On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (10 page)

From birth, they are raised in a religion that encourages submission to Allah and his chosen leaders on earth. Oppression by a bad ruler is preferable to chaos among believers, according to one of the most prominent eleventh-century Sunni Islamic scholars, Muhammad al Ghazali. So Saudis are instructed by religious leaders to obey their ruler even if he is bad. “The religious leaders protect the government from people instead of representing people to the government,” says a male student at Imam University, the kingdom’s premier institution for training religious scholars, reflecting the skepticism, common even among devout youth, of the ruling partnership of the Al Saud and the religious establishment.

A hapless Saudi woman escapes her car during the Jeddah floods. (
ARAB NEWS
)

Cynical Saudis distort their national emblem with mops and buckets to express anger at the government’s failure to deal with severe flooding in Jeddah in 2009 and 2011.

As this young man indicates, these days life in the labyrinth is under assault. Outside information and influences are penetrating its walls through the Internet, satellite television, ubiquitous cell phones, and social media. Saudi society no longer is shrouded from the outside world and its influences.

Much as Ronald Reagan once challenged Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall,” a growing number of Saudi youth are tearing at the walls of their national labyrinth.
Saudi Arabia boasts 9.8 million Internet users, or 38 percent penetration, according to the International Telecommunications Union, an agency of the United Nations.
And with 5.1 million Saudis on Facebook in January 2012, a 25 percent increase in six months, Saudi Arabia is second only to more populous Egypt (with 10 million users) among Middle East nations in use of this social networking site. (Saudi Arabia ranks 30th in the world, right behind Russia, which has five times the population.)
Tellingly, Saudi users are overwhelmingly young (69 percent are under thirty-four), male (69 percent), and single (91 percent). While much of the Facebook chatter is personal, not political, Saudis have learned to connect, and they did so spontaneously—and furiously—when floods swept Jeddah in late 2009 and again in early 2011. The
government’s failure to provide proper sewage and drainage systems in this wealthy kingdom encouraged conspiracy theories among angry citizens, who claimed the actual death toll in these floods was ten times the official number of 150 dead. “Add a zero to anything he says about casualties,” a cynical young Saudi professor advises as we watch the prince in charge of Jeddah promising yet again on the evening news to aid victims, punish the guilty, and fix the problem. Unhappy Saudis these days routinely e-mail each other photos of flood damage, destitute children, dilapidated school buildings, and displays of lavish living by princes.

The regime is not blind to these cracks in its walls of control. Historically, when the Al Saud rulers are anxious, they slather on a new layer of religious restriction to hold Saudis inert in the labyrinth. When the regime is more confident, it chips off a small piece of this religious rigidity here and there to give citizens a sense of relative freedom. So, as noted earlier, when the Grand Mosque in Mecca was overrun in 1979 by homegrown jihadists seeking to remove the Al Saud and restore the kingdom to Islamic purity, the royal family tried to appease religious fanatics by forcing an already restrictive religious society to conform to an even more puritanical way of life.

After the shocking terrorist attack on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, carried out mostly by Saudi-bred terrorists, the royal family began belatedly to discern that it had made a pact with the devil. Just how deadly a pact was brought home two years later, when extremists started attacking Saudi targets, not merely foreign infidels. So once again the regime swung into action to combat extremism. With one hand, it got tough on homegrown terrorists, arresting jihadists and trying to root radical imams from the kingdom’s seventy thousand mosques.

With the other hand, the regime relaxed some of the oppressive social restrictions it had imposed two decades earlier. Press controls were partially eased so that newspapers could criticize extremists, suddenly a popular whipping boy of the regime, and even once again publish photos of
women. The regime convened national dialogues and, more important, curbed some of the worst excesses of the religious police—at least temporarily. Previously, any fanatic could proclaim himself a
mutawa
, or religious policeman, and bully his fellow citizens in the name of religious purity. Now the would-be bullies had to be appointed and trained by higher authorities. But as soon as uprisings began sweeping the Middle East, the nervous Al Saud once again began to cement the small nicks in the walls of Saudi society that the king had created less than a decade earlier. The religious establishment was given new money and new authority to expand its reach deeper into the kingdom by establishing fatwa offices in every province.
More ominously, King Abdullah issued a royal decree making it a crime for print or online media to publish any material that harms “the good reputation and honor” of the kingdom’s grand mufti, members of the Council of Senior Ulama, or government officials. So much for reform.

Beyond religious rules, tradition also binds Saudis within their walls. Most remain deeply averse to conduct that might be seen to violate social norms and invite shame upon themselves and their families. So myriad unspoken rules bind most Saudis in place as tightly as Lilliputians tied down Gulliver.

The tight-knit tribal unit tracing its lineage to a single ancestor is the key social grouping in Saudi Arabia and remains a powerful force for conformity. Over millennia, to survive the challenges of the desert and of competing tribes, these groups developed a set of core values such as generosity, hospitality, courage, and honor that bound the entire group and preserved its unity. These values, writes David Pryce-Jones in
The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
, can be summed up as self-respect, but not in the Western sense of conscience or relationship with God. For Arabs, a man’s self-respect is determined by how others see him. So appearance is everything.

