The New Face of the Saudis

Undoubtedly, Saudi King Abdullah has not initiated inter-religious dialogue efforts under his auspices without a reason. By doing so he is aiming to hit two birds with one stone. It's beneficial to view the whole subject from a little retrospective angle and a little through the means of philosophy: European positivism signed the death sentence of religion in the 19th century, so all through the 20th century religion's demise was expected to take place, with Nietzsche having declared that "God is dead." However, the god Europe attempted to kill — as Gill Kepel put it — came back in the last quarter of the 20th century to "get revenge." This was the result of an unsubstantiated and fallacy-ridden approach to the concepts of god and religion in an unsacred universe designed in the minds of enlightened Europeans.

Religion and culture came to be handled from completely different conceptual perspectives in the 21st century. "Culture" was the most essential element utilized by nation states in the 19th and 20th centuries in their attempts to invent and build a nation; today the nation state is suffering a profound crisis while culture, having undergone a functional mutation, is struggling against religion on one hand and playing a role as part of international politics as a strategic value on the other. The "soft and benign power" — which is cheaper and whose impact works into people more prevalently and deeply according to a recent cost analysis made by Americans — is being used entirely on the cultural level. That is, the power that is more effective and cheaper than the military power is culture, dubbed "the soft power."

As the experience we had in the 20th century taught us, Muslim countries will never be able to acquire a cultural power strong enough to compete with and get the better of the military and political hegemony of the West. From political considerations soaking with culture to financial development projects, and from educational systems to the reorganization of social life, it is compulsory to make new assessments, because culture is the West's own weapon it invented while gaining power and winning a victory against its own Christian past and the non-Western world. If the Islamic world, which has its religion-based wisdom and insight, is really willing to gain its political, economic and military independence, and to sow and tell the rest of the world that achieving a new anthropocentric and more liberal and just world is possible, it should return to its own essence and roots and it should be able to develop a new language, message and a new platform based on its wisdom and insight.

"Inter-religious dialogue" is taking on a strategic value in addition to its search for a new language that will be an alternative to the secular-profane culture. If Pope Benedict XVI suspended all efforts at dialogue as soon as he was elected, it was because he clearly saw that Catholicism, and Europe on the whole, did not stand a chance on this benign field of competition. King Abdullah has gravitated toward two aims through making a single move. Primarily, he is trying to eradicate the deep-seated recrudescence of disturbance precipitated by the post-Sept. 11 association of many perpetrators of violent acts of terrorism — fairly or unfairly — with Islam and the Saudis. He might have been given a message by the West even through an insinuation. During the Mecca meetings, it was continually emphasized that Islam is a religion that stands against violence and terrorism and that the biggest problem in a world that never ceases to have conflicts is relations with the "other." It was then reiterated that Islam has the healthiest approach among all other religions and cultures.

Additionally, there are emerging powers in the region, which is being reshaped. These powers are Iran, Turkey and Qatar. All three countries want to play key roles in the region, albeit with different methods and targets. And Saudis, as a "regional power," don't want to lose their initiative potency during this process. From this perspective, they have analyzed the region from a completely new perspective. The venerable scholar of Islam, Mr. Fethullah Gülen, noticed this transformative power 10 years ago and took forward steps at the cost of sparking great reactions. Unfortunately, the official and semi-official groups in Turkey which continue thinking with concepts of 200 years ago are unaware of what is going on; they are trying to make sense of the world using the concepts of the 19th century or, to be more precise, they don't understand the world.