns, which raised countercriticism by the Saudi religious orthodoxy during the 2000s and 2010s, recently Crown Prince Muḥammad bin Salmān Āl Saʿūd has been increasingly portrayed in the Saudi media as directing the Kingdom toward a modern Islamic civil state, indicating a possible change in the perception of this concept. This article offers a contextual analysis of the Saudi intellectual polemic on the civil state model, which has been taking place for the past fifteen years, its development, meanings­, and prospects. The article will also consider the implications of the long-standing debate over the civil state idea taking place in Egypt on the short-lived Saudi contestation, in an effort to enhance the overall understanding of the conception of the civil state in the Arab world.

Keywords:

• Saudi Arabia
• civil state
• secularism
• Islamic State
• Egypt
• Arab Spring
• Muhammad bin Salman Al Saud
• IS
• religion

1 Introduction

Since the Arab uprisings, the ambiguous notion of a civil state (dawla madaniyya) has been gaining a foothold in many Arab states, at the official and popular level, as an ideal and desired model of statehood. For example, the 2014 Tunisian constitution consensually defined Tunisia as a “civil state”.¹ The 2014 Egyptian constitution (amended in 2019) states that the military is assigned to protect Egypt’s “civil-ness”, a clause that later was even given practical force in the law.² In Lebanon, President Michel Aoun recently called for declaring Lebanon a civil state.³ In Iraq, the main slogan heard in the mass demonstrations that erupted in 2015 was “bread, freedom, civil state” (khubz, ḥurriyya, dawla madaniyya).⁴ Surprisingly, even in Saudi Arabia there have been voices advocating a civil state.

The Saudi voices raised in favor of a civil state are particularly interesting, as for decades the Saudi monarchy has maintained an image of a religious-theocratic state, although academic research has presented a complex picture of the relationship between religion and state in the Kingdom. As early as the 1980s, Aharon Layish pointed out that Saudi Arabia was moving away from the vision of the theocratic state at the core of the Wahhabiyya, according to which Sharīʿa dictates all of society’s affairs and foreign relations.⁵ Jon Mahoney and Kamel Alboaouh, too, suggested that Saudi Arabia is going through a “transition away from a theocratic monarchy to a more consultative form of political authority”.⁶ However, it is still widely assumed that “the oil boom of the 1970s and subsequent development of Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure, economy, and even social sphere have not changed its theocratic nature.”⁷

Some scholars offered middle-way conceptualizations for the status of religion in the Kingdom. For example, Madawi Al-Rasheed went so far as to say that the Saudi regime is “neither fully secular nor religious”, and that Saudi Arabia is actually “politically secular and socially religious”.⁸ Abdullah Hamidaddin stressed that Saudi Arabia should not be considered religious, but rather “ambivalently religious”.⁹ Yet in a recent paper, Muhammad Al-Atawneh, who addressed the question to what extent do Saudi monarchies accommodate theocracy, suggested instead that Saudi Arabia be seen as a “theo-monarchy that draws power from long-standing religiocultural norms”.¹⁰ Since the idea underlying the civil state model contradicts the theocratic model, the debate taking place in Saudi Arabia on the nature of the state and its orientation between a religious state and a civil one deserves examination.

As the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state proliferated throughout the Arab world, academic interest in this concept grew.¹¹ The existing literature mainly refers to the Egyptian case study, where a prolonged debate took place around the civil state concept.¹² There are also some studies on the perception of the civil state in Tunisia, Libya, and Syria.¹³ However, academic research has not yet crystallized into an overall appraisal of the civil state concept in the Arab world. Alternatively, specific test cases have been explored, with the understanding that the civil state model encompasses a diversity of models of civil states, and that although the conceptions of the civil state in the Arab world have commonalities, various socio-political circumstances dictate differences in the meanings of the concept, its development and acceptance.

This article looks into the Saudi case study, examining the intellectual debate on the civil state option in the Kingdom, which has not been fully addressed thus far. Several scholars have already pointed to Saudi modernists promoting ⁣⁣a civil state.¹⁴ However, the contribution of this paper is in tracing key milestones in the progress of this debate, and in contextualizing them within local, regional, and international developments –– what motivates the debate and what limits it. The merit of this paper lies also in the assessment of the Saudi discourse of the civil state in light of the exhaustive Egyptian debate over this concept. It is not our intention to systematically compare the two cases, but to analyze whether Saudi Arabia is following Egypt’s path in dealing with the emerging idea of ⁣⁣a civil state or taking a different one.

To this end, the next section will discuss the academic effort to grasp the multiple meanings of the polysemous term “civil state”, while seeking to place it within well-established analytical categories. The following section will outline the genealogy of the Saudi civil state discourse based on the textual analysis of op-eds, books, and public statements by Saudi opinion leaders, publicists, intellectuals, activists, and religious scholars over the past 15 years, and contextualize its landmarks. It should be emphasized that this is a purely theoretical discussion, not an examination of whether Saudi Arabia actually meets the criteria of a civil state. In the last part, we will discuss the Saudi civil state trajectory according to lessons learned from the Egyptian experience and consider its future prospects.

2 A civil state: one concept, multiple meanings

Since the Arab uprisings, the “civil state” concept has attracted increasing scholarly attention, as it has become a common expression used by protesters, movements, political parties, and leaders to denote the state they envision. Yet, while the civil state constitutes a popular concept, it is concurrently characterized by “semantic haziness”,¹⁵ as rival ideological currents in the Arab world, Islamists and non-Islamists alike, support this model but render the concept differently. In effect, the Arab discourse contains a range of civil states, deriving from the various complexities of different political environments and religious beliefs.

Notwithstanding their variations, all civil state perceptions are based on some common premises, most notably the notion that the optimal state model is an Islamic state which is simultaneously modern, non-secular and non-(clerical) religious. The implicit message of this assertion is threefold. First, the assertion that an Islamic state is modern is intended to renounce other prototypes of an Islamic state which reject modernity and maintain or project a fundamentalist and scriptural understanding of Islam. Second, the assertion that an Islamic state is non-secular is intended to refute the controversial assumption that modernization necessitates secularization.¹⁶ Third, when presenting the Islamic state as non-religious, the common explanation among Islamist civil state advocates for this seeming dissonance is an anti-clerical one: (Sunni) Islam rejects the governance of a religious scholar ruling by God-given right, and supports a state whose ruler is a representative of the people, hence, a civil ruler, not a religious one.¹⁷ Non-Islamists, while accepting this interpretation of a civil state, mean non-religious in a broader sense, of a state that also separates religion from official decision-making in areas of politics, legislation and economics.

Hence, Islamist and non-Islamist supporters of a civil state alike have different rationales for upholding modern norms, institutions, and procedures of government. Non-Islamist or so-called liberal Muslim currents generally perceive the civil state as liberating the political, legislative, and juridical practices and institutions led by the state from a religious justification or destination and from the intervention of religious authority and institutions. They usually refrain from an explicit call for secularization or a secular state, which often invokes antagonism and challenges the mainstream. Instead, they stress that in a civil state, Islam is not privatized; rather, it enjoys a distinguished status in public affairs, culture, education, and history, outside the realm of the official state branches.

