On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (28 page)

Despite government welfare programs and grand plans for larger ones, charitable giving by individuals and organizations remains a mainstay of helping the poor in Saudi Arabia. And most of the poor feel no compunction—or much gratitude—at receiving charity. The poor often regard the rich as simply lucky in receiving more of Allah’s bounty than they have and therefore obliged to share it.

Indeed, the Koran repeatedly reminds believers that giving charity—especially in secret—is pleasing to Allah. “
O you who have believed, do not invalidate your charities with reminders [of it] or injury as does one who spends his wealth only to be seen by the people and does not believe in Allah and the Last Day.” Elsewhere the Koran assures believers that Allah knows what they give in secret. “
If you disclose your charitable expenditures, they are good; but if you conceal them and give them to the poor, it is better for you. Allah with what you do is acquainted.” The Bible, of course, includes the same admonition when it tells Christians not to let their right hand know what their left hand is doing when it comes to charity.

Still, the sense by Saudi citizens of a right to the wealth of others is different from the mind-set of most poor people in the West. “People in this society are accustomed to taking, not giving,” says a Saudi sociologist, who asks to remain anonymous. “It is in the culture. Bedouins were nomads. The chief took care of the whole tribe. Now government takes care of people. If you govern with money, you need to pass out a lot of it to maintain power.” Indeed, as noted earlier, in March 2011 after revolutions in several Arab countries, King Abdullah doled out nearly $130 billion, on top of a $150 billion annual budget for the kingdom, to every sector of society including handouts to the very poor. This spending didn’t even pretend to be an economic stimulus but was merely a handout.

While most of the poor live in urban areas simply because more than 80 percent of all Saudis have moved to the country’s three largest cities over the past few decades, a number of those remaining in rural areas are very poor. The most destitute people I met were near Hafr al Batin, a city of six hundred thousand near the Kuwait border and home to a large Saudi military installation, King Khalid Military City. On the outskirts of this squalid, crime-ridden city are hundreds of poor outcasts called
bedoons
(nationless people). These people left the impoverished kingdom before the discovery of oil to seek livelihood in Iraq and other places and then returned over the past few decades in hopes of securing
a better life. But the kingdom doesn’t recognize them as citizens, they say, so their children aren’t permitted to attend school; nor can the men work because they lack citizenship papers or visas. These people live in wooden shanties scattered in barren dirt fields. There are no roads, few cars, and in many cases no electricity. When I visit there one night, the landscape, lit only by moonlight, makes this poor village look abandoned. Several of the men and a few boys welcome me to one shanty, an open room with a rug and a lone electric bulb. Most of these people subsist on charity or on occasional earnings from someone willing to hire them for day labor despite the lack of proper papers. Meanwhile they continue to strive to establish citizenship to secure some prospect of escaping this truly subsistence living.
My guide for the visit, Mekhlef bin Daham al Shammary, a human rights lawyer who helps them, was arrested six weeks after our visit for “annoying others” and remains in prison. I can’t escape the irony that while the Saudi government supports the right of return for displaced Palestinians to their homeland, so far these displaced Saudis get no such moral, much less material, support from their government.

By contrast, life in the tiny village of Al Athlah, in impoverished southern Arabia, seems almost a paradise. The village is half an hour from Jizan, the capital of the province of the same name. Once we leave the main highway, we travel down dirt roads, past mud brick homes, piles of garbage, and barren fields. Most of the four hundred citizens in this dusty rural village are related to the local imam, who has been issuing the call to prayer five times a day for half a century and also preaching the weekly Friday sermon at the mosque. The old man doesn’t know his age but estimates he is about ninety. His
thobe
is short, his feet bare, and his face thick and leathery. His long white beard is orange from the henna he has used to dye it. By his count, he has ninety children and grandchildren living in the village; his youngest son is ten and his eldest is sixty. He has just built a new home in preparation for marrying another wife.

