Friday mornings in Saudi are as tranquil as Sunday mornings in the West. Because it is the day of rest and religious observance, shops and schools are closed, the streets are empty of cars, and most people go back to bed after dawn prayers. At midday, men stream into one of the kingdom’s seventy thousand mosques to pray and hear the weekly sermon by their local imam. Muslims are required to attend this communal sermon—all except women, of course, who are forbidden to go to mosque. They stay home and watch the televised sermons preached in the Grand Mosque in Mecca or the Great Mosque in Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites.
Strolling alone down Riyadh’s main shopping street on a Friday morning reminds me, in the words of Texas folksinger Kris Kristofferson, “there’s nothing short of dying, half as lonesome as the sound, of a sleepin’ city sidewalk, Sunday morning coming down.” The morning may belong to God, but afternoon along Tahlia Street belongs to rebellious youth. Tahlia is Riyadh’s Champs-Élysées, with three lanes of traffic in each direction separating expensive shops and restaurants on both sides. The center median features a row of fake palm trees. At night, the street has a glamorous glitter from tiny lights that encircle the palms. But in the daylight of a hot March afternoon, they are all too visibly a dusty brown.
Young men lounge against souped-up cars parked along the curb as they watch other young men alternately gun their engines and hit the brakes, causing their cars to rock up and down in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Tahlia Street. Adding to the chaos, boys on four-wheel bikes weave with suicidal abandon among the cars and then up onto the median, lifting the front wheels so high that the bikes are virtually vertical and the riders who cling behind each driver can almost drag the long hair of their uncovered heads on the pavement. Loud rap music—in English—echoes from every bike. Most of the young men are dressed in low-slung jeans or ghetto shorts and T-shirts. Riyadh police, leaning against their green-and-white-marked cars, double-parked every few hundred yards, watch the scene but do nothing to interfere with this display of youthful exuberance, so at odds with the decorous behavior demanded of the young by austere religious leaders, especially in this, the kingdom’s most conservative city. The so-called religious police are nowhere to be seen, perhaps because they know this crowd is too large to be thwarted by a few bearded men in short thobes armed with thin sticks.
This scene of jaded youth—rebels without a cause—so reminiscent of a 1950s James Dean movie, is just another example of tensions tearing at Saudi society as tradition is challenged by modernity. The young, overwhelmingly Internet savvy, are well aware of the lifestyles of Western youth, but have almost no leisure options available in the kingdom to absorb their youthful energies. Cinemas are banned. Dating is forbidden. Shopping malls are off limits to young men unless accompanied by a female relative. (This is intended to ensure they do not prey on young women in the malls.) Public fields for soccer are few. Concerts are outlawed. Even listening to music is forbidden by conservative religious sheikhs, though this admonition is widely ignored, as the ubiquitous rap music along Tahlia Street underscores. An annual book fair sponsored by the Ministry of Information and Culture is about as close to public entertainment as the kingdom gets. Yet religious fundamentalists in 2011 crashed even that staid event, seized a microphone, and berated the presence and dress of women in attendance.
“Youth want freedom,” says Saker al Mokayyad, head of the international section at Prince Nayef Arab University, which trains the oppressive internal security forces, here and throughout the Arab world, that keep citizens under constant surveillance. “A young man has a car and money in his pocket, but what can he do? Nothing. He looks at TV and sees others doing things he can’t do and wonders why.”
A growing number of young Saudi men defy tradition in favor of jeans and T-shirts. (GETTY IMAGES) However, most young Saudis are reared traditionally, like the robed boy, below, brushing his teeth with a miswak, as the Prophet Muhammad did. (TURKI AL SHAMMARI)
Young people in every society resent authority, reject rules, and seek to exert their independence. But the difference in Saudi Arabia is at least twofold. Because this is a quintessentially authoritarian society, there are many more restrictions and conventions against which youth can rebel. Further, almost any form of youthful rebellion stands in stark contrast to the unquestioning acceptance and unruffled conformity of previous generations of Saudis. In a society with one of the youngest populations on earth, this frustration poses a powerful challenge not just to parents but to the regime and to the religious establishment, from whom the young increasingly are alienated. In a recent survey, some 31 percent of Saudi youth said “traditional values are outdated and … I am keen to embrace modern values and beliefs,” the highest percentage in the ten Arab countries surveyed. In short, the sedentary Saudi python is having a very hard time digesting its youth bulge.
