Salman al-Awdah: In the shadow of revolutions
The Middle East in London Magazine April-May 2013
Madawi Al-Rasheed charts how religious scholars in Saudi Arabia reacted and adapted to the Arab uprisings
Unlike the majority of official Saudi religious scholars, veteran Islamist Salman al-Awdah (born 1956) anchored peaceful collective revolutionary action in an Islamic framework and reached out for humanist interpretations that assimilate Western intellectual positions with his own Salafi orientation. He surprised his audiences as when he published As’ilat al-Thawra (Questions of Revolution) in 2012. Al-Awdah rehabilitated revolution after decades of Sunni religious scholars associating it with instability, chaos and danger. This book put him in a position different from both traditional official Saudi ulama and Jihadi ideologues, who had adopted violent strategies locally and globally. Needless to say the book was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia, prompting the author to circulate it on the internet. In this book, al-Awdah’s engagement with the question of revolution brought him back as a relevant figure at a critical moment in the Saudi and Arab public sphere. The eruption of unforeseen and unexpected revolutions needed an Islamic endorsement, interpretation and justification. Al-Awdah swiftly seized the opportunity and improvised a text that moved away from the duality of the permissible and prohibited in Islamic political theology.
Al-Awdah fuses western political thinking on revolutions by Marx, Popper and Fanon with his own Islamic Salafi heritage, producing a hybrid discourse that aims to reach beyond religious study circles. He defines revolution as building on the past, reform and reconstruction rather than destruction. It always starts peacefully but may later become militarised when confronted with oppression. Simply phrased, revolution is a fruit that ‘may ripen, dry prematurely or be belatedly harvested.’