Religion is very easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. So you should not be extremists, but try to be near to perfection and receive the good tidings that you will be rewarded.
—PROPHET MUHAMMAD, SAHIH BUKHARI HADITH, VOL. 1, BK. 21, NO. 38
Lulu, invisible in her black abaya, tugs open the heavy steel door of the high wall that surrounds her Riyadh home in the poor district of Suwaidi. The dusty street is empty, but she is careful to avoid exposing even a glimpse of herself to any passerby, as she ushers me onto a tiny concrete courtyard leading to the modest two-story home she shares with her seven children and her husband—every other day. On alternate days he is downstairs with his first wife of nearly forty years, with whom he shares another eight children, all older than Lulu’s brood, who range from ages five to twenty.
As we climb the bare tile stairs to her home, Lulu nods toward the ground-floor door as we pass and says simply, “That is her home, and up here is mine.”
Lulu is a gentle woman in her early forties who speaks halting but passable English, learned as a student at King Saud University. Deeply devout and eager to win a convert to Islam, she has agreed to let me live with her to experience traditional, rigorously religious Saudi life. Converting an infidel to Islam, which means “submission,” entitles one to paradise, she believes, so religion is the centerpiece of her conversation. While Saudis these days can access hundreds of satellite television channels, the Internet, modern shopping malls, and even illicit drugs and alcohol, her home is free of any worldly modernity. The family has one television and viewing is limited to Al Majd, a religious network that bans any appearance by women in its programming. Similarly, the family’s sole computer is used only under Lulu’s supervision and then only for homework, most of it studies of the Koran, or for accessing religious sites. The walls of her home, like those of any devout Wahhabi Muslim, are devoid of photos or any human representations because they are forbidden by this strict interpretation of Islam. She is the primary caregiver to her seven children and has no household help, as the salary of her professor husband can’t cover maids for both wives, and Islam requires that a husband treat his wives equally. Her life is that of a lower-middle-class Saudi: no frills.
Like all Wahhabis, Lulu follows the Hanbali school of law, the most conservative of Islam’s four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Unlike the other schools of law, which employ consensus (ijma), analogy (qiyas), and other rationalist methods to decipher God’s will, the Hanbali tradition relies almost exclusively on a literal interpretation of the Koran and Sunna for guidance. While Wahhabi religious practice is considered austere by most Muslims, the Islam practiced by Lulu and her family is strict even by Wahhabi standards.
By choice, Lulu rarely leaves home. She has no interest in the world outside her home, where her focus is on serving her husband and ensuring that her children follow a strictly religious path. As the days go by, it becomes clear Lulu not only accepts but welcomes the confines of her life. She has no aspiration beyond living life in a way that pleases Allah and ensures her entry to paradise. An essential element of achieving this goal is serving every need of her husband, a professor of hadith, the thousands of stories about the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, collected and passed down by his contemporaries as a guide for devout Muslims’ daily lives. If her husband should be dissatisfied with her or, even worse, be somehow led astray, the fault would be hers. “Men are in charge of women,” says the Koran. “So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard.” Serving Allah means serving her husband.
Lulu’s children, including teenage girls, admire and obey her. I ask Lulu if she wants her daughters to have opportunities she did not have. “No, I pray they have a life like mine,” she says instantly. Her eldest daughter, a student at King Saud University, says, “She is dedicating herself to helping us have a life just like hers.” The daughter, dressed in a modest floor-length skirt and long-sleeved sweater even at home, speaks with deep reverence, not the sarcasm that a Western teenager might use.
Lulu and her household illustrate the deep and genuine commitment of a majority of Saudis to their religion. Most Westerners, who live in an aggressively secular environment, would find it impossible to imagine the pervasive presence of religion, which hangs over Saudi Arabia like a heavy fog and has been a source of stability, along with the Al Saud, for nearly three centuries. But the growing gap between Islam as revealed in the Koran and Islam as practiced in the kingdom is undermining the credibility of the religious establishment and creating divisions among religious conservatives and between them and modernizers. As a result, the religious pillar is cracking, with serious implications for the kingdom’s future stability. But for devout Muslims like Lulu, these troubling divisions simply mean redoubling their effort to follow the true Islam by adhering strictly to the example set by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen hundred years ago.
Even small children in Saudi Arabia can be preoccupied with religion. An hour outside Riyadh in rocky desert terrain, a Saudi family concludes a daylong outing. A bright full moon illuminates the black line of silhouettes in prayer. Ahmad, six, and his father, brother, and sister bend, straighten, and prostrate themselves in unison in the direction of Mecca. I sit alone nearby on a blanket beside the dying embers of the fire, where we cooked chicken kebab for dinner. Observing my failure to pray, a concerned little Ahmad comes over and says, “I need to teach you something.” Sure, what is it? I say. “Do you know what to say when the angel of death comes?” he asks earnestly. Assuming my ignorance, this sweet child immediately provides the dialogue that the dying can expect to have if they want to transit successfully from death to the hereafter:
“The angel asks you ‘Who is your God?’ and you say ‘Allah,’ ” prompts Ahmad. “Then he asks ‘Who is your Prophet?’ You say ‘Muhammad.’ What is your faith? You say ‘Islam.’ Then he asks ‘What is your work?’ and you say ‘I heard and believed in Allah.’ ” It is impossible to imagine a child of that age in any other society on earth being similarly concerned about the hereafter—for himself, let alone a stranger. And Ahmad is the child of open-minded parents educated in the United States.
