by Robert Lacey
It seemed appropriate, when long-distance telephone dialing was introduced to the Kingdom, that Riyadh should be allotted the code 01 and Jeddah and Mecca 02, while the east, the source of the country’s wealth, had to make do with 03. A cartoon of the time showed a cow straddling the map of Saudi Arabia: it was grazing in the east and being milked in the west by a merchant who handed the bowl to a princely individual doing nothing at all in the middle.
For many years the Saudi Shia had endured this situation with passivity. Like Judaism and other persecuted faiths, Shia Islam had developed a tradition of quietism as a survival mechanism, along with taqiya—literally, discretion or “cautionary dissimulation.” Shia were authorized to pretend, in self-defense, that they were not Shia—which gave Sunnis another reason to denounce them as deceptive and unreliable.
Then, in the mid-1970s, an eloquent young Shia preacher, Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, started raising consciousness in Qateef. He was a quiet, modest character with downcast eyes, very much the cleric with his neat beard and round white turban, but with a subtle determination. Drawing inspiration from Karbala, Al-Saffar (pronounced As-Saffar) praised the bravery of Husayn’s determined resistance to discrimination and the unfair distribution of wealth. Where, he asked pointedly, might one see such injustices today? While in the pulpit, he was careful not to mention the Saudi regime directly—he kept his specifics firmly in the days of Husayn. But his listeners got the point.
Behind the scenes, Al-Saffar talked more frankly to the young Shia activists that he had organized into a secret discussion group, the Islamic Revolution Organization (IRO), whose pamphlets listed their complaints aggressively: “When the people look at the squandering of the national wealth, while every area in which they live is deprived, miserable and suffering, is it not natural for them to behave in a revolutionary way, and for them to practice violence, and to persist in fighting for their rights and the protection of their wealth from the betrayal of the criminal Al-Saud?”
The gloves were off—and that was just fine by the several thousand hurriedly deployed Wahhabi National Guardsmen on the streets of Qateef. They happily adopted the solution of their Ikhwan forebears to the raucous challenge posed by Ali Al-Marzouq and his overexcited Shia friends. The rhythmic chest-thumping and the cries of “Islamic Republic!” were all tokens of deviancy. The posters of Khomeini were evidence of loyalty to a foreign power. Suddenly the guardsmen were over the barrier, laying into the crowd with sticks, thrashing about them wildly.
“You could see the blood everywhere,” remembers Ali.
He tried to shield himself, but the guardsmen had them surrounded, and Ali cowered with his companions as the blows rained down. “They shouted out that we were kuffar and broke open the head of the man beside me. The blood went all over my back. When I finally got home that night there was so much blood, my parents thought I had been shot.”
Ali was lucky. A few days later Dr. Jon Parssinen, an American professor in social sciences at the “Oil College,” as the University of Petroleum and Minerals was known, noticed two empty seats in his classroom on the hill beside the Aramco headquarters in Dhahran. The class shifted uneasily when he asked where the students were.
“After the class,” recalls Parssinen, “one of their friends took me aside and quietly told me they had been shot in Qateef. Nobody, but nobody, discussed what had happened. Their places remained empty for the rest of the semester, two bright young men who had been heading for important careers in petroleum engineering. It was very sad, but in those days you just did not talk about it.”
According to official estimates, seventeen people were killed in the riots that consumed the Qateef area for the next five days, with more than a hundred injured. More than two hundred were arrested. Buses were overturned. The offices of Saudia, the national airline, were burned, and the local branch office of the Saudi British Bank was ransacked.
“Qateef was cut off for several days,” recalls Clive Morgan, the bank’s area manager for the Eastern Province, who went to assess the damage. “We had to talk our way through various military checkpoints until we reached the National Guard Headquarters Command Post—which was very reminiscent, to my mind, of television scenes of the Vietnam War.”
Saudi National Guardsmen were attacked and suffered casualties, and several Shia communities barricaded themselves off, defying the authorities for days. From the other side of the Gulf, Radio Tehran incited its fellow Shias with the ayatollahs’ take on the Saudi royal clan: “The ruling regime in Saudi Arabia wears Muslim clothing, but inwardly it represents the U.S. body, mind, and terrorism.”
“Oh Khaled, release your hands from power!” shouted the inhabitants of Sayhat, a Shia community to the southeast of Qateef. “The people do not want you!” It was a humiliating loss of face for a ruling family that prided itself on being habitually in control.
CHAPTER 5
Vox Populi, Vox Dei
Since the early 1960s the House of Saud had been on the lookout for trouble—investigating and arresting Communists, socialists, and “godless” radicals of all sorts. Serious opposition, everyone anticipated, would be coming from the left.
But the attacks of 1979 had come from the very opposite direction—from those on the right and from directly behind the royal family. “Godless” was the reproach that was now being thrown at the king and princes of the House of Saud. It might have been expected that the long-suppressed Shia of the Eastern Province would one day rebel, but Juhayman and his radical ilk had been nurtured in the traditional territory of Wahhabi mosques and religious scholars that the Al-Saud considered their heartland. Conservatives, it seemed, could also cause turmoil.
