Introduction
Following the formal establishment in 1932 of the Saudi Monarchy by King Abdul-Aziz, otherwise known as Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia displayed a complicated attitude toward the USSR: “while the Soviet Union was among the first states to recognize Saudi Arabia, serious and cordial relations were not maintained between the two states.”Footnote 1 After the end of WWII, however, the anti-Communist stance, which was historically a defining feature of Saudi Arabia's policy, attracted worldwide attention for its ramifications. In the last four decades of the twentieth century, the manner in which Saudi Arabia treated Communism as a global-, regional-, and domestic-level threat led the country to spearhead anti-Communist movements across the region and beyond to protect “the encircled Kingdom.”Footnote 2 However, this paper does not directly address Saudi foreign policy or all its actions against Communism during the Cold War; rather, it is about the motivations for such actions, and Saudi discussions around them.
Accordingly, this article is intended as an entry in the debate on the role of the Saudi stance toward Communism in the Cold War, heretofore classified as an example of curbing subversive ideologies, like Arab Nationalism and other secular ideologies, in the context of social, political and regional changes.Footnote 3 It is increasingly recognised that a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the Cold War on any nation-state requires consideration of structural/historical factors, institutionalized ideological elements, and sociopsychological reflections of the global Cold War, as suggested by Engerman and Citino.Footnote 4 This realization has influenced a number of literature reviews and critiques of Saudi history as well as research on contemporary politics in the Arab World.Footnote 5 Consequently, good progress has been made in systematically and methodologically examining the complex interplay of internal factors and regional perspectives that motivated the Saudi attitude toward Communism.Footnote 6
The resulting literature was divided in its assessment of the basis for anti-Communism. It did not evolve incrementally, but rather in a piecemeal or cursory manner. As Toby Matthiesen has recently noted, challenging the assumptions of Cold War literature, Saudi Arabia's role in anti-Communism is not often the focus of “serious scholarship.”Footnote 7
Most critiques in post-2001 western literature on Saudi Arabia's anti-Communist stance focused on the ambivalent relationship between Islam and Communism, fighting secular leftist ideas and the implications of Saudi Arabia's version of Islam (Wahhabism) for the Arab and Muslim world.Footnote 8 While this literature concentrated on linking ideology and politics, it did not analytically disentangle evaluations of the Saudi anti-Communist stance from the complex, interrelated factors described above.
The debate has been reframed more recently by emphasizing the historical circumstances and events through which the notion of opposing both Communism and Socialism emerged inside Saudi Arabia. Greater attention and analysis have been devoted to mobilization and the revolutionary notion of class consciousness, with special emphasis on the nascent Communist opposition and non-religious dissidence that strengthened the development of social movements and generated friction and resistance within the state itself.Footnote 9 In the context of the latter, the history of the radical popular Left opposition in Saudi Arabia during the Cold War has recently attracted much scholarly attention, highlighting the threat of Communism and its Cold War implications in academic discussion.
These recent critiques are echoed in the scholarship of Rosie Bsheer, Mohammed Turki Al-Sudairi, and Toby Matthiesen.Footnote 10 These authors have made key contributions to the body of literature on Saudi history during the Cold War, moving beyond conventional narratives and in particular toward Communism's evolution in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s. The association of Saudi Arabia with anti-Leftist politics in the Cold War, derived from the work of Rosie Bsheer, has significantly influenced this article's perspective on the Saudi anti-Communist stance.Footnote 11
Moreover, modern Saudi historiography, formed and institutionalized as a field in the early twentieth century, was not parochial in its initial assessment of Communism. In their accounts, Saudi historians have long pondered the significance of various threats to Saudi Arabia as root causes of its opposition to Communism.Footnote 12 These discussions received notable scholarly impetus in the 1950s and proved influential in the society, when the main contours of a more general theoretical conundrum were established: did Communism have intrinsic power against Saudi Arabia or were Arab Nationalism and Zionism nurtured and framed by global Communism as a multifaceted threat to it?