As both Lulu’s and Ahmad’s stories demonstrate, the emerging divisions and debates have not diminished the omnipresent ritual of religion. Every airport, shopping mall, and government or private office building includes a large area spread with prayer rugs indicating the direction of Mecca, so worshipers know where to kneel and pray. Every hotel room has a sticker on the wall or bed or desk with an arrow pointing toward Mecca. Even new cars often include complimentary prayer rugs so travelers can stop alongside a road and pray. The sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer begins in the predawn hours and is heard four more times throughout the day and evening from mosques so numerous that the effect in cities is a chorus of prayer calls in surround sound. All retail businesses close several times a day, supposedly for thirty minutes but sometimes longer, while men go to pray in designated public locations or at mosques. (Women pray at home, as the strict segregation of sexes means they are not permitted in mosques, even though they were during the Prophet’s time.)
Lying on my pallet on the floor of Lulu’s home, I awake at four A.M. when the muezzin in the nearby mosque begins to call “Allahu akbar,” or “God is most great.” He repeats twice, “I testify that there is no god but God.” Then he adds, “Hurry to prayer. Hurry to salvation. Prayer is better than sleep.” Soon I hear the sound of men’s sandals clickety-clacking down the stairs outside my door, as Lulu’s husband and two teenage sons rush to the mosque. The big steel door clanks shut behind them. Then silence.
A few hours later Lulu’s husband, sole driver of the family’s SUV, drops the children at a special school that focuses on teaching students to memorize the entire Koran by ninth grade. Along with study of more conventional subjects. Even when her husband and children are out, Lulu almost never leaves home. All her interests are there. Asked if she would like to drive, she seems genuinely puzzled. “Why would I want to drive? In Islam it is a man’s responsibility to drive his wife and children. Some women just want to drive to have fun. But this is wrong.”
When her husband is home, I am banished to my room, where I read the Koran to pass the time. A religious man like her bearded husband would never mix unnecessarily with a woman who is not a relative, even if she covers her body and face. Indeed, during the week I spend with Lulu, I see her husband only once—when he picks us up from a rare outing to her sister’s home. Fully veiled, I silently slip into the seat behind him, but we are not introduced and the conversation continues as if I were as invisible as Casper the friendly ghost.
Doing Allah’s will is Lulu’s consuming focus. At age nineteen, when her husband offered himself to her family, Lulu willingly chose to be a second wife. “Some men need another wife for many reasons, perhaps to keep from doing something bad,” she explains, clearly meaning adultery, though she doesn’t speak the word. “I prayed to Allah, ‘Let me do this if it is good.’ ” She is separated from the first wife only by a set of stairs, yet they rarely visit. “It is natural that sometimes there is jealousy,” she says, “if he gives her a gift or spends more time there. But I just say ‘humdililah’ [praise be to God].” She beats her breast with her fist for emphasis.
For someone accustomed to an overactive American life, the ennui in Lulu’s home is frustrating at first. After a few days, however, it begins to feel eerily similar to my youth in Matador, a tiny windswept West Texas town, in a home with strict religious parents—a father who read the Bible every night and a mother who, like Lulu, served him and was subservient to him. We had no television or telephone and few escapes other than attending church every Sunday morning and evening. So boring was that existence that as a teenager I set myself the goal of emulating the town’s newspaper editor, who had ventured as far as California—a wider ambition wasn’t imaginable in my limited life, so I surely didn’t ever dream then of any place as distant or exotic as Saudi Arabia. My later fascination, over a thirty-year career as an international reporter and editor, was with the myriad places to which I traveled and the diverse people I met. Now here I was far from Matador but once again confined to a home focused only on religious asceticism similar to that of my family.
Clearly Lulu is a genuinely devout woman who sincerely wants to save me. Just as my father forbade shorts and pants, Lulu tells me that my pants and sweater are not pleasing to God. Lulu would no sooner wear a pantsuit even at home than run down the street naked, because anything that reveals the human form is forbidden. My floor-length black abaya similarly is gently criticized because it fits across the shoulders and features modest decoration on its long sleeves. Fingering the blue and orange stitching, she says, “This is wrong. Your abaya shows the body, and this decoration attracts men to look at you.” Outside the home, Lulu and her daughters shroud head to toe in shapeless black abayas that are akin to wrapping oneself in a black bedsheet. Before exiting, they also cover their faces with a separate black niqab, securing it firmly in a knot behind their head. The niqab features a slit for the eyes, but these devout ladies cover even that slit with another black cloth, which can be flipped up or lowered over the slit depending on whether one needs to see clearly.
