Hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided.
—KORAN, SURA 3:103
A child born in Saudi Arabia enters a harsh and divided society. For millennia, Saudis struggled to survive in a vast desert under searing sun and shearing winds that quickly devour a man’s energy, as he searches for a wadi of shade trees and water, which are few and far between, living on only a few dates and camel’s milk. These conditions bred a people suspicious of each other and especially of strangers, a culture largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty. Even today Saudis are a people locked in their own cocoons, focused on their own survival—and that of family—and largely uncaring of others. While survival in the desert also imposed a code of hospitality even toward strangers, life in Saudi cities shuts out strangers and thus eliminates any opportunity and thus obligation for hospitality toward them.
Walk down the dusty and often garbage-strewn streets of any Saudi residential neighborhood, and all you will see are walls. To your right and to your left are walls of steel and walls of concrete. Walls ten or twelve feet high. Western neighborhoods offer grassy lawns, flower beds, front steps, and doorways that seem to invite you in, but Saudi Arabia’s walls are there to shut out strangers—and to shut in those who live inside. The higher and more ornate the walls, the more prosperous or princely are the occupants. But rich or poor, royal or common, Saudis are shut-ins.
If America is a messy melting pot of nationalities, races, genders, and sexual orientations all mingling with perhaps too few guardrails, Saudi Arabia is the precise opposite: a society of deep divisions and high walls. Imagine an entire society living within a maze of myriad walls that block people from outside view but, more important, separate them from one another. The walls of this metaphorical Saudi maze are those of religion, tradition, convention, and culture. As with any maze, there are narrow pathways meandering through, but most Saudis have neither the curiosity nor the courage to explore, much less seek to escape, their prescribed warren.
Inside this labyrinth, the people present a picture of uniformity. From the king to the lowest pauper, men wear identical flowing white robes. Their heads most often are draped in red-and-white cotton scarves, usually held in place by a double black circle of woven woolen cord. Similarly, women—when in public—are invisible beneath flowing black abayas, head scarves, and generally full-face veils, or niqab. The society presents a somber cast as men move about their daily business, because laughter and visible emotion are discouraged by Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia. Encouraged—and everywhere visible—is prayer. When the call to prayer sounds, as it does five times daily, men leave their beds or their work to kneel in rows and prostrate themselves in unison toward the holy city of Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad.
Like the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus for King Minos to imprison his wife’s son, the walls of the Saudi maze have been constructed by the Saudi ruling family, the Al Saud, and its partner, the religious establishment of Wahhabi Islam, to maintain their joint control over Saudis—and to keep them isolated enough that they cannot coalesce around common frustrations.
Beneath the surface, however, cracks in the facades of control and conformity were beginning to show well before revolutionary winds swept from Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli and across much of the Middle East. The regime faces growing challenges from still largely docile reformers and, more seriously, from religious fundamentalists who view the Al Saud as princely puppets of the infidel West and the religious establishment as hirelings of those princes. Meanwhile, the placid surface of traditional society no longer can constrain or conceal its many internal divisions based on tribe, class, region, and Islamic sect. These traditional divisions have been compounded by more recent ones including the growing gaps between rich and poor and between conservatives (who cling to religious and cultural traditions) and modernizers (who believe Islam and greater individualism can coexist). While Saudis still may be publicly passive, they are neither happy nor harmonious.
From birth, they are raised in a religion that encourages submission to Allah and his chosen leaders on earth. Oppression by a bad ruler is preferable to chaos among believers, according to one of the most prominent eleventh-century Sunni Islamic scholars, Muhammad al Ghazali. So Saudis are instructed by religious leaders to obey their ruler even if he is bad. “The religious leaders protect the government from people instead of representing people to the government,” says a male student at Imam University, the kingdom’s premier institution for training religious scholars, reflecting the skepticism, common even among devout youth, of the ruling partnership of the Al Saud and the religious establishment.
A hapless Saudi woman escapes her car during the Jeddah floods. (ARAB NEWS)
Cynical Saudis distort their national emblem with mops and buckets to express anger at the government’s failure to deal with severe flooding in Jeddah in 2009 and 2011.
As this young man indicates, these days life in the labyrinth is under assault. Outside information and influences are penetrating its walls through the Internet, satellite television, ubiquitous cell phones, and social media. Saudi society no longer is shrouded from the outside world and its influences.
