On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (32 page)

But given the age of both men, at some point soon the Al Saud family will have to make the generational change to a grandson of the founder. The Allegiance Council, which already has a majority of grandsons, might be assumed to favor a member of the next generation. But given the deference to age in Saudi society, especially in the royal family, the grandsons are likely to defer to their remaining uncles’ judgment. Moreover, the competing interests of the multiple grandsons may well serve to block one another’s ambitions. One grandson on the Allegiance Council confides that the grandsons’ numerical advantage won’t affect the outcome. “We will simply follow what the senior members of the family say.”

Another grandson acknowledges that groups of family members are already meeting regularly these days to discuss the changes they all know are coming. He insists all will go smoothly. “The only difference is that instead of being loyal to our uncles, we will be loyal to our cousins,” he says of the impending generational change. “In the next two to five years
this will cease to be an issue.” The family, he says, is trying to organize a whole series of moves to arrange succession not just at the top but at key ministries like defense, interior, and foreign affairs, each of which was held for decades by the same princes who now are either dead or dying. (Defense, as noted, has been filled by Prince Salman.) “It is like a rosary,” he explains. “You can’t move one bead without moving them all. So the family wants to move all the beads at once.”

This is another way of saying that the family hasn’t yet balanced issues of internal equity, so the country simply will have to wait for better or at least more energetic leaders. The leadership has essentially been on hold since 1995, when King Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke and Crown Prince Abdullah became acting king and ruled without a functioning partner or crown prince for a decade. In 2005, when Fahd died and Abdullah became king in title as well as fact, he named Sultan his crown prince, but within two years Sultan was in New York seeking treatment for cancer; he died in October 2011. So for at least fifteen years, the kingdom has been without a team who could make the sclerotic Saudi bureaucracy function. All important decisions wind up at the king’s desk. Now the kingdom once again has both a king and a crown prince, yet both are infirm and cannot provide energetic, let alone visionary, leadership.

So Saudis watch and wait, having no input into the succession decisions but aware that rivalries and tensions within the family clearly could break into the open and that a royal house divided might not stand. It obviously is in the self-interest of the Al Saud family to ensure smooth transitions, but in a family of thousands of princes and several dozen different branches, consensus could prove elusive. And if the family settles for another aged son of the founder to succeed Salman, the country’s sad status quo would simply continue to run its downward course.

If, however, the throne can be passed to a new-generation royal, there will at least be an opportunity for change. That next generation includes numerous princes with the education, experience, and energy to tackle the kingdom’s many problems. And several appear to be actively jockeying, including Khalid al Faisal, son of the late King Faisal and governor of Mecca; Muhammad bin Fahd, son of King Fahd and governor of the Eastern Province; Muhammad bin Nayef and Saud bin Nayef, both sons of the late Crown Prince Nayef and top officials in his Ministry of Interior; Al Waleed bin Talal, Saudi Arabia’s most successful businessman and son of the crotchety Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, a lifelong advocate of democratic reform by the royal family; Khalid bin Sultan, son of the late Crown Prince Sultan and deputy minister of defense; and of course their younger uncles, Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz and Mugrin bin Abdul Aziz, sixty-seven, the youngest surviving sons of the founder. At the most simplistic level, a new-generation monarch might be capable of working a full day and at least press the sclerotic bureaucracy to implement, rather than deep-six, royal decrees, as so often now occurs. Such a driver of change, of course, could crash, but in the absence of an alert and active driver, the kingdom seems doomed to sink ever deeper into the mire of unproductive dependency, with all the mounting frustrations that such indignity provokes.

Four of the princes who would be king. Each is among the not-so
-
young younger generation of grandsons of the country’s founder.

Khalid al Faisal, 72, governor of Mecca, a moderate, modern prince known for his religious rectitude, is the son of the late King Faisal. (
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Muhammad bin Nayef, 53, deputy minister for security at the Ministry of Interior and son of the late Crown Prince Nayef, works closely with U.S. security agencies on counterterrorism. (
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Muhammad bin Fahd, 61, governor of the oil-rich Eastern Province and son of the late King Fahd, is widely known for amassing a personal fortune. (
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Khalid bin Sultan, 63, deputy minister of defense and son of the late Crown Prince Sultan, is a billionaire horse breeder with close ties to the U.S. military. (
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Saudis watch the diminishing line of Al Saud brothers and the impending generational succession as if it were an old-fashioned time bomb with a lit fuse. The wick burns ever shorter, advancing a moment of explosion that could destroy life as they know it. But they are powerless to remove the bomb or snuff out the flame. All they can do is watch, wait, and worry.