From the first day until the last—and on subsequent visits to her home—Lulu is persistent in seeking to convert me to Islam. On my first day, she seats me before the family computer to watch an hourlong video of a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Texas explaining his conversion to Islam. When this example didn’t induce my conversion, she next issues a stern warning: “It is very bad to die believing Allah had a son,” she says, debunking Christians’ view that Jesus is the son of God. “Allah has no sons.” When I observe that Christians, like Muslims, believe in one God and that a righteous life on earth is required to gain admission to heaven, she politely rejects any equation between the two religions. “It is bad for you to believe Christians have their religion and Muslims have theirs. No,” she says emphatically, “you must believe in Islam. Allah says this.”
Finally, when this conversion effort fails, a disappointed Lulu assumes it can only be fear, not any failing of Islam. “Why are you not a Muslim, Miss Karen? What stops you? Are you afraid of some people in your country when you go home?”
Lulu represents the cloistered and benign Islamic conservatism that the Al Saud and their religious partners, the Council of Senior Ulama, profess to believe dominates the kingdom. Lulu wishes she were in such a majority but says fewer than 50 percent of women any longer share her views and lifestyle. Lulu is not interested in the world beyond her walls—or even in the here and now—but only in the hereafter. She is far more concerned about whether God had a son than about which elderly son of Abdul Aziz will next rule Saudi Arabia. She is content to criticize those outside her walls who adopt modern ways she considers non-Islamic while focusing on preserving her family’s religious piety inside her walls. A greater openness in recent years has allowed some Saudis to choose a more liberal lifestyle—where men and women sometimes mix, where women can check into a hotel without a male relative, where there is even talk of women being allowed to drive; but if it were to become the new norm, Lulu would undoubtedly resist adapting with all her might. This is the challenge for the kingdom: how to accommodate those citizens who want more freedom to change and those, like Lulu and her family, who truly see change as a road to hell.
As old divisions among tribes, regions, genders, and classes grow ever more visible, religion’s ability to serve as a unifying force is becoming weaker. Indeed, rather than unifying Saudi believers, Islam is now becoming another source of division. This is true for at least four reasons.
First, the Al Saud have politicized Saudi Islam. For two decades they used their religious establishment to support jihadists in Afghanistan and religious extremists at home. Then they abruptly switched course in 2003 to insist that the same religious leaders promote the regime’s campaign for a kinder, gentler interpretation of Islam, to undermine Islamic extremists, whom the Al Saud belatedly recognized as threatening their rule. This shift, which followed the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists inside the kingdom in 2003, has led many Saudis, moderates as well as conservatives, to view the religious establishment, or Council of Senior Ulama, as apologists for the Al Saud and, worse, as indirect puppets of America. The Al Saud regime always has been the dominant partner in the relationship with religious leaders, but in recent years the religious partner has come to be seen as so openly compliant with Al Saud political needs rather than Allah’s commands that it has lost much of its credibility—and as a consequence, the Al Saud also are losing theirs.
Secondly, while Islam often is seen as a very literal faith, whose adherents follow the injunctions of the Koran to the letter, in fact, in the Muslim world, many interpretations of Islam exist. For most of Saudi history, religious scholars of the Wahhabi sect provided the only valid interpretations. But that is changing dramatically with the advent of the Internet and education. More Saudis are reading and interpreting the Koran for themselves. Thus, for example, women seeking more social equality are plucking verses from the Koran to justify an expanded role for women, even as fundamentalists cite other verses to justify keeping them sequestered and subordinated. In sum, the Al Saud and their Wahhabi ulama no longer have a lock on interpreting Islam.
Third, while the many muezzins call to the faithful in scripted words in perfect harmony, the religious voices reaching Saudi citizens these days through the Internet and satellite television are anything but harmonious. Saudi Islam has become discordant. On any given day, at any hour, Saudis are logging on to the Internet or tuning in to a satellite television channel, where they hear a wide range of Islamic voices preaching everything from modern and moderate Islam to extreme fundamentalist and even violent Islam. While the regime tries hard to prop up and promote the authority of its official Council of Senior Ulama by, among other things, creating an official Web site for fat was by this group only (www.alifta.com), the regime has largely lost control of an increasingly diffuse and divided Islam. Thanks to the Internet, fatwa “shopping” is common among young Saudis.
Fourth, modern society presents a whole range of challenges that the Prophet Muhammad did not have to deal with and could not foresee. A youthful population with Internet access to the rest of the world has raised a profusion of issues that are taxing the theology and ingenuity of Islamic scholars. Sheikh Mutlag, a member of the senior ulama and an adviser to King Abdullah, surely didn’t expect, when he was pursuing his religious studies, that he would be called upon to issue a fatwa on the appropriateness of carrying into a toilet a cell phone that included downloaded selections from the Koran. He settled the issue by permitting cell phones in a toilet on the clever justification that the Koran is (or should be) completely “downloaded” into every Muslim’s mind at all times.