In this context, most Saudi professional historians, scholars, official pundits, and clerics, whose works were published and distributed by different Saudi entities, tended to focus on one aspect of Saudi diplomatic history in the Cold War era: the protection of the state itself against the overlapping subversive ideologies of Communism, Arab Nationalism, and Zionism.Footnote 13 While their works provided valuable knowledge, they require further elaboration and, in particular, application. This paper aims to contribute to an endeavour that saw the development of a specific genre of Saudi literature designed to understand the extent of Saudi Arabia's antipathy to Communist ideology, which was grimly portrayed as something antithetical to the realm of morality and strength. This examination was best exemplified in the work of former Egyptian and Syrian intellectuals who were teaching in Saudi Arabia in the late 1960s: Abd al-Qanī, Al-Sārhan, and others proved influential in the development of inflammatory narratives and anti-Communist themes.Footnote 14 These scholars, who came from different spectrums of Saudi and Arab society, enabled a shift in Saudi historiography from historical examination during the Cold War toward the more unrealistic accounts that subsequently dominated. In short, most scholars have tended to focus on only one aspect of the Saudi anti-Communist stance, such as the ambivalent relationship between Islam and Communism, the development of internal opposition, or the origins of the reluctant relationship between Riyadh and Moscow throughout the period.
In response, this essay proposes a method to overcome many of the shortcomings associated with single perspectives, yielding a richer understanding of notions that otherwise portray the Saudi attitude toward Communism as a dogmatic impulse. Drawing on insights from historiographic methodology and historical interpretation, the principal purpose is to delve deeply into Saudi Arabia's anti-Communist stance throughout the Cold War. Hence, in addition to exploiting primary sources and material, this article rigorously revisits a broad range of Saudi academic writing, including works from such diverse disciplines as modern history and anthropology.Footnote 15 Sources not only include English or Western texts, but also a plethora of Arabic resources. This wide-ranging review allows a historiographic approach to Saudi and Arab historians through comparison with relevant primary sources and Saudi national discourses. Understanding the concepts and narratives developed on a national scale by Saudi scholars provides insight into the underlying ideas and strategies of anti-Communism, which shaped the official narratives of the state in the Cold War.Footnote 16
Thus, this paper is intended to reveal, in an academically informed and empirically grounded manner, how Saudi Arabia targeted Soviet Communism, in light of the USSR's introduction of changes to the Middle East, transformation of the political landscape, disturbance of demographic structures, and encouragement of radicalism. Concurrently, this paper highlights the importance of overlapping ideologies in the interplay between regional and international environments. In this context, the perceived interrelationship between Arab Nationalism, Communism, and Zionism provoked Saudi Arabia's rigorous stance against Communism. These different elements constituted the core reasons for Saudi anti-Communist strategy, which saw these ideologies as intertwined. Therefore, they represent a suitable point of departure.
Nasser “The Linchpin” of Communism in the Arab World
Following the Soviet agreement to sell arms to Egypt in 1955, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser was well positioned to consolidate his domestic rule and establish his regional reputation. Saudi Arabia under the leadership of then-Crown Prince Faisal, his advisors, and the religious establishment started portraying Egypt and Nasser's movement as the embodiment of Communism in the Arab World. They promoted the claim that Nasser “operated in accordance with Moscow's norms and values.”Footnote 17 Nasser was thus represented as a tool of Moscow in the Arab world, and was even referred to by Saudis as the “progeny of the devil.”Footnote 18
Investigating the relationship between Nasser and Communism is crucial for understanding Saudi anti-Communism in the Cold War. Although Saudis treated Nasser as a puppet of Moscow, there was a long-standing debate over whether he was actually neutral, with no intention of permanently adhering to a pro-Soviet line. In August 1958, the Central Intelligence Agency circulated a new assessment of Arab Nationalism in the Cold War, outlining in great detail the sociopolitical impact of the movement on Arab politics. It pointed out that there was a difference between Arab Nationalism and Nasser's claims; the former involved a well-established resistance to colonialism while the latter was an attempt to extirpate the influence of western imperialism via the Soviets.Footnote 19 The CIA also offered some insight into Nasser's relationship with Communism, observing that he was neither a Communist nor sympathetic to that doctrine. Rather, he opposed Arab Communists because they were a challenge to his own authority.Footnote 20
