Not much has changed since you were here last, has it?” a young worldly businessman in Jeddah whom I had known for more than two decades said to me in the summer of 2009. I had been in and out of Saudi Arabia throughout the 1990s. I had made, as my text will make clear, a difficult trip in 2002, a time when emotions—mine and my hosts’—were raw, so close were we to the terror attacks of 9/11. In the years that followed, Iraq had fully engaged me and my concern with Saudi Arabia was secondary; what I looked for, from afar, was the Saudi response to Iraq. My return to Saudi Arabia was an attempt to understand what had taken place within the Saudi realm. My host had warmly welcomed me back. He opened his family’s home for me—the grace and hospitality of people there redeem the country and are at such variance with the stern exterior of the place. I understood what he meant and why he said what he said, but an outsider could see and sense that things had altered there.
Seven years earlier, there had been endless laments that Saudis didn’t have the ruler they needed. Many repeatedly spoke with sorrow and nostalgia of the late King Faisal (ruled 1964–75). He had been the last “real monarch,” they said of him. He had been an immensely disciplined man, he had moved his country forward while keeping the religious establishment in check. By standards of Arabia and the Gulf, he had been austere—no monumental palaces, no extravagant spending. In the telling, he had negotiated the Saudi-American relationship while keeping faith with wider Arab and Islamic loyalties. There had been drift in the years of the two men who came after him, Khalid and Fahd. A great deal of ground had been ceded to the religious establishment, more broadly to the religious reactionaries. The access of the royals to the public treasure had grown brazen, and it was during those years that the Hijazis in the more religiously tolerant western part of the country had lost ground to the kingdom’s heartland in Najd. The money and the royal favor and patronage had shifted to the more religiously and culturally severe Najdis. The Najdi version of Islam had triumphed. There had been no Hijazi imam of the Grand Mosque in years, and this sat uneasily with the Hijazis; they had no prominent members in the high ranks of the judiciary or the senior ulama, the community of scholars.
I had returned four years into King Abdullah’s reign. Was this what the modernists had been hoping for? I spoke with a technocrat in his early forties in the Eastern Province, a man who had never been taken in by the official version of things and who had traveled widely and lived abroad for a good number of years; he said that this monarch would decisively win a free election. He had opened a national dialogue and showed every indication that he understood the desire for change; he had been more supportive of women’s rights—an influential and outspoken daughter of his had emerged as a leader in women’s causes. He had reined in the extravagance. He accepted that the country’s educational system was a colossal failure, and had appointed a son-in-law, schooled at Stanford University, as minister of education. More novel and daring still, he had selected a woman with a graduate degree from Utah State University as deputy minister of education. The repair had begun, this young technocrat said. There were no guarantees of success, but grant this ruler the credit for giving it a try.
A more unsentimental interpretation was given to me by a disaffected academic, fifty years of age. The king was impulsive and blunt, he said, suspicious in the way of Bedouin culture. Saudis recognized more of themselves in him, they spoke of him with both reverence and familiarity, he added, referred to him as Abu (father of) Miteeb, after his oldest son. He didn’t put on airs, he spoke bluntly to foreign leaders, and he put American officials on notice that Arabia would make its own calls on vital matters of security and regional concerns. But I was not to exaggerate what King Abdullah can do, or how deeply he sees into the heart of matters, I was warned. The monarch was in his eighties, his skills were tactical, his education rather limited. He did not have the wider horizons of Faisal or the administrative skills of Fahd. Kingship came to him, but the ability to transform the country, repair its educational system, move its sluggish bureaucracy, was beyond him. He had his half-brothers, and though he was the first among equals, the senior princes could still thwart any reformist project.
