On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (19 page)

Saudi society, as we have seen, is deeply divided along multiple fault lines—tribal, regional, religious, gender, and more. All these divisions are visibly accentuated among Saudi youth. The gap between the easy riders on Riyadh’s Tahlia Street and the devout but questioning Imam University students, between the educated young women at Saudi ARAMCO and the isolated girls on the mountaintop in Faifa, between Lulu’s cloistered daughters and Manal’s liberated ones, is all the sharper and thus all the more threatening to the future stability of the Al Saud regime. If overall Saudi society was once homogeneous, the current generation of Saudi youth is openly and proudly heterogeneous. The most significant thing they have in common is dissatisfaction with the status quo. Whether, and if so how, to accommodate this pressure from the young is among the most daunting challenges for the Al Saud regime.

P
lease excuse me for rushing,” Prince Abdullah bin Musa’id, a nephew of King Abdullah, says, ushering me hastily from his study toward the front door of his home. “I have to finish early today—this is football day.” As if to ease the impression of insufficient hospitality, he adds, “If you are free, please come back at ten
P.M.
”

When a Saudi speaks of football, he means soccer, the kingdom’s national sport. Saudi soccer games are about the only time reserved Saudis are allowed to shout and show joy. Prince Abdullah, however, is referring to American football, his personal passion. Behind his desk is an autographed football and helmet from his favorite team, the San Francisco 49ers. Every Sunday during the American football season, he hosts a dozen or so male friends to watch Sunday afternoon football live on the four oversize television screens in the basement of his Riyadh home. Given the time difference between the United States and Saudi, these gatherings begin around ten
P.M.
and last until the early hours of Monday morning. The prince watches football for entertainment but also because he sees in the sport lessons for his country’s somnolent, riskless society.

“In the United States, ‘we tried’ is a compliment,” he explains. “Here we focus on failure, not on trying. Saudis don’t take risks because we are so hard on failure. But if you don’t risk much, you can’t accomplish much.”

Prince Abdullah took a risk—and failed. He had a dream of transforming Al Hilal, the country’s most decorated soccer team, into a profitable, high-performance powerhouse
that would win Saudi Arabia admiration throughout the Middle East for exporting something other than religious jihadists. “
Soccer is our only entertainment, so we should have the best league, make huge money, and reach youth all over the Arab world,” he says. To pursue this dream, he assumed the presidency of Al Hilal determined to use all the modern promotional and marketing strategies of a successful U.S. sports owner. But his royal relatives who control television and franchise rights were unwilling to surrender power even in a sports franchise. So after a few years, a thwarted Abdullah gave up and took up Fantasy Football and watching powerful U.S. football franchises compete. Like many other Saudis who seek change, the prince expresses deep concern for the future of his country and, like those nonroyal Saudis, is resigned that he cannot effect change.

Clearly, it is not just women and young people who chafe at the strictures of tradition and religion but princes as well. Listening to intelligent, creative, concerned Saudis, whatever their gender, age, or birthright, talk about stifled ambitions and straitjacketed lives inevitably makes me feel I am exploring a museum of mummies rather than a living culture. If only Saudis could throw off their centuries-old bindings and be allowed to think and act independently and even organize with others, they clearly would have sufficient enterprise and energy to begin to reverse the sullen social lethargy now so pervasive that even billions of petrodollars have not been able to resolve problems of poor education, overdependence on foreign workers, growing joblessness among Saudis, declining health and health care, and mounting poverty. The fact that most Saudi princes are as powerless as ordinary Saudis to address these problems may seem surprising, but perhaps it should not in a society where seniority trumps enterprise, especially among princes.

Being born a prince still has advantages, but these days the benefits are more akin to those enjoyed by the offspring of elite businessmen or politicians in the West. These younger princes can gain access to an influential minister or businessman more easily than the average Saudi, but they have
little access to or influence on the handful of senior Al Saud princes who rule the kingdom through division, diversion, and dollars.

Saudi Arabia’s founder fathered forty-four sons and innumerable daughters. Many of his sons were almost as prolific as their father, so the kingdom now boasts thousands of princes—sons, grandsons, great-grandsons, and by now great-great-grandsons of the founder. These princes may be born to rule, but the truth is only a handful ever will. Indeed, this plethora of princes is so large and so diverse that little if anything links them except some Al Saud genes. In no other country on earth is there a royal family on anything like this scale. Collectively, they increasingly are viewed by the rest of Saudi society as a burdensome privileged caste. The monarch sees their diversity, divisions, and demands as just one more problem requiring skillful management, all the more so as the issue of generational succession looms large, now that Abdul Aziz’s surviving sons all are in their late sixties or older.

Even in a government that prefers princes for most key jobs in Riyadh ministries and provincial leadership roles around the country, the majority of Abdul Aziz’s heirs have no government position. Hundreds of them, to be sure, have quasi-official roles running programs to help the poor or foundations of one sort or another, and many hundreds more use their royal lineage to build businesses through which they obtain land and government contracts worth hundreds of millions and sometimes billions. But the family is so large some princes still can’t find a sinecure.
Third-generation princes are said to receive only $19,000 a month, hardly enough to lead a princely life, and King Abdullah, since assuming the throne in 2005, has stopped passing out envelopes of money to vacationing family members, has curbed the use of the Saudi national airline as an Al Saud private jet service, and has privatized the telephone company so the government no longer covers free cell phone usage for royals. (The extended royal family, including progeny of Abdul Aziz’s siblings, is said to include roughly thirty thousand members.)

