Book Reviews AWAKENING ISLAM: THE POLITICS OF RELIGIOUS DISSENT IN CONTEMPORARY SAUDI ARABIA. By Stéphane Lacroix; translated by George Holoch. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 270 pp. Hardbound $29.95. While also a social history of the Saudi Islamist movement, Stéphane Lacroix’s Awakening Islam examines the origins of a failed “insurrection” in the early 1990s against the Saudi state by an Islamist movement it had earlier nurtured. Lacroix is a political scientist who successfully uses the historical perspective to better understand the social origins of Islamist politics in Saudi Arabia. Blending data from interviews with written sources in Arabic, French, and English, he examines its local, regional, and international dimensions, grounding the Sahwa in a broader historical narrative. Some prior knowledge of Pierre Bourdieu's sociology will aid the reader as it informs the study throughout, particularly his concept of the “ield.” It is to better understand the ields—these competitive spheres of the social and political landscape—that Lacroix mobilizes the histori- cal perspective. The Sahwa originated from the convergence of Muslim Brotherhood refu- gees from Egypt (and to a lesser extent Syria and Iraq) with local Saudi Wahhabis. They were leeing repression by secular dictators like Nasser of Egypt from the 1950s, and Saudi Arabia welcomed them. They were best placed to counter Nasser's ideological attacks on the Saudi rulers, described as agents of imperial- ism for their close relationship to the West. In the 1960s the kingdom embarked upon its “Islamic modernization.” Modernization was a legitimizing ideology of the ruling family and funded by oil wealth. The Brothers, better educated than the local Wahhabi clerics and trusted more than the Saudi intelligentsia, were enlisted to modernize the Saudi educational system. The Brothers permeated it at every level, afecting society as teachers and reconiguring its curricula. The generation that they produced was committed to social activism guided by a fusion of Brotherhood and Wahhabi doctrines. Oil revenues dropped in the 1980s and recession ensued in the kingdom; few opportunities for this new generation of Sahwi graduates existed. This compounded their resentment of the secular modernizers directing the state bureaucracy. Before the recession, Sahwi’s attention was focused on acquiring larger allocations of state resources than rival Islamist groups. Ater the reces- sion, their attention moved toward opposing a regime whose legitimacy they The Oral History Review 2012, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 323–394 © The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oral History Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com at London School of economics on October 8, 2015 http://ohr.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from