When the king designated Minister of Interior Prince Naif second deputy prime minister, the reformists drew back. The dour prince, so close to the religious establishment and a patron of the mutawwa (religious police), had been given a clear shot at succession. No other senior member of the royal family is viewed with the unease that the liberals have for Naif. The state was a salafi state (one that strictly follows tradition), Naif believed; he was not one to play to liberal sentiment or to court popularity and approval. He was the quintessential autocrat: he beheld the world beyond Arabia’s borders with unadorned suspicion. He has been a forceful advocate of the view that it was idle to discuss the issue of women’s rights. For all the talk of an “allegiance council” that would open up the succession to a discussion within the royal clan, Abdullah had given in to the weight of custom and to the prerogatives of al-thaluth, the triangle—his three Sudairi half-brothers (related to the Sudairi clan through their mother): Crown Prince Sultan, Minister of Interior Naif, and the influential governor of Najd, Prince Salman.
The stranger’s luck: it brought my way two talented men of public affairs, one in Jeddah, the other in the Eastern Province. They had a gift of narrative and a willingness to look into their country’s troubles. I didn’t have to explain much; they knew what I was after, they were willing to cut into the tangle of concerns that had brought me to Arabia.
“The religious radicals are in retreat, they’ve lost the monopoly they once had on religious subjects, religious knowledge is easily available, ‘Shaykh Google’ is now the most influential source of knowledge,” the man from Jeddah, a journalist in his mid-forties, bright and inquisitive and self-possessed, said to me.
The bloggers are multiplying by the day, people have access to knowledge, they can dial a fatwa on any subject of choice, this is not the same society it was a decade or so earlier. I remember when a neighbor of ours was the first to have cable news. We were glued to CNN, that neighbor had an honored and prestigious place; now satellite dishes are everywhere, the Chinese-made dishes are sold for a pittance. There is no need to defer to any particular religious preacher, for fatwas and opinions can be easily found. Saudi society is plenty religious at any rate. Peddling piety to Saudis is like trying to sell water in a water-sellers’ market. The extremists are no match for the state. The radical preachers who came into fame and influence in the 1990s have moved on. Their most prominent figure, Safar al-Hawali, has suffered a stroke; Salman al-Awda and Ayid al-Qarni have gone mainstream, and have become pop stars. This is what they wanted all along—they used to preach before a handful of people, now they have vast television audiences.
He reached for an American analogy and he found it: “These preachers are now part Dear Abby, offering advice to the bewildered, and part Rick Warren, the popular California preacher.” The state lets these men be, he said, for it has nothing to fear from them.
I had been told that this man had had a brush or two with the authorities, that he had reached his own accommodation with the ruling order. He was no sycophant, he had high pedigree, a knack for political and economic analysis, and a place in the media. All wasn’t well, he said, the limits on free expression cripple the public space, but to him the religious extremists were cultists: “Saudis discovered that the extremists have nothing to offer.” He echoed the wider verdict that once the extremists took up arms against the state they were doomed. The space for liberty was small, he conceded. He gave the rulers their due—they were shrewd in the ways of power. He had to his judgment a tone of resignation. The country was what it was, he did not think that it would attempt any great breakthroughs. He was a Hijazi, but he took in stride the decline of the Hijazis relative to Najd. The Hijazis are loners, he said, they can’t work together, they were not ready for the energy of the Najdis and their sense of solidarity.
In the Eastern Province, I was offered a less resigned view of things. This was odd and unexpected, for it came from a Shi’a political analyst and information entrepreneur, fifty years old. A lunch had been given for me in the home of a technocrat in Dhahran. Intended or not, it was a Shi’a gathering, a simple affair, a group of five noted professionals from this region. The house was airy, the unpretentious home of a professional, a small garden outside, the furniture in good, simple taste. Children walked in, polite and well dressed, it was a Friday (the Muslim day of worship and thus a day off from school), and they were welcomed and fussed over.
I had cheated myself, I had talked more than I should have. They were keen to know of Iraq and of Lebanon, they wanted to know what the presidency of Barack Obama offered for the region. There was a quiet presence in the room, that of the man who identified himself as a “political development analyst.” There was an unbent quality to him. It had been a free-for-all discussion, he had kept his interventions to a minimum, and I had decided I would seek a narrative from him about his province, about the Shi’a, and about the wider “political development” of the realm.
