Inside the Kingdom (63 page)

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 the
Financial 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.

TIME LINE

1744 Founding of the first Saudi state, in Dariyah, Nejd, Central Arabia

1803 Saudi armies conquer Mecca

1818 Turkish cannons flatten Dariyah

1824 Beginning of the second Saudi state

1891 Second Saudi state falls to the Rasheed family of Hail

1902 Abdul Aziz (aged around twenty-five) captures Riyadh to become sultan of Nejd

1913 Abdul Aziz annexes Qateef and Al-Hasa in the east

1921 Abdul Aziz conquers Hail, seat of the Rasheeds

1926 Abdul Aziz enters Jeddah to become king of the Hijaz and sultan of Nejd

1929 Battle of Sibillah. Abdul Aziz defeats rebel Ikhwan

1932 Proclamation of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

1933 Oil prospecting begins in the Eastern Province

1938 First significant oil “strike” at well number seven, Dhahran

1945 Abdul Aziz meets U.S. President Roosevelt on the Great Bitter Lake, Egypt

1953 Death of King Abdul Aziz. Accession of King Saud bin Abdul Aziz

1964 Faisal bin Abdul Aziz replaces his brother Saud as king

1965 The creation of Medina’s Salafi Group, Al-Jamaa Al-Salafiya Al-Muhtasiba

1973 King Faisal announces a boycott on oil sales to the United States

1975 Faisal assassinated. Khaled bin Abdul Aziz becomes king

1979 Iranian Revolution. Shah deposed

1980 Saddam Hussein invades Iran, starting the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88

1982 Death of King Khaled. Fahd bin Abdul Aziz becomes king

1983 Bandar bin Sultan appointed ambassador to Washington

1984 Mohammed bin Fahd becomes governor of the Eastern Province

1985 Sultan bin Salman orbits earth in NASA
Discovery
flight

1986 Oil Minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani dismissed

1987 402 pilgrims die following Iranian political demonstration in Mecca

1988 Osama Bin Laden and “Arab Afghans” active in Afghanistan

1989 Last Soviet soldiers leave Afghanistan

1990 Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait

1991 Gulf War. Iraqi forces ousted from Kuwait. Battle of Al-Khafji

1992 Following reform petitions, King Fahd establishes the Majlis Al-Shura

1993 Osama Bin Laden active in Sudan

1994 Bin Laden stripped of Saudi citizenship

1995 National Guard Center bombed in Riyadh

1996 Al-Khobar Towers building bombed in Eastern Province

1998 Al-Qaeda bombs U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, East Africa

2000 Al-Qaeda bombs USS
Cole
in Aden

2001 Al-Qaeda 9/11 attacks on World Trade Center and Pentagon

2002 Fire in Mecca girls’ school kills fifteen

2003 Al-Qaeda attacks in Riyadh. BBC cameraman Simon Cumbers killed

2004 Third National Dialogue addresses women’s issues

2005 Death of King Fahd. Accession of Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz

2006 King Abdullah visits Beijing

2007 Founding session of Allegiance Council to decide future succession

2008 King Abdullah initiates interfaith dialogue in Madrid, then New York

2009 King Abdullah removes conservative religious figures from his government

GLOSSARY OF NAMES AND ARABIC TERMS

All characters are listed here by their first names. When searching for a word, please ignore
Al-,
the definite article. Rendering Arabic words and phrases into their precise English phonetic equivalents, complete with accents, gaps, and symbols, is an exercise of great complexity—and not a little snobbery in a book for the general reader. The results are also confusing, since
Q’run, badawin,
or
Ramzan
do not correspond to the spellings most people recognize.

Unless you are a devotee of a particular system, you can, in fact, spell Arabic words just the way they sound to you—
Abdullah, Abdallah, Abd’Allah.
T. E. Lawrence certainly did so in
Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
even changing spellings as he went along, writing
Jeddah
or
Jiddah
as the mood took him, and declining his publisher’s attempts to impose uniformity. He was, in fact, quite restrained, since modern transliterations of that city’s name have included
Jaddah, Jedda, Jidda, Judda, Juddah, Djiddah, Djuddah, Djouddah, Gedda, Djettah,
and
Dscheddah,
to name only some—and all are acceptable.

The general rule I have adopted in this book, as in
The Kingdom,
is that Arabic words and names are rendered here whenever possible in the spellings that Western readers will most easily recognize—Koran, bedouin, Ramadan. The transliterations do not take account of the difference between Arabic’s “sun” and “moon” letters, so the definite article is invariably spelled
Al-,
whether or not it elides.
Bin
and
ibn,
meaning “son of,” are used interchangeably.