Inside the Kingdom (62 page)

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.”