I wouldn’t be disappointed. He gave me the entire next day, picked me up from the Holiday Inn, by the highway, where I was staying. (A special debt is owed the host who rescues a stranger from the hotel lobbies of a country with a forbidding public space.) He took me to the town of Qatif—the principal Shi’a town—and gave me entry to this place that I had come for. He had a PhD from England, he had spent long years in exile—in Iran, Kuwait, and, of course, England. People here shy away from political discussions; he savored them. I never asked if he had spent time in prison, but I know he had begun his Shi’a activism as a very young man, at the height of the enthusiasm—and panic—generated by the Iranian Revolution, that he had left the country only to return in 1994, when an uneasy accommodation had been reached between the government and the Shi’a oppositionists. By then, the ideological appeal of the Iranian Revolution had faded, and the House of Saud had decided to live and let live with its Shi’a critics. (That reckoning had come, in no small measure, because of the neo-Wahhabi unrest in Najd; the rulers had concluded that the Shi’a in the Eastern Province were no threat to the realm.)
What adversity this man knew hadn’t dented his innate optimism. “A sophisticated political society is putting down roots,” he said.
We have forty-two private television channels—they are not legal, but the state has stepped out of the way, in a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” accommodation. We have more than three hundred nongovernmental associations, they are neither banned nor licensed. The society goes its own way, it has outgrown the rulers’ will and the rulers’ control. We have political parties in all but name. There is our movement, the Shi’a-based Reform Movement; there is Salman al-Awda in Najd, he has his own movement, Najdi-based neo-Wahhabis, that draws its adherents from the Najdi middle class and its money from the rich bankers in Riyadh; there are liberal constitutionalists drawn from the ranks of the professionals; there is a Hezbollah movement in the Eastern Province.
No one is waiting on the royals, it is enough that they know their limits and we know ours. King Abdullah has opened greater space for reform, but he can’t control the floodgates. We met with him several times, my colleagues and myself in the Reform Movement, when he was Crown Prince. He signaled that he understood our demands for equality and for redress of grievances, but we have not had access to him during his kingship. In all fairness, we understand that Shaykh Salman al-Awda, too, had not been able to see him. As a Shi’a I know I am oppressed, I know the limits of this society. I can’t transcend my Shi’ism, neither wealth nor education would enable me to go beyond my Shi’ism. I accept this, but I don’t want to be discriminated against in a blatant way. We are of this land, and this country. There had been a ban on travel to Iran, it was lifted in 1995–96, and those who went to Iran returned disillusioned with that experiment. It was not the promised land, they discovered. They saw poverty in Iran, the shelves in the stores were empty, there was more religious orthodoxy than they expected, they were now more appreciative of what they had in their own country.
No one here wants to overturn the order, they want it reformed and modernized, made more tolerant. We want basic rights, we can’t build Shi’a mosques, so when one of our clerics led the prayer in the basement of his own house, he was arrested. We have little if any contact with the provincial government. Prince Mohamed bin Fahd has been governor for more than two decades, we barely know him, but that’s not unusual, he keeps to himself and to his circle of retainers. We had had a privileged role in the oil industry, we had the skills for it because government employment had not been available for us, but now there are greater limits on us in the oil industry. Sensitive jobs in refining, in oil security, are denied us.
“There is an appetite for greater freedom,” he insisted. I had led him there by suggesting that the place had no yearning for liberty, that it preferred the security of what it knew.
Go to the causeway that connects us to Bahrain on the eve of our weekly break. It is choked with traffic. We have everything Bahrain has, only cheaper. We have parts of the country, by the mountains around Taif, which are as beautiful as Lebanon. Yet five to six million Saudis travel abroad every year—to Bahrain, to Lebanon, to Egypt, to European destinations—in search of greater personal freedom. Once they step on foreign soil, they dispense with the shackles that limit them here. Their children see this schizophrenia in their elders’ lives; this kind of restrictive order lives on borrowed time. We have eighty thousand students abroad now, twenty-six thousand of them in the United States, fourteen thousand of them in Britain. They will want more than economic security, they will want a modern life. There is an innate Saudi appetite for “new” things—fast food, satellite dishes, cell phones, all the gadgets. Admittedly, this is not political freedom, but the old ways are destined to fall.