Interestingly enough, in a series of speeches at great public gatherings, Nasser himself “criticised Arab Communists as being a part of the fifth column of a foreign power.”Footnote 21 This was reflected in an American report that noted Communists in Arab states were repeatedly attacked and described a negative attitude toward Communism that saw its followers as internationalist and atheistic in character.Footnote 22 Muḥammad Ḥasanayn Haykal's seminal works on Nasser were among the first to further the study of Nasser and Communism. Haykal recognised the overlapping interests of Nasser and Moscow and argued that Nasser moved in a series of different circles, some of them touching, others making contact at certain points, and others almost overlapping.Footnote 23 Accordingly, Nasser could not easily be classified as a Communist; he simply looked to the USSR for support, which correspondingly increased his distrust of the West. This sympathy toward Moscow's stance in the Arab World was an important element driving derogatory Saudi rhetoric against Nasser over time, offering a locus for their struggle against Communism. From this perspective, the Saudis in the Middle East at the time tried to sully Nasser's reputation and contain his promotion of Arab Nationalism, denouncing him for debasing Islam and claiming that he operated in accordance with Moscow's norms and values.Footnote 24
The British embassy quoted Crown Prince Faisal claiming that Marxism had isolated the Arabs from international support at a time when the enemy was gaining ground in the international arena. The hopes attached by Arab leftists to the military might and diplomatic resourcefulness of the Soviet Union proved to be of little avail.Footnote 25 A British document in the National Archives states that it was acknowledged by Crown Prince Faisal that Nasser was Moscow's agent in the region. As one British diplomat in Riyadh put it, “Faisal has always told us that Communism stalks behind Nasser; yet although he will openly admit it, he must realize that it is not just a question of Nasser and Communism, but of the steady pressure from outside of ‘revolutionary socialism’ on Saudi Arabia.”Footnote 26 Not surprisingly, tensions between Cairo and Riyadh frequently erupted, and the pledged solidarity, understanding, and cooperation vanished, to be replaced by dissension, distrust, and rivalry.Footnote 27
Various local historical narratives reflected this tension to demonstrate the untrustworthiness of Nasser and substantiate official Saudi claims.Footnote 28 The Syrian historian Sulṭān Sālim, who lived in Saudi Arabia during the Cold War, explained the dominant tendencies of Arab Nationalism in a publication on Faisal's thoughts. He argued that Arab Nationalists had developed a distinct identity based on ethnicity rather than Islam, emphasizing relationships between nation-states based on worldly interests. This trend sparked Moscow's interest in the potential of Arab Nationalism to advance its interests and establish a prominent role in Arab lands.Footnote 29 During this period, Saudi critics of Nasser left nothing to the imagination in assigning blame, portraying him as a sinner, a Communist project, an Arab Communist, oppressor, saboteur, and enemy of Muslims.Footnote 30 Such malicious writing proliferated and categorically denounced Nasser's policy using inflammatory quotes and anti-Arab Nationalist themes. Under these circumstances, “the Saudi government employed non-Saudi men persecuted by the Egyptian state to counter Nasser's rhetoric.”Footnote 31 It is also interesting to note that the Saudi description of Nasser as a passive subordinate of Moscow was a regularly repeated theme in Western documents.Footnote 32
Debates over Nationalism and Communism were given precedence in various texts in ways that served the Saudi vision of fighting both ideologies. Even religious texts were often accompanied by more contemporary accounts of Soviet conspiracy, unreliability, and lack of transparency toward the Arab World. A Saudi thinker and minster argued that Soviet strategy involving Arab Nationalism masked a hidden agenda for which Nasser would “pay a heavy price.”Footnote 33 It was clear that worldly ideals of a common interest between Pan-Arabism and Communism were being discussed among elite, intellectual, and public audiences, within Saudi Arabia and beyond. The effect was to increase Riyadh's concern with pursuing anti-Communism and anti-Nationalism.Footnote 34
This idea of a common interest was despite the differences and occasional conflicts between Arab Nationalism and the Soviet Communism discussed above.Footnote 35 Yet the link between Arab Nationalism and Communism was a crucial influence on the Saudi attitude to crises faced by the Arab world.Footnote 36 Abdullah Sindi concentrated on the role of religion in Saudi Arabia throughout the Cold War, which he categorized as part of the Saudi anti-Communist stance. He wrote that “pan-Islamist theory was presented as a determinant of strategy that would provide the necessary justification for combating Communism and for opposing socialism and revolutionism.”Footnote 37 He went on to draw an interesting conclusion, pointing out that “Saudi Arabia chose the route of religion as the road to salvation from Soviet influence, Arab Nationalism and the Arab struggle against Zionism.”Footnote 38