Senior ulama are usually stern and inaccessible where foreign females are concerned. But Sheikh Mutlag agrees to meet me to discuss the role of a religious scholar in the lives of Saudis. The sheikh is something of a homespun humorist—a latter-day Will Rogers, the Oklahoma cowboy commentator famous for quips such as “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we pay for.” In a similar vein, when a devout Saudi asked the sheikh if it was religiously permissible to eat a penguin, a remote possibility in Saudi Arabia, the amused Sheikh Mutlag responded, “If you find one, eat it.”
His common touch and practical advice have made him popular with young Saudis, even though some of their elders consider him a buffoon. Those same traits apparently appealed to King Abdullah when he named Sheikh Mutlag an adviser on issues such as whether the kingdom should have a minimum marriage age for girls. Public anger forced this issue on King Abdullah after a Saudi father married his twelve-year-old daughter to his eighty-year-old cousin, who paid the father a dowry of 85,000 Saudi riyals (about $20,000).
While the sheikh declines to disclose his advice to the king, he does volunteer, “If there is harm to the girl, it is forbidden. This is what the Prophet Muhammad said.” When I point out that the Prophet Muhammad was betrothed to the six-year-old daughter of one of his righteous companions and consummated the marriage when she was only nine, an annoyed Sheikh Mutlag waves off any comparison. “Her mother and father and she all agreed,” he says. “And Aisha was not like a nine-year-old today. The Prophet consulted her on all issues.” The sheikh then promptly excuses himself to pray. When he returns, he terminates the meeting, promising to reschedule in a few days. Of course, he never does. But what’s one little broken promise to an infidel?
Or perhaps he was just seeking to chalk up one credit with God. Muslims believe that each human is flanked by two angels who record good and bad deeds. If a believer even thinks of doing something good, the angel records the thought as a single good deed. If the believer actually does what he or she says, God gives credit for ten good deeds. So perhaps this is why Saudis so often make promises even if they have no intention of keeping them. Partial credit is better than none at all.
There are myriad modern issues to which scripture offers no specific guidance. The religious scholars must find justification for any ruling they issue in the Koran, the hadith, or fatwas issued down through the ages, much as late medieval monks pored through scripture to debate how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, even as the Renaissance swept across Western Europe.
To understand where Saudi Islam is going these days, it is necessary to step back and understand its outlines and origins. As Muslims see it today, and have always seen it, Islamic law recognizes five categories of acts: those God requires of man, those recommended but not required (like visiting Medina after the required pilgrimage to Mecca), those God prohibits (theft, alcohol, fornication), those discouraged but not forbidden, and last, those to which God is indifferent and neither rewards nor punishes. Only in this last category is man free to make laws governing conduct. Otherwise, these broad categories govern all legal and ethical conduct of devout Muslims—and of a truly Islamic nation.
There is considerable disagreement among Muslim scholars as to distinctions within and between categories. Religious scholars to this day study and debate fatwas, but all such rulings should find foundation in the Koran, or in the traditions and sayings of the Prophet and his companions, or in the scholarship of Muslim jurists in the first few centuries after Muhammad—in short, in events and judgments made more than a millennium ago.
What is authentic, of course, is sometimes a matter of dispute. The Sunna, the example set by the Prophet’s words, deeds, and practices, is considered the ideal and thus this pattern of behavior is practiced and passed on by pious Muslims. While Christians seek to emulate the sinless life of service that Jesus Christ, their spiritual leader, led on earth, they make no attempt to copy Jesus, the man, in his earthly personal habits, dress, or lifestyle. It is Jesus, holy figure of faith, who matters to Christians. Muslims, on the other hand, see Muhammad as only a man but one worthy of emulating in minute detail as a role model for daily life.
“For nearly 1,400 years Muslims have tried to awaken in the morning as the Prophet awakened, to eat as he ate, to wash as he washed himself, even to cut their nails as he did,” writes Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Muslim scholar, in Ideas and Realities of Islam. “There has been no greater force for unification of the Muslim peoples than the presence of this common model for the minutest acts of daily life.”
The actual religious requirements of Islam are quite simple—in contrast to the requirements of religion in daily life. To be a Muslim, one has only to fulfill five requirements. The first is the shahada, or statement of belief: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Say those words, and you are a Muslim. The second requirement is that a believer pray five times daily, an act of worship that reminds man that he must submit to God’s will rather than his own. The third is the requirement that every Muslim pay zakat, an annual tax of 2.5 percent on all his various forms of wealth, not simply his cash or income. The fourth is fasting during the holy month of Ramadan from sunrise to sunset. And finally, good Muslims must make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime if at all possible.
The obligatory Muslim prayers, or salat, are not requests for intercession or offers of thanks, as common Christian prayers are. While Muslims also offer this sort of prayer, or du’a, the salat is something very different. It is a precisely regulated, formal ritual that features bodily bending while repeating specific verses from the Koran and that climaxes in prostration to God in the direction of Mecca to demonstrate submission to God’s will.
The entire procedure requires nearly ten minutes and can be performed only after the worshiper has properly purified himself—and his heart—for the act of worship. This washing, or ablution, is a critical part of preparing for prayer; it requires the worshiper to wash his hands up to the wrist, rinse the mouth, clean the nose, and scrub the face, forearms up to the elbows, head (by rubbing a wet finger from the forehead to the nape of the neck and back), ears, and finally feet. The Prophet is quoted as saying, “The key to paradise is prayer [salat] and the key to prayer is purification.”
