Shortly before this book was due to go to press, I was traveling by car toward Jeddah’s balad, the picturesque ancient “downtown” that was forsaken in the oil boom and the rush to the suburbs. Three decades of tumultuous Saudi development have unrolled since I first laid eyes on the old quarter’s crumbling array of carved wooden mansions, and I was just reflecting on the conflicting, push-and-pull progression of the Kingdom’s life in those years—when I hit the traffic jam. Excited men, largely Pakistanis and Asians, were halting their cars and leaping out toward the sidewalk, abandoning their vehicles, in some cases, where they stood in the street, in order to dash toward an awning in the parking lot of a mosque beside the palm-fringed lagoon. There I could make out security vehicles gathered around a tall white ambulance, where policemen in khaki uniforms kept the all-male crowd at bay. The sun blazed down from almost immediately overhead. My watch said eleven o’clock—the hour when Saudi executions are held.
It was over by the time my car had drawn level with the scene. Saudi executioners pride themselves on performing their duties swiftly and efficiently, with a single wheeling blow from a razor-sharp sword. I could see the headless body still kneeling, bizarrely upright beneath the awning, while the suddenly subdued spectators turned back toward their abandoned cars. Vivid stripes of red blood ran down the brightly laundered white cotton robe in which the condemned man had met his end.
My driver sized up the victim’s white costume in a glance.
“Afghan,” he said—and drove on.
Public execution is the dark side of life inside the Kingdom, the medieval spectacle that is both pilloried and fondly gloated over by the Western media. In fact, very few Saudi men (and still fewer Saudi women) have ever witnessed an execution. Public beheadings today are disciplinary displays intended to make a point to the ever-swelling community of migrant workers—some ten million, legal and illegal, in a population of twenty-eight million—and the grim deterrent seems effective. By day or by night, you can walk the streets of any Saudi town without fear of muggers. People leave their cars unlocked. Gun crime against or between locals is virtually nonexistent, and if you raise the issue of capital punishment with Saudis, many will ask why their rate of executions, some seventy-three per year since 1985, according to Amnesty International, makes them so much more barbaric than the United States, where the rate has been forty-two per year over an equivalent period (China, of course, dwarfs both countries in this gruesome respect). With regard to voyeurism, they will point out that every U.S. execution chamber features its own viewing gallery, and that in June 2001 the U.S. government painstakingly assembled no fewer than three hundred people to witness in person, and on closed circuit television, the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
They are on less solid ground when it comes to defending their country on questions of torture and detention without trial. Until quite recently the calculated infliction of pain was a tool routinely deployed by the Saudi secret police—in 2002 a group of largely British expatriates, some of them involved in the illegal alcohol trade, were shamefully tortured by the Mabahith when they were falsely accused of bombings that were actually the work of Al-Qaeda. King Abdullah has tried to put a stop to that. His human rights commissions are charged with pursuing all complaints of prisoner abuse—according to recently released detainees the first question in their nightly interrogations has often been “Have you been tortured or threatened today?” This reflects the influence of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, whose “soft policing” techniques have been praised by foreign security experts. But the fact remains that the Saudi government claims the right to detain its citizens without charge for six months. As this book goes to press in the spring of 2009, there are at least eleven political prisoners, a group of Jeddah liberals and their associates, who have been detained without trial for nearly two years.
When Fouad Al-Farhan drew attention to the plight of these men in his popular Arabic blog, he was arrested himself—on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day.
“I came out of a coffee shop,” he recalls, “to be surrounded by this group of guys in tracksuits and running shoes—no uniforms in sight. It was all very polite and even respectful in a weird way. No one would have known I was being arrested, unless I chose to make a scene or try to escape—in which case they were dressed to catch me very quickly. They looked like they were a running club who had come to invite me to the gym. They took me home to say good-bye to my wife and family while they rooted round in my books and my PC to get a profile of my politics.”