Once he held three jobs—school custodian, farmer, and
imam. In his old age, he has cut his workload to two jobs, lopping off work at the local school. He still rises before dawn to call the faithful to prayer, before turning his attention to farming and herding his camels and sheep. He recalls riding a donkey for twenty days over some four hundred miles to make his first pilgrimage to Mecca as a young man. Still, so insular is his life that I am the first Westerner he has ever met. He is incurious; all that matters to him is in this tiny village—mosque, herds, and family.

The family now has electricity, so they no longer go to bed at sunset. And thanks to a grandson who works for the provincial governor, there is a car, cell phones, and even a flickering television. But the old man expresses a preference for an even more austere life. “
Life was better in the past,” he says. “Camels, sheep, a simple life. I am strong now because of that simple life.” Indeed, he still drinks milk directly from the teat of his cow and continues to eat
khader
, a traditional regional dish made from maize, milk, and sugar, for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The family, a roomful of aunts and uncles, sons and daughters, boys and girls, share three spoons and the bowl of
khader
, which has the consistency of overcooked oatmeal and tastes like sawdust sprinkled with sugar. Also on the menu is bread made from baked
khader
and grilled fish eaten with the right hand. It is this austere rural life that so many Saudis have fled, but this extended family clearly still savors it.

There is another pool of poverty in every big city, consisting of foreigners who do the most menial jobs and live at a subsistence level in factory dormitories or filthy tenements. Visiting one of these tenements, where the stairs are littered with broken glass and stained with spilled liquids and urine, conjures up Calcutta, not Jeddah, the kingdom’s most urbane city. Below even this threshold of poverty are the totally indigent—for example, imported South Asian maids, who have fled cruel households to live under bridges and beg money from passing motorists, or East African pilgrims, who stay illegally and beg for a living after performing hajj. All, of course, are Muslims.

Saudi poverty probably does not represent a direct threat to the Al Saud. The Saudi terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 and the ones who have launched similar attacks in Saudi Arabia are mostly the embittered sons of the Saudi middle class who turned first to radical Islam and then to terrorism to vent frustrations. But the poor represent a different sort of threat. They stand as a mute reminder of the pretense of the regime and the religion it claims to represent. Yes, “the poor are always with us” can be said in any society. But no other regime so wraps itself in religion and bases the legitimacy of its rule on living by the dictates of the Koran. Individual royal princes sponsor numerous charities and hand out money to individual supplicants, but the ineffectual government they run has proved incapable of making any serious dent in the country’s poverty problem. Islam preaches compassion for the poor, the widows, and the orphans and calls upon all believers to offer charity to those who are less fortunate. The Prophet Muhammad lived a humble, even austere life, sharing what he had with those who came to him and often visiting the poor. “
He is not a perfect Muslim who eats his fill and lets his neighbor go hungry,” the Prophet said in an often-quoted hadith. Based on that admonition, the Prophet would not feel much at home in modern Saudi Arabia.

I
magine Saudi Arabia as a stagnant pond. Nothing is transparent in the murky waters. The surface is littered with the detritus of a dysfunctional society—unemployed men, frustrated women, angry youth, forgotten poor, inadequate education, and an immobile economy. All are obstacles for the Saudi leadership. But another sort of social debris floats beneath the surface, more immediately menacing than the rest. These are the Saudi terrorists, once admired and supported by the Al Saud and their countrymen as Islamic jihadists when they murdered infidels, but now, when they threaten the regime, branded as outlaws.

They blasted to global attention on September 11, 2001. In the wake of that attack, a shocked world discovered that fifteen of the nineteen mass murderers were Saudis acting under the aegis of Al Qaeda.

September 11, however, was not the beginning of Saudi jihadism. During the 1980s, thousands of young Saudis had joined their countryman, Osama bin Laden, in waging war against Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan; others in the 1990s demolished a U.S. military barracks in Saudi Arabia and bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa; and still others attacked the USS
Cole
in Yemen. In the years following their
successful destruction of the Twin Towers and damage to the Pentagon, these jihadists turned their terror on sites in the kingdom itself. Only at that point did the Saudi regime focus serious attention on its homegrown terrorists.

