Inside the Kingdom (19 page)

Prince Sultan, however, was not so keen. He had tried making up fasting days in the past, and he had not enjoyed doing his penance when everyone else had gone back to eating normally. He preferred to fast as he went along—and NASA was, in fact, delighted at the chance to monitor the impact of daytime food and drink deprivation on the young Muslim. It proved minimal.

The prince called Bin Baz from the Kennedy Space Center every day or so.

“ ‘Look,’ ” Sultan remembers telling him, “ ‘we’re going to be traveling at eighteen thousand miles per hour. I’m going to see sixteen sunrises and sunsets every twenty-four hours. So does that mean I’ll get Ramadan finished in two days?’ The sheikh loved that one—he laughed out loud.”

After some discussion, the two men agreed that everything should be reckoned in normal, earth time, from the time and place of launch in Cape Canaveral. This would also apply to the five daily prayer times, which, because of weightlessness, would have to be carried out in an upright position, with the prince strapped into his seat and wearing his space boots.

“It would be no good trying to face Mecca,” remembers the prince. “By the time I’d lined up on it, it would be behind me.”

Sultan bin Salman would be the first Muslim ever to fly in space and Bin Baz was eager for his firsthand observations.

“Keep your eyes open,” were his parting words on the day before blast-off. “I want to hear about everything you see.”

“I shall never forget it,” says Prince Sultan today, “the sight of the earth, so small and round and bright in the blackness. Everything was very clear and sharp. We have a saying in the Koran, ‘Verily, we have mansions of stars in the heavens.’ That summed it up for me. Twenty years later it remains woven into everything that I believe.”

Back in Taif, the young prince received a hero’s welcome. His uncle Fahd was there to greet him on the tarmac, along with his proud father, Salman, and a multitude of admiring brothers and cousins. Later that evening the young prince escaped to the home of Bin Baz, where the sheikh had gathered a reception committee of the Kingdom’s most learned religious figures. They wanted to hear the firsthand facts about what was revolving around what in the universe.

“The sheikh was so excited,” remembers the prince. “He met me by the front door and embraced me and led me in to meet all the sheikhs, keeping hold of my hand the whole way.
‘Allahu akbar! ’
he kept repeating. He kept asking me questions. How was it that we didn’t fall out of the sky? How could the shuttle fly that fast without using its engines?

“ ‘Let this not be the last time!’ he said. ‘Who’s going to go next?’ ”

In the light of the prince’s clear testimony that he had looked down on a spherical globe, Sheikh Bin Baz ceased his assertions that the earth was flat. It was important for the Muslims, he always said, to be open-minded and to accept the clear evidence that God put before them. But the blind sheikh knew what he knew, and he never formally recanted what he had said. Many doubted whether, in his heart, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, who would rise to be the most senior religious figure in Saudi Arabia, ever truly abandoned his belief in the evidence of what he felt beneath his feet and had gazed on before his sight was taken from him.

By 1985 the Kingdom’s greatest asset was becoming its major problem—oil had plummeted from spectacular boom to disastrous slump. Around forty dollars per barrel when the decade opened, the price started to slip in 1981, with production dropping by a third in Fahd’s first year as king. The world economy was being flooded with new supplies from Canada, Alaska, and the multiplying North Sea oil platforms, while demand was decreasing as a result of economic recession, more fuel-efficient cars, and the conservation measures prompted by the high prices of the boom years. Virtually all of America’s power-generating industry switched back in these years from oil to coal. “Oceans of Oil,” bemoaned
Texas Monthly
magazine in a 1984 special issue devoted to the world glut of energy.

In 1981 Saudi oil income had stood at a healthy SR 328 billion per year. Over the next four years it would decline steadily to a quarter of that. The fall had a disastrous impact on Fahd’s government spending plans, and he took out his frustrations on his world-famous oil minister, the handsome, dark-eyed Sheikh Ahmad Zaki Yamani.

“Why haven’t you been round to see me recently?” he would complain over the phone.

The king resented the minister’s high profile abroad and the fact that the articulate Yamani—who, unlike Fahd, could speak fluent English—delivered his opinions to the world not just on questions of oil, but on Israel-Palestine and U.S.-Saudi relations as well. Scarcely a month went by in the early 1980s without Sheikh Yamani giving an interview or a prestigious lecture to an admiring—usually Western—gathering. He was on the cover of every news and business magazine.

Many in the royal family shared Fahd’s unhappiness that a commoner should be treated as the voice and face of Saudi Arabia. Yamani had been Faisal’s protégé in the 1960s, and his successors came to feel that Zaki had grown too big for his boots. The Al-Saud particularly disliked the way that the outside world referred to him as “Sheikh.”

“Yamani was plain
ustaz
—Mister Yamani,” says an adviser to the royal court. “
Sheikh
is an honorific reserved for tribal chieftains and for religious scholars.”

For his part, the oil minister resented being roused at two in the morning to attend the impromptu cabinet meetings called by Fahd, and for being blamed for events that, in his opinion, were the nature of the market. Many of the new fields coming on line around the world had been made economically feasible by OPEC’s price rises, and the West had “got religion” on energy conservation under the same pressure of price. There had never been great affection between Fahd and Yamani, and over the years their relationship grew openly hostile. In October 1986 Fahd sent Yamani a cable at an OPEC meeting instructing him to push for a price of eighteen dollars a barrel. The king had agreed to this strategy after long discussions with the rulers of Kuwait and other Gulf states, and was furious to hear afterward, as they told it, that Yamani had treated the agreed policy with ill-concealed disdain.

