Graveyard of Clerics by Pascal Menoret

Author:Pascal Menoret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2020-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

THE TALAL AFFAIR

ONE DAY SOMEBODY DENOUNCED THAMIR TO THE MINISTRY OF Islamic Affairs for spreading the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood. He had given a series of talks and thought the accusation was linked to them. The blow was weak, however. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs could not dismiss him since he was working at the Ministry of Education. Yet the episode still revealed the widespread surveillance Islamic activists were subjected to.

Thamir thought the tip might have come from the Jamis. In Tumiya, as in the rest of Riyadh, the Jamis practiced close surveillance of all other Islamic movements. Their opponents called them Jamis in reference to the Ethiopian sheikh Muhammad al-Jami, whose quietist Salafi voice had spread through Saudi Islamic universities during the 1980s, starting from the Islamic University of Medina, where he was a professor. Other Islamic activists thought that the Jamis were supported by the state to compete with them from within the Islamic movement. Jamis attracted students under the pretense of studying religious sciences and becoming true Salafis.

Tumiya’s Jamis gathered around a hundred members, and were busy opposing the Muslim Brothers and more politicized Salafis. For instance, they had blackmailed local mosque imams into closing down a Quranic circle whose orientation they deemed too radical. The circle members were forced to move from mosque to mosque around Tumiya until the day when, facing hostile imams everywhere, they simply could no longer exist as a group and had to dissolve.

“The Jamis are those who think that those in power . . . cannot be touched,” Salman said. “To them everything the government says is right; the state simply never errs.”

The Jamis were not very popular, even if they were active in several suburbs of Riyadh.

“The Jami library was burned to the ground, but I do not know if it really happened,” he said. “They say of themselves that they are Salafis and they attack the sheikhs; they attack all those who bring anything new. They even attack people who to us are Salafi, for bringing new things. They attack anything that smacks of novelty, of anti-government activism, of revolt. ‘Revolt against those in power is forbidden,’ they say.”

When he spoke of the Jamis, ʿAdel was even more cutting.

“The Jamis are the flip side of secularism, you see?” he said to me once. “Secularists call for the separation of religion and state and want to take over politics. The Jamis reply to them, ‘Take politics, we just want religion.’”

Jami surveillance did not penetrate only those Islamic groups they accused of political activism: it also extended to families.

“I went to Kuwait to visit relatives,” Salman said. “I went to a bookstore Thamir had recommended, which sells lots of books by Muslim Brother authors. . . . I bought a nice collection that I left at home while my cousin and I drove around. My other cousin, a girl—I think they are Jamis—when I came back, the books were shredded up, as if a pack of rats had eaten them.

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