Publicly, Crown Prince Fahd professed himself undismayed. “The reaction of the country was like a national opinion survey,” he declared. “Everyone came to fight against Juhayman.”
But in private the crown prince was less confident. The Shia intifada, or uprising, in the Eastern Province worried him particularly.
“He kept talking about Iran,” remembers his friend Adnan Khashoggi. “He could not get over what had happened to the Shah.”
Revolutions are disruptive by definition, but the Iranian upheaval had had an extra, unanticipated ingredient. In 1776 the American Revolution showed that colonialism could not last forever; thirteen years later the French Revolution marked the end of the road for absolute monarchy; and Russia’s 1917 Revolution came as confirmation of this—the old institutions were on their way out.
But Iran did not fit into this satisfying slide toward secular modernity—quite the contrary. An apparently impregnable, Westernizing autocrat, smiled on by America, with a huge army, an efficient secret police, and burgeoning oil revenues, had been brought down without a serious shot being fired—all the Shah’s modernization had proved helpless against the supposedly outmoded power of religion.
Fahd was not well read, nor had he been conventionally educated. His upbringing in the isolated mud city of Riyadh in the 1920s and ’30s was dominated by Koranic instruction and what were officially described as “traditional desert pursuits”—riding, shooting, hunting, and sitting for long hours in his father’s majlis. But he had learned much through watching how carefully his father handled the religious sheikhs. The Shah had got on the wrong side of the mosque, reckoned Fahd—and that was the side on which the former playboy already feared himself to be. So the crown prince did not argue when his elder brother Khaled came up with a fundamentally religious answer to Juhayman’s unexpected challenge.
The traditional old monarch got the idea from his regular meetings with the ulema. The sheikhs had no doubt as to a solution—photographs of Saudi women, they said, should no longer appear in the newspapers. They had always said this was un-Islamic—Bin Baz had issued many a fatwa on the subject—and the desecration of the Grand Mosque was the proof. In the months following the siege, the blackened and bullet-scarred carcass of the Mosque, with the gaping holes smashed through its marble flooring, made a
sight on which many pondered.
“Those old men actually believed that the Mosque disaster was God’s punishment to us because we were publishing women’s photographs in the newspapers,” says a princess, one of Khaled’s nieces. “The worrying thing is that the king probably believed that as well.”
In fact, of course, the proliferation of pictures and photographs had been a major element in the grievances of Juhayman and his followers. When King Khaled passed on the sheikhs’ verdict to his advisers he did not go into details about the complaints of the rebels, but his firmness suggested he believed that God had intervened personally in Mecca at the beginning of Muharram in A.H. 1400. Everybody knew, he argued, that photographs of unveiled women were un-Islamic. So why had the government been allowing them?
The younger members of the government were dismayed. The “Ph.D. set” of technocratic ministers recruited by Fahd to turn the oil revenues into modern infrastructure were appalled at the irrelevance of the gesture as much as at its check on the progress of women. But when it came to religion, the old king was operating in one of those areas he considered his own—and he did not even take the matter to the Council of Ministers. Khaled had come to agree with the sheikhs. Foreign influences and bidaa were the problem. The solution to the religious upheaval was simple—more religion.
Crown Prince Fahd had, in fact, already announced a more progressive, secular, and essentially Westernizing strategy. For nearly twenty years the House of Saud had been promising constitutional reform—the establishment of a Majlis Al-Shura, or “Consultative Council” of nominated worthies who would scrutinize legislation. In the long term, it was hinted, the Shura Council might even develop into some sort of elected, representative parliament. King Faisal had first proposed this in 1964, as part of a package of reforms to be known as the “Basic Law” (constitution was a taboo word, since the Kingdom already claimed to possess a perfect constitution in the form of the Koran). On succeeding Faisal in 1975, Khaled had renewed his own commitment to the Majlis Al-Shura and the Basic Law, and after the siege of the Mosque, Fahd announced that the reform plan was still on track.
“We shall soon have a Consultative Council,” declared the crown prince in one of a flurry of post-Juyhayman interviews that he gave in the closing days of 1979, showing his seriousness by promising fifty, sixty, or maybe as many as seventy members. “Initially its members will be appointed. We must move gradually.”
How fast was “gradually”? he was asked.
“Within a period,” he promised, “which, I believe, will not exceed two months.”
But when the two months was up, the crown prince did not announce the new Majlis and Basic Law. Instead he resorted to a standard Saudi delaying tatic, the creation of a committee to reexamine the practicalities of the proposal—in this case, a panel of religious and government worthies to be headed by his cautious brother Nayef.
“Once we embark on this path,” warned Fahd meaningfully in his private briefing to the committee, “there will be no coming back. In the end we will have to face direct elections—nobody says that we have to do that now.”
This was hardly the way to stir action in any committee, let alone in a quorum of the cautious Saudi establishment. So no more was heard about a Consultative Council—let alone a national opera house or a multi-elephant Aida.
In January 1980, Samar Fatany had just returned from studying in Cairo to join the English language service of Radio Jeddah. She came from an old Mecca family—her uncle was an Islamic judge who had taught in the Grand Mosque.
