CHAPTER 32
King Abdullah loves the French game of pétanque, also known as boules. He acquired the taste in the sandy boulevards of Lebanon, and he plays it for hours. He roundly defeated Prince Charles when Charles visited the Kingdom in February 2004—but in the rules of pétanque à l’Abdullah,the king always wins.
The game is played in the desert, where the players take their ease on cushions ranged around the walls of a tall, plushly carpeted, open-sided tent. Outside on the sand is laid a small square of green baize marked with black arrows, and the target ball is thrown out thirty feet or so into the desert.
One by one the players rise from their cushions to take their place on the green baize and toss their single boule, which has their name attached to it with tape. As in the normal game of boules, the aim is to finish up closest to the target, and it is permitted—in fact, it is rather encouraged—to knock your rivals out of the way.
When every other player has thrown, the king steps forward, and this is where the normal game changes. For Abdullah has a deadly aim, he always throws last—and on at least one occasion he has been known to have two boules to throw. So that is why the king tends to win Saudi Arabia’s royal pétanque championship, and having won, he takes a little purse of gold and hands it graciously to the runner-up—since in this royal version of a plebeian game, the runner-up is, in a way, the winner.
Abdullah used to spend a lot of time camping in the desert with his falcons. Now he favors the comforts of his farm north of Riyadh, where he keeps his Arabian horses in neat white courtyards of hacienda-style stables. The huge picture window of his sitting room is arranged to give him a view of the animals as they graze around a lake. He likes to sit watching them on Thursday mornings, the beginning of the Saudi weekend. It is the one morning he gets some time to relax—though his staff are only happy when they see him emerge to take some exercise in his brightly colored, thick-soled athletic shoes. A daily walk and a daily swim help keep the Angel of Death at a distance.
As in the declining days of Fahd, there is a whole power structure around the king that is hugely concerned to keep their patron alive—though in Abdullah’s case they are joined by most of the Saudi population.
“He is our Muawiyah,” says Hala Al-Houti, thirty-four, a Jeddah business executive, one of the new generation of Saudi working women. “We can only hope he never loses hold of the thread.”
The early caliph Muawiyah, who had been a scribe to the Prophet, once said that he would not draw his sword where a whip would suffice, nor use a whip where his tongue was enough—and that if he should ever find himself connected to his people by just a single strand of hair, he would never allow it to snap. As the people pulled, so he would give way with them; only when they relaxed the thread would he try to pull them gently in the direction that he thought it best to go. Governance Muawiyah-style was a delicate matter of mutual respect, and it is a mark of the Saudi school system that while it signally fails to teach its children how to think for themselves, it does instill snippets of classical learning like this.
The modern Muawiyah keeps in touch with his people from his book-lined study in Riyadh. Above his desk hang some richly embroidered black-and-gold Koranic inscriptions, of which his favorite comes from the “Thunder” sura: “God will never change the condition of a people until they change it for themselves.” This is the basis for Abdullah’s belief in bringing changes to Saudi society.
There is also an entire wall full of television screens—one huge flat screen, surrounded by twenty or more satellite monitors, all displaying the channels that the Saudi population are watching at that moment. Each monitor has a number, and if something catches the royal eye, Abdullah presses that number on the control pad beside him. Instantly its sound becomes live and the image switches to the main screen. Sitting alertly in front of his video bank, this eighty-six-year-old Arab could be navigating the starship Enterprise. He puffs on an occasional Merit cigarette as he samples what his people think.
To back up the king’s personal sampling, full-time teams of researchers watch all the TV channels systematically and write daily digests that are read out to Abdullah every night. Parallel teams monitor the published press and also the radio, particularly the grievances on the call-in shows, while a fourth, rather more geeky group, scans the ferocious and often hostile fundamentalist bloggers and websites. Together they make up a quartet of polling outfits to rival that of any U.S. presidential candidate. Early in 2008, for example, the teams warned Abdullah of the grassroots anger engendered by widespread inflation. Dr. Mohammed Al-Qunaybit, an eloquent Shura member and newspaper columnist, appeared on television to express his vivid disappointment with virtually every area of the king’s domestic policies.