When Al-Farhan told his captors the significance of the date, they thought it was a huge joke.
“Well, come and enjoy the anniversary with us!” said one of them. “We’ll bake you a cake in prison!”
The food in the recently completed Mabahith jail north of Jeddah turned out, in fact, to be remarkably good—in line with the rest of the facilities. Al-Farhan was assigned his own air-conditioned cell, about ten by eleven feet, containing his own WC and shower. Prison rumor credited the creature comforts to pressure exerted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in their post-9/11 visits to Saudi Arabia.
“Everything came from America,” recalls Al-Farhan. “The handle on the WC was stamped CALIFORNIA. It did not happen with me, but I have heard of political prisoners in Riyadh who would pick up the phone when they received visitors and would order a huge plate of rice and kharoof(sheep) to be delivered to their room.”
In the middle of this almost surreal material comfort, Al-Farhan discovered there was nothing that he could control for himself.
“I was totally helpless,” he recalls. “Like a baby or an invalid. If I wanted the AC up or down, or even the lights on or off, I had to ask on the intercom for the guards to do it for me. I was at their mercy. When I did not cooperate with the questioners once, they just left me in my cell for thirty-two days. I have to say that no one hurt me or threatened me, and that I got my three meals a day. But they played with my mind. I went crazy with fear and self-doubt. I now know that a human being cannot live by himself for very long—I certainly could not. When they did finally call me for questioning again, I was actually grateful.”
Fouad’s interrogators were concerned that he had a friend—a “mole”— inside their organization. In the prewritten letter that he had arranged to have posted on his blog if detained, he gave the false impression that he had had advance, inside knowledge of his arrest, and this worried the Mabahith very much.
“Here I am trying to hunt down Al-Qaeda,” said Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in the course of one long conversation with the troublesome blogger, “and now I have to search out security leaks among my own men.”
Prince Mohammed insists that Al-Farhan was not detained to limit his freedom of expression, but for security reasons. The blogger had been speaking out on behalf of a group of reformers whom the ministry accused of raising funds for anti-American insurgents in Iraq, and, once arrested, his blog was kept going by the exiled Tunisian activist Sami bin Garbiah, who is the scourge of the Tunisian government. Fouad says that these were only pretexts for government unhappiness with his writing, and points to the focus his captors placed on one of his most popular—and notorious—blogs, a list of the ten Saudis that he most disliked and least wished to meet.24
“That is not the Saudi way,” his interrogators chided. “Be polite. You should be respectful to others in the community. You were creating discord”—using fitna, the shariah law term that denotes disagreement or “division among the people.”
Fitna provides the legal justification for the Saudi system of detention without trial. Under shariah law the ruler is responsible for preserving harmony in the community, so if “those that govern” determine that you pose a threat to the security of society or to public order, they are required to detain you for the sake of the community as a whole. It is a divine duty. One American ambassador who was negotiating with Prince Nayef in the 1990s about the detention of a U.S. citizen recalls the normally impassive interior minister throwing his arms into the air to proclaim, “I can do nothing except as God commands!”
The ambassador’s interpreter must have shortened or conflated several things that the prince probably said. The interior minister would have pointed out that the prisoner had been either detained or sentenced according to the law, that the law in Saudi Arabia is the law of God, and that the prince was an instrument of the law. But it comes down to the same thing. If, as a country, you adopt the Koran as your constitution, then all your wars must be holy wars, those who die for their country are all holy martyrs—and the secret police are doing the work of God. Habeus corpus is not a shariah concept.
“They kept telling me they were respecting my rights,” recalls Fouad Al-Farhan. “They came to my wife and gave her thirty thousand riyals (about $8,000) to help with her living expenses, and when I came out they gave me forty thousand ($11,500) to compensate me for my loss of business, though I lost ten times that. To get out I had to sign a statement promising to be a good Saudi citizen and not to write online criticizing the Saudi government. They make everyone sign something like that, so if you ‘mis behave’ again, they can wave it at you, saying that you’ve let them down. All through my time there they kept reminding me that I had not been physically or mentally abused, and that is true. But what does that mean? The world stopped for me for 137 days. I was not allowed to read any books or newspapers. Months after my release I discovered that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. I could never go out once and see the sun. Isn’t that mental—and physical—abuse?”