This non-Islamist view of a civil state may better be grasped by using the term “civil Islam”, first coined by Robert Hefner at the turn of the millennium, describing “an emergent tradition” of pluralistic and democratized Islam in Indonesia, which affirms the legitimacy of religion in public life.¹⁸ Reflecting on “civil Islam” in retrospect, while examining its applicability to other case studies, Hefner characterized civil Islam as an aspiration “to imbricate Islamic values and practices with those of a democratic and religiously-undifferentiated citizenship”.¹⁹ Hefner’s civil Islam is also consistent with the non-Islamist understanding of a civil state, as it repudiates the Islamic state in the sense of an entity which embodies religion in all areas of the state in a totalizing and monopolizing way, and “implies a renunciation of Islam’s holism”.²⁰ Indeed, civil Islam affirms the legitimacy of religion in public life; however, this religion assumes the shape of a public religion, voiced by independent associations and spirited public dialogue, as opposed to a “regimist” or “statist” religion.²¹ Therefore, non-Islamist calls for a civil state in the sense of separation of religion and politics, state neutrality, relinquishing state religion and dismantling the dominance of the religious establishment in decision making and in legislation –– are calls for a civil Islam.

The civil state advocated by some Islamist currents, on the other hand, espouses a modern Islamic state which complies with the tenets of Islam, sometimes using the phrase “a civil state with an Islamic source of authority” (dawla madaniyya dhāt marjaʿiyya Islāmiyya) to imply that their support of a civil state does not mean relinquishing the need for a partial or a full enactment of Sharīʿa.²² The “post-Islamism” analytical category, coined by Asef Bayat in reference to Iran, better captures the perception of most Islamist civil state proponents.²³ Bayat described post-Islamism as Islamists’ realization of the anomalies of the Islamic political system and a re-conceptualization of the Islamic state advocating democracy instead of authoritarianism, civil rights instead of religious duties, pluralism in place of totalism, and modernization instead of restoring the past.²⁴ In a more updated work referring to other contemporary case studies, Bayat revisited the original concept, emphasizing that post-Islamism “favors a civil and nonreligious state”.²⁵

This nuanced contrast between civil Islam and post-Islamism heightens the prevailing multiplicity of outlooks regarding the civil state model, an ambiguity which is sometimes referred to as word juggling or a “semantic limbo” that relieves the parties from the necessity of declaring themselves explicitly in favor of a secular state or a religious one.²⁶ For this reason, more conservative Islamist currents reject the civil state as secular. However, the civil state is in effect a post-secular model, or “post-secular-religious” model, to use the conceptualization offered by Arvind-Pal Mandair and Markus Dressler, meaning a perspective that is beyond the binary of secular/religious.²⁷ In his Notes on Post-Secular Society,²⁸ Jürgen Habermas urges modern societies to reconcile the secular position with religious norms and values by incorporating into the public debate religious values ⁣⁣translated into secular terminology.²⁹ In this spirit, the civil state, at least in theory, incorporates secular norms translated into Islamic reasoning.

Academic research on the roots, meanings, and development of the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state is still in its early stages. There is a growing body of literature which is coping with the challenge of characterizing the existing areas of non-religiosity and secularity within Islam. Different conceptualizations of the blurred boundaries between the religious and the secular assume that the two are not opposites that exclude one another, but rather exist within each other. Scholars have observed “multiple (cultures of) secularities”,³⁰ “Islamicate secularities”³¹ and a variety of “secularisms”³² within Islam, as well as a diversity of “Islamisms”, instead of one monolithic and prototypical Islamism or Neo-Islamism.³³ Some have coined combination terms, such as Nasir Ghobadzadeh’s category of “religious secularity”, which refers to a vision shared by Iranian reformist clerics for the emancipation of religion from the state, based on religious argumentation,³⁴ and Sherman A. Jackson’s “Islamic secular”, which denotes the “non-sharʿī realm” within Islam.³⁵

Nevertheless, advocates of a civil state would rarely accept such conceptualizations and definitions, because these conceptualizations still use the religio-secular dichotomous concepts, and fail to adopt terminologies from within the Islamic discourse.³⁶ The use of the term civil state is intended to create a degree of synthesis between Islamic cultural particularism and modern Western norms and patterns, declaratively denunciating both the religious fundamentalist vision and the Western-secular model of statehood. The study of the civil state has not yet attempted an overall appraisal of the civil state conception in the Arab world, nor does this article purport to offer such an assessment. Instead, we turn to address the origins of the civil state discourse in a setting not yet considered, that of Saudi Arabia, thus adding another experience to the multiple histories of the Arab civil state discourses.

3 Re-branding the Islamic State: a contextualization of the Saudi debate over a civil state

3.1 The 9/11 effect

The idea of ⁣⁣a civil state surfaced vehemently in the Saudi intellectual discourse in the mid-2000s. The 9/11 attacks, planned and carried out by terrorists who were mostly Saudis, as well as the presence of Saudi fighters in the forces combating the US-led coalition in the 2003 Iraq war –– all provoked external and internal criticism of the Kingdom, demanding a re-examination of its Wahhābī foundations. On the initiative of then-Crown Prince ʿAbdallāh Āl Saʿūd, a national dialogue was launched to clear Saudi Arabia’s name and refute its image as a fertile ground for radicalism or an Islamic state based on al-Qaeda’s worldview.³⁷ As Mark C. Thompson has pointed out, this official forum started as a cross-constituency dialogue that discussed sensitive issues rarely brought up before, such as the ideological and social basis of the Kingdom. The First National Meeting (held in 2009–10) concluded by adopting a charter that acknowledged the Kingdom’s intellectual, religious, and spiritual diversity and advocated greater political participation and reform within the Saudi political system.³⁸

A Saudi debate on the desired state model, which questioned the foundations of the Islamic State in the Kingdom, had already started after the USSR withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, in light of the emerging Afghan model. The 9/11 events and “Ben Ladin’s enduring challenge”³⁹ for the Saudi monarchy further increased the critical, open discussion of Wahhābī political thought. This discussion included members of the royal family, conformist religious scholars, reformist clerics, publicists, and the general public, who even considered alternative models for the future Saudi Arabia. Eventually, criticism of Wahhabism was limited; however, it was against this background that individual liberal intellectuals dared to voice demands, not only for reforms and liberalization as they had hitherto done, but in favor of the civil state model.⁴⁰ In the words of Gwenn Okruhlik, this was “a ‘moment’ for believers in civil, tolerant Islam to assert their positions in national debates”.⁴¹

The first vocal Saudi spokesman for a civil state was the former editor and columnist of the Al-Waṭan daily, Qaynān Al-Ghāmdī.⁴² In 2006, Al-Ghāmdī had a famous debate in the Saudi press with one of the “quietist ʿulamāʾ”, Shaykh Saʿd Al-Burayk.⁴³ Al-Burayk denounced the term civil state, since it may be interpreted as a purely secular Western state, which in his view constitutes an obscene model that dismisses Islamic institutions. Drawing on the Egyptian experience, Al-Burayk mentioned pro-civil-state Egyptian intellectuals who interpreted the concept in the sense of a non-religious state, one that abolishes the place of religion in politics, legislation, law, and social affairs, in order to attack the Saudi advocates of a civil state and condemn them as subversive Westernizers.⁴⁴ Al-Ghāmdī, for his part, rejected Al-Burayk’s claims, stressing that a civil state is rather consistent with Islamic institutions and basing his argumentation on religious justification. In Al-Ghāmdī’s perception, a civil state entails equal citizenship, which is at the core of Islam. To further substantiate this claim, he argued as did some Al-Azhar scholars, that the first state that the Prophet Muḥammad established in Al-Madīna was a civil one, as it elevated religious pluralism, which was enshrined in Ṣaḥīfat al-Madīna.⁴⁵