Anti-Communism was thus a social and religious construct deeply embedded in the history and culture of Saudi Arabia. The government fostered it in universities, mosques, and schools as a struggle against the evils of Communism and those responsible for its development. Through that condemnatory literature, negative emotions toward Communism were heightened and encouraged under the patronage of the state in communal myths in order to mobilize support.Footnote 39 As Determann rightly suggests, “social and economic developments in the Kingdom in the 1950s and 1960s were stymied by opposition to Communism.”Footnote 40 According to AbuKhalil, what emerged was an anti-Communist literature that spread throughout the Muslim world in the 1960s and 1970s, funded by the Saudi government to unite Muslim states against Communism and Arab Nationalism.Footnote 41
Encouraged by these developments, many Islamists and religious figures fled to Saudi Arabia during the Cold War as “Saudi Arabia had been giving refuge to the God-fearing opponents of the Arab World's secular regimes ‘Pro-Communist’ and particularly members of the Muslim brotherhood from Egypt under Nasser.”Footnote 42 Saudi Arabian professors, journalists, and clerics asserted that Islam and Communism were incompatible. This also reflected the State's position, to the point that Saudi leaders perceived Communism and Arab Nationalism as the root of ignorance, reaction, and killing in Arab and Muslim lands.Footnote 43
During this time, Saudi Arabia relied heavily on the experience of renegades from secular Arab states such as Egypt and Syria to implement the building of Islamic centers and institutions and thus to mobilize and encourage public opinion in targeting Communist elements, Arab Nationalists, and Arab Leftists.Footnote 44 In this way, the Kingdom helped set up independent bodies in an effort to free Arab and Muslim peoples from the grip of regional Arab Nationalism and global Communism. Namely, two institutions resulted from these efforts, designed to undertake a range of soft power approaches in opposing the drift toward Communism and Secularism.Footnote 45
The first was the Islamic University of Medina (IUM), established in 1961 as a competitor to al-Azhar University in Egypt, with a message matching the state's formal stance of countering Arab Nationalist influence regionally and Communist influence globally. For this period, Michael Farquhar's work is instrumental in explaining Saudi activities to combat the Soviet threat, highlighting the correlation between the creation of IUM and opposition to Arab Nationalism and Socialism. He notes that “IUM was a project in 1961 backed by the Saudi State for mostly non-Saudi male students to preach to them and also (non-Muslims) around the world which were seen as having strayed from true creed.”Footnote 46
The second institution was Rabiṭat al ʿalam Al-īslāmī (Muslim League World) (MWL) founded in 1962 with a permanent headquarters in Mecca and with former Minister of Finance Muḥammed Surur Al-Ṣabban as its first secretary general.Footnote 47 Even though the MWL was formed as a religious organization rather than a political or governmental one, its aims included opposition to ideologies of Arab Nationalism, Socialism, and Communism that were inconsistent with Islam.Footnote 48 Building Islamic institutions was particularly effective because it did not involve formal agreements between governments but the application of soft power to pursue state objectives. Thus, rousing anti-Communist and Nationalist feelings were key in Saudi speeches, communiqués, and leaflets, which all gave a central role to religion while simultaneously attacking its ideological opponents.Footnote 49
To this end, Saudi Arabia used religious institutions to target its adversaries, both Arab Nationalists and atheist Communists, directly. The former Saudi minister of education has acknowledged in his book Higher Education in Saudi Arabia: A Quest for Identity that the construction of the educational system in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s and 1960s was influenced by the official policy against Communism and Arab Nationalism.Footnote 50 He further clarified that in order to oppose Communist and Nationalist influence in the educational system, “the State encouraged Saudi and foreign teachers to develop sort of an Islamic consciousness that echoed with their students against these subversive ideas.”Footnote 51 Saudi Arabia thereby remained committed throughout the Cold War to catering to Muslim needs, from educational to religious facilities, using this religious foundation to reinforce its political authority as it sought to rein in all secular movements and Communism.
