1969 Nasserist coup in Saudi-Arabia

What if this Saudi Arabian Republic managed to keep the clerics tightly under their thumb in a similar manner to the OTL People's Republic of China, even as far as possessing the right of who to replace an outgoing cleric / religious leader (like China plans to do with the 15th Dalai Lama) and persecuting those suspected of being against the Arabian Republic regime or not following the party line?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Dalai_Lama
 
I imagine the Nasser might try getting them into the United Arab States, though not the United Arab Republic. Cairo wouldn't mind having the Hejaz under their hegemony again, plus the Persian Gulf area. Qatar and Bahrain might throw themselves into the United Arab Emirates, as either the Arabians, Egyptians, or Iranians.
 
And the worst of it is, this could probably be the better option for the majority of the Saudi people. CFrazy isn't it, that the west would want to defeat communism is exactly the sort of way that would actually spur the communists on most of the time.

ANYTHING is better than Salafism...
 

raharris1973

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On the good side - gender and sectarian persecution, as a matter of principle and practicality, is less in Arabia and around the Islamic world. In practice, instrumental causes will still lead to many sectarian and some gender biases in Arabian and Muslim society. No 9/11. No Islamist guerrilla violence in many parts of the world like Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. The occasional religious-motivated assassin will still surface from time to time.

On the (potential) bad side:
Nasserist Saudi Arabia tilts hard to the USSR and destabilizes other Arabian monarchies.
Early, deeper and longer oil crisis for the consuming world.
Minimal reinvestment of Persian Gulf oil money in various sectors of developed world economies.
Nasserist Arabia supports Arab nationalist terrorism around the world against exiled regime opponents, westerners and Israelis through the 70s, 80s and beyond. This may have included attacks within CONUS.
Lack of Persian Gulf oil producer symbiosis with the US and west may mean Soviet bloc survives on oil revenue rents into the 20th century.
US defense industrial base further deteriorates in 1970s due to lack of Persian Gulf paying customers, even while Israel and Iran remain big customers in the 70s.
No Egyptian-Israeli peace, Nasserist Arabia subsidizes Egypt's "frontline state" status.
The first Nasserist coup is probably not the last. There are likely follow-on coups (Nasserist, Baathist, militarist or other), possibly civil wars and revolutions in Arabia, costing many lives.

More on the (potential) good side:
More non-fossil fuel energy tech development
Israel, focused on the Egyptian and Syrian fronts, never does a deep invasion of Lebanon, doing, at most, shallow incursions and stand-off strikes. No Falangist massacre of Palestinian civilians, no Hizballah
 
The first Nasserist coup is probably not the last. There are likely follow-on coups (Nasserist, Baathist, militarist or other), possibly civil wars and revolutions in Arabia, costing many lives.
This bears keeping in mind; could well be that our PoD leads to Arabia being in a state of war for years on end, dragging in their Nasserist and Baathist neighbors to the north.

If said conflict drags on for at least a decade, how does this change things? For example, do we still get an Islamic Revolution in Iran?
 
Would it be possible to have the Arabian Republic embrace some form of Titoist ideology that acts in a similar (albeit secularist) manner to the OTL post-Nasserist Islamic Revival?

Also who would lead the more traditionalist states in the Arab Cold War with the absence of Saudi Arabia and how would the Yemeni conflicts from 1962-1986 play out?
 
Also who would lead the more traditionalist states in the Arab Cold War with the absence of Saudi Arabia...?
Could it be that nobody leads them TTL, that Islamic nations continue taking their lead from more secularist states like Egypt, Iran, and Turkey? I mentioned earlier how this might even prevent the rise of "Islamization" in the upcoming decades.
 
Could it be that nobody leads them TTL, that Islamic nations continue taking their lead from more secularist states like Egypt, Iran, and Turkey? I mentioned earlier how this might even prevent the rise of "Islamization" in the upcoming decades.

It would be interesting to see how Iran plays out, particularly if the West goes out its way to nip the 1979 Revolution in the bud or somehow finds a fairly Pro-Western Anti-Soviet faction among the clerics or another similar (possibly secularist) faction to appropriate the 1979 Revolution.
 
Perhaps we see Nasser supporting having a portion of central Hejaz be placed under a region for the holy a cities or just the areas around them and a port city and airport or something? I can see him being happy to have this way to unify Arabs and Muslims around his leadership further, and to use it to play host to African, Indonesian, and Pakistani leaders. Though obviously he wouldn't go in there demolishing things (hopefully) and he would be too smart to claim himself as the host of the area, even is Arabia did join Egypt and others in a single state or confederation. He would be careful so as to not have too much influence leak away from Cairo, but that shouldn't be a problem since I doubt any would want to make Mecca or Medina the political center of the region. Too sacred and isolated for that.
 