As this debate endured, it shifted from a general theoretic discussion over the civil state concept to a concrete polemic over the orientation of the Saudi state. Al-Ghāmdī explicitly argued that Saudi Arabia is de facto a civil state. His use of the term civil state is not in a sense of separation between state and religion, since his interpretation attributes to Islam the source of authority of the constitution and the state mechanisms, but rather in the non-clerical meaning. To better establish his claim, he (and many others to follow)⁴⁶ relied on local Saudi key figures who enjoy an authoritative and even a mythical status. Al-Ghāmdī anchored his position in the notion that the separation between political and religious authority in Saudi Arabia was rooted in the division of roles established by the Kingdom’s forefathers, Muḥammad bin Saʿūd, who filled the role of a political leader, and the founder of Wahhabism Muḥammad bin ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, who was responsible for religious affairs. Al-Ghāmdī also grounded his claim in the well-known proclamations of Prince Turkī Al-Fayṣal Āl Saʿūd and Prince Talāl bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl Saʿūd, who represent a reformist current within the royal family itself, albeit a relatively weak one, according to which only the political leader must be obeyed, while religious scholars enjoy a mere consultative status.⁴⁷ Considering Wahhabism’s bad reputation in the world and the negative image of young Saudis as terrorists, Al-Ghāmdī urged Al-Burayk to abandon the religious state. A civil Saudi Arabia, in name and in practice, he noted, would restore the Kingdom’s international prestige.⁴⁸

The debate between Al-Burayk and Al-Ghāmdī caused a stir and exposed the Saudi public, for the first time, to a discussion on the concept of a civil state in the Kingdom, with the participation of other publicists, most of whom supported Al-Ghāmdī’s position.⁴⁹ Abdulaziz Al-Khedr even commented that this relatively open discussion in the press about the choice between a “religious state” and “civil state” was concomitant with a “media campaign against extremism and terrorism with many different schools of thought taking part”.⁵⁰ While it was essentially a superficial discussion, avoiding sensitive issues such as the status of the Shiite minority, women’s status, and human rights or an explicit demand to reform state-religion relations, the importance of such “civil seedlings”⁵¹ lies not only in bringing the civil state concept to public consciousness but also in criticizing the clerics for clinging to the religious state model, while damaging Saudi Arabia’s efforts to restore a positive image.

The authorities’ reaction to this debate indicated that Al-Ghāmdī had crossed a red line, as following the controversy with Al-Burayk, he received a warning from the Saudi Ministry of Communications and Information implying that he should lower the provocative tone demonstrated in Al-Waṭan. When he refused, he was prevented from working as a publicist in all Saudi newspapers and moved to England, until he was offered a job as editor of the Saudi daily Al-Sharq in 2009.⁵² Against this backdrop and a wave of arrests of Saudi reformists in 2007–08, the discussion on the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state ceased; it resurfaced only with the outbreak of the Arab uprisings, which instigated throughout the region a reconsideration of the social contract between the state and its citizens.

3.2 The Arab uprisings effect

Another high-profile debate, demonstrating the controversy around the idea of a civil state in the Saudi context, erupted in late 2010 and early 2011 between publicist Khālid Al-Dakhīl and cleric Ibrāhīm Al-Saʿīdī in the Al-Ḥayāt daily. Similar to Al-Ghāmdī, who exhorted the clerics to adopt a seemingly semantic, yet substantial change in addressing Saudi Arabia as a civil state, Al-Dakhīl challenged the convention that the Qurʾān and the Sunna comprise the constitution of the Kingdom as enshrined in the “Basic Law of Saudi Arabia” (al-Niẓām al-Asāsī li-l-Ḥukm), and called to turn the Basic Law into the Kingdom’s official constitution.⁵³ In Al-Saʿīdī’s view, Al-Dakhīl denied the religious nature of the Saudi state, which is embodied in the superiority of the Qurʾān and the Sunna over a man-made charter.⁵⁴ The debate revealed differences in the interpretation of the term religious state, and reluctance on the part of Al-Dakhīl to explicitly use the expression “civil state”. While Al-Dakhīl, like Al-Ghāmdī, defined a religious state as a state ruled by a cleric and thus not suitable to describe the Saudi case, for Al-Saʿīdī, like Al-Burayk, in an ideal religious state, Islam guides all spheres of life, political and personal, civil and religious. By this logic, Al-Saʿīdī also rejected the formula of a “civil state with an Islamic source of authority”, arguing that this expression reduces the Sharīʿa to a legislative source of authority only. In his view, the use of the term civil instead of secular state reflects subservience to the West, which refers to the implementation of Sharīʿa as holding back progress.⁵⁵

With the outbreak of the Arab uprisings, protests and calls for reforms erupted in Saudi Arabia as well. One of the prominent figures leading the defiant “Islamo-liberal”⁵⁶ discourse vis-à-vis the Saudi regime in this context was Shaykh Salmān Al-ʿAwda. Al-ʿAwda was one of the “awakening Shaykhs” (ṣahwiyyūna)⁵⁷ or “ḥarakī ʿulamāʾ”,⁵⁸ who were “moving beyond contemporary Salafi views” and demanding political liberties and rethinking Islamic law based on theological argumentation.⁵⁹ Al-ʿAwda incorporated his support for the establishment of ⁣⁣a civil state within an implicit critique of the regime. His book The Questions of the Revolution (Asʾilat al-thawra), published in 2012, discussed Islam’s stance regarding a revolution and presented it as legitimate. The book includes a chapter titled “The Identity of the Post-Revolutionary State –– Religious or Civil?”. Cautiously enough, this chapter does not refer specifically to the Saudi Kingdom, but generally presents the religious clerical state as un-Islamic, and the civil state, in the sense of the enactment of a civil and just social contract between the authorities and institutions, as consistent with Sunni political doctrine.⁶⁰ By implication, Al-ʿAwda legitimized a revolution in Saudi Arabia aimed at establishing a civil state. The book was banned in Saudi Arabia, but was distributed for free on Al-ʿAwda’s social media accounts, which have millions of followers.⁶¹ He currently faces a trial, as the prosecution demands his execution, after his arrest in 2017.

3.3 The Islamic State (IS) and the anti-Muslim Brotherhood campaign effect

The civil state debate was renewed in 2014,⁶² possibly against the background of the rise of the Islamic State (IS), whose radical version of an Islamic state further instigated criticism against a religious state and bolstered calls for a civil one.⁶³ Similar to the embarrassment that Al-Qaeda inflicted on Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism after 9/11, IS also put Saudi Arabia in a defensive position, both in the face of repeated claims around the world that Wahhābī thought engenders IS-style religious extremism, and in Saudi Arabia itself, in the face of IS’s claim to represent the “true” Islamic state as opposed to Saudi Arabia. The term civil state was used in this context as an antithesis to an IS-style Islamic state. Saudi publicists argued that unlike IS, which presents a primitive model of an Islamic state –– one that does not take into account the changing times and needs –– the Saudi civil model of an Islamic State upholds the tenets of Islam while keeping up with human progress and modernity. In this vein, IS was presented in the Saudi press as an unsuccessful imitation of the Saudi model due to its attempt to apply outdated forms of government to a population that has already come a long way in modernization. At the same time, the secret of Saudi success was presented as the combination of religious and civil elements through a slow and calculated process of modernization, while considering the needs of a tribal population.⁶⁴

