Swat valley regression vs. Saudi reform

Schools for women are being destroyed in the Swat valley of Pakistan and a woman has been named Saudi Arabia's deputy education minister in charge of a new department for female students.

Both are revolutionary and involve complex application of political power:

1. Military action by the Taliban is seeing schools demolished and Sharia law imposed as part of a peace settlement in the Swat valley.
2. Consensus building among the religious elite and ruling family by King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia have led to a shift away from ultra-conservative rule.

Saudi Arabia's changes are the most important, for it has the world's largest known reserves of oil, has that region's dominant economy and controls the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

King Abdullah's reforms promise to be sweeping, as the London Financial Times reports:

King Abdullah has not just shaken up his government. He has seized control of the Saudi justice and education systems from the most reactionary elements of the clerical establishment and placed them in the hands of reformers.

His changes to the 21-man Council of Religious Scholars are illustrative of the change in religious/theological balance. King Abdullah ended the monopoly of an austere Islamic school of thought identified with the kingdom's dominant Wahhabi clerics. He brought in representatives from three more moderate Sunni groups. He named none from the Shi'ite minority.

In that context of shift in the balance of religious power, King Abdullah fired powerful, individual enemies of reform. He replaced the chief of the Saudi religious police, Sheikh Ibrahim, who runs the commission for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, known as the mutawa, which enforces bans on alcohol and drugs, has gained a reputation for brutality. He replaced the country's most senior judge, Sheikh Salih Ibn al-Luhaydan, who ruled last year that it was permissible to kill owners of satellite television channels broadcasting "immoral" programmes. And several other hardline judges were fired.

Appointment of the nation's first woman minister was certainly important, although his appointment of Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, his son-in-law, as education minister, had at least equal practical effect.

The Financial Times concludes:

All this will be seen as a turning point if it breaks Wahhabi social control. The al-Saud need to curb decisively the corrosive power of the religious establishment and lead the kingdom towards a form of modernity that its religious heritage can sustain. That must eventually mean enlisting Islamist progressives – the most potent source of ideas for renewal – who have called for free elections, freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary, a fairer distribution of wealth, and a foreign policy arrived at through open debate – in short, a constitutional monarchy . . . .

The Taliban-imposed changes in Pakistan are also driven by religion. But unlikely to survive perhaps fundamentally secular U.S. military efforts.

With a net effect, assuming the Saudi monarchy manages well the transitions in power that are in store as a result of the crown prince's terminal illness, of a major theological and social shift toward greater human freedom.