So what’s a prince to do? Let’s look further at Prince Abdullah and also at three of his cousins. All are grandsons of the founder, and none are playboy princes of the all-too-frequent sort so open to Western caricature. Rather they are educated, talented, and serious men. All four understandably are concerned about the future of Saudi Arabia and of Al Saud rule. These four underscore the diversity among princes, yet share a common powerlessness to shape the country’s future.

Prince Abdullah, the football fanatic, is one of the least aristocratic of the founder’s grandsons. A double tragedy in his family helped force this prince to earn his own way in life. The year Abdullah was born, 1965, his older brother, Khalid, was shot and killed for protesting the introduction of television into the kingdom by his uncle, King Faisal—ironically, the very innovation that the prince and his football friends so enjoy today.

A decade later, in an unprecedented act of regicide, another brother, Faisal, assassinated King Faisal. The young man, perhaps angry that the king had banned him from traveling abroad or seeking revenge for his brother’s death, entered King Faisal’s office with a visiting dignitary.
When the monarch reached to embrace him, the young man shot his uncle three times with a small pistol. He was swiftly apprehended and soon beheaded in front of ten thousand spectators. As a result of these two losses, the boys’ father, Prince Musa’id, is largely a recluse, leaving Prince Abdullah, his eldest surviving son, to represent his branch in royal-family councils, including the important commission of princes who will select the kingdom’s leadership once King Abdullah dies.

Today Prince Abdullah, in his midforties, lives a quiet life on the outskirts of Riyadh in a well-guarded walled estate. His home is a desert-mud color set against bare desert hills. The large but certainly not palatial home resembles the walled house of a wealthy Southern California business magnate.
Foreign laborers are busy tending flower beds that create splashes of color in the otherwise monochromatic brown surroundings of home and hills.

Because his father had no money to lend him, Prince Abdullah says, he secured a bank loan to launch a recycling business in 1991. Saudi Paper Manufacturing buys waste paper from the government and then recycles and sells it. After a decade, with the business solidly successful, Prince Abdullah says he got bored and turned to his real passion—sports. Having failed to persuade the government to let him build Al Hilal into a powerhouse franchise, he now watches American football and dreams of owning a U.S. football team. On this particular Sunday night, he and his friends face a wall of four large flat-screen televisions tuned to two National Football League games and two soccer matches. This modern prince is multitasking by also playing Fantasy Football on the computer in front of his knees as he squats on the floor with his friends. This is hardly a beer-guzzling, couch potato crowd. Most of the young men are in their thirties, bareheaded but dressed in traditional Saudi
thobes
and sipping Pepsi, nothing stronger. The food and drinks are laid out by servants, but each man serves himself and returns to his seat on the floor. Abdullah, sitting cross-legged in sports pants, his balding head uncovered, would fit no one’s image of an Al Saud prince.

For a member of the publicity-shy royal family, the prince has a most unusual new ambition. Abdullah wants to write a book comparing sports in the United States and Saudi Arabia, to illustrate how sports reflect national character and could be used to change national character. His description of some of the key differences amounts to a damning portrait of Saudi society. American sports stars, he says, rarely make excuses for losing. “They acknowledge the other team outplayed them. But here we make excuses and blame a loss on things beyond the team’s control, like the referee wasn’t fair.” Similarly, he admires the hard work U.S. athletes put into improving their performance and thus that of their team. “
Here Saudis prefer not to work if they can avoid it. So we don’t train hard or try hard.” The book remains unwritten.

Al Saud princes may dress alike, but they do not think alike.
Clockwise from top left
, American football fan Prince Abdullah bin Musa’id bin Abdul Aziz al Saud (
ABDULLAH AL SHAMMARI
); astronaut Prince Sultan bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz al Saud (
GETTY IMAGES
); diplomat Prince Turki al Faisal bin Abdul Aziz al Saud (
GETTY IMAGES
); religious scholar Prince Abdul Aziz bin Sattam bin Abdul Aziz al Saud. (
ABDULLAH AL SHAMMARI
)

Abdul Aziz bin Sattam, another grandson of the founder, has little in common with Prince Abdullah bin Musa’id, other than his Al Saud genes. Abdul Aziz, a forty-nine-year-old bachelor, is as formal in his dress and bearing as his cousin is casual. He disdains sports, spending his free time either walking in the desert or reading books. His conversation is dominated by professorial explanations of Islam—the religion, the ritual, the law, the hereafter.

His father, Prince Sattam bin Abdul Aziz, was the first son of the founder to earn a U.S. degree—and the only son to marry just one wife. Prince Sattam earned a degree in business administration from the University of San Diego in 1965 and soon afterward became deputy governor of Riyadh, a post he held for nearly forty years before becoming governor in late 2011. His son, by contrast, was educated entirely in Saudi universities.
Prince Abdul Aziz earned degrees in industrial relations and sociology and finally a doctorate in government jurisprudence from Imam University, the kingdom’s premier institution for religious training.

The prince typifies the generation that came of age in the 1980s on the heels of the attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca by religious extremists. The country ceased sending students abroad for education and exposure to Western ways and sharply tilted toward pacifying the fundamentalists, allowing the religious establishment to dominate every aspect of Saudi life, especially education. So for most of the two decades between the attack on the Grand Mosque in 1979 and the attack by extremist Saudis on the World Trade Center in 2001, Saudi education was dominated by fundamentalist, xenophobic religious indoctrination that encouraged young Saudis to see the West as decadent and Christians and Jews as infidel enemies of Islam. That is pretty much Abdul Aziz’s view.