ABSTRACT

By the year 1927 a rift begun two years earlier between the Saudi government and the Ikhwan substantially widened and the latter began openly to criticise the sincerity of Abd al-Aziz’s motives as an Islamic leader. During the early Khalifate period, with the rapid expansion of Islam and the establishment of governmental institutions, it evolved into a strictly regulated tax levied by an Islamic government on specific forms of property. Muslim government was empowered to make such a contract because it was an Islamic authority which belonged at once to the Islamic community or umma but ultimately to Allah. The temporal leader of an Islamic government fulfilled part of his covenant with Allah by enforcing the latter’s divine and ultimate authority on earth, just as every Muslim had his individual covenant with Allah. Just as Islamic governments had earlier been forced to depend on non-Islamic taxes for additional revenue, so too did the Al Saud.