We spent a day around Qatif. Little relieved the eye. It was summer, and the heat was fierce. The waters of the Gulf were green and rancid, and still. The trees and the shrubs planted by the highway were a reminder that everything here has to be secured against an unforgiving physical harshness. It was a veritable moonscape, and it raised for me, as it always does when I am there, thoughts of the rulers’ advantage: they keep the place going, they plant the shrubs, there is no merciful public space—no shade—where their opponents could meet. “There are the mosques and the malls,” a young friend reminded me, a way of acknowledging the limits of public life in this country. A senior member of the royal family is said to bluntly assert in his private councils that the House of Saud conquered the Peninsula by the sword, and that those who want to take their domain from them better be prepared to claim it by the sword as well. Few Saudis today believe that the realm is up for grabs.
Those things more fundamental than royal succession, more than the comings and goings of the royals and the gossip about their personal fortunes, were underlined for me by a retired technocrat in Dhahran, seventy years of age, Shi’a but married to an exquisitely cultured Sunni wife.
Here in the Eastern Province we used to be the breadbasket of the Peninsula, we grew rice of the highest quality, and this is now of the past. Go find a Saudi tailor, we did exquisite embroidery work. Now the stitchers are gone, they married Syrian women and made their way there. The stitching is done by Indians and Pakistanis. We wear what we don’t make, we eat what we don’t grow. We can easily conjure up the expatriates leaving us one day. On that day we would find ourselves without skills, without proper education. You are told that we beat back the extremists, the terrorists. But this doesn’t matter, they don’t need weapons. They have power over our destiny, over the kind of schooling we can have, they have a stranglehold on the culture. Look at our appalling educational system. There is talk of building magnificent libraries, there is in the works a university for science and technology. But there is no free inquiry, we don’t have the rudiments of a scientific culture. We have religious scholars with prestige and standing obsessing over sorcery and witchcraft. A number of them firmly believe that volcanoes and earthquakes are not phenomena of the natural world but acts of divine will meant as a rebuke to God’s creatures who stray from the proper path. We have a belligerent religious ideology, our young people go to the mosques and the prayer leaders ask the Almighty to make widows of infidel women, orphans of infidel children. Oil sustains all this, devours the alternatives. This is the ride we have taken, it doesn’t truly matter which member of the royal family gains the upper hand. Think of us in the Eastern Province, we’re for all practical purposes an occupied country. The rulers are from Najd, the mentality is Najdi to the core, and there is little we can do about it.
The man grieved for a lost age and a spoilt garden. In a chronicle of the 1860s, a classic of desert writing by William Gifford Palgrave, Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia (1862–63), I found the same lament, a traveler’s vision of what was once there and what was to come. Palgrave had come to Hasa, this eastern part of the Peninsula, from Najd. He came with an aversion to the Wahhabis of Central Arabia, and he was to feel an affinity for this worldly people on the Persian Gulf—cultivators and merchants, “a sea-coast people looking mainly to foreign lands and the ocean for livelihood and commerce, accustomed to seeing among them not infrequently men of dress, manners, and religion differing from their own.” The stitchers of my host’s imagination turned up in Palgrave’s rendition:
For centuries Hasa had carried on a flourishing commerce with Oman, Persia, and India on the right, and with Basra and Baghdad on the left, nay even with Damascus itself, in spite of political hostility and local distance. For the cloaks of Hasa manufacture, and the embroidery which adorns them, are alike unrivalled; such delicacy of work, such elegance of pattern, are unknown save in Cachemire [Kashmir] alone. The wool employed is of exquisite fineness, and, when skillfully interwoven with silk, forms a tissue alike strong to wear and beautiful to the eye; while its borderings of gold and silver thread, tastefully intermixed with the gayest colours, may be envied but never equaled, by Syria and Persia.