The much-imprisoned reformer Mohammed Saeed Tayeb, who is also campaigning on behalf of his fellow constitutionalists in prison, puts it another way.
“We have never used violence. We have never taken up weapons. The only thing we did was to have a different opinion, and for that we got put in prison.”
Saeed Tayeb’s prison tally to date is five spells behind bars adding up to more than seven years, and at the age of seventy, he was still banned from leaving the country.
“When we, the constitutional reformers, come out of jail, the government does not give us rewards as they give to those violent terrorists. We are not given a job, or a car, or a new wife—we do not even get the dialogue and discussions that those extremists are granted. The last time I saw Prince Mohammed bin Nayef I said to him, ‘I want to be in their basket! ’ He smiled at me. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘That is not your thobe.’ He was very friendly. ‘I am quite sure things will be all right,’ he said. ‘Try to be patient. Things will be happening, inshallah.’ ”
Prince Nayef’s son has promised that the Saudi system of travel bans is in the course of revision by the Ministry of the Interior. In the future, he says, bans will only be issued for security reasons that have been certified by a judge—in the middle of March 2009 he phoned Mohammed Saeed Tayeb to tell him that his ban had been lifted: Mohammed was now free to travel.
“Where are you planning to go?” asked a friend of the ancient agitator.
“Anywhere in the world,” replied Saeed Tayeb, “so long as there are no reformers there.”
FINDING THE RIGHT PATH
A pilgrim was delayed on his journey to Mecca, and when he finally caught up with his companions, he discovered that they had already made their first visit to the Grand Mosque to pray. He found them back at their hotel taking tea together around an open-air table at the edge of the souk.
“It’s easy to get there,” they said, pointing to the jumble of alleys and shops that made up Mecca’s souk in the old days. “Set off in that direction. Turn left at the incense seller, and you’re sure to reach the Mosque.”
The pilgrim had had a stressful journey. He was eager to pray. He felt he needed to commune with his God. So he set off at once into the colorful maze of little shops, and when he found the incense seller he turned left. But he had only gone a short way down that passageway when he found another incense seller—and another one after that, who was located beside yet another junction. Each time, the pilgrim stopped to ponder the correct route to his destination. Which one should he choose? What if he chose the wrong path, got lost, and missed the cherished spot at which he aimed?
After carefully navigating the twists and turns of the marketplace, the traveler was delighted to find himself at an entrance to the Grand Mosque, where he entered and said his prayers. Returning joyfully to take tea with his friends, he told them of his navigational problems and of his eventual good fortune—to be gently informed that any route he might have chosen would have landed him at the huge Mosque. Choose your own incense seller. There are many paths that we can take to reach our God.
It is early September 2008, and the pilgrims are flying in to Jeddah. Every seat on the plane is occupied, the women wearing black robes and headdresses, the men swathed in white pilgrim towels.
“I am responding to Your call, oh Allah, I am responding to Your call. I am obedient to Your orders. You have no partner . . . ”
The men are chanting with their heads bowed—some of them in unison, some of them bent over into their own, intense, privately mouthed prayers. The public-address system crackles: The plane is still thirty thousand feet above the ground, but now, reports the captain, we are about to enter the area of holiness that surrounds Mecca. This is the pilgrims’ last chance to wash and to change into their towels. The chanting gets louder; the excitement is mounting—Ramadan is due to start tomorrow.