Some of these young Saudi terrorist recruits are rebelling against a rigid and repressive society and gravitate to terrorism to escape boring lives; others turn to terrorism in an attempt to impose even harsher religious repression on a society they see becoming corrupted by infidel influences. Some of the Saudi terrorists thus are motivated by an extreme version of fundamentalist Islam and others more simply by hatred of America, the West, and the Al Saud, whom they see as American lackeys. Some, like most of the 9/11 terrorists, are the alienated sons of middle-class families, while others emerge from the urban or rural poor. While their backgrounds and motivations may differ, all the young terrorists seem to share contempt for the society they see around them in Saudi Arabia and a yearning for more meaning in their lives.

No one, including the vigilant and technologically sophisticated security services of the Al Saud regime, knows for sure how many active or incipient terrorists there are inside the kingdom. The regime knows the number it kills or arrests, the number it holds, and the number it claims to have rehabilitated since starting in 2005 a much-touted program to reform them, but it does not know how many Saudi terrorists now are biding their time behind the walls of Saudi homes and mosques. No doubt they are there—as Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who heads the antiterror strategy, found out firsthand.

Even as the prince was receiving Western accolades in 2009 for the success of the kingdom’s antiterror campaign, he narrowly escaped assassination by a homegrown terrorist. The “reformed” terrorist asked Prince Muhammad to receive him in order that he might help facilitate the surrender of a group of Saudi terrorists in Yemen. Muhammad, who meets regularly with young extremists he hopes to convert, agreed. His guest cleverly came to the prince’s home on a weekend, thereby avoiding the intensive security at the kingdom’s
fortresslike Ministry of Interior, where the prince works. Muhammad’s bodyguards patted down the visitor but failed to detect plastic explosive hidden in his rectum. Seated beside Prince Muhammad, who offered tea, the terrorist dialed his friends in Yemen on a cell phone and handed it to the prince to arrange the supposed surrender. No sooner had the prince greeted the men on the other end of this deadly conversation than his guest exploded, his body blown into what investigators later counted as seventy-three pieces. The largest piece, an arm, hit the ceiling and fell on the floor in front of the prince, who miraculously was barely scratched.
The prince, still holding the phone, could hear the terrorist cell in Yemen cheering “
Allahu Akbar
” at his presumed death. The assassination attempt later was posted on YouTube by the terrorist cell.

The Saudi regime, belatedly focused on its internal terrorist threat, still is inclined to blame the West for the problem. In the regime’s view, the West spawned and continues to spawn Saudi terrorism by its covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, its invasion and long occupation of Iraq, its war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and especially its backing of Israel against the interests of the Palestinians. As is so often the case, the Saudi regime finds it easier to blame external forces than to acknowledge its own culpability. But if some of these external events were germs that set off a fever, it was Saudi Arabia that provided the petri dish in which the germs fed and spread. For most of the past three decades, the Saudi regime allowed religious fanatics to set the rules and thus produced a rigid society offering no political, social, or cultural outlets for youthful energy and frustration other than jihad. Not surprisingly, bored, frustrated, and only in some cases pious Saudi youth had little resistance to the blandishments of Osama bin Laden and other jihadist messiahs. To these alienated youths, violence offered an opportunity for action and meaning now and for paradise later.

Khalid Sulayman al Hubayshi, born in 1975 in Jeddah, is typical of the young Saudis who turned to terrorism to escape boredom and find purpose in life. Now in his midthirties,
Khalid spent more than a decade on the run as a fighter in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and then as a prisoner of the United States in Guantánamo and of the Saudis in Riyadh. He then underwent so-called “rehabilitation” at the hands of the Saudi government and gained his freedom in 2006.