The Iraq war and the jihad in nearby Anbar and Baghdad were on the margins of Saudi life. Four or five years after 9/11, after the (usual) speculations about the troubles of the Saudi state, the ship had been steadied. There was that Arabian luck which had seen this realm through many a crisis, and it would come in the nick of time. In the summer of 2005, the ailing King Fahd, incapacitated for the full length of a decade and barely conscious of his surroundings, died and was succeeded by his half-brother Abdullah. Fahd had taken the country through a great ideological fight with Iran in the 1980s and had seen it through Saddam Hussein’s challenge in 1990–91. He had been shrewd but self-indulgent, and generous to a fault with his children and retainers. He had been something of a libertine in his earlier years; it took some imagination—and a generous suspension of disbelief—to label him Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. His personal history had left him at a severe disadvantage in his dealings with the religious reactionaries.
Abdullah was Fahd’s opposite: tight with money and with the treasure of the state, disciplined, and keen to repair the realm. True, he had had a long period as an understudy for Fahd, but kingship was to give him greater authority and self-confidence. He no doubt saw himself in the role that had been played to perfection by King Faisal, who had come to the rescue in 1964 when his older brother Saud had placed the realm in jeopardy with his extravagant ways and self-indulgence. Abdullah led a successful push to take his country into the World Trade Organization. The religious establishment had opposed that bid. The jurists had complained that membership in that organization would compel the country to trade in pork and liquor, and that the sharia would be trumped by foreign laws. The clerics were overridden; the economic reforms and transparency sought by Abdullah would be defended as needed concessions for membership in that world body. If a fight to keep the social and religious peace of the land was under way, Abdullah was the better standard-bearer. If the Saudi-American relationship required new terms of engagement, this new monarch would be the one to draw them. He wanted distance from the Americans, it was his way of displaying greater fidelity to Arab and Muslim loyalties. He was unsparing in his opposition to the Iraq War. He saw President George W. Bush’s “freedom agenda,” unfurled in 2003, as a threat to his dynasty and his country, an intervention at once dangerous and naïve in the internal affairs of the Arabs.
In a memorable formulation, Ibn Saud, who sought and obtained British patronage but made sure he was not hurt by Britain’s embrace, spelled out his attitude toward his benefactors: “England is of Europe, and I am a friend of the Ingliz, their ally. But I will walk with them only as far as my religion and honor will permit.” In the same vein, this son of the founder of the dynasty sought some distance from the Americans. He did so perhaps secure in the knowledge that the American security guarantee would still be there in a time of peril. Abdullah was too old, and too wary, to wager on some new, untested doctrines of how international order is secured in our time. He courted the Chinese, and hosted Russia’s president on Saudi soil, but he had no illusions about the Chinese or the Russians or the Indians rushing to the aid of his country in the face of a major threat. America was fickle, the Saudis knew, they did not want to be too close to it lest they burn, too far lest they freeze. They had successfully warded off George W. Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom,” they had kept the Americans out of their affairs; they had waited out that period of American assertiveness (2001–6), and could experience a sense of relief as the Bush administration sputtered to the finishing line. Bush had “circled” the Saudis, and the Egyptians for that matter. He had tried to prod them, push them in the direction of reform and openness. It hadn’t worked. The oil markets worked in favor of the Saudis, and the Egyptian ruler had hidden behind his country’s reflexive suspicion of foreign powers. In November 2007, with little more than one year left of the Bush presidency, the administration had convened a conference in Annapolis, Maryland, aimed at securing Israeli-Palestinian peace. It was too late in the hour, but this was the kind of diplomacy the Saudis fully mastered. They were unsentimental about Annapolis’s chances of success; they hadn’t wanted the conference, but they showed up for it. There was safety in numbers: nearly fifty countries and international organizations were there as well. There was no point in picking a fight with the Americans, no need to squander political capital on a symbolic occasion. The question of Palestine was not about to be resolved, nor was it going to go away.
The Americans probe, and the Saudis hunker down: this has been Saudi Arabia’s way with the Pax Americana for as long as America has had dealings with the Saudi state. In the war on terror, the Americans were keen to disrupt the money trail, to cut off the sources of terrorist financing. The Saudis promised cooperation, but that opaqueness of the realm and of its charities was a great barrier. Very little had come of that 2002 pledge to establish oversight of the charities. In February 2008, the leading American official who had been tracking terrorist financing, Treasury Department under secretary Stuart Levey, charged that millions of dollars were being raised in Saudi Arabia, and in the other oil states of the Gulf, and given to terrorist organizations. Levey was blunt when it came to Saudi Arabia’s place in that money trail: “If I could somehow snap my fingers and cut off funding from one country for terrorism, it would be Saudi Arabia.” The realm was big and inaccessible, nearby there were offshore banking centers in Dubai and Bahrain that could launder and conceal and transmit money. The Americans were destined to be locked into this cat-and-mouse game with the Saudis.
In November 2008, in one of those sudden seismic shifts in the American landscape that shall forever bewilder foreign observers, the American electorate chose for its political standard-bearer a newly minted U.S. senator, an African American, with a Muslim pedigree on his father’s side. The Saudis had not known Barack Hussein Obama. In truth, they had kept their distance from this American election. Back in 2000, they had been heavily invested in the contest between George W. Bush and Vice President Albert Gore. They had sweated out that drawn-out drama. They hadn’t thought much of Gore; in their eyes he was an unabashed supporter of Israel, he was heir to Bill Clinton, and they had never taken to him either. The dynastic element in George W. Bush’s election greatly appealed to the Saudis; after all, this was George ibn George Bush, and the Saudi rulers had known and trusted Bush senior. In contrast, the contest between John McCain and Barack Obama elicited no great interest in Arabia. In his years in the Senate, McCain was not the sociable politician the Saudis favored. He was an American nationalist; on the stump, he had promised an energy policy that would secure American independence from “countries that don’t like us very much.” The Saudis knew they were the principal target of his remark. All along, he had been skeptical of the Saudi claims that they were serious about prosecuting the war on terror and cutting off the sources of terrorist financing. The American electorate would make this decision, and the Saudis would live with the new American president.
President Obama would send mixed early signals. He was done with George W. Bush’s “diplomacy of freedom,” he would pursue a foreign policy of realpolitik. For his first message to an Arab-Islamic audience, he had chosen a Saudi-owned forum based in Dubai, Al-Arabiya television. (This television channel had the advantage of being the un–Al Jazeera, as it were.) In that interview, he promised a return to the “respect and partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as twenty or thirty years ago.” Obama was no revolutionary in foreign affairs, and the new tone was reassuring for Arab rulers unnerved by George W. Bush’s Wilsonianism. There were, though, hints of Jimmy Carter in Obama—a belief in multilateralism, an olive branch to the Iranians, a willingness to reach an accommodation with the rulers in Damascus. This was a president carried into office by a massive financial crisis at home: he looked at burdens abroad with a jaundiced eye. He would not push the Saudis on matters of internal reform, nor did it seem likely that he would pursue a muscular foreign policy in the face of America’s and Saudi Arabia’s rivals in the region.
President Obama had come into office with a blueprint for “engaging” Iran. The Saudis could only wait—and puzzle over the direction of American policy in the Persian Gulf. They had made their own uneasy peace with Iran. They had watched the Bush administration’s mix of rhetorical belligerence toward Iran and passivity in the face of Iran’s growing claims of power. They had correctly concluded that there would be no strike against Iran, and no bargain with it during President Bush’s tenure. Obama’s promise of engagement—at least on the face of it—was more problematic. It awakened the dormant Saudi (and wider Arab) suspicion that an American deal with Iran would be made at their expense. It was hard to divine the mood in Washington as the new stewards of American diplomacy alternated between promises of engagement and threats of more biting sanctions. The president talked of accommodation, but his secretary of state held out the possibility of punitive sanctions and “crippling action” against Iran. The Saudis are no strangers to Washington’s chaotic ways. The notion of a “defense umbrella” for the states of the region introduced by the secretary of state was as baffling to them as it was to the Israelis—perhaps as it was to the Americans pondering their options in Iran.
Three months into its tenure, the Obama administration dispatched one of its top Middle East hands, Dennis Ross, to Saudi Arabia to lay out to King Abdullah the American policy toward Iran. Roger Cohen of the New York Times has supplied a telling narrative of this meeting.
[Ross] talked to a skeptical monarch about the Obama administration’s policy with Iran—and talked and talked. When the king finally got to speak, he began by telling Ross: “I am a man of action. Unlike you, I prefer not to talk a lot.” Then he posed several pointed questions about U.S. policy toward Iran: What is your goal? What will you do if this does not work? What will you do if the Chinese and the Russians are not with you? How will you deal with Iran’s nuclear program if there is not a united response? Ross, a little flustered, tried to explain that policy was still being fleshed out.
Is it any wonder the Saudis have survived so many obituaries of their doom? A few weeks after this briefing, chaos would engulf Iran in a very un-Saudi event: a presidential election. Crowds seized by both delirium and a sense of violation—with women in a prominent role, no less—would take to the streets. The upheaval came close to overwhelming the new Obama approach to the Iranian theocracy. From this sort of chaos, the Saudis averted their gaze. They no doubt derived some satisfaction from seeing the Iranian regime reeling at home. But a regime that abhors popular passions, and does all it can to keep its people out of the contests of politics, had no interest in seeing the Persian realm undone by popular fury.
There is a Saudi (perhaps a Najdi) pride in the indifference of the realm and of the people of the desert to the tumult, and the temptations, of the outside world. This prideful imperturb-ability was on display when President Obama came calling on the Saudi monarch in June 2009. Obama was on his way to Cairo for what was billed as his major speech, his outreach to the Islamic world. Cairo would celebrate him, but the Saudis barely took notice. I was in Saudi Arabia at the time; the earth did not shake, a young untested American leader had come to visit Arabia’s wise and skilled monarch—the importance of the Saudi realm and of its monarch had been acknowledged. The media downplayed the visit. The Saudis, it was later learned, had not given the American visitor anything by way of diplomatic concessions. He was keen to restart the moribund Israeli-Arab negotiations and wanted help from the Saudis, and they had none to offer. They had a diplomatic initiative on the table, made back in 2002, and they would go no further. Egypt, Obama’s next stop, would be more exuberant in its enthusiasm for the American visitor. Cairo was a city of fife and drums, but Arabia was not easily stirred, there was wealth there, and an ability to stand up to foreign pressures.
“The Saudis are second-guessers,” former secretary of state George Shultz said to me in a recent discussion of Saudi affairs. He had known their ways well during his stewardship of American diplomacy (1982–89). This was so accurately on the mark. It was as sure as anything that the Saudis lamenting American passivity in the face of Iran would find fault were America to take on the Iranians. There is a congenital Saudi dread of big decisions. In a perfect world, powers beyond Saudi Arabia would not disturb the peace of the realm. The Americans would offer protection, but discreetly; they would not want Saudi Arabia to identify itself, out in the open, with major American initiatives in the Persian Gulf or on Arab-Israeli peace. The manner in which Saudi Arabia pushed for a military campaign against Saddam Hussein only to repudiate it when the war grew messy, and its consequences within Iraq unfolding in the way they did, is paradigmatic. This is second-guessing at its purest.
The Saudis have sway in the diplomacy of the region around them, but they are shrewd enough not to push their luck too far or to succumb to any illusions about their power. Yes, the Saudis were moved, perhaps offended, by the defeat of the Sunni Arabs in Iraq, which became so painfully evident in 2006–7. But their monarch never took the bait of posing as a savior of the Sunnis. It was one thing to tolerate bands of jihadists heading out to Damascus on their way to Iraq, quite another to take the plunge into the mayhem of Iraq. The Saudi ruler was under no illusions about the capabilities of Saudi forces or about the kind of power they could bring to bear on Iraq. He had watched the ordeal of America in Iraq, he knew that any Saudi intervention would be an act of great folly.
