[The kingdom’s rulers may have managed their own social
pressures better, but they’re wary of the tumult that’s shaking
their neighbor.]
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WHY SAUDI ARABIA IS SO QUIET ABOUT IRAN’S PROTESTS  
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Kim Ghattas
November 24, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The kingdom’s rulers may have managed their own social pressures
better, but they’re wary of the tumult that’s shaking their
neighbor. _

, Getty; The Atlantic

 

Expressions of support for Iranian protesters have been pouring in
from around the world—from leaders such as President Joe Biden
[[link removed]],
the former first lady Michelle Obama
[[link removed]], French
President Emmanuel Macron
[[link removed]],
and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
[[link removed]]—as
the protests, well into their second month, remain defiant
[[link removed]] and
have even gained in intensity
[[link removed]].
But aside from some media coverage, those nations closest to Iran, its
Gulf neighbors, have remained conspicuously silent. Most striking of
all is the lack of any official response from Saudi Arabia—which one
would expect to be cheering along the popular revolt against a regime
that Riyadh considers its archenemy.

The Saudi silence stems from lessons the kingdom absorbed during the
events that turned the Persian monarchy into an Islamic Republic: Wait
until the outcome is clear, and then wait some more. The protests that
brought down the shah in 1979 unfolded over more than a year. Although
today’s protests have become the greatest challenge to the Islamic
Republic since that time, no rapid conclusion seems likely; hence the
Saudi policy of watchful waiting. Back then, the Saudis also misjudged
the outcome after their ally the shah was deposed, because they
believed that they could work with his successor, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini—only to find he was an adversary. Whatever the outcome this
time, Saudi Arabia seems certain to reserve judgment while buttressing
its own position.

Kim Ghattas: A whole generation revolts against the Iranian regime
[[link removed]]

The House of Saud may consider that position already better secured by
the recent reforms introduced by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In
important respects, the kingdom has leapt into the 21st century: Women
can drive, the hijab is no longer enforced, and the religious police
have largely disappeared. Saudi Gen Zers of both sexes can mix in
public, dance at raves, go to movie theaters, and cheer at football
stadiums. The contrast with Iran is sharp. There, the Gen Zers are
rising up against a repressive, ideologically driven regime that
continues to enforce an outdated Islamic lifestyle, depriving them of
fun and pleasure while failing to provide them with jobs and
opportunities.

So if the Saudis are studiedly saying little, that silence may be
underpinned by a quiet satisfaction. Right now, their record of
managing such social pressures looks a lot better.

The events of today represent a stunning reversal of the situation
in the 1960s, when the shah reportedly sent
[[link removed]] King
Faisal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud a series of letters urging him to
modernize and “make the schools mixed women and men. Let women wear
miniskirts. Have discos. Be modern. Otherwise I cannot guarantee you
will stay in your throne.” The king wrote back telling the shah he
was wrong: “You are not the shah of France. You are not in the
Élysée. You are in Iran. Your population is 90 percent Muslim.”

Such a candid and cordial exchange between the rulers of the two
countries is hard to credit now, but before 1979, Saudi Arabia and
Iran were regional partners—twin pillars in America’s Cold War
efforts in the Middle East to contain the Soviet Union. The two
monarchies—one Sunni, the other Shiite—were even allies in an
intelligence partnership known as the Safari Club
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which ran clandestine operations and fomented coups around Africa to
roll back Soviet influence.

Given this relationship, the Saudis initially viewed the protests that
engulfed Iran after 1977 as an internal affair, and refrained from
comment. But as the movement to depose the shah grew, both Riyadh and
Washington worried that a pro-Soviet regime dominated by leftists and
nationalists would take over.

In early 1979, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al
Saud openly expressed support for the shah as Iran’s legitimate
ruler. But by mid-January, the shah was gone, and within two weeks,
Khomeini flew back triumphantly to Tehran. The secular revolutionaries
thought they could exploit the ayatollah’s religious support and
control him. They were wrong. Khomeini effectively hijacked the
revolution and turned Iran into an Islamic Republic.

Saudi Arabia moved quickly to accept the outcome, relieved to see a
man who spoke the language of religion rise to the top instead of
leftist revolutionaries. Saudi Arabia congratulated Iran’s new prime
minister, Mehdi Bazargan, and lauded the Iranian revolution for its
solidarity with “the Arab struggle against the Zionist enemy.” In
April, Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the kingdom’s future
ruler, spoke of his relief that the new Iran was “making Islam, not
heavy armament, the organizer of cooperation” between their two
countries.