“So many young graduates were coming back from abroad with plans and ideas to make our country a better place,” she remembers of the early 1980s. “They were exciting days, with lots of challenges. There were bazaars and plays and fashion shows—international events, with the women from different countries wearing their national costumes. There were at least four cinemas in Jeddah. I got a job on the local radio, reading the news.”
But after Juhayman came the clampdown. The Saudi security services did not intend to be caught napping again.
“You had to get permits for everything—from the governor, from the ministry—and things could be canceled at the last minute. They made things so difficult that, after a time, you gave up.”
This jumpy, repressive atmosphere was given another jolt by the changes made to appease the ulema. Jeddah’s movie houses were shut down. Older folk compared it to the 1920s, when the Wahhabis conquered the Red Sea kingdom of the Hijaz. The grandmother of Sami Nawar, modern Jeddah’s director of historic conservation, recalled stuffing muslin down the horn of the family’s windup gramophone to avoid trouble with the combative Ikhwan.
“It’s that climate up in Nejd,” she would explain, “with such extremes of hot and cold. That’s where their extreme ideas come from, poor dears.”
“Christmas used to be such fun in the compounds,” remembers Dr. Enaam Ghazi, an Egyptian physiotherapist. “People put lights in the trees. The lights didn’t show from the street, but you could ride round on your bicycle and enjoy them. That stopped after Juhayman. No more Hallow een. No more Valentine’s.”
King Khaled’s ban on female photos in the newspapers was followed by the complete package of changes demanded by the ulema—particularly in education.
“Modern science, geology, the history of civilization, the history of Europe—I remember studying all that in my Saudi school in the 1970s,” says Mahdi Al-Asfour, an Aramco planning consultant. “That vanished. Now it became just the history of Islam and the Al-Saud, with hours of extra religious studies—and even science and math had to include some Islamic content. When my child went to school, he came home crying one day because one of the teachers told him that he would be going to hell. Why? Because he listened to music and because his thobe was not cut short enough.”
Over in the east at the University of Petroleum and Minerals, the American lecturer Jon Parssinen noted how international relations was dropped from the Oil College’s social science program—“too Western, too secular”—while the course entitled Social Change in Developing Countries was handed to a safe pair of Muslim hands. Psychology survived only as long as the tenure of the dean who was its protector. Then it vanished with him, judged inappropriate in an Islamic institution. Parssinen found himself spending more time than ever with the dean, ripping contentious pages from the course textbooks.
“We’d sit down together and spot a bare-breasted African lady in a cultural-geography book, or a chapter on homosexuality in the sociology primer—‘Tear it out!’ We’d lay the books on our knee and rip out whole sections. It was serial murder. If students ever asked me about the missing pages, I’d quietly arrange to give them copies after class.”
One enterprising instructor had been teaching English by getting his pupils to chant ABBA songs—“Thank you for the music, the songs you’re singing.” That vanished very early.
Islam was the watchword. Headed by a descendant of Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, the Ministry of Higher Education Islamized the curricu las of the colleges and energetically set about expanding the religious faculties. Saudi universities had started out almost totally religious in the 1950s, and now they went back to that. By 1986 no fewer than sixteen thousand of the Kingdom’s one hundred thousand university students would be pursuing religious studies whose foundation involved long hours devoted to learning the Koran by heart.
Instructors in nonreligious courses found themselves under extra pressure.
“One September two of our best professors, ladies from Canada and the United States, arrived back at Jeddah for the start of the new year,” remembers a bright young Saudi woman who was studying English literature at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 1983. “They were sent home. They had been teaching the origins of the English novel—Tom Jones, Moll Flanders and all that bawdy stuff. Someone had reported them. There were a group of ‘veilers’ in our class—‘the fanatics with eyes.’ They considered themselves the guardians of our virtue
.”
The fundamentalists in the class did appreciate one piece of Christian literature, however.
“We were reading John Milton,” remembers the student, “Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, in which Eve was depicted as a seducer, the source of all human sin and wickedness. Trouble arrives with the very first woman—the veilers just loved that. Eve is treated quite kindly in the Koran: we don’t talk badly about her in our religion; for Muslims she is the mother of mankind. But for Milton she was the temptress, the reason for man’s descent from heaven to hell. ‘There you are,’ these religious women would say. ‘We women are sinful. We are misleaders of men. That is why we should all stay at home and be veiled.’ ”
. . .
Heaven and hell—most people in modern Saudi Arabia believe in them quite literally. Good Muslims will go one way, bad Muslims the other, with the all-powerful, all-watching Deity keeping score. Every action that you take in your life—every decision that you make—helps decide whether you will spend your eternity with comely virgins or whether you will fry.
“We like you so much,” say Muslims sadly to their Western friends. “We hate to think of you in the fire.”
Hell and heaven are not, for most Saudis, symbolic concepts, as many liberal Westerners today find it comforting to believe. For a Saudi—as for most devout Muslims—your eternal destiny will depend literally and ines-capably on (a) being a Muslim and (b) following the demands that Allah makes of you. The life that matters is the afterlife—which makes for an earthly existence disciplined by fear and punishment.