The frequent use of the civil state concept in the Saudi press since 2014 was also a product of the Saudi anti-Muslim Brotherhood stance, following their removal from power in Egypt in 2013 and the formation of a Saudi-led coalition with Egypt, Bahrain, and the UAE against the Turkish-Qatari axis supporting the Muslim Brotherhood. The Saudi press introduced the civil state model as the most advanced state model achieved by human civilization,⁶⁵ the antithesis of the model to which Islamist movements, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies, aspire. For instance, Saudi scholar ʿAbd al-Ghanī Al-Kindī’s interpretation of the concept of a civil state accepts the Westphalian order of separate sovereign nation-states.⁶⁶ Thus, the civil state model is contrasted to the notion of ⁣⁣the restoration of the Caliphate or the reign of Islam over the entire world, delegitimizing the way of Al-Qaeda, IS, and the Muslim Brotherhood.⁶⁷

3.4 De-theocratizing the Saudi state: is there official backing?

The voices advocating a civil state are not backed by the Saudi regime; rather, they are repeatedly rejected by clerics close to the Palace.⁶⁸ ʿAbdallāh Al-Qaḥṭānī testified that raising the issue of a civil state in Saudi Arabia is risky, a trap that could lead to the writer’s arrest; nonetheless, he called on the Saudi government to put an end to the debate and officially recognize Saudi Arabia as a civil non-religious state.⁶⁹ For now, however, the civil state concept is not part of the official rhetoric of Crown Prince Muḥammad bin Salmān Āl Saʿūd.⁷⁰ The Saudi Grand Mufti and Head of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars, Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl al-Shaykh, dismissed the call for the establishment of a civil state more than once, arguing that it is contrary to the provisions of Islam.⁷¹ Religious scholars cling to the claim that a civil state or a “civil state with an Islamic source of authority” is contrary to Islam, depriving it of control over the regime, legislation and the judiciary, morals and behavior.⁷²

Ultimately, the vocal public debate on the notion of ⁣⁣a civil state in Saudi Arabia –– which was primarily the domain of a limited circle of liberals, such as Turkī Al-Ḥamd,⁷³ Muḥammad Al-Qaḥṭānī and ʿ Abdallāh Al-Ḥāmid,⁷⁴ and of a few “civil shaykhs”⁷⁵ who have challenged the official political-religious narrative, such as Al-ʿAwda and ʿ Alī Al-ʿUmrī⁷⁶ –– was silenced, though it may have endured in private salons and majālis and within the virtual discourse that was allowed to take place online.⁷⁷ Al-Rasheed –– who is one of the co-founders of a new opposition party advocating democracy⁷⁸ established by Saudi exiles in September 2020 –– describes this group of civil state proponents as a minority that has acquired a place in the public arena and that offers society “a third alternative between the Salafi-Jihad radical movement and the official and obedient Salafi current by peacefully calling for democracy and a civil state”.⁷⁹ They are not organized as a cohesive movement, they have not been given official authority or political-institutional support, and moreover, even if they have enjoyed relative tolerance for several years and the ability to voice their liberal ideas, most are currently in prison or remain silent following a wave of arrests that began in 2017.

At the same time, we may be witnessing a change in the attitude of the Saudi regime toward the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state. Even though the civil state was not incorporated into the Crown Prince’s “Saudi Vision 2030”, since 2017 it has been evident in the Saudi press that Saudi Arabia under his leadership is being portrayed as a civil state marching toward progress and modernity and shunning the image of a primitive or backward religious state. One of the recurring themes in the Saudi press lately is that the founder of the first Saudi state, Imam Muḥammad bin Sa ʿ ūd, laid the foundations for a civil state already in 1727, and currently King Salmān Āl Saʿūd and his son, Crown Prince Muḥammad, are following in his footsteps.⁸⁰ The transformation of Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Muḥammad into a civil state –– in the sense of renewing and moderating the religious discourse, promoting women’s rights, and strengthening the modern state’s significance in political consciousness –– is being presented as a normal historical development, a natural and desirable move, and an expression of the will of the Saudi people.⁸¹

The growing examples of publicists in the conservative Saudi media portraying Crown Prince Muḥammad as directing Saudi Arabia toward a civil state suggest that this concept is in line with Crown Prince Muḥammad’s reformist agenda and the image of a rejuvenator he seeks for himself.⁸² In 2017, Crown Prince Muḥammad declared his intention to revert to a “moderate Islam open to the world and all religions”. He presented a new discourse and announced his plan to change the political direction of the country toward liberalization and modernization.⁸³ He was able to introduce new policies that seemed very unlikely before his arrival. Significant reforms included the reopening of movie theaters, the lifting of the ban on female drivers, the admission of women into stadiums, and curbing the powers of the “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” (the so-called religious police). The appointment of Shaykh Muḥammad Al-ʿĪsā as the new head of the Muslim World League was considered another sign of relative liberty regarding the interpretation of Islam. This new discourse of religious tolerance, whether genuine or not, is “seductive to Western ears”, which is one of Crown Prince Muḥammad’s goals.⁸⁴ On this background, the possibility that Crown Prince Muḥammad will adopt the civil state concept is not entirely inconceivable, even if it would be to the dismay of the religious establishment.

The next section will examine the development of the Saudi discourse on a civil state in parallel to Egypt, where the discourse of the civil state went a long way until it reached the mainstream, with the backing of the religious establishment and the Salafi movement.

4 The Saudi versus the Egyptian civil state trajectory

In previous research, I outlined four stages in the evolution of the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state in Egypt.⁸⁵ In the first phase, from the early 20^th century to the 1980s, calls for the establishment of a civil state were sporadic, mostly on the part of Christian intellectuals and diplomats, liberals, or reformist clerics. At the time, the term “civil state” was used in the sense of separation of religion and state and full civic equality. The concept was considered foreign and imported and therefore was uncommon and unaccepted, especially among Islamic currents. Next, following the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, a dynamic was created that led centrist Islamist intellectuals to adopt the terminology of a civil state into their political doctrine, in the sense of a modern non-clerical Islamic state. This stage included the development of theoretical explanations that justify the change in the position toward this concept, including the formula “a civil state with an Islamic source of authority”, which aimed, as aforementioned, to clarify that it does not refer to a secular state nor abolish the claim for the enactment of Sharīʿa principles. The dual use of the term civil state, in the Islamist and non-Islamist senses, seemed like “a dialogue of the deaf” that continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

As in Egypt, so in Saudi Arabia, the discourse of the civil state was at first marginal and reserved mainly for liberal intellectuals and minorities,⁸⁶ and later expanded to include reformist Islamists. Meanwhile, the Salafis in both countries rejected the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state in all its interpretations as a model that denies the all-encompassing nature of Islam. Despite this similarity, the political power relations between these currents in the Saudi Kingdom differ from Egypt, hence the weight of the position of each current in relation to a civil state differs. In Egypt, centrist Islamists, mainly the Muslim Brotherhood, had greater political influence than the Salafis, who only joined the political arena after the 2011 uprising and had no impact on the civil state discourse until then. In Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, the Salafi worldview is the dominant one in the ruling circles and in the religious establishment, while the Ṣaḥwis are popular at the social level but politically excluded, and liberals are marginalized in both domains. Accordingly, in Saudi Arabia, contrary to Egypt, the Salafi conception that opposes a civil state is prevalent, while civil state supporters are being silenced.

