In 1984, a sixteen-year-old boy walked into a firefight in Tripoli, Lebanon. Bernard Haykel (b. 1968) survived by luck. His parents, a French-Lebanese surgeon raised in Guadeloupe and an American mother of Polish descent, had come to Lebanon on their honeymoon in 1967 and stayed. Nine years of civil war had taught the family what a confessional map looks like when it turns into a military one. The near miss settled the question. They sent their son to the United States to finish high school.
Haykel’s father spent the war in operating rooms, repairing what militias did to bodies. His son watched Sunni Islamist militants take over Tripoli’s streets and, at a distance, watched clerics take over a state in Iran in 1979. Most Western social science of that era treated religion as a dependent variable, a costume worn by class interest or anti-colonial grievance. A boy in Tripoli could see it functioning as an independent one. Theology decided which checkpoint you could pass, which militia held your neighborhood, which government claimed your obedience. Haykel later built a scholarly method on the premise that ideas of God organize armies, and that anyone who dismisses this is describing a different planet.
He grew up a polyglot among identities: Arabic, French, and English; Christian, Muslim, and Jewish milieus; Lebanese streets and American schools. He has said this formation left him permanently unsettled, and that he prefers it that way. Decades later, speaking to Princeton’s alumni magazine during the Arab Spring, he put the method in one line: “I think confusion is underrated.”
At Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service he studied international politics and considered diplomacy. At Oxford the plan dissolved. He took an M.A., an M.Phil., and a D.Phil. in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, finishing the doctorate in 1998. Two teachers marked him. Wilferd Madelung (1930-2023), the great historian of early Islamic sects, drilled into him the discipline of the original text: read the Arabic, reconstruct the argument, place it in its century. The anthropologist Paul Dresch, who had lived among Yemeni tribes, taught the opposite discipline: a text means nothing until you know who reads it, who pays the reader, and whose cousin holds the rifle outside the mosque. Haykel fused the two. Texts without society produce fantasy. Society without texts produces a Middle East where nobody believes anything, which is a fantasy of another kind.
A Fulbright took him to Yemen in 1992 and 1993, and Yemen made him. Sanaa in those years still ran on manuscripts, tribal mediation, and scholars who traced their learning through chains of teachers going back centuries. Haykel worked in that world with the languages to read it and the patience to sit in it. His dissertation, published by Cambridge in 2003 as Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani, centered on the Yemeni jurist Muhammad al-Shawkani (1759-1834).
Al-Shawkani came out of Zaydi Shiism, the school that had ruled highland Yemen through an imamate for a thousand years, and turned on its scholarly establishment. He championed ijtihad, the right of a qualified scholar to reason from Quran and hadith, and attacked taqlid, deference to the accumulated rulings of the legal schools. Haykel’s insight was to read this as a fight over power, without reducing it to one. A scholar who bypasses the school bypasses the men who run the school. Al-Shawkani’s method stripped authority from hereditary Zaydi elites and pushed Yemeni religious culture toward a Sunni, scripturalist orientation. Legal method redistributed social position. The book also broke the standard genealogy that traced Islamic revival to central Arabia or nineteenth-century Cairo. Yemen had its own revival, running on its own arguments.
The larger point traveled well beyond Yemen. Once a tradition licenses the individual reader to judge the inherited authorities, the license goes wherever readers go. It can produce a quietist purist, a parliamentary Islamist, or a man with a suicide belt. The method does not choose. Circumstances choose.
Haykel joined New York University in 1998 and earned tenure there. Princeton recruited him as full professor in 2007, into a department that Bernard Lewis (1916-2018) had helped make famous and that still prized philology, medieval sources, and command of languages. Haykel fit the tradition and cut against it. Like the old school, he insists that classical texts exert independent force on history. Against the grand civilizational narrative, he starts small: this community, this legal text, this prince, this tribe. He directed Princeton’s Institute for the Transregional Study of the Contemporary Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia from 2007 to 2023, ran its Near Eastern Studies program and its oil and energy project, and taught courses that moved from eighth-century jurisprudence to spot prices for crude.
His central subject became Salafism, the movement claiming to recover the practice of Islam’s first generations, the salaf. Haykel mapped its internal geography with a care that most journalism never manages. Quietist Salafis concentrate on creed and ritual and often preach obedience to rulers as a lesser evil than civil war. Activist Salafis contest elections. Jihadi-Salafis wage war on governments they deem apostate. Saudi Wahhabi clerics, who share much of the Salafi vocabulary, have spent decades condemning al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda has returned the compliment by marking them as court scholars of an infidel state. Keeping these distinctions straight protected Haykel from the two standard errors: treating every bearded literalist as a bomb in waiting, and treating jihadist theology as an invention with no roots in Islamic law. Militants select, simplify, and radicalize materials that the tradition contains. Ibn Taymiyyah (1263-1328) wrote with far more qualification than the men who wave his fatwas, and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) founded a movement whose Saudi heirs mostly defend the throne. The genealogy runs through selection.
Haykel also declined the comfortable explanation that Saudi money built global Salafism. Money spread the books and built the mosques. Money cannot explain why a Birmingham engineer or a Cairo student finds certainty in them, or why so many Salafi militants turned their guns on Riyadh. He points instead to mass literacy, urbanization, collapsed scholarly hierarchies, and the modern conviction that a man can open the sources and judge for himself. Salafism claims the seventh century and depends on the twentieth: print, cassette, satellite, broadband.
After September 11, 2001, this expertise acquired a market. Haykel studied al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula through its sermons, legal rulings, and online magazines, and through the tribal politics that sheltered it. In a 2010 federal court declaration he stated that he regularly advised the CIA, the State Department, and branches of the armed forces. His standing counsel ran against the bureaucratic instinct to treat “al-Qaeda” as a corporation with a headquarters. In Yemen the label often covered marriage alliances, tribal protection rackets, local feuds, and the occasional manipulation by government officials who find jihadists useful. Doctrine mattered, and doctrine acted through kinship, patronage, and state failure.