There is no love lost in the Saudi realm for the Persians or for the Shi’a Arabs. Where Saudi Arabia could contest Iran’s push into Arab affairs without open, frontal warfare, the Saudis were willing to expend decent treasure and resources. But a big, costly duel with Iran was an altogether different matter. Lebanon is the test case of the Saudi way. The Saudi rulers care greatly about the political fate of Lebanon. (The more senior figures in the realm have a soft spot for that country; it had once been their playground, they had bonded with its notables and politicians and fallen for its guile and charm.) In a fundamental way, the Saudis are invested in the Sunnis of Lebanon; the erosion of their power relative to the Shi’a underclass weighs heavily on the Saudis. Demography, education, urbanization, young men of fighting age—and, yes, the coattails of Iran—had brought new, unprecedented power to the Shi’a in the 1980s and 1990s. The Saudis could not reverse the tide, but they waged a rear-guard action in defense of Sunni interests.
Political money matters greatly in Lebanon, and the Saudis underwrote the ride of an ambitious Sunni political contender, Rafiq Hariri, who had been born and reared in the coastal city of Sidon. Formed by the nationalism and pan-Arab outlook of the Sunni street that dominated Sidon in the 1950s and 1960s, Hariri had been born to modest circumstances. A bulldozer of a man, gifted and restless in the extreme, Hariri had made a fortune in Saudi Arabia in construction. He had risen through royal patronage; luck and drive had brought him to the attention of Crown Prince (later King) Fahd. Secure in his wealth, Hariri had itched for a return to the old country. He would reenter Lebanon with his own wealth and with Saudi political money. In no time, he was to overwhelm the Sunni merchant/aristocracy of Beirut. They had been dismissive of him, he was an upstart, and, besides, he was not a Beiruti, and the Beirut Sunni bourgeoisie had a sense of its own primacy among the Sunnis of Lebanon. Hariri was to prevail, and the Saudi role in his ascendency was considerable. Until his assassination in 2005, Hariri’s mission was the defense of Sunni rights and privileges in Lebanon. His politics were made in the Saudi mold: a dread of ideology, a defense of property, the shoring up of a Lebanese political order that would limit Iran’s sway. He had been a skilled juggler, he had walked a fine, thin line between Saudi Arabia and Syria. The act had worked for nearly two decades. The shrewd Syrian ruler Hafez al-Assad had played the game to perfection, allowed Hariri room for maneuver as part of Syria’s broader relations with the House of Saud. But Hafez’s heir, his son Bashar, lacked his father’s touch and patience. Hariri was struck down to underline that a new man had come into his own in Damascus.
No sooner had Hariri been assassinated than the Saudis began to make no secret of their preference. They would throw their weight behind his son, Saad. Thirty-five years of age when his father was assassinated, Saad had been in no small measure a child of Saudi Arabia, he had lived a good many years there looking after his father’s business interests. He had imbibed the rituals of Saudi court life—its long silences, its aversion to loners, its suspicion of crowds. (Saad had an older brother, Bahaa, but he was impulsive and flamboyant, more Lebanon than Saudi Arabia; he had been sidelined, and the Saudi royal court had played its role in giving the edge to the younger brother.) Saad Hariri was a good investment for the House of Saud. He would claim his father’s fallen standard and in time assume the post of prime minister. He would balance the power of the Shi’a, and the Saudis would keep a discreet distance from the quarrels of Lebanon. On the face of it, the Saudis could insist that they harbored no animus against the Shi’a of Lebanon, they might even invite a Shi’a politician or two to Riyadh. There were rumors that they had bankrolled the campaign in 2009 of a young Shi’a politician at odds with Hezbollah. But no one was fooled, the Sunnis were the Saudi cause in Lebanon. A dynasty that held the Shi’a of the Eastern Province at bay was not about to travel to Lebanon in search of Shi’a allies. Saad Hariri was not at one with the princes of the Saudi realm, he would always be the son of a Lebanese courtier who made good in Arabia. But he could enter the Saudi world in a way denied his Shi’a and Christian compatriots.
The Saudis do not have the temperament or the desire for big ideological quests. They don’t trust the region beyond their borders. The kind of fervor that played upon Cairo in the 1950s and 1960s, Baghdad in the 1980s, and the Iranian revolutionaries in the time of their zeal and enthusiasm is alien to the Arabian Peninsula. The Saudi means of “seduction” are rather limited; the strictures of Wahhabism, the separation of men and women, the aloofness and insularity of the Najdis set this realm apart. The sons of Ibn Saud have his guile, his recognition that the world beyond the Peninsula is full of menace and envy. The royals in Riyadh may savor the flattery offered by a northern Arab or two eager for Saudi patronage, but they have always seen through invitations that would take them out of the comfort, and safety, of their own world.
A “Sunni pact” of Arab states under Saudi leadership has a surface appeal to it, but the Saudis know better than to attempt it. Even in their very immediate neighborhood, in what should be their zone of comfort (the dynastic states of the Peninsula and the Gulf), the Saudi writ is rather limited. The smaller states march to their own beat. Qatar has an explicitly anti-Saudi thrust to its policies abroad and shows its fellow Wahhabi neighbor no deference. In the contest between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the Qataris have been more sympathetic to Iran’s outlook. The freewheeling journalism of Al Jazeera has caused great discomfort in Riyadh over the years. The entire national ethos of Kuwait—its founding myth as a place on the Gulf to which tribes keen to escape the harsh limits of Central and Eastern Arabia migrated in times past, the walled city that resisted Wahhabi raiders—is at odds with the Saudi way. The parliamentary tradition of Kuwait is a big barrier between these two states, and Kuwaiti policy at home and abroad has always been strikingly independent.
Nor are matters any simpler between the House of Saud and the United Arab Emirates. There is an uneasy history of territorial disputes, and a determination by the rulers of Abu Dhabi and Dubai to carve out their own path in foreign and defense policies, and in the kind of liberties they will countenance. For all the talk of an anti-Iranian coalition in the Gulf, Dubai is an offshore base of the Iranian economy. Only the island state of Bahrain is willing to call the shots in accord with Saudi preference. This has to do with the economic dependence of Bahrain on Saudi Arabia, a dependence strikingly similar to Dubai’s relationship to Iran. More important, Bahraini deference is a function of the sectarian dilemma of that island nation—a Sunni dynasty and security apparatus ruling a largely Shi’a population with historic ties to Iran. That causeway connecting Bahrain to Saudi Arabia is not only an economic pipeline for Bahrain and a safety valve for Saudis eager to escape the prohibitions of their country, but it is, as well, a protection of last resort for the Khalifa family that rules Bahrain. No one is under any illusions, rescue for the ruling Bahraini regime would come via the causeway from the Saudi realm should the need arise. Bahrain aside, the Saudis face prickly dynastic states sure that they can cut their own deals in the world.
For the House of Saud, above all there was no burning zeal in dealings with foreign entanglements. The Saudi rulers had come into an accommodation of their own with Hafez al-Assad in Damascus. The long peace held for three decades. The Saudi rulers were not enamored of al-Assad: he had taken plenty of their treasure; he had backed Iran in its war against Iraq in the 1980s; he had shown the Sunnis in his country no mercy. But he accepted the rules of the regional game, he gave the wealthy oil states cover in 1990–91 when Saddam Hussein made his bid for dominion. The Saudi-Syrian peace broke down after Hafez’s death in 2000. His son slipped into Iran’s orbit, he broke the code of protocol and decorum by dismissing his rivals in the Arab order of power as “dwarfs” and “half-men.” And of course there was the assassination of Rafiq Hariri in 2005. He had thrown down a gauntlet to the Saudis in Lebanon, and in Palestinian affairs. He presided over a realm in economic disarray, but he still strutted around. He needed economic help and foreign investments in tourism and the service sector, and the Saudis responded with pressure of their own. They were Syria’s largest foreign investors, they had injected some $900 million into the Syrian economy in 2006, and they let that figure slip to a paltry $15 million a year later. But as is their way, they did not give up entirely on the Syrian regime. By 2008–9, they were at work trying to “peel” Syria off from Iran, and to tempt Bashar al-Assad into cooperation. It was safe to assume that they loathed the inexperienced Syrian ruler, but he was at the helm in Damascus, and a new administration in Washington was courting him and holding out the promise of his rehabilitation. The Saudis would steal a march on Washington, they were eager to bury the hatchet with the man in Damascus.
In October 2009, less than five years after Hariri’s assassination, King Abdullah made his first visit as monarch to Damascus. All may not have been forgiven, but it was time to move on and to heal the rift with the Syrian regime. There was a deal to be struck over Lebanon, divided between Syria’s wards and Saudi Arabia’s. Hezbollah was of course a case apart, a veritable Iranian instrument by the Mediterranean. Fidelity to Rafiq Hariri’s memory and cause had run its course. There is an unsentimentalism to the Saudi way, and the Saudis had signaled to the devotees of Hariri who had turned his death into a cult of martyrdom that it was the better part of wisdom to let the matter rest. There is a Saudi way of dealing with death: burial in an unmarked grave, three days of mourning, and then a return to the normal world. This is the way of the desert, the farewell given king and commoner alike. The Hariri cult—his burial place turned into a shrine, the day of his death on February 14, 2005, marked as a time of mourning, the insistence of his followers that an international tribunal is sure to avenge him and to bring the killers and their accomplices to account—was destined to run afoul of Saudi “realism.” And the Saudi monarch let it be known that since tens of thousands of Lebanese had perished in that country’s war without end, there was something willful about worshipping at the altar of the fallen man.
No international tribunal looking into Hariri’s murder was going to unseat the Syrian dictator, the Lebanese were no match for Damascus. Iran’s threat had grown, and it was time to try to weaken the nexus between the Syrians and the Iranian theocrats. In the Saudi sense of things, the Arab order of power is best served by a workable trilateral arrangement of Riyadh, Cairo, and Damascus. They would go the extra mile to accommodate Syria’s rulers. The broad coalition of Lebanese Sunnis and Christians allied with Saudi Arabia—led by Hariri’s son—had no choice but to accept the Saudi writ. Syria was nearby, a permanent menace, and her Lebanese critics were vulnerable targets for assassins’ bullets and deadly car bombs. Furthermore, the specter of American power that had driven Syria out of Lebanon back in 2005 had receded. Lebanon was once again a marginal, small country of little consequence in the scheme of Pax Americana, and this Saudi-Syrian entente was a fait accompli that the Lebanese could not challenge. Lebanon was but a piece of a broader Saudi chessboard, and the Lebanese wards of Saudi Arabia were folded into a broader Saudi quest for defending their brand of order in their neighborhood.
Once the Saudis made their way back to Damascus, it was inevitable that their Lebanese protégé, Saad Hariri, now prime minister in his own right, would follow. In December 2009, he made his own difficult journey to Damascus, the matter of his father’s murder was put aside as he called on Bashar al-Assad. There is an expression in the unsentimental world of the Levant of a man killing another, then walking in his victim’s funeral procession. The Syrians had waited out the outrage and ostracism, the Hariri forces had insisted on Syria’s culpability in the murder of their old leader, and now the son bowed to the inevitable. The two men, the Syrian ruler and his Lebanese visitor, it was reported, spent eight hours together, they talked of the past “without drowning in it,” the sycophantic press reported. The Lebanese visitor, it was said, laid out to his host his view of Syria’s old transgressions in Lebanon, while Bashar al-Assad spoke of the campaign of vilification that his country had endured the preceding five years. The Syrians were propriety itself. Hariri, though only a prime minister in the hierarchy of protocol, stayed overnight in a palace reserved for monarchs and heads of state. The men were in agreement, it was announced, on the positive role played by the Saudi monarch. There was no escaping the tyranny of geography and the inequality of power. Saudi Arabia was done with the Hariri assassination and with the campaign to isolate Syria in the Arab councils of power; its Lebanese wards were now ready to recognize the harsh facts of their weakness and vulnerability.
