On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (4 page)

King Abdul Aziz bin Saud, founder of the current Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with five of his forty-four sons plus household servants. Five sons have succeeded him on the throne since his death in 1953. (
GETTY IMAGES
)

If George Washington is famous for never telling a lie, Abdul Aziz is equally famous for cunning and duplicity, traits still much admired in Saudi Arabia. For instance, Abdul Aziz’s admirers tell the story of a clash between a religious sheikh and the king over the length of Abdul Aziz’s
thobe
, the floor-length garb resembling a long shirt that is the Saudi national dress. The religious man told his monarch his
thobe
was too long, a sign of extravagance and vanity that displeases Allah. Abdul Aziz asked that the critical cleric be given a pair of scissors to cut the
thobe
to the proper length. Once that was done and the satisfied cleric departed, Abdul Aziz ordered his guards never to let the man into his presence again. The gesture of submission to religious dictate had been only for appearance.

Knowing when to yield and when to fight is a survival instinct the founding ruler perfected—and passed to his sons. When his Ikhwan urged him to declare a holy war on the British infidels, who after World War I had replaced the Ottoman Turks as the dominant foreign power in the Middle East, Abdul Aziz demurred because he needed British money and cooperation to drive his rival, Sharif Hussein, the great-great-grandfather of Jordan’s King Abdullah, from Mecca and complete his conquest of Arabia. Once the Ikhwan helped conquer Mecca and the surrounding Hejaz region, Abdul Aziz fought a brutal war with these same religious extremists because they wanted to continue to wage jihad beyond Arabia into Iraq, a British protectorate. He was not about to risk his precariously constructed kingdom to expand into Iraq and turn the powerful British against him. Instead, he turned on the Ikhwan, precisely the people whom he had used to help him secure power, and destroyed them. Abdul Aziz’s devotion to religion took a backseat to his determination to retain his rule of Arabia. (And the same is true today of his sons who, when it suits them, confront religious leaders and even fire some of them, while professing total devotion and obedience to Allah.)

“
Draw the sword in their face and they will obey; sheathe the sword and they will ask for more pay,” Abdul Aziz once told a British official, to explain his modus operandi. To the Ikhwan leaders, he warned before destroying them, “
Are there not a number of you upon whose fathers’ and grandfathers’ necks my sword and that of my fathers and grandfathers made play?”

To demonstrate his willingness to use power where persuasion failed, Abdul Aziz razed the villages of some of his own cousins who had massed an army to threaten his hold on Riyadh. He forced the surrender of one village, Laila, and condemned to death nineteen of its leaders. Demonstrating an unerring flair for dramatic brutality, Abdul Aziz granted the leaders a twenty-four-hour stay of execution while a platform was built outside the main gate of town. At dawn, he took his seat before an assembly of men summoned from the countryside around Laila. In pairs the condemned men were led before him, and each was put to death on his command by a black slave wielding a sword. With eighteen men dead, he abruptly pardoned the nineteenth and told him to go tell all he met what he had seen of the just vengeance of Abdul Aziz. It was classic Al Saud—offering people a choice between brutality and submission.
The lessons learned and taught by Abdul Aziz are deeply imprinted in the minds of his elder sons, who helped him subdue Arabia in their youth and who have followed him on the throne.

Like his father, the current king, Abdullah, has practiced the art of balance. Much as his father subdued the Ikhwan, Abdullah has faced the challenge of subduing its modern variant, the Islamic jihadists. In a striking parallel to the Ikhwan, whom Abdul Aziz used and then destroyed, the modern-day Islamic extremists were indulged in the 1980s by a royal family eager to burnish its religious credentials, as Islamic fundamentalism swept the region in the wake of the religious revolution in Iran. The regime supported the jihadists as they fought the Soviets in Afghanistan and imposed rigid religiosity in the kingdom. The Saudi regime then ruthlessly suppressed religious extremists some thirty years later when they began terrorist attacks inside Saudi
Arabia in 2003 and thus were seen to pose a threat to Al Saud rule.