The youth rebellion takes many forms. Some young people simply show their independence by wearing baseball caps and sneakers or by adopting other Western fashions and habits, though this does not necessarily mean they want a Western way of life. Restlessness leads others to lawlessness, such as beating up teachers, vandalizing property, or using drugs and alcohol. For still others, rejecting encroaching modernism means turning to fundamentalist Islam as the only acceptable means to confront authority both parental and governmental. For a minority of these Islamists, this confrontation leads to extremism and even terrorism. But virtually all Saudi youth, whether attracted by modern mores or by the pull of religiosity, are part of a generation that, unlike their parents or grandparents, is questioning and confronting authority. For a conservative society like Saudi Arabia, this attitude itself is revolutionary—and its manifestations are evident everywhere.
In a society that is usually passive, one young Saudi man confronted conventions and the royal regime by filming a poor neighborhood in Riyadh and posting his dramatic nine-minute film on YouTube in October 2011. The film opened with young Feras Bugnah noting, “We are not in Somalia,” as he takes his cameras into the homes of three poor Riyadh families to show unlit rooms, broken beds, and families living on 2,500 Saudi riyals (about $650) a month. Bugnah concludes the film by interviewing the neighborhood imam, who acknowledges that young boys are selling drugs and young girls are sold by their fathers into prostitution to earn money. He asks each family what they want to say to King Abdullah, and each asks only for a home, something out of reach for about 70 percent of Saudis, given the high price of land because previous kings have given most of the state’s land to princes or a handful of powerful businessmen who do the regime’s bidding.
The film, entitled in English We Are Screwed, went viral—some eight hundred thousand Saudis viewed it—before young Bugnah was arrested by authorities, an indication of how explosive the kingdom’s housing issue is deemed to be by the government, which promised 250 billion Saudi riyals (roughly $65 billion) for housing in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals across the Middle East.
A second youth video, Monopoly, highlighted the near impossibility of owning a home in Saudi Arabia because a monopoly on landownership by royals and other wealthy Saudis has put the price of land out of reach of a majority of Saudis. It struck a responsive chord in the population. One Saudi went to his Twitter account to call on wealthy countrymen to donate land to the Ministry of Housing so ordinary Saudis could afford to buy homes, and at least one Saudi businessman responded.
Not all angry young Saudis are so constructive. Alienation increasingly is begetting lawlessness among Saudi youth. Newspapers regularly report students beating teachers who dare to give failing grades. One young woman in Jubail, an industrial city on the Persian Gulf, angered that her school headmistress confiscated her camera-equipped cell phone (forbidden as she could snap photos of unveiled classmates), returned to school with her mother to confront the headmistress. When the conversation didn’t go as the young woman hoped, she picked up a glass and cracked it over the supervisor’s head, sending her to the hospital for five days and earning the twenty-year-old student two months in prison and ninety lashes. More shocking to authorities in a country that forbids demonstrations of any kind, hundreds of Saudi youth celebrating National Day, honoring the kingdom’s founding, spontaneously began smashing windows and ransacking shops and showrooms along the Corniche in Al Khobar, a generally modern town comprising a mix of Saudis and foreigners in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Such out-of-control behavior once would have been inconceivable. But some of the 225 youths arrested during the rampage essentially excused their behavior by blaming the authorities for failing to provide places for young people to relax and enjoy free time. (A dozen of the teens were flogged for their conduct.)
If boredom is one motivator for lawless acts, another is anger at the government. The Saudi government in 2010 installed in major cities a sophisticated camera system that tickets speeders by automatically sending a ticket to their cell phones. Traffic accidents are the number-one killer in Saudi Arabia. Every ninety minutes someone dies in a traffic accident, and every fifteen minutes another Saudi is left handicapped for life. Traffic fatalities in 2010 totaled more than six thousand, double the number who died in Britain, even though Saudi Arabia’s population is less than half that of Britain. Despite the obvious need to enforce traffic rules, the new saher system has been repeatedly vandalized by young Saudis, who destroy the cameras or steal license plates from police cars and then repeatedly speed through lights, generating scores of bogus tickets for police officers. Youth claim that the money from fines goes to enrich Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, crown prince and minister of interior, who is responsible for the nation’s invasive intelligence agencies. In choosing this target, young Saudis are protesting what they see as both royal corruption and state intrusion into their lives.