The “long war” on terror had shifted its central front from Iraq to the Afghan-Pakistani theater. No sooner had the Obama administration come into this inheritance than there was on display evidence that the U.S.-Saudi terms of engagement had not changed. The Saudis were there lending a helping hand in Pakistan, joining the United States in an effort to keep the Pakistani state afloat, offering an aid package of some $700 million at a gathering in Tokyo in April 2009. Pakistan mattered greatly to the Saudis as a hedge against Iran. A fortnight later, the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, was on his way to Riyadh. The heart of his mission was the money trail yet again, that network of financing that led from a quiescent Arabian setting to Quetta and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, on to Kabul and Kandahar. U.S. intelligence sources were confident that the Taliban drew on money generated from poppy cultivation and the opium trade, and from contributions that reached them from supporters in Saudi Arabia and the smaller Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Order at home, zeal and penchant for trouble abroad. There were Saudi financiers who could not countenance life under soldiers of virtue and terror, but they were ready to play with fire in lands beyond.
Saudis inhabit the modern world. Their world—the very piety they profess—has been made by their oil wealth and by the modern technologies bought by that wealth. Some years ago, in an astute set of observations, the Egyptian American scholar Mamoun Fandy, in his book Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent, caught the complexity of Saudi society. He is worth quoting at some length:
Saudi Arabia is a very complex mix of the “traditional,” the various forms of modernities, and the postmodern, depending on the region and the sociocultural formation. For example, the Eastern Province is dominated by a Shi’a population, an oil industry, and an obvious U.S. presence. Highways, shopping malls, and expatriate communities give the impression of an American city, especially with the number of U.S. soldiers and civilians in Dhahran, Dammam, and Khobar. Except for the Saudi customs of closing shops for prayers and veiling women, these cities are a microcosm of global creolization. They contain at least as many foreign workers as Saudi citizens. Saudi children are raised by Asian and European nannies and are frequently bilingual. On the local level, hijabs and abayahs (local dress) are made in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and designer abayahs are made in Paris and London. Prayer rugs with a compass indicating the direction of Mecca are made in Japan. The holy places in Mecca and Medina are by definition part of global culture. Almost all religious icons sold outside the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina are made outside the country and sold to foreigners as if they were Saudi-made.
There is an apocryphal Saudi tale about a Bedouin who had spent a lifetime in the fierce desert and who, on a visit to his relatives in the city, came into his first contact with the air conditioner. “May paradise be the abode of he who came up with this invention,” the man said. His relatives were taken aback: “But you have beseeched the Almighty on behalf of an infidel,” they reminded him. “Give me a Muslim who would come up with a similar invention and I will beseech Allah on his behalf and on behalf of his parents,” the simple bedu replied. The “infidels” are the source of much of the comfort of the Saudi world, a modernist commentator observed in the pages of the most enlightened of the Saudi dailies, Al-Watan, in late September 2009. “We can’t pray for the undoing of the infidels while we enjoy the fruits of their labor and inventions—all the way from the airplane to the Internet to the soft drinks and the Viagra pills. Here we are awaiting the formula for the shots against the swine flu as some of us curse the West and hope for its undoing.”
Wahhabism carried within it the risk of self-righteousness—the risk, as David George Hogarth put it in his classic The Penetration of Arabia (1904), of its adherents imagining that the “eye of God is focused peculiarly on themselves.” The Wahhabi doctrine is a product of Najd and its culture. It is easy to write for it a stark, solitary tale, an alternative history: a sect rises in an unforgiving environment and then atrophies, or is undone by mighty outsiders. Oil wealth and the modern state and all the inventions of the dreaded infidels—the fax machine and the internet, satellite television, the ease of travel—gave Wahhabism power and stridency. The struggle with Wahhabism, both within Arabia and beyond, is driven by a desire to see that creed come to terms with its own limits, to recognize the luck and the circumstances that enabled it to survive. In March 2009, the cinema made its appearance in Saudi Arabia. A Saudi comedy was screened twice a day for eight days in Jeddah. Tickets were sold, “we even sold popcorn,” said the general manager of the studio which had made the film. More than twenty-five thousand people saw the film, women seated in the balcony, men in the stalls. The senior cleric who headed the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice declared the film an “evil” innovation. Several days later, he had a change of heart. Cinema was permissible, he said, so long as it was used “in matters that please Allah.” Saudi society has been here before: change has stolen upon it repeatedly in the past, and the gatekeepers know when to let well enough alone.
The fight over the cinema was of no small significance to both its proponents and the militants. Weeks after its screening in Jeddah and Taif, that Saudi film came to Riyadh itself. This was Riyadh’s first film showing in thirty-five years. The militants were prepared. After evening prayer, a dozen or so religious radicals turned up at the cultural center where the film was being shown to preach against the sins of the cinema. The police were there in full force as a buffer. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions will happen because of the cinema, one diehard warned. Text messages were sent to the film’s principal star asking God to bring about his ruin. The film was sparsely attended, security was tight, nine of the militants were arrested.
Those asserting the “normalcy” of the cinema and of movie houses were in truth attempting to retrieve past liberties. There had been no fewer than fifty movie houses in the country in days past, twenty-five in Jeddah alone. Sports clubs had had their own small movie theaters. Saudis flock to movie houses when abroad with their families. The ban on the cinema, the modernists argued, put the country on a par with Afghanistan under the Taliban, the only other Muslim country that enforced such a ban. This tribute to virtue was defective. Practically every Saudi home, even the poorest, had access to satellite television and the dish. In the privacy of their homes, thanks to satellite dishes that the most impoverished can afford, Saudis could sample the libertine fare of Italy, Germany, and Turkey. To their hearts’ delight, they could savor the racy music clips of Lebanon (on Rotana, a channel owned by a member of the Saudi family, no less). It was hard manning the cause of virtue in an open world. The promoters of the cinema were sure that time and the desire of ordinary men and women were on their side. This confrontation would play out along a familiar divide between those who want to hustle Arabia into the modern world and those who don’t. There had been battles within the royal clan itself over the introduction of television four decades earlier. There was a repeat of this now. The film at the heart of the controversy, a Saudi comedy, had been made by Rotana, an entertainment empire owned by Prince Waleed bin Talal. Amid the spirited debate about the film, it was revealed that Prince Waleed’s brother, Khalid, had denounced the film and publicly broken with his brother over it. He had tried to advise his brother in private, he said, but Waleed would not mend his ways, and the making and marketing of this film was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“In Riyadh everything was forbidden, and everything permitted,” a distinguished American-educated modernist, Turki al-Hamad, wrote in Adama, his coming-of-age autobiographical novel. Of his stand-in character, a Najdi young man who was raised in the Eastern Province and had arrived in Riyadh for university education in the late 1960s, Turki al-Hamad wrote: “Cinemas were nonexistent, but he watched the latest films there that were not even screened in Beirut or Cairo. Around any sports club or the film rental shops one could watch or hire any film one wished…. In Riyadh he saw overtly pornographic films.” The risk of a public code as restrictive and severe as the Saudi code had become in the early 1980s is the risk of hypocrisy—that schizophrenia that separates what is said and avowed in Saudi public life and the way men and women live and make their way around unsustainable prohibitions. Arabs, Saudis included, may be particularly good at handling cognitive dissonance, but a heavy price is paid by societies that preach one code and live by another. This observation will have to stand: no society can be as good and wholesome and religiously observant as Arabia professes to be. The (real) life is whispered in private, and insinuated, and known for all its warts and imperfections, while the self-image is left intact and unchallenged.
The modernists are loath to admit it, but the prohibitions enforced by the mutawwa, and by the religious-bureaucratic institution that sustains them, are rooted in a wider conservatism, an unease with change. That peculiar institution, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, weighs heavily on the society. Its intrusive enforcers are everywhere—in the shopping malls and on the road, on the lookout for “deviations” from public and religious decorum. Ironically, the Committee had been established in the 1920s when the puritans of the Najd and the Ikhwan conquered the worldly Hijazis. A buffer was needed between the two, a way of checking the scolds of the Najd. It was here where the system began, and it would, in time, spread to the entire realm. The Committee had acquired high official status, its leader was given ministerial rank, and there was money aplenty for it. Its enforcers were not the hardy breed of days past taking the rod to those who missed prayer, or flogging a poor soul caught smoking in public. The zealots now patrolled the streets in their GMC Suburbans, the treasure of the realm making possible, and lucrative, this peculiar enterprise.
The Office of the Inquisition in Castilian (and Spanish) history never had it so good. This Committee, it should be understood, cuts a big swath in the land. The most revealing statement about its power, and its reach, was made by the religious scholar who headed it in June 2008, Shaykh Ibrahim al-Ghaith, in an interview with Asharq Al-Awsat. This was a time when the Committee was under scrutiny, but its leader was unapologetic. There was a royal decree, the cleric said, dated September 7, 1980, which stipulated that “the state should protect Islam, apply the sharia, promote virtue and prevent vice.” (Notice the date of the decree, less than a year after the seizure of the Grand Mosque and the turn of the state in favor of orthodoxy.) More powerful still, more binding than any ruler’s writ, there was, the cleric reminded those who would question the legitimacy of his work, a “divine injunction,” God’s word in the Quran: “You are the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah” (3:110). This was not a man to be intimidated by the laments of modernists worried about their worldly pursuits and their privacy.
A full sense of the resources of this institution is conveyed by Shaykh Ghaith’s own startling statistics: In the course of the year 2006, the presidency of the Committee, he said, had conducted more than 47,500 “awareness and guidance programs” and distributed more than 7,830,000 pamphlets and audiocassettes. All this was in the domain of the Committee’s first mission, the promotion of virtue. As for the second part, the prevention of vice, the cleric revealed that his operatives had dealt with 416,000 cases that involved 434,000 individuals—no less than 2 percent of the total population of the country—both citizens and noncitizen residents alike. The Committee had been merciful, he was keen to say. Some 392,000 individual cases had been resolved with discretion, only 42,000 individuals having been referred to the authorities. “No one is referred to the quarters concerned unless we see that such a referral is unavoidable.”
No “reform” could contemplate the eradication of this institution, so integral had it become to the public order. The distinguished Princeton historian Michael Cook rightly observes that the “righteousness” within Saudi society was a substitute for the holy war on its frontiers. As the order of nation-states and territorial boundaries took hold, warfare against the infidels had come to an end. “If the Saudi state was not to lose its religious identity, it had to turn its righteousness inwards…. In effect, forbidding wrong within Wahhabi society had taken the place of holy war on its frontiers.” There was no thought of dismantling this religious-bureaucratic apparatus. At best, this institution might be tamed and “softened,” its abuses kept in check. In early 2009, King Abdullah had shuffled the deck and removed the Committee’s leading cleric, signaling that he wanted to rein in the Committee and to regulate its affairs. The monarch had come down the middle in the debate about the Committee. “No to its cancellation, yes to its reform” was the new official mantra. A new religious functionary, a man in his mid-forties, a good generation younger than his predecessor, was to be the new leader.