There had been bliss and prosperity, Palgrave writes, but “now all is fallen away; the Nejdean eats out the marrow and the fat of the land; while his senseless war against whatever it pleases his fanaticism to proscribe under the name of luxury—against tobacco and silk, ornament and dress—he cuts off an important branch of useful commerce, while he loses no opportunity of snubbing and discouraging the unorthodox trader.” The foreign traveler had railed against the bigotry of the Najdi overlords; in the decades to come, oil wealth would give this hostility to the cultivators and the stitchers greater power still.
The Saudi realm is handicapped by an official narrative of its own perfection. The rulers are invested in this version of things, one or two of the senior princes more so than the others. There are no Saudi terrorists, they are all outsiders. The radical doctrines of political Islam were not products of Wahhabism but imports brought into the country by Egyptian and Syrian adherents of the Muslim Brotherhood who had been given asylum and a new chance at a better life, but who had repaid the kingdom by indoctrinating its impressionable young men with their brand of radicalism. (The Egyptians return the favor: all was well, and secular and tolerant, in Egypt, but the Egyptians who went to Arabia in search of a livelihood came back altered by their contact with Wahhabism.) In the same vein, there are no Saudis infected with the AIDS virus, no prostitution rings, no sexual abuse of children.
This narrative is, in part, rooted in a cultural reluctance to name, and thus acknowledge, troubles. People here glide around harsh, unpleasant truths, leaving them unnamed. Then, too, there is the matter of Islam. If the Saudi realm is the gift of Islam—its land the home of the faith, its monarch the Custodian of Mecca and Medina, its unwritten constitution the Quran and the sunna, the tradition, of the Prophet—the blemishes of normal life are at best ignored lest they become blemishes on Islam itself. There was nothing odd or unexpected about the refusal of Saudis to accept that fifteen of the nineteen death pilots and “muscle” of 9/11 were their own. A pattern of denial and evasion runs deep. The American oil industry and the Saudi state were in truth twins; they had developed side by side, the Arabian American Oil Company the other great force alongside the Saudi monarchy. Yet a whole Saudi official history has been woven together which edits out the role of the Americans in the making, and securing, of the Saudi state. Now, all national histories are selective in what they remember and what they adorn and what they leave out, but the Saudi realm is particularly given to concealment and denial and to a comfortable, unexamined history. This makes reform doubly difficult, for a great deal of Saudi effort is expended on hiding the warts of the place.
Much has been made to me—much is made in the official discourse—about the huge numbers of students sent abroad and about the opportunity for change this holds out for the country. No doubt, years in the United States and Britain will leave their mark on untold numbers of younger Saudis; they shall be more skilled than their compatriots who had to settle for education on native soil. They shall receive the rewards of their foreign education. After a period of estrangement that followed the terror attacks of 9/11, the doors of American universities have opened once again for Saudi students. But the political impact of this education is difficult to foresee. It would be a stretch to see these students returning to transform the Saudi world. Saudis rebel, but they make their peace. In the literal and figurative senses of it, Saudis shed foreign garb and don their own when they return from foreign lands. They adjust to the limitations and peculiarities of their country; the culture takes them back and has a way of overlooking the things they might have done or said in youthful enthusiasm. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see those returning from foreign lands taking up extreme piety—a form of penance for liberties indulged in the “lands of unbelief.”
