The Egyptian attorney, Ahmed el-Gezawi, was sentenced to 20 lashes and one year in prison for allegedly smuggling the prescription drug Xanax into the kingdom during a religious pilgrimage. El-Gezawi's supporters have rejected those charges and claim instead that the arrest was the result of a lawsuit that el-Gezawi filed against King Abdullah to call attention to the rights of hundreds of Egyptian migrant workers who have been detained in Saudi Arabia without being formally charged with a crime.
Egypt's military leaders and Cabinet have since tried to downplay the rift and demonstrate that bilateral relations have not been damaged. SCAF chief Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi spoke of Egypt's "love and respect" for Saudi Arabia and made a personal request to King Abdullah to reopen the Saudi diplomatic mission in Egypt. Egypt's Foreign Ministry meanwhile condemned the "irresponsible actions" of the Egyptian protesters and described them as out of line with "deeply-rooted Egyptian-Saudi ties."
The SCAF's urgency to contain the fallout from this incident is understandable given Egypt's increasingly desperate need for foreign aid to stabilize its economy. Egyptian officials claimed that Saudi Arabia agreed at a summit in Morocco the week of April 15 to deposit $1 billion in the Egyptian central bank and buy government bonds worth $750 million by the end of April as part of a $2.7 billion aid package. The Egyptian government needs Saudi Arabia to follow through with this aid and does not want a diplomatic quarrel to sever that financial lifeline.
The issue of the Egyptian lawyer also hints at deeper political tensions across the Arab world. Egypt and Saudi Arabia have long competed for influence in the Arab world. With Egypt far too preoccupied with its internal political turmoil to play an influential role in the region, Saudi Arabia has taken the lead in trying to patch together an Arab coalition of states that will help contain Iran's regional rise and preserve the old order, particularly when it comes to the defense of the remaining monarchies in the region.
The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in Egypt and the encouragement the MB is giving to like-minded Islamists in the region poses a significant, long-term threat to the sustainability of the Saudi royal family. Saudi Arabia's absolute monarchy strikes a careful balance with its Salafist religious community in order to maintain power and cannot afford to let the Muslim Brotherhood's republican form of Islamism take hold in the kingdom. Backing its preferred, rigid version of Salafist Islamism is a large part of the Saudi strategy to contain this threat by further dividing the Islamist political scene.
Hints of this strategy may be seen in the Egyptian Salafist bloc's recent decision to withdraw support for the Muslim Brotherhood's presidential candidate, Mohammed Morsi, and instead endorse Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh, a more liberal Islamist candidate who defected from the MB and has a working relationship with several figures within the Salafist camp. Despite the major ideological differences between the extreme conservative Salafists and liberal-leaning campaign of Aboul-Fotouh, the Salafist Nour party is apparently trying to limit the strength of its Islamist rivals in the MB. Though Riyadh in the long term does not want to give too much weight to Salafists in other countries for fear of encouraging such a trend back home, sowing divisions among Egypt's Islamists helps achieve Saudi Arabia's short-term goal of limiting the rise of the MB, which has more established roots across the region.
Saudi Arabia's financial and political backing of the Egyptian Salafists, who hold a quarter of the seats in the upper and lower houses of the Egyptian parliament, is an intensifying point of contention between the two countries. On one level, the SCAF is also trying to sow divisions into an already-fractured Islamist scene as a way to contain the MB politically. However, the SCAF is extremely alarmed at the prospect of Salafists enlarging their political base in Egypt with the help of Saudi Arabia.
Currently, the SCAF's need for financial assistance will outweigh its concerns about Saudi Arabia's meddling in Egyptian politics. With time, these tensions will intensify as the Egyptian military and the Saudi royals disagree over the best containment strategy against the MB, since they involve a much deeper problem that threatens to erode the foundation of the Saudi monarchy.
