Saudi Reformers

The article about Saudi reformers on the front page of the Times today was pretty interesting, mostly because of the absence of law and even the absence of social movements.

The article profiled several reformers in Saudi society who have been critical about the absence of civil liberties and civil rights, the treatment of women, and the prevalence of Wahhabism. One of those profiled, Turki al-Hamad, has had his novels banned. Another, Fawaziah al-Bakr, has been pushed out of teaching jobs because she has questioned the limited role for women in Saudi universities.

First, the article suggests that such reformers are isolated in Saudi society. They do not belong to organizations or mass movements militating for change. Their books get banned; they lose their teaching jobs. Both the state and civil society make it difficult for them to circulate their ideas, so that they never even reach a wider audience. And public debate about social change is frowned upon in general.

Law is largely a tool of repression. The article describes three activists who were arrested for circulating a petition seeking a constitutional monarchy. The activists and their lawyer were given jail terms ranging from 6 to 9 years.

Of course, law is not the most important source of meaning or form of social control. Religion has that honor, so the article contains the familiar account of the religious police harassing men and women who step outside the relatively strict codes of behavior prescribed by the Saudi form of Islam. (I wish the newspaper devoted as much critical coverage to US police harassing gays and lesbians or engaging in racial profiling as they do to the religious police in Saudi Arabia, but maybe that's just me.)

The article got me thinking -- we're all Rosenbergians now; we're pretty critical of litigation as a tool of social change, but it's obviously a matter of perspective. After all, a lawsuit does at least allow opponents of a regime to articulate a grievance and demand redress, all in relative safety. Think about the tobacco litigation -- it may not put the tobacco companies out of business, but it has exposed shady tobacco company practices and the case has been a subject of public debate about corporate greed. But maybe Mr. Hamad wishes he could sue the Saudi state to force it to lift the ban on his book and have a public discussion about censorship.