These goodwill gestures come on the heels of an April spat in which the Saudis arrested Egyptian lawyer Ahmed al-Gizawy on charges of smuggling narcotics into the kingdom, sparking large-scale protests near the Saudi embassy in Cairo. In response, Riyadh quickly postponed negotiations over a $2.7 billion aid package to Egypt, closed its embassy and consulates in the country, and recalled its ambassador.
For Egypt, which is battling an official unemployment rate of around 12.6 percent, ending the dispute was critical. An estimated 1.6 million Egyptians work in the kingdom and provide important remittances to their families back home -- the Central Bank of Egypt estimated that these remittance flows amounted to $785 million in 2006. And bilateral trade between the countries reached a record $1.2 billion during the first quarter of 2012, with Egyptian exports to Saudi Arabia totaling $528 million.
Eventually, the Saudis restored relations and agreed to deposit $1 billion in Egypt's central bank and sign other financial agreements, but not until a Brotherhood-led parliamentary delegation traveled to Riyadh and apologized directly to King Abdullah. As for Gizawy, he remains in a Saudi prison and is slated to stand trial this Wednesday.
Amid all this, the Saudis remain deeply ambivalent about Morsy. Since his election victory, Saudi and Saudi-owned pan-Arab news outlets have complained that challenger Ahmed Shafiq's campaign was undermined by mistrust and intimidation, and that Iran may be able to manipulate Morsy. They have also questioned Morsy's current affiliation with the Brotherhood, in light of his resignation from the group after assuming the presidency, and one paper speculated that he might mishandle touchy foreign-policy issues such as clamping down on "Tehran's support for local groups and attempts to spread the Shiite ideology" in Egypt.
The Saudi-Brotherhood relationship has always been complicated. The Saudi royals -- led by King Abdullah, who is formally known as the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" -- fancy themselves the leaders of the global Muslim community, and rely on clerics to shore up their rule and command political submission from their people.
The Brotherhood, by contrast, originated in Egypt as a response to Western colonialism and decadence, which its founder, Hassan al-Banna, felt were degrading Muslim societies. The Brotherhood relies on religious pretexts to advance a populist political movement.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Saudis embraced their common ground with the Brotherhood, encouraging thousands of its members to emigrate from Egypt, Iraq, and Syria to the kingdom as a means of counteracting Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arab socialist advances. The Brothers quickly became influential in Saudi society and particularly in the education system, where they composed a large portion of the university faculty.
At first, the alliance was mutually beneficial, but Brotherhood activists soon challenged the kingdom's political establishment. The most infamous byproduct of Saudi exposure to the Brotherhood was Osama bin Laden himself, who took inspiration from Palestinian Brother and jihadi theorist Abdullah Azzam's lectures in Jeddah during the early 1980s. After the outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991, the Saudis suffered another Brotherhood-induced headache from the Sahwa ("Awakening") clerics, a group of ultraconservative Islamists who directly challenged the monarchy over the "infidel" U.S. military presence on the Arabian Peninsula.
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