Before long, though, the Saudis were facing an insurrection from their
own zealots. In November 1979, religious extremists laid siege
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Mecca for two weeks. The deeply conservative kingdom had just begun
relaxing some of its strictures with the recent introduction of
television and cinemas. Those controversial advances now came to an
abrupt end. Fearing that it might meet the same fate as the shah, the
House of Saud staked its future on Sunni puritanism, further
empowering the clerical establishment and pouring money into the
religious police.

And little did the Saudis know what Khomeini had in store. Soon, the
ayatollah was exporting the Islamic revolution around the region,
wielding religion as a weapon and challenging the House of Saud’s
position as leader of the Muslim world. If the Saudis had read
Khomeini’s early writings, they would have had some inkling of his
disdain for them. To counter Iran’s efforts to extend its influence,
the Saudis promoted the kingdom’s brand of ultraorthodox Sunni Islam
from Egypt to Pakistan.

As the Iranian revolution transformed the region, the shock of
suddenly facing an implacable enemy instilled in the Saudis a visceral
fear of popular uprisings—either within their own kingdom or in any
neighboring country. This dread was still uppermost in their mind in
2011, when they watched millions of protesters throng the streets to
bring down another American-backed leader, this time in the Arab
world—Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak—during the Arab uprisings.

Today, saudi arabia and its neighbors would welcome a change of
leadership in Iran, but uncertainty about the outcome governs Saudi
caution. The protests are unlikely to lead to the wholesale overthrow
of the ayatollahs in the short to medium term. So will the regime
attempt to defuse internal pressures by giving in to some of the
demands, reining in the religious police, focusing more on Iran’s
domestic politics and economy and less on regional hegemony? Or will
the current leadership come down hard on the protesters, causing the
regime to step up internal repression and support for proxy militias
in the region?

Given the pressure at home, the Islamic Republic may well unleash some
of its allies to launch diversionary attacks against regional
adversaries. Already, in September, Iran attacked
[[link removed]] Kurdish
areas in northern Iraq with ballistic missiles. In October, Saudi
Arabia shared intelligence with the U.S. that warned
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an imminent attack on the kingdom—Riyadh is concerned that its
currently fraught relationship with the U.S. could make it more
vulnerable to an attack. (The October report contained no specific
details, but the U.S. did raise the level of alert of its forces in
the region.)

The official Saudi silence about the protests belies a somewhat more
active posture: The royal court is thought to be funding Iran
International, a London-based Persian TV channel, set up in 2017 as an
opposition station and now beaming images of the protests back into
Iran. Although satellite dishes are illegal, an estimated 70 percent
of Iranian
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own one, and Iran International has become a vital source of
information inside the country and for the diaspora.

The Islamic Republic has repeatedly called on Saudi Arabia to shut
down the station. “This is our last warning, because you are
interfering in our internal affairs through these media,” the
commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hossein
Salami, said
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month. “You are involved in this matter and know that you are
vulnerable.” The warning was repeated
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the supreme leader’s military adviser, Major General Yahya Safavi,
and Iranian authorities arrested a woman accused of links
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the station.

The channel also reports on news from the region and from inside Saudi
Arabia, where life for young Saudis has been so transformed in recent
years. In early March 2020, the kingdom organized a “Persian
Night”
[[link removed]] of
music in the celebrated desert venue of Al Ula, inviting such major
Iranian figures as the singer Andy to perform even as they’re banned
from performing in their own country. Broadcast on Iran International
television, the event was emblematic of the House of Saud’s aptitude
at reading the times and social trends—in contrast to the
limitations of Iran’s rulers, both the shah and the ayatollahs. The
Saudis like to draw such comparisons to show how Iran is lagging
behind.

But inside the kingdom, the new social and cultural reforms, and the
rapid pace of their implementation, are not to everyone’s taste in
the conservative monarchy—which is why the new freedoms also have
strict limits. Under bin Salman, Saudi Arabia has become more
[[link removed]] authoritarian
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Aside from the high-profile killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi,
murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the kingdom has cracked
down on anyone remotely critical of the changes. These include such
minimal-seeming threats as a young Saudi mother of two studying in
Leeds who was jailed while visiting home for retweeting Saudi
dissidents and spreading “false” information
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a U.S.-Saudi dual national who was sentenced
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16 years in prison after sending out critical tweets.

Looking at events in Iran, the Saudi crown prince may be
congratulating himself for defusing the social discontent that had
been building inside the kingdom for years. But he will likely
continue to do so quietly—notwithstanding Iran International’s
coverage—because the ultimate lesson from 1979 is that geopolitical
fallout from the coming changes within Iran will wash over the region.
And any interregnum will be messy.

KIM GHATTAS [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at _The Atlantic _and a senior nonresident
fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

_THE ATLANTIC_

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* Iran
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* Saudi Arabia
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* protests
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* Sunni
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* Shiite
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* Women
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* Kurds
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