A STATE WITHIN THE STATE
THE NEIGHBORHOOD SAT ON BOTH SIDES OF THE OLD MECCA road, in the south of Riyadh. Built in the 1930s as a service area for travelers, it had expanded in the 1980s, after the oil boom. Behind the low-lying storefronts lining the main avenues there were rows of identical concrete villas surrounded by barren courtyards. The summer camp I would visit that day was in the local high school, in the middle of a superblock, far from the main road and the noise of traffic.
The summer camp director had sent a young supervisor to wait for me on the avenue, several blocks away. I drove behind him to the high school, whose entrance was framed with large boards advertising the summer camp. We walked in, and there was bedlam all around. Students ran everywhere. There was a fetid stench in the air, a mix of cooking odors and poorly ventilated classrooms. Above all, the place was in a fantastic uproar, as both students and teachers seemed to be continuously shouting. The high school was a new building but looked as though it had been ravaged by generations of angry students. The floor was covered with empty bottles and greasy paper. There was trash everywhere. Graffiti covered most walls. Names, phone numbers, and email addresses were carved on tables. Even the sports field, outside the main building, was dilapidated and its equipment damaged.
Older students had escaped any manner of control. The director, a man in his late thirties with a furtive gaze, told me that he focused his whole attention on younger students, “because they are the future of this country.” There were around five hundred summer campers there.
Two hundred primary school students were housed on the second floor, which was separated from the first floor by a series of gates and fences. Around three hundred middle and high school students shared the first floor, by far the dirtiest, noisiest place in the school. To avoid bullying and sexual harassment, the administration made a point of separating younger students from older students. This summer camp felt like a prison riot.
The director seemed overwhelmed by his role. His attention was being constantly snatched by teachers or students bursting into his office—a place he seemed to rarely leave. He had to make all decisions. His high school reminded me of Thamir’s school, even if the neighborhood hosted a different population. Tumiya was mostly Bedouin, and the majority of its residents came from central Najd. Here, the director told me, the residents were mostly sedentary and came from rural, southern Najd, the plateau between Riyadh and the mountains of Yemen. Income levels were modest, and inner-city families had started to move to the area, where they could access private property and forget about downtown Riyadh’s overpopulated dwellings and greedy slumlords.
The director took me on a tour of the school. We first went to the second floor, where a classroom had been assigned to each “family.” But the rooms were so dirty and unwelcoming that students had deserted them, congregating instead in a game room at the end of a dusty hallway. There a supervisor with a broken voice painstakingly explained to us that he was about to rearrange tables; that he had organized access to Ping-Pong and foosball tables; that he had printed out numbers that students would draw out of a bag to take turns for the games. As he spoke, he waved a bunch of laminated cards in my face, while students pushed one another around the Ping-Pong tables, apparently trying to cut the line.
The director then took me to the sports field, where several soccer matches were unfolding. There were dozens of students around the fields, some playing while others waited in line, their hands on the shoulders of the student in front of them, sad expressions painted on their faces. The director pointed them out to me and said that he was proud to know how to organize youth. I turned my gaze away in embarrassment. The sun was setting behind a row of houses. The fine powder of the Riyadh dust was going up in columns around us.
We walked back in as supervisors were distributing snacks. Standing on a second-floor balcony, they were throwing bags of candies to the students massed in the covered courtyard below. Students were jumping around, trying to catch some food, landing on one another’s feet. The deafening noise was barely interrupted by the call to the sunset prayer. One of the supervisors came down and stood in front of the crowd in the courtyard, ready to lead the collective prayer. Other teachers surrounded the students and tried to have them form the ranks required for the ritual. Slaps were distributed, shouts were exchanged, and the whole place descended into chaos again.
