Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, first mentioned the phrase “moderate Islam” during the Future Initiative Forum in October 2017. Since then, the phrase has represented the Kingdom’s changed approach towards religion in its attempt to open up the country for international tourism and investors. This has been largely due to “Vision 2030”, a roadmap to post-oil diversification, which requires relaxing social and cultural norms in order to introduce fast-paced change. “Moderate Islam” signifies Saudi Arabia’s shift from the traditional religious role it has played domestically and with the wider Muslim world. Since 2017, the phrase has been constantly contrasted with the Sahwa era (Islamic Awakening) which limited social freedom and was considered the culprit of extremist thought. As a result, “moderate Islam” became a tool which allowed wider social and cultural normalization even if it failed to provide a genuine and progressive understanding of the term. Moreover, “moderate Islam” has not only been an attempt to normalize change, but to re-define social behavior deemed appropriate for the newly emerged Saudi identity. For example, the push for “moderation” has been widely used to limit public demands for civil rights by labeling feminism as a form of extremism. The purpose of this paper is to examine the state’s new construction of “moderate Islam” and the effects it has on the religious discourse. It will further explore the implications of the term on the social scene in light of the ongoing inconsistencies that resulted from the rapid opening of the country. The paper makes this argument by evaluating how the state utilizes local and global events to promote itself outside the traditional religious role it has played in the past. The characterizations of moderate Muslims will also be examined through analyzing the religious discourse over the past three years.

During the Islamic Awakening (a?-?a?wah l-?Isl?miyyah) period, Saudi Arabia was governed by a hegemonic Islamic identity that regulated every aspect of public life, of which the cultural sphere reserved the lion’s share. It was not until the announcement of Vision2030 in 2016 that this predominant cultural identity was disrupted. Led by Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia and architect of the Vision, a comprehensive makeover of the economic, social, and political structure of the country has gotten underway. In the shadow of this modernizing effort, a new cultural discourse has emerged, emphasizing individual responsibility and law-abidance, and privileging specialized legal knowledge and Rule of Law rhetoric. The paper traces the development of this emerging legal culture to recent state-led efforts aimed at introducing the law as a focal marker of popular culture in order to match the institutionally oriented modernizing ambitions of the state. Instances pointing to such state intervention in the cultural sphere are ubiquitous. Chief among them is a new law curriculum for high school students, the launch of the Saudi Character Enrichment program, as well as two Ministry of Justice initiatives dedicated to promoting legal awareness in the kingdom and making various sources of legal knowledge available for public and private use. The paper argues that this unprecedented incorporation of law into the social field has given rise to a new subjectivity, one that is unbound by anti-law sentiments characteristic of the previously dominant Islamic identity. A careful discourse analysis of news articles, public debates on social media, and the ascent of a new class of lawyers that have taken the initiative in meeting the increasing public demand for specialized legal knowledge captures the cultural construction of this new subjectivity. Illuminating the discursive continuity between the shifting institutional and cultural attitudes toward the law in recent years offers a holistic account of change in Saudi Arabia and allows a more dynamic understanding of state-society relations.

From the late 1990s, “cultural security” (al-amn al-thaqafi) or “thought security” (al-amn al-fikri) emerged as a major watchword in Saudi Arabia. This development could be evidenced from the exponential growth observed in the quantitative availability of academic works on the subject, many of which were produced under the rubric of “national security studies” (dirasat al-amn al-watani). This has been paralleled by the Saudi state’s embrace of thought security, particularly at the backdrop of its struggle against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-2000s, through the formation of dedicated thought security institutions embedded within government bureaucracies and organizations. The concept of thought security refers to state-led securitization and management of an ideational (or cultural, thaqafi) sphere from external or internal threats which, if not effectively counteracted, could result in dangerous political, social, or economic consequences expressed in terms of “thought deviancy” (al-inhiraf al-fikri) resulting in societal implosion and state/regime collapse. The paper traces the historical evolution of thought security discourse. It argues that the origins of the discourse are rooted in the popularization of a holistic conception of culture by Arab intellectuals and revolutionary regimes in the 1950s and 1960s. This understanding of culture treats it as an ethnographic and territorialized category congruent with the nation-state, as being interlinked with political, economic and social conditions (consequently acting as an impediment or a catalyst for national modernization), and as being susceptible to the manipulation and subversion of foreign actors seeking to pursue their political, economic and military interests (al-ghazu al-thaqafi). At the core of this understanding is the notion of culture’s engineerability (bina al-thaqafa) by the state. This holistic conception of culture was imported into Saudi Arabia through Islamist networks in the context of the ‘Arab Cold war’, and consequently re-interpreted to fit an idiosyncratic framework whereby Islam came to denote culture. In the 1990s and 2000s, thought security institutions adopted this Islamized discourse on culture as their own, reproducing many of its key themes relevant (and not so relevant) to their securitization objectives. Since 2015, a new development – marked by the establishment of new thought security institutions and the re-structuring of the old – has played out and wherein the state, as part of its campaign to combat Islamist transnational threats such as the Muslim Brotherhood, has begun to ‘de-Islamize’ this discourse, ironically returning it “full circle”.

It is hard to overstate the historical significance of Diriyah, a village strategically located within the Wadi Hanifa, and capital of the first Saudi state. Its establishment in 1744 was achieved through a pact initiated between the political leader Muhammed bin Saud and the religious leader Muhammed ibn Abdel Wahhab, embodying the twin pillars of ruling family and religious revivalism that underpinned the modern Saudi state. Saudi Arabia is currently undertaking a multifaceted development program, Saudi Vision 2030, whose agenda encompasses not only economic diversification but also social transformation and national ambition. Diriya, located on the outskirts of Riyadh, stands at the nexus of many of Vision 2030 goals – developing tourism, increasing entertainment, and strengthening national identity. In this paper I assess the current development plans for Diriyah, comparing them with earlier ones initiated from 1984. Using primary sources – development presentations, advertising brochures - as well as on site visits and interviews, I examine both the narrative discourse and core elements of this project. I argue that the new plans for Diriyah reflect an important shift, from a traditional heritage site to one more tied to transnational capital through real estate ventures, international sport, and global entertainment. Moreover and significantly, the new plans diminish the historical importance of Muhammed ibn Abdel Wahhab. Both changes reflect the new nationalism in Saudi Arabia, which seeks to mobilize the youthful population through economic endeavors that directly tie them to the Al Saud dynasty and state, while diminishing the role of the religious establishment in public life. This paper stands at the nexus of cultural studies, transnational capital, and nationalism. It will contribute to our understanding of how festivals and heritage projects inform political identity (Erskine-Loftus et al, 2005; Exell and Rico,2014) with attention to how the global reconfiguration of cultural investment and wealth is challenging traditional center-periphery power narratives (Dresch et al, 2005; Elsheshtawy, 2011).