“The king’s advisers,” said Dr. Al-Qunaybit, “are creating a cloud of confusion around him.”
Dr. Al-Qunaybit was only saying what most people were thinking, and his case was strengthened when Hashim Yamani, the commerce minister, was questioned about the rising cost of rice. Once an exotic foreign delicacy, rice (and particularly basmati rice) has become, with prosperity, the staple of every Saudi meal, but the minister dismissed the question with the insouciance of Marie Antoinette.
“There are nineteen types of rice,” he responded. “And it is not compulsory for people to eat the most expensive.”
The Saudi system may not be democratic, but it usually seeks to be responsive. Abdullah acted quickly to increase food subsidies and raise government salaries, then brusquely sacked the minister of commerce. But he also let it be known that the people’s tribune, the eloquent and critical Dr. Al-Qunaybit, should moderate his acerbic tone for a spell. In Saudi Arabia it is the king, and the king alone, who throws the last ball.
One day late in 2006, Mahdi Al-Mushaikhis, an engineering student in the Eastern Province, came to his uncle Fouad in a troubled state. Some of the young man’s relatives had been receiving strange phone calls about his fiancée. The couple had been together only a few months. They had signed the milka, the formal plighting of the troth that permitted private time together and sexual relations, and until that moment Mahdi had felt very happy with his future wife. But the phone calls suggested she had been with other men. If that was the case, Mahdi did not wish to proceed to full marriage.
Fouad Al-Mushaikhis is a man to whom many in his family would turn for advice. A calm and sagely grizzled graphic designer in his middle forties, he is an activist among the Shia community in Qateef, in the Eastern Province, displaying all the self-composure of a man who went into exile with his fellow campaigners at the age of fifteen and had to parent himself through some very hard years. His right temple is scarred with a bullet mark, his personal souvenir of the 1979 intifada. Having returned to the Kingdom with his fellow exiles at the end of 1993, Fouad now mentors young Shia in the Qateef region, teaching them computer design at weekends and giving them personal advice.
“You must not be hasty. You must sit down and talk to her,” he instructed his nephew, who was nearing the end of his studies at the University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran. But when Fouad met with the couple, he saw that the girl had been traumatized in some way. She was terrified to speak.
“Will you give me my rights?” she blurted out aggressively after Fouad had asked his nephew to leave the two of them alone.
“What I can promise,” he replied, “is that I will not pass on anything you say unless you are willing.”
And so, for the first time, the “Qateef girl” spilled out the sensational story that would provoke headlines around the world in the closing months of 2007—and would provide a metaphor for all that was wrong, and a few things that were right, inside King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia. Before getting engaged to Mahdi, the girl confessed, she had been persuaded to hand over a picture of herself to a girlfriend who had passed it on to a male relative, a good-looking boy a year or so younger than them named Hassan, who would sometimes drive the two girls to the mall.
“Can I see her picture?” is a matchmaking ploy very common among young Saudis, so restricted in their opportunities to meet and date. Pakistani- and Indian-run picture studios do a roaring trade in Saudi souks—providing, in this case, a kitschy photograph that, as Fouad remembers it, showed the Qateef girl standing against a baby blue backdrop. The picture had been taken two years earlier. Her head was covered, and she was dressed demurely in a black skirt and orange top, posing beside a small plastic tree that had been copiously laden with every imagineable variety of plastic fruit.
The Qateef girl had never been alone with Hassan, she told Fouad, nor had she ever lifted her veil to show the boy her face. But after her family arranged her contract of marriage to Mahdi, she had started to worry about the photograph being in Hassan’s possession. Affection had flowered between the newly betrothed couple, and the girl had also discovered that Mahdi was fiercely possessive. She characterized her fiancé-husband as hemish, an Egyptian colloquialism that male Saudis sometimes apply to being fully “in charge” of their women. Not wanting to risk losing the man she now loved, she contacted her girlfriend to ask if she could get the picture back.