“I don’t know how I can work with this guy any longer,” Yamani had declared impatiently to a ministerial colleague who telephoned him during the meeting on Fahd’s behalf to confirm the king’s instructions. Later, he had a direct and acrimonious confrontation with Fahd on the phone.

The oil minister had gone several steps too far, and he seemed to know it. On his return from the OPEC meeting Yamani flew briefly to Jeddah, then headed for Riyadh, where he waited, as if expecting the end—which came within a matter of days. A brief official statement made no pretence of “resignation,” but stated baldly that the oil minister had been dismissed. Yamani was playing cards with his family when the news was announced on television. He was a fan of
baloot,
Saudi Arabia’s most popular card game, a version of the French game
belote.
“Turn up the volume,” he said without looking up from the table—and went on playing cards.

In later years a myth developed that King Fahd deliberately kept the price of Saudi oil low through the 1980s in a devious scheme devised with Ronald Reagan to diminish Russia’s income from its own oil and gas sales and eventually bankrupt the USSR, thus securing Cold War victory.

“That was simply impossible,” says the oil economist Dr. Ibrahim Al-Muhanna of the Saudi Ministry of Petroleum. “No single producer could then or now ‘control’ the price of oil. In 1986 Ronald Reagan actually sent [Vice President George H. W.] Bush to Riyadh begging us to push the price
up,
and we would certainly have pushed the price up if we had had the power to do so. The national budget was in desperate need of the revenues. No one liked or wanted the low oil prices of the mid-late 1980s. Everyone suffered, Saudi Arabia most of all. It was a very bad time.”

Between 1981 and 1986 Saudi oil production would fall from nearly ten million barrels per day to less than four, with a catastrophic impact on government revenues. To start with, the Finance Ministry could draw on its investment reserves, put aside for just such a day as this. For a dozen years the Saudi government had been cautiously piling its surpluses into foreign bonds and currencies, mainly the dollar. But in 1985 the budget tipped from surplus into deficit and the government started to borrow and to draw down still more heavily on the surpluses accumulated in the boom years.

“The money just dried up,” recalls one of Fahd’s associates. “Things got so tough that ministries had to struggle to pay the salaries at the end of the month.”

The once mighty Kingdom was on its way to being a debtor state, and in a government-dominated economy, that meant widespread unemployment and hardship.

The young suffered most. High birthrates and the excellence of the expensive new medical system were producing tens of thousands of young male Saudis with little prospect of suitable or steady work. Thanks to the post-Juhayman “reforms” to the education syllabus, Islamist teaching did less than ever to prepare young minds for the realities of the modern world—and the products of the rote-learning religious colleges were particularly lacking in the practical skills that their society needed. Young Saudis were being taught to scorn what the West was giving them, while also being encouraged to blame the West for their ills.

It was a prescription for trouble. Frustrated in their search for the support and self-respect of a decent living—which would also have enabled them to pay the high Saudi bride price to get married—these young men became easy targets for radicalization, sublimating sexual frustration into religious extremes. As part of the program to make the country more pious, thousands of Koranic study groups had been set up in the early 1980s in mosques and, during the holidays, inside government schools. Koranic recitation competitions featured regularly in the newspapers. Boys who memorized some or all of the Koran were rewarded by the Ministry of Education with awards of one thousand to two thousand riyals ($250 to $500)—money prizes that were especially attractive to children from poor backgrounds. Religious extremists had a field day in these apparently innocent Koranic classes and quizzes, the Saudi equivalent of American spelling bees. They were fertile recruiting grounds for the fundamentalist campaign that was coming to be known as the
sahwah
—“the awakening.”

Discontent was not eased by a widespread understanding of how much of the oil boom’s revenues had gone into the pockets of those around the king. People could live with royal extravagance in the good times—any self-respecting Saudi family was expected to enrich itself, starting with the family at the top. But with less gravy to go around, resentments were more deeply felt, particularly as Fahd made little apparent effort to check his personal spending. Rumors started to circulate about the favor the king lavished on his latest, prettiest young wife, Al-Johara (“the Jewel”) and her son Abdul Aziz, on whom Fahd doted. The boy became known in common gossip as “Azouz” or “Azouzi.” A soothsayer was said to have warned the king that he risked being assassinated like his brother Faisal if he did not keep Azouzi beside him wherever he went—which resulted in the eleven-year-old turning up at the White House for the state dinner in honor of his father’s visit to Washington in February 1985. The bemused Reagans gave the teenager a model of the U.S. Space Shuttle and sat him beside Sigourney Weaver.

Soothsayers are not uncommon in Saudi Arabia. Newspapers regularly report the arrest of witches and fortune-tellers. As the slump continued and people looked back nostalgically to the boom years of King Khaled, the superstitious started to award Fahd that most damning of titles—an unlucky king.

If you did not go hungry in the reign of King Abdul Aziz, you would never go hungry.