Then came February 2015, and the scene that made him a public name. Graeme Wood (b. 1979) published “What ISIS Really Wants” in The Atlantic, and built the article’s spine from Haykel’s analysis. Wood reported that every academic he asked about the Islamic State’s ideology sent him to the same office in Princeton. Haykel told him that Muslims who declared the group un-Islamic held “a cotton-candy view of their own religion,” one that skipped what the tradition had historically and legally required. The Islamic State, he argued, read seventh-century norms of war with obsessive seriousness and carried medieval legal materials into the present.
The article detonated. Muslim scholars, pundits, and academics accused Haykel of handing the Islamic State the religious legitimacy it craved. Fred Clark, a progressive Christian blogger, wrote that Haykel’s language matched the script fundamentalists always use against non-fundamentalists. Within days Haykel gave an interview to ThinkProgress to draw his own lines. Asked whether Islamic texts necessitate a group like ISIS, he answered: “There is nothing predetermined in Islam that would lead to ISIS.” Muslims who condemned the group stood fully inside the tradition, he said, and calling them lesser Muslims was absurd. He also noted what Wood’s article had left in shadow: the Islamic State’s reading was ahistorical, a pretense that a millennium of Islamic legal development never happened.
His position, stated in full, satisfied nobody. The Islamic State argued from Islamic revelation, law, and history; a scholar who declared those arguments irrelevant because they were repellent had quit the scholarly enterprise. At the same time, the movement grew from the American invasion of Iraq, Sunni exclusion, the Syrian collapse, sectarian rule, and a generation of jobless young men. In January 2016 he carried both halves into a Senate hearing room and testified that the Islamic State pursued an “austere, intolerant, and muscular vision of Islam,” and that ignoring either its ideas or its circumstances failed the analysis. He added that the caliphate’s female morality police, demolition videos, and slick online propaganda had no precedent in the Prophet’s Arabia. The restoration of the past was a modern product.
With the literary scholar Robyn Creswell, Haykel opened a stranger door into the same house. Their 2015 New Yorker essay “Battle Lines” examined the verse that militants write in classical Arabic meters: elegies for dead fighters, odes to leaders, laments for prisoners, poems that began as tweets. They introduced readers to Ahlam al-Nasr, the young woman celebrated as the Poetess of the Islamic State. Analysts had ignored this material as decoration. Creswell and Haykel argued the opposite: the beheading videos address foreigners, while poetry offers a window onto the movement talking to itself. In verse, the militant acquires ancestors, brothers, a code of honor, and a death that means something. Doctrine recruits the mind. Poetry recruits the rest.
Saudi Arabia had been in his file since the 1990s, and it slowly moved to the center. He co-edited Saudi Arabia in Transition: Insights on Social, Political, Economic and Religious Change (2015) with Thomas Hegghammer and Stéphane Lacroix., a volume that broke the kingdom into its parts: rival princes, clerical factions, merchant networks, restless women, tribes, technocrats, and a young population raised on satellite television and expecting more than the old bargain offered.
The House of Saud held the sword. The heirs of Ibn Abd al-Wahhab held the pulpit, the courts, and the schools, and preached obedience to the dynasty in exchange. Unequal from the start, the arrangement still gave clerics power over daily life. Oil paid for all of it and shaped the citizen’s relation to the state: subjects of patronage rather than taxpayers with claims.
Then Mohammed bin Salman (b. 1985) broke the bargain, and Haykel found himself closer to a subject than scholars usually get. He met the crown prince repeatedly and exchanged messages with him in Arabic over WhatsApp. He denies the title of adviser and says he offered blunt views when asked, including a detailed warning that Saudi Arabia could not defeat the Houthis by force. He supported major elements of the program: caging the religious police, moving women into public life and employment, cutting clerical power, diversifying an oil economy. He read the project with a colder eye than either its promoters or its critics. Mohammed bin Salman has not secularized the state. He has nationalized religious authority, placing the clerics inside boundaries the ruler draws. Saudi nationalism, entertainment, technology, and loyalty to the dynasty now compete with piety as sources of legitimacy. This explains a paradox that confuses outsiders: women drive and concerts play while clerics, feminists, princes, and businessmen sit in prison. The state relaxes social rules because it alone now decides which rules exist.
The murder of Jamal Khashoggi (1958-2018) in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018 turned Haykel’s access into his liability. Critics asked what a Princeton professor was doing on the crown prince’s phone. In an April 2019 interview with Isaac Chotiner of The New Yorker, Haykel condemned the killing, called the imprisonment and alleged torture of women activists inexcusable, said political prisoners should be charged or released, and defended his engagement, disclosing his contacts and his business interests in the region under questioning that was designed to draw blood. He kept one warning constant: destroying or destabilizing the Saudi state might repeat, at larger scale, the catastrophes he had studied in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the one he had survived in Lebanon. His realism gives heavy weight to order and to the horror of collapse.
On Yemen he never wavered. He called the Saudi war unwinnable from early on. The Houthis, in his account, grew from Zaydi history, tribal politics, and state failure; Iranian and Hezbollah support strengthened a movement that Yemen itself produced. Riyadh might have done better with its traditional tools, patronage and bargaining among tribes and notables, than with air power. He considers the Houthis authoritarian and radical, and he considers the conspiracy theory of their existence a recipe for bad strategy. Dresch’s training shows here. Firepower does not govern a society embedded in its own loyalties.
Honors accumulated: a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, a board seat at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington until December 2025, a senior fellowship at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the Nelson Mandela Chair in Afro-Asian Studies at Mahatma Gandhi University in Kerala in 2023, Luce Foundation support for research on Muslims in India, election to the American Academy of Sciences and Letters in 2024. As of 2026 he is completing The Realm: MBS and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia for Penguin Press, the book toward which thirty years of Arabian research has been converging: the story of a religiously legitimated oil monarchy remade into a nationalist, centralizing, socially liberalizing autocracy.
