by Ed Husain
Standing in Karantina that day I reminisced and marvelled over what I previously considered as wrong: mixed-race, mixed-religion marriages. A Friday or Saturday night in one of Britain’s town centres, where people of all ethnicities mixed freely, seemed like an illusion. The students to whom I described life in modern multi-ethnic Britain simply could not comprehend that such a world of freedom, away from ‘normal’ Saudi racism, could exist.
Saudi racism was not limited to Karantina. It was an integral part of Saudi society, accepted by most. My students often used the word ‘nigger’ to describe black people. Even dark-skinned Arabs were considered inferior to their lighter-skinned cousins. I was living in the world’s most avowedly Muslim country, yet I found it anything but. And alongside the racism and intolerance I was appalled by the imposition of Wahhabism in the public realm, something I had implicitly sought as an Islamist.
Since the founding of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, two Wahhabi-educated generations have been busy imposing ‘Islam’ on their society. But if it truly had been Islam, then any Muslim would be delighted to live there. In fact the mainly Muslim 7-million strong immigrant workforce loathed life in Saudi Arabia and, given the chance, would prefer to live almost anywhere but there.
At the British Council I helped people prepare for British immigration examinations - professionals who had spent their entire working lives in Saudi Arabia and now wanted to leave. There were Egyptians, Syrians, and Indians; bankers, accountants, engineers, and business managers. I asked many why they wanted to leave. Invariably their reply was that they did not want their children to suffer the same miserable lives that they had.
These people had built Saudi Arabia from the desert that it once was. Yet, despite years living in and working for the good of Saudi Arabia, creating the country’s infrastructure, they had no hope of ever gaining Saudi citizenship; they were foreigners and always would be.
Again, memories of the West came back to me: millions of people had been naturalized as British citizens, millions more in the United States and Canada. Western countries had shared their history and identity with others. Why was Wahhabi Saudi Arabia so different? What was so special about being ‘Saudi’ that it could not be conferred upon others?
Had I not reached Saudi Arabia utterly convinced of my own faith and identity, then I might well have lost both. Wahhabism and its rigidity could easily have repelled me from Islam. It was only my experiences with Sufism and its broadness, its culture of tolerance, humanity, and love, that kept me within the Prophet Mohammed’s fold.
Working for the British Council in Saudi Arabia was a radically different experience from my time in Syria. Students in Syria were intellectually engaged with current affairs and progress in science and technology, brought up subjects for discussion in class, and enjoyed comparing Western culture with Arab traditions. Moreover, British Council managers in Syria fully understood and helped realize the raison d’être of the Council: to promote modern Britain in all its diversity. Thus gay and Asian teachers, for example, were welcomed and supported. In Saudi Arabia I felt as though I were working for a Saudi organization, not a British one. Nepotism, corruption, sexism, and racism were tolerated because we could not be seen to offend ‘local culture’. Why is the British Council in Syria more boisterous than its counterpart in Saudi, when we consider Syria to be part of the ‘axis of evil’, and Saudi Arabia an ‘ally’ in the fight against terrorism?
Despite fitting in perfectly, on the outside at least, and living in a country that had segregated every public institution and banned women from driving on the grounds that it would give rise to licentiousness, I was repeatedly astounded at the stares Faye got from Saudi men and I from Saudi women.
Faye was not immodest in her dress. Out of respect for local custom, she wore the long black abaya and covered her hair in a black scarf. In all the years I had known my wife, never had I seen her appear so dull. Yet on two occasions she was accosted by passing Saudi youths from their cars. On another occasion a man pulled up beside our car and offered her his phone number. In supermarkets I only had to be away from Faye for five minutes and Saudi men would hiss or whisper obscenities as they walked past. When Faye discussed her experiences with local women at the British Council they said, ‘Welcome to Saudi Arabia.’
