On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (17 page)

Not all youth, of course, act out. Some simply bear their boredom in sullen silence. Two teenage sons of a midlevel government employee describe the ennui of their lives spent studying, praying, and for relaxation, watching movies and playing computer games at home. The brothers, seventeen and fifteen years of age, are wearing jeans and T-shirts, not traditional Saudi dress, as they accompany me to a Jeddah restaurant. To join a foreign woman on a public outing is most unusual, but Jeddah, as a port city with a long history of foreigners mingling with Saudis, is far more liberal than Riyadh, and their father is a U.S.-educated government official eager to expose his sons to a wider world. The elder youth, who just received his driving permit, drives us to the restaurant in his used white Toyota, complaining along the way that wealthy boys his age own new BMWs. A subdued and shy boy, he rises at five to shower and pray. At six fifteen he drives his brother to school before heading for the seven fifteen start at his own school. When classes conclude at one thirty
P.M.
, the boys return home to have lunch with their father and then do homework. “There’s nothing much to do after that,” says the elder youth. So the young one plays video games on the Internet and the elder watches Egyptian movies on his computer. They are typical of the bored but largely well-behaved majority of Saudi youth who don’t like the emptiness of life yet don’t know what to do about it.

Asked if they could change one thing about their country, the elder pauses before finally saying he would allow cinemas.
The younger answers instantly: “I would allow girls to go to school with boys.”

Boys from wealthy families can relax in one of the multiple male sitting rooms of their homes or the well-appointed tents common inside the walled compounds of the wealthy. Young men of more modest means pool their money and rent an
istirahat
, or public house for relaxation, that can be leased by the day, week, or month. They gather there regularly to talk, eat, and watch sporting events and movies—or sometimes engage in less innocent pursuits.

But poor young Saudis have almost no options for entertainment.
These bored teenage boys play soccer in the streets or often are attracted by the allure of petty crime. Crime, of course, isn’t limited to the poor. Many Saudis who turn to car theft do so not because they need a car or want to sell it for money but simply for excitement. I meet with one young convicted thief at a coffee shop. Mustafa, twenty-five (who declines to give his family name), began stealing cars when he was nineteen even though he says he was earning $1,000 a month working in the National Guard. He and a group of similarly bored friends would select a car they liked, follow it for a few miles, and then bump into it. When the driver pulled off the highway to survey the damage, usually leaving the engine running, one of the boys would jump in the victim’s car and drive away, leaving his accomplices quickly to follow. At other times, they would trade excitement for ease and select their victims by surveying a supermarket parking lot for cars left running while the owners dashed in to make a purchase. “
Our concentration was on playing with the cars and having fun. It was exciting,” he says.

A handsome young man with a large gap between his two front teeth that makes him look even more boyish, Mustafa was caught after a year and a half of joyriding in stolen vehicles and sentenced to ten months in prison and 350 lashes, administered in groups of 50 over seven weeks. “I used to cry and feel sorry for myself,” he says. “Prison is for criminals, and I was just having fun. I am not a criminal.” While in prison, he began using drugs and once free again supplemented drugs with alcohol. He resumed stealing to help pay for his vices. Soon he and his young accomplices were caught by the religious police. A lack of evidence allowed him to escape conviction and jail, but the incident frightened him enough that he finally listened to a friend’s urging that he join Alcoholics Anonymous. Mustafa insists he has been clean for two years and now has a new job as a receptionist in a clinic. “I just wanted excitement, but now I am convinced it is not exciting. But too many young people do this,” he says.

Indeed, according to public security authorities, auto theft is on the rise and nearly 80 percent of all cars are stolen by
Saudis between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four. Most use the cars for
tafheet
, or spinning, a favorite after-midnight pastime of thrill-seeking young Saudi men. Groups of young men gather on isolated roads and accelerate their cars, spin them sideways, sometimes overturn them, or more often smash them into the parked vehicles of the scores of other young men who gather to watch. Not surprisingly, those who engage in
tafheet
prefer to spare their own vehicles by using stolen cars.
Some 90 percent of stolen cars are found abandoned by thieves after joyriding or spinning, so police often refuse even to look for a stolen car until several days after it disappears. It’s yet another sign of the growing lawlessness in Saudi Arabia, as citizens decide which laws to obey and police which ones to enforce. “Young people don’t care about laws,” says Muhammad al Negir, who works in public security in Riyadh. “Families have a responsibility to help us police their children, but they don’t.”