He is married to Navina Najat Haidar, curator of Islamic art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and daughter of a former Indian foreign secretary. They met at Oxford. The marriage joins two approaches to the same civilization: he reads it through law, theology, and power; she reads it through miniature painting, architecture, and the museum case.
The through-line of Haykel’s work is a refusal that costs him something in every camp. He refuses to reduce jihadism to poverty or blowback, which angers those who want Islam held harmless. He refuses to read texts as machines that manufacture behavior, which angers those who want Islam indicted. He refuses to treat Saudi repression as disqualifying his engagement with Saudi power, which angers human-rights advocates, and he refuses to soften his judgment of the Yemen war, which cannot please Riyadh. The boy from Tripoli learned early that theology moves men and that states, when they fail, fail onto the bodies of surgeons’ patients. His scholarship holds both lessons at once and declines to let either one win.
Notes
Childhood, firefight, parents’ honeymoon, Madelung, and the “confusion is underrated” quote: Phil Zabriskie, “The Arab Spring, a Season Later,” Princeton Alumni Weekly.
Wood article, “cotton-candy view,” goatee description, Wood describes Haykel talking through a “Mephistophelian goatee,” a status detail you may want, “smack in the middle of the medieval tradition”: Graeme Wood, “What ISIS Really Wants,” The Atlantic, March 2015.
Haykel’s pushback, “nothing predetermined in Islam,” ahistorical reading, defense of Muslim critics of ISIS: Jack Jenkins, “What The Atlantic Left Out About ISIS According To Their Own Expert,” ThinkProgress, February 20, 2015.
Fred Clark‘s criticism, the fundamentalist-script charge: “Scholar Clarifies, Walks Back His Comments in Atlantic ISIS Essay,” Slacktivist, February 21, 2015.
Senate testimony, January 20, 2016, Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, source of “austere, intolerant, and muscular” and the two-sided failure warning: Bernard Haykel testimony.
Jihadi poetry, Ahlam al-Nasr, poetry as the movement talking to itself: Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Battle Lines,” The New Yorker, June 8, 2015.
Chotiner interview covering WhatsApp contact, denial of adviser role, Khashoggi, business interests, women activists: Isaac Chotiner, “A Middle Eastern Studies Professor Interprets Mohammed bin Salman,” The New Yorker, April 2019.
Career dates, institute directorship 2007-2023, Mandela Chair, Academy election, AGSIW board through December 2025: Wikipedia, Bernard Haykel.
FDD fellowship and The Realm (Penguin Press): Foundation for Defense of Democracies profile.
Recent Haykel commentary with Lebanon reflections, tennis beside the bombing image, his description of the Lebanese as resilient: Bloomberg weekend interview with Mishal Husain, 2026.
Extrapolations made without a link, which I judge self-evident: the surgeon father treating war wounded as a daily reality of Tripoli in the civil war; Sanaa in 1992-1993 as a manuscript and tribal-mediation culture, well documented generally, and consistent with Dresch‘s ethnography; the description of Oxford training and Princeton’s departmental character; the WhatsApp detail is sourced to the Chotiner interview.
The Convertible Scholar: Bernard Haykel and the Economy of Fields
Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) built his sociology on a simple wager: society is a set of fields, each field is a game, and each game has its own stakes, its own rules, and its own currency. The academic field pays in citations, chairs, and the recognition of peers. The journalistic field pays in visibility. The political field pays in influence and access. In “The Forms of Capital” (1986) and Homo Academicus (1984), Bourdieu argued that the interesting action happens at the borders, where agents convert one currency into another, and where each field polices the exchange rate. A field defends its autonomy by punishing members who import foreign capital, because foreign capital devalues the domestic kind. The physicist who wins arguments by press conference offends physics. The scholar who wins arguments by knowing a king offends scholarship.
Bernard Haykel plays in at least four fields at once, and his career is a long series of conversions among them.
The first field is the philological academy, and it is where he accumulated his founding stake. The currency there is austere: dead languages, manuscripts, chains of transmission, the capacity to read Muhammad al-Shawkani in eighteenth-century Yemeni script and situate him against Zaydi legal tradition. Oxford under Madelung is close to the autonomous pole of the scholarly field, the region where, in Bourdieu’s phrase from The Rules of Art (1992), the game runs on the loser-wins logic of art for art’s sake: the less your work serves any external master, the purer your prestige. A dissertation on a dead Yemeni jurist, published by Cambridge in 2003, is capital of maximum purity. Nobody at the State Department cared about al-Shawkani. That was the point. The academy consecrated Haykel precisely because his knowledge had no market.
Then the market arrived. September 11 repriced the entire field of Islamic studies overnight, and the repricing rewarded a specific portfolio: classical training plus contemporary fieldwork plus Gulf networks. Most scholars held one asset. Haykel held all three, because Dresch had taught him to treat tribes and texts as one subject. The 2010 court declaration in which he lists the CIA, the State Department, and the armed forces as regular clients records the first great conversion: philological capital exchanged for standing in the policy field. The rate was excellent. What Oxford had priced as erudition, Washington priced as intelligence.
Each subsequent conversion built on the last. Policy standing made him the man every academic sent Graeme Wood to see in 2015, which converted scholarly authority into journalistic celebrity, a currency the academy officially despises and unofficially envies. Celebrity plus Gulf expertise brought the WhatsApp channel to Mohammed bin Salman, which is capital in the rarest field of all, the court, where the currency is proximity to the person of the ruler. Court access then flowed back down the chain: a Penguin advance for The Realm, Bloomberg weekend interviews, Senate invitations, FDD fellowship, board seats. By the mid-2020s Haykel had become a kind of central banker of his own portfolio, moving value among four fields, each conversion increasing his total holdings.
Fields punish converters. The academic field in particular defines itself against the political and economic fields, and its members earn distinction by displaying independence from power. A professor who exchanges messages with a crown prince has moved toward what Bourdieu calls the heteronomous pole, the region of the field where external demand sets value, and the autonomous pole retaliates by questioning whether he remains a scholar at all. The retaliation does not require anyone to identify an error in his Arabic. It works through category: adviser, courtier, access journalist, lobbyist. Every one of those labels is an attempted demotion from one field to a lower-status one, and Haykel’s insistence that he is not an adviser, that he offered blunt views when asked, is a defense of his classification. In field terms he is claiming that the flow of value ran outward, scholar instructing prince, rather than inward, prince paying scholar.