Much as Ronald Reagan once challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” a growing number of Saudi youth are tearing at the walls of their national labyrinth. Saudi Arabia boasts 9.8 million Internet users, or 38 percent penetration, according to the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations. And with 5.1 million Saudis on Facebook in January 2012, a 25 percent increase in six months, Saudi Arabia is second only to more populous Egypt (with 10 million users) among Middle East nations in use of this social networking site. (Saudi Arabia ranks 30th in the world, right behind Russia, which has five times the population.) Tellingly, Saudi users are overwhelmingly young (69 percent are under thirty-four), male (69 percent), and single (91 percent). While much of the Facebook chatter is personal, not political, Saudis have learned to connect, and they did so spontaneously—and furiously—when floods swept Jeddah in late 2009 and again in early 2011. The government’s failure to provide proper sewage and drainage systems in this wealthy kingdom encouraged conspiracy theories among angry citizens, who claimed the actual death toll in these floods was ten times the official number of 150 dead. “Add a zero to anything he says about casualties,” a cynical young Saudi professor advises as we watch the prince in charge of Jeddah promising yet again on the evening news to aid victims, punish the guilty, and fix the problem. Unhappy Saudis these days routinely e-mail each other photos of flood damage, destitute children, dilapidated school buildings, and displays of lavish living by princes.
The regime is not blind to these cracks in its walls of control. Historically, when the Al Saud rulers are anxious, they slather on a new layer of religious restriction to hold Saudis inert in the labyrinth. When the regime is more confident, it chips off a small piece of this religious rigidity here and there to give citizens a sense of relative freedom. So, as noted earlier, when the Grand Mosque in Mecca was overrun in 1979 by homegrown jihadists seeking to remove the Al Saud and restore the kingdom to Islamic purity, the royal family tried to appease religious fanatics by forcing an already restrictive religious society to conform to an even more puritanical way of life.
After the shocking terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, carried out mostly by Saudi-bred terrorists, the royal family began belatedly to discern that it had made a pact with the devil. Just how deadly a pact was brought home two years later, when extremists started attacking Saudi targets, not merely foreign infidels. So once again the regime swung into action to combat extremism. With one hand, it got tough on homegrown terrorists, arresting jihadists and trying to root radical imams from the kingdom’s seventy thousand mosques.
With the other hand, the regime relaxed some of the oppressive social restrictions it had imposed two decades earlier. Press controls were partially eased so that newspapers could criticize extremists, suddenly a popular whipping boy of the regime, and even once again publish photos of women. The regime convened national dialogues and, more important, curbed some of the worst excesses of the religious police—at least temporarily. Previously, any fanatic could proclaim himself a mutawa, or religious policeman, and bully his fellow citizens in the name of religious purity. Now the would-be bullies had to be appointed and trained by higher authorities. But as soon as uprisings began sweeping the Middle East, the nervous Al Saud once again began to cement the small nicks in the walls of Saudi society that the king had created less than a decade earlier. The religious establishment was given new money and new authority to expand its reach deeper into the kingdom by establishing fatwa offices in every province. More ominously, King Abdullah issued a royal decree making it a crime for print or online media to publish any material that harms “the good reputation and honor” of the kingdom’s grand mufti, members of the Council of Senior Ulama, or government officials. So much for reform.
Beyond religious rules, tradition also binds Saudis within their walls. Most remain deeply averse to conduct that might be seen to violate social norms and invite shame upon themselves and their families. So myriad unspoken rules bind most Saudis in place as tightly as Lilliputians tied down Gulliver.
The tight-knit tribal unit tracing its lineage to a single ancestor is the key social grouping in Saudi Arabia and remains a powerful force for conformity. Over millennia, to survive the challenges of the desert and of competing tribes, these groups developed a set of core values such as generosity, hospitality, courage, and honor that bound the entire group and preserved its unity. These values, writes David Pryce-Jones in The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs, can be summed up as self-respect, but not in the Western sense of conscience or relationship with God. For Arabs, a man’s self-respect is determined by how others see him. So appearance is everything.
Honor, for Arabs who seek leadership in any sphere, is akin to favorable public opinion polls in a democracy. Loss of respect equates to loss of honor. “Honor is what makes life worthwhile: shame is a living death, not to be endured, requiring that it be avenged,” Pryce-Jones writes. A man who kills his wife or daughter for unfaithfulness simply is preserving the honor of his family and his tribe. “Between the poles of honor and shame stretches an uncharted field where everyone walks perilously all the time, trying as best he can to interpret the actions and words of others, on the watch for any incipient power-challenging response that might throw up winners and losers, honor and shame.” The determination of all Saudis to retain honor and avoid shame cannot be overstated. Understanding this begins to help Westerners like me, accustomed to spontaneity, grasp why Saudis are so passive and conformist.