By way of verification, a careful statement of the strategy was transmitted through an official message from Faisal to U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson articulating the shared goal of the two nations to fight Communism, “just as we fight it on the basis of our religion you fight against it as a doctrine, and that way we could put an end to the spread of Communism in the world.”Footnote 52 Therein lies the key to understanding the struggles with foreign ideologies that made it helpful to label Communism and Nationalism “as sources for elimination of spirituality values of Islam.”Footnote 53 Hence, the shared cause of Nasser and Moscow was an important corollary of Saudi Arabia placing itself in a position to exert influence and to pursue strategies to address what the regime believed to be a Moscow-Cairo rapprochement that resulted in a radicalization of Arab politics.Footnote 54
Alongside the external dynamics, the internal environment had also changed, as the struggle for power within the Saudi royal family was a contributing factor in exploiting anti-Communist trends. In the late 1950s, Saudi Crown Prince Faisal emerged as the de facto ruler of the Kingdom. To counter the swift spread of Communism in the Middle East, he emphasized that “the local expressions of the global left politics were particular threats to the existence of Saudi Arabia.”Footnote 55 Furthermore, according to Rosie Bsheer, during leadership disputes in the period 1958–64, the powerful Crown Prince accused his elder brother King Saud of being a Communist and overly lenient with Arab Nationalists.Footnote 56 Consequently, the period from the early 1960s onwards witnessed a dramatic change in the Saudi position toward Communism, and also saw changes from the bottom up. This represented the end point of the Saudi defensive posture toward Communism and Arab Nationalism, as will be discussed further through the prism of the Yemeni civil war.Footnote 57
The Communist Wheels Turning in Yemen's Yards
From the early 1960s, the threat posed by the potential for the Yemeni civil war to become a stepping-stone for Nationalist-Communist activities drove Saudi Arabia much more forcefully to mobilize efforts to protect itself and seek effective support through international appeals.Footnote 58 Saudi Arabia perceived the start of the war as enabling a sharp rise in revolutionary left ideas in the Arabian Peninsula, with Arab Nationalism and Communism woven into the same threat matrix at the southern gate of the country.Footnote 59 Jesse Ferris depicted the Yemeni civil war as “a potential revolutionary dagger in the heart of the conservative Anglo-American order in the Middle East.”Footnote 60 All along, the civil war in Yemen was seen as a potentially destabilizing factor in the peninsula, and the involvement of Nasser of Egypt with Moscow's blessing provoked fear inside Saudi Arabia.Footnote 61 Surprisingly enough, the war in Yemen marked the first attempt by Saudi Arabia since its official establishment to engage in a war indirectly (via proxy) outside its borders. As such, the crisis in Yemen accelerated the rapprochement between Riyadh and London. Saudi Arabia restored diplomatic relations with the UK, which had been cut since 1956, as an effort by Riyadh to overcome its fear of any victory for Nasser and his left ideas in Yemen.Footnote 62
The war in Yemen should therefore be examined in the context of the broader Saudi strategy of countering Communist influence in the Arabian Peninsula, not in isolation.Footnote 63 One constant throughout the Yemeni conflict was repeated Saudi references to the war being a product of Communist development and a byproduct of Nationalism in the Arabian Peninsula.Footnote 64 Faced with these external developments, Saudi Arabia had repeatedly endeavored during the Cold War to secure its political position and to develop an international consensus by urging various U.S. administrations to take a strong stance against Nasser's movement, and in 1955 the nation-state reiterated its position by intervening in Yemen.Footnote 65
Apprehension was manifest in a meeting between Crown Prince Faisal and U.S. President John F. Kennedy in 1962 when the Saudis warned the United States of the dangers posed by Nasser and his leftist propensities, linking him with the Soviet Union. In one message Riyadh told the United States that “Nasser is a Communist who presents a real danger to the Arab World.”Footnote 66 The most striking example of the perceived Communist threat in Yemen is found in a message imparted during a meeting with the State Department's representative in 1962 regarding American reluctance to help Saudi Arabia in the war in Yemen. Faisal made it clear to the United States that “it was better for Saudi Arabia to go down fighting in Yemen rather than to be assassinated later.”Footnote 67 During this period, Crown Prince Faisal asserted that “Nasser was merely being used by atheist Communism for its own purpose, and Communism is of course a destructive creed which the devout Muslims must rigorously oppose.”Footnote 68 This reflected the inherent tension felt by King Faisal toward the Kennedy Administration, “which entered office with a strong emphasis on supporting modernizing states, and left little room for conservative states such as Saudi Arabia.”Footnote 69 This was best described as an endeavor by the Saudi King, who spoke the language of anti-Communism and anti-Nasserism, to influence shifting U.S. policy that increasingly emphasized modernization and democracy in the Middle East.Footnote 70
The request for the United States to relax its demands for reforms and reshuffle priorities toward restraining Nasser was perhaps a tacit criticism. However, it resulted in a breathing space in its special relationship with Saudi Arabia during this period. In the years after the outbreak of the Yemeni conflict the political landscape had moved; the U.S. envoy apparently expressed President Kennedy's deep concern over the recent course of events in Yemen to Faisal, and recognized that “what is involved here is a difference over means, not objective.”Footnote 71 The State Department further articulated in July 1963 that “unless we send the fighters promptly, Saudi King Faisal may again accuse us of breaking promises.”Footnote 72 Throughout this process, Saudi Arabia tried to secure its political position against the threat of Communism in order to gain political traction, and propagated generalized discourses on the evils of the conflict and its Communist instigators.