Most people have heard of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim man or woman must try to make at least once in their lives. Less well known is the migration inspired by Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, when the devout travel to spend the whole of that month in Mecca. Every hotel, apartment block, and boarding house in the city is booked, and the Grand Mosque overflows with visitors. Up in Medina the story is the same. A prayer said during Ramadan is worth double the prayer said at any other time, and a prayer said in either of the two holy cities is worth double that. So in terms of storing up credits for heaven, this is bumper bargain time—multiple mileage-point upgrades.
In one sense, Ramadan is all about subduing your appetites. Saudis cherish the tale of the battle of Badr, fought in Ramadan two years after Mohammed’s migration to Medina, when a small force of fasting Muslims defeated a much larger army of Meccans who had been fully fed.
“When you can control your hunger, you can control your human desires,” says the student Ahmed Sabri. “And when you control yourself, you are strong.”
Yet in another sense, Saudi Ramadan is like Carnival—ultimately a riot. The vast majority of the population fasts conscientiously from dawn to dusk, as required, and that is not an easy accomplishment, even if many choose to spend long stretches of the daylight hours asleep. Once the sun has gone down, however . . .
It is day for night. The Saudis celebrate their God, who has given them the strength to fast—no food, no sex, and, most difficult of all, no liquid of any kind for more than twelve hours, not even a sip of water. They celebrate their religion with its complicated array of demands and rewards that, as they know in their hearts, no other religion can rival. But, most important, they celebrate the company of their friends and family. As the moon runs its course, they feast and chat, play games, laugh, joke, and pray, with the prayers getting longer and louder and ever more poetic as the month progresses. It is the “glory time.” There are Ramadan gifts, and gaudy Ramadan lights and decorations. The children run around getting far too excited. There is special Ramadan food. Shops overstock. People overeat. Ramadan is the Saudis’ monthlong, after-dark Christmas.
The king, the court, and all the government ministers move to Jeddah for the month, doing business for abbreviated hours in the day, then shuttling up and down the highway to Mecca at night. Batches of prisoners get released—those who have not been convicted of drug offenses or crimes of violence. There are no executions. It is the season of “Ramadan breath,” since the rules do not permit you—or, more relevantly, others—to suck on a breath freshener to perfume the fumes from an empty stomach. It is also the season of the office party, when filing clerks and sales directors nervously nibble dates together over iftar, the sunset breaking of the fast. Without alcohol, the atmosphere of the Saudi office party is emphatically different from that of its ribald Western equivalent: it starts with everyone, from managing director to office boy, forming lines, kneeling down together, and saying their prayers. In Ramadan 2008 the governor of the Mecca region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, announced that, for the first time, it would be permissible for female workers to break the fast at such gatherings in the company of their male colleagues.
Ramadan is the season when the Saudi TV channels stage special editions of their top-rated shows, the most popular of which is Tash Ma Tash—literally “Splash, No Splash,” or “You either get it or you don’t”—an irreverent, satirical mixture of Little Britain andSaturday Night Live. For Ramadan in 2007 the series opened with its two comic heroes planning to open a new dish (satellite) television channel. They hired themselves a couple of busty blondes to present round-the-clock news—and the channel failed. They tried a “love advice” channel, then a music channel, and finally a psychic channel offering help against black magic, dressing the blondes in ever more alluring costumes (while also attempting to seduce the girls themselves). Nothing worked, until they had a brainwave—“Go Islamic.” They hid the girls completely behind veils and put on long, Osama-style beards to present a gloomy program called Repentance. The advertisers came flocking in.