Not all youth, of course, act out. Some simply bear their boredom in sullen silence. Two teenage sons of a midlevel government employee describe the ennui of their lives spent studying, praying, and for relaxation, watching movies and playing computer games at home. The brothers, seventeen and fifteen years of age, are wearing jeans and T-shirts, not traditional Saudi dress, as they accompany me to a Jeddah restaurant. To join a foreign woman on a public outing is most unusual, but Jeddah, as a port city with a long history of foreigners mingling with Saudis, is far more liberal than Riyadh, and their father is a U.S.-educated government official eager to expose his sons to a wider world. The elder youth, who just received his driving permit, drives us to the restaurant in his used white Toyota, complaining along the way that wealthy boys his age own new BMWs. A subdued and shy boy, he rises at five to shower and pray. At six fifteen he drives his brother to school before heading for the seven fifteen start at his own school. When classes conclude at one thirty P.M., the boys return home to have lunch with their father and then do homework. “There’s nothing much to do after that,” says the elder youth. So the young one plays video games on the Internet and the elder watches Egyptian movies on his computer. They are typical of the bored but largely well-behaved majority of Saudi youth who don’t like the emptiness of life yet don’t know what to do about it.
Asked if they could change one thing about their country, the elder pauses before finally saying he would allow cinemas. The younger answers instantly: “I would allow girls to go to school with boys.”
Boys from wealthy families can relax in one of the multiple male sitting rooms of their homes or the well-appointed tents common inside the walled compounds of the wealthy. Young men of more modest means pool their money and rent an istirahat, or public house for relaxation, that can be leased by the day, week, or month. They gather there regularly to talk, eat, and watch sporting events and movies—or sometimes engage in less innocent pursuits.
But poor young Saudis have almost no options for entertainment. These bored teenage boys play soccer in the streets or often are attracted by the allure of petty crime. Crime, of course, isn’t limited to the poor. Many Saudis who turn to car theft do so not because they need a car or want to sell it for money but simply for excitement. I meet with one young convicted thief at a coffee shop. Mustafa, twenty-five (who declines to give his family name), began stealing cars when he was nineteen even though he says he was earning $1,000 a month working in the National Guard. He and a group of similarly bored friends would select a car they liked, follow it for a few miles, and then bump into it. When the driver pulled off the highway to survey the damage, usually leaving the engine running, one of the boys would jump in the victim’s car and drive away, leaving his accomplices quickly to follow. At other times, they would trade excitement for ease and select their victims by surveying a supermarket parking lot for cars left running while the owners dashed in to make a purchase. “Our concentration was on playing with the cars and having fun. It was exciting,” he says.
A handsome young man with a large gap between his two front teeth that makes him look even more boyish, Mustafa was caught after a year and a half of joyriding in stolen vehicles and sentenced to ten months in prison and 350 lashes, administered in groups of 50 over seven weeks. “I used to cry and feel sorry for myself,” he says. “Prison is for criminals, and I was just having fun. I am not a criminal.” While in prison, he began using drugs and once free again supplemented drugs with alcohol. He resumed stealing to help pay for his vices. Soon he and his young accomplices were caught by the religious police. A lack of evidence allowed him to escape conviction and jail, but the incident frightened him enough that he finally listened to a friend’s urging that he join Alcoholics Anonymous. Mustafa insists he has been clean for two years and now has a new job as a receptionist in a clinic. “I just wanted excitement, but now I am convinced it is not exciting. But too many young people do this,” he says.
Indeed, according to public security authorities, auto theft is on the rise and nearly 80 percent of all cars are stolen by Saudis between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Most use the cars for tafheet, or spinning, a favorite after-midnight pastime of thrill-seeking young Saudi men. Groups of young men gather on isolated roads and accelerate their cars, spin them sideways, sometimes overturn them, or more often smash them into the parked vehicles of the scores of other young men who gather to watch. Not surprisingly, those who engage in tafheet prefer to spare their own vehicles by using stolen cars. Some 90 percent of stolen cars are found abandoned by thieves after joyriding or spinning, so police often refuse even to look for a stolen car until several days after it disappears. It’s yet another sign of the growing lawlessness in Saudi Arabia, as citizens decide which laws to obey and police which ones to enforce. “Young people don’t care about laws,” says Muhammad al Negir, who works in public security in Riyadh. “Families have a responsibility to help us police their children, but they don’t.”
