Saudi Suburbia

Another rest house, another shilla of young Saudis hanging out in a tent in the east of Riyadh. Half a dozen men in their early thirties were watching a soccer game on a old television set in a small room covered with a grubby carpet and littered with tin plates and plastic cups. Outside, a brief and dramatic winter storm was pummeling the volleyball field directly in front of the tent.

After months of wandering about, and thanks to Sheikh ‘Abd al-Ilah's help, I had eventually fallen in with a group of Islamic activists, young professors, and lawyers with whom I had more in common than fieldwork: as a former philosophy teacher, I somehow belonged to the family. Thamer, my main contact in the group, taught religion in high school and we often reflected on the similarities between Islamic studies in Saudi Arabia and high school philosophy in France. Both disciplines were crucial to the identity of a strong centralized state that used ideology to assert its own authority. Both were often reduced to pedantic and dry catechisms, inflicted on crowded classrooms of overwhelmingly bored and sneering students, under the distant gaze of the ministry's inspectors. Thamer valiantly tried to turn his courses into lessons on freethinking and liberty, introducing the students to novel ways of dealing with the sacred texts and reading with them authors who, like Malika Oufkir and Naguib Mahfuz, were considered deviant by mainstream Islamists.