King Abdullah is said to be Tash Ma Tash’s greatest fan—and they need that level of support. From its first broadcast in 1993 the program has provoked the fury of the strictly religious community, earning fatwas as if they were Emmys. In 2000 the permanent committee of the grand ulema itself pronounced condemnation—with its creators, Nasser Al-Qasabi and Abdullah Al-Sadhan, receiving death threats from the terrorist groups whom they frequently lampooned. Tash Ma Tash has ridiculed Saudi tribes and tribal customs, bureaucratic delays and corruption, religious extremists, the religious police, greedy investors, wasta (influence and pulling strings), unfaithful Saudi husbands, arrogant Saudis abroad, ignorant Saudi teachers, the ban on women driving and the subjugation of women. One episode imagined a household where the women ruled the roost and the men were kept on their knees doing the housework all day. Fans of the show reckon it has become even more scathing since Ramadan 2006, when it moved from the official government channel to satellite TV in Dubai, and, in 2008, renamed itself Kullena Eyal Garyah (“We Are All Village People”). Yet in all its sixteen years on the air, Tash Ma Tash has never once made fun of a greedy prince or a pompous government minister.
“Our leaders make mistakes,” says Nasser Al-Qasabi, “and we enjoy laughing at the results of those mistakes. But we don’t make fun of the leaders personally. That is not the Saudi way.”
That is not likely to change anytime soon—but once upon a time it was not the custom for Saudis to sit down in front of the television and laugh at themselves.
If you switch on the TV just before iftar, the breaking of the fast, you can catch a special Ramadan version of Khaled Bahaziq’s popular counseling program, Yalla Saadah—“Let’s Go for Happiness.” The onetime mujahid has adapted his marriage guidance work for television, trying to spread his message about the need for men to behave more gently and sweetly toward their wives.
“Since the men won’t come to my therapy sessions,” he says, “I am taking the message to them. I hope that just a few of them will listen—though I fear that it will only be just a few. Women will be driving cars in this country, I believe, long before their men start to change—and it will be from that sort of practical change, inshallah, that some sort of mental change may follow.”
Waiting for that long-delayed and deeply symbolic innovation—which, according to ongoing popular rumor, King Abdullah is perennially preparing to make—the pioneer women drivers of the 1990 demonstration gather every year on November 6, the anniversary of their great adventure, to share their memories and look to the future.
“We discuss,” says Fawzia Al-Bakr, “what we can do to empower the younger women. Since 9/11 women have the right to work in the private sector, but like any other activity outside the home, they can do it only with the written permission of their mahram [male guardian].”
The problem of the male guardian was one of the issues discussed at the Third National Dialogue, held in Medina in June 2004, which Dr. Al-Bakr attended as a member of the organizing committee. The former political prisoner was invited to help set the agenda and suggest the names of participants. As at the Second Dialogue, the previous year, male and female delegates were kept in separate conference rooms, with women making their contributions to the men’s gathering via closed-circuit television.
“We had separate accommodation,” she recalls, “and even our own elevator—WOMEN ONLY.”
But the segregation fostered unexpected harmony.
“Most of the women delegates were very religious and very conservative,” recalls Dr. Al-Bakr. “I was one of the few liberals, and to start with, the atmosphere was definitely prickly. Neither side trusted the other—there was so much hostility. But as we lived together and ate together, we came to see the human side. They were very honorable women, with very fine intellects. I developed great respect for them, and I think they felt the same for me. We became a sort of sisterhood. By the end of the day we were all talking away together, sharing our problems and ideas about our children and our work.”
The June 2004 gathering came up with three specific recommendations: that women should be able to work and study without the permission of a mahram; that female-only courts should be established with female judges to adjudicate on women’s issues; and that a high-quality national public-transportation system be established for the benefit of all women, and particularly for poorer women and girls who could not afford drivers.
King Abdullah received Dr. Al-Bakr and all the women delegates afterward to thank them publicly for their work and to promise that their proposals would be considered in depth. Four and a half years later, in the spring of A.D. 2009 (A.H. 1430), there is no sign that a single one of the women’s recommendations has been seriously studied, let alone acted upon.
Husayn Shobokshi, the dreamer who wrote of his lawyer daughter driving him home from the airport, is writing his column again and has his talk show back—in a better time slot, with a still larger audience. He is setting up a new twenty-four-hour news and comment TV channel in Jeddah. He has also become a Sufi.