After the prayer, the director led me to his office, where the procession of solicitors resumed. I savored the relative calm of the moment, far from the sound and the fury of the courtyard. I asked if I could see the summer camp program, and the director looked at his feet. He said that one of the supervisors, who was a muezzin in a nearby mosque, had taken it away with him to carry out his religious duty; he would only be back tomorrow. The director’s powerlessness—and his inability to tell a good lie—made him almost likable. Other directors I met during my fieldwork in summer camps served me a polished script while clicking away at their PowerPoints. Here, the institution offered itself up in its raw state.
During our conversation, a student who could not have been older than twelve, very fair-skinned, with an oval face and almost feminine features, entered the office and complained that “somebody” kept calling his cellphone. The director gently took the cellphone from the boy’s hand, looked up the number, and tried to call back—no answer. The boy left the office to continue his inquiry and came back a few minutes later: “It is So-and-so” (another summer camper). The director asked the boy to fetch him. The complainant came back with the other boy: he was older, probably fifteen or sixteen, dark-skinned, and overweight. He stood in front of the director’s desk in obvious embarrassment.
“Why do you keep calling him?”
“Just because, because I did not know where he was.”
“How do you know him?”
“From here, from camp. I just know him.”
“From now on, I forbid you to come near him or to call him again.”
The director sounded determined for the first time since the beginning of my visit. The anger in his voice was palpable. The older boy was mortified and visibly shaken. I could not help but remember the stories of rape my interviewees and friends had told me. Most involved educators, religious preachers, family friends, or older students. Many had started with unwanted attention at school before developing into something else. One of my friends told me about a religious preacher who was lecturing at his middle school. After class one day, the preacher, who had regularly showered him with attention, drove him to the Wadi Laban, on the outskirts of town, and raped him in his car. My friend had not complained for fear of retaliation and punishment.
Yet at the same time I could not but sympathize with the older student, who might have been doing nothing more than expressing his feelings toward his classmate. Love between boys, which people pejoratively called wirʿanjiyya, was widespread in gender-segregated schools, and a few phone calls were hardly a crime. In addition, being dark-skinned and overweight probably meant that the older student was more likely to be accused of all sorts of offenses. Both the younger student and the director were fair-skinned, in a context where skin color mattered yet remained unspoken and former slaves and Afro-Saudis were relegated to a subordinate status.
The main issue faced by this summer camp, however, was economic rather than moral. A student and a supervisor walked into the office. The student wanted to rent a projector for an activity; there was none in the school. His supervisor parleyed with the director, who refused at first and then, inexplicably, surrendered, asking in a faint voice how much this would cost—very little, as it turned out. I asked about budget. The director told me that the Ministry of Education ministry allocated thirty thousand riyals (eight thousand dollars) to each camp for the whole summer: not in cash, but in equipment distributed by a regional commission. The equipment was often inadequate, and the camp had to rely on registration fees for its day-to-day functioning.
Some summer camps were free. In wealthier suburbs, the fees sometimes amounted to two hundred riyals (about fifty dollars). In private camps, outside the purview of the Ministry of Education, registration fees could climb to two thousand riyals (about five hundred dollars). Here, the hundred-riyal fee (twenty-five dollars) was optional. If all students paid, the camp would be able to count on fifty thousand riyals (about thirteen thousand dollars)—but not all students paid. The al-Rajhi and al-Subayʿi banks also made hefty donations to the summer camps through the local education administration. Elsewhere, businessmen often donated to their neighborhood’s summer camp, but in this impoverished area, few donations came directly to the camp.
At least the air conditioning and plumbing were working. In one summer camp I visited, the A/C was off, with average daytime high temperatures above forty degrees Celsius. In another, teachers and students had to pay directly for the computers and video players that the Ministry of Education could not dispatch. In poorer areas, running a summer camp required a good dose of forbearance. A summer camp administrator summed up the situation by saying: “When one enters the summer camps, one no longer belongs to oneself.”
Extreme centralization meant that the director took on more responsibilities, potentially made more mistakes, and faced constant nudging and nagging from students and teachers alike. Three local teenagers walked in and asked to join the camp. The director sent them to the supervisor in charge of registrations. But the latter was not around, and things started to go awry. A father walked in with his son in tow. The director knew the father and registered the boy on the spot. But the boy had not filled out his registration form, and they had to wait for a form to be brought by one of the supervisors. While he was waiting, throwing anxious looks right and left, the father made sure to ask how well the younger students were segregated from the older boys.
