Guest Post: Saudi Arabia and the churches

Saudi Arabia and the churches Summary: MBS and King Salman had several high-level contacts with Christian leaders in recent months. A dialogue with the Catholics. The Saudi ban on church building. In recent months there have been an unusually large number of meetings between Saudi Arabia – MBS and his father King Salman – and Christian leaders (and on one occasion Jewish leaders), Catholic and Anglican but not so far as we have seen Orthodox or other churches (such as the Christian Zionists who are an important element in US support of Israel, particularly among Republicans). All these meetings have been presented by the participants as taking place in a good atmosphere and contributing to understanding between Muslims and Christians. In November 2017 Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, head of the Maronite (catholic) church in Lebanon and Syria, visited Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the King and MBS, the first visit of a Maronite patriarch; his visit coincided with the affair of the resignation possibly under Saudi duress of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, and he may have played a role in defusing it. In March MBS met the Archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual head of the worldwide Anglican communion, in London. Later in March he met religious leaders in New York. They reportedly included two rabbis and another Jewish leader as well as Catholic leaders. Perhaps the most important encounter was the visit of French Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Vatican’s Council for Inter-religious Dialogue, to Riyadh last month to meet the King, MBS, and Shaikh Muhammad Abd al-Karim al-Isa, Secretary General of the Muslim World League (a former Saudi minister). The late King Abdullah met Pope Benedict in 2007,and an official Saudi delegation met Pope Francis in the Vatican in November 2017, but this was the first open visit to Saudi Arabia by a senior Catholic figure. Both the Cardinal and the Secretary-General  went public with warm words, and agreement was reached on the establishment of a standing committee under their headship to promote dialogue. The elephant in the room is the ban on all non-Muslim religious practice in Saudi Arabia, including above all building churches. Christians in the kingdom, 2 million of them according to some estimates which seem on the high side (about one quarter of the non-Saudis), are obliged to keep any religious practice more or less clandestine. Like other difficult obstacles to reform in Saudi Arabia, this is not so much a matter of Islamic doctrine as of tradition and practice. In 2012 there were unconfirmed media reports that the Saudi grand mufti had said that churches should be destroyed in accordance with the saying of the Prophet “no two religions in the Arabian Peninsula” (although there are of course churches in non-Saudi parts of the peninsula, and always have been both in ancient and in modern times). Other views are possible. For example a member of the Saudi religious establishment from a distinguished family (although not from the Al al-Shaikh, the family of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab whose alliance with the Al Saud is the foundation of Saudi religious legitimacy) Abd al-Aziz al-Tuwaijiri gave a public lecture in Oxford in 2013 on “tajdid”, renewal of Muslim thinking. Asked whether Christians should be prevented from practising their religion simply because there were until recently scarcely any Christians in Saudi Arabia, he said that it was not consistent with tajdid and churches should be provided. According to one prolific Saudi tweeter @HassanMohmdd the agreement between the Cardinal and Shaikh Muhammad al-Isa, which has not been published, includes agreement on building churches in Saudi Arabia as well as on continuing dialogue. He records this without comment and we have not seen any comment, favourable or unfavourable, on the issue even from critics of the regime such as the anonymous blogger Mujtahidd, who never miss an opportunity to attack MBS in particular, for example for his alleged contacts with Israel. Most observers believe that the “no two religions” doctrine is deep rooted, and that it is unthinkable that building churches should be permitted. But to change it would accord with the radical new approach MBS claims to adopt.