Read this way, the April 2019 Chotiner interview is a border inspection. The New Yorker occupies a particular position in the journalistic field: it polices the boundary between the academy and power on behalf of the liberal public. Chotiner’s questions followed customs procedure. Do you advise him. Do you have business interests in the region. What did you say to him after the murder. Each question tested whether Haykel had smuggled undeclared capital across a border, whether court access or Gulf money had contaminated the scholarly goods he was presenting for entry. Haykel declared his holdings, condemned the killing, called the treatment of the women activists inexcusable, and defended the engagement itself. The inspection ended without a seizure and without an exoneration, which is the usual result. Border disputes in Bourdieu’s world do not resolve; they establish that a border exists and that this traveler will be searched again.
The Khashoggi murder was a field crisis. Before October 2018, access to MBS traded at a premium across all four of Haykel’s fields. The academy tolerated it as fieldwork, journalism paid for it as sourcing, the policy world prized it as channel, and the court dispensed it as favor. The killing collapsed the exchange rate in three of the four fields simultaneously. Saudi access became toxic capital, the kind that must be explained rather than displayed. Consultants resigned from Vision 2030 boards, conferences emptied, and the men who had flown to Riyadh for the Davos in the Desert suddenly discovered scheduling conflicts. Those exits were portfolio liquidations by holders trying to sell before the price fell further. Haykel held his position. In Bourdieu’s terms he bet on hysteresis working in his favor: that the crisis would pass, the asset would recover, and the scholars who had dumped their Saudi holdings at the bottom would have to buy back in at a loss, while the one analyst who kept the channel open through the winter would own it alone. The 2026 book, arriving as the definitive account of MBS by the one Western scholar with sustained access, is the payoff of that bet. Whether the bet compromised the analysis is exactly the question the academic field keeps asking, because the field’s business is asking it.
Wood’s article performed a conversion on Haykel’s behalf and without his full control: it took claims calibrated for the scholarly field, where “ISIS argues from Islamic legal materials” is a banality, and released them into the journalistic and political fields, where the same sentence functions as ammunition. Capital changes meaning when it crosses a border. The ThinkProgress interview days later was Haykel attempting to repatriate his own statements, reasserting the scholarly qualifications (“nothing predetermined in Islam,” the ahistoricism point) that the journalistic field had stripped in transit. His complaint that the piece was Wood’s argument and not his is a property claim: the capital was mine, the conversion was unauthorized. Bourdieu wrote in On Television (1996) that the journalistic field increasingly forces all other fields to trade on its terms, fast, binary, and personalized. Haykel learned the tariff schedule in one week of February 2015.
Agents who hold capital in two fields can do things pure natives of either field cannot. Haykel can tell a Senate committee about Ibn Taymiyyah because the academy certified his reading; he can tell a seminar about Saudi succession because the court showed him the interior. Each field grants him a monopoly rent in the other. The rent explains the resentment. Pure academics watch him collect returns on access they consider corrupt; pure policy operators watch him claim a scholarly immunity they cannot claim. The double agent is indispensable to both fields and trusted by neither, and the periodic inspections, Chotiner in 2019, the recurring adviser-or-not question, the reception awaiting The Realm, are the price of the rent.
Haykel’s dispositions were formed in a Tripoli where survival required reading multiple codes at once, Arabic and French, Christian and Muslim, militia and state, and where his family itself was a conversion, a French-Lebanese surgeon and an American wife who turned a honeymoon into a life. A childhood spent crossing lines produces an adult at ease on borders, and at ease with the suspicion that border-crossers attract. His self-description as a polyglot formed by multiple identities is a habitus report. The scholarly method he built, texts read through societies and societies read through texts, is the same disposition transposed into an epistemology: refuse to naturalize any single field’s view of the world. Bourdieu would note the fit between the disposition and the position. The man moves easily among fields because he never fully belonged to one, and he never fully belonged to one because he learned early that exclusive belonging is what gets people killed.
The human-rights critique of Haykel is, in field terms, a demand that the academic field enforce its autonomy: no conversions with murderous courts, whatever the analytic yield. His defense is a claim about the field’s actual product: the analysis of Saudi Arabia that the field exists to produce cannot be produced from the autonomous pole, because the object of study sits behind a door that only heteronomous capital opens. Both positions are coherent. They are also both self-interested, in the way Bourdieu insisted all position-takings are: the critics hold portfolios heavy in purity, Haykel holds a portfolio heavy in access, and each side’s principles track its assets. The illusio of the academic game, the shared belief that the stakes are real and worth fighting over, is what keeps the fight going, and the fight itself is what keeps the border marked.
The Realm will be judged twice, in two currencies. The journalistic and policy fields will price its access: what did he see, what did MBS say, what do we learn about the succession, the murders, the money. The academic field will price its autonomy: does the analysis survive subtraction of the access, would the argument stand if the WhatsApp channel had never existed, does the book criticize its subject at the points where criticism costs the author something. A book can clear one market and fail the other. The reviews that matter will be conversion audits, and Haykel has spent his career being audited, which may be why he waited thirty years to write it. He was accumulating enough capital in every field to survive the inspection at the border where all four of them meet.
Voice on WhatsApp: Bernard Haykel and Hirschman’s Triangle
Albert O. Hirschman (1915-1997) knew exit before he theorized it. He left Berlin in 1933 at seventeen, fought in Spain, and spent 1940 in Marseille smuggling refugees over the Pyrenees ahead of the Gestapo. The century’s great scholar of staying was a serial escaper. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) begins with a small question, what customers do when a product deteriorates, and opens onto a large one: when an organization you belong to goes bad, do you leave, or do you stay and complain? Exit is the economist’s answer, silent and clean; the firm reads falling sales and corrects. Voice is the political answer, noisy and costly; the member protests from within. Loyalty is the hinge. It holds exit at bay long enough for voice to work, and it can also curdle into staying past all reason. Hirschman’s point is the seesaw: each option draws strength from the other. Voice bites only when the listener knows the speaker can leave. Exit teaches only when someone stays behind to translate it. And when exit gets too easy, the alert quit first and the organization deteriorates in peace, complained about by no one who matters.