Behind him, the three teenagers were still waiting. The director refused to register them, saying that it was not his job, but everybody in the room knew that he had just helped a boy sign up. Outraged by this obvious injustice, one of the teenagers insisted. He stayed by the desk and adopted an attitude of silent supplication, his face and hands turned toward the director. He asked again and the director eventually changed his mind. He agreed to register the three teenagers and loaned them his pen, “the pen of the director himself,” because no other pen could be found in his office. There was no stapler either, and everybody had to wait again until somebody brought one from somewhere far inside the school.
The main goal of the summer camps, according to the director, was to create among students a feeling of citizenship, which he defined as “the love of king and country.” The camps also aimed to build healthy bodies, ward off idleness, develop students’ talents, and organize their leisure. Such lingo was common among summer camp personnel and congruent with the descriptions given in the literature of the Ministry of Education. The language about citizenship was a direct application of the Saudi government’s campaign to create a stronger sense of nationalism, away from both tribalism and Pan-Islamism. The concept of love was central to Saudi nationalism, which Al Saʿud had rebranded as “humanitarianism” in contrast to both Al-Qaʿeda’s terror campaigns and Saudi-bashing in North America. Around Riyadh, huge billboards celebrating the “Kingdom of Humanity”1 showed a grinning King ʿAbd Allah hovering over a crowd of Siamese twins, recently separated at the National Guard Health Program.2
Summer campers seemed less interested in citizenship than in negotiating, resisting, or provoking the educators, who responded cautiously and sometimes brutally. This summer camp looked and felt like a disciplinary space, where children and adolescents were parked several hours a day by their families and were subjected to the violence of either other students or the teachers. This sorry state certainly had to do partly with the personality of the teachers and the fact that this director was in charge of a summer camp for the first time in his life. But it also had a lot to do with state repression of the summer camps, from poor funding to finicky control over the activities.
I had wanted to study the summer camps since my first interviews with young activists—including ʿAdel—who had mentioned how important these structures had been in their politicization. The camps were open for six weeks every year, in June and July. They usually welcomed members of local Quranic circles and Islamic awareness groups. They were “like extended Quranic circles,” ʿAdel told me.
“Students arrive around the mid-afternoon prayer. They have afternoon activities, then activities after sunset and after the evening prayer. Summer camps are an official thing, a state thing. But Islamic activists organize them and do theater, sing, play soccer, play sports, have social activities, cultural programs.”
In Riyadh, 57 summer camps gathered around twenty-two thousand students in the mid-2000s, roughly one third of the number of summer campers across the country at that time.3 I thought I could benefit from my budding Islamic activist network to get a foot in the door and study summer camps from up close. But Thamir gently refused to help.
“Our position—the position of the Muslim Brothers—is too fragile in Riyadh, we cannot help you,” he said. “Go all the way to the top of the bureaucracy and trickle down from there.”
The Muslim Brothers had contributed to the emergence of summer camps in schools and colleges and were once powerful in the organization. Many old-timers told me that summer camps had started in the early 1980s, when they were mere excursions to the southern mountain of ʿAsir, near the border with Yemen. The idea was to seek cooler temperature in the highlands during the sweltering summer months. Camps often lasted two weeks and were individual endeavors, with little institutional support. Soon, though, the camps spread to four, then eight weeks, and most students would remain in Riyadh for most of that period. Summer was a good time to escape state control and experiment with more liberated student activities.