I have long harbored doubts about the ability of the young to remake the system. I think of one telling case, a Saudi who broke with the country’s politics in the early 1980s. He was a graduate student at an elite American institution, headstrong and bright and argumentative. He hailed from a poor Najdi hamlet, away from the palaces of princes and the polish of the Jeddah merchants. In 1981, he had done something unusually daring for a Saudi. He had published a piece in the leftist weekly The Nation. He wrote it under a pseudonym, Hayyan ibn Bayyan, in the form of an open letter to his country. It was a powerful piece of writing about a Saudi people “with no sense of control over their own destiny.” Wealth had unsettled the country. “The sudden influx of money and foreigners is unhinging a traditional, xenophobic culture. The result is a nation on the brink of collective neurosis, while an oblivious government resolutely insists that all is well and offers doctored statistics chronicling ever-rising national wealth.” The piece was written in the shadow of the Iranian upheaval of 1979, and he evoked the Iranian precedent. “Only immediate reforms can thwart future turmoil,” he wrote.
“Hayyan ibn Bayyan” was a young author eager to be known and acclaimed for his work; it did not prove particularly difficult for the authorities to know his true identity. In a brutal political culture with little material cushioning, that piece of dissent would have doomed its author. But the system was forgiving. In the space of a few years, the young dissident had returned to Arabia after finishing law school in the United States. He had done so on a government scholarship. Ample room was made for him, and he was to prosper in the legal profession. No one of consequence held his moment of indiscretion against him. The costs of breaking with the system had been made clear to him, as clear as the benefits of accepting the order and its limits. This was not a man to storm the barricades against the order of power, nor was he likely to be there at the ramparts in defense of the order. The rulers did not ask for his enthusiasm. It was enough that he accepted the Saudi political world for what it was.
The Saudi world changes and it doesn’t change. In early May of 2009, a Saudi blog posted a notice of Riyadh’s “first TweetUp meant to gather people who use Twitter to socialize and meet face to face.” The meeting was to be held in a coffee shop in northern Riyadh; the coffee shop was left unnamed. “Due to local laws we will have a female gathering in the family section and the male gathering in the singles section of the coffee shop.” The new ways were breaking in, as they had been incessantly, as is inevitable in this world. But those pushing at the old order were still paying tribute to its red lines.
The “tweeters” were not bidding for sovereign power, only for the chance to partake of new and enticing things. Those men and women set to meet in that coffee shop were no threat to the primacy of Ibn Saud’s surviving sons. The political life had not produced an alternative to the order of the royals. There were times when critics within the realm—and Arab spectators in Cairo, Beirut, and Damascus—thought that the laws of gravity would prevail and the realm would crack. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the order had survived the Nasserist challenge of the 1950s and 1960s, the Khomeini decade in the 1980s, and Saddam Hussein’s bid for mastery over the Persian Gulf. A good century after Ibn Saud had conquered Riyadh for his family, sons of his were still at the helm. The matrimonial bed had served Ibn Saud’s reason of state. His sons, now old men, could still rule for yet another decade, and there were countless grandsons in the wings. As though to underline the frustratingly slow ways of the Saudi order, in April of 2009, Prince Talal ibn Abdulaziz, a son of Ibn Saud who had broken with his brothers in the 1960s, a “Free Prince” who had once opted for a brief exile in Cairo, was back at it again. His themes had not altered with the years. “The region is roiling with turmoil and radicalism, and I am afraid we are not prepared for that. We cannot use the same tools we have been using to rule the country a century ago.” He called for a dialogue within the royal family, he wanted to prepare the country for eventual elections. “Hypocrites claim our society is unprepared for change and blame religious institutions. Certain people are pleased to hear that. We have to stop using the religious institutions as an excuse. King Abdullah is the ruler. If he wills it, then it will be done.” Prince Talal, now eighty years of age, was one of eighteen surviving sons of Ibn Saud. By now the realm had grown used to his pronouncements. It was hard to know where his jealousy of his brothers in the circle of power ended and his genuine desire for reform began.
The sordid political condition of the Arab and Muslim world worked to the advantage of the House of Saud. The Saudis could gaze at the republics around them. As they thought of Libya under an odd, deranged ruler, as they pondered the dynastic succession in Syria, and the terrible bloodletting in Iran under its theocrats, they could only be glad that they had been spared the ruin of such upheavals. Saudis—particularly the ones in the Hijaz, by the Red Sea with its proximity to Egypt—once envied Egypt its modern ways and its vibrant culture in cinema and literature. The Saudis could now see the sad decline in Egyptian political and economic life. Egyptians in droves were coming to Arabia in search of livelihood, and the autocracy on the Nile had thwarted the political culture. To be sure, Saudis hadn’t been given liberty, but the stability had come to acquit the realm.