Not all or even most young Saudis flagrantly flout society’s rules and laws, but even conservative youths are questioning authority. Imam University, named for Imam Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the first Al Saud dynasty in the eighteenth century, is home to some sixteen thousand devout young men pursuing studies, primarily in Sharia, or Islamic law. But here, too, winds of change are wafting. Four young men in their early twenties gather one evening with one of their professors at the home of an Imam University graduate to meet with me, a double no-no. (Mixing with women is forbidden, and for the deeply orthodox, so is mixing with infidels.) All four of the boys have beards, a sign of religious devotion. Three of the four wear their scarves draped across their heads without the black agal, the double black circle of cord, to hold the scarves in place, another mark of strict religiosity. These outward signs leave me expecting to hear a very austere interpretation of the responsibilities of young Saudis and strong support for the Al Saud and the religious establishment. But appearances in today’s kingdom often are deceiving.
Saud, twenty-one (who declines to provide his family name), describes objecting when his father tried to enroll him in a Koran course at age six. Three years later his father forced him to go despite his protests. By secondary school, he says, he had become knowledgeable about Islam and, to his teachers’ dismay, began questioning what was taught in religion classes. “I don’t accept I should be loyal to Salafi,” he says, referring to the fundamentalist Islamic thought that underpins Wahhabi teachings. For an Imam University student to say such a thing is tantamount to a Baptist preacher’s son saying “I don’t accept Jesus as my savior.”
Asked to whom he turns for guidance on religious issues—parents or professors or the imam at his mosque—the young man says, “I depend on myself to research an answer. I have no specific sheikh.” Again, this independence of mind on religious orthodoxy is something new; the generation of this young man’s parents simply accepted religion as dictated by parents, schools, and imams.
The other three young men are more circumspect. While growing up, says one, “my main concern was to obey my parents. There was no discussion. You just obey.” For that reason, says another, despite his deep interest in science and his desire to study it, he enrolled in Imam University because his background was religious and his parents directed him toward religious studies. This parental push leads nearly two-thirds of university graduates to earn degrees in Islamic subjects that fail to equip them for work in the private sector, where employers seek expertise like economics, marketing, computer programming, or management.
The young men talk openly about their parents, their rearing, and the doubts—at least briefly—that each experienced about Islam as it was taught in their schools. Listening to even mild doubts about Wahhabi Islam expressed by Imam University students makes me feel almost subversive. The setting is a large, well-appointed living room where the attentive male host repeatedly pours small cups of Arabic coffee and offers cups of sweet tea and bowls of dates. When I unthinkingly set my teacup on top of my Koran to spare the expensive side table, one young man leaps to move the offending cup off the holy book, wordlessly reminding me that no temporal table is as important as the book of Allah’s word.
After the young men speak, their professor, a man in his early forties, sums up with what amounts to a shockingly harsh indictment of Saudi society. The country, he says, has turned its focus from religion to money. “We have become consumers,” he says. “Everything is for sale. You can buy and sell a fatwa. Sheikhs go on television to advise the people, but all they care about is their television contract. Our social relations are chosen on the basis of whether or not we get a benefit.” Even the sacred right of a Muslim to demand punishment of an offender or receive instead “blood money,” a payment in cash to the victim’s family if it agrees to spare the offender from his required Islamic punishment, is being exploited to earn cash, he says. “We have a bazaar of blood. Greedy people now earn commissions on arranging a deal between the victim and the offender to forgive the offender in exchange for a large sum of money.” (This is a Saudi version of tort lawyers in the United States who sue on behalf of victims and take a large portion of any award.)
Suddenly the call to prayer sounds through the night from a nearby mosque, and the men all rise and depart to a tent in the front yard of this large walled home to perform isha, the final prayer of the day. The host lingers a moment to end the evening. “These young men are very moderate,” he says. “Most Imam University students wouldn’t agree to meet a foreigner.” What percent would refuse? I ask. “At least seventy-five percent,” he says. Pronouncing his own conclusion on the evening, he insists society is changing—as evidenced by these young men meeting a foreign woman. “Usually in society, the old teach the young,” he says, “but now with technology the young are teaching the old.”