The stakes in this struggle between the Committee and its critics were crystallized in a remarkable open letter to the new head of the Committee by one of the erstwhile religious firebrands, Ayid al-Qarni himself. Qarni’s platform was a column in the influential daily Asharq Al-Awsat on March 10, 2009. Qarni welcomed the new man at the helm, “His Highness Shaykh Abdulaziz al-Humayyin,” opening with a reminder that the appointment was part of the “renovation and reform” undertaken by the monarch. The modernists couldn’t have had a better ally than Qarni, for he cut to the heart of what troubled them. “In Islam, we have no courts of inquisition that rejoice when a sinner is caught, and are eager to see the disobedient arrested; instead we have institutions of mercy, penitence administration, and councils for reconciliation and forgiveness. We are commanded by God to be discreet and to overlook errors if they do not constitute a threat to society, if they are not destructive, if they do not disturb the peace.” The enforcers of the Committee had played havoc with the privacy of their suspects, and Qarni minced no words in this regard: “In Islam, spying and violation of privacy to get to know secrets are not permitted; instead there is guidance, with flexibility and gentle rendering of advice.”
Qarni spoke to this senior cleric from within the tradition itself.
Our Prophet, God’s prayers and blessings be upon him, said: “He who knows discretion toward the weakness of a Muslim in this life, will be protected by God in this life and in the afterlife.” A man came to the Prophet and told him he had caught a sinner, The Prophet said: “It would have been better for you to be discreet about what he has done.” The Prophet used to protect those who erred; he would not name them, expose them, or injure their feelings.
Qarni had the perfect pitch. He was sure, he observed, that “His Highness the Shaykh” is likely to follow the Prophet’s example and discretion. The proper advice is best rendered in private; that which is given in public is a “sort of reprimand” and nothing else. The bureaucratic apparatus of the zealots was put on notice. Larger numbers of Saudis were clamoring for the saving graces—and compromises—of normal life.
The long-running debate about the Committee and its work was joined—and clarified—when the Committee proposed installing surveillance cameras in the shopping malls and other public places. This was odd, the critics of the Committee and its methods protested. The zealots had always taken a severe view of photography, they had defaced magazine covers, they had a ritual of cutting out of magazines provocative pictures of movie stars and unveiled women, yet here they were advocating an intrusive new technology. The zealots were hoist on their own petard: to uphold “virtue” they had to gain access to the privacy of families, to intrude on the secluded domain of women. It was a sure thing that the installation of surveillance cameras would never get off the ground.
The enforcers of virtue were on the defensive. On June 1, 2009, in the Saudi edition of the pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat, there was a picture of a man of the mutawwa, surrounded by cameramen and a handful of spectators, bowling in an alley in a Riyadh shopping mall. He had his unkempt beard, the signature headdress without a cord (the mutawwa way). The thing looked scripted, he had been authorized to do it. A former student of mine savored the picture. The diehards will bend, he said, if the powers that be side with the modernist camp. The mutawwa were clearly on notice, they now had to work with the police and with the provincial governments, they needed arrest warrants where they had once been free to act on their own. They could not “out” their prey, defame them in public, or tell of their misdeeds. A man of the mutawwa in a bowling alley was not enough. The Committee centers were a law unto themselves. In Riyadh, there were more such centers than police stations. A watchdog institution, the National Society for Human Rights, wrote in 2009 about five losses of life at the hands of the mutawwa in Riyadh, Tabuk, Medina, and Najran. In guarded language, this watchdog organization noted the attempt of the Committee to deny or belittle these incidents or to write them off as individual acts. “It’s compellingly important to determine the work mechanisms of the Committee staff, especially field workers among them, in such a way that people’s liberties are safeguarded and at the same time the Committee staff members are enabled to perform their duties toward the community,” the National Society for Human Rights observed.
The liberals may despair of it, but “commanding right and forbidding wrong” was demanding, steady work. Amid this debate, in Kharj, southeast of Riyadh, it was announced that the mutawwa had broken up a prostitution ring. A tip came to them about a Syrian woman active in the trade who had arranged for a “private evening” in a luxurious guesthouse for six of her girls and five men. In yet another item, at about the same time, the men of the Committee had arrested two well-known soccer players. They had been picked up in a Riyadh hotel in the company of two young women. Their mobile telephones had led to rounding up of other women. It was not the practice of the Committee, its spokesman said, to target particular individuals or entrap them. It was no fault of the Committee, he insisted, that the names of the soccer players had leaked. The mutawwa did their work without fear or favor, he added, they have always tried to protect the privacy of people brought up before the judicial authorities. The Committee’s bureaucratic apparatus was precise about the merciful ways of its work. Less than 10 percent of the violations they uncover are referred to the judicial authorities. The rest are resolved on the promise that the violators would mend their ways.
The royals were skilled traffic cops: they held back the religious enforcers when their excesses grew particularly burdensome or notorious. But they gave into them as well. In July 2009, a dispatch from Jeddah carried news of a victory for the religious zealots. The minister of interior had issued a decree granting the mutawwa permission to “enter all seaside chalets in Jeddah, to monitor them daily so as to limit any unsuitable behavior occurring inside.” The little liberties were always under siege. A month earlier, I had been at the seaside in Jeddah. I had gone to the beach house of a noted man of business and former official of the state. In truth, he was a royal, but a relative had instructed me to address him by his first name. The house was discreetly concealed behind a nondescript gate. The walls did not give away a place of luxury. Once within the gate, the drive led to a house in exquisite taste—immaculate landscaping, a dock at the end of a long walkway, the owner’s yacht within sight. A big, gaudy house next door, out of place by the sea—it belonged to a royal, and my host looked upon it with despair and resignation—was under construction.
Saudi restrictions were a world away. My host held the political affairs of his country with the same resigned indifference that he reserved for his neighbor’s architectural travesty. All political doors had been open to him, but the political game had not held him, he had retreated into commerce and into the saving graces of private life. He had retrieved from a quarry nearby two blocks of black marble that dated back centuries. He was proud of his find, he had them displayed in a corner of his garden, he savored their beauty as he was showing me the mango trees and the tropical vegetation he tended to. There wasn’t much to say about politics in this land, he said in passing, he was of the royals, and he knew them as they were. He would not dwell on them, but he said enough to tell me that he didn’t see much difference among the sons of Ibn Saud. Nothing would tempt him back into the political arena, he said. He had been close to the Crown Prince, but that was years back. He had the means and the standing for a private life, and for him this would do.
On the way back to town, I stopped by a marina—it was by the road, a gated community manned by private security. There was no abaya to be seen on the premises. It was nighttime, but women and children were everywhere, there were boats and small yachts and countless Jet Skis. The marina could have been anywhere in the world, there was nothing that gave away its oddness against the background of Saudi reality. A few miles away, on the Jeddah boardwalk, it was a different world. Ordinary Saudis escaping the summer heat rolled out their mats, or simply sat down by their cars on folding chairs they had brought with them. There were groups of men spending the evening together, and there were families with children nearby. I couldn’t help thinking of the fate of the young girls, and of the reprieve given them by childhood. Soon these young girls, now relatively free and unencumbered, would be pushed by puberty into the restricted space of women. Of this brief respite, they would have but a vague memory. The place was hard on its people, and watchful. The minister of interior cracking down on the private chalets could be forgiven the thought that Saudis beyond these private enclosures of the affluent are doubtless on his side. “The unsuitable behavior perhaps is women swimming,” a commentary on this Jeddah dispatch added. The balance between piety and liberty had not yet been found.
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue had mastered the game of press releases and public persuasion. It had going for it some of the deeply held phobias and predilections in the land. Its dispatches (I work here with a sample from June–July 2009) told of its enforcers cracking down on sorcery; indeed a “modern” unit, it was announced in late June, had been established to combat sorcery and to prevent those who dabble in sorcery and witchcraft from entrapping women in distress. And there was the steady flow of victories: the busting up of yet another prostitution ring, the arrest of a drug dealer who practiced his trade in proximity to a school for boys. An Asian gang had been undone—one woman and six men—its members had been caught making and selling moonshine; a Sudanese doorman had been using his workplace for purposes of prostitution and the Committee had caught up with him. Above all, there were these endless reports about witchcraft, and they kept the Committee men in the field with plenty to do.
In the minister of interior, the Committee had a powerful friend at court. In the royal sweepstakes occasioned by the serious illness of Crown Prince Sultan, the Committee’s “vote” belonged to the minister of interior. Prince Naif had intervened in the matter of a film festival that had been in the works for the summer of 2009. He had banned it, and the pamphleteers of the Committee were fulsome in their praise of him. In the daily Al Riyadh (June 27, 2009), one of the Committee’s leaders paid tribute to Prince Naif as “the first man of national security.” This man’s entire life, the writer said, had been dedicated to protecting the sharia and to affirming the “Islamic mission” of the Saudi state. “Prince Naif has never broken faith with the mission of enjoining the good and forbidding evil. He has always stood with our work, believed it to be our domain, in the same manner that medicine is left to physicians, engineering to engineers, and so forth.”
The writer of this tribute gave the matter away. The Committee was fighting for its turf, its access to public treasure, its place in the public order. This senior prince, third in the line of hierarchy, was the Committee’s protector and ally. The reformers could draw strength from the monarch, the enforcers of virtue from his half-brother. An American-educated bureaucrat from King Abdullah’s entourage presided over the National Society for Human Rights, a government-constituted “liberal” watchdog. But on its side, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue had a dedicated religious apparatus and the support of a contender for the throne. A cynic could write it all off as a “division of roles” among the brothers in the House of Saud—the reforming king, his half-brother the strict autocrat at Interior. It is a big royal clan, and there are princes for all kinds of seasons and casting calls. No outsider fully knew the play among the brothers. Those who talk don’t know, those who know don’t talk, said a shrewd businessman at the end of a long discussion about the ways of the royals. All hopes are invested in them—the religious reactionaries’ determination to keep the orthodoxy intact and supreme, the liberals’ expectations that the old ways could yet crack and be challenged.
The religious establishment often bends with the wind—in truth, it yields to royal prerogative when it has to, when the will of wali al-amr, the custodian of power, is at stake. This introduces a good deal of uncertainty and skepticism about the writ of the jurists. Things forbidden and haram are suddenly given a waiver, the gates that had been bolted are thrown wide open. Even the fierce gatekeepers of the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are given to this kind of sudden change, and the laymen are skeptical and knowing enough to understand that orders had come from on high—from the monarch, or from the all-powerful minister of interior—that brought about sudden shifts of opinion. In December 2009, the leading cleric in the Province of Mecca, one Shaykh Ahmad al-Ghamdi, put forth an opinion that the mixing of men and women, al-ikhtilat, was in the nature of things organic to the lives of nations, and those who hitherto had banned it hadn’t really given the matter the attention it deserved. That thin, artificial line between permissible and impermissible things in the country was given a stark illustration.
A young Riyadh lawyer, known for his modernist, fearless positions, Abdul Rahman al-Lahem—the American Bar Association gave him the International Human Rights Lawyer Award in 2008—saw in this change in the position of so prominent a figure in the ranks of the religious enforcers yet further evidence of the difficulty of an ordered life under the law. “It doesn’t concern me,” the lawyer wrote, “if a shaykh awakens from a long slumber, what matters is the logic that reduces the law to the whim of a religious judge and to what goes on in the mind of a shaykh.” Abdul Rahman al-Lahem allows himself one of the satirical notes that have landed him in trouble, on more than one occasion, with the religious establishment:
It has become a daily requirement, in the morning, for all in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, before heading out to work, to check the daily list prepared by our brothers in the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, for such a blacklist, of what is permitted and what is not, is subject to daily change. That which was a vice in the night can become, with Allah’s blessing, a virtue in the morning. In the end, the opinion of Ghamdi isn’t of great interest to people, what matters is the quest for a legal order that specifies crimes and their punishment in a manner akin to other nation-states. Law should be the shaykh in our midst.
The irreverence of this young lawyer is the price the custodians of religion—armed with the writ and the sanction and the resources of the state—pay for their heavy-handed ways. The legal orders that stick on the ground, that have the consent of those whose lives are anchored in those orders, always run in tandem with prevailing practice and custom and tradition. The Committee and its zealots are no exception to this rule. A strict constructionism—to borrow a term from American legal practice—would need the wisdom to be silent at critical junctures on matters of great controversy, the subtlety in the face of truly contested issues of public life.
