The Saudi state, throughout its history, has been dominated by three schools of thought: the traditional religious school « which is the original and fundamental ideology of the state»; the rightist conservative school; and the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. Although these schools of thought have been employed and adhered to, simultaneously, it is not rare for one of them to gain the day at a critical turn of events. Responses to historical challenges and pressures, imposed on Saudi Arabia by local, regional or international circumstances, dictate the intricate balance between these competing schools of thought.

The rightist conservative school, different as it is, and more progressive in some respects, from the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, is to a certain extent overlapping with it, due to the fact that the latter has been a source of ideological inspiration for the former. This is the reason why Saudi Arabia has sometimes been viewed by many outsiders as more of an Islamic than an Arab state.

These two ideologies, migrating, as it were, to Saudi Arabia from its Arab neighborhoods, have benefited the kingdom in two ways: they were used as a shield against the ideological assaults of the Arab nationalist, socialist regimes and the leftist movements in general, on the one hand, and as indispensable tools, especially the Muslim Brotherhood ideology, in the religious polemics against the local 'Salafist' (backward looking), school that was adamantly opposed to any form of modernization of society, on the other hand. Those polemics, as is well known, were not confined to Saudi Arabia, with its deeply entrenched religious legacy, but were widely spread all over the Arab and Muslim worlds. The subject matter of these polemics, raging even between the Salafists themselves, was not purely religious and scholastic, but was also concerned with modern thought and consciousness, as a contribution by the Muslim Brotherhood, which, though conservative and fundamentalist, is more closely related to modernity in ways the pure Salafists were not.

As a political regime, Saudi Arabia had no choice but to adopt the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood, taken as a complementary constituent of its own Salafist ideology, which was full of gaping lacunae in the face of modern challenges. The ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood was ready to fill these gaps within the Salafist framework because it was from the start obsessed with the ideological war against communism, socialism, nationalism, liberalism and all western trends in the fields of semantics, language, culture, the arts, philosophy, sociology and economics. It was a conservative Islamic reaction against westernization, secularization and modernity which had swept Egypt in the twenties of the last century, while the Salafists of the Arabian peninsula were living happily in their past and for the sake of it.

By the seventies of the last century, that Salafist though, through its prolonged interaction with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, had obtained a degree of vivacity and effectiveness in the social, pedagogical and cultural fields, and tried its best to come to grips with modernity by transcending its purely religious, ritual and ceremonial functions inside the mosque and in Society at large. The Muslim brothers on their side tried to contain the Salafist school, in Saudi Arabia and outside it, by launching an elaborate charm offensive and dealing with its representatives with the utmost respect and veneration, trying to either win them over to their own ideology, or at least buy their silence and mitigate the consequences of any potential conflict of opinion with them. Many reasons can be cited to explain the flexibility of the Muslim Brothers towards their Salafist counterparts:

1- Their ideology, in its Qutbist and Mawdoodist versions « referring to Sayyed Qutb the Egyptian leader of the Muslim Brotherhood executed