Such meetings always leave me grateful for a glimpse into the evolving attitudes of conservative young Saudis, but at the same time mindful of the enormous gulf between them and young people in the West. However much adherents of so-called cosmopolitanism would like to see all peoples around the globe as similar, Saudis, even Internet-savvy ones, are not at all like Western youth. It isn’t just that many young people in the West use drugs, have sex before marriage, and rarely even think about religion, let alone practice any faith. The biggest difference is that Western youth aren’t reared in societies that venerate religion or value tradition, so they are free to seek their own paths uninhibited by strong societal or family pressures. Young Saudis, even those resisting authority and seeking some independence, are struggling against the thick walls of religion and tradition constructed brick by brick from birth by family, school, mosque, and government. Even if these values and traditions are rejected, the act of breaking free defines the individual.
This struggle to break free of the strictures of Saudi society is vividly illustrated by several works in a youth art show in Jeddah in early 2011. The show, staged discreetly in a fifth-floor gallery hidden from street view, is nonetheless new, provocative, and for Saudis even daring. One sculpture portrays a gaunt plaster-of-Paris head jerked back by clear plastic tubes that connect the head to a large stone, depicting the controlling connection between authority and youth. The mouth on the upturned head is agape in an anguished scream. Visible inside the open mouth are scores of tiny words representing the messages that parents feed to children from birth—words like abi (shame) and haram (forbidden). Behind the head is a spigot indicating that youth sometimes can turn off the messages from parents but can never sever the connections that link youthful minds to stone-age authorities. The artist “perceives a culture that suffers from subservience and uniformity through mind compulsion and his art mirrors that view and creates in turn the ultimate defining point of today’s generation,” the show’s printed program says in describing the sculpture.
Nearby is another example of art criticizing authority—this one by a Saudi prince. The painting, entitled A Witness Who Never Forgot by Prince Saad bin Muhammad, depicts a young male face staring sternly as cars float in rising flood waters. To indicate the young man is Saudi, the traditional red-and-white shemagh is bound tightly around his head, but it also covers his mouth so that it resembles a football helmet more than a scarf. The painting “conveys the societal limitation that prevents one from realizing his personal power and potential,” says the show guide. The artist, who lived through the devastating 2009 flood in Jeddah, explains over coffee in the gallery, “The painting is the accumulation of the pain of the city. It is like a bleeding wound. I had to get it out of my system by painting a witness who could never forget.” Ironically, a week after the painting went on display, the second devastating flood struck Jeddah and forced the prince to cancel an earlier scheduled meeting with me at the gallery because he couldn’t get out of his home. When we did meet a few days later, I asked how he felt living through another flood only fourteen months after government officials had promised “never again.” “I am not going to answer that,” he says. “It is like pressing on a raw nerve and I don’t want to say something I will regret.” Even an alienated Al Saud prince has to be careful what he says in words if not in his art.
Saudi youth, whether liberal, traditional, or fundamentalist, share at least three characteristics: most are alienated, undereducated, and underemployed. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who generally express gratitude to the Al Saud for improving their standard of living during the oil boom of the 1970s, young Saudis born in the 1980s and 1990s have no memory of the impoverished Arabia prior to the oil boom and thus express almost no sense of appreciation. Instead, they have experienced a kingdom of poor schools, overcrowded universities, and declining job opportunities. Moreover, their royal rulers’ profligate and often non-Islamic lifestyles are increasingly transparent to Saudis and stand in sharp contrast both to Al Saud religious pretensions and to their own declining living standards.
“The government has become that ‘other’ which is no longer trusted,” writes Dr. Mai Yamani, a Saudi sociologist, in Changed Identities, interviews with some seventy young Saudis on their attitudes toward social change. In Saudi Arabia, youth are supposed to practice silent obedience. But for this generation of twenty-something Saudis, youthful optimism has been replaced by concern for their livelihoods and contempt for a government that fails to provide. As a result, the young use religion as a sword against authority, confronting their elders and, by extension, the regime for religious and social hypocrisy, Dr. Yamani writes.