The girlfriend reported a complication. Hassan wanted to meet his picture pal one last time. He would hand over the picture, he promised, at City Plaza, a mini-mall a couple of hundred yards from her family home, but only if he could meet her privately. So being keen to get the whole thing over, the Qateef girl set off from home, walking the distance to the mall by the time agreed, around 9 P.M. that night.
She was not at all pleased with Hassan for compelling her to go through this, and as she turned left off her street and started walking along the main road she grew still more annoyed when a car slowed down to crawl alongside her, its three male occupants leaning across to make suggestive comments. As she hurried into the mall, she upbraided Hassan for tipping off the men, whom she presumed to be his cronies. But he swore he knew nothing—and he was as horrified as she was when they escaped together through the mall’s rear door, to find the men in their vehicle waiting there for them. As the couple drove away, they were followed by their pursuers, who, the moment that they were off the main street, overtook them and forced them off the road. A foolish escapade was turning into a scarcely believable true-life nightmare. At knifepoint, two of the gangsters forced their captives out of their vehicle and onto the floor in the back of their own car, where one sat in the middle with a foot planted firmly on each of them.
“Come on over!” they could hear him boasting on the phone to his friends. “We’ve got a boy and a girl for tonight!”
Fouad Al-Mushaikhis could not believe what he was hearing. But it got worse. His nephew’s wife described how, arriving at a rough farm, the Qateef girl’s abaya was pulled off and she was dragged out of the car into a primitive majlis-style room. There were cushions around the walls, with a rough and dirty woven palm mat in the middle of the floor. Four more men had arrived, their headdresses swathed around their faces like balaclavas so she could not see their features. They told her to take off her clothes and to get ready for some “fun.” When she refused to strip, they beat her with palm fronds and ripped off the thin shift she was wearing beneath her abaya. She pleaded with them, telling them that she was married and from a good family. She called out to God, but they just laughed at her. Then they pushed her down onto the thin palm mat and raped her one by one. As they waited their turn, the men made videos on their mobile phones, leering and cheering from their cushions around the room.
“If you talk,” they threatened, “we will spread these movies all around.”
The girl’s ordeal went on for hours—till 2 A.M. she later reckoned—and while it was going on, four of the attackers tied up Hassan, then raped and videotaped him as well.
Fouad was in tears. He could not believe what he was hearing. The girl took forty minutes to get through her story. The final video-blackmailing detail convinced Fouad that the attackers were an organized gang who routinely kidnapped victims and had carried out these rape orgies before. They had worked out every detail, even copying the contact numbers from their victims’ cell phones before they let them go. They understood Saudi society. Such is the importance of “face” in this family-based culture that it is not unknown for families to seek out their daughters’ violators and pay them for their silence. The men who raped the Qateef girl had every reason to believe that the Shia community of Qateef would connive in their crime.
Fouad, who surely represents modernity in this drama, pondered for a week what to do. He was distraught. He found it difficult to do any work, and he spent a lot of time out walking, leaving his home so that his own family should not see his distress. He met with the girl again to try to get the details straight, then called another meeting with the couple.
“There is a really big problem that we have to face,” he told his nephew. “When you hear what has happened, you will be shocked, and you are going to have to be strong. You have got to act as a man and stand by your wife—even though your family, when they hear what has happened, will insist that you have got to divorce.”
Mahdi listened—then did as his uncle said. He stood by his woman. His sense of hemish made him determined to take his revenge on her violators, and the young man’s aggression showed Fouad the way ahead. He could hardly have pursued the cause of the Qateef girl without the support of her future husband. Fouad had determined to play Sherlock Holmes.
“Do you remember anything about the men?” he asked.
The problem with bringing the rapists to justice was a total lack of solid evidence. When the girl had finally got home after the attack, sobbing and semicomatose, her family had assumed she was suffering from a problem she had long had with anemia. They rushed her to hospital, where she did not mention being raped. So she was not examined internally and no DNA samples were taken—not that any such procedure would have been guaranteed. Saudi hospitals have no standardized protocol for processing rape allegations, and in some emergency rooms it remains routine for doctors—male or female—to refuse to hear or acknowledge what the assaulted patient is trying to say.