Something as simple as a wife accompanying her husband on a brief trip abroad is laden with rules and norms that trap her into largely self-induced inaction. A young Saudi mother, the very picture of Western fashion in tight jeans and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, describes with dismay how tradition prevented her mother from accompanying her father on a short trip to neighboring Dubai. If a Saudi woman is traveling, Rana explains, she is expected to visit senior relatives and even close neighbors to bid them good-bye. Upon her return, she is obliged to make another round of visits to the same individuals to pay her respects and dispense small gifts. To simply pack her bag and fly off for a few days with her husband would break society’s conventions and thus disrupt social harmony, exposing her to negative gossip and bringing shame upon her family. So confronted with that heavy load of tradition, the wife simply stayed home. This little convention, multiplied and magnified throughout the Saudi maze, is what consumes so much of the time and saps so much of the initiative of Saudi citizens, confines them to their walled compounds, and restricts them largely to contact among family members.
Rana, the mother of two young boys, insists she is not bound by such cultural conventions: “I advised my mother to just go. But she worries that other people will judge her. I don’t care what people think.” As evidence of her independence, she recounts flying to neighboring Dubai with her two children for a four-day holiday after “only” two weeks of planning with her extended family. “It was as satisfying as if I had gone to the moon, to travel with so little planning,” she says, explaining that normally Saudis require four to six months to check their plans with extended family before finalizing them. Imagine a mother in Paris or New York needing two weeks to clear plans for a long weekend with her children in London or Miami, trips on a par with Riyadh to Dubai! Rana’s “rebellion” clearly indicates that change in Saudi Arabia still consists of very small steps.
For most Saudis, appearances remain far more important than actual behavior, a curious contradiction since Islam teaches that it is precisely individual behavior that Allah will reward or punish on the Day of Judgment. With urbanization, Saudis know little about the true piety of those they encounter in daily life, so appearances have become even more important. To be accepted as pious, a man simply has to sport a beard and short thobe. Covering herself completely in public similarly conveys a woman’s devotion to Allah. This is precisely why many educated Saudi women say they veil: not to do so risks conveying antisocial behavior and being ostracized as liberal.
That this preoccupation with appearance of the flesh, not purity of the heart, can be misleading is illustrated by a little incident that occurred during Ramadan, a month when Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset to draw closer to Allah. Abdullah, a devout Muslim, driving to a predawn breakfast, recounts how his car was struck at an intersection by an SUV, whose driver sped away. Abdullah gave chase while calling the police. Nearly half an hour later, the offending driver finally stopped as he approached his own neighborhood. “Please don’t confront me in front of my neighbors,” the culprit begged. A disgusted Abdullah recalls, “He was only concerned about being humiliated in front of men, not that Allah had already seen his bad behavior—and in Ramadan, when we are supposed to be focused especially on Allah.” As always, appearance is all important.
All this focus on appearances leads to timidity among Saudis. A reform-minded government official who spent decades working for a powerful prince with whom he remains friends is willing to confide to me his scathing criticism of the royal regime and his deep pessimism about the future of Saudi society, a view he didn’t express a quarter-century ago, when I first met him. What, I ask, does his princely friend think of his analysis? Nothing. The official never dared mention his critique to the prince, and it clearly has never dawned on him that he might do so. Whatever truths are told furtively in the private sitting rooms of Saudi society, they rarely are told to power. And this clearly leaves a gaping hole in the rulers’ knowledge of their people’s genuine points of view.
Why, we might ask, are most Saudis so docile? After all, this is a culture that prides itself on the courage of ancestral tribal warriors raiding visiting caravans to ancient Arabia—and battling each other. Why are modern-day descendants of this fierce culture so willing to play the role of powerless pawns, resigned to the frustration of their everyday lives and to the uncertain future of a society over which they have so little influence? After all, they are increasingly well educated and well informed. Why don’t they simply take more initiative, more freedom of action, for themselves?
The answer is that both tradition and religion have made most Saudis accustomed to dependence, to being reactive, not proactive; to accepting, not questioning; to being obedient, not challenging; to being provided for rather than being responsible for their own futures. During the centuries when Arabia was dominated by warring tribes, the tribal head was responsible for the needs of his tribe and expected to receive loyalty and obedience from others if he met those needs.