When Muslims pray, they begin in a standing position and repeat the opening sura of the Koran:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,
The Compassionate, the Merciful
Owner of the Day of Judgment.
Thee only do we worship; and unto Thee alone do we turn for help.
Guide us to the straight path,
The path of those whom thou has favored; not the path of those who have
earned thine anger nor of those who go astray. Be it so.
It is routine for a Saudi—male or female—to interrupt a conversation to pray. Men go to a nearby mosque, while women cover themselves and pray wherever they are indoors. Other times, in public places, a man will simply roll out a prayer rug in the lobby of a hotel and fall to his knees as others continue to traipse past, scarcely taking notice of the prostrate worshiper. Occasionally, a host will simply prostrate himself across the room, leaving his guest to watch as he subjugates himself to Allah.
Against the backdrop of all this religious tradition and ritual, every decision taken in Saudi Arabia by anyone from the king on down involves religion. But religion cannot serve to direct society down a common path when the religious guides themselves are divided. So beyond the cacophony of Islamic voices now bombarding Saudis from television and the Internet is the even more serious spectacle of a religious establishment at war within itself.
In recent years, the senior religious scholars have publicly criticized first the king and then each other over the issue of the religious rectitude of men and women mixing. The king’s firing in 2009 of Sheikh Shetri, a member of the senior ulama who criticized the mixing of men and women at the king’s new namesake university, unleashed the unholy spectacle of other compliant ulama suddenly discovering and disclosing that, lo and behold, the Prophet himself had mixed with women, even to the extent of allowing unrelated women to wash his hair. Then the head of the Hai’a, or Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, in the holy city of Mecca, Sheikh Ahmad Qasim al Ghamdi, not only supported men and women mixing in public places but also said he instructed his mutawa’a, or religious police, not to interfere with such mixing. The grand mufti, the kingdom’s senior religious scholar, then got involved and (according to Saudi newspaper reports) told Sheikh Al Ghamdi to stop making statements about religious issues that aren’t his concern.
This display of discord played out in the media and became fodder for conversation and comment across the country. Under pressure from religious conservatives, the head of the Hai’a in Riyadh fired his chief in Mecca late one Sunday night. So the public was treated to the added spectacle of the king’s appointee firing the king’s defender. This paradox was not lost on King Abdullah, so things got worse. Within hours of the firing of Sheikh Al Ghamdi, the Hai’a issued an embarrassing retraction: “The information sent out today concerning administrative changes at some Hai’a offices, particularly those concerning Mecca and Hail, was inaccurate, and the administration has requested editors not to publish it.”
It was too late. Both the firing and the retraction had become major news, not only on the Internet and television but even in the controlled print press. Outraged conservatives went to Sheikh Al Ghamdi’s home, demanding to “mix” with his females. The sheikh also reported receiving angry text messages, and still other outraged opponents scrawled graffiti on his home. In another unprecedented move, the unrepentant Sheikh Al Ghamdi went on television after Friday prayer, when most Saudis are home relaxing, to defend himself and say of his fellow Saudis: “Most people want to be more religious than the Prophet. I don’t expect to change them. They are fanatics. I just want to tell the truth because the relationship between men and women is not war.”
While this kind of open, divisive debate is taking place within the official religious establishment, that establishment also is coming under external attack from respected fundamentalist and also moderate religious scholars. At the moderate end of the spectrum is Sheikh Salman al Awdah, once such a fierce fundamentalist that in the 1990s he was jailed for his virulent criticism of the regime. Since then he has moderated his views, helped the regime try to dissuade young Saudis from turning to terrorism, and been granted a weekly television show that became hugely popular with young Saudis, most of whom want to live a genuinely devout life, not one focused simply on the minutiae of religious ritual so popular in the fatwas of the elderly Council of Senior Ulama.
About fifty years of age, Sheikh Salman’s intense face is framed by a heavy black beard, and his penetrating eyes look straight through his rimless glasses at an interlocutor who asks what led to his change in religious views. “There is only one change,” he says. “I am getting older and more logical in my thinking.” This former religious extremist has become a multimedia phenomenon with a Web site (IslamToday.net), a newspaper column, videos, books, and lectures in addition to his television show. The sheikh dispenses advice on contemporary issues and temptations—and along with it, criticism of the society and by extension the Al Saud and their religious establishment. On just one Friday television show, the sheikh criticized the kingdom’s education system as a failure, accused the government of insincerity and inadequacy in its latest plan to create a high-tech revolution in the kingdom, and charged the religious leaders with being more interested in building mosques than in building clinics to serve the poor. “Saudi society is slow to change and has no plan,” he tells a visitor to his home. “So what is coming is a spontaneous change. My project is to teach the young to be honest and deal with each other in a good way. If we can change the young, they might change the country.”