The pervasive question of women’s subjection haunts the realm, but no resolution appears in sight. It often seems that the entire theology and cultural life of the land is reduced to the felt need to control the border between men and women, and to keep the women in the confines they have been relegated to. The watchfulness of Saudi society, the absence of joy in the public space, the dreariness of its media—they are all the inevitable outcome of a religious and moral code that segregates the sexes and places draconian limits on the lives of women.
John Stuart Mill never of course ventured into Arabia, or thought about the dilemma of its women. But a reading of his memorable treatise “The Subjection of Women” (1869) speaks to the damage that befalls cultures that accept, and codify, the inequality of the sexes. “The object of this essay,” Mill wrote:
is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinion at all on social and political matters: that the principle which regulates the existing social realities between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
Mill was addressing the disabilities of women in Victorian England. Those pale in comparison with the restrictions placed on Saudi women. There was nothing in Victorian society that came close to the Saudi law of Mahram, which stipulates the guardianship of a male (a husband, a father, a brother) over the conduct of women—their right to travel, to have a passport, to open a bank account, in short, the right to all these things taken for granted in other lands. Saudi women suffocated by the restrictions placed on them are often given to reminding all who care to listen that these restrictions are not timeless, that they have been imposed in recent decades, that they are a byproduct of the oil wealth. (Kuwaiti liberals recall a time before oil when Kuwait City had a brothel in the middle of the city and alcohol was openly available.) Only a society exempt from the brutal laws of economic need and economic rationality could afford the ban on women driving, the broader restrictions on the freedom of women to move about, and the machinery of bureaucratic and legal control that keeps these discriminatory practices in place. Wajeha al-Huwaider, an outspoken, American-educated woman (she had made her way, alongside her husband, to Indiana and Washington, D.C.), a Shi’a from the Eastern Province, recently made that ironic, painful point. “It is interesting,” she told the Kuwaiti daily Awan, in an interview published in July 2009, “that the mothers and grandmothers of today’s Saudi women had all these rights, and enjoyed much greater freedom than today’s women—as did all Muslim women in past eras, such as the wives of the Prophet. None of those women were subjected to this oppressive Mahram law, which is not based on the tenets of Islam and in fact has nothing to do with Islam.”
Wajeha al-Huwaider’s testimony is not unique. Echoes of it can be heard in the laments of so many Saudis concerned about the new power of the religious reactionaries. A man from the southwestern Province of Asir recalled the change in his own lifetime in his mother’s behavior. She had once mixed freely with neighbors, shook hands with male visitors, joined in their conversation. Then it was as though a curtain fell on a whole epoch: she had grown religious, she would no longer receive even a young boy from the neighborhood. More startling to this man, his mother had accepted the change, she and so many others in this once-uninhibited part of the country came to view the past as a time of depravity, a time of jahiliyya, pre-Islamic ignorance. Men and women in Asir, this man added, once lived as though they were on stage: they cherished music and the song, they were away from Najd and its culture and its enforcers. Indeed, they prided themselves on their defiance of Najd, on their deep differences with that severe heartland. They knew that they were not trusted by the political-religious order based in Najd, that their loyalties were suspect and their ways held in contempt. But the dominant order prevailed, he concedes. It has all but extirpated the old ways of Asir. Nowadays, the locals drawn into the mutawwa are more severe than the Najdis, keen to demonstrate their zeal and sternness. The political-religious apparatus had been skilled; it had co-opted the tribes. “What was spared by the tribes, was cut down by the Wahhabi sword, what was spared by the Wahhabis was done in by the tribes.” This man’s mother, and younger people after her, made their adjustment to things beyond their power.
A remarkably similar account is rendered in a work of historical fiction—again, the fiction is mere disguise, a bow to necessity—by the political writer Turki al-Hamad in Ri’h al-Jannah (The Wind of Paradise), published in London in 2005. In this book, Turki al-Hamad picks up the trail of the death pilots and the Saudi “muscle” who were aboard the planes of 9/11. There is the needed narrative license in this book, but it is in the main a work of journalistic reconstruction of that time and of that band of jihadists. Two young brothers, Wael and Waleed, in Turki al-Hamad’s book are easy stand-ins for Wael and Waleed al-Shahri, who were aboard American Airlines Flight 11, which crashed into the North Tower—this was the Mohamed Atta team. The two brothers were in the first-class cabin, side by side, seats 2A and 2B.
Turki al-Hamad is nothing but a man of the Saudi world, there are excursions into Hamburg and Cairo, but it is the Saudi background and the Saudi young men that interest him the most. The Wael and Waleed in his account are ordinary boys from the mountainous countryside of Asir. They love the fields beyond their village, but they dread the field work. They have a pious father, they have for him the respect—and fear—owed him in this culture. It is the father who hustles them to prayer at dawn. There is hushed talk in the family of a time when their father was less of a scold, but they themselves have no memory of that time. They have an older brother who quit the village for the lights of Jeddah and the security of a government job. The older brother comes home now and then, but he has no kind words for the stern ways of the household. One of the two future jihadists has a vague recollection of the girls bringing food to their fathers in the mountains, and he recalls as well the songs of an uncle who sang as he did his work in the fields. But that was before the village “found its way to the path of God.”
That older time of indolence became a dreaded past that no one wants to remember. The mother of the future hijackers tells of that time when women worked the fields unveiled, when they went to hawk things in the market, and took part in mixed gatherings of men and women. “But praise be to God, the preachers, the duaat, descended on the province, they began teaching people the proper way, and women ceased receiving guests or working the fields or turning up in the markets. They donned the veil, we were living in darkness, but God the merciful delivered us into light. Had it not been for these duaat we would have been consigned to the flames of hell.” All this happened, the storyteller says to her son, after the big event, the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979. Once again, that event is seen as the divide between a time of an older freedom in the hill country and the discipline and unforgiving rigor of the new ways. Turki al-Hamad himself is a man from the town of Buraida in Qasim, with its pride of place in the strict Wahhabi orthodoxy. In his narrative, Qasim rides roughshod, and has its way, with the other provinces. These older traditions—and the liberties that came with them—are trampled upon.
That the damage to women is so pervasive need not be belabored. But young men denied normal access to the company, and to the world, of women are damaged as well. That odd brew of belligerent piety and sexual prurience and watchfulness that runs the society is the predictable response to the repression. We don’t have the details and confessions and life histories of Saudi jihadists who cast caution aside to take up the struggle against the order at home (or in lands beyond) in order to draw that obvious connection between sexual repression and compensatory militant zeal. But from Afghanistan and Algeria to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, the “boys of the jihad” carry with them the burden, and the pain, of that separation from women and enforced abstinence. Mohamed Atta’s last will and testament, found in a travel bag that missed its connecting flight on 9/11, spoke of a sexual disturbance and a misogyny surely not his alone. “Neither pregnant women nor unclean persons shall be allowed to take leave of me—I reject it,” the young Egyptian wanted it known. “No woman shall beg pardon for me after my death…. Women shall not be admitted to my burial nor later find themselves at my grave.” To desire and despise women at the same time, to attribute to them hidden, wicked powers that must be controlled: this is the fate of cultures and subcultures that keep the sexes apart.
To make his point about the connection between the freedom of women and “human improvement,” Mill had written that if his society persisted in denying women’s rightful claim to equality, “all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women” will have been a mistake. “They never should have been allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element; and it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or a domestic servant.” The Saudi realm has done much better, and gone much further, than enabling women to read and write; it has enabled them to attain the highest academic distinctions. Yet it continues to hem them in, to deny them (and itself) the dividends of what ought to be ordinary, unencumbered liberties. The rulers plead that the prohibitions in the land are not theirs to overturn, that these are matters of custom, and of faith, that they will atrophy on their own, or they will be reversed by the religious scholars whose domain they are.
As matters stand, women constitute 50 percent of the native population of Saudi Arabia, but only 10 percent of the work-force. In words that (unintentionally) echo Mill’s about the subjection of women, an enlightened commentator, Mshari Thaydi, who had made his own journey into the world of the religious diehards only to break with them, wrote of the contradiction between educating women and then denying them the opportunity to work. “We cannot deny the fact that female university graduates need work and a source of income, not to mention their need to gain the moral satisfaction that comes with employment. Otherwise, there would be no point in arduous study, attending university and paying university fees if it would lead only to women staying at home or fighting over jobs designated for women. Why then give them an education in the first place?” (Asharq Al-Awsat, October 24, 2009).
“My life has not changed much, for all the talk of reform,” a proud younger woman in Jeddah, with the best of education, said with a mix of resignation and bitterness. She was a woman of considerable means, her husband a successful businessman. “I have five cars and two drivers, and I have to try to arrange my life in such a humiliating way so that I can have my children picked up from school. When I go to government ministries for official business, a notarized statement now and then, the normal business in a society burdened by all sorts of regulations, I am dismissed and told to return with my Mahram, my male guardian. The waste of it, things will never change, King Abdullah means well, but the old habits and the old ways have taken hold.”
An older woman, a worldly widow who has known wealth and foreign travel, and years of exposure to Britain and the United States, spoke of the humiliation that came into her life after the death of her husband. Her son, she was told, was now her Mahram. She had raised and nurtured him, she had seen him get the finest American education; she bristled at the thought that she would need his permission to travel abroad, to conduct official transactions with the government bureaucracies. She had submitted to the old ways when her husband was alive, he had been indulgent of her headstrong ways, he had sheltered her from the slights. Now the boy she raised was entrusted with guardianship over her. We were in her splendid beach house on the Red Sea, an open lagoon lay before us, it was nighttime, and a lit-up walkway led to a pagoda over the water. She had secured the property, and the house reflected her taste; servants moved discreetly in the background, and the dinner laid out for us was again reflective of her style and worldliness. She spoke of her time in America, in the 1960s, with her husband, a young couple who knew America in those days when the color barrier between black and white divided American society. She marveled at the election of Barack Obama, knew the details of his electoral triumph. She and a dozen like-minded women, she told me, had laid out to then Crown Prince Abdullah their concerns over the disenabling limits on their lives. This was six or seven years earlier, the meeting had been arranged by Abdullah’s wife. He promised he would do what he could, she had a soft spot for the man, but she, too, could not see him turning back the tide of religious reaction.
In late 2009, the fault line between the modernists and the religious reactionaries and the all-important question of women’s place in the life and labor of the land came into sharp focus when the monarch inaugurated a much-trumpeted project that bore his name, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology. This was a vision of Arabia’s future, a state-of-the-art institution of higher learning with the most advanced technology, located on a desert plot on the Red Sea coast, some fifty miles north of Jeddah. Its curriculum was entirely technical and scientific, there would be no place in it for disputations of politics and the social sciences and the humanities. The king had nursed this project for nearly a quarter-century, the king’s men said. He had granted the institution a $10 billion endowment; the bill for building the campus may have been in excess of $2 billion. Scientists and administrators from the world’s preeminent institutions of higher learning were aggressively courted to staff and lead this institution. But the old matter of the mixing of the sexes was to rear its head. This university was to be a case apart, it was to be a coeducational institution. The upholders of the orthodoxy braved the storm. A member in good standing of the Council of Higher Ulama, one Nasser al-Shethri—an advisor to the royal court, at that—in an appearance on a satellite television channel that serves as a platform for the religious diehards opined that the “mixing of sexes is a great sin and a great evil.” The cleric had crossed a red line; he was immediately stripped of his membership in the highest clerical body. The king spoke in no uncertain terms, he warned of extremists who “know only the language of hate, fear dialogue, and only seek destruction.” The balance between monarch and cleric was laid bare: the cleric was chastened, he had been misunderstood, he had spoken out of love and regard for the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.