The Saudi file of Bernard Haykel is a case study Hirschman never lived to write, because it puts all three corners of the triangle in one story and prices each one in blood, prison, or reputation.
Start with the deterioration. Through 2017 the Saudi reform story ran at a premium: the religious police caged, women entering the workforce, a young ruler talking economic transformation to Western investors. Then October 2018, a consulate in Istanbul, a bone saw. The quality of the product collapsed, and Hirschman predicts what happened next: the most quality-sensitive customers exited first. Consultants resigned from advisory boards. Speakers withdrew from the Riyadh investment conference within days. The exits were loud by design, exit performed as voice, a resignation letter written for the press. Hirschman would have recognized the hybrid and noted its weakness. A boycott stings only while it holds, and this one dissolved within two years; the money returned, the conferences refilled, and the regime learned that Western exit is a rental, priced in news cycles.
Haykel did not exit. He kept the WhatsApp channel open, kept visiting, kept writing, and finished a book. His public defense of this conduct is a nearly verbatim recitation of Hirschman’s case for voice. Ostracism, he argues in effect, teaches the ruler nothing; it removes the last unpaid critic from the room and leaves the counsel to courtiers and consultants on retainer. He says he told Mohammed bin Salman bluntly that the Yemen war could not be won. He condemned the Khashoggi killing, called the treatment of the imprisoned women activists inexcusable, and said prisoners should be charged or released, while declining to convert any of it into departure. Voice over exit, chosen deliberately, with the reasoning stated: influence requires presence.
Hirschman supplies the argument, and Hirschman supplies the objection. Voice, he insisted, draws its force from the credible threat of exit standing behind it. A customer who will buy the product no matter what is a customer the firm can ignore. So the question his framework puts to Haykel is exact: what does his exit threaten? If Haykel left, the court loses one interlocutor among the thousands petitioning for the crown prince’s time. Haykel loses his research object, his book’s foundation, his singular position as the Western scholar with the channel, thirty years of accumulated Arabian access. The asymmetry runs the wrong way. Exit costs the speaker nearly everything and the listener nearly nothing, and under those terms, Hirschman warns, voice degenerates. It softens itself to keep the channel open. It times its criticisms for private settings and its praise for public ones. It becomes counsel the ruler can consume as flattery in the form of candor, the most pleasant product an intellectual sells. Haykel’s critics rarely cite Hirschman, but this is their argument in his grammar: voice without an exit option is loyalty wearing voice’s clothes.
Loyalty is the corner Haykel refuses. He denies being an adviser and describes himself as a scholar who says blunt things when asked. Hirschman’s category does not require the member’s confession. Loyalty, in his scheme, is any attachment that delays exit past the point where a detached actor leaves, and it is measured in conduct. By that measure the record reads loyal: the warnings against destabilizing the kingdom, the argument that American pressure on the succession might repeat Iraq, the decision to hold through the post-Khashoggi winter when holding was expensive. Haykel might answer that the loyalty is to the object of study and to analytic access, to Saudi Arabia rather than to its ruler. Hirschman would find the distinction real and unstable, because in a state where one man has absorbed the institutions, loyalty to the country and access to the autocrat travel through the same door, and the doorkeeper knows it.
Now set the other biography beside his, because the triangle only shows its full geometry with two bodies in it. Jamal Khashoggi spent decades as the licensed voice of the Saudi system: editor, media adviser to Prince Turki al-Faisal (b. 1945), the insider who criticized within limits and understood the limits as the price of the room. In 2016 the government banned him from writing. Voice from within had reached its ceiling, and Hirschman’s scheme offered him the remaining corner: he exited, to Virginia, in 2017. Then he did the thing the scheme marks as most dangerous inside an authoritarian state. He combined the corners, exit plus voice, criticism published in the Washington Post from beyond the kingdom’s reach. Hirschman’s late essay on the collapse of East Germany, written after 1989, showed exit and voice fusing into a single force that brought down a state: the ones who fled and the ones who marched amplified each other. Authoritarian regimes understand this fusion as the existential threat, which is why they treat the exile who speaks as a traitor rather than an emigrant. Saudi Arabia did not close Khashoggi’s channel. It reached across the border, into a consulate, and closed him.
Put the two men on the triangle and the pricing becomes visible. Khashoggi was a member; Haykel is a customer. Hirschman drew the distinction himself: firms have customers, organizations and states have members, and the options carry different penalties for each. A customer who exits walks away; a member who exits commits a kind of secession, and a member who exits and keeps speaking commits, in the regime’s ledger, treason. Haykel’s voice risks his reputation in Princeton and Manhattan. Khashoggi’s voice cost him his life in Istanbul. The women who chose voice from inside, the activists who campaigned for the driving reform the regime then claimed as its own gift, paid in prison and, by credible accounts, torture. Within the Saudi system the menu reads: voice inside, prison; voice from exile, death; exit in silence, tolerated; loyalty, rewarded. The only actor who gets voice at survivable prices is the foreigner, because his membership was never on offer and his body sits outside the jurisdiction. Haykel’s position is possible because he cannot be a traitor. Voice is cheap for him in the currency where it is fatal for Saudis, and expensive for him only in the currency of standing, which is the currency his critics collect in.