Not all or even most young Saudis flagrantly flout society’s rules and laws, but even conservative youths are questioning authority. Imam University, named for Imam Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the first Al Saud dynasty in the eighteenth century, is home to some sixteen thousand devout young men pursuing studies, primarily in Sharia, or Islamic law. But here, too, winds of change are wafting. Four young men in their early twenties gather one evening with one of their professors at the home of an Imam University graduate to meet with me, a double no-no. (Mixing with women is forbidden, and for the deeply orthodox, so is mixing with infidels.) All four of the boys have beards, a sign of religious devotion. Three of the four wear their scarves draped across their heads without the black
agal
, the double black circle of cord, to hold the scarves in place, another mark of strict religiosity. These outward signs leave me expecting to hear a very austere interpretation of the responsibilities of young Saudis and strong support for the Al Saud and the religious establishment. But appearances in today’s kingdom often are deceiving.

Saud, twenty-one (who declines to provide his family
name), describes objecting when his father tried to enroll him in a Koran course at age six. Three years later his father forced him to go despite his protests. By secondary school, he says, he had become knowledgeable about Islam and, to his teachers’ dismay, began questioning what was taught in religion classes. “
I don’t accept I should be loyal to Salafi,” he says, referring to the fundamentalist Islamic thought that underpins Wahhabi teachings. For an Imam University student to say such a thing is tantamount to a Baptist preacher’s son saying “I don’t accept Jesus as my savior.”

Asked to whom he turns for guidance on religious issues—parents or professors or the imam at his mosque—the young man says, “I depend on myself to research an answer. I have no specific sheikh.” Again, this independence of mind on religious orthodoxy is something new; the generation of this young man’s parents simply accepted religion as dictated by parents, schools, and imams.

The other three young men are more circumspect. While growing up, says one, “my main concern was to obey my parents. There was no discussion. You just obey.” For that reason, says another, despite his deep interest in science and his desire to study it, he enrolled in Imam University because his background was religious and his parents directed him toward religious studies. This parental push leads nearly two-thirds of university graduates to earn degrees in Islamic subjects that fail to equip them for work in the private sector, where employers seek expertise like economics, marketing, computer programming, or management.

The young men talk openly about their parents, their rearing, and the doubts—at least briefly—that each experienced about Islam as it was taught in their schools. Listening to even mild doubts about Wahhabi Islam expressed by Imam University students makes me feel almost subversive. The setting is a large, well-appointed living room where the attentive male host repeatedly pours small cups of Arabic coffee and offers cups of sweet tea and bowls of dates. When I unthinkingly set my teacup on top of my Koran to spare the expensive side table, one young man leaps to move the offending
cup off the holy book, wordlessly reminding me that no temporal table is as important as the book of Allah’s word.

After the young men speak, their professor, a man in his early forties, sums up with what amounts to a shockingly harsh indictment of Saudi society. The country, he says, has turned its focus from religion to money. “We have become consumers,” he says. “Everything is for sale. You can buy and sell a fatwa. Sheikhs go on television to advise the people, but all they care about is their television contract. Our social relations are chosen on the basis of whether or not we get a benefit.” Even the sacred right of a Muslim to demand punishment of an offender or receive instead “blood money,” a payment in cash to the victim’s family if it agrees to spare the offender from his required Islamic punishment, is being exploited to earn cash, he says. “We have a bazaar of blood. Greedy people now earn commissions on arranging a deal between the victim and the offender to forgive the offender in exchange for a large sum of money.” (This is a Saudi version of tort lawyers in the United States who sue on behalf of victims and take a large portion of any award.)