In the mid-1990s, the Saudi press accused the summer camps of spreading extremism. Some camps were denounced as training facilities for the armed militants who, in 1995 and 1996, had bombed U.S. military facilities in Riyadh and Khobar. The camps were suspended in 1995 by royal fiat and reopened two years later, after students and supervisors begged for clemency. A few pilot camps first operated under the control of the Ministry of Education. And when the camps fully reopened they were forced into an administrative straitjacket. The Muslim Brothers had lost their monopoly. A coordination committee was created, with two dozen inspectors regularly touring the camps. The Interior Ministry and the emirate of Riyadh (the provincial administration) also sent inspectors to make sure that the teachers’ ideas were appropriately nonpolitical. Supervisors and teachers had to get ministry clearance every spring, and many seasoned activists were pushed aside. Camp activities were blueprinted and vetted months before the summer. They had become “a matter of implementation,” a supervisor told me.
The debate over the summer camps raged again ten years later, after the 2003 Riyadh bombings against U.S. military contractors. Every summer, journalists and pundits wrote that the summer camps produced terrorists and Islamic activists responded, saying that they were organizing idle, potentially dangerous youths and that the summer camps, instead of fostering extremism, were actually preventing it. Both sides pointed an indignant finger at the specter of political violence. Both sides believed that youth, Saudi Arabia’s dangerous class, was in need of supervision. ʿAdel had witnessed the first crackdown on the camps when he was a teenager.
“When I was in middle school,” he said, “the camps stopped for a year, because they feared their influence on society. It was after the 1995 ʿOlaya bombing. They got scared and they shut down the camps. Of course, right after that, statistics almost immediately showed a spike in crime . . . because the youth did not know what to do. And even those they call ‘committed,’4 they became committed because they went with somebody who controlled them. Whereas if nobody controlled them, they would go out with their cousins and say, ‘Let’s do some joyriding.’ And joyriding is viewed as leading to crime, drugs, weapons, etc.”
Our activities versus joyriding and violence: this was a common trope among Islamic activists. A camp director told me that, according to a study carried out by the Interior Ministry in the mid-2000s, youth delinquency dropped by sixty percent when the summer camps were in operation. If idle hands were the devil’s workshop, one had to invest in leisure to keep young Saudis off the asphalt and away from cars. Islamic activists therefore did not think leisure was ungodly.5 They actively invested in fun as a way to reach youth, to prove their own social usefulness, to organize in a domain that had often been crushed by state policies. When there were no movie theaters in the country, Islamic activists invested in theater. When there were no liquor stores, Islamic investors opened amusement parks. They had created family-friendly environments that fostered leisure and fun and allowed members of the middle class to meet their peers in semi-public spaces. (In that sense, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, with his interest in leisure and entertainment in the late 2010s, was an heir to the very Islamic activists he so forcefully fought against.)
After Thamir said that he could not help me gain access to the summer camps, I asked the King Faysal Center for a formal letter of introduction. One of the center’s administrators, who in a former life had played a role in the camps, recommended that I write a one-page research proposal. He then put me in touch with the head of research at the Ministry of Education.
In early June, I drove to the Ministry of Edutation’s Directorate of Planning and Development, located in what looked like a former school in the middle-class suburb of Rabwa. Four decrepit buildings hugged a barren courtyard. Inside, portraits of King Fahd, of King ʿAbd Allah, and of the crown prince were hung in most offices. The head of research, a man in his early thirties, had written a master’s thesis on the Saudi education system and was expecting me to carry out quantitative research. He was surprised when I explained my qualitative methodology and said that I did not have a survey questionnaire. He feared that some of my questions about family and economic background, which I had included in the list of topics I was interested in, would offend parents. He said that Saudi society was “conservative” and “exceptional” and urged me to seek help from the King Faysal Center if anything happened. To appease his fears, I said that I had conducted similar research among high school students in Tumiya, where things had gone very well.
“How did you meet them?” he asked, immediately suspicious.
“Through their teacher, who is also a friend.”
He paused.
“You know, the Ministry of Education does not control everything in the summer camps,” he said. “Summer camp administrators have strong personalities and do not like others to meddle in their business.”
