Inside the Kingdom (18 page)

Theroux found humor the best recipe for survival, surprising visiting journalists by offering to guess the number of the room in which they were staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. He would always get it right—room 103. He had been allocated the same room himself when he first arrived in Riyadh. It was the room with the hidden microphones.

Control became the watchword of the 1980s in Saudi Arabia—particularly for women. Freshly elected to the committee of a women’s charity in Jeddah, Maha Fitaihi decided to organize a forum on women’s issues and obstacles to development—until news reached the Ministry of Social Affairs, which supervised all charitable activities. They told her to change the subject or cancel the event. Saudi women did not suffer from any obstacles to their development, she was confidently informed by one of the all-male staff of the ministry, and whatever problems they might encounter could be solved by their religion. A lecture on women’s health issues, drugs, and AIDS provoked a similar response. “A few isolated cases don’t make an ‘issue,’ ” she was told, and an official letter soon arrived, sternly instructing her not to organize any further educational or awareness gatherings, unless they were focused on “Islamic” affairs.

Up in Riyadh, Hatoon Al-Fassi encountered even more drastic difficulties when she tried to organize a graduation ceremony for her class at King Saud University. It was an all-female occasion—every mother had been allocated two tickets—held in the gymnasium hall on the male side of the campus. Through the year, Hatoon and her sporting colleagues had been visiting the gym every Thursday to train at gymnastics, volleyball, and handball, and the plan was for these sports to feature in the end of year celebrations.

But Wahhabi religious orthodoxy was opposed to women’s sports. Reflecting this, there had never been organized sport or games for girls at Saudi state schools, whose control was handed to the religious establishment by King Faisal in the early 1960s. Energetic physical activity was considered harmful, in some unspecified way, to feminine bodily functions, and also involved the wearing of immodestly revealing athletic costume. For their sports activities, Hatoon and her athletic friends—graduates, for the most part, of the Kingdom’s private academies—dressed in tracksuits with long trousers and long sleeves. It made their volleyball hot, but respectable.

The entertainment for the graduation evening involved the finals of the sporting tournaments, interspersed with folkloric music and dance from different corners of the peninsula, with a spectacular roller-skating exhibition whose participants (also in long sleeves and trousers) had been rehearsing for months.

But as the program got under way, there came heavy knocking at the doors of the building. It was the religious police calling for the music to be stopped. The mutawwa did not actually enter the hall, but they kept patrolling noisily outside, their angry male presence intimidating the women trapped inside the gym. Hatoon and her friends tried to keep up the spirit of the ceremony with loud applause for the trophy presentations, but they found themselves whistling in the dark—literally. At 10 P.M. some malevolent male hand outside threw the power switch, and all the lights in the hall were extinguished.

There was no female sports program at King Saud University the next year, and no music or dancing when the women’s degrees were conferred. There were also new attendance regulations. Women had to be on campus by eight in the morning, after which the gates would be closed until noon. No female undergraduate could leave the university between those hours, unless she was a wife or mother and could show a paper as proof—and the paper, of course, had to be signed by her male guardian.

. . .

In just a few years, it seemed, the triumph of the religious was complete—and it was marked by the increasing number of beards. In the immediate aftermath of the Grand Mosque siege, Saudi men had tended to trim their beards. They did not want to be associated with the hairy excesses of the rebels. But as the 1980s passed, facial hair made a comeback. Religious conservatives gloried in their long and luxuriant Islamic beards. Sprouting defiantly from every facial follicle, the Salafi beard became the badge of piety, superiority, and the capacity to inspire fear. You could easily identify the religious police as they advanced toward you in the street. They looked like a posse of menacing Juhaymans.

Every face of authority seemed to be conspiring to shut down Saudi society in the early 1980s. In fact, the Mabahith and the mutawwa answered to different masters. While the Mabahith were government officials taking their orders from the Ministry of the Interior, the mutawwa were comparatively unregulated: their network of local committees for the “promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice” gave them the character of freelance vigilantes, taking their cue from the local pulpit. A strong king or local princely governor could have called them sharply to heel. But following the capture of the Grand Mosque, there was not a member of the royal family inclined to do so.

CHAPTER 10

Stars in the Heavens

I
n June 1982 (coincidentally the month that Fawzia Al-Bakr went to prison) old King Khaled died. His personal 747, a huge white and green Boeing jumbo jet, contained an operating theater equipped with the latest heart-monitoring and resuscitation devices with links to his surgeons in the Cleveland Clinic. Yet the precautions failed to save him. Venerable, bluff, and widely loved, Khaled had been the Ronald Reagan of Saudi kings.

Now it was time for a touch of Nixon. Saudis appreciated the competence of Fahd the Leopard, but few felt great fondness for him, and the new king made a bid for sympathy in his first broadcast to his people. He was now responsible, he said, for ruling “in accordance with God’s revelation,” and he had to confess that he found these divine requirements a heavy duty—his heart was “trembling,” he said, “for fear of failure and retribution.” Fahd warned of the problems ahead, and of the threats from the great powers hatching plots “to divide and fragment” the Arabs. “What is most to be feared,” he cautioned, “is that they will attack us from within by the sowing of dissension and driving our citizens to extremism.” He did not suggest that the impetus to extremism might be coming from
inside
the Kingdom. The enemies were all outside. Saudi youth, in particular, “must not imitate the lost youth of the West and be carried away by corrupt pleasures.”