This embrace of extreme religiosity began in 1979 after a Bedouin preacher and several hundred followers did the unthinkable: they used firearms, forbidden in any mosque, to seize control of Islam’s holiest site, the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Just as the imam was concluding the dawn prayer on November 20, gunshots rang out, freezing worshippers who stood in concentric circles emanating from the Kaaba, a large cube covered in black silk in the center of the mosque. Juhayman al Uteybi, age forty-three, with intense black eyes and unruly black hair, seized the microphone from the imam and barked orders to his followers to secure the mosque. Juhayman and his cohorts were determined to end what they saw as the Al Saud’s excessive tolerance of infidel innovations—women newscasters on television, cinemas, and even tolerance of Shias, who in their fanatical minds, are members of a heretical sect of Islam not worthy to be called Muslim. Panicked worshipers tried to flee, only to find all fifty-one gates of the mosque chained shut.
Thus began the first jihadist attack in modern Saudi history, one whose repercussions continue to this day.

The shocked Al Saud first tried to black out any news of the dramatic event. But when days passed with no progress in dislodging Juhayman and his followers, the government laid bloody siege to the holiest site in Islam for nearly two weeks, severely damaging the mosque and finally destroying Juhayman and his compatriots with help from the Western infidels he decried: French commandos deployed CB, a deadly chemical that blocks breathing and inhibits aggressiveness, immobilizing the religious rebels, who were rounded up by Saudi troops.
But the siege claimed at least one thousand lives. Juhayman and his compatriots were quickly executed. The traumatized royal family soon curbed the societal liberties Juhayman had condemned. Women announcers were ordered off television, women were forced to wear the veil, and cinemas were closed (except at Saudi ARAMCO). In short, the Al Saud killed Juhayman and his cohorts but adopted their agenda of intolerance, spawning yet more
radical Islamists and eventually their deadly attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and on Saudis in 2003.

This incident marked the beginning of a now widespread sense among Saudis that their government was incompetent. That sense only grew in 1990, when the kingdom’s rulers, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in defense purchases over the decades, nonetheless concluded they needed U.S. troops to protect the country from Saddam Hussein, who had invaded Kuwait and had his eye on Saudi oil fields as well. That cynicism continues to compound to this day, with incidents like the repeated floods in Jeddah in 2009 and 2011 and with the government’s inability to diversify the Saudi economy to create jobs for the growing number of unemployed youth.

In the wake of the attack on New York’s Twin Towers by Saudi nationals, both political reformers and religious fundamentalists began to call for reforms inside the kingdom. Fundamentalists sought reforms that essentially would make religious leaders full partners of the Al Saud. Seeing the regime on the defensive, Saudi intellectuals and other moderates too began to press for political pluralism, including a constitution limiting the government’s powers and even direct elections to the country’s Potemkin parliament, the Majlis Ash Shura, or Consultative Council.

Faced with these mounting and seemingly irreconcilable demands, Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler (as King Fahd lay dying), deftly sought to defuse both threats. The regime imprisoned some of its critics and co-opted others. In 2003 Abdullah launched what he called “National Dialogues” that moved the debate from substantive political reform of the monarchy to superficial reform of the society. The articulate activists from the religious and the reformer ranks soon were subsumed and diluted by a broader and far less threatening group of public representatives selected by the government to participate in the nationally televised “dialogue.” In short, the government picked the topics for discussion, such as the role of women, youth, tolerance, and unemployment, and selected those who would discuss them. These National Dialogues soon sucked the energy
out of the incipient reform movement and within a year had become just another somnolent event under royal sponsorship, ignored by most of society and viewed with cynicism by more politically aware Saudis. The recommendations of the National Dialogues were bound in expensive volumes at the conclusion of each session but most were never acted upon. As so often happens in Saudi Arabia, a large new building called the Center for National Dialogue is the only remaining monument to that latest reform movement.

As delicately as the regime co-opted demands for power sharing, it met the violent attacks of extremists on Saudi citizens with matching brutality. For two years after the attack on the World Trade Center, as the United States pressured Riyadh to cut Saudi citizens’ financing of terrorists, the Saudi government largely denied that extremism was a problem. But when frustrated extremists turned to violent attacks on Saudi civilians in 2003, the government met the challenge with massive force, killing hundreds and arresting thousands, many of whom remain incarcerated without trials nearly a decade later.