In the third stage, from the late 1990s onwards, the Mubārak regime intervened in the intellectual controversy and decided it in favor of the non-Islamist interpretation of a civil state. The Mubārak regime nationalized the discourse of the civil state and created an artificial unification of its concepts and content in accordance with its agenda and needs, which converged with the outlook of the liberals and the left. Intellectuals working in the service of the regime idealized this model, while senior clerics, including the Shaykh of Al-Azhar, sanctioned it with religious approval. So far, the Saudi regime has not taken sides in the debate over the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state. This may be because one of the main legitimization strategies of the Saudi regime is “the notion that the state is fundamentally Islamic in nature”.⁸⁷ In the Saudi case, the exclusion of the voices calling for a civil state does not necessarily indicate that Crown Prince Muḥammad chose the Salafi side of the debate. It should not be ruled out that the Saudi regime will choose to manage the civil state discourse on its own, as Mubārak did, and not allow the liberals to lead it, especially after some of them have used the civil state concept in an oppositional manner, to legitimize an uprising against the regime. The fact that the use of the civil state concept to describe the Kingdom under the leadership of Crown Prince Muḥammad has not bred any resentment on the part of the ʿulamāʾ reinforces the assumption that the civil state concept is being expropriated from the public and is being directed by the regime.

The downfall of Mubārak in 2011 opened the fourth stage in the genealogy of the idea of ⁣⁣the civil state. It freed the discourse of the civil state from the control of the regime and re-exposed the old polarization on the question of the status of religion, this time in the form of a debate over the definition of the state in the new constitution. In 2011, the military transitional regime made an initial move to oblige the drafters of the future constitution to define Egypt in the first article as a civil state, which was halted due to opposition from Al-Azhar, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Salafis, and their supporters on the Egyptian street. A second move was made after the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated president, Muḥammad Mursī, in a military coup in 2013, culminating in the definition of Egypt as “a state whose government is civil” in the preamble to the 2014 constitution; the explicit concept of a civil state could not be placed in the first article due to Salafi opposition. Following this episode, several timid voices in Saudi Arabia called to anchor the civil model in a constitution.⁸⁸

A third move in this direction was made in the 2019 constitutional amendments, which determined that the Egyptian Armed Forces are to protect the civil-ness of the state (madaniyyat al-dawla). Hence, de jure, it is implicit that Egypt is of a civil nature and that the army guarantees its non-religious (and non-Islamist) nature. This amendment was made possible despite the initial opposition of the Salafi Al-Nūr party, after the Egyptian parliament approved an official interpretation of the phrase madaniyyat al-dawla, a reservation that explicitly states that although Egypt declares itself a civil state, it does not mean a secular state.⁸⁹ Since July 2020, the State Security Law dictates a procedure in case the civil-ness of the state is endangered, in accordance with this constitutional amendment.⁹⁰ Throughout the Egyptian transitional period, the Salafis consistently opposed these successive moves to define Egypt as a civil state at the forefront of the constitution. However, as Magued has shown, the Al-Nūr party eventually succumbed to the dictates of the coup regime and allowed the validation of the civil state in the constitution and in the law, wishing to take the place of the Muslim Brotherhood which had been completely excluded in the public arena since Mursī’s ouster.⁹¹

This development did not go unnoticed in Saudi circles. For example, Shaykh Muḥammad Al-Saʿīdī, who strongly opposed the concept of a civil state in the aforementioned controversy with Khālid Al-Dakhīl in 2010–11, attested that he had followed the debate in the Egyptian parliament over the constitutional amendments, and that he considers the explicit parliamentary declaration regarding the de-secularization of the civil state an achievement which should be attributed to the Salafi Al-Nūr party.⁹² Despite the Saudi Salafi opposition to the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state, the constitutional validation that the concept underwent in Egypt with the consent of the Salafi Al-Nūr party and the parliamentary official guarantee of its non-secularity may weaken the Salafi opposition in the Kingdom to the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state.⁹³ The Saudi civil state trajectory is far from its Egyptian counterpart and will probably take its own unique path, in correlation with the changing relationship between the regime, the religious establishment, and the public. However, in the long run, it is not unreasonable for the Egyptian precedent to affect the Saudi civil state perception.

5 Conclusion

This article sought to offer a contextual analysis of the Saudi intellectual debate on the civil state model that has been taking place in the last 15 years. The idea of a civil state has reached Saudi Arabia after traveling a long way in the Arab world in general and in Egypt in particular, through which it was established as a model combining Islam and modernity. This model stands against the Western-secular state model separating state and religion, and against a religious state model in a theocratic, clerical, or fundamentalist sense. While in Egypt the interpretations of a civil state ranged from the “civil Islam” proclaimed by the Mubārak regime, the left-secular opposition and liberals on the one hand to the “post-Islamism” proclaimed by centrist Islamists and mainly the Muslim Brotherhood on the other, in the Saudi discourse it was the Salafi view that prevailed and that rejected the concept in both the former and latter interpretations. Saudi approaches of “civil Islam” or “post-Islamism” were allowed to be publicly expressed for a short while out of an interest in providing Saudi Arabia with a moderate image and de-legitimizing alternative models of an Islamic state, such as those advocated by Al-Qaeda, IS, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Saudi civil state debate is short-lived compared to the Egyptian experience, and it progressed at a different pace and in different political and social circumstances. Yet, similar to the Egyptian civil state discourse in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the regime in Saudi Arabia has recently seized the discourse from the public and monopolized it. Like Mubārak back then, Crown Prince Muḥammad is currently portrayed in the media as leading the country toward a modern, advanced, and open civil state. On the face of it, this image undermines the religious legitimation strategy of the Saudi regime. However, adopting a pro-civil state image does not pose a challenge to the status quo nor entail a shift from a religious to a civil legitimacy, as long as the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state rests on the latest parliamentary Salafi-backed Egyptian (anti-Islamist and de-secularized) interpretation of the concept. Still, if Crown Prince Muḥammad is to adopt the civil state, even only rhetorically, it will be a declaration of deviation from the Salafi adherence to the principle of the sovereignty of God, and a challenge to the status of the religious establishment; it will be a statement of modernization and de-theocratization of the state.

While the Egyptian experience of debating the civil state model, theorizing, validating, and codifying it has influenced the Saudi perceptions of this model, the brief Saudi contestation over it may have its own impact on the perception of the civil state in the Arab world. If the civil state concept will continue to be marginal in Saudi Arabia, this will mark the boundaries of the civil state model’s outreach in the Arab world. However, if this model will gain momentum in the official rhetoric of the ultra-conservative “theo-monarchy”, not just in “seculareligious” states such as Egypt,⁹⁴ this will further contribute to the establishment of a civil model that is far removed from the initial meaning of a secular state and closer to the meaning of an intermediate post-secular model. Further research examining Saudi perceptions of the civil state in social media and in private niches can complement these findings and help us better comprehend the complexities of this term and its outreach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Limor Lavie

Limor Lavie is a Lecturer at the Department of Arabic, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, 5290002, Israel, [email protected].

Notes

1 Tunisia’s Constitution of 2014. On the differences between the 2014 Tunisian constitution and the 2022 Tunisian constitution regarding the notion of the civil state, see: Lavie, “Harḥaqat dat mi-medīnah: Tmūrōt be-maʿamad ha-Islām be-ḥūqōt Tūnīsyah (1959–2022)”, The Journal for Interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Studies 8.2 (2022), pp. 135–162.

2 Egyptian State Information Service, “Constitutional Amendments”; Al-Ashwal, “Taʿarraf ʿalā al-ijrāʾāt al-jadīda fī qānūn al-amn al-qawmī li-l-ḥifāẓ ʿalā madaniyyat wa salāmat al-dawla”, Al-Shurūq, 6 July 2020.