This asymmetry cuts both ways, and an honest Hirschmanian account holds both edges. Against Haykel: counsel that risks nothing but reputation lacks the tragic weight of Khashoggi’s, and the regime knows the difference between a critic it must kill and a critic it can host. His voice is structurally safe, therefore structurally discountable. For Haykel: the safety is exactly what makes the voice sustainable. Khashoggi’s fusion of exit and voice was heroic and terminal; it produced a martyr and no policy. The activists’ inside voice produced prison sentences and a reform announced as royal generosity. If every channel that survives is a channel the regime permits, then the choice is between permitted voice and no voice, and Hirschman’s Nigerian railways stand behind Haykel’s answer. In that famous case, the availability of exit, trucks on the roads, let the railroads rot, because every shipper who cared about quality left and nobody influential remained to complain. Total exit does not punish the deteriorating organization; it anesthetizes it. A Riyadh emptied of independent scholars hears McKinsey, hears the sovereign fund’s bankers, hears the poets of the court. Haykel’s wager is that one unpaid voice in that room beats a clean conscience outside it.
The wager has a term structure, and this is where Hirschman presses hardest. Voice justifies itself by results. Loyalty justifies itself by faith that results will come. The line between them is temporal: at some point the member using voice must be able to say what evidence would move him to exit, or the voice has become loyalty and the analysis has become position. Haykel’s public record names the Yemen advice, the post-Khashoggi bluntness, the calls to charge or release prisoners. The record does not name the threshold, the act by the crown prince that would close the channel from Haykel’s side. Perhaps no such threshold exists; perhaps naming one is naive about how access works; perhaps a scholar’s obligation is to observe rather than to sanction. Hirschman’s framework does not settle the ethics. It only insists that an actor who cannot specify his exit price has, whatever he calls himself, already paid it.
The Realm will be the audit. A book on Mohammed bin Salman written from inside the channel is voice’s final product, and it will show what three decades of staying purchased: either an account that says in public, under the author’s name, the things blunt counsel says on WhatsApp, or an account calibrated to survive publication with the channel intact. Hirschman, who escaped four countries and spent his career defending the ones who stay, would read it the way he read everything, looking for the moment when loyalty stops being the condition of voice and starts being its replacement.
Hudson & FDD
Bernard Haykel holds affiliations with both the Hudson Institute as a former nonresident senior fellow and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) as a senior fellow. These connections indicate his active integration into the network of Washington think tanks that shape American foreign policy toward the Middle East.
His presence at these institutions indicates a specific set of professional alignments:
Both Hudson and FDD generally advocate for strong American leadership, a firm stance against Iran, and robust strategic partnerships with traditional allies. Haykel’s work within these spaces positions him as an expert whose analysis informs policy choices regarding Gulf security and counterterrorism.
Haykel’s commentary through these platforms frequently emphasizes the importance of the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia. He offers analysis on how Washington might navigate regional forces, including the economic goals of Vision 2030 and the container of Iranian influence.
While maintaining his role as a professor at Princeton University, his think-tank fellowships serve as a vehicle to translate complex academic research on Salafism and Gulf politics into actionable briefings, panel discussions, and media commentary for policymakers in Washington.
Haykel stands out as an intellectual who resists the myth of misunderstanding. His scholarship treats theological and political actors as rational, savvy agents who understand their goals and incentives.
Mainstream commentators often treat radical religious movements or strict state ideologies as products of ignorance, medieval brainwashing, or a lack of modernization. The implicit assumption is that if these populations were better educated or exposed to liberal values, the ideology would evaporate.
Haykel treats Salafism and Wahhabism with structural seriousness. In his analysis of Islamic State (ISIS) doctrine or official Saudi religious policy, he argues that these actors are not suffering from a cognitive bias or a misunderstanding of their own texts. They are literalist, highly text-focused, and rigorous. They deploy specific jurisprudential logic to justify state power, territorial expansion, or legal violence. To Haykel, religious actors are rational within their framework. They use theological consistency as a lever to secure legitimacy and outmaneuver rivals in a competitive religious marketplace.
A standard intellectual narrative regarding the recent social and economic changes in Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman positions the state as finally waking up, correcting past errors, and learning how to be modern. This view treats the previous decades of strict religious enforcement as a long, unfortunate mistake.
Haykel views these changes through the lens of political survival and state capacity. The pivot away from the official clerical establishment and toward a nationalist, economically diversified state is not a moral awakening or a sudden understanding of Western liberal virtue. It is a calculation. The state faces demographic pressures, volatile oil markets, and regional threats. The leadership understands that its survival depends on restructuring the social contract. Ideology is altered because the previous arrangement no longer serves the preservation of power.
Pinsof notes that social scientists often collect misunderstandings to justify their own relevance and advance political agendas. In Western academia, Middle Eastern studies is heavily factionalized, with scholars frequently acting as advocates or critics based on ideological alignments.
Haykel operates with an awareness of these academic rivalries. He has faced criticism from peers for his willingness to engage directly with Saudi leadership and for his objective, text-based analysis of militant groups. By refusing to frame Middle Eastern conflicts as simple products of Western misunderstanding or mass manipulation, Haykel treats the region as an arena of sober, self-interested political actors. He describes the system as it operates, not as a broken entity requiring academic therapy.
If John J. Mearsheimer (b. 1947) is correct that humans are tribal at their core, driven by intense socialization and inborn attitudes rather than universal reason, this anthropology validates the core analytical framework of Bernard Haykel.
Haykel, a leading scholar of Saudi Arabia and Islamic political thought, focuses his work on how deep-seated religious traditions, tribal structures, and regional identities shape the political landscape of the Middle East. If Mearsheimer’s view holds, then Haykel’s insistence on understanding Salafism, Wahhabism, and Saudi statecraft through their own internal, historical logic—rather than through a Western liberal lens—is the only correct way to approach the region.
Here is what Mearsheimer’s anthropology means for Haykel’s work:
Mearsheimer argues that political liberalism mistakenly treats people as atomistic actors with a universal desire for a specific set of human rights. If this universalism is a delusion, then Western foreign policy attempts to export democracy or liberal norms to the Arabian Peninsula are fundamentally misengineered.
