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A Break With The Past: Sidelining the Al al-Shaykh?

by Senior Analyst Talal Kapoor

Muhammad bin Salman (MbS) was recently the subject of a lengthy piece in The Atlantic magazine, in which his interviewers prodded him on the issue of religious extremism, a subject which he had touched briefly upon in several interviews given between 2018 and 2021. The crown prince was eager to speak, once again hoping to present the Kingdom as a religiously tolerant beacon of change - one where he, at the helm, pursued a 'moderate' interpretation of Islam. No longer would Saudi be held back by centuries-old ways of thinking that hindered progress; the rigidity of contemporary Islamic jurisprudence was now a thing of the past.

The Atlantic feature proved controversial for what many considered a too-flattering portrayal of MbS ("charming" and "intelligent", he was called), and the magazine noted afterwards how state media, in highlighting the interview, put a spin on his words to downplay the more inflammatory remarks (such as those referencing the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi), but the controversy was nothing compared to what followed his appearance on television a year previously. In an interview with Saudi-owned al-Arabiya News in April 2021, MbS had stated that "any person that adopts an extremist approach, even if he was not a terrorist, is a criminal and will face the full force of the law." Further, "extremism in all things is wrong, and our Prophet Muhammad talked in one of his hadiths about a day when extremists will surface and he ordered them killed when they do so," he said. Opposition activists heard this as a veiled threat, thinking the language of criminality was targeted at them, but in fact the crown prince was speaking of moderation in the application of Islamic laws.

"We are obliged to implement only the stipulations clearly enunciated in the Qur'an. Thus, I cannot apply a shari'a punishment without a clear or explicit Qur'anic stipulation of the Sunnah." In a remarkable shift, the crown prince says that he intends to disregard many of the sayings (hadith) attributed to Islam's prophet Muhammad that were passed from generation to generation without any verifiable source, despite many of these hadiths having formed the bedrock of Islamic jurisprudence over the centuries. He draws a distinction between the different types of hadith, based on the strength of veracity - some are classified as well-known (mutawater), where the narrative chain through a significant number of sources is well-established, others are ahad, or solitary, hadith, which have only a single narrator, and yet others may be khabar, which have a too-large and disparate number of narrators, which throws their veracity into doubt. "The government, where shari'a is concerned, has to implement Qur'anic regulations and teachings in mutawater hadiths, and look into the veracity and reliability of ahad hadiths, and to disregard khabar hadiths entirely".

The controversy arises because this interpretation goes to the root of Islamic jurisprudence itself - it would nullify a majority of the hadiths on which many Islamists base their doctrine (in fact, the mere expression of this view has even led to clerics being labelled as extreme). Taken to its logical conclusion, this means that some Qur'anic laws would disappear entirely, such as stoning for adultery or the amputation of the hand for theft, and various Islamic criminal laws, such as death for apostates and homosexuals, would see their legal basis vanish as well. MbS here rejects blindly following the authority of hadith and favors a more direct interpretation, which would consider a more varied context, taking into account aspects such as knowledge and culture. Fatwas, he says, should be based on the time, place, and mindset in which they are issued. This is a monumental shift, given that the Saudi legal system operates within the Islamic legal tradition, and it represents a profound break with the fundamentalism associated with the Kingdom.

Related articles: The Legacy of 1979: Religious Fundamentalism and the Royal Family (Part II)
The Legacy of 1979: Religious Fundamentalism and the Royal Family (Part I)
Page 2: battle lines formed?