Fouad knew that the local police would be worse. Even when presented with evidence, they would presume provocation on the part of the woman: her rendezvous with Hassan would sink her cause fatally. So what could the Qateef girl say to prove her innocence?
“I remember,” she told Fouad, “that some of the men had a very strong smell. They smelt of something like fish.”
Sherlock Holmes had his clue. Fouad contacted Hassan, whose intransigence had started the trouble. The boy could make some amends, Fouad told him, by accompanying him to the bustling Qateef fish market, the main fish market of the Saudi east coast, where he would have to walk slowly past the various stalls. It was Fouad’s plan to follow at a distance and see if anyone reacted to Hassan’s presence.
Fouad and Hassan went twice to the fish market, and on the second visit the plan worked. As the boy walked down the central aisle of the long and narrow fish shed, awash with pungent water and glittering fish scales, Fouad saw two stallholders nudging each other with alarm. They vanished together behind their high freezer cabinet, and did not reemerge until Hassan had safely passed.
Now Fouad needed confirmation from the other victim.
“They won’t be able to see you,” he reassured her, “through your veil.”
The Qateef girl went to the stall as directed, and haggled over some fish. It was good fish, she later told Fouad, but she refused to hand over a single riyal to the animals who had abused her. She was terrified and had nearly fainted on the spot. Yes, she confirmed—the two men who had hidden behind their freezer were indeed the men who abducted her.
Fouad now had two suspects, and in the days that followed he gathered names and phone numbers and license plate details. He wrote everything down on a sheet of A4 paper, highlighting the main points, in the form of a letter from Mahdi asking for justice. “My wife has been raped,” it stated bluntly. But Fouad did not take it to the police. He went instead to the majlis of the royal governor of the Eastern Province, Prince Mohammed bin Fahd.
Here is the next point to ponder in this ancient and modern morality tale. Mohammed, the eldest son of the late King Fahad, has presided over two decades of spectacular growth in Saudi Arabia’s oil province, and his multifarious family businesses, run by his brother and his sons, have profited from it spectacularly. This linkage between public position and private profit would raise ethical questions in other parts of the world, but in Saudi Arabia it is the way things get done. Mohammed bin Fahd has many critics in the Kingdom’s largest and most prosperous province, which he governs—but it was thanks to him that the rapists were brought to justice.
“I could tell from the prince’s face,” remembers Fouad. “He was totally shocked by some of the details. I had highlighted them in bold on the piece of paper that I gave to him. His color changed. ‘Why haven’t you gone to the Qateef police?’ he asked. ‘I’m more afraid of them,’ I told him, ‘than I am of those criminals.’ ”
A few days later Fouad was sitting at a table in the Dammam Corniche waterfront park talking to two Mabahith colonels, and as he watched the detectives gently interrogating his nephew’s wife, he could not help admiring the way they went about their work. The colonels had been chosen by the prince’s office to supervise the case, and over the days that followed they selected an investigative team that quickly got results. After making their own inquiries, the detectives arrested the two fish sellers, who promptly surrendered the names of their accomplices. Several of them confessed. As events took a positive turn, Mahdi and his wife decided that they would move in together, taking up residence in Mahdi’s mother’s house, not far from Qateef’s Shia burial ground, and just across the street from Fouad’s home. Adversity had helped them become fully man and wife.
Fouad assumed that justice would now take its course, but he had not reckoned on the Saudi court system, based on the shariah, God’s eternal and unchanging law, derived from the Koran and the Hadith (Islamic traditions). Since law is a branch of religion, it follows that all Saudi judges are religious sheikhs, most of them of a conservative and distinctly Wahhabi inclination, very concerned to encourage their own view of virtue and to discourage vice, particularly when that vice might involve bidaa, innovations, of a Western nature. This meant, in the case of the Qateef girl, that the three judges started their deliberations by focusing on the premarital relationship that had drawn the young woman to the City Plaza that fateful night. This was the single undisputed offense before the court. The rapists had withdrawn their confessions and were now pleading innocence, while the girl’s signed “confession” to the police remained on the record.