After months of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, Frank Gardner has resumed his work as the BBC’s security correspondent, in a wheelchair most of the time. In October 2005 he went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Order of the British Empire from the Queen—standing up and shuffling thirty yards across the ballroom to meet her on crutches.
“How very gallant of you to come like this,” said Her Majesty.
“T-1,” Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, passed away in 2007, aged over ninety, having had the satisfaction of seeing many of his projects come to fruition and to be succeeded as principal royal adviser by his son Khaled. Less gregarious than his father but equally hardworking, Khaled is responsible, among other things, for the running of the new Allegiance Commission, which will choose the next king or crown prince. Once known as “T-4” because of his relatively lowly position in the heirarchy of the Tuwayjri family, Khaled has been promoted. Today he is known as T-1 among the foreigners who seek to make sense of the confusing array of names who cluster around the king.
The outspoken and reforming Prince Khaled Al-Faisal has been promoted by King Abdullah. He is now governor of Mecca and the Jeddah area, where, in October 2007, he allowed the reinstatement of Ramadan celebrations in the streets. The street vendors and sweets makers could sing their songs—watched for the first time in thirty years by mixed crowds of men and women not segregated into separate sections. Should the nineteen grandsons in the royal family’s new council of electors prove brave enough to select one of their own generation for the succession—a very long shot—Khaled is the grandson on whom you might put your money to become crown prince.
His half brother Turki, the former head of Saudi intelligence and short-lived ambassador to Washington, is now directing his family’s learned research institute in Riyadh—the Kingdom’s leading center for independent scholarly study—and is doing some research of his own into what happened in the Muslim year 1000 (1591-92 in the Christian calendar). He is hoping that the topic might make a book. As the book you’re reading goes to press, the prince is a visiting professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Wahhabi “between quotation marks,” as he puts it, lecturing at a school that was founded and is still staffed to some degree by Jesuits.
His brother-in-law Bandar bin Sultan is still national security adviser to his uncle the king, but has not featured in the headlines recently. In October 2007, during a series of state visits to European capitals, King Abdullah settled down to watch the first of a multipart TV series on his life and reign, to discover the voluble Bandar dominating the screen and claiming personal credit for a number of royal policy initiatives—including, crucially, the 2001-2 confrontation that led George W. Bush to endorse the creation of a separate Palestinian state. His Majesty was dismayed. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but the TV series was not seen again—and nor was Prince Bandar when the Saudi party arrived in Rome. His staff explained that the prince had had to leave for a long-delayed shoulder operation in Geneva. As to Bandar’s new foreign policy role as national security adviser, one of his aides explained that the prince considers his new responsibilities to be “low profile” and not a matter for discussion in books or newspapers.
. . .
Osama Bin Laden has also been keeping a low profile—hiding somewhere, it is presumed, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, whence reports occasionally emanate of his death. These are examined very seriously by the lawyers of the Bin Laden family, since they are administering his assets and share of the family fortune, confiscated at the time that his brothers renounced him in 1994. When Osama dies, this sum—some seventy million riyals ($20 million) according to a family friend—will be distributed according to Islamic law among his surviving wives and children.
Mansour Al-Nogaidan resides in Ajman, in the United Arab Emirates, with his wife, who is a doctor, and their two small children. He returns to Buraydah from time to time, but he can no longer find a Saudi newspaper that will publish his work. He has paid a high price for his plain speaking. He is a columnist for the Bahraini paper Al-Waqt (“Time”), where he expounds his great hope for the appearance of an Islamic Luther who will reform Islam as Martin Luther reformed Europe’s medieval church.
“Muslims are too rigid,” he wrote in the summer of 2007, “in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It’s time for many verses—especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions—to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It’s time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It’s time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the Prophet’s words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace, and of light. . . . This is the belief I’ve arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey.”