Haykel’s research shows that the political legitimacy of the Saudi state does not rest on liberal concepts of individual rights or popular sovereignty. Instead, it rests on a historic pact between the Al Saud ruling family and the religious establishment, rooted in a specific interpretation of Islamic law. Mearsheimer’s anthropology explains why this structure remains resilient: the population is born into a society that provides a powerful value infusion long before individual critical faculties develop. The collective identity and the survival of the group take precedence over the individualist assumptions embedded in Western policy.
Mearsheimer asserts that reason is the least important way people determine their preferences, trailing far behind socialization. For Haykel’s analysis of religious movements like Salafism, this is a crucial point.
Western commentators often treat conservative religious movements as irrational or as products of economic deprivation. Haykel approaches them as coherent systems of thought with an internal logic. If socialization and inherited tradition dictate moral codes, then the adherence of millions of people to strict religious frameworks is not a failure of education or a lack of exposure to modern reason. It is the natural result of intense socialization within a specific cultural ecosystem. Haykel’s detailed tracking of textual authority and religious edicts reflects an understanding that these socialized frameworks dictate political behavior far more than abstract, universal principles.
Mearsheimer writes that individuals develop strong attachments to their group and are willing to make great sacrifices for it. In the context of Saudi Arabia’s recent transformations under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Haykel has observed a distinct shift toward a more explicit, Saudi-first nationalism.
Under Mearsheimer’s framework, this shift is a brilliant lever. By leaning into national identity and historical pride rather than relying solely on religious legitimacy, the state activates the baseline tribal sentiment that Mearsheimer identifies as the primary engine of human cohesion. Haykel’s work captures this transition as the state replaces an older pan-Islamic appeal with a focused, localized national project that binds the population to the state through shared history and survival.
Ultimately, Mearsheimer’s anthropology provides the theoretical foundation for Haykel’s empirical observations. It suggests that any analysis of the Middle East that expects a natural convergence toward global liberal norms is bound to fail, because humans are not lone wolves waiting to be liberated; they are social beings whose view of right and wrong is already formed by the specific societies that protect them.
Badges of the Believers: Bernard Haykel Through Alliance Theory
The Alliance Theory of political belief systems, developed by David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton in “Strange Bedfellows” (Psychological Inquiry, 2023), makes a claim that sounds modest and detonates on contact. Political beliefs, they argue, derive from alliance structures rather than from values. Humans possess evolved machinery for choosing allies (by similarity, transitivity, and interdependence) and for supporting them in conflicts (through perpetrator biases, victim biases, and attributional biases). Belief systems are the exhaust of this machinery: patchwork narratives, ad hoc moralizations, double standards that track the ally-rival map with a fidelity no philosophy could produce. The libertarian evangelical exists because pro-life churches and wealthy Republicans cut a deal in the 1970s, and the philosophy came afterward, as paperwork. Moral principles are not so principled. Core values are not so core. What people call a worldview is a roster.
Set this machine loose on Bernard Haykel’s material and it eats well, because his material is a fourteen-century archive of alliance structures wearing theological badges.
Start with the finding at the center of his Salafism scholarship: the same scriptural corpus sustains quietists who preach obedience to kings, activists who run for parliament, and jihadists who behead the kings’ servants. Every one of these factions claims the identical method, direct return to Quran and hadith, and the identical ancestors, the salaf. If doctrine drove behavior, this dispersion needs explaining. Alliance Theory explains it without strain: the doctrine is the tag, and the alliance selects the reading. Quietist Salafis are allied with rulers, so their reading discovers that rebellion is a greater evil than tyranny. Jihadi-Salafis are a revolutionary coalition, so their reading discovers that the rulers are apostates whose blood is licit. Saudi Wahhabi clerics share nearly the entire theological vocabulary of al-Qaeda and condemn al-Qaeda anyway, which puzzles anyone who thinks beliefs generate loyalties and puzzles nobody who thinks loyalties generate beliefs. The clerics are interdependent with the House of Saud, salaried, credentialed, protected; al-Qaeda’s rival coalition marks those same clerics as court scholars. Enemy of my ally is my enemy. Pinsof’s transitivity criterion, running on turbans.
Takfir, the practice of declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, looks in this frame like alliance technology in its purest form. Haykel noted, in his 2015 clarifications, that Sunnis historically resisted expelling errant Muslims from the faith, preferring to call them strayed, and that the Islamic State’s wanton hereticization made it strange even among militants. Alliance Theory reads takfir as a boundary instrument: a device for converting a religious community, which is a loose super-alliance, into a fighting coalition with a hard membership perimeter. A group that anathematizes freely is a group optimizing for coalition purity over coalition size, the classic revolutionary trade. The mainstream Sunni reluctance to use the instrument is the opposite optimization, the big-tent super-alliance protecting its breadth. Neither posture follows from the texts, which contain materials for both. Each follows from the coalition’s structural position.
Al-Shawkani fits the frame. Haykel’s own analysis of the Yemeni jurist, stripped of theological courtesy, describes a coalition fight. Hereditary Zaydi scholarly families held authority through taqlid, deference to accumulated school precedent; precedent was their asset. Al-Shawkani’s ijtihad, the claim that a qualified scholar may bypass the schools and reason from revelation, was a weapon that liquidated the asset. Haykel wrote that a scholar who bypasses the school challenges the men who control the school. That sentence is Alliance Theory avant la lettre: the legal method is the instrument, the redistribution of authority is the point, and the doctrine of scriptural return spreads not because readers found it true but because rising coalitions found it useful, in eighteenth-century Sanaa and in every mass-literate society since. Pinsof would add only that al-Shawkani himself need not have been cynical. The machinery runs below awareness; the badge-wearer believes in the badge.