3 Alsharqiya, “The Lebanese President Calls for Reforming the System and Declaring Lebanon a Civil State”, 31 August 2020.

4 Anon., “Khubz, ḥurriyya, dawla madaniyya”, YouTube, 12 September 2015.

5 Layish, “Saudi Arabian Legal Reform as a Mechanism to Moderate Wahhābī Doctrine”, Journal of the American Oriental Society 107.2 (1987), pp. 279–292.

6 Mahoney and Alboaouh, “Religious and Political Authority in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia”, MANAS: Journal of Social Science 6.2 (2017), pp. 241–257.

7 Van Diemen, “Saudi Arabia – Does the State Control Religion or Does Religion Control the State?”, Socratic Hive (2012).

8 Al-Rasheed, Contesting the Saudi State: Islamic Voices from a New Generation (2007), pp. 57–58.

9 Hamidaddin, Tweeted Heresies: Saudi Islam in Transformation (2020), p. 49.

10 Al-Atawneh, “Is Saudi Arabia a Theocracy? Religion and Governance in Contemporary Saudi Arabia”, Middle Eastern Studies 45.5 (2009), pp. 721, 733.

11 See, for example: Abu-ʿUksa, Freedom in the Arab World: Concepts and Ideologies in Arabic Thought in the Nineteenth Century (2016).

12 Lavie, The Battle over a Civil State: Egypt’s Road to June 30, 2013 (2018); Lavie, “The Idea of the Civil State in Egypt: Its Evolution and Political Impact Following the 2011 Revolution”, Middle East Journal 7.1 (2017), pp. 23–44; Wessel, Grey Scales: Negotiating the Civil State in Post-Revolutionary Egypt (2016); Magued, “The Inter-Islamic Competition and the Shift in al-Nur Party Stance Towards Civil State in Egypt”, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 49.1 (2022), pp. 121–138.

13 Natil, “Civil State in the Post-Arab Spring Countries: Tunisia, Egypt and Libya”, in Çakmak (ed.), The Arab Spring, Civil Society, and Innovative Activism (2017), pp. 217–231; Ben Achour, “The Historic Compromise between ‘Civil State’ and Religion in Post-Revolutionary Arab Neo-Constitutionalism”, in Ferrari and Toronto (eds), Religions and Constitutional Transitions in the Muslim Mediterranean: The Pluralistic Moment (2017), pp. 26–40; Awad, “Is Secularity by Any Means Imaginable? A Reading of the Idea of ‘Civil State’ in the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood’s Contemporary Political Project for the Syria of the Future”, Islamochristiana 40 (2014), pp. 105–124.

14 Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists: The Struggle Over Divine Politics in Saudi Arabia (2016), pp. 1–30; Okruhlik, “Empowering Civility through Nationalism: Reformist Islam and Belonging in Saudi Arabia”, in Hefner (ed.), Remaking Muslim Politics: Pluralism, Contestation, Democratization (2005), pp. 189–212.

15 Steuer and Blouët, “The Notions of Citizenship and the Civil State in the Egyptian Transition Process”, Middle East Law and Governance 7 (2015), p. 242.

16 Krämer, “Modern but Not Secular: Religion, Identity and the Ordre Public in the Arab Middle East”, International Sociology 28.6 (2013), pp. 638–639.

17 Yildirim, The Civil State in John Locke’s Political Philosophy and Khomeinism: The Civil State in John Locke’s Political Philosophy and its Relevance to Velayet-i Faqih Theory (2020).

18 Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (2000), pp. 12–13, 20.

19 Hefner, “Whatever Happened to Civil Islam? Islam and Democratisation in Indonesia, 20 Years On”, Asian Studies Review 43.3 (2019), p. 379.

20 Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia, pp. xviii, 116, 218.

21 Ibid., pp. 12, 19, 218.

22 Tadros, The Muslim Brotherhood in Contemporary Egypt: Democracy Redefined or Confined? (2012), pp. 47–68.

23 Civil Islam and post-Islamism are sometimes used interchangeably. See, for example: Yilmaz, “Beyond Post-Islamism: Transformation of Turkish Islamism Toward ‘Civil Islam’ and Its Potential Influence in the Muslim World”, European Journal of Economic and Political Studies 4.1 (2011), pp. 245–280.

24 Bayat, “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society”, Critique: Critical Middle East Studies 9 (1996), pp. 43–52.

25 Bayat (ed.), Post-Islamism: The Changing Faces of Political Islam (2013), pp. 8, 25.

26 De Poli, “Arab Revolts and the ‘Civil State’: A New Term for Old Conflicts between Islamism and Secularism”, Approaching Religion 4.2 (2014), p. 99.

27 Mandair and Dressler, “Introduction: Modernity, Religion-Making, and the Postsecular”, in Dressler and Mandair (eds), Secularism and Religion-Making (2011), pp. 3–36.

28 Habermas, “Notes on Post-Secular Society”, New Perspectives Quarterly 25.4 (2008), pp. 17–29.

29 Fischer (ed.), Secularization and Secularism Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2015), pp. 20–21.

30 Burchardt, Wohlrab-Sahr, and Middlee (eds), Multiple Secularities Beyond the West: Religion and Modernity in the Global Age (2015).

31 Dressler, Salvatore, and Wohlrab-Sahr, “Islamicate Secularities: New Perspectives on a Contested Concept”, Historical Social Research 44.3 (2019), pp. 7–34.

32 See, for example: Casanova, “The Secular, Secularizations, Secularisms”, in Calhoun, Juergensmeyer and Vanantwerpen (eds), Rethinking Secularism (2011), pp. 54–74.

33 Chamkhi, “Neo-Islamism in the Post-Arab Spring”, Contemporary Politics 20.4 (2014), pp. 453–468.

34 Ghobadzadeh, Religious Secularity: A Theological Challenge to the Islamic State (2014), pp. 2–4.

35 Jackson, “The Islamic Secular”, American Journal of Islam and Society 34.2 (2017), pp. 1–38.

36 Alatas, “Rejecting Islamism and the Need for Concepts from Within the Islamic Tradition”, in Martin and Barzegar (eds), Islamism: Contested Perspectives on Political Islam (2009), pp. 87–92.

37 Dekmejian, “The Liberal impulse in Saudi Arabia”, The Middle East Journal 57.3 (2003), p. 400.

38 Thompson, Saudi Arabia and the Path to Political Change: National Dialogue and Civil Society (2014), pp. 61–66.

39 Riedel and Saab, “Al Qaeda’s Third Front: Saudi Arabia”, Washington Quarterly (2008), pp. 33–46.

40 Al-Zaidi, “Political Reform Attempts in Saudi Arabia”, Contemporary Arab Affairs 8.4 (2015), p. 557; One of the manifestations of the Saudi post-Afghanistan war reform discourse is the liberal-oriented program articulated by one of the leading Shiite reformists, Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār, in 1990 and submitted to King Fahd, titled “Pluralism and Freedom in Islam” (al-taʿaddudiyya wa-l-hurriyya fī al-Islām). This program did not use the term “civil state” back then; however, in retrospect, its opponents gave it the title “The Civil Petition” (al-ʿarīḍa al-madanniya) as a derogatory name [Louër, “Shiʿi Identity Politics in Saudi Arabia”, in Longva and Roald (eds), Religious Minorities in the Middle East Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation (2012), p. 221].