Yet he stamped my research project with the seal of the Ministry and attached it to an official authorization letter. He then ushered me into the vast, dusty office of the director of planning and development. Throned on an antiquated metal chair, the director, a debonair man with ample girth, kept on smiling as he signed the letter. He said a few words of approval and showed us out. The head of research walked me to my car, saying that he hoped my work would contribute to improving the summer camps’ image. He then sent me off to the headquarters of the education department for the Riyadh province to have my documents signed and stamped there, too.
I drove there on a hot June day. My letter in hand, I first headed to the fourth floor of a modernist slab, where I met the chief of staff of the local director of education. The man was seated behind a desk in a long antechamber. Behind him, a closed door led to the director’s office. In front of him, a dozen solicitors were handing him paperwork that he quickly organized into different piles. When it came to my turn he grabbed my letter, listened to my quick explanation, and told me to come back after the noon prayer.
I came back an hour later and found my letter signed. The chief of staff told me to take it to the first floor, where it was dated and given an administrative number, and then to go to the sixth floor to meet the religious activists who were managing the summer camps.
The sixth floor housed the department of student activities. As I exited the elevator, I noticed a change of scenery. Exit the secular-looking administrators, with their shaved chins and double black ropes holding their headdresses. Employees here cultivated a pious appearance: beards, shortened robes, and free-flowing headdresses were the norm. Unlike in other parts of the building, the walls, newly painted in pastel colors, were spotless. Mediocre seascapes replaced the portraits of the king and the crown prince in each office.
The head of student activities had a dour air about him. He read the letter and asked me to present my project. I spoke about the municipal elections and the link between student activities and mobilization. When I spoke about my fieldwork in Tumiya, the director loosened up a bit. He was probably pleased to see that I was not trying to link the camps to terrorism. He asked his assistant to bring coffee and tea, and asked me how many camps I wanted to visit. I said that I wanted to see four or five centers before choosing one for the summer. He called in Abu Ahmad, who was in charge of public relations at the summer camps’ coordination center. Abu Ahmad, a bearded man in his early thirties, was a fast-talking journalist with an automatic smile who published a weekly page about the summer camps in the local Al-Jazira newspaper.
“Is that not the newspaper that launched a campaign against the camps in 2003?” I asked.
“Bravo,” he said, before telling me that this campaign was the reason why his position had been created. He told me that he would call me in a couple of days to plan out my field research. Walking to my car, I kept thinking about the relative oasis of calm, neatness, and outward religiosity constituted by the department of student affairs in this messy, rather dirty, and secularist looking ministry building. It was precisely the existence of this distinct space, which could escape the control of the Ministry of Education, that journalists and pundits had criticized.
The summer camps’ coordination center was another example of what some of my interlocutors called “a state within a state.” Located near the Ministry of Education’s sports stadium, the coordination center also seemed off-limits to secularists. It housed several committees that reported on activities, dealt with funding and equipment, organized competitions between camps and trips to the country, and coordinated inspections.
Abu Ahmad introduced me to the summer camp inspectors, these envoys of the central administration who toured the camps all summer long and made sure that activities stayed within the ministry’s guidelines. The inspectors were amphibious beings. In between the administration and the schools, they shared features with both worlds. Religion teachers for the most part, often in their mid-forties, they were committed to the autonomy of student activities while also relaying Ministry of Education policies, thus apparently undermining the independence of the summer camps. These conservative types did not want to create trouble; their guidance was gentle and they exerted continuous surveillance over the activities, which they wanted, ultimately, to maintain.
Abu Ahmad said that my visits to the camps would take place during inspections. This made me uncomfortable. How could I work properly under the gaze of the central administration? How would camp directors and supervisors react to my presence? Yet as a former high school teacher myself, I also felt comfortable in the company of the inspectors. These idealists on a stipend felt a lot like my ex-colleagues in the French education system, and it was relatively easy to talk to them. There would be some benefits to their presence, too: they could act as middlemen, give me some background on the various neighborhoods, or explain what I was doing. In a word, they would help me pass. But things did not go as expected.