Now the 2015 Islamic State debate, which Alliance Theory reads better than any participant read it at the time. Notice what the fight was about. Nobody disputed the group’s actions; the dispute concerned a classification, Islamic or un-Islamic, that had no operational content whatever. No drone strike depended on it. The classification mattered because it was an alliance signal. “ISIS is un-Islamic” functions as a protective bias applied to 1.6 billion allies: it severs the transitive link between the militants and the Muslims that the coalition of liberals and Muslims needed severed. “ISIS is very Islamic” functions, in the mouths of a rival coalition, as an offensive bias that welds the link back on. Every speaker was legible as a coalition member the moment the sentence left his mouth. Into this signaling environment walked Haykel with a descriptive proposition, that the group argues from Islamic texts and that most Muslims reject it, and the environment did to his proposition what alliance machinery does to all propositions: it stripped the content and read the badge. Wood’s coalition wore the quote as armor. The opposing coalition read the same quote as defection from the Muslims’ defense. Haykel spent the following weeks insisting that he had made a claim about the world rather than a declaration of allegiance, and the insistence largely failed, because in a polarized signaling environment the claim-about-the-world is the one message the channel cannot carry. His complaint that Wood’s argument was not his argument was, in Pinsof’s terms, a man discovering that his words had been conscripted by an alliance he had not joined.
The frame then turns, as it must, on Haykel, and the diagnosis writes itself. List his alliances: the Princeton academy, the American security establishment he advised, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies with its Iran-hawk program, the Saudi court, the Gulf institutes, and beneath them the formative loyalties of a Lebanese childhood in a Sunni city during a war against militias backed by Tehran. Pinsof’s central prediction is that heterogeneous alliances produce heterogeneous beliefs, patchworks that no single principle explains. Haykel’s portfolio scans accordingly: supportive of MBS’s social liberalization, scathing on the Yemen war, condemning the Khashoggi murder, opposed to destabilizing the kingdom, hawkish on Iran from an FDD platform, insistent on Houthi local roots against the Iranian-puppet theory his hawkish allies prefer. Searching this set for the consistent philosophy misses what it is: a map of his roster. Each position supports an ally or resists a rival, and the positions that seem to cut against his allies, Yemen above all, cut against one ally in the service of another, since telling Riyadh the war is unwinnable is loyal counsel to Riyadh.
The sharpest test is perpetrator bias. Pinsof’s catalogue is specific: allies of a transgressor downplay responsibility, emphasize mitigating circumstances, embellish good intentions, minimize harm. Hold Haykel’s post-Khashoggi record against the checklist. He did not deny the crime or the crown prince’s system of control. He did emphasize context: the region’s alternatives, Iraq and Syria and Libya, the catastrophe of collapse, the reforms that repression accompanied. He did embellish intentions in the weak sense of crediting the transformation as sincere modernization rather than mere consolidation. He did warn more against the punishment than against the perpetrator, arguing that American pressure on the succession might repeat historic disasters. A committed Pinsofian scores this as textbook ally-support with the denial module disabled, the pattern of a sophisticated coalition member whose bias operates on emphasis rather than on facts. Haykel’s answer would be that every mitigating circumstance he cites is real, that Iraq did collapse, that order is a value with a body count attached to its absence. Alliance Theory’s uncomfortable reply is that this is what perpetrator bias feels like from the inside: the mitigating circumstances are always real, and the bias lives in which real things get the emphasis. The theory cannot convict him, since accurate beliefs and ally-serving beliefs overlap. It can note that his emphases have tracked his roster for a decade, and that the theory predicts he would experience this tracking as judgment.
So the frame performs. Now the adjudication it forces, because a sentence earlier in this series claimed that ideas of God organize armies, and Alliance Theory says coalitions organize armies while ideas ride along as insignia. The Haykel archive supports the correction further than comfort allows. The dispersion of Salafism across political postures, the Wahhabi-jihadi enmity inside a shared vocabulary, the alliance-shaped readings of identical texts, all of it says the coalition picks the doctrine. Haykel’s own maxim concedes the ground: theology matters, but it does not act by itself; it becomes effective through networks, leaders, repression, collapse. Strip the politeness and that maxim stands nearer to Pinsof than to the sentence it replaced. The armies of the Middle East were organized by coalitions, tribal, sectarian, dynastic, and the theology arrived as the uniform.
And yet the archive keeps three exhibits that the pure version of the theory handles awkwardly, and honesty requires displaying them. First, persistence. Pinsof derives alliance structures from stochastic drift; small initial differences snowball into arbitrary configurations, and the American structure reshuffles across decades. The Sunni-Shia boundary has held for fourteen centuries across empires, economies, and alliance structures that share nothing else. A tag that survives every reshuffle of the roster is doing work beyond tagging. Pinsof has a mechanism for this, tags as self-fulfilling focal points, but a focal point that stable starts to look like a cause. Second, constraint. Coalitions select doctrines, but they select from an inventory, and the inventory is not infinite. A movement that wants to sacralize rebellion must find rebellion in the texts, and the texts resist some readings more than others; Haykel’s genealogies show militants working hard, selecting, simplifying, straining against materials that do not say what they need. The badge must be made of something, and the something shapes which coalitions can form, at what cost, with what internal contradictions. Third, price. Pinsof’s machinery explains cheap beliefs, the poll answers and the double standards that cost the believer nothing. The Haykel archive is full of expensive beliefs: the militant who dies for the caliphate, the quietist scholar who rots in a Saudi cell rather than amend a legal opinion, the poet elegizing a brotherhood that will kill him. Alliance signaling can price some of this, since costly signals buy coalition credit, but a signal paid in death collects no return the signaler can spend, and the emotional machinery Haykel and Creswell found in jihadi verse, the manufactured immortality, suggests the doctrine is generating loyalty at least as much as expressing it.
The defensible position, then, sits between the corrected sentence and the correction. Coalitions organize armies. Doctrines are the coordination technology coalitions run on: the tag that marks members, the focal point that solves the assembly problem, the boundary instrument that sets the perimeter, and, in the strong cases, the loyalty engine that makes men pay prices no roster logic can explain. Ideas do not command; they enable, constrain, and occasionally possess. Haykel’s lifework, read through Pinsof, documents both halves: the alliance machinery selecting its theology, and the theology, once selected, acquiring a grip on its selectors that the machinery did not order and cannot fully release. The Islamic State was a coalition wearing a doctrine. Some of its members were a doctrine wearing men.