This was in keeping with an old tradition: the struggle over women’s education had always been a seesaw affair. The state would probe what the society could bear; it would step back and let matters run their course, then it would throw its weight behind a tolerable consensus. This had begun in the late 1950s, and the Najdi heartland was particularly zealous in its opposition to the schooling of girls. Educators sent to Najd to open schools for girls were often set upon by the mob and had to seek sanctuary in government offices. We have an authoritative account of this struggle supplied by a Saudi scholar, Abdullah al-Washmi. There is vibrancy in the story he tells, in a book published in 2009 by a publishing house based in Morocco. (The life of culture is so curtailed in Arabia that a book of this kind must find an outlet in Casablanca, Beirut, or Cairo.) It is 1960, and a fairly tolerant monarch, Saud, and his crown prince, Faisal, are keen to introduce public education for girls. The Najdi city of Buraida opposes this “heresy.” There is agitation in the mosques, money is collected to send a delegation to Riyadh to protest this unwanted innovation. Some eight hundred people make their way to Riyadh, led by a local judge. There, they encounter a stern Prince Faisal who is a believer in the cause of women’s education. Schooling for girls is not compulsory, they are told; those who want to educate their daughters can send them to school, those who oppose it can keep them at home. It is the king’s will, they are warned, that such schools are to go forth. Indeed, it so happens that there is another delegation from Buraida in town, they are told—one that came to press the case for girls’ education. There are many in Buraida who don’t want their town left out of the new blessings and largesse of the state.
It wasn’t a straightforward affair, this battle. The chronicler of this struggle tells us that there were many who opposed girls’ schooling in the daytime, and pressed for it under the cover of night. There were also noted men of means who had small private schools for their own daughters and relatives yet who opposed public schools for the education of others. The government alternated between laissez-faire and hard decisions that settled the recurring fights between the traditionalists and their rivals. Police protection was often needed for the new schools and their teachers, and the government provided it. The religious reactionaries fought these changes, then ended up sending their daughters to the very schools they had hitherto condemned. Purity gave in to self-interest. The bloggers and the pundits were having a field day with the handful of religious zealots who had spoken out against King Abdullah’s big, new project. Soon, they prophesied, the daughters of the zealots would be bidding for admission to the prestigious new university. The state wields enormous power, its deference to the reactionaries is often a measure of its indifference to the sensibilities of the modernists. When challenged, the monarch had not blinked. Whether this university would have the “multiplier effect” its enthusiasts claimed for it is an altogether different endeavor. On the eastern edge of this vast country, there is another modern enclave, Aramco in Dhahran. It evokes small-town America in the early 1960s. It has decidedly “liberal” ways. But the world beyond its gates and checkpoints is not governed by Aramco’s code.
There are (obvious) costs to rebellions, and (hidden, silent) costs to societies that opt for the stagnation of the status quo. Saudi Arabia was spared the damage of the so-called revolutions of the Arab and Islamic world. No colonels had risen at dawn and successfully seized the levers of power as the “Free Officers” had done in Egypt, Iraq, and Libya. No “armed imam” had stepped forth, as was the case in Iran, to impose a reign of virtue and terror. A middle class has been spawned by the oil wealth and the stability and by the spread of an educational system, but this class has never put in a bid for independent political power. There are currents borne by the wind which have given the House of Saud its primacy: the belief in conquest and in ghazu’ (the raid) which endows the rule of the Sauds with legitimacy. In the desert fashion they had gone out and conquered the domain, and it is now theirs. The religious calling of the state was tethered to the power of kingly rule: the standing of the Wahhabi religious class and its authority have been a prop to the royal family. Arabia has been swept clean of other interpretations of Islam. The mystical Sufi tradition, long established in the Hijaz, has been overwhelmed; Shi’a communities in the Eastern Province and Ismailis (a small Shi’a sect) in the southwest survive, but they are on the defensive, and bereft of power and resources.
The most worldly part of the realm, the Hijaz—the center of the pilgrimage, at the crossroads of Muslims from as far away as North Africa, India, and Indonesia—has been reduced to subservience. The British-educated political writer Mai Yamani, herself a woman from the upper reaches of Hijazi society (her father, Ahmad Zaki Yamani, had risen to power and fame as oil minister in the 1970s and early 1980s, only to be later sidelined by King Fahd), has written of the erosion of Hijazi power. The very title of her major book, Cradle of Islam: The Hijaz and the Quest for an Arabian Identity (2004), tells of wounded pride and of the passing of a world. Oil income has been merciless: it functioned like a huge wrecking ball. Where pilgrimage had once been a source of considerable wealth, indeed accounting for three-fifths of the new Saudi state’s revenues, oil income has dwarfed the wealth of the Hijazi merchants and notables.
Royal patronage has become a principal source of wealth. The House of Saud could now make or break fortunes. It could enrich Najdi men of business, it could make tycoons of outsiders like the Lebanese businessman Rafiq Hariri—outsiders content to live in the shadow of monarchy, marginal men happy to dwell on the wisdom and asala (authenticity) of the Sauds. Hijazis have been left with a stark choice: subservience to the rulers or a lapse into bitter nostalgia. Even the use of the name of the Hijaz has been discouraged—the proud urban centers of Jeddah, Mecca, Medina, and Taif now go by the name of the Western Province. It is inconceivable that a challenge to the realm could be mounted from the Hijaz. It would be sure to be overwhelmed by the material and cultural power of Najd. Hijazis in the know (Mai Yamani included) see the end of King Faisal’s reign in 1975 as a turning point in their fortunes, for that monarch had been their patron, he had spent his formative years in their midst. His immediate successors—Khalid and Fahd—have not shared his affinity for the Hijaz and its people. More broadly, the loss of Hijazi influence is a product of the changes that have come to the country: the new, strict piety occasioned by the rise of Iran as a rival to Saudi Islam, the seizure of the Grand Mosque by the religious diehards, the price exacted by the Najdi religious class for its support of the monarchy. Najd and the House of Saud would chart their own way. Saudi Arabia would go on to accumulate new clout in the Arab-Islamic world, it would negotiate new terms of engagement with the world beyond. Gone was the edge of the worldly Hijazis.
The Hijazis were of course not alone in this sense of disinheritance in the face of Najdi power. In the southern hinterland, in the Province of Asir, this feeling of alienation runs deep, and we have seen it earlier in the autobiographical novel of Abdullah Thabit, The 20th Terrorist. The Islam of this hill country bore no resemblance to the austere Wahhabism of Najd, and there were sprinkled throughout the province offshoots of the Shi’a faith, Ismailis and Zaydis (another small Shi’a sect), heresies within heresies as the Wahhabi preachers and jurists would put it. “The southern part of Saudi Arabia has been kidnapped and held by a force of religious extremism,” a man from Asir observed to me. “In less than thirty years it has been reshaped, a society that favored life and love and the song has been remade into a stern, unforgiving land.”
The people in al-Hasa (renamed the Eastern Province since 1952) remain the quintessential stepchildren and outsiders of the realm. This coastal country in Eastern Arabia had been conquered in 1913, the first acquisition beyond Central Arabia of the emerging Saudi state. The Shi’a were a majority in Hasa, they were traders and cultivators, they carried on commerce with Bahrain and Basra, Oman and Bombay. They had deep reservoirs of water and date plantations. Ibn Saud was a practical man, he had struck here, Guido Steinberg writes in a perceptive essay, “The Shiites in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, 1913–1953,” because Najd could not produce “the necessary amount of foodstuff for all its inhabitants.” Moreover, the trade routes from Southern Najd went through Hasa to Bahrain, across the Gulf. This population of Eastern Arabia, Steinberg adds, was to “bear the burden” of financing Ibn Saud’s campaigns in Northern Najd, Hijaz, and Asir.
The “pacification” of this unhappy acquisition of the realm—pacification is the right term, I believe—was not a pretty tale. Wahhabi enforcers blew in with the conquest, there were rafida (rejecters of Islam), heretics in need of redemption, there were opportunities for extortion, the people of Hasa were to provide for the conquerors and religious enforcers. A cousin of Ibn Saud, cruel by the harshest standards of the desert, Abdullah bin Jaluwi, was sent there, the undisputed master of all around him, and his reign of terror smothered the independent life of the population. The town of Qatif, almost wholly Shi’a, had put up some resistance, but its scholars and urban notables were decimated: a good deal of their land was confiscated, the unyielding ones were executed or banished into exile. Fanatic Wahhabi warriors drawn from the Ikhwan, the Wahhabi shock troops, were unleashed on the Shi’a. The religious Shi’a ceremonies were banned, driven underground. Ibn Saud was at some remove from the place: he could unleash the official terror and then step in to soften the blows, he would give in to the Wahhabi ulama and then urge greater tolerance. It was hard work appeasing the Wahhabi preachers: they sought nothing less than the extirpation of Shi’ism.
Oil, and the wealth it brought in the aftermath of the Second World War, altered the life of the entire realm and the terms of engagement between the Saudi state and the Shi’a. The burden of taxation could be lifted, the zeal of the Wahhabi preachers and judges was checked. The great force in the land, the Arabian American Oil Company, gave new opportunities for the Shi’a, since the oil complex and the oil bounty were in their midst. An unsentimental realism had settled upon the Shi’a. Save for a maximalist or two who would speak of secession of this territory from the Saudi realm, they resigned themselves to their fate. The state and its ruling creed were not theirs, the Sauds could dispense a measure of mercy but not much more. The protest that erupted in 1979—in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution—put on display the unhappiness of this population, and then its inability to throw off the Najdi dominion.
A thoughtful Shi’a intellectual from Qatif wrote to me in November 2009 about the unease of the Shi’a in the midst of a tangled fight on the Yemeni-Saudi border. “Our walls are probably higher than the Berlin Wall. The clashes with the Houthis in the south led many to question Saudi Shi’a loyalty to our country. We had to give a renewed declaration of loyalty, exactly as we did in all previous events where the Shi’a were involved, as you see, we are treated as members of a sect rather than citizens.” The Houthis were Yemeni rebels, doctrinally they were Zaydis, an offshoot which by strict religious criteria is closer to the Sunnis than it is to the practice of Shi’ism. The Houthis were caught in a struggle against the secular autocracy of the Yemeni strongman, Ali Abdullah Salih: they sought autonomy in the northern part of their country. Their leader, Hussein Houthi, after whose tribe they are named, had fallen in battle in 2004, but the rebellion had persisted. The Yemeni strongman had pulled off a familiar political trick: the standoff with a band of rebels was turned into a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia. The autocracy in Yemen knew no other trick. It needed Saudi patronage, and the clashes on the Yemeni-Saudi border were a natural concern of the Saudis. The rulers in Riyadh loathed the Houthis, and they had a congenital worry about the loyalty of the Ismailis and the Zaydis on their side of the border. No sooner had this Yemeni crisis begun to grow more deadly than the Wahhabi diehards stepped forth. In their eyes, the sins of the Houthis were the sins of the Shi’a everywhere—Iran and its tributaries in the Arab world.
The Shi’a intellectual who wrote to me of this new burden to his community was a man of his country, a reformer in the best sense of the term. But the culture of his country imposed its demands on him. It was in that spirit, and to ward off those charges of Shi’a disloyalty, that the leading Shi’a cleric in the Eastern Province, Shaykh Hassan al-Saffar, issued a statement of support of his country. “I can not help but stand by my nation against any violation to each span of its territories…. We are all partners in this nation and we must have a unified stand with the leadership against any aggression.” Saffar called on Yemenis to “solve their problems inside their borders,” and he had a plea to make, subtle but important in this climate, to the media and the writers in the Muslim world to refrain from “using sectarian language which harms the interest of the nation, especially in such sensitive circumstances. May Allah protect our country from all evil, and keep it safe from the intrigues of all aggressors.”