Young people in any Saudi city drive past princely palaces that often stretch for blocks and ask how such opulence squares with the Prophet’s example of humility and equality among believers. “He is not a perfect Muslim who eats till he is full and leaves his neighbors hungry,” the Prophet said in a well-known hadith. How can the Al Saud claim to represent Islam and so visibly violate this basic religious tenet? they wonder. They also hear their religious imams condemn any human likeness as sinful, yet they see life-size pictures of Al Saud rulers in the foyers of every public building in the kingdom. The young also question the sincerity of religious leaders whom they see as sycophantic shills for the Al Saud. In mosques, they hear sermons condemning mixing of unrelated men and women, yet some senior religious scholars endorse King Abdullah’s namesake university, where such mixing occurs. Some of those scholars also lecture to mixed audiences when they go abroad.
How can a film festival be permitted one year in Jeddah and banned the next? Why does Jenadriyah, the annual national festival celebrating Saudi culture, allow families to attend one year and ban them the next, forcing men and women to attend on separate days? Why did the kingdom spend a reported $100 million to build the King Fahd Cultural Center and use it primarily for commercial events or rare cultural programs that never focus on Saudi Arabia?
Above all, they see daily reminders of hypocrisy at home. Why, they ask parents, is it permissible to watch a movie on television, yet public cinemas are forbidden? Why is it okay for one hundred thousand Saudi students abroad, at government expense, to mix in Western universities, but not permissible for those same universities to open mixed-gender branches in the kingdom, as they have in other Gulf sheikdoms like Qatar, which would enable many more young Saudis to obtain a quality education? Why can a young Saudi, however furtively, exchange cell phone numbers with a girl and even video-chat online with her, yet if they dare sit together in public, both risk harassment by the religious police? How can it be wrong for young Saudis, who increasingly meet on Facebook, to hold hands before they are married? “Facebook opens the doors of our cages,” says a young single Saudi man in his midtwenties, noting that the social network is the primary way men and women meet in the kingdom. “The young understand it is part of nature to have a boyfriend or girlfriend, and we should not pretend it isn’t happening.”
One father who has had to field queries from his children counsels patience. “I saw things change in my lifetime,” he tells his sons. “I used to go to cinema. Maybe you will see them change in your life too.” This father, who like so many Saudis doesn’t want to be publicly identified, predicts that cinema will return to Saudi sooner rather than later. “The religious will decide they can make money owning cinemas showing Islamic films,” he says. “Gradually we will get cartoons like Tom and Jerry, then animated children’s movies like Toy Story, and finally adult movies like Ocean’s Eleven.” So religious greed will restore cinema—clearly, cynicism in Saudi isn’t limited to the young.
“The young are at a crossroads,” says a thoughtful Jeddah-based businessman and father. “They see life in the West, and also the Saudi Arabia of tradition. They need guidance to know how to choose the best of the West, but they don’t get guidance. Instead, what they see here is a gap between religion and life. If religion is preached rigidly and practiced another way, it confuses the young.”
A number of young Saudi adults are trying to bridge the gulf between religion as preached in the mosque and life as seen on the Internet. It is another of Saudi Arabia’s many paradoxes that in a country where religion and state are one, far too often religion and life are separate. Ahmad Shugairi, a Saudi businessman in his thirties, is trying to help young people connect religion and life. “Religion here is just a ritual,” he explains, “not a way of life.”
For the past half-dozen years, Shugairi has been host of a popular television show called Yalla Shubaba (Come On, Youth). He knows something about alienation firsthand. As a young man living in Long Beach, California, he rejected religion and focused on fun. Then at age twenty-two, he abruptly decided to “stabilize” his life. He returned to the kingdom, married, began to read the Koran, prayed five times daily, and fasted during Ramadan. By his own admission, he swung from having no interest in Islam to what he describes as a fixation on the minutiae of religion, engaging like so many Saudis in debates on the proper length of one’s thobe or beard rather than on the essence of the Prophet Muhammad’s message. All this, he says, convinced him that most of his fellow Saudis were corrupt and not living their religion properly. He describes himself as having been perpetually angry and intolerant.
Then, like so many young Saudis these days, he began to watch and listen to religious sheikhs from outside the kingdom on satellite television and the Internet. In his case, they were moderate ones, though the airwaves also are replete with extreme fundamentalist sheikhs. Two moderates in particular caught his eye. One was from Kuwait and the other from Egypt. He began to hold weekly studies of the Koran with a few Saudi friends, and he developed what he calls “a more tolerant, updated, flexible view of Islam.”