After a month in Jeddah, I was becoming seriously worried for Faye’s well-being. I heard from an Asian taxi driver about a Filipino worker who had brought his new bride to live with him in Jeddah. After visiting the prominent Balad shopping district, the couple caught a taxi home. Some way through their journey, the Saudi driver complained that the car was not working properly and perhaps the man could help push it. The passenger obliged. Within seconds the Saudi driver had sped off with the man’s wife in his car and, months later, there was still no clue as to her whereabouts.
We had heard stories of the abduction of women from taxis by sex-deprived Saudi youths. At a Saudi friend’s wedding at a luxurious hotel in Jeddah, women dared not step out of their hotel rooms and walk to the banqueting hall for fear of abduction by the bodyguards of a Saudi prince who also happened to be staying there.
Why had the veil and segregation not prevented such behaviour? My Saudi acquaintances, many of them university graduates, argued strongly that, on the contrary, it was the veil and other social norms that were responsible for such widespread sexual frustration among Saudi youth.
At work, the British Council introduced free internet access for educational purposes. Within days the students had downloaded the most obscene pornography from sites banned in Saudi Arabia, but easily accessed via the British Council’s satellite connection. Of course we appealed to the students not to abuse the facilities, but to no avail. In Syria, where unrestricted internet access was also available, not once did I encounter such difficulties.
Segregation of the sexes, made worse by the veil, had spawned a culture of pent-up sexual frustration which expressed itself in the unhealthiest ways. Millions of young Saudis were not allowed to let their sexuality blossom naturally and, as a result, they could see the opposite gender only as sex objects.
Using Bluetooth technology on mobile phones, strangers sent pornographic clips to one another. Many of the clips were recordings of homosexual acts between Saudis, and many featured young Saudis in orgies in Lebanon and Egypt. The obsession with sex in Saudi Arabia had reached worrying levels: rape and abuse of both sexes occurred frequently, some cases even reaching the usually censored national press.
Saudi newspapers editorialized about these worrying trends, though with reference to Saudi women’s invention of temporary marriage contracts known as misyaf - ‘a summer marriage’. These allowed women to escape Saudi Arabia with a male partner, usually to a European capital. After the ‘summer’, the marriage was annulled. Such arrangements were traditionally the preserve of wealthy Saudi men, but now women were finding ways of overcoming the tyranny of the monstrous mutawwa’een.
My students told me about the day in March 2002 when the Mutawwa’een had forbidden fire fighters in Mecca from entering a blazing school building because the girls inside were not wearing veils. Consequently, fifteen young women burned to death, but Wahhabism held its head high, claiming that God’s law had been maintained by segregating the sexes. What sort of God was this?
As a young Islamist I organized events at college and in the local community that were strictly segregated, and I believed in it. Living in Saudi Arabia, I could see the logical outcome of such segregation. In Syria, and in Asian families in Britain, families were relaxed about the free mixing of the sexes. As an Islamist I had been harsh, demanding segregation at social events. Syria had opened my eyes. Our sexuality is a gift from God and we must let people make open choices, not impose an unnatural, hypocritical separation.
Still, I struggled to understand why, among some early Muslim communities, the veil was an accepted code of dress. The Prophet Mohammed had honoured women by banning female infanticide, an ancient Spartan p
ractice adopted by pre-Islamic Arabs. He also gave women inheritance rights, and elevated their status to equal men’s. No longer could a man bequeath to his son a herd of horses, a flock of camels, and a harem full of women. The pagans of Mecca complained that before long the Prophet would say that horses were human too, and had rights. Such was their incomprehension of the Prophet’s emancipation of women.
Islamist Muslims are not, of course, the world’s only misogynists. It is, it seems, a universal male trait, with few exceptions in tribal African communities, where the reverse is true. If Arab men expressed sexist attitudes in the medieval period, they were hardly alone. Even in more recent times Nietzsche lampooned women as cats, birds, and at best cows. He advised that we should think of women as property. In stark contrast, the Prophet Mohammed was a founding father of female emancipation.