The fearful and almost apologetic address was an opening gesture by the liberal-minded king to appease the religious conservatives.

“If an election were held here tomorrow,” Fahd once confided to a colleague, “Bin Baz would beat us without even leaving his house.”

This basic awareness was drilled into every young member of the House of Saud.

“Without exception,” says a minister who has worked with the family for many years, “they are brought up to have respect and to show respect toward the religious scholars.”

This respect was in singular contrast to the ill-disguised contempt that the Shah had shown toward Iran’s mullahs.

“I have no doubt that Fahd has gone to heaven,” said one of his admirers after his death. “It is only fair. His life on earth was such hell being perpetually polite to those religious fanatics.”

One aspect of Fahd’s purgatory was that the new king felt obliged to rein in some of his pleasures. In the early 1980s he had accepted the gift of a rakish twin-funneled luxury motor yacht from his friend John Latsis, a Greek shipping tycoon whose Saudi oil-refining and construction business, Petrola, owed much to the favor of Fahd. Complete with its own helipad and disco dance floor, the
Abdul Aziz,
later the
Prince Abdul Aziz
, was the longest yacht in the world, and Fahd liked to moor the 482-footer off Marbella, on the southern coast of Spain, where Latsis helped him raise a huge white-pillared palace that was a bizarrely accurate replica of the White House in Washington. Helicopters hovered overhead, and private jets flew in to nearby Málaga every day with exotic flower displays and a never-ending supply of wealthy visitors. When the Saudis came to town, calculated one local publication, their combined spending contributed $10 million per day to the resort’s hedonistic economy. It was small wonder that the mayor of Marbella announced that he was proposing to name a street in the Saudi monarch’s honor.

Once he became king, however, Fahd felt able to make only one trip to Marbella—his family had to go and have the fun without him. The king confined himself to the palace that Latsis built him on a man-made island off Jeddah, and when in Riyadh he was an austere Wahhabi, receiving the ulema every Tuesday as his predecessor had done, with Sheikh Bin Baz sitting beside him in pride of place.

Bin Baz, for his part, was seeking to enter the twentieth century. The blind sheikh had become notorious among liberals for a fatwa he had issued a dozen years earlier when American astronauts were landing on the moon—“On the Possibility of Going into Orbit.” His judgment had cast such doubt on the American achievement and on the proven facts of the moon landing that people accused Bin Baz of doubting the roundness of the earth. This was not totally fair. There are Western websites to this day that assert that the U.S. moon landings were staged in a TV studio, and the sheikh’s main point in his fatwa was to be skeptical: “We cannot believe anyone who comes and says ‘I was on the moon’ without offering solid scientific evidence.” In fact, wrote Bin Baz, “we see nothing in the Koran against the possibility that men may reach the moon. . . . We know there are spaces between earth and sky. There is nothing to say that the rockets cannot fly in them.”

The sheikh’s ruling—in response, he said, to numerous queries he had received from “the Muslims”—was a detailed and touchingly open-minded attempt to square the dry facts of modern science with the mystic teachings of the Koran and its talk of genies flying between the planets. But Bin Baz’s suspicions of the Americans weighed heavy: “We must make careful checks whenever the
kuffar
[infidels] or
faseqoon
[immoral folk] tell us something: we cannot believe or disbelieve them until we get sufficient proof on which the Muslims can depend.”

At a superficial reading it was possible to assume that Bin Baz had gone beyond questioning the moon landing to denying it, and soon afterward the sheikh gave an interview in which he mused on how we operate day to day on the basis that the ground beneath us is flat, even though science asserts, against our physical experience, that the world is spherical.

“As I remember from when I could see,” he said, “it seemed to be flat.”

It was an honest expression of paradox, particularly moving from a man who had been blind most of his life, and it led him to the belief that he was not afraid to voice and for which he became notorious—Bin Baz believed that the earth was flat.
¹⁰

At least one senior member of the ulema reproved Bin Baz for his embarrassing assertion, which radicals had seized on to satirize the Wahhabi establishment as “members of the Flat Earth Society.” But the sheikh was unrepentant. If Muslims chose to believe the world was round, that was their business, he said, and he would not quarrel with them religiously. But he was inclined to trust what he felt beneath his feet rather than the statements of scientists he did not know: he would go on believing the earth to be flat until he was presented with convincing evidence to the contrary.

In 1985 the evidence presented itself. Prince Sultan bin Salman, the thirty-eight-year-old son of the governor of Riyadh, was selected by NASA to serve as payload engineer on one of its
Discovery
space shuttle flights, and the prince went to Bin Baz for advice. Much of the training, and the first few days of the flight, would fall in Ramadan, so what should he do about fasting?

“You can apply the Prophet’s rules about traveling,” replied the scholar without hesitation. These rules made clear that Mohammed permitted the traveler, if he wished, to postpone his fast until his journey’s end: then he could make up the lost days in his own time.