It is this kinder, gentler Islam that he now seeks to propagate on his television show. “In the past we had two kinds of television—boring sermons from a sheikh, or sports. I want to provide spiritual and life guidance but make it fun. In the eighties religion meant praying in the mosque and reading the Koran. We want to change that so people understand that a religious person is successful and connected to God in this life.”
To do so, he sometimes shines a harsh light on Saudis as they are, to encourage them to seek change. For instance, in one show he went to the street to ask citizens to guide him to the nearest public library. None could. But when he asked directions to the closest shopping mall, everyone had a ready answer. He showed the contrast between shopping malls teeming with young Saudis and empty libraries dusty from disuse. He holds up a mirror to the materialism and shallowness of Saudi life, which has made him a popular hero among the young, who see in him the candor and courage so lacking in a culture where appearances, however hypocritical, are everything.
“The old ways of rearing kids won’t work anymore,” he says, explaining why new efforts at guiding youth are essential. “This age group has enormous energy, and it can either be constructive or destructive, but you can’t suppress it. And they are a thousand times more exposed to the world than their parents.
“When I was young,” he adds, “if you wanted to meet a girl, you had to drive by, and if you liked her, you rolled down your window and passed your phone number—your family’s phone number. Then you went home and sat by the phone to see if she would call. Today, you see a girl, you exchange mobile phone numbers, and five minutes later you can be sitting in Starbucks”—at some risk, of course. While unrelated males and females are not allowed to meet, young people do so surreptitiously but frequently, finding in the thrill of evading the religious police an added excitement to meeting someone of the opposite sex.
Another prominent Saudi seeking to channel the restlessness of alienated youth is Prince Turki bin Khalid, a grandson of the kingdom’s late crown prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. The young prince has founded a newspaper, Al Shams, specifically targeted at young Saudis. “We cover everything from the perspective of the young,” he explains. “And we write about human interest, education, new habits, new trends—everything except politics.” The paper, with a modest circulation of sixty thousand, runs features on successful young Saudis who the prince hopes will be seen as role models for alienated youth. “We have a big problem with the system, equal opportunity and work ethic,” he says, proving that even some royals are well aware of the malaise that grips growing numbers of young Saudis. “If we could solve these things, we could soar, as we have many really smart young Saudis.”
Prince Turki was inspired to launch a publication aimed at the young by observing former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate successfully courted young Americans through MTV. The prince, a student at Georgetown University in Washington at the time, says he learned that “young people everywhere have more power than they think.” The prince sees today’s Saudi Arabia as emerging from a “darkroom” into the light. “At first you can’t see color until your eyes adjust,” he says. “That is what is happening with young people here; we are now seeing colors after twenty years in the darkroom. I don’t want alcohol. I don’t need cinema, but I want a Saudi Arabia that is colorful, tolerant, and proactive.”
Even at Saudi ARAMCO, the national oil company, which is widely acknowledged to attract the best and brightest young Saudis—and which offers them the most open environment in the kingdom—the generational divide is apparent. “The young generation is demanding, impatient, and much smarter than my generation,” says Abdulaziz al Khayyal, a senior vice president at the company. “We took whatever jobs were offered because we had no choice. We needed to eat. This generation doesn’t need money, so talented young people want to have fun; they want to be challenged and feel they contribute something to their society, not just do what they are told. Today’s young want more action.”
Saudi ARAMCO, founded and run by U.S. oil companies for more than four decades until Saudi Arabia purchased it in 1980, is a massive fenced city often called “Little America” because its wide streets, low bungalows, and grassy lawns resemble a California suburb. The Saudi ARAMCO compound features its own golf course, schools, cinemas, swimming pools, grocery stores, and library. Until religiosity gripped the kingdom in the 1980s, pork and alcohol were permitted on the premises, and Christmas was celebrated, complete with wise men riding camels to see baby Jesus. No longer. But today men and women continue to mix freely both at work and leisure. Women even are allowed to drive within the compound. Like many Western companies, Saudi ARAMCO sponsors public service campaigns, including one to discourage driving while using a cell phone.