I have met Shaykh Hassan al-Saffar, a man of deep culture and moderation. Months earlier, I called on him in a humble, small house that served as his office in Qatif. A trim, almost stylish man, born in 1958, he treated me to a simple lunch. He wore the tight-fitting tunic of a religious scholar and a white turban. The wire-rim glasses reflected the style of the man and his scholarly aura. We ate with plastic utensils, from paper plates, the meal the standard fare of salads and some chicken and cans of soda, brought in from a small establishment nearby. This was worlds removed from the palaces of the royals and from the glitter of Jeddah. The setting and the meal couldn’t have been more spare, but the man himself was self-possessed and forthright and free of any dissimulation. He had behind him a life of political activism and opposition. He had known exile in Iran, Kuwait, and Syria. He had been something of a revolutionary in his youth, but he had made his peace with the rulers, reaching an accord with them back in 1993, when he returned to his homeland to work within the bounds of the political-religious order. More radical scholars and activists had seen that accord as a deed of surrender, but he would live with the choice he made. He had no aspiration to rule, no dreams of secession of the Eastern Province tugged at him. When I called on him, a more radical Shi’a scholar, Nimr al-Nimr, from a village on the outskirts of Qatif, had provoked a small storm by warning that the dignity of the Shi’a was more precious than the homeland and by speaking openly of the threat of secession. Shaykh Nimr was then a wanted man, he had gone underground, and young men stirred up by his passion had rallied to him, held vigil in front of his house. This was not Hassan al-Saffar’s way. The Iranian religious utopia was not his, the passion of the Houthi gunmen was for this man an alien endeavor. He was in this country, but not fully of it. He would be called upon, time and again, to demonstrate his fealty to it.
The country, and its dominant religious creed, were what they were. A Shi’a cleric with social and political awareness had his work cut out for him. In the aftermath of the terror attacks in 2003 and 2004, and the scrutiny of the outside world, the custodians of power had signaled that they understood that all was not well in the realm and that religious extremism had to be reined in. But the religious class had its passions, and the powers that be in the political arena could not always control them.
There was something of a nonaggression pact between the dynasty and the religious class. So long as the preachers and the scholars acknowledged the primacy of the rulers, they were relatively free to indulge their passions and phobias. Much was made of the appointment to the Grand Mosque in Mecca of a black man, Shaykh Adel Kalbani. He was dubbed the Barack Obama of his religious guild; a racial barrier had fallen. But Kalbani soon provoked a storm in mid-2009, when he opined that the Shi’a religious scholars were heretics and apostates. Another scholar in Riyadh, Shaykh Mohamed Arifi, did him one better: he launched an attack against the most revered figure in the Shi’a religious constellation, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, in Najaf, Iraq, branding that singularly moderate jurist heretical and corrupt. Yet another Wahhabi preacher decreed it impermissible, haram, to sell property to the Shi’a anywhere in the kingdom. This zeal was bottomless. It was impermissible, too, another man of the religious establishment advised, for a believer to visit his Shi’a neighbors or to return their greetings. The monarch could sponsor an “interfaith dialogue,” he could journey to Madrid and New York, as he did, and convene international gatherings of religious figures from the world over. But the religious gatekeepers and enforcers had their deeply held beliefs about the ways of the faith. And the Shi’a religious scholars and lay activists were justified in their sense that the monarch had ventured abroad to mend fences with Jews and Christians while leaving the Sunni-Shi’a schism in his homeland to the mercy, and the agitation, of the Wahhabi extremists.
A worldly scholar of Hassan al-Saffar’s sophistication and exposure to the modern media and the outside world was alert to his community’s humiliations. He knew the ways of the Wahhabi establishment—the bigotry of the extremists within its ranks, the silence of others who quietly spoke of their unease with extremism but left the debate, and the new television channels and the pulpits, to the diehards. There was a contagious fever of extremism at play in the land, Saffar noted in a wide-ranging interview with the website of Al-Arabiya television in early January 2010. He was under no illusions about the balance of things in Saudi religious life. The Salafis (the fundamentalists, the religious reactionaries) had the upper hand, they had unlimited access to the media, they had the educational system and the judiciary, and precious few were willing to challenge the worldview they propagated. For their part, his Wahhabi rivals were secure that this land, the Arabian Peninsula, was theirs and theirs alone. Saffar could plead that the kind of sectarian bigotry loose in the land led to the estrangement of Saudi Arabia from the Shi’a in other Islamic countries, but this was a hollow threat: the Wahhabi establishment had no interest in an accommodation with other sects. It was one thing to step aside and let the monarch pursue a dialogue with Jews and Christians and Hindus, it was quite another to strike compromises with the rafida, the Shi’a heretics, over Islam itself.
In a penetrating and suggestive study of Castile in the mid-seventeenth century, historian J. H. Elliott described that Castilian world as a nonrevolutionary society. The material for revolt was in place, Castile had succumbed to a sense of defeat and disillusionment but was not overtaken by the revolutionary change that struck France and England. It fell back on its belief in kingship, the poderosos (the powerful ones, the oligarchical forces) threw their weight behind the monarchy. Elliott’s narrative is remarkably close to the trajectory of Saudi history. Kingship rescued the Saudi world in the 1960s under Faisal, and gave it relief under Abdullah three decades later. Saudi Arabia would not pay the price of a generalized revolt. The militants of Al Qaeda could not win. The appeal of Osama bin Laden was never tested in the Saudi kingdom. He never came back from holy war abroad to summon the faithful at home. Would Najd have risen to his cause? There are grounds for skepticism as to the ability of that particular challenger to upend the monarchy. He was an outsider with a Yemeni father and a Syrian mother—and the descendant of a merchant—in a culture that gave honor to princes and to conquest.
In the absence of a generalized revolt that would impose a new social order, the realm is likely to muddle through. There will be bloggers pushing for reform, there will be modern, stylish women forced to step out into the public domain wrapped in their abayas and denied the right to a normal, whole life. Small changes will seem like large breakthroughs, a realm of this kind places severe limits on creativity. In 2005, there was an excited buzz in the country about a novel by a young Saudi woman, Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of Riyadh, which was released in Lebanon. The genre of the novel, in its modern form, had not been an Arabian one; poetry was the cultural medium of choice in this land. In any generous evaluation, this novel was a terrible literary disappointment. It yielded no insight into the society, it depicted the empty lives of a handful of wealthy young women. Its vindication lay in the act of its publication and no more. Its literary quality recalled the novels published in Cairo early in the twentieth century when modern fiction made its appearance in Egypt. Censorship and self-censorship limit what Saudis can say—and how far into the world they can see. In her author’s note to the English translation of her novel, Rajaa Alsanea comes across as more the eager “ambassador” of her country than a writer challenging the codes of a restrictive culture.
It never occurred to me when I wrote my novel, that I would be releasing it in any language other than Arabic. I did not think the Western world would actually be interested. It seemed to me, and to many other Saudis, that the Western world still perceives us either romantically, as the land of the Arabian Nights and the land where bearded sheikhs sit in their tents surrounded by their beautiful harem women, or politically, as the land that gave birth to Bin Laden and other terrorists, the land where women are dressed in black from head to toe and where every house has its own well in the backyard! Furthermore, coming from a family that values other cultures and nations, and being the proud Saudi I am, I felt it is my duty to reveal another side of Saudi life to the Western world. The task was not easy, however.
This was no heretical literary canon in the works. This was not an author who had come forth to challenge the verities of her world.
Countries have horizons—limits of the imagination, a sense of things that can and cannot be, imagined futures. Rulers and subjects and dissidents alike in this Saudi realm seem committed to the realm as it is—the rulers for the obvious advantages power grants them, the citizenry because they can’t conceive how an order so intricate and entrenched could be taken apart and then put together again. The Saudi order could fend off the challenges—and the examples—of other lands. Across the border, there was the principality of Kuwait: women could drive, and vote, and run for the national parliament. There were several churches in Kuwait City where a variety of denominations could worship in broad daylight. In May 2009, several women contested the parliamentary election, and four of them—two Sunnis, two Shi’a—were elected to a parliament of fifty members. A barrier had been broken, this was the first time women had been elected to the national assembly. The four women were professionals of high educational accomplishment. The Islamists had agitated against the propriety and legitimacy of women running for the parliament. But Kuwaiti opinion was done with that prohibition. This was not a distant European example—it wasn’t even Iraq, where women had a big role in the parliament—but a dynastic state nearby. Still, the Saudi system could take that Kuwaiti breakthrough in stride. The upholders of the Saudi order have never had a high opinion of parliaments and of open parliamentary debates where matters of state are laid bare. For the Saudi rulers and their allies in the religious establishment, Kuwait was a small principality, boisterous and given to political disputes, a land without the blessings and the limits imposed on a country that was home to Mecca and Medina. This Saudi realm of reserve and religious probity and caution—a prying, watchful society—would move at its own pace.
Under King Abdullah, Saudi political culture offered an Arabian version of the theme of the “good tsar” that ran through the life of the Russian autocracy. Intermittent, furious rebellions, peasant upheavals, punctuated Russian history as an expanding state herded its people into the modern world. As Paul Avrich aptly put it in a remarkable work, Russian Rebels: 1600–1800, ordinary Russians saw the state as a “giant octopus” which squeezed out their life’s breath.
Yet they always distinguished sharply between the tsar and his advisers. The tsar was their benevolent father, the bearer of justice and mercy, while the boyars were wicked usurpers, demons in human form who throve on the people’s enslavement. To eliminate them—to “cleanse” or “remove” them from the land, as rebel propaganda put it—was their devout wish, for only by demolishing the wall of nobles and bureaucrats, they felt, could the ancient bond with the sovereign, on which their salvation depended, be restored.
In the reign of Abdullah the “good king,” petitions and open letters were full of laments for what has befallen the realm: the obscurantism of the religious class, the plunder of public treasure, the impoverishment of broad segments of the population in a country awash with oil wealth, the growing power of the princes and their expanding and privileged role in the economic marketplace. In those appeals, the monarch is innocent of all these transgressions, a benevolent arbiter who would set things right if only he knew, if the sycophants and the palace guard and the vast royal household would let him in on the sordid workings of the realm.
In this vein, a surprisingly brave and quite sweeping indictment of the state of public affairs was addressed to the monarch by a prominent public figure in early 2010, one Dr. Abdullah al-Hamed, who identifies himself as a member of the “society for civil and political rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.” An exhaustive autopsy that ran well over a dozen pages and was widely circulated through the internet, the petition was prompted by heavy rains which fell on Jeddah in late November 2009. The rain exposed Jeddah’s inadequate sewage system. A large metropolitan area, the kingdom’s commercial capital, lacked a decent treatment facility for its sewage. Massive flooding may have caused the deaths of five hundred people; entire neighborhoods were overwhelmed by the floods. The municipality had been unable to cope with the disaster. Jeddah’s ordeal (like that of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina) became a statement on the shortcomings of the public order and on the gap between the wealth of the realm and the inadequacy of its services.
