Page 131 - Aamir Rehman - Dubai & Co Global Strategies for Doing Business in the Gulf States-McGraw-Hill (2007)

Silicon from Sand: Essential Background on the GCC 115

later Saudi Arabia took a 25 percent stake in the company.
Ownership reached 60 percent in 1974, and by 1988 the company—
renamed Saudi Aramco—was fully owned by the Saudis. Aramco’s
first Saudi president—Ali Al Naimi—took the reins in 1984 and
today is the Kingdom’s oil minister. Al Naimi began working with
Aramco at the age of 11, and his rise embodies the phased manner
in which Saudi Arabia and its nationals have taken control of their
oil industry.
While full control of the oil revenue grants the monarchy
formidable power, and its foreign alliances give it international pro-
tection, to be secure the Crown needs another crucial element:
the perception of religious legitimacy. It’s very telling that the
monarch’s official title is not King of Saudi Arabia, but instead the
much more faith-based Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, refer-
ring to the sanctuaries of Makkah and Madinah. He controls the
country’s natural resources, and in return maintains the public
services and religious sites without directly taxing people’s
incomes. But in a country so deeply defined by Islam, the monarch
also needs to justify his role in religious terms before his people by
enforcing Islamic law and upholding religious practices.

The Religious Establishment
Islam is at the core of Saudi Arabia’s identity. The country’s flag is
Islam’s declaration of faith: “There is no god but God and
Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” The country’s constitution,
according to its official documents, is the Qur’an. The legal system,
at least officially, must be entirely consistent with Islamic law.
In this environment, institutions that represent Islamic author-
ity will naturally be influential. While Islam has no formal system
of clergy or ordination, it does have religious scholars—called
ulema—who are trained to interpret Islamic law. A judge in an
Islamic court is called a qadi, and a qadi must be trained by scholars.
In Saudi Arabia, government courts are fully Islamic and presided
over by qadis, as the judicial system is Islamic law. The arbitration of
commercial disputes, however, can occur through nonreligious
institutions with ultimate recourse to the state-run Islamic courts.
Besides their role in the Islamic courts, the ulema also wield sig-
nificant influence in the government and society. Several government