“I start from the view that talking on the phone while driving is against the law so one shouldn’t do it,” says Al Khayyal, who is responsible for the campaign’s message. His son, on the other hand, tells him that any such campaign simply will look silly, because no young Saudi ARAMCO employee is going to ignore a ringing cell phone just because he or she is driving. “I often ask myself if this youthful exuberance will diminish as they get older or will this young generation be like the sixties generation in the United States and stay demanding and self-centered all their lives,” Al Khayyal muses. My conversations with young people of all types across the kingdom convince me that this bulge of young Saudis is very likely to bring the kind of societal change in attitudes that baby boomers forced on America starting in the 1960s. America proved resilient enough to weather that generational storm. With all the entrenched rigidities of religion and regime, Saudi Arabia is unlikely to prove anywhere near as resilient.
Accommodating these rapidly changing attitudes and demands of youth is a challenge even at Saudi ARAMCO, the most international and professional institution in Saudi Arabia. In recent years, the company has begun to allow young women to compete for its coveted College Preparatory Program, which accounts for 75 percent of all new hires at the company. The young women chosen for the program know that, on average, they outperformed men on the standardized test given to all applicants. They understand that they are privileged to be in the program, but none of them exhibits any sense of gratitude to Saudi ARAMCO for giving them an opportunity that they earned just as their male colleagues did.
In a country where young women are kept under constant family surveillance until marriage, these young women live in a dormitory on the grounds of the corporate compound. It is, of course, well supervised but still a big break from tradition. Here they attend classes to prepare for entry into foreign universities to earn degrees mostly in engineering, management, or finance and eventual employment at Saudi ARAMCO in jobs typically held by males. They are taught, among other things, how to manage contemporary social issues such as handling confrontations with foreigners or explaining the hijab, if they choose to wear a head scarf when abroad.
At my meeting with a dozen of these young women, they discuss how different their lives are from those of their mothers. Most of their mothers are educated but do not work. The difference, the young women say, isn’t the absence of society’s rules, which still exist, but rather the willingness of their generation to break them.
“There are even more rules in society now,” says one young woman. “But it is no longer shocking not to follow them.” Most of these young women nineteen or twenty years of age have had their own e-mail accounts and their own cell phones since prepubescence. They believe opportunities will be much greater for them than they were for their mothers, but only if they persist. “We know the opportunities won’t come voluntarily,” says one. “As Gandhi said, we have to make our own change, and we will.”
It is not just educated and privileged young women who push for more opportunity. In the poor, underdeveloped province of Jizan, in the south of Arabia near Yemen, Salim al Fafi, seventy-five, sits in the front yard of his large home in Faifa, a village atop a three-thousand-meter mountain an hour’s drive from Jizan City. Reaching his home in a four-wheel drive vehicle is like climbing a corkscrew. Al Fafi’s beard is white, but he proudly points to his youngest son, who at six is the same age as one of the dozen barefoot grandsons darting around his yard. From his mountain perch, he gazes contentedly at a big orange sun setting slowly over the green fields below and says he measures his pleasure by the size of his family: three wives, thirty-five children, and thirty grandchildren. While all the women are kept inside the house, even here in this bucolic, if primitive, world, new demands intrude. His greatest problem: his seven unmarried daughters are pressuring him to get them to school in Jizan so they can receive an education. By contrast, none of his wives who grew up in the village is educated or even thought of becoming so. Because he has no way to get his daughters down the mountain and into the city for schooling, he says he tells them to “just get married and have children.” For these young women, life has not yet changed—though clearly their thinking has.
Saudi society, as we have seen, is deeply divided along multiple fault lines—tribal, regional, religious, gender, and more. All these divisions are visibly accentuated among Saudi youth. The gap between the easy riders on Riyadh’s Tahlia Street and the devout but questioning Imam University students, between the educated young women at Saudi ARAMCO and the isolated girls on the mountaintop in Faifa, between Lulu’s cloistered daughters and Manal’s liberated ones, is all the sharper and thus all the more threatening to the future stability of the Al Saud regime. If overall Saudi society was once homogeneous, the current generation of Saudi youth is openly and proudly heterogeneous. The most significant thing they have in common is dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whether, and if so how, to accommodate this pressure from the young is among the most daunting challenges for the Al Saud regime.