Saudis had sent abroad their share of jihadists and their religious diehards, and, heaven knows, more than their share of money to all sorts of radical causes. They had been able to channel to foreign lands the wrath of the young and the disgruntled. This had been the case in the 1980s and 1990s, and there had been that self-righteous assertion in the aftermath of 9/11 that Saudi Arabia—its charities and its jihadists, its preachers and its media—had had nothing to do with this culture and this time of religious terror. But it was a matter of time that those furies would rebound on Saudi Arabia itself. The peace of the realm was shattered in mid-2003, with attacks on residential compounds that housed foreign workers. The year that followed was a worse year still. The targets included the country’s oil infrastructure, and there would be no reprieve in 2005 either. Al Qaeda was now gunning for the Saudi regime itself. But the regime had ridden out the challenge. In truth, the monarchy and its survival were never at stake. The Saudi authorities would claim (and the reliable Government Accountability Office would sustain them) that the last successful terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia occurred in February 2007. The forces of order had hunted down Al Qaeda operatives, “arrested or killed, thousands of them,” in the words of a 2009 GAO report. In 2008 alone, about a thousand individuals were indicted on various terrorism-related charges.
Obedience, a reluctance to venture beyond accepted norms and ways, seems so integral, so true, to the life of this realm. In October 2009, Reporters Without Borders triggered a burst of commentary within the country’s intellectual and journalistic establishment. It had given Saudi Arabia a dismal rating on the matter of press freedom—a ranking of 163rd out of 175 nations, pretty close to the very bottom of the scale. (Kuwait ranked 60th, the United Arab Emirates 86th, Jordan 112th, Morocco 127th, Egypt 143rd. Only Syria in the Arab world presented a bleaker spectacle than Saudi Arabia, a rank of 165th.) I was in the country then, and it was interesting to observe the split between what the journalistic-intellectual establishment said in private and the commentary that was offered in the press. In public, there was a closing of the ranks: the country deserved better; those sitting in judgment of it did not know its ways and mores; the bleak assessment was a function of the fact that visas for foreign reporters were hard to come by. In private, a different judgment could be heard: the country deserved the rebuke it had received; it hadn’t made allowances for free inquiry; the press, big and cumbersome, stayed away from the issues that mattered.
There was no need for censorship, the wiser of my interlocutors said. The work is done by self-censorship, the limits of the accepted and the tolerable are known by one and all. The press can report on social matters—the needs of the handicapped, the ordeal of widows and divorced women, the plight of children. The political realm, by tacit agreement, is left alone. There is nothing but trouble awaiting those who venture into high matters of state.
An outsider encountering Arabia does not need the index offered by Reporters Without Borders. For me, again and again, the vastness of the land and its bleakness are steady reminders of the prohibitive costs of rebellion. In the fall of 2009, on my second visit to the country in four months, I made the journey from Jeddah to the resort town of Taif in the mountains beyond Mecca, a couple of hours away. I was traveling with a good friend and a man of Taif who knew the town. We drove past the holy city of Mecca on a highway through a desert landscape. The mountains, some five thousand feet above the plains, seemed menacingly close. The rocky hills were barren. It must have taken a herculean task to cut through the rocks. The landscape offered a reminder of the hardness of life in the Peninsula before the advent of the oil age. Man battled the elements here, and the unforgiving hills offered a silent rebuke to those who would dare go it alone. It was Mohamed bin Laden (Osama’s father) who had been the contractor for this road. The work on it had begun in 1959, and it would take six long years to complete it.