The dominant discourse espoused by Saudi Arabia from the outset of the Yemeni civil war, which of course demonized Communism and Arab Nationalism, made use of ideas and beliefs that had become deeply embedded in Saudi society.Footnote 73 This thinking was echoed by the Saudi-Syrian writer ‘Umar Ḥleeq, who referred to Saudi Arabia in the Cold War as the linchpin of stability in the region against its enemies, “the idolaters” of Egypt and Moscow.Footnote 74 Furthermore, one of the most hard-hitting criticisms of Soviet policy in the Middle East was articulated by Jamīl Al-Ḥujilān in his book Al-dawlah wa al-thawrāh (The State and Revolution). Al-Ḥujilān expressed open hostility toward Communism in the Middle East, views which became extremely popular in the mid-1960s both inside and outside the Kingdom. In this regard, he benefited from his official position in Faisal's government as minister of information in the 1960s and made arguments in line with the state's official position. In his book, he postulated that “the bloodshed is Arab and Muslim blood but the reason is a Communist weapon, is not it sad that Communism comes, represented by Moscow, from the end of the world to put their red feet on our Arab and Muslim lands.”Footnote 75
Al-Ḥujilān lamented that Arabs and Muslims were the only ones “who were victims of the USSR's influence in the Middle East in order to humiliate Islam and Muslims.”Footnote 76 Following this lead, Sālim wrote, “Saudi's Islamic leadership is capable of deterring Nationalism under Communist protection in Yemen and reconstruct the Muslim nations away from the source of evil.”Footnote 77 This sentiment was echoed by another Saudi historian, who described Nasser as “a global puppet of Moscow, who found common ground with the USSR, to destroy Muslims and their religion from the bottom up.”Footnote 78 The aforementioned authors were representative of the tendency of many Saudi and Arab researchers to uncritically describe the roles of Moscow and Cairo in Yemen as deceptive and treacherous.Footnote 79
This weaving and knitting, this blending and mingling of strands of history, constituted the essence of the Saudi manipulation of rivals, which consequently exerted the most powerful influence in the minds of Arab elites, as Stephen Walt correctly suggested.Footnote 80 Accordingly, Saudi historiography in the 1960s moved from justifying the state's position toward taking action against Communism globally and Arab Nationalists and Leftists regionally. This development was cultivated and cherished by the state itself to provide a locus for the struggle by showing “a complex, multidimensional social history that has been flattened, obscured and repurposed in the service of monarchy and imperialism.”Footnote 81 Historical narratives were thus polarized, and the internal debates with regard to Communists and Arab Nationalists signified an epoch of change in Saudi Arabian history, a new mechanism that actively constructed alternative frameworks to interpret Arab Nationalism within the context of Communist ideology. As such, Saudi history discourse in the 1960s has rightly been characterized in its global context as creating distinctive national narratives for use against Arab Nationalism and Communism.Footnote 82
Zionism From the Matrix of Communism
Despite the extensive literature on the Arab–Israeli struggle over the Palestinian conflict, linking Communism with Zionism throughout the Cold War was part of the official Saudi anti-Communist discourse.Footnote 83 These writings evoked emotions of conspiracy and became increasingly popular during the Cold War. To illustrate the relationship between these divergent ideologies, in the relevant literature they were generally portrayed interchangeably in order to debunk the opponent's fables, “arguing that they were all Communist strategic assets and not to be trusted.”Footnote 84 One Saudi academic writer, for example, posited that “even if Communism and Zionism are two different ideologies, their common end destruction of the religion of Islam, unites them in a single purpose.”Footnote 85 With this approach, Khayr al-Dīn Al-Ziriklī, who served as former Saudi minister to Egypt, the Arab League in Cairo, and finally as ambassador to Morocco, offered to the Saudis and Arabs in the Cold War a conceptualist explanation of the relationship between Zionism and Communism. He asserted that “the ‘firm relations’ between Communism and Zionism were because of the Eastern Orthodox Church propaganda of the Zionist occupation.”Footnote 86
In this convoluted schematic, the Saudi historical discourse was eclipsed by a religious resurgence. Following 1956, the exponential proliferation of Saudi and Arabic literature accelerated the notion of a direct correlation between Communism and Zionism.Footnote 87 Within this particular discourse, the debate over the association of Communism with Zionism's agenda resurfaced in the 1960s and was enshrined at the highest level of dialogue.Footnote 88 From this angle, the official emphasis on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict had an additional dimension in the political homogeneity of the Kingdom, feeding into the context of the Cold War struggle against Communism.