Islam in Saudi Arabia has many faces. The late blind grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz believed the world was flat and was the unchallenged voice of Wahhabi Islam until his death in 1999. (REUTERS)
Islam in Saudi Arabia has many faces. Sheikh Salman al Awdah, among the most prominent of today’s proliferating religious voices, is popular among Saudi youth for challenging Wahhabi orthodoxy. (ABDULLAH AL SHAMMARI)
At the other end of the spectrum from this charismatic moderate is a deeply conservative imam who leads a much more private life but whose critiques of the regime, while less public, are thus free to be even more acerbic. The imam, who asks to remain anonymous, seeks to block out evil and live an austere, ascetic life focused on serving others. He drives a beat-up old car and wears a plain brown thobe cut above his ankles to indicate avoidance of extravagance. When meeting with guests in his home, he himself serves the coffee and tea that are obligatory expressions of hospitality. The imam is surrounded in his study from floor to ceiling by books, which he pores over to perfect his knowledge of authentic Islam. Sporting a frizzy, uncut black beard, a hallmark of conservative religious Muslims, he refuses to shake hands but is willing to converse on Islam and even seeks to convert me. He sums up his approach—and that which he clearly proposes for others—this way: “One who believes in God sees this life is short and he must live for the next life. Some others think this is the only life so they are corrupt and greedy.”
The imam clearly puts the Al Saud in the camp of the corrupt and greedy. He seethes with anger at a regime that he sees as kowtowing to American infidels, encouraging the mixing of men and women, and leading corrupt lives focused on materialism rather than on the hereafter. “We are very weak,” he says. “If the royal family can’t renew itself, the regime will collapse. The young are attacking the government because it is loyal to the United States, not to Islam.”
One year after the spirited religious debate on gender mixing and shortly after the Arab Spring, Sheikh Al Ghamdi was fired and Sheikh Salman left the kingdom for what he said would be temporary self-imposed exile in South Africa. Only the imam, who never went public with his thoughts, remained unaffected by a new crackdown on religious debate imposed by King Abdullah in the wake of Arab Spring rebellions across the Middle East. Eager to ensure the support of religious conservatives inside the kingdom, the monarch imposed a ban on public criticism of the religious establishment, the very kind of open dialogue that he had encouraged for half a dozen years in his efforts to curb religious extremism in Saudi Arabia. But with Al Saud survival possibly at risk from an unhappy, frustrated populace, the Al Saud compass pointed once again in the direction of the religious.
Not surprisingly, Saudi youth have a difficult time navigating all these conflicting currents of Islam. Whether motivated by moderates or by fundamentalists, young Saudis are far more likely to question religious authority than were their parents a generation ago. Meanwhile the religious authorities are faced with the problem of trying to issue fatwas that are relevant to modern life yet more often end up merely pointing up the inadequacy of religious rulings to current issues confronting young people.
So minute and myriad are the issues where religion impacts daily life that the government has established an official Web site for approved fatwas to guide the faithful. The site (www.alifta.com) is intended to discourage young Saudis from following fatwas they find posted on the Internet from some unapproved sheikh at home or abroad who doesn’t represent Islam as propounded by Saudi Arabia’s religious scholars. For instance, one Saudi sheikh issued a fatwa condemning soccer because the Koran, he insisted, forbids Muslims to imitate Christians or Jews. Therefore, using words like foul or penalty kick is forbidden. The country’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh, rejected that fatwa and called on the religious police to track down and prosecute its author. Using a few non-Arabic words, said the grand mufti, is not forbidden, as even Allah used some non-Arabic words in the Koran. (Not incidentally perhaps, the grand mufti understood that soccer is a national passion.)
The official Web site even allows believers to query the ulama, much as Americans of earlier decades used to write Ann Landers for advice on life. For example, one young man asked religious authorities whether, having masturbated during the daytime in Ramadan when he was a teenager (and didn’t know it was forbidden) and then having performed ablutions afterward, he had violated proper fasting and prayer.
The short answer: yes. “First, practicing masturbation is haram [prohibited] and it is even more sinful during the day in Ramadan,” wrote the religious officials in fatwa number 10551. Furthermore, they noted, the young man would indeed need to make up with fasting and prayer for every day he masturbated during Ramadan, because masturbation invalidates his fasting and his prayer, making them void because he failed to cleanse himself with a bath prior to praying.
Not only is masturbation forbidden—so is shaking hands with women. The ulama insist the Prophet Muhammad said, “I do not shake hands with women.” Therefore, modern-day Muslims should follow that example. Ironically, those same ulama have ruled in another fatwa that touching a woman after washing for prayer doesn’t make one unclean and thus does not require repeating ablutions. Similarly, it is acceptable to wave one’s hand to others while saying the Islamic greeting “Peace be upon you,” but it is forbidden to wave one’s hand as a substitute for the words of the peace greeting since waving is a Western practice.
More consequential life issues also are prescribed by the religion. For instance, Saudi religious scholars insist that a Muslim woman must cover her entire body in the presence of a man who is not a relative. While the Saudi religious authorities acknowledge, in a fatwa on veiling, that there is historic evidence of the permissibility of uncovering the face and hands, this, they say, was in practice before the revelation of Sura 33:59 requiring veiling (“O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies”) and before the Prophet commanded women to observe it. Therefore the former is abrogated by the latter.