Honor, for Arabs who seek leadership in any sphere, is akin to favorable public opinion polls in a democracy. Loss of respect equates to loss of honor. “
Honor is what makes
life worthwhile: shame is a living death, not to be endured, requiring that it be avenged,” Pryce-Jones writes. A man who kills his wife or daughter for unfaithfulness simply is preserving the honor of his family and his tribe. “
Between the poles of honor and shame stretches an uncharted field where everyone walks perilously all the time, trying as best he can to interpret the actions and words of others, on the watch for any incipient power-challenging response that might throw up winners and losers, honor and shame.” The determination of all Saudis to retain honor and avoid shame cannot be overstated. Understanding this begins to help Westerners like me, accustomed to spontaneity, grasp why Saudis are so passive and conformist.

Something as simple as a wife accompanying her husband on a brief trip abroad is laden with rules and norms that trap her into largely self-induced inaction. A young Saudi mother, the very picture of Western fashion in tight jeans and a Ralph Lauren polo shirt, describes with dismay how tradition prevented her mother from accompanying her father on a short trip to neighboring Dubai. If a Saudi woman is traveling, Rana explains, she is expected to visit senior relatives and even close neighbors to bid them good-bye. Upon her return, she is obliged to make another round of visits to the same individuals to pay her respects and dispense small gifts. To simply pack her bag and fly off for a few days with her husband would break society’s conventions and thus disrupt social harmony, exposing her to negative gossip and bringing shame upon her family. So confronted with that heavy load of tradition, the wife simply stayed home. This little convention, multiplied and magnified throughout the Saudi maze, is what consumes so much of the time and saps so much of the initiative of Saudi citizens, confines them to their walled compounds, and restricts them largely to contact among family members.

Rana, the mother of two young boys, insists she is not bound by such cultural conventions: “I advised my mother to just go. But she worries that other people will judge her. I don’t care what people think.” As evidence of her independence,
she recounts flying to neighboring Dubai with her two children for a four-day holiday after “only” two weeks of planning with her extended family. “It was as satisfying as if I had gone to the moon, to travel with so little planning,” she says, explaining that normally Saudis require four to six months to check their plans with extended family before finalizing them. Imagine a mother in Paris or New York needing two weeks to clear plans for a long weekend with her children in London or Miami, trips on a par with Riyadh to Dubai! Rana’s “rebellion” clearly indicates that change in Saudi Arabia still consists of very small steps.

For most Saudis, appearances remain far more important than actual behavior, a curious contradiction since Islam teaches that it is precisely individual behavior that Allah will reward or punish on the Day of Judgment. With urbanization, Saudis know little about the true piety of those they encounter in daily life, so appearances have become even more important. To be accepted as pious, a man simply has to sport a beard and short
thobe.
Covering herself completely in public similarly conveys a woman’s devotion to Allah. This is precisely why many educated Saudi women say they veil: not to do so risks conveying antisocial behavior and being ostracized as liberal.

That this preoccupation with appearance of the flesh, not purity of the heart, can be misleading is illustrated by a little incident that occurred during Ramadan, a month when Muslims fast between sunrise and sunset to draw closer to Allah. Abdullah, a devout Muslim, driving to a predawn breakfast, recounts how his car was struck at an intersection by an SUV, whose driver sped away. Abdullah gave chase while calling the police. Nearly half an hour later, the offending driver finally stopped as he approached his own neighborhood. “Please don’t confront me in front of my neighbors,” the culprit begged. A disgusted Abdullah recalls, “He was only concerned about being humiliated in front of men, not that Allah had already seen his bad behavior—and in Ramadan, when we are supposed to be focused especially on Allah.” As always, appearance is all important.

All this focus on appearances leads to timidity among Saudis. A reform-minded government official who spent decades working for a powerful prince with whom he remains friends is willing to confide to me his scathing criticism of the royal regime and his deep pessimism about the future of Saudi society, a view he didn’t express a quarter-century ago, when I first met him. What, I ask, does his princely friend think of his analysis? Nothing. The official never dared mention his critique to the prince, and it clearly has never dawned on him that he might do so. Whatever truths are told furtively in the private sitting rooms of Saudi society, they rarely are told to power. And this clearly leaves a gaping hole in the rulers’ knowledge of their people’s genuine points of view.

Why, we might ask, are most Saudis so docile? After all, this is a culture that prides itself on the courage of ancestral tribal warriors raiding visiting caravans to ancient Arabia—and battling each other. Why are modern-day descendants of this fierce culture so willing to play the role of powerless pawns, resigned to the frustration of their everyday lives and to the uncertain future of a society over which they have so little influence? After all, they are increasingly well educated and well informed. Why don’t they simply take more initiative, more freedom of action, for themselves?

The answer is that both tradition and religion have made most Saudis accustomed to dependence, to being reactive, not proactive; to accepting, not questioning; to being obedient, not challenging; to being provided for rather than being responsible for their own futures. During the centuries when Arabia was dominated by warring tribes, the tribal head was responsible for the needs of his tribe and expected to receive loyalty and obedience from others if he met those needs.