In 1960, the Saudi Grand Mufti Sheikh Ibn Baz issued a fatwa titled, “the Islamic ruling on advocating the arbitration of Communist principles,” in which he postulated, “communism is being against God and an anathema to Islam, and compared it equally with Zionism and its ignorance and moral decadence.”Footnote 89 In such a climate, this theme reverberated resoundingly when the Saudi King “urged the U.S. to take note of the threat that Zionism and Communism posed to peace in the Middle East and even to stability and integrity of U.S. society itself.”Footnote 90 This sentiment, which interweaved the ideological threads of Communism and Zionism, was accepted and reproduced by the Saudis in the Cold War and was meant to induce macro-mobilization. Henry Kissinger recalled that it was hard to know how to begin in answering such a line of reasoning, “but King Faisal insisted that an end had to be put once and for all to the dual conspiracy of Zionism and Communism.”Footnote 91 King Faisal had framed the struggle against Communism in such a manner to incorporate his struggle against Nasser and Zionism alike.
From a macro perspective, the utilization of Israeli–Palestinian conflict by various Arab systems had always been sufficient to induce monomania. In subsequent years, Saudi criticism of Arab revolutionary strategy, Zionism, and Communism became more intense, with Nasser receiving the majority of the blame.Footnote 92 Toward this synthesis, Saudi Arabia had labored to justify its rigid position toward Moscow during the Arab–Israeli conflict and often felt that this incident and others were all elements of a plot led by Moscow and its proxies through which Communism would establish itself militarily in the Gulf.Footnote 93 In response to mounting Arab criticism of Saudi Arabia after 1956 for not using its oil as a weapon against the West, a Saudi official explained to the State Department, “Do our leftist brothers want us to perish in hunger in order to let Moscow grow fat? The Arab Nationalists with their propaganda machinery are responsible more than anything else for the latest disaster of Palestine.”Footnote 94
Henceforward, Communism and Zionism occupied a central position in Saudi Cold War discourse because these two ideological strands were the main cause, in the state's view, of the Israeli occupation flourishing in the Arab world. Thus, to draw an analogy between them as the single problem facing the Muslim world, Muḥammed ‘Abd- al-Qanī, a member of the Political Geography faculty at Alexandria University, wrote an article on the implications of the creation of Israel for the Arab world. He argued that the rising conflict between Zionist Israel and Palestine was the defining factor in Moscow's consolidation of its power in the Cold War.Footnote 95 Discussing the Soviet role in the conflict, he indicated that Moscow did not help and arm Arabs against Israeli aggression, nor did it appear as a hero of the Arab nations, but instead aimed to give the Israeli occupiers a feeling of empowerment.Footnote 96 Accordingly, he cited evidence in support of the notion that “the creation of the Zionist nation of Israel was also an important factor in the Communists’ interest in the Arab world.”Footnote 97 Amīn Mḥmūd, a historian and former minister of culture and higher education in Jordan, also explicitly linked Zionism with Communism, equating the creation of Israel with the rise and prominence of the devil incarnate of Soviet power in the Arab World.Footnote 98 According to him, “the Zionist movement had creed as a sinister carrier of a Communist plague, which somehow led to the formation of the nucleus of Marxist-Communist cells in the Arab world at the expense of the Palestinian tragedy.”Footnote 99 Likewise, Saudi and Arab sources confirmed that Moscow had few illusions in the conflict, beyond helping Arabs, and was destined to fail. In fact, Saudi historical writing was preoccupied with this trend during the last four decades of the twentieth century; Moscow's role in the conflict was thought to employ the motto of secularism, Zionist agenda, revolution against Islam, and Palestinian rights.Footnote 100 Such negative views remained strong, and even proliferated during this period.Footnote 101
The Israeli–Palestinian conflict was thus an opportunity for Saudi political writers to exploit Communism and Zionism, drawing parallels between their dangers for the Arab world along with Arab Nationalism. Ṣalāḥ Al-Munjīd, for example, Syrian-born, a Saudi citizen, and considered an influential scholar in the field of history and Islamic studies, filled a hole in our understanding of the conflict. He confirmed the inescapable fact that “if we think Moscow sided with Arabs in 1956, it would be an unmitigated disaster of inarticulate diplomatic amateurishness.”Footnote 102 By way of contrast, Al-Munjīd held that the Soviet Union should have borne responsibility for the Arab crisis that led to the defeat of 1967.Footnote 103 Specifically, Al-Munjīd illustrated how immigrants flew from Moscow to Israel, causing a rapid increase in the Israeli population and enabling the aggressor state to fill its occupied lands with migrants, who came principally from the atheist-Communist Soviet Union.Footnote 104 In the same vein, the Saudi writer ‘Umar Ḥleeq provided comprehensive examples of the relationship between the Communist Soviet Union and Zionist Israel after 1948. Ḥleeq postulated that Communist Moscow was the main protagonist in creating the Israeli state and enabling it to flourish for years.Footnote 105 He went on to ask what really drove Arab Nationalists to embrace Moscow's agendas in Middle Eastern politics? He answered that Soviet strategy was driven by a desire to control Middle Eastern oil and destroy their religion, with little interest in solving the Palestinian issue.Footnote 106