“The shariah is quite clear,” declared Sheikh Abdul Muhsin Al-Ubaiqan, himself a former judge and now a member of the Majlis Al-Shura. “If she had confessed to adultery, she would have been sentenced to stoning. As it was, she confessed without reservation to an improper premarital closeness.”
In the circumstances, the three Qateef judges, all devout Sunnis, considered that they were being lenient in sentencing this sinful young Shia woman—and the man with whom she had been in the car—to just ninety lashes each and two months in prison. As for the other defendants, the accusation of multiple rape was the allegation of one admitted sinner against a group of men who were all protesting their innocence—and who, if they turned out not to be innocent, could plausibly claim enticement by a woman whose looseness was now a matter of record. Kidnapping seemed proven, but who could tell exactly what had happened after that? It was her word against theirs. Considering the paucity of incriminating evidence, the judges could not possibly invoke the standard shariah death penalty for rape. Sentences ranging from ten months to five years, they considered, were more than harsh enough.
As the verdict was read out in court, the rapists sneered openly at their victim. She had been summoned to appear and stand alongside them not as their accuser, but as a fellow sexual offender. Fouad had secured Saudi justice for his nephew’s wife, but it was not the justice for which he had hoped.
To most Western readers, Fouad Al-Mushaikhis will seem a hero in this tale. But that is not how he appeared to many people in Qateef. As soon as news of the arrests began circulating, people had started to take sides—and not Fouad’s side, for the most part.
“Every evening when I got home from work,” he remembers, “there would be a group of friends and neighbors hovering around.”
Fouad would invite them in for tea, and after the preliminaries and normal courtesies had been negotiated, most of the visitors proffered the same piece of advice—“Just drop it. Don’t stir things up.”
His family begged him to abandon his mission, while his wife’s family threatened to take her away and impose a divorce. One of Fouad’s beloved uncles refused—and still refuses—to shake Fouad’s hand, his attitude reflecting that of a local sheikh, the firebrand Nimr Al-Nimr (“Tiger of the Tigers”), who publicly denounced anyone who would have a hand in surrendering Shia boys into the ungodly clutches of the Sunni legal system. Some of the rapists were related to Fouad’s own family, and their wives came to him pleading that he should drop the case.
“My husband has no sin in this,” said one in tears. “I give him no blame. He was just invited by a sinful woman.”
When the court issued its verdict, the sentences seemed very fair to the many segments of Qateef society who saw Fouad as a troublemaker. But for that very reason Fouad refused to give up.
“I told people, ‘The more you push me, the more I shall expand the circle.’ ”
His nephew Mahdi agreed. The boy was determined to protect his wife from being lashed. Uncle and nephew decided to appeal the court’s verdict, turning for reinforcement to the wider Saudi media and to Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, a controversial young Riyadh lawyer specializing in human rights. Two of King Abdullah’s cherished “agencies of civil society” were about to be tested as building blocks of modernity and reform.
“To start with,” says Fouad, “I had avoided publicity. I could see that it would upset the judges. But then I got a local journalist friend to write a general sort of article about rape victims and society’s response. He didn’t mention any names, yet we got more than seven hundred responses, and a lot of them brought up the case. It was clear that people knew about it even though nothing had then been published—and most of them were against the criminals. They wanted the death penalty. So that encouraged me. I decided to widen the thing still further.”
In the short term, widening the case seemed to make things worse. In November 2007, three judges of the General Court of Qateef agreed that the original sentences had not been severe enough—on anyone. They increased the sentences on the rapists to terms ranging from two to nine years. But they more than doubled the punishment of their victims, the Qateef girl and Hassan, to two hundred lashes and six months in jail. The judges also confiscated the professional license of her lawyer, Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, on the grounds that he had tarnished the court’s reputation by talking to the press about the case. In a rare public statement, a court official explained that the woman’s sentence had been increased because of “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”
The case of the Qateef girl went international overnight. The U.S. State Department gave its views. So did Hillary Clinton in her presidential primary campaign, and a regiment of columnists in every language. The Qateef judges’ attempt to squash one young woman for publicizing her plight had exactly the reverse effect. In Saudi Arabia it became the issue everyone discussed. The idea that the victim was to blame and that she had somehow “invited” rape seemed to sum up the Kingdom’s perverse and topsy-turvy code of traditional values. Observers noted how King Abdullah had announced ambitious plans in October to reform the Kingdom’s entire legal system, reducing the power of individual clerics. Now it was November, and the clerics had struck back.
