Abstract
"Graveyard of Clerics is an ethnographic study of political action in Saudi Arabia. The book studies two phenomena that have rarely been analyzed together in the Middle East: urban sprawl and the politicization of religious activism. Suburbs emerged in Saudi Arabia after WWII, when the US oil company Aramco built racially segregated housing for its American employees and its Saudi, Arab, and Asian workforce. The country became an early non-western testing ground for urban growth techniques that, perfected in the United States before WWII, were widely exported during the Cold War: state guaranteed mortgages, standardized building and subdivision, and extensive freeway systems. Cheap gas, safe loans, and real estate speculation metamorphosed the Saudi landscape from the 1970s onward. Saudis started fleeing the inner cities, choked with car traffic and invaded by foreign migrants, to the peace and isolation of the suburbs. At the same time, autonomous religious movements emerged in the suburbs of Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, and Dammam between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The Saudi Muslim Brotherhood, created by activists who had fled Egypt, Syria, and Iraq to avoid repression, developed within the cracks of the fledgling educational system. Various Salafi groups soon appeared in reaction to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the increased state control of religion and social life. In the 1970s and 1980s, the relative isolation of the suburbs allowed for the constitution and mobilization of vast activist networks. Religious activists politicized the suburban spaces where consumer debt and welfare benefits, boosted by the oil boom of the 1970s, had fostered political apathy. Islamists found followers through their powerful critique of the religious establishment (the senior Saudi 'ulama') and the country's military and economic alliance with the United States. Scholarship on Saudi religious movements typically focuses on ideology and rarely mentions the impact of US imperial policies on state building and space making. Graveyard of Clerics contests these well-trod narratives, which (1) fail to explain the emergence and resilience of vast political networks in highly repressive environments, (2) overlook the anti-imperialist undertone of religious protests, and (3) focus on elites while being oblivious of the vast majority of everyday activists. Combining interviews, archival research, analysis of secondary sources, and extensive field research, Graveyard of Clerics contends that activists use the spatial resources offered by urban sprawl to organize and protest. Taking Riyadh as a case study, Menoret analyzes what happens to Islamic activists when they hail from a wealthy, religious society. In the suburbs of Riyadh, religious activism is not primarily an expression of socioeconomic frustration. It most often represents conservative, homeowner-based politics in an environment that Islamic activists view as both questionable and promising. The book thus contributes to three bodies of literature: the study of global suburbs, the study of religion in Saudi Arabia, and the study of political activism in suburban spaces"--