Inside the Kingdom (61 page)

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
and
Saturday 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.