There is still no sports or organized physical activity for girls in Saudi state schools. Saudi Arabia did not send a female team to the Beijing Olympics for reasons of “decency”—athletic costume in almost every Olympic contest except shooting is considered too revealing. Women’s sports clubs are criticized by traditionalists as “leading to the spread of decadence”—though three of the conservative sheikhs who argued for the ban, Abdul-Rahman Al-Barrak, Abdullah Al-Jibreen, and Abdul Aziz Al-Rajhi, have recently suggested a way by which it would be possible for a woman to take exercise in an Islamic fashion. “A woman can practice sports at home,” they said, “and there are many ways to do that: she can, for example, race her husband in a deserted area, like the Prophet Mohammed—peace be upon Him—who raced with his wife Aisha twice.”
The Mabahith continue their work as the social control system, the Ministry of the Interior’s own private monitoring service on dissent and the national mood. It released Fouad Al-Farhan from jail after 137 days, but, at the time of this writing, seven of the dissidents on whose behalf he protested remain behind bars. By Western standards this is deplorable. By Saudi standards it is an improvement on Fawzia Al-Bakr’s 1980s experience of disappearance without a trace. Today the Mabahith operate according to defined protocols—the spouses and families of those detained, for example, must be notified within twenty-four hours—and their work is the subject of increased public comment.
Even more scrutinized are the activities of the religious police. In late 2008 a number of religious policemen were awaiting trial on charges that ranged from harassment to the unlawful killing of a suspect taken into custody—though no one reckoned that the religious courts would treat them with the harshness that secular folk felt they deserved. At the heart of the Saudi state lies the bargain between the religious and the royals, and though the misalignments in that delicate balance have inspired the problems of the past thirty years—inside the Kingdom and beyond—that fundamental deal is also the reason why the royal family has weathered the storm. Looking ahead and wondering what might assist the cohesion of this complicated society as it rattles into the twenty-first century, it would seem unwise to abandon the grounding of religion.
Among the Shia in the east the steps to reform continue, albeit at pigeon-step pace. Tawfiq Al-Seif is working with Jaffar Shayeb and Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar for Saudi Arabia to adopt more flexible interpretations of the Koran—what Muslims call tafsir.
“There is a verse in the Koran that says that in order to be strong in war against your enemies you have to prepare ‘swords and horses,’ ” says Tawfiq. “Well, if you take that literally nowadays and go into battle with swords and horses you will find yourself hopelessly weak against your enemies. So here is a case where everyone would agree that you have to reinterpret what the Prophet said. Literalism can only represent the outside of things, and in the last thirty years it has taken us badly off the path. We must search for the value that lies inside the words. What the pious Muslim—Sunni or Shia—should be asking himself today is not what the Prophet did then, but what he would do now if he were confronted by the realities of modern life.”
Ahmad Al-Tuwayjri, one of the framers of the 1992 Memorandum of Advice, believes it is very possible for Wahhabism to reform itself and lead the way in new directions.
“In the beginning,” he says, “Wahhabism was an extremely progressive, reformation movement that shook up a world of superstition and blind imitation. Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab tried to correct the fundamen tals in a way that was dynamic and modern for its time. It is only in the twentieth century that the dawah wahhabiya [Wahhabi mission] became identified with those who pull backward and refuse to change.”
The man who spent forty days in prison after he presented the Memorandum of Advice in 1992 now has a successful law practice in the Saudi courts and is working with activists from other countries to create a World Forum for Peace.
“People talk as if there are only two ways for us in the Kingdom,” says Al-Tuwayjri, “to imitate the West slavishly or to preserve everything and resist any change. But there is a third way, the way of ijtihad—to find out and follow the truth. If our Muslim scholars do not lead the way and have the courage to change, they will be left behind and Islam will pay a heavy price. Our current king, Abdullah, is a good man. We know that he is reform-minded. But as of 2008, I have to say that the political institutions are evolving too slowly.”