Saudi Arabia took the Zionist-Communist conspiracy to its most extreme form in the Cold War, as when King Faisal famously articulated that “Zionism and Communism were two sides of the same coin.”Footnote 107 He further asserted that the Soviet Union did not support Arabs but pretended to back Arab states, “which was all part of a grand Communist and Zionist conspiracy of working against the Muslims.”Footnote 108 The tendency to link Communism and Zionism had grown unprecedentedly in Saudi local writing, fueled by the official position of the state. The Saudi political writer Mājid Al-Turkī joined the chorus with a similar notion. Drawing on data from his Center for Russian Studies in Riyadh, he consolidated his views in the context of the bitter legacy of Soviet Communism in the Arab world. The manner in which he framed problems unambiguously indicated the entity deemed responsible for them was “the USSR and its Communist ideology.”Footnote 109 He pointed out that “the Communist ideology of the USSR in the Cold War relied on the Zionist scholars to flourish and survive.”Footnote 110
Conflating the Zionist movement with the Communist threat had an important impact on Saudi anti-Communist strategy by intertwining “these evil ideologies that afflicted the Muslim World.”Footnote 111 As such, in evaluating modern Saudi diplomatic history in the Cold War, the concept of “encirclement syndrome” applies to understanding the Saudis’ anti-Communist stance. This functioned as a focus for the state's calculated action later in the twentieth century, and it also provided the basis for taking a highly selective approach in opposing Communism.Footnote 112
Conclusion: Fighting Communism Moved from the Balcony to the Barricades.
At the outset of this article, the basic assumption was that Saudi enmity to Communism was intertwined in the 1950s and 1960s with enmity toward Arab Nationalism and Zionism, which in turn were inextricably linked with its anti-Communist stance. Hence, the extent to which Saudi Arabia fostered anti-Communism can be explained “not simply as a favor to the West, but because it viewed such efforts as integral to its own national security.”Footnote 113 Analyzing the Saudi literature on Communism in this light, the historical narratives concentrate on interpreting the strong anti-Communist trend that developed on a national scale, extending to critiques of other movements from Arab Nationalism to Zionism that were generally framed as atheistic offshoots of Communism. In other words, this genre facilitated the development of “Takfirism” in the 1960s and 1970s, inspired by antipathy toward Communism and driven by lack of pluralism. Moreover, the struggle against Communism made the Saudi discourse more attractive to not only Saudis, but other Arabs and Muslims who were persecuted by their homelands, or who shared the Saudi view of stringent anti-Communism. This resulted in the production of radical historical narratives that have dominated the Arab world over the last four decades, as laid out by Matthias Determann.Footnote 114
The development of this kind of historical narrative, framed culturally and educationally, created an interactional mechanism that led to what Thomas Hegghammer theorized in the late 1970s as “the rise of classical Jihadists.”Footnote 115 This was predicated on steering Saudi Arabia in subsequent years to spearhead anti-Communist efforts across the region and beyond by attracting, encouraging, and supporting the actions of the mujahideen. Hence, the 1950s and 1960s strategy of anti-Communism was very much a building block in fighting Communism globally, whose methods Saudi Arabia reconceived and redeveloped “ideologically and financially” in the late 1970s to eliminate Communism everywhere.
In conclusion, an examination of the Saudi anti-Communist stance of 1958–67 reveals that “the encircled Kingdom” was essentially dominated by a fear of Soviet Communism that extended to and entangled with all other secular ideologies. In other words, the Saudi anti-Communist stance was developed by the nation-state itself to incorporate other secular ideologies in the region. Ideologies such as Arab Nationalism and Socialism were perceived as being a partial product of Communist ideas and beliefs and therefore not to be trusted. Strengthened by these developments, the political and dialectical expression of the Saudi anti-Communist stance moved from the balconies to the barricades.