41 Okruhlik, “Empowering Civility Through Nationalism”, p. 190.

42 Shiite intellectual Muḥammad Maḥfūz had called for a civil state already in 2004, meaning a state in which the Shiite minority enjoys civil equality. However, his voice was marginal and did not provoke any public reaction, compared to Al-Ghāmdī [Maḥfūẓ, Al-Iṣlāḥ al-siyāsī wa-l-waḥda al-waṭaniyya: kayfa nabnī waṭanan li-l-ʿaysh al-mushtarak (2004), pp. 141–142; Maḥfūẓ, Al-ḥiwār wa-l-waḥda al-waṭaniyya fī al-mamlaka al-Saʿūdiyya (2004), p. 220].

43 Ismail, “Reclaiming Saudi Salafism: The Saudi Religious Circles and the Threat of ISIS”, Journal of Arabian Studies 9 (2019), p. 169.

44 Al-Burayk, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya naqīḍ li-jawhar al-Islām wa li-l-dawla al-dīniyya”, Al-Waṭan, 12 May 2006.

45 Al-Ghāmdī, “‘Al-dawla al-madaniyya’ hiya ‘jawhar al-Islām’ lā naqīḍuhu, ʿinda munaẓẓirīhā al-mutakhaṣṣiṣīna, wa ʿinda al-ʿawāmm”, Al-Waṭan, 5 May 2006; See also the interview with Qaynān Al-Ghāmdī (former editor of Al-Waṭan) in Al-Sanbul, “Munaẓẓirū al-dawla al-dīniyya yakhdimūna ahdāf Bin Lādin”, Al-Yawm, 9 June 2006.

46 For example, Al-Qaḥṭānī, “Al-Saʿūdiyya wa falsafat al-taḥdīth”, Al-Jazīra, 7 February 2015.

47 Al-Fayṣal, “Al-Wulāʾ hum al-ḥukkām wa ṭāʿatuhum wājiba ammā al-ʿulamāʾ wa hum mustashārūna”, Al-Sharq al-Awsaṭ, 20 January 2002; Bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, “Walī al-amr bayna al-ḥākim wa al-ʿālim: walī al-amr huwa al-ḥākim lā al-ʿālim”, Al-Sharq al-Awsaṭ, 29 January 2002. 

48 Al-Ghāmdī, “Tabayyana anna ikhtilāfī maʿaka ḥawla kiyān lā ḥawla taḥrīr muṣṭalaḥāt”, Al-Waṭan, 19 May 2006.

49 Āl Shaykh, “Qaynān wa Al-Burayk wa-l-dawla al-madaniyya”, Al-Jazīra, 21 May 2006; Abū al-Khayl, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya wa-l-mujtamaʿ al-mutadayyin”, Al-Riyāḍ, 7 June 2006; Al-Ḥāwī, “Mā bayna al-dawla ‘al-dīniyya’ wa-l-dawla ‘al-madaniyya’”, Al-Ḥayāt, 24 May 2006.

50 Al-Khedr, “Saudi Enlightenment Remains Elusive as Rivals Fail in Effort to Counter Extremism”, in Craze and Huband (eds), The Kingdom: Saudi Arabia and the Challenge of the 21^st Century (2009), p. 253.

51 Hefner, Civil Islam, p. 14.

52 Īlāf, “Al-Ghāmdī li-Īlāf: Ghādartu mujbaran”, 19 September 2007.

53 Al-Dakhīl, “Al-Niẓām al-Asāsī huwa dustūr al-mamlaka”, Al-Ḥayāt, 19 December 2010.

54 Al-Saʿīdī, “Al-Niẓām al-Asāsī li-l-Ḥukm huwa: al-niẓām al-asāsī li-l-ḥukm”, Al-Ḥayāt, 30 December 2010; Al-Saʿīdī, “Al-mafhūm al-dīnī … wa ‘al-thiyūqrāṭī’”, Al-Ḥayāt, 3 February 2011.

55 Al-Dakhīl, “Al-Saʿūdiyya laysat dawla dīniyya”, Al-Ḥayāt, 16 January 2011; Al-Saʿīdī, “Qirāʾa sharʿiyya fī al-Niẓām al-Asāsī li-l-Ḥukm fī al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya al-Saʿūdiyya”, Al-Ḥayāt, 24 April 2011; Al-Saʿīdī, “Istiqrāʾ al-Niẓām al-Asāsī li-l-Ḥukm”, Al-Madīna, 7 October 2011.

56 Lacroix, “Saudi Arabia and the Limits of Religious Reform”, The Review of Faith and International Affairs 17.2 (2019), p. 277.

57 Lacroix, Awakening Islam: The Politics of Religious Dissent in Contemporary Saudi Arabia (2011), p. 115.

58 Ismail, “Reclaiming Saudi Salafism”, p. 169.

59 Razavian, “Post-Salafism: Salman Al-Ouda and Hatim Al-Awni”, in Bano (ed.), Modern Islamic Authority and Social Change, vol. 1: Evolving Debates in Muslim Majority Countries (2018).

60 Al-ʿAwda, Asʾilat al-thawra (2012), pp. 127–129.

61 Al-Jazīra, “‘Asʾilat al-thawra’: tadhkirat safar al-Shaykh Salmān Al-ʿAwda ilā al-sijn”, 23 August 2020; Al-Najjār, “Salmān Al-ʿAwda: Al-dāʿiya al-ʿābir li-minaṣṣāt al-tawāṣul”, Al-Jazīra, 20 January 2018.

62 Al-Dakhīl, “Laysat ʿalmāniyya … lākinna shabīha bi-hā”, Al-Ḥayāt, 27 April 2014.

63 Bunzel, “The Kingdom and the Caliphate: Duel of the Islamic States”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 18 February 2016.

64 Al-ʿUmrī, “Al-Saʿūdiyya wa Dāʿish wa al-Wahhābiyya”, Al-ʿArab, 25 February 2016.

65 Al-ʾAmīr, “Al-dawla wa al-akhlāq.. tarājuʿ fikrat al-dawla al-multazima”, ʿUkāẓ, 17 March 2018; Āl al-Shaykh, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya dawlat al-mustaqbal”, Al-Jazīra, 1 March 2019.

66 Al-Kindī, “Al-Saʿūdiyya fī muftaraq ṭuruq bayna kamāshat al-maḥāwir wa-l-ḥurūb al-mumkina”, Al-Sharq al-Awsaṭ, 5 April 2020.

67 Al-Ṣirāmī, “Al-mujaddid bin Salmān: qāʾid ‘al-ṣaḥwa’ al-Saʿūdiyya”, Al-Jazīra, 11 June 2019; Al-Rashīd, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya: hal lā dīniyya?”, ʿUkāẓ, 14 June 2020; Āl al-Shaykh, “Shayʾ min dawla al-madaniyya wa-l-dawla al-dīniyya”, Al-Jazīra, 16 June 2015.

68 Al-ʿUmrī, “Lā.. li-l-ʿilmāniyya!”, Al-Yawm, 14 June 2020; Al-Haṭalānī, “Taʿlū akthar wa akthar al-aṣwāt al-muṭāliba bi-l-taghyīr fī al-mujtamaʿ al-Saʿūdī, lākin hal al-niẓām al-malakī jāhiz li-talbiyat al-maṭālib?”, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 22 January 2013.