Countless generations of Muslim men have failed to grasp the Prophet’s spirit of progress, social change, and respect for humanity. Rather than continue in the Prophetic vein, and award women more rights, many Muslims stopped where the Prophet stopped in his seventh-century context. This ossification of the past continues to haunt Muslim women around the globe. And Saudi Arabia is a prime example.
In a world in which women were spoils of war, passed on from father to son as objects of pleasure, their containment in the private realm was perhaps understandable. A beautiful face could indeed launch a thousand ships. Covering it with a veil was a sensible precaution. However, in today’s world, where is the need for such ancient customs?
It is interesting to note that the earliest congregational prayers for Muslims were not segregated. Even today, in the annual Haj, men and women are not segregated and it remains forbidden by Islamic law for women to wear the veil. Are there lessons here for modern Muslim scholars?
Our experiences in Saudi Arabia scotched the myth, widely held among Muslims, that Muslim countries are somehow morally superior to the decadent West. After hearing personal stories from my students about incidents of paedophilia, rape, and abuse in their families I was convinced that the West is no more decadent than the East. The difference is that in the West we are open about these issues and try to handle them as and when they arise. In comparison, in the Muslim world, such matters are swept under the carpet in an attempt to pretend that all is well.
In my Islamist days we relished stating that AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases were the result of the moral degeneracy of the West. And I recalled large numbers of Islamists in Britain who hounded prostitutes in Brick Lane and flippantly quoted divorce and abortion rates in Britain. The implication was that Muslim morality was superior. Now, more than ever, I was convinced that that too was Islamist propaganda, designed to undermine the West and inject false confidence in Muslim minds.
At one point during my stay in Saudi Arabia I seriously worried whether my observations were idiosyncratic, the mus ings of a wandering mind. I needed to discuss my troubles with other British Muslims. There were several working at the British Council and I spoke with them all. Jamal, who was of a Wahhabi bent, fully agreed with what I observed and went further. ‘Ed, my wife wore the veil back home in Britain and even there she did not get as many stares as she gets when we go out here. The Saudis can tell the beauty of a woman by her eyes!’ When little else was visible, I suppose they had to make do. Another British Muslim had gone as far as tinting his car windows black in order to prevent young Saudis gaping at his wife.
The problems of Saudi Arabia were not limited to racism and sexual frustration. Underscoring these deep problems was the literalist Wahhabi approach to religion that had sapped the life from the ordinary people of Saudi Arabia and attracted a small number of Europeans and Americans who came to learn what they thought was ‘Islam’. They would arrive eager to be exposed to the fiery Friday sermons and then return home to ape them in European capitals. In contemporary Wahhabism there are two broad factions. One is publicly supportive of the House of Saud, and will endorse any policy decision reached by the Saudi government and provide scriptural justification for it. The second believes that the House of Saud should be forcibly removed and the Wahhabi clerics should take charge. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are from the second school.
In Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah I met young men with angry faces from Europe, students at various Wahhabi seminaries. They reminded me of my own extremist days and the attempt by the Muslim World League to enlist me for a Saudi education. In Jeddah I arranged to meet two students, one from Brixton and another from Dublin. We met at the Aroma Caf’ on Jeddah’s Corniche. Their long beards, extremely short robes, and fixed gazes rendered them oddities in the upmarket surroundings. I did not divulge my own background to them, or my Sufi sympathies, and must have appeared an ignorant Muslim, heavily influenced by Western culture.
The importance of short robes comes from the life of the Prophet. It was pagan Arab custom to wear long, flowing robes to display wealth and status. To remove feelings of superiority, haughtiness, and one-upmanship in new Muslim hearts, the Prophet requested that his followers wear shortened robes. But when he saw his humble friend Abu Bakr in such a garment he said, ‘Not you, Abu Bakr. For arrogance is not within you.’ Wahhabis fail to understand this context of the Prophet’s teachings, and adhere to his sayings literally. Worse, by shortening their robes in false imitation of the Prophet’s teachings, while most Muslims do not, many harbour the very feelings of religious arrogance the Prophet sought to heal.