“If I had been a judge in Qateef that day,” declared Ibrahim bin Salih Al-Khudairi, a judge on the Riyadh Appeals Court, “I would have sentenced all of them to death. The woman and her male companion were lucky not to get the death penalty.”
Listening to this sort of assertion in a TV discussion that had turned to debating the subject of the Qateef girl’s “honor,” Mahdi Al-Mushaikhis decided to put in a call.
“Since all of you are presuming to gossip and pass judgment on my wife’s ‘honor,’ ” he said, “I would like to point out that none of you know her. I do. Listen. I am her husband. I am going to tell you the truth.”
The firestorm of publicity got results. In less than a month Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem was given back his license to practice law, and a few weeks later King Abdullah announced pardons for the Qateef girl and Hassan.
“I never had any doubt,” says the controversial Al-Lahem—now a liberal, once a Salafi fanatic—“that in the end King Abdullah would put right everything that was wrong with this case.”
In his letter announcing the pardons, the king also set up an inquiry into what he called “the dark tunnel of iniquity” surrounding the rapists, their connections to the local police, and the faulty response of the judicial system—an inquiry that has still to report. Police investigations made it clear that the rapists, aged between twenty-six and forty-two, had long-established links with local drug and alcohol dealing. To both liberals and conservatives they represented the unacceptable face of modernization. Off-the-record, people close to the king disclose that Abdullah’s personal verdict was uncompromising: The men should all be beheaded.
So what does it tell us, this slip-sliding Saudi drama of old and new? At the end of a book, people expect some prognosis for the future, and on the subject of Saudi Arabia, the think tanks and foreign-affairs societies can offer statistics and analyses aplenty. I prefer to offer, and have chosen to end with, the messy human story of the Qateef girl, since it defined Saudi Arabia to the world for a moment, and still provides, in my view, the best route into the muddle of tradition and progress that makes up the Kingdom today.
Take your pick as to the story’s defining turn. You might select the exhilarating moment when Mahdi, a twenty-six-year-old student of petroleum engineering, picked up the phone to call MBC, the popular satellite broadcasting channel, to speak boldly to millions and to defend the honor of his wife. Here, in Saudi terms, was something very new.
You might select something very old—the interventions by the local prince-governor, Mohammed bin Fahd, and then by his uncle the king, who used their absolute powers to circumvent the established mechanisms of police and the law to secure the outcome that we in the West would certainly define as justice. In other chapters we have seen this arbitrary power deployed to ward off harm to Mansour Al-Nogaidan, the restlessly reflective Salafi, and to protect Mohammed Al-Harbi, the progressive chemistry teacher from Buraydah. So is autocracy the answer to the conundrum? Do we believe that benevolent despotism could or should offer Saudi Arabia the long-term way ahead?
Or you might reflect on the fact that, as this book goes to press, Mahdi is living separately from his Qateef girl, who packed her bags several months after the royal pardon and went back to live with her mother. Mahdi told her she had to leave. All his closest family—brothers and sisters, mother, cousins, and aunts—feel that his world-famous wife has brought unacceptable shame on their clan. The only dissent comes from his liberal and Westernized Uncle Fouad, who is still ostracized by many in the town. Everyone else in the family wants Mahdi to break off his marriage, and as of this writing, the young student, just graduating and starting adult life as a petroleum engineer, is under incredible pressure to act as his family requests. He has done his bit for her, after all—a great deal more than most other Saudi men would have dared. In the family-created, family-dominated Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the story of the Qateef girl does not have a Western happy ending. By the Saudi rules of the game, it has got to end in divorce.