Like Abdul Aziz, his sons strongly prefer to co-opt rather than to confront, to buy rather than to bully, to deflect rather than to directly deny. But in extremis, they are willing to employ pretty much the same harsh practices as neighboring Arab rulers or Abdul Aziz himself. Saudi Arabia is replete with secret police, surreptitious surveillance, grim prisons, and torture chambers, even if this is an aspect of the regime that most Saudis manage to avoid.

Since becoming king in 2005, Abdullah, more than any modern Saudi king, has sought to introduce modest reforms to please modernizers and to blunt the kingdom’s image at home and abroad as a breeding ground for fanaticism. Among other things, he has advocated that women be allowed greater opportunities—a handful of prominent females for the first time even joined a monarch’s official entourage for foreign visits. In 2011 he announced that women would be appointed (by him) to the Majlis Ash Shura and would actually be allowed to vote in 2015, albeit only in elections for municipal
councils, powerless bodies first elected in 2005 to help defuse Western criticism of the kingdom in the wake of 9/11. Still, women are expected to be segregated from men in the Consultative Council and participate only by closed-circuit television. Being members of the council may be one thing; mixing with male members is another.

King Abdullah also began sending a flood of Saudi youth abroad for education—more than one hundred thousand attend foreign universities now, roughly half in the United States.
In 2009, to reinforce his call for improvements in the kingdom’s notoriously poor education system, he established King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the new gender-mixed research university, a first in Saudi Arabia, with an endowment reported to be second only to Harvard’s.

When one of the senior religious
ulama
had the temerity to criticize this unprecedented mixing as an infidel innovation forbidden by Islam, the mild-mannered king promptly fired him, a modern form of his father’s beheadings. The sacking of this sheikh had the desired effect of prompting supportive statements on KAUST from other tame religious leaders, but it angered religious conservatives who see the approval of gender mixing as yet further prostitution by a religious establishment that puts pleasing the king and retaining its privileges ahead of pleasing Allah. Always careful to balance, the king, who had secured
ulama
approval for gender mixing at his elite university, did nothing to curb the country’s religious police from roaming the kingdom’s streets and harassing ordinary Saudis mixing with anyone of the opposite gender.

As is clear by now, the regime perpetually performs a delicate minuet, dancing closer at times to the religious establishment and at other times to modernizers, but always focused on retaining Al Saud control. None of King Abdullah’s reforms, of course, provides any real sharing of power by the Al Saud who, even as revolutions have toppled regimes all around them, still appear determined to salve Saudis’ frustrations with money alone rather than with meaningful political freedoms.

Indeed, the second source of Al Saud survival is money. Abdul Aziz understood this well even in the pre-oil era, when he had little of it. Until the discovery of oil in 1938, his only sources of modest revenue were a tax on pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca; the
zakat
, an annual tax on wealth and assets of Muslims required by the Koran; and a small subsidy from the British. All this he freely dispersed at his daily
majlis
to a succession of tribal chiefs and other supplicants. He regularly fed thousands at his palace from huge communal trays of rice and mutton and passed out clothes to the needy from his basement storerooms. He literally kept his gold and silver coins in a metal chest that was carried about the kingdom wherever he went, as omnipresent as the black doomsday box that accompanies modern American presidents wherever they go.

“
Neither I nor my ancestors have kept a chest in which to hoard money,” he told one of his ministers. “Hoarded money does no good. In peace I give all, even this cloak, to anyone who may need it. In war I ask and my people give all they have to me.”

By the 1930s, the cost of government salaries, an army, payments to tribal leaders to maintain loyalty, and efforts at nation building such as installing radio and telegraph stations and creating a water supply for townspeople left Abdul Aziz almost always broke. So desperate was he that in 1933 for only 50,000 pounds (about $250,000) he granted Standard Oil of California, which a year earlier had struck oil in neighboring Bahrain, a concession in Saudi Arabia. “Put your trust in God and sign,” the king instructed his finance minister.
In 1938 Standard Oil struck oil—gushers of it—in the kingdom’s Eastern Province.