Some rules apply to all Muslims, regardless of gender. Any sexual deviancy is forbidden. So is any public display of affection between opposite sexes, whether related or married. The only acceptable display of affection in Saudi Arabia (in contrast to the West) is between two men, whose hand holding is seen as a display of trust. Eating only with the right hand is required of all Saudis, because the left is reserved for toilet functions or touching other unclean objects.
Despite its great rigidity, Islam also is pragmatic enough for believers to meet its requirements without excessive hardship. For instance, those who are ill or traveling may forgo fasting during Ramadan and make up for it by fasting another time. Similarly, if a worshiper has no access to water to cleanse for prayer, there is what amounts to a dry cleaning procedure. The process is called tayammum and involves rubbing a bit of sand on one’s hands and face or, if indoors, patting a cushion to make dust rise, a symbolic cleaning.
Educated, modern Saudis, especially the young, often chafe at the restrictive nature of Wahhabi Islam and even more so at the growing gulf between what is enunciated in mosques and fatwas and what is practiced by many of the ruling political and religious elite. Increasingly, traditional, conservative Saudis see the ruling authorities as corrupted, while more liberal Saudis see the same authorities as hypocrites who say one thing and do another.
“Things that used to be haram [forbidden] like music are now everywhere,” says a professor at Imam University, one of the kingdom’s premier religious schools. “We memorize the Koran but we don’t live it.” This man is offended to see the government erect a huge new mosque across from a run-down hospital, and to see a popular Saudi blogger imprisoned for exposing government corruption in an arms deal with Britain. “During the whole of Islamic history, these [the Council of Senior Ulama] are the most corrupt religious authorities.”
A colleague, who confesses to fighting his brother to prevent him from committing the offense of listening to music, says, “We have replaced religion with ritual. Imam University teaches people to memorize, not question.” The insistence that Muslims never ask “how” or “why” dates from at least the tenth century. During the first two centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Islamic scholars debated a range of religious issues, but that pretty much ended in the tenth century. “The efforts to explore the content of faith by reason had led to a confusing mass of theories and views that threatened the community’s harmony,” wrote German scholar Tilman Nagel. So questioning “how” or “why” became forbidden and remains so in Wahhabi Islam.
Glaring contradictions abound. For instance, fatwas from religious ulama forbid the use of gold- or silver-plated dinnerware or utensils. “If anyone drinks from vessels of gold or silver, it is as if the fire of Hell is rumbling in their stomach,” one fatwa quotes the Prophet as having said. The Prophet further said, “Do not drink from vessels of gold or silver and do not eat in plates made from them. They are for them [unbelievers] in this world and for you in the Hereafter.” Yet it is common for members of the royal family to dine at home with silver utensils on food served on gold-rimmed china and to drink from gilded goblets and teacups. Such ostentatious display of wealth, and the contradiction with the Islam practiced by the Prophet, who ate with his right hand from a communal plate of food, disturbs religious purists. “We have become just consumers,” laments the Imam University professor. “This leads to corruption and destruction.”
This growing lack of respect for senior religious authorities, coupled with the increasing availability of other Islamic views to Saudis, is prompting more independent thinking and action in the daily lives of young Saudis. The globalization of the workplace also is altering religious habits. One young Saudi in his twenties who works as a salesman for an international company describes his soul searching over whether to shake hands with a female on whom he was paying a business call for his company. He consulted his imam not once but twice; each time he was told that shaking hands is haram, or forbidden. In the end, he decided to shake the woman’s hand anyway as he felt it was simply good manners. “I shook her hand, and I don’t feel unclean,” he said.
Islam is a religion of doing, not hearing or preaching; of active faith, not passive belief. Like fundamentalist Christians, pious Muslims believe they will be accountable to God at a final judgment day for everything they do on earth, so they want to know precisely what God commands and to please him in all things. The stakes are high.
The Koran speaks repeatedly and graphically of the rewards in store for righteous believers and of the torments awaiting wrongdoers. Those who live by Allah’s commandments “will be honored in gardens of pleasure on thrones facing one another. There will be circulated among them a cup [of wine] from a flowing spring. White and delicious to the drinkers; No bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intoxicated. And with them will be women limiting [their] glances, with large beautiful eyes.”
By contrast, those who have not led humble, obedient lives will find themselves in hell. “We have made it a torment for the wrongdoers. Verily it is a tree that springs from the bottom of the Hellfire. Its emerging fruit is like the heads of devils. And indeed, they will eat from it and fill with it their bellies. Then indeed, they will have after it a mixture of scalding water. Then indeed, their return will be to the Hellfire.”
Even before this final judgment day, Muslims believe, every human being—believer and nonbeliever—must undergo a so-called “grave trial” immediately after death. Once in the grave, the believer’s soul is borne up by angels through seven heavens, whereupon God records the person’s good deeds, and the Angel of Death conducts the grave trial asking, “Who is your God? What is your religion? Who is your prophet?” If the believer successfully answers, a window on paradise is opened for the individual with the words, “Rest in tranquillity.”
