Saudi Reforms

Cabinet picks resigned, bankers got a serious pay restriction, and the stimulus bill got rewritten, protested, and then passed in the US House and Senate. These news items all received massive attention, and as well they should have. However in the Middle East, two articles unrelated to these other major headlines blew my mind and yet received little if any coverage on the major international English News channels

On Valentine's day, yes, V day, something very important happened in Saudi Arabia. While religious police were cracking down on potential romantic gifts, King Abdullah, a romantic at heart at the tender age of 84, changed the future of development in Saudi Arabia and really the entire world. According to this article, King Abduallah has modernized his country's education system and moderated their religious police, notorious for their enforcement of sexual segregation and other conservative interpretations of Islamic law. The education minister is now a moderate, whose deputy minister is now a woman. As a former resident of Saudi Arabia, a country where women are not allowed to even drive, this is truly amazing.

Yet the most important aspect of Saudi's reforms came in the religious courts, where for the first time since the creation of Saudi Arabia in the 1920's and 30's, all four branches of traditional Islamic jurisprudence will now be represented. Before this reform, only the most conservative branch of Islamic jurisprudence, Hanbali, was present. This resulted in Saudi Arabia pushing its own unique and modern view of Islamic law on the rest of the world through the importance of the Two Holy Cities and equally as much through massive amounts of oil revenues. Wahabi Islam, considered by even some Hanbali scholars to be too extreme, does not recognize alternative interpretations of Islam as valid. The official recognition of the diverse opinions by Islamic scholars will undermine al Qaeda, Wahabis, and other militant extremists who refuse to recognize the tradition of respect for contradictory interpretations of Islamic Law.

King Abdullah has been involved with encouraging interreligious dialogue for the past couple years now, and I didn't buy it until now. I think this guy may be serious in trying to undo the damage that celebrated intolerance has wrought on the world since the enshrinement of Wahabi Islam as their official state religion. If these reforms in women's rights, education, and Islamic jurisprudence stick for the next couple years, then the world will truly be a better place. Perhaps even Saudi Arabia will be able to develop past its only major source of income, oil revenues.