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Saudi Arabia's historic communist movement is considerably overlooked in the literature on secular dissent in the kingdom. This article attempts to address this gap by offering a historical account of the movement's early formation, dispersion, radicalization and, ultimately, transformation into the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia. This metamorphosis from a diffuse and ideologically eclectic organization into a more orthodox, Soviet-style, and structurally coherent party, paradoxically, marked the Saudi movement's political twilight as it assumed an organizational and intellectual straitjacket that contributed to its demise.
Well-known accounts of modern Saudi history have often treated different nonIslamist or secular dissident groups in a cursory and conjoined fashion, situating these movements against the backdrop of certain themes, such as the threat of the pan-Arab ideology of Egyptian president Gamal 'Abd al-Nasser, intra-royal family struggles, and the birth pangs of modernization.1 Other accounts have dismissed this history altogether, claiming that such contestations were either wholly foreign-instigated or "had little impact on either state or society."2 In regional histories of the Arab left, Saudi experiences have been either neglected or marginalized as a product of influences from the non-Gulf, northern Arab states.3
Only recently has scholarship begun to seriously engage this silenced history, both with respect to Saudi Arabia and the broader Gulf region.4 The conventional interpretation, viewing these forms of dissent in relation to the influx of foreign influences, has persisted, however. Toby Matthiesen's writings on Saudi Arabia's Shi'i communities and their diverse forms of political mobilization and institutional participation throughout the 1950s and 1960s highlight the proliferation of novel ideas and outside discourses as important catalysts for new political developments.5 Similarly, John Chalcraft's work situates these same contestations at the heart of transnational labor networks, looking at the ways that foreign workers facilitated the transmission of political ideas and tactics of disobedience to their Saudi coworkers.6
An alternative reading of the literature has stressed local agency and the role of domestic factors in contributing to the rise of secular forms of dissent. Sultan Alamer, in his masterful discussion on Saudi Arabia's constitutional "moment" in the early 1950s, called for an approach that not only rejected considering this period exceptional (either positively or negatively) but sought to contextualize these events in light of domestic and regional conditions.7 In...