On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (16 page)

Instead, she insisted on imprisonment with her one-year-old daughter while she appealed the judge’s ruling. She stayed in jail for nearly four years while her husband cared for their son. Her plight gained growing public attention and quiet support from Princess Adelah and eventually the princess’s royal father. Four years into the sordid saga, the king asked the Supreme Judicial Council to review the case.
Within months, the lower court’s decision was overturned, and after more than four years of separation, Fatima, Mansour, and their children were reunited.
Fatima’s tale, however horrifying, also is uplifting since it indicates that even poor and uneducated women can refuse to accept the status quo when they reach the limits of their tolerance of tradition and of a sometimes cruel social system. It isn’t any longer only modernizers who seek more dignity for women.

Over the past half-dozen years, society’s attitude has shifted marginally toward greater acceptance of women pursuing higher education, jobs, and even a modicum of independence. Still, when it comes to marriage, to making the critical decision of what male will assume control of a woman’s life after her father, most Saudi women continue to wait for others to seal their fate. “
Girls wait to be selected like a commodity from a fruit stand,” says Fawzia al Bakr, a sociologist at King Saud University and a veteran of the 1990 driving protest who is researching young Saudis’ attitudes. “For a Saudi woman, there is no legal age for having no guardian. She is always dependent on some male.”

Such dependence remains a fact of Saudi life, but what is new is that increasing numbers of Saudi women so clearly resent it. Saudi women may remain trapped in cocoons, but they are flexing to burst free. This process may well prove liberating for all of Saudi society.

F
riday mornings in Saudi are as tranquil as Sunday mornings in the West. Because it is the day of rest and religious observance, shops and schools are closed, the streets are empty of cars, and most people go back to bed after dawn prayers. At midday, men stream into one of the kingdom’s seventy thousand mosques to pray and hear the weekly sermon by their local imam. Muslims are required to attend this communal sermon—all except women, of course, who are forbidden to go to mosque. They stay home and watch the televised sermons preached in the Grand Mosque in Mecca or the Great Mosque in Medina, Islam’s two holiest sites.

Strolling alone down Riyadh’s main shopping street on a Friday morning reminds me, in the words of Texas folksinger Kris Kristofferson, “there’s nothing short of dying, half as lonesome as the sound, of a sleepin’ city sidewalk, Sunday morning coming down.” The morning may belong to God, but afternoon along Tahlia Street belongs to rebellious youth. Tahlia is Riyadh’s Champs-Élysées, with three lanes of traffic in each direction separating expensive shops and restaurants on both sides. The center median features a row of fake palm trees. At night, the street has a glamorous glitter from tiny lights that encircle the palms. But in the daylight of a hot March afternoon, they are all too visibly a dusty brown.

Young men lounge against souped-up cars parked along the curb as they watch other young men alternately gun their engines and hit the brakes, causing their cars to rock up and down in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of Tahlia Street. Adding to the chaos, boys on four-wheel bikes weave with suicidal
abandon among the cars and then up onto the median, lifting the front wheels so high that the bikes are virtually vertical and the riders who cling behind each driver can almost drag the long hair of their uncovered heads on the pavement. Loud rap music—in English—echoes from every bike. Most of the young men are dressed in low-slung jeans or ghetto shorts and T-shirts. Riyadh police, leaning against their green-and-white-marked cars, double-parked every few hundred yards, watch the scene but do nothing to interfere with this display of youthful exuberance, so at odds with the decorous behavior demanded of the young by austere religious leaders, especially in this, the kingdom’s most conservative city. The so-called religious police are nowhere to be seen, perhaps because they know this crowd is too large to be thwarted by a few bearded men in short
thobes
armed with thin sticks.

This scene of jaded youth—rebels without a cause—so reminiscent of a 1950s James Dean movie, is just another example of tensions tearing at Saudi society as tradition is challenged by modernity. The young, overwhelmingly Internet savvy, are well aware of the lifestyles of Western youth, but have almost no leisure options available in the kingdom to absorb their youthful energies. Cinemas are banned. Dating is forbidden. Shopping malls are off limits to young men unless accompanied by a female relative. (This is intended to ensure they do not prey on young women in the malls.) Public fields for soccer are few. Concerts are outlawed. Even listening to music is forbidden by conservative religious sheikhs, though this admonition is widely ignored, as the ubiquitous rap music along Tahlia Street underscores. An annual book fair sponsored by the Ministry of Information and Culture is about as close to public entertainment as the kingdom gets.
Yet religious fundamentalists in 2011 crashed even that staid event, seized a microphone, and berated the presence and dress of women in attendance.

“
Youth want freedom,” says Saker al Mokayyad, head of the international section at Prince Nayef Arab University, which trains the oppressive internal security forces, here and throughout the Arab world, that keep citizens under constant surveillance. “A young man has a car and money in his pocket, but what can he do? Nothing. He looks at TV and sees others doing things he can’t do and wonders why.”