Still, we spoke about life in Britain, how they were coping in Saudi Arabia, and what they would do when they returned home. They were exceptionally candid in discussing their frustrations with Saudi Arabia. The country was not sufficiently Islamic; it had strayed from the teachings of Wahhabism. They were firmly on the side of the monarchy and the clerics who supported it. Soon they were to return to the West, well versed in Arabic, fully indoctrinated by Wahhabism, to become imams in British mosques. Saudi Arabia exports more than oil.
During the seven months I spent in Jeddah I prayed at mosques all across the city. All the mosques had state-funded preachers, Wahhabi men with long, unkempt beards who wore the red and white chequered Saudi Bedouin headscarf from Najd. Almost without exception, Friday sermons were highly politicized and radical. The imams prayed for jihad in Iraq and Palestine to continue, and called on God to destroy the Jews and the Americans. This mantra of destruction would have elicited an amen from me a decade earlier. Now I sat mute, not even raising my hands as is Muslim custom, but looking around bewildered. How could we? Why did we not learn from the fact that, despite Islamist prayers for destruction over five decades, Israel was still in place and America reigned supreme? Was God not telling us something in rejecting Islamist-Wahhabi prayers of cataclysm?
When I put these thoughts to a Saudi he responded by saying that early Muslims made similar prayers. I spent much time trying to convince him that early Muslims were a religious minority, struggling against the powerful Byzantines and Persians; now Muslims were a billion-strong global community - why the prayers for destruction?
Muslims, mostly Arab Muslims, have not accommodated themselves to the new post-colonial world in which they are no longer dominant as a political force. The focus of Arab anger should not be directed at the West or Israel, but at bringing about a better society with strong economic infrastructures and educational facilities, underpinned by political plurality, in their own countries. Without this focus they express themselves in the way they know best: in terms of religion. Islam, one of the world’s greatest religions, has been hijacked by Arab anger expressed in Islamist political terms. Indeed, the attacks on America on September 11 were a manifestation of this very Islamist-Wahhabi rage.
The relationship between Islamists and Wahhabis is a complex one. Their historical trajectories are different, and yet they converged in the 1960s. King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, keen to subvert the Egyptian prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalist appeal and anti-monarchy rhetoric, funded Egyptian Islamis
ts of the Muslim Brotherhood. When Nasser clamped down on Islamism, Faisal gave thousands of them sanctuary in Saudi Arabia. In 1966 Syed Qutb was hanged by Nasser, despite demands from King Faisal to spare the former’s life. Soon Syed’s brother, Mohamed Qutb, found shelter in Saudi Arabia as a university lecturer. As long as Saudi money and shelter were available, Islamists were happy to align themselves with the kingdom. And deeper ties were being formed: Islamists, already averse to Sufism, readily accepted Wahhabi theology. In Egypt Saudi money bolstered Islamist publishing houses. In the West Muslim communities with Islamist leadership, such as the East London mosque and many others, received Saudi funding for their projects. At Saudi universities Islamists taught essential parts of the national curriculum, thus forming ties with a younger generation of Saudis.
My Saudi students gave me some of their core texts from university classes. They complained that, regardless of their subject of study, they were compelled to study ‘Thaqafah Islamiyyah’ (Islamic Culture), and often to memorize such books. The Islamic Culture series includes books about Arabic literature, jurisprudence, hadeeth (study of the Prophet Mohammed’s sayings, actions, and edicts), tafseer (exegesis or study of the commentary on the Koran), and other works on Islamic culture for university-level students. These books were published in 2003 (after the Saudi promise in a post-9/11 world to alter their textbooks) and were used in classrooms across the country in 2005.
I read these texts very closely: entire pages were devoted to explaining to undergraduates that all forms of Islam except Wahhabism were deviation. There were prolonged denunciations of nationalism, communism, the West, free mixing of the sexes, observing birthdays, even Mother’s Day. (In Syria, Mother’s Day was observed by most people, and there was never an objection on religious grounds.) In simple terms, these were all denounced as evil.
