Attack on Holy Site in Medina Latest Attempt to Undermine Saudi Monarchy

Four security officers have been killed and another wounded after a suicide bomber struck Medina, Saudi Arabia; the attacker detonated himself near Al-Haram Al-Nabawi, the mosque where Mohammad is supposedly buried. According to Al-Arabiya, the bomber targeted Saudi security officials, approaching them under the guise of wanting to break the fast of Ramadan with them.

Medina is the second holiest site for Muslims behind Mecca, and the attack on the Al-Haram Al-Nabawi mosque is believed to have been perpetrated by the Islamic State (though no one has claimed responsibility for the attack). The attack was the second of three attacks in Saudi Arabia that day and the latest in a series of attacks during the holy month of Ramadan, which ends on July 5^th.

Around the same time, a car bomb and a suicide bomb exploded in the Qatif region of the country. Earlier, Abdullah Qalzar Khan, a Pakistani national, detonated himself near the U.S Consulate in Jeddah after security officers confronted him for acting suspiciously. Two guards were wounded in the later attack but no one was killed in either bombing. The attack, which occurred on the final day of Ramadan, is the latest in a series of attacks which have surged in light of the Islamic State’s call for increased attacks during the holiday.

On the surface, the fact that a jihadist group attacked a Muslim holy site may appear counterintuitive. But jihadist groups have a history of attacking Saudi Muslim holy sites.

In 1979, several hundred jihadists seized Masjid al-Haram, the Grand mosque of Mecca and the holiest Muslim site. Jihadists claimed the arrival of the Mahdi, the Islamic end times figure, and denounced the Saudi government. The siege lasted two weeks and was put down when a French counter-terrorism special operations unit stormed the mosque, taking it back for the Saudi government. The Grand Mosque Siege would come to have a powerful impact on Al Qaeda and other Jihadist groups, and indicates how such groups are willing to engage in violence at holy sites.

While not seizing Muslim holy sites themselves, the Islamic State’s attack on Saudi officials near Al-Haram Al-Nabawi builds on the example of the Grand Mosque siege, particularly in its attempt to undermine the perceived effectiveness of Saudi security at these sites.

In the case of Saudi Arabia, the government’s perceived inability to protect key sites is a direct indictment of the Saudi kingdom’s legitimacy, which rests upon the monarchy’s claim to serve as Guardian to Islam’s holy places. This is a lesson the Saudi monarchy knows well, since their ancestors carried out their own violent seizure of Mecca and Medina in the early 1800s destroying mosques and shrines in a religious revivalism challenging the then Guardian of the holy sites, the Ottoman Caliphate.

Contrary to claims that Islamic State’s attacks against mosques and holy sites puts them outside the mainstream of Islamic history, the Saudis own history shows that Islamic revivalist movements will strike at the heart of Islamic holy sites, and indeed that this tactic has in the past proven effective. It also shows that movements, like the Saudi Wahhabist movement of the 19^th century, or the Islamic State today, can have tremendous staying power, even when early attempts to hold territory fail.