But there is no tranquillity for the nonbeliever. His soul is ripped from his body and borne aloft by angels, although he is not permitted to view heaven. Instead, he is returned to his grave for trial. Two angels squeeze his body relentlessly as he fails to answer their questions. He is shown his place in hell, and then the angels hit him so hard his body turns to dust, only to be immediately restored and again hit so hard he crumbles into dust, and so on forever until Judgment Day. Only martyrs are spared the grave trial and allowed to go directly to paradise. Small wonder, then, that jihad appeals to devout young men.
Still, while many Saudis are focused on the afterlife, it is entirely possible to lead a largely Western lifestyle in this birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad—and a very small minority does. While restaurants are limited to serving nonalcoholic beer and wine and “Saudi Champagne” (a mixture of apple juice and Perrier), some private homes of the wealthy feature full liquor cabinets and, in more limited cases, large, well-stocked wine cellars. Children in these households often attend modern schools with international curricula, where girls’ sports teams are acceptable, and teenage boys and girls are allowed to mix in their family homes. The children study voice and dance, listen to music, and watch television. The mothers watch Oprah Winfrey, visit spas, and contribute time to charity work. The fathers gather to drink and talk and watch soccer in each other’s homes. These are, in effect, the Saudi version of the “millionaires and billionaires” in the United States who so trouble President Obama.
Many Saudis can’t afford, or won’t risk, indulgences like alcohol or prostitution while inside the kingdom but are eager to partake of them during travels abroad. Millions of Saudis cross the King Fahd Causeway that connects the kingdom to Bahrain, a sheikdom where they can enjoy cinema, alcohol, and prostitutes or just the pleasure of dinner in a relaxed environment with friends both male and female. Indeed, Saudis give proof to the old saying that opposites attract. The United States—which prides itself on individualism, not conformity, on openness, not secrecy, on rule by institutions, not by a royal family—seems to hold a special attraction for many Saudis, even those who condemn its morals. In this as in so many other things, Saudis see none of what Americans would call hypocrisy in saying one thing and doing another.
By “promoting good and forbidding evil”—even if occasionally indulging in some forbidden conduct—the majority of Saudi society continues to be committed to a righteous way of life and to exhibit a rectitude in public that these Saudis see missing in most Western nations, especially the United States. Isn’t it better, such Saudis ask, to condemn extramarital sex, even while indulging in it occasionally, than to have more than 50 percent of all infants born to unwed mothers, as in the United States? Isn’t it better to drink in private than to have open bars, alcoholics, and drunk drivers menacing the roads?
Saudi society of today is reminiscent of a simpler time in the United States when husbands and wives may have cheated on each other but didn’t divorce; when a majority of Americans went to church even if the sermons didn’t guide their conduct during the week; when unwed mothers were embarrassed about their condition; and when Americans didn’t spill their most intimate secrets on Facebook or on reality TV shows. A healthy level of hypocrisy helped keep guardrails on society so that young people were presented—if only in public—with an ideal model for life.
Saudi Arabia, assaulted by technology and globalization, tipsy from a population explosion that has left more than 60 percent of its citizens age twenty or younger, and clinging to religion as an anchor in this sea of change, is trying to preserve a way of life exhibited by the Prophet fourteen hundred years ago.
For the Al Saud, navigating between those Wahhabi clerics who insist that true religious orthodoxy is one of austere rules (not coincidentally interpreted by them) that must govern every aspect of social life, and those more liberal Saudis who insist that the true Islam of the Prophet is a kinder, gentler religion that loves learning and life, is a pressing challenge. It is compounded by a generational change in Al Saud leadership that can’t be far off, given that all the remaining brothers who could be king are nearly seventy years old or older. So far, the royal family has chosen to let various voices compete in the marketplace of Islamic ideas rather than try to reconcile competing versions of orthodox Islam. But the longer these contending strains of Islam continue, and the more divided Saudi society becomes, the harder it will be for the Al Saud to reclaim the religious legitimacy that has largely cloaked them since the founding of their dynasty.
Ironically, this breakdown in social cohesion brought about by modern development was foreseen nearly seven centuries ago by Ibn Khaldun, an Islamic social thinker (A.D. 1332–1406). An historian, he sought to understand the basic causes of historical evolution that he believed were embedded in the economic and social structure of societies. Often described as the founder of sociology and demography, Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian, in his Muqaddimah (An Introduction to History) outlines two main types of society: primitive and elementary society (jawam al-bedoun) and civilized and complex society (jawam al-hazari). He found asabiya, or social cohesion, greatest in primitive tribal societies. He saw the increasing power of the ruler and of government institutions that characterizes more complex societies, as well as unnecessary consumption and indulgence in luxury by the population, as features that inevitably would lead to a decline in social cohesion and a sense of individual alienation from society. This fourteenth-century analysis pretty accurately sums up the divisiveness and alienation in today’s Saudi Arabia.