In more recent times, when the late King Abdul Aziz conquered Arabia and declared the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he sought to establish a stable state with himself in charge. To do so, he needed to remove the tribal leaders’ freedom to switch loyalties—and warriors—to whoever promised the most booty. The king pledged that if the tribes fought only when he ordered and against whomever he ordered, he would provide for all their needs. To ultimately render tribes incapable of marauding, he persuaded them to settle down to raise crops rather than to pursue the dangerous and often desperately poor life of raiding. Most important, his regime took possession of traditional tribal lands and territory, making them state property, which then was redistributed, often to the very same tribal chiefs. But the state retained the right to repossess the land if a tribe didn’t obey. Thus, tribal raiding was no longer a livelihood but a crime. The king and his family had become the arbiters of power and prosperity.
To this day, the pull of tribe and tradition can lock even the most educated and seemingly sophisticated Saudis in corners of the labyrinth. Such is the case with Abdul Rahman bin Humaid, who graduated from Harvard in the spring of 2003 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in international legal studies from American University. His goal was to serve Saudi Arabia as a diplomat wherever in the world he was needed. Instead, the spring of 2010 found a still youthful Abdul Rahman working in a dusty Saudi National Guard outpost in his birthplace, the small industrial city of Yanbu. There he heads the same tribal National Guard unit that once was commanded by his father and, before that, his grandfather.
What happened? With his Harvard degree and Ph.D. in hand, he had launched his diplomatic career in 2004 handling congressional affairs for the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. He and his young wife were enjoying walks along the Potomac and movies and dinners out with friends. Suddenly in 2007, his father was killed in a car accident. The young diplomat went home for the funeral. As tradition requires, he paid his respects to King Abdullah, then supreme commander of the National Guard, who had sent his condolences to the family. At their meeting, King Abdullah summarily appointed Abdul Rahman commander of his tribal fouj, or group of warriors on government retainer. It was not an offer—it was a royal request that tradition required him to accept. In that instant, Abdul Rahman’s career in international diplomacy was replaced by one of adjudicating internal tribal disputes. His tribe, the Utaiba, is the kingdom’s largest, with 3 million members; as one of Arabia’s so-called asil, or noble tribes, it can trace its origins back to one of the original tribes of Arabia.
“Be patient,” Abdul Rahman recalls King Abdullah telling him. “You will face a lot of problems.”
Asked what kind of problems he has faced, Abdul Rahman says they range from internal tribal disputes to more mundane requests. “Sometimes someone wants me to translate a letter from American Express,” he says. “Whatever it is, I try to help.”
Abdul Rahman is sitting in the air-conditioned meeting room where he receives guests and tribal supplicants. A handsome man who resembles a young Omar Sharif, he is surrounded by photos of his father and grandfather and supported by a gaggle of uncles and sons. As fouj commander, he is, of course, wearing the traditional red-and-white scarf and white thobe, not the Western suits he donned in Washington. “I enjoyed going to Congress,” he says, “but duty calls. My grandfather did this job. My father did too. So why not me?”
Later, over coffee with his wife, mother, and eight sisters, I ask him if his role as commander is for life. He says, “Who knows?” But here is a clue that the idea of being a diplomat hasn’t yet died. In a country where most men wander to work late and spend most nights chatting with male friends, Abdul Rahman is an exception. “I try to keep everything like in America,” he says. “I rise early and get to the office by eight and come home for lunch at twelve thirty or eat with my men; then home to visit my wife and children by three so I can have dinner at seven thirty and be in bed by nine thirty.” It is a Potomac River schedule on the shores of the Red Sea. Yet Abdul Rahman is in Yanbu, not Washington; duty has prevailed over dreams; he has been relegated to a comfortable corner of the Saudi labyrinth.
Saudis, from poor supplicants at royal offices to impressive servants of the regime like Abdul Rahman, are accustomed to receiving their livelihood from the ruler. The unspoken but implicit social contract still is that rulers provide stability and prosperity, and the ruled obey. So far prosperity has been sufficient to secure most people’s acquiescence, even as many grumble these days about too much religion, too much dependence on the United States, too much corruption among the princes, too great a gap between rich and poor, too much unemployment among the young. Perceptive Saudis also mutter about the reemergence of tribal loyalties because the regime, rather than create a spirit of nationalism, has sought to ensure control by keeping citizens divided and distrustful of one another, and by encouraging tribal leaders who still meet weekly with senior princes to compete for Al Saud loyalty and largesse.
