Saudi Arabia’s tough religious tradition is seen by many outsiders - and some Saudi liberals - as a root cause of the international jihadist threat that has inflamed the Middle East for years and struck in Paris last week.
However, while Riyadh has cracked down hard on jihadists at home, jailing thousands, stopping hundreds from travelling to fight abroad and cutting militant finance streams, its approach to religion has raised a dilemma.
It assails the ideology of militants who proclaim jihad against those they regard as heretics or infidels, while allying with a clerical establishment that preaches intolerance, although not violence, against exactly those same groups.
Wahhabism, the kingdom’s official ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim school, regards ‘Shiaism’ as heretical, lauds the concept of jihad and urges hatred of infidels. Its clerics run the Saudi justice system and have funds to spread their influence abroad.
“Muslims should be fair to non-Muslims. They can do business with them and should not attack them. But that does not mean they should not hate them and avoid them,” a senior Saudi cleric, seeking anonymity, said last year.
For the government, focusing on that distinction, between accepting hatred and inciting violence, has let it retain the support of Wahhabi clergy and ultra-conservative Saudis while also carrying out a massive security operation against militants.
Modern jihadist organisations, including Islamic State and al-Qaeda, follow an extreme interpretation of the Salafi branch of Islam, of which Wahhabism was the original strain, and whose clergy still enjoy great influence in wider Salafist circles.
The government defends its record on combating radicalism, pointing to its detention of thousands of suspected militants, its intelligence sharing with allies and its barring of clergy who praised militant attacks.
Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Maj Gen Mansour Turki in an interview this summer said the clerics and firebrands now exhorting Muslims - including Saudis - to go and fight in Syria or Iraq, or to launch attacks elsewhere, were themselves living in territory controlled by Islamic State rather than in the kingdom itself.
Militant backlash
The Grand Mufti and the council of senior scholars, the top Wahhabi cleric and institution, openly defame Shias as “rejectionists”, a term in common currency among Sunni militants in the sectarian bloodbath afflicting many Middle East nations, and often refuse to accept that Shias are Muslim.
Their teaching on jihad - that it is a blessed activity in defence of Islam against infidels and heretics, and will win rewards in heaven - differs from that of militant groups only in requiring the approval of the king and Saudi official clergy.
To outsiders and to liberal Saudi critics of the ruling al-Saud, such intellectual gymnastics, reinforced in frequent clerical messages and a centrepiece of the kingdom’s militant rehabilitation programme, sometimes look like hairsplitting.
However, they fall squarely in the context of Saudi Arabia’s idiosyncratic internal politics, in which the unelected dynasty depends on the Wahhabi clergy to support its legitimacy.
Global influence
Although Saudi Arabia finances preachers, mosques and madrassas around the world, and although Salafism has become common among Muslims globally, Saudi Arabia’s own influence in the movement has become diluted.
Among militants, Saudi religious influence is even less pronounced. Jihadists often turn to texts written by long-dead Wahhabi scholars and they often adopt a Saudi style of oratory in their religious speeches, but they mock the kingdom’s modern clergy as puppets of a corrupt, pro-Western regime.