69 Al-Qaḥṭānī, “Al-Saʿūdiyya dawla dīniyya Islāmiyya? am madaniyya?”, Al-Ḥiwār al-Mutamaddin, 4 May 2016.

70 A single report by Saudi journalist Turkī Al-Dakhīl indicates that Crown Prince Muḥammad used the expression “a civil state”, but not with reference to Saudi Arabia. According to this report, Crown Prince Muḥammad said that Iran must be a civil state so that understandings can be reached with it, in the sense of a state that respects the international norm of non-interference in the affairs of another state [Al-Dakhīl, “Kayfa yumkinu an natafāhama maʿa Irān?!”, ʿUkāẓ, 7 May 2017].

71 Anon., “Muftī al-Saʿūdiyya: al-dawla al-madaniyya al-dīmuqrāṭiyya tunāfī taʿālīm al-Islām”, Al-Ḥurra, 25 October 2012; Anon., “Al-Shaykh ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl al-Shaykh yuḥadhdhiru min al-daʿwa ilā dawla madaniyya dīmuqrāṭiyya”, YouTube, 5 February 2014.

72 Al-Burayk, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya naqīḍ”; Al-Saʿīdī, “Qirāʾa sharʿiyya”.

73 Anon., “Turkī Al-Ḥamd li-24: al-ṭāʾifiyya tantahī ʿinda waqf muḥāwalat ilghāʾ al-ākhar”, 24.ad., 1 June 2015.

74 According to Milād Al-Ḥarrāthī and Muḥammad Al-Shuyūkh, Al-Ḥāmid and Al-Qaḥṭānī, founders of the Ḥasm Association (Civil and Political Rights Association) established in 2009, demanded the establishment of a civil state in Saudi Arabia by drafting a constitution and electing a parliament. Inciting demonstrations against the Saudi regime in 2012 led to the dissolution of the association in 2013 and to the jailing of Al-Ḥāmid and Al-Qaḥṭānī [Al-Ḥarrāthī and al-Shuyūkh, Thawrāt al-Rabīʿ al-ʿArabī wa taʾthīruhā ʿalā ẓāhirat al-Islām al-siyāsī wa ʿamaliyyāt al-iṣlāḥ fī al-waṭan al-ʿArabī (2015), p. 336].

75 Okruhlik, “Empowering Civility Through Nationalism”, p. 204.

76 Anon., “@abajanna”, video on Twitter [Arabic], 27 September 2017; Anon., “#Aqniʿnī2 maʿa d. ʿAlī Al-ʿUmrī: bayna al-dawla al-madaniyya wa-l-dawla al-Islāmiyya-6”, YouTube, 11 June 2016. 

77 On the Saudi critical discourse on religion and religiosity that was enabled mainly on Twitter during 2012–14, see: Hamidaddin, Tweeted Heresies: Saudi Islam in Transformation (2020).

78 Al-Rasheed and Alaoudh, “It’s Time for Democratic Change in Saudi Arabia”, The Washington Post, 1 October 2020. ʿAbdallāh Al-ʿAwda, the son of Salmān Al-ʿAwda and a co-founder of this party said that it aspires to a Saudi civil state [Anon., “Khāṣṣ.. al-muʿāraḍa al-Saʿūdiyya fī usbūʿ”, mbsmetoo, 27 September 2020].

79 Al-Rasheed, Muted Modernists, p. 2.

80 Al-Jūfān, “Amr malakī yarbuṭu al-abnāʾ bi-l-tārīkh.. ‘al-Sudayrī’: maʿānin ʿaẓīma tatarassakhu bi-‘Yawm al-Taʾsīs’”, Sabaq, 29 January 2022; Anon., “Raʾīs Majlis al-Shūra: Yawm al-Taʾsīs imtidād li-300 ʿām min al-ḥukm al-rashīd”, ʿUkāẓ, 22 February 2022.

81 Al-Kindī, “Hal tumaththilu siyāsāt al-Amīr Muḥammad bin Salmān nihāyat al-tārīkh?”, Al-Sharq al-Awsaṭ, 2 April 2020; Al-Amīr, “Intiṣārāt al-dawla al-madaniyya”, ʿUkāẓ, 30 September 2017; Al-Muṣṭafā, “Al-Saʿūdiyyūna al-Shīʿa wa-l-mushāraka bi-bināʾ ‘al-Saʿūdiyya al-jadīda’”, Al-ʿArabiya, 8 March 2018; Al-Turkī, “Al-libirāliyya al-khalījiyya”, Īlāf, 17 October 2019; Al-Rashīd, “Al-dawla al-madaniyya”.

82 Al-Ḥirbish, “Wājibāt wa istiḥqāqāt al-shabāb fī al-dawla al-madaniyya al-ḥadītha”, ʿUkāẓ, 31 August 2021.

83 Al Arabiya English YouTube Channel, “Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Interview on Vision 2030 [English subtitles] – Part 1/3”, 28 April 2021.

84 Lacroix, “Saudi Arabia and the Limits of Religious Reform”, pp. 97–101.

85 Lavie, The Battle over a Civil State; Lavie, “The Idea of the Civil State in Egypt”, pp. 23–44; Lavie, “The Constitutionalization of the Civil State: Self-Definition in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen following the Arab Uprisings”, Religions 12.4 (2021), pp. 269–287.

86 An additional difference between the Egyptian and Saudi discourses is the degree to which the minority communities are involved. While in Egypt, Coptic intellectuals have taken an active part in the discourse encouraging the idea of ⁣⁣a civil state, most Saudi Shiite intellectuals who advocate civic equality and have addressed the authorities with petitions calling for reform, refrain from calls for a ⁣⁣civil state. [Al-Ṣaffār, Al-Salafiyyūna wa-l-Shīʿa tajribat ḥiwār (2012), pp. 122–123.]

87 Mouline, The Clerics of Islam: Religious Authority and Political Power in Saudi Arabia (2014), p. 12; Al-Dakhil, “Wahhabism as an Ideology of State Formation”, in Ayoob and Kosebalaban (eds), Religion and Politics in Saudi Arabia: Wahhabism and the State (2008), pp. 23–38.

88 ʿAdnān, “ʿAlmanat al-Saʿūdiyya mumkina: al-ḥaram wa-l-dustūr”, Al-ʿArab, 1 November 2014.‏

89 Anon., “‘Tashrīʿiyyat al-nuwwāb’ tuqirru ikhtiṣāṣ al-quwwāt al-musallaḥa bi-l-ḥifāẓ ʿalā madaniyyat al-dawla”, Al-Yawm al-Sābiʿ, 14 April 2019.

90 Al-Ashwal, “Taʿarraf ʿalā al-ijrāʾāt al-jadīda fī qānūn al-amn al-qawmī li-l-ḥifāẓ ʿalā madaniyyat wa salāmat al-dawla”.

91 Magued, “The Inter-Islamic Competition”.

92 Al-Saʿīdī, “Miṣr tanhā fawḍā muṣṭalaḥ al-dawla al-madaniyya”, Al-Waṭan, 20 April 2019.

93 One possible indication of that is the participation of the Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs, Call and Guidance, Shaykh Dr ʿAbd al-Latīf bin ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Āl al-Shaykh in the 32^nd conference of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, in which he stated that the event deals with the status of women in the civil state [Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, Dawah and Guidance, “Maʿālī al-wazīr: walī al-ʿahd yaḥmilu humūm al-umma al-Islāmiyya wa-yuqaddimu waʿyan wa-idrākan ʿamīqan li-ḥāl al-ummatayni”, 6 June 2022].

94 Bayat, Post Islamism, p. 186.