Today’s Saudi Arabia thus is less a unified nation-state than a collection of tribes, regions, and Islamic factions that coexist in mutual suspicion and fear. A resident of the Hejaz, the relatively cosmopolitan region encompassing the port of Jeddah and the holy city of Mecca, the kingdom’s two international melting pots, resents the fact that men from the Nejd in central Arabia, and the original home of the Al Saud, occupy all key judicial and financial jobs in the kingdom and are allowed to force their conservative customs and religious views on all Saudis. Shia Muslims from the oil-rich Eastern Province, even more than the Sufi Muslims from Jeddah or the Ismaili Muslims from the impoverished south of Saudi Arabia, resent the total domination of the Wahhabi philosophy over every aspect of life and the pervasive discrimination against them. Tribal loyalties also divide the population, as few individuals ever marry outside their tribe. The preferred marriage partner is one’s first cousin. A Saudi instantly can tell, from an individual’s accent and name, the tribal origins of another Saudi. Social life consists almost entirely of family, and family connections are almost always within one tribe. Thus even the most modern and relatively liberal of Saudis who may mix at work with coworkers of various tribal backgrounds most likely is married to a cousin and socializes almost exclusively with other relatives.
In sum, division is a daily feature of Saudi life. While the cosmopolitan people of Hejaz resent those of Nejd for their power and provincialism, Nejdis see people of the Hejaz as a polyglot people lacking pure lineage. Similarly, the people of northern Arabia, comprising tribes that traditionally looked toward Syria and Iraq, are seen as inferior, as are those of southern Arabia, with its historic ties to the tribes of Yemen. The people of these four regions remain distinct and divided to this day. Even when people move to major Saudi cities, many tend to seek out their own regional and tribal kin as neighbors. Regional racism is a daily fact of Saudi life.
Overlaid on these traditional divisions of Saudi society are more contemporary ones that result from the kingdom’s haphazard development and faltering modernization since the advent of spectacular oil wealth in the 1970s. Most Saudis only two generations ago eked out a subsistence living in rural provinces, but Saudi society has undergone a pell-mell urbanization over the past forty years with the result that fully 80 percent of Saudis now live in one of the country’s three major urban centers—Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. In Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital and largest city, there are first-world shopping malls and third-world slums. Some royal palaces stretch literally for blocks behind their high walls that block out the less fortunate parts of Saudi society. In poorer neighborhoods, some Saudis live in tents beside barren patches of dirt, where filthy, barefoot boys play soccer on fields demarcated only by piles of garbage or live in ramshackle tenements often with little furniture and limited electricity.
Trapped between the wealthy and the poor is an increasingly fearful and resentful Saudi middle class, whose standard of living has slipped dramatically over the past half-dozen years. A 2006 Saudi stock market crash, coupled with rising inflation, has left them treading water and slowly sinking as they borrow money to try to maintain a lifestyle they cannot afford. Consider a Saudi schoolteacher who can no longer afford to buy a car, whose son cannot find a job and who spends too many hours a week lining up at dysfunctional government offices supplicating for services that all too often can be secured only with the signature of a prince or a bribe to a corrupt bureaucrat. A teacher who wants to be reassigned to work in a different school district can register with the Ministry of Education and wait three or four years for approval or, as one teacher describes, pay 5,000 Saudi riyals ($1,350) to one of the ubiquitous middlemen who make a living buying and selling approvals that ought to be routinely granted by a functioning government. This teacher in the Eastern Province is typical of an increasingly embittered middle class that no longer sees a path to upward mobility in Saudi society and is bitter at the daily indignities necessary to survive.
The growing gap between wealth and poverty rankles many Saudis. One of the hundreds of Al Saud walled palaces in Riyadh and throughout the country. (KAREN HOUSE)
The growing gap between wealth and poverty rankles many Saudis. Saudi tenements in Jeddah are all too typical. (ROGER HARRISON)
Other societies, too, have disparities between rich and poor, between old and new, between liberal and conservative, but in few if any societies are they so pronounced as in Saudi Arabia. These disparities are all the more glaring because Islam preaches equality of all believers. Other societies have social and political systems that at least offer mechanisms to bridge divides. Not so in Saudi Arabia, where there is only one law—Islam—and only one final arbiter of that law—the Al Saud king. Islam itself has become a major source of division as religious leaders offer widely divergent interpretations of Koranic scripture and thus of Allah’s will. Meanwhile, the Al Saud, whose legitimacy is rooted in their role as guardians of Islam, far from seeking to diminish divisions in society, continue to exploit them in order to protect and perpetuate their rule. And, like everything else in Saudi Arabia, the royal family itself, as we shall see, is increasingly divided.
So modern Saudis—divided and distrustful and increasingly frustrated over a social contract with the Al Saud that no longer serves them well—maneuver within their maze, most of them neither knowing how to escape from it nor actively seeking to do so while sullenly resenting the ways in which they are trapped.