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz thinks the same—at eighty-six, he is an old man in a hurry. For more than thirty years his most cherished ambition has been the creation of an internationally prestigious college that will bear his name, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), a graduate-only, Arabian equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The world’s leading scientists and scholars will gather and mingle freely on its campus, dreams the king—men and women, East and West, all united in their pursuit of learning.
The inspiration for Abdullah’s romantic ambition is the Bayt Al-Hekma, the House of Knowledge, which flourished in Baghdad between the ninth and thirteenth centuries as the center of study in the Muslim world—in the entire Western world, in fact. It was the Bayt Al-Hekma that kept civilization alive as Europe endured the travails of the Dark Ages. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, zoology, and philosophy all survived and thrived in these centuries thanks to the Arab House of Knowledge: from its Kitab Al-Jabr (Book of Equations) came the study of what we call algebra. The ideas of Galen, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates were researched, preserved, and embellished by the Bayt Al-Hekma, so it was Muslim scholars who passed on the raw material that inspired Europe’s intellectual rebirth at the end of the Middle Ages. Without the Arab House of Knowledge there could have been no Thomas Aquinas, no Bacon or Galileo.
This is the early Islam to which modern Muslims should look back and aspire, thinks King Abdullah—to an age that was characterized by tolerance and the pursuit of knowledge. The scholars of the Bayt Al-Hekma followed inquiry wherever it led, opening their minds to new ideas. To understand the miracle of God’s universe is to understand God’s handiwork, they believed, and following in the tradition of that big idea, KAUST aims higher than the processing of international graduate students. The university represents the king’s considered response to the joyless and totalitarian aspects of Salafism—the starting point, he hopes, of a trickle-down change of educational attitudes that will eventually illuminate every madrasa in the land.
In the spring of 2007, Abdullah offered the state oil company, Aramco, almost any sum they needed to pick up his project and make it happen. KAUST already has a $10 billion endowment to match that of MIT, and is heading for $25 billion, according to theFinancial Times, which would place its wealth in the world second only to that of Harvard. In the king’s view Aramco has always been the most efficiently managed Saudi enterprise in or out of government, light-years ahead of the tradition-bound Ministry of Higher Education. Abdullah had originally intended that the campus be located on the cool, green plateau of Taif, above Mecca, but was persuaded to shift it to the site of the proposed new economic city that bears his name on the Red Sea coast. His one proviso was that he wanted to see the students and professors at work on the campus in two years’ time—September 2009.
A few months later the king decided he would like to inspect the progress of his university, so he called up the royal bus, his preferred manner of transport. It is a nightmare for his security detail. A bus makes a very large target. But the king enjoys the laughter and camaraderie of bus travel. There are jokes and songs when you travel on King Abdullah’s bus, and, high above the road, you also get a very good view.
The bus rattled up the coastal highway from the royal palace in Jeddah, drawing to a halt outside the new King Abdullah Economic City a hundred miles away.
“Where’s the university?” asked the king, getting down from the bus.
When he discovered that this was a preliminary, courtesy stop at his new economic city, he got straight back on the bus, leaving a bewildered reception committee in the dust. He had come to see where his students would study, and when he reached the correct site, to discover nothing much more than palm trees and sand, he was not pleased. He pretended to show an interest in the plans and projections hurriedly unrolled for him, but his family could see that he was both angry and depressed.
It was not a jolly bus ride back down the coast to Jeddah, and when the bus stopped, the king went straight out to the beach to say his sunset prayer—seated, since Abdullah has some difficulty kneeling these days. Muslims who suffer from disability are permitted to pray seated—or, indeed, to pray lying in bed if they are completely incapacitated.
It was a poignant sight, the king dressed in white, sitting in his chair quite alone on the beach, praying earnestly toward Mecca. He was holding his hands up, cupped before his face, imploring his God. His family said they had never seen him look sadder—so much to do, so little time in which to do it.
That evening, the king stayed longer at his prayers.