M
uch of the Middle East remains in turmoil and transition as this book goes to press. Some of the revolution has been largely peaceful, as in Egypt; some has been suppressed for the time being, as in Bahrain; some has led to civil war, as in Libya and in Syria. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia—far and away the most important country in the region, given its enormous oil reserves and exports, its consequent impact on the global economy, and its role as strategic counterweight to revolutionary Iran—still seems stable and largely peaceful. But on its current flight path, Saudi Arabia is in serious trouble, so how may the journey end?

Unfortunately, the most likely path, given the risk-aversion of the elderly rulers, is continuation of the status quo. That option would mean continued and deepening economic and social stagnation, with the ensuing risk of social explosion. A second option would be to open up the society and economy to relieve stagnation and begin the process of revitalization. A third course could be a reversion to the rigid religiosity and repression of the 1980s. A final outcome could be chaos and collapse. The aged, infirm, and politically paralyzed Saudi leadership for now is sticking with the status quo.

Like deer in the headlights, the senior Saudi leadership is frozen in time and place. The geriatric rulers see the turmoil in the region around them and the growing disaffection of Saudi youth. They dimly understand that there is a problem, but they don’t begin to understand the dimensions of the discontent, let alone how to reduce it. Thus they fall back on the tactics that have served the Al Saud in the past—keeping
society divided, playing one group off against another, dispensing large sums of money to placate angry citizens, shoring up relations with the religious, and praying that their father’s social compact of loyalty to the Al Saud in exchange for stability will hold.

Early in 2011 King Abdullah, recuperating in Morocco from back surgery while revolution rolled through Tunisia and Egypt, returned home to do what Saudi kings know how to do—spend money.
He dispensed $130 billion (an astounding 85 percent increment to the annual budget) to almost every group in society that was unhappy or that conceivably could become so. Some 500 billion Saudi riyals were passed out among the religious, the military, students, and the unemployed, with half the total earmarked to create housing. For the first time, a minimum wage was set for Saudi workers, though of course not for foreigners, who do most of the work. The religious were given permission to open fatwa centers in all regions of the country (as if the religious didn’t already produce enough fatwas) and were allowed to fire an outspoken sheikh in Mecca whom the king personally had intervened to save only a year earlier.

The new largesse doubtless has bought a bit of time, but it will do nothing to revitalize the stultified economy. Rather, it simply increases dependency on unproductive government jobs and royal handouts, further sapping Saudi enterprise. For many Saudis, these latest tips, however generous, reinforce their sense of entitlement, their resentment over unequal distribution of wealth, and their humiliation over the indignity of dependence on royal favors that they believe should be a public right. In today’s Saudi Arabia, money may buy passivity, but it rarely buys gratitude—and surely not the kind of loyalty that King Abdul Aziz once commanded from his tribal followers.

Because King Abdullah offered only money and no real reform proposals, modernizers saw his action as another lost opportunity to institute changes that might reverse the country’s downward course. Might the Al Saud have been expected to do more? Not really, and for several reasons.

First, with succession tensions consuming the royal family, continuity, not change, is the safest course for all princely contenders. Second, when the Al Saud family is nervous, as now, it tilts toward pacifying its religious partners, who almost never favor change—unless it is a retreat toward seventh-century purity. Historically, only when the Al Saud are confident have they risked religious ire by offering even small reforms, such as those King Abdullah advocated early in his rule, when he championed opportunity for women, or as a confident King Faisal did in the 1960s, when he introduced girls’ education and television to the kingdom.

Third, the senior royals genuinely believe that the traditional practices that have brought them through numerous challenges, both external and internal, over the past half-century remain sufficient. Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz, governor of Riyadh, interviewed in 2010 at his sprawling modern office in downtown Riyadh, took pains to explain why democracy wouldn’t work in Saudi Arabia. “
If Saudi Arabia adopts democracy, every tribe will be a party,” he said, and the country would be chaotic. Instead, he says, the kingdom has
shura
, or consultation. “Government asks a collection of people to consult, and when there is no consensus, the leader decides.”