From the debacle that befell Jeddah, Abdullah al-Hamed ranged far and wide. The “Jeddah calamity,” he wrote, “should have sounded the alarm to awaken us in our country, where the life of the citizen is cheap indeed, and where people were left by the authorities to be swept by floods and the sewers even though billions of dollars were marked for contracts and public works that have never been carried out.” The “princes of darkness” and their cabals of thieves had made off with public money, their theft aided by the absence of a free press that could have taken up the question of corruption. A commission had been established, this petitioner wrote, to combat corruption and to advance the cause of transparency, but it had died in infancy, and nothing came of it. The “culture of corruption” had taken root in the country, the “mafias” had proliferated, all protected by members of the royal household, princes with absolute power, exempt from scrutiny and accountability. The princes, Dr. al-Hamed reminded the monarch, have tightened their grip on the public life. They now run the provinces of the country, they have claimed for themselves domains in municipal affairs and environmental protection and the like that had been the preserve of commoners. And where commoners are left at the head of institutions and ministries, they are “front men” for the real powers—the royals. There had been a tacit agreement in the realm: power to the princes, commerce to the merchants. This division of roles, Abdullah al-Hamed wrote, has been shredded. The princes are now active in schemes large and small: they own restaurant chains, taxi concessions, they are land speculators, they help themselves to lucrative oil deals which enable them to sell oil off the books in world markets. The “second generation” of princes has become particularly good at coming up with schemes for quick enrichment, costly contracts are given to them, while the living standard of the Saudi population at large erodes by the day. In neighboring oil lands, hundreds of billions of dollars have been set up for future generations, but the Saudi realm lacks this protection. A mere 22 percent of Saudis own their homes, the rest are tenants, in a country where oil ought to be the patrimony of all citizens.
This petitioner was unsparing, and was writing of things that were the stuff of gossip—and public knowledge: the land grants given to the royals, the confiscation of public land for private development by the more powerful of the princes, the absentee governors of the provinces who live abroad and return only when there are deals to be made. No one cries “halt” to this abuse; the editors of the major dailies are appointed by the powers that be, not to mention the ownership by the princes and their in-laws of “empires of information,” television channels, newspapers, that glorify the achievements of the “inspired princes” who own these means of communication. “Yes, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, you have issued many reform decrees, but they have not been carried out. The citizenry have lost all hope, there is rampant unemployment among the men and women, but the princes and their courtiers continue to import foreign laborers on whom they impose monthly kickbacks reminiscent of the slavery of bygone age,” al-Hamed wrote. Nothing escaped the net of these princes: a ban some years back on the import of satellite dishes created a black market for that coveted item, and the beneficiaries made fortunes in the process. An open parliamentary life might have exposed the abuse, but silence engulfs the country. It is a petitioner’s trick: the “good king” knows of the abuse and doesn’t, he stands outside the circle of the accused, but that circle is perilously close to him. The structures of oppression and plunder are not quite his, but they answer to him, the beneficiaries are his countless nephews, present everywhere. The “good king,” particularly one so advanced in age, is both a repository of hope and a way of dodging the difficulty of repairing entrenched structures of order.
A perfect storm hit the world economy in late 2008. This, too, in an odd way, served the purposes of the custodians of the Saudi order. To be sure, the Saudis could not emerge unscathed as oil rose to $140 a barrel in mid-2008 before it collapsed to $40 a barrel by the end of the year. The storm touched them, but lightly when compared to the damage that befell economies the world over. International banks pulled back from corporate financing, but Saudi banks were on the whole well capitalized, they had not trusted the new financial instruments. There were no credit default swaps in Riyadh and no populist pressures on Saudi banks to grant loans to those who could not afford to pay them back; their mortgages were not “securitized.” The financial sector did not bulk as large in the Saudi economy as it did in the United States, the European Union, and the other Arab states of the Persian Gulf. As percentage of GDP, the Saudi financial market stood at 75 percent, compared to 97 percent in the United States, 112 percent in the European Union, and an average 104 percent in the other Arab states of the Gulf. In a financial calamity that hit equities without mercy, the Saudi foreign assets were heavily invested in U.S. Treasuries. Caution had shown up the new financial instruments and their creators.
For more than a decade, the Saudis had had a case of Dubai envy and resentment. There was “buzz” about Dubai and swagger. The foreign press was smitten with the city-state, its ruler Mohamed bin Rashed had become something of an international celebrity, he had reinvented a place of little consequence and endowment into a hub of commerce, finance, and tourism. The expats loved Dubai and its extravagance—the Dubai World Cup, the world’s richest horse race, had become an event of note on the calendar of the well-heeled; real estate speculation knew no restraint. But the boom had been built on debt, and the economy of Dubai had gone bust. Hundreds of cranes and dredgers ground to a halt. Those pundits and outsiders smitten with Dubai had moved on. Countless expats deserted the place. The Saudis had felt vindicated by the stumble of Dubai. They were not given to this kind of exuberance, their restricted mores would not permit the night life and liberties of Dubai. They had opted for a safer course, they had avoided the speculative investment in real estate that had become the norm in Dubai and other Arab states of the Gulf, and could feel that they had been good stewards of the oil windfall that came their way in the 2003–8 years.
“We have seen wealth come and go, and come back again,” a young businessman with an American education and an international reach said to me.
But some of our fundamental problems persist. We still can’t get good schooling for our children, and those of us who can afford it send them abroad. We are supposed to hire Saudis, but we don’t have the right kind of Saudis to hire. When we give them jobs, they turn up and idle the time on their mobiles talking to their friends—the work is done by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. We have not undertaken the reforms we need, our wealth hides our troubles. We have a good and decent king, but beneath the level of kingship, the old ways prevail.
There are highly motivated individuals within the system, younger men in their thirties and forties, they mean well, a peer of his, a policy analyst for the government, added. But the bureaucracy, awesome in size and now deeply entrenched, stifles them. They can’t turn things around with the ease that an earlier generation of technocrats, starting from scratch, had been able to do.
The outside world comes to Saudi Arabia, but largely on Saudi terms. Former American officials (even a former president or two) in search of deals and speaking fees are commonplace in Jeddah and Riyadh: they say little about the internal practices of Saudi Arabia, and know little about them. The economic pressures weigh heavily on the industrial democracies and their leaders: when those leaders turn up in Arabia, they do so for big economic projects and contracts vital to their workers and corporations at home. Saudi self-confidence has grown with the years. China has risen, and its model of economic openness and political autocracy is congenial to the Saudis. As more Saudi oil was finding its way to China, India, and Far Eastern markets, the Saudi sensitivity to the norms of the democracies, never particularly strong to begin with, has eroded. The Chinese come for commerce, and nothing else, they want secure oil supplies and deeper inroads into a lucrative Saudi market. They have nothing to say about the internal order of the Saudi state. Indeed, they themselves are as compulsive as the Saudis about warding off outside intervention in their affairs.
The Saudis are quite assertive about the uniqueness of their world, their land being the birthplace of Islam, home to Mecca and Medina. In the scheme of things, they have laid claim to a heavy dosage of cultural autonomy, declaring outsiders largely unfit to judge them. For better or worse, the Saudis are on their own, their world what they make of it themselves. This truism breaks down when the Saudis venture abroad, when their charities and their preachers, and their young, pitiless jihadists, and their well-financed media intrude on other lands, denying those lands the tranquility the Saudis crave for themselves. In a world where Saudis stay at home, their educational curriculum would only be a concern for the students taking in that knowledge, and the parents weighing the merits of what truths are transmitted to their children. But the outside world is perfectly entitled to judge the Saudi worldview when young men forged in that culture take what they have been given and taught, carry their wrath and their dread of “the other” beyond Saudi borders.
The ethos of the Arabian Peninsula’s cultural uniqueness can become an all-too-convenient alibi for intolerance and self-righteousness. There can only be one true faith in Arabia and one true doctrine of that faith (the Wahhabi creed) while other countries, “normal” lands, can be judged by one and all. Thus a country that denies the Shi’a minority in the Eastern Province access to the military and to diplomatic posts, and to the full sense of citizenship and belonging, can grant itself the right to sit in judgment on the way Iraq negotiates its way out of the sectarian impasse between the Sunni rulers of the past and the new order that gave the Shi’a of that country political primacy. In the same vein, the irony is lost on a Saudi political and religious class that agitated against a Swiss vote which rejected the construction of new minarets in Switzerland as it overlooked the draconian limits and restrictions on any form of non-Islamic practice in the kingdom. The Sunni clerics calling for an economic boycott of Switzerland, in the aftermath of that country’s decisive vote against new minarets, on November 29, 2009, couldn’t comprehend the great irony of their passion. They were demanding of the Swiss tolerance they haven’t asked of themselves. In their view of things, their country’s uniqueness acquitted it of the burden of reciprocal tolerance. The kingdom, observed one religious figure, the imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, was the qibla of Muslims everywhere (the direction of the Kaaba in Mecca toward which Muslims must turn during prayers). Thus “not a single church bell will ring in the Saudi territory.” The world may wink at this lack of reciprocity, but damage is incurred by a people who grant themselves that kind of absolution from reciprocal norms.
The regime had answered the military challenge of Al Qaeda, and—no surprise—its “rifle and sword” had prevailed. In mid-2009, in a long-awaited trial of nearly a thousand militants, the criminal courts handed out prison sentences to 330 and sentenced one Al Qaeda leader to death. A discerning observer of his country said that all that was “surgery” when the skill his country needed was knowledge and treatment of “viruses.” The virus of religious radicalism and of intolerance had not been treated, he added. The Ministry of Interior and the police can’t cope with the malady. The order lacked the skill—and the candor—to face that deeper challenge. He was of this order, he said, he was loyal to his country, he had no patience or sympathy for any schemes of revolt. He thought that the rulers were too clever by half, that they exaggerated their ability to control the forces of religious reaction that they had indulged. For now, the rulers had the upper hand, he conceded, but he warned that the zealots were winning in the countryside, in the rural hamlets, and among the urban poor. He saw the religious reactionaries as a cunning, patient lot. They wait, secure in the belief that their worldview is seeping into the land.
“The rulers wink at all this at their own peril,” he added:
Yes, the rulers have the money and the bureaucratic apparatus and the big palaces, but the religious class has the people all to itself. The preachers can summon the people to the causes that stir them, appeal to their passions. We could have had a secular state had we followed in the footsteps of Ibn Saud. But his sons were lesser men, they gave in, the extremists have had their way for a long time now, and there is no way of knowing how this will end. The future of the country is one big unknown. There is a silent crisis in the land, the bombs are not going off, Saudis are not out in open rebellion. But the silent crisis—the young men who can’t marry, who can’t find employment or adequate housing, who have nothing to look forward to—stalks us all, rulers and ruled alike.
The hold of the royals on the country remains quite extraordinary. Saudis—some of them quoted in this text—speak of an increasingly younger country outgrowing the writ of the Sauds. Of this, I remain skeptical. The “opening” of Arabia in recent years bears the mark of the man at the helm, King Abdullah. Perhaps the man was merely an instrument of wider forces at work, a leader who caught a ride on a societal wave of change. Things were changing in the country—the spread of education, the scrutiny of the outside world, the recognition by growing numbers of Saudis that religious radicalism and unchecked zeal had led them and their country to a blind alley—and a shrewd political guardian had sensed that “reform” was the safer course for his realm and his family’s inheritance. The Sauds had been good at assigning different roles to different princes; thus has the dynasty survived and prospered. Doubtless, Abdullah had the writ of the senior princes for the course he embarked upon. The talk of dissatisfaction on the part of this or that half-brother of his was the steady gossip that surrounds this secretive royal house.
But the personal factor matters in a monarchy of this sort. And herein lies the question that can only be a matter of conjecture: what becomes of this reformist impulse when Abdullah passes from the scene? Desert chronicles are not particularly reliable, but the best guess for King Abdullah’s year of birth is 1923. As of this writing, in 2010, the Saudi ruler was in his late eighties. His Crown Prince, his half-brother, Sultan, was only a year younger, and ailing. This Saudi dominion has survived many obituaries of its imminent demise. Younger inheritors will step forth, and they will make their preferences felt as to the balance between authority and needed change. But a process of reform so closely tied to the preferences of an old ruler was one that rendered the more enlightened in Saudi Arabia nervous about the staying power of the changes that have come their way in recent years. What one prince grants, another might be tempted to take back.