The air grew softer as we made our way up through the mountains. The vegetation, not particularly lush, seemed natural to the land. The trees that would be easy to overlook in so many other lands seemed like a precious gift here, after the ride through the unrelenting plains. I had been told that Taif and its surroundings resembled the towns of Mount Lebanon in my ancestral land. But the traveling companion who made this observation for me fell into despondency and disappointment as we arrived in Taif. He hadn’t been here in years; as a young boy he had gone camping with his friends in Taif. But this was now a ruined playground. Urban sprawl had claimed the green spaces of his imagination. Taif bore no resemblance to the cascading, soft hills of Mount Lebanon. A Ramada Inn was perched atop the hills, and the landscape below gave scant comfort. Thoughts of Osama bin Laden and his bands of warriors storming these hills and making their way to Mecca and beyond seemed like wild fantasies. This immense land under an eternal sky overwhelms both a rebel’s call to sedition and the judgment of outsiders who—rightly—find it lacking on the scale of liberty and free expression.
The strength of the dominant order went beyond simple political loyalty. A standoff that played out in public in late 2009 between Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s second man in command, Said al-Shahri, and his own father, Ali, told volumes about the advantages of the rulers. Said had served time in Guantánamo. He had returned home and gone through the government’s much-trumpeted program of rehabilitating former jihadists. But the jihad beckoned, and Said slipped across the border to Yemen. (The recidivism rate is in the range of 20 percent; the majority of jihadists return to normal life, but a determined minority dreads order and routine and is true to its calling.) Said’s zeal was bottomless: he declared his own father, a retired civil servant, a kafir, an apostate, and an unbeliever. At an open forum in Riyadh on October 20 the father disowned his own son: “My country is more important than my son, all the more so if my son is a devil in the form of a man.” Said, his father observed, “bit the hand that fed him” by breaking with the good government that secured his release from Guantánamo. The father had seven sons, he said, and six daughters, and all of them “led quiet lives and followed the straight path.” This one son had gone astray, and the father prayed for his undoing.
The theological and political arguments for obedience are strong, but much stronger are those sacred cultural ones of custom and practice. The son had breached the code of the land when he broke with his own father, for this is a culture that maintains that Allah’s blessing comes from the approval and the blessings of the parents. Now these diehards who answer the call of the jihad are perhaps sons without fathers in the figurative sense of things. Said was on his own, but it is hard to see him prevailing against the weight of tradition. To get at his sovereign, he had to get past his own father. The fight against the ruler was hard enough, the one against the father harder still.
Right alongside the report of this father’s denunciation of his son, in the same paper on that day (Okaz, October 21, 2009), there was a report of a former jihadist from the town of Taif who had seen the light. He was in the rehabilitation program and had been given permission to attend the funeral of his sister-in-law, and to spend four days with his family. He was grateful, he said, to the custodians of power who returned him to the bosom of his family from the ordeal of Guantánamo. His father, too, was full of gratitude; he prayed to the Almighty to deliver the “beloved country from the schemes of the envious and the ill-wishers.” This realm, which has had a way of directing its furies to distant lands, has shown resilience when these furies played out at home.
All was not quiet, to be sure. At the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen was reeling, claimed by deadly confrontations between an inept government and forces of secession and radicalism. The Yemeni and Saudi jihadists had found common cause. In late August 2009 one of the more influential of the younger princes, Muhammad bin Naif (a son of the minister of the interior), a man charged with running the counterterrorism effort, was slightly injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up after he had joined a group of well-wishers who had come to greet the deputy minister, as is customary during the month of Ramadan. The attack had taken place in Jeddah; the terrorist, a young Saudi, it was announced, came from the ranks of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and was on a list of eighty-five militants wanted by the state. He had slipped into Saudi Arabia from Yemen. The bomb had been implanted in his rectum. On the prince’s order, the man had not been searched, for he had claimed that he had come to turn himself in personally to Prince Muhammad. The (big) war against Al Qaeda may have been settled, but there were still bitter accounts between the forces of order and their challengers. A militant was still ready to die for his cause.