I wonder what the officers reaction would be to the Al ash-Sheikh, the family descended from Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself, who have been the major religious authority in the country since the first awakenings of the Wahabist movement. Would the officers keep the Saud's arrangement with them (a division of political and religious powers), or would they have attempted to neutralise them? Muhammad ibn Ibrahim Al ash-Sheikh, the Grand Mufti until 1969, was a figure of towering moral authority and deep religious conviction (he was one fo the primary architects of the Kingdom's export of Salafism internationally). To oppose him would have almost certainly resulted in a Jihad. There had been a fundamentalist revolt in the 1920s by the Ikhwan; I have very little doubt that secularists taking control of the Two Cities and the Kaaba would have caused a wave of violence. The Saudis are bad enough... imagine Saudi Arabia with the civil establishment swept aside, totally under the control of the Grand Mufti and the Ulema.
 
The closest example would be to the successful Libyan coup, but it is important to note that King Idris was out of the country when it happened, and I don't think he had an institution like the SANG to keep power. Furthermore, the Libyan monarchy had only existed for two decades, had little appeal in an united Libya outside Idris's home region of Cyrenaica, and did not produce an heir. The Libyan monarchy was much more vulnerable as an institution than the Saudis.

People forget that the Senussi dynasty was a political offshoot of the original tribal/religious organisation. Kind Idris' authority came from his leadership of his powerful Sufi tribe, which at its height had hundreds of thousands of votaries. In my rather horrified reading of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, I found that, to my deep amusement, Stoddard is rather shrilly terrified of the Senussi order, who he predicted would throw the British and the Italians back into the Mediterranean. I suppose he was half right. The Gadaffi managed to stage his coup was really just a stroke of good luck. If he had been in the country at the time of the coup, I daresay he could have held on (at least in Cyrenaica). I found the monarchist sentiment that emerged in Benghazi during the Libyan Civil War rather fascinating.
 
I think the likely initial result of a coup is total chaos. The golpistas did not seem well-organized enough to pull off a seamless coup, and the Saudis are heavily entrenched among the Nedji tribes in particular. That, combined with the fact that the leadership of the coup came primarily from Hedjaz, could mean western Saudi Arabia (including the Holy Sites) falls quickly to the republican government, while Saudi-backing tribes control much of the east. Given that most of the oil is in the east, as well as British and American military forces in the Persian Gulf, you might be looking at a partitioned Arabia, albeit with the east in a much better position to prosecute a war.

At the same time, there's still Egyptian and Soviet support for the republicans to prop them up in the short term. Additionally, the east's oil reserves means everyone and their mother will want a piece. Iraq could start edging towards the territory or supporting the republicans in a bid to scoop up some oil production, Iran may start funding Shi'a proxy militias in the North that might align with either or no side, Jordan may want a piece or all of Hedjaz back in Hashemite hands in exchange for helping out the Anglo-Americans, and Israel's interests will be best suited by everyone shooting each other in the desert rather than shooting at the IDF in the Golan and Sinai.

On top
of all of that, oil prices just shot through the roof at the beginning of Nixon's term, probably kicking off stagflation a few years early, and America just added another potential conflict on top of Vietnam. President George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey or even George McGovern seem shockingly plausible now.
 
A Nasserist purge in Saudi Arabia has great potential. I think the shift of the majority of oil production to the the Communist/Nonaligned bloc would spur earlier development of nontraditional energy resources . North sea , mexican gulf , Alaska and fracking may take off two decades earlier. High oil prices may inspire earlier recycling to recover petroleum in plastics. I suspect more Western electricity would come from nuclear power as oil is conserved for transportation rather than the generation of electricity. Research into alternative energry gets a boost earlier than in OTL. Politically Iran benefits initally as the West most important energy supplier. If the nasserist mess up in Mecca, islamism may focus more on the G-dless atheist Soviet lackeies than against the West . the Shah may embrace a role as defender of Shiism negating Khomeni's rise to power. I don't seen Panarabism working out any better inthe timeline though.
 
A Nasserist purge in Saudi Arabia has great potential. I think the shift of the majority of oil production to the the Communist/Nonaligned bloc would spur earlier development of nontraditional energy resources . North sea , mexican gulf , Alaska and fracking may take off two decades earlier. High oil prices may inspire earlier recycling to recover petroleum in plastics. I suspect more Western electricity would come from nuclear power as oil is conserved for transportation rather than the generation of electricity. Research into alternative energry gets a boost earlier than in OTL. Politically Iran benefits initally as the West most important energy supplier. If the nasserist mess up in Mecca, islamism may focus more on the G-dless atheist Soviet lackeies than against the West . the Shah may embrace a role as defender of Shiism negating Khomeni's rise to power. I don't seen Panarabism working out any better inthe timeline though.
There's no reason for Nasserists in Saudi to catch the Stupid Virus. Much like Nasser did in Egypt, they will co-opt the theocratic establishment, exploiting Islam for their own political ends, and hastening the rise of Islamism when the regime inevitably decays into rampant corruption and the disillusioned populace turns to the empowered hard line theocrats for solace. THis may butterfly the Iranian Revolution as we know it. Iran may even end up with a broadly secular leftist regime instead of a Shia Islamist one though in this timeline.
 
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