Suddenly the call to prayer sounds through the night from a nearby mosque, and the men all rise and depart to a tent in the front yard of this large walled home to perform
isha
, the final prayer of the day. The host lingers a moment to end the evening. “These young men are very moderate,” he says. “Most Imam University students wouldn’t agree to meet a foreigner.” What percent would refuse? I ask. “At least seventy-five percent,” he says. Pronouncing his own conclusion on the evening, he insists society is changing—as evidenced by these young men meeting a foreign woman. “Usually in society, the old teach the young,” he says, “but now with technology the young are teaching the old.”

Such meetings always leave me grateful for a glimpse into the evolving attitudes of conservative young Saudis, but at the same time mindful of the enormous gulf between them and young people in the West. However much adherents of so-called cosmopolitanism would like to see all peoples around the globe as similar, Saudis, even Internet-savvy ones,
are not at all like Western youth. It isn’t just that many young people in the West use drugs, have sex before marriage, and rarely even think about religion, let alone practice any faith. The biggest difference is that Western youth aren’t reared in societies that venerate religion or value tradition, so they are free to seek their own paths uninhibited by strong societal or family pressures. Young Saudis, even those resisting authority and seeking some independence, are struggling against the thick walls of religion and tradition constructed brick by brick from birth by family, school, mosque, and government. Even if these values and traditions are rejected, the act of breaking free defines the individual.

This struggle to break free of the strictures of Saudi society is vividly illustrated by several works in a youth art show in Jeddah in early 2011. The show, staged discreetly in a fifth-floor gallery hidden from street view, is nonetheless new, provocative, and for Saudis even daring. One sculpture portrays a gaunt plaster-of-Paris head jerked back by clear plastic tubes that connect the head to a large stone, depicting the controlling connection between authority and youth. The mouth on the upturned head is agape in an anguished scream. Visible inside the open mouth are scores of tiny words representing the messages that parents feed to children from birth—words like
abi
(shame) and
haram
(forbidden). Behind the head is a spigot indicating that youth sometimes can turn off the messages from parents but can never sever the connections that link youthful minds to stone-age authorities.
The artist “perceives a culture that suffers from subservience and uniformity through mind compulsion and his art mirrors that view and creates in turn the ultimate defining point of today’s generation,” the show’s printed program says in describing the sculpture.

Nearby is another example of art criticizing authority—this one by a Saudi prince. The painting, entitled
A Witness Who Never Forgot
by Prince Saad bin Muhammad, depicts a young male face staring sternly as cars float in rising flood waters. To indicate the young man is Saudi, the traditional red-and-white
shemagh
is bound tightly around his head, but
it also covers his mouth so that it resembles a football helmet more than a scarf. The painting “conveys the societal limitation that prevents one from realizing his personal power and potential,” says the show guide. The artist, who lived through the devastating 2009 flood in Jeddah, explains over coffee in the gallery, “The painting is the accumulation of the pain of the city. It is like a bleeding wound. I had to get it out of my system by painting a witness who could never forget.” Ironically, a week after the painting went on display, the second devastating flood struck Jeddah and forced the prince to cancel an earlier scheduled meeting with me at the gallery because he couldn’t get out of his home. When we did meet a few days later, I asked how he felt living through another flood only fourteen months after government officials had promised “never again.” “I am not going to answer that,” he says. “
It is like pressing on a raw nerve and I don’t want to say something I will regret.” Even an alienated Al Saud prince has to be careful what he says in words if not in his art.

Saudi youth, whether liberal, traditional, or fundamentalist, share at least three characteristics: most are alienated, undereducated, and underemployed. Unlike their parents and grandparents, who generally express gratitude to the Al Saud for improving their standard of living during the oil boom of the 1970s, young Saudis born in the 1980s and 1990s have no memory of the impoverished Arabia prior to the oil boom and thus express almost no sense of appreciation. Instead, they have experienced a kingdom of poor schools, overcrowded universities, and declining job opportunities. Moreover, their royal rulers’ profligate and often non-Islamic lifestyles are increasingly transparent to Saudis and stand in sharp contrast both to Al Saud religious pretensions and to their own declining living standards.