A growing number of young Saudi men defy tradition in favor of jeans and T-shirts. (
GETTY IMAGES
) However, most young Saudis are reared traditionally, like the robed boy, below, brushing his teeth with a
miswak
, as the Prophet Muhammad did. (
TURKI AL SHAMMARI
)

Young people in every society resent authority, reject rules, and seek to exert their independence. But the difference in Saudi Arabia is at least twofold. Because this is a quintessentially authoritarian society, there are many more restrictions and conventions against which youth can rebel. Further, almost any form of youthful rebellion stands in stark contrast to the unquestioning acceptance and unruffled conformity of previous generations of Saudis. In a society with one of the youngest populations on earth, this frustration poses a powerful challenge not just to parents but to the regime and to the religious establishment, from whom the young increasingly are alienated.
In a recent survey, some 31 percent of Saudi youth said “traditional values are outdated and … I am keen to embrace modern values and beliefs,” the highest percentage in the ten Arab countries surveyed. In short, the sedentary Saudi python is having a very hard time digesting its youth bulge.

The youth rebellion takes many forms. Some young people simply show their independence by wearing baseball caps and sneakers or by adopting other Western fashions and habits, though this does not necessarily mean they want a Western way of life. Restlessness leads others to lawlessness, such as beating up teachers, vandalizing property, or using drugs and alcohol. For still others, rejecting encroaching modernism means turning to fundamentalist Islam as the only acceptable means to confront authority both parental and governmental. For a minority of these Islamists, this confrontation leads to extremism and even terrorism. But virtually all Saudi youth, whether attracted by modern mores or by the pull of religiosity, are part of a generation that, unlike their parents or grandparents, is questioning and confronting authority. For a conservative society like Saudi Arabia, this attitude itself is revolutionary—and its manifestations are evident everywhere.

In a society that is usually passive, one young Saudi man confronted conventions and the royal regime by filming a poor neighborhood in Riyadh and posting his dramatic nine-minute film on YouTube in October 2011. The film opened with young Feras Bugnah noting, “We are not in Somalia,” as he takes his cameras into the homes of three poor Riyadh families to show unlit rooms, broken beds, and families living on 2,500 Saudi riyals (about $650) a month. Bugnah concludes the film by interviewing the neighborhood imam, who acknowledges that young boys are selling drugs and young girls are sold by their fathers into prostitution to earn money. He asks each family what they want to say to King Abdullah, and each asks only for a home, something out of reach for about 70 percent of Saudis, given the high price of land because previous kings have given most of the state’s land to princes or a handful of powerful businessmen who do the regime’s bidding.

The film, entitled in English
We Are Screwed
, went viral—some eight hundred thousand Saudis viewed it—before young Bugnah was arrested by authorities, an indication of how explosive the kingdom’s housing issue is deemed to be by the government, which promised 250 billion Saudi riyals (roughly $65 billion) for housing in the wake of the Arab Spring upheavals across the Middle East.

A second youth video,
Monopoly
, highlighted the near impossibility of owning a home in Saudi Arabia because a monopoly on landownership by royals and other wealthy Saudis has put the price of land out of reach of a majority of Saudis. It struck a responsive chord in the population. One Saudi went to his Twitter account to call on wealthy countrymen to donate land to the Ministry of Housing so ordinary Saudis could afford to buy homes, and at least one Saudi businessman responded.

Not all angry young Saudis are so constructive. Alienation increasingly is begetting lawlessness among Saudi youth. Newspapers regularly report students beating teachers who dare to give failing grades. One young woman in Jubail, an industrial city on the Persian Gulf, angered that her school headmistress confiscated her camera-equipped cell phone
(forbidden as she could snap photos of unveiled classmates), returned to school with her mother to confront the headmistress.
When the conversation didn’t go as the young woman hoped, she picked up a glass and cracked it over the supervisor’s head, sending her to the hospital for five days and earning the twenty-year-old student two months in prison and ninety lashes. More shocking to authorities in a country that forbids demonstrations of any kind, hundreds of Saudi youth celebrating National Day, honoring the kingdom’s founding, spontaneously began smashing windows and ransacking shops and showrooms along the Corniche in Al Khobar, a generally modern town comprising a mix of Saudis and foreigners in the country’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Such out-of-control behavior once would have been inconceivable.
But some of the 225 youths arrested during the rampage essentially excused their behavior by blaming the authorities for failing to provide places for young people to relax and enjoy free time. (
A dozen of the teens were flogged for their conduct.)

If boredom is one motivator for lawless acts, another is anger at the government. The Saudi government in 2010 installed in major cities a sophisticated camera system that tickets speeders by automatically sending a ticket to their cell phones.
Traffic accidents are the number-one killer in Saudi Arabia. Every ninety minutes someone dies in a traffic accident, and every fifteen minutes another Saudi is left handicapped for life. Traffic fatalities in 2010 totaled more than six thousand, double the number who died in Britain, even though Saudi Arabia’s population is less than half that of Britain. Despite the obvious need to enforce traffic rules, the new
saher
system has been repeatedly vandalized by young Saudis, who destroy the cameras or steal license plates from police cars and then repeatedly speed through lights, generating scores of bogus tickets for police officers. Youth claim that the money from fines goes to enrich Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz, crown prince and minister of interior, who is responsible for the nation’s invasive intelligence agencies. In choosing this target, young Saudis are protesting what they see as both royal corruption and state intrusion into their lives.