by Robert Lacey
“Our leaders make mistakes,” says Nasser Al-Qasabi, “and we enjoy laughing at the results of those mistakes. But we don’t make fun of the leaders personally. That is not the Saudi way.”
That is not likely to change anytime soon—but once upon a time it was not the custom for Saudis to sit down in front of the television and laugh at themselves.
If you switch on the TV just before iftar, the breaking of the fast, you can catch a special Ramadan version of Khaled Bahaziq’s popular counseling program, Yalla Saadah—“Let’s Go for Happiness.” The onetime mujahid has adapted his marriage guidance work for television, trying to spread his message about the need for men to behave more gently and sweetly toward their wives.
“Since the men won’t come to my therapy sessions,” he says, “I am taking the message to them. I hope that just a few of them will listen—though I fear that it will only be just a few. Women will be driving cars in this country, I believe, long before their men start to change—and it will be from that sort of practical change, inshallah, that some sort of mental change may follow.”
Waiting for that long-delayed and deeply symbolic innovation—which, according to ongoing popular rumor, King Abdullah is perennially preparing to make—the pioneer women drivers of the 1990 demonstration gather every year on November 6, the anniversary of their great adventure, to share their memories and look to the future.
“We discuss,” says Fawzia Al-Bakr, “what we can do to empower the younger women. Since 9/11 women have the right to work in the private sector, but like any other activity outside the home, they can do it only with the written permission of their mahram [male guardian].”
The problem of the male guardian was one of the issues discussed at the Third National Dialogue, held in Medina in June 2004, which Dr. Al-Bakr attended as a member of the organizing committee. The former political prisoner was invited to help set the agenda and suggest the names of participants. As at the Second Dialogue, the previous year, male and female delegates were kept in separate conference rooms, with women making their contributions to the men’s gathering via closed-circuit television.
“We had separate accommodation,” she recalls, “and even our own elevator—WOMEN ONLY.”
But the segregation fostered unexpected harmony.
“Most of the women delegates were very religious and very conservative,” recalls Dr. Al-Bakr. “I was one of the few liberals, and to start with, the atmosphere was definitely prickly. Neither side trusted the other—there was so much hostility. But as we lived together and ate together, we came to see the human side. They were very honorable women, with very fine intellects. I developed great respect for them, and I think they felt the same for me. We became a sort of sisterhood. By the end of the day we were all talking away together, sharing our problems and ideas about our children and our work.”
The June 2004 gathering came up with three specific recommendations: that women should be able to work and study without the permission of a mahram; that female-only courts should be established with female judges to adjudicate on women’s issues; and that a high-quality national public-transportation system be established for the benefit of all women, and particularly for poorer women and girls who could not afford drivers.
King Abdullah received Dr. Al-Bakr and all the women delegates afterward to thank them publicly for their work and to promise that their proposals would be considered in depth. Four and a half years later, in the spring of A.D. 2009 (A.H. 1430), there is no sign that a single one of the women’s recommendations has been seriously studied, let alone acted upon.
Husayn Shobokshi, the dreamer who wrote of his lawyer daughter driving him home from the airport, is writing his column again and has his talk show back—in a better time slot, with a still larger audience. He is setting up a new twenty-four-hour news and comment TV channel in Jeddah. He has also become a Sufi.
After months of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation, Frank Gardner has resumed his work as the BBC’s security correspondent, in a wheelchair most of the time. In October 2005 he went to Buckingham Palace to receive the Order of the British Empire from the Queen—standing up and shuffling thirty yards across the ballroom to meet her on crutches.
“How very gallant of you to come like this,” said Her Majesty.
“T-1,” Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, passed away in 2007, aged over ninety, having had the satisfaction of seeing many of his projects come to fruition and to be succeeded as principal royal adviser by his son Khaled. Less gregarious than his father but equally hardworking, Khaled is responsible, among other things, for the running of the new Allegiance Commission, which will choose the next king or crown prince. Once known as “T-4” because of his relatively lowly position in the heirarchy of the Tuwayjri family, Khaled has been promoted. Today he is known as T-1 among the foreigners who seek to make sense of the confusing array of names who cluster around the king.
The outspoken and reforming Prince Khaled Al-Faisal has been promoted by King Abdullah. He is now governor of Mecca and the Jeddah area, where, in October 2007, he allowed the reinstatement of Ramadan celebrations in the streets. The street vendors and sweets makers could sing their songs—watched for the first time in thirty years by mixed crowds of men and women not segregated into separate sections. Should the nineteen grandsons in the royal family’s new council of electors prove brave enough to select one of their own generation for the succession—a very long shot—Khaled is the grandson on whom you might put your money to become crown prince.
His half brother Turki, the former head of Saudi intelligence and short-lived ambassador to Washington, is now directing his family’s learned research institute in Riyadh—the Kingdom’s leading center for independent scholarly study—and is doing some research of his own into what happened in the Muslim year 1000 (1591-92 in the Christian calendar). He is hoping that the topic might make a book. As the book you’re reading goes to press, the prince is a visiting professor of government at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., a Wahhabi “between quotation marks,” as he puts it, lecturing at a school that was founded and is still staffed to some degree by Jesuits.
His brother-in-law Bandar bin Sultan is still national security adviser to his uncle the king, but has not featured in the headlines recently. In October 2007, during a series of state visits to European capitals, King Abdullah settled down to watch the first of a multipart TV series on his life and reign, to discover the voluble Bandar dominating the screen and claiming personal credit for a number of royal policy initiatives—including, crucially, the 2001-2 confrontation that led George W. Bush to endorse the creation of a separate Palestinian state. His Majesty was dismayed. Accounts differ as to what happened next, but the TV series was not seen again—and nor was Prince Bandar when the Saudi party arrived in Rome. His staff explained that the prince had had to leave for a long-delayed shoulder operation in Geneva. As to Bandar’s new foreign policy role as national security adviser, one of his aides explained that the prince considers his new responsibilities to be “low profile” and not a matter for discussion in books or newspapers.
. . .
Osama Bin Laden has also been keeping a low profile—hiding somewhere, it is presumed, in the tribal areas of Pakistan, whence reports occasionally emanate of his death. These are examined very seriously by the lawyers of the Bin Laden family, since they are administering his assets and share of the family fortune, confiscated at the time that his brothers renounced him in 1994. When Osama dies, this sum—some seventy million riyals ($20 million) according to a family friend—will be distributed according to Islamic law among his surviving wives and children.
Mansour Al-Nogaidan resides in Ajman, in the United Arab Emirates, with his wife, who is a doctor, and their two small children. He returns to Buraydah from time to time, but he can no longer find a Saudi newspaper that will publish his work. He has paid a high price for his plain speaking. He is a columnist for the Bahraini paper Al-Waqt (“Time”), where he expo
unds his great hope for the appearance of an Islamic Luther who will reform Islam as Martin Luther reformed Europe’s medieval church.
“Muslims are too rigid,” he wrote in the summer of 2007, “in our adherence to old, literal interpretations of the Koran. It’s time for many verses—especially those having to do with relations between Islam and other religions—to be reinterpreted in favor of a more modern Islam. It’s time to accept that God loves the faithful of all religions. It’s time for Muslims to question our leaders and their strict teachings, to reach our own understanding of the Prophet’s words and to call for a bold renewal of our faith as a faith of goodwill, of peace, and of light. . . . This is the belief I’ve arrived at after a long and painful spiritual journey.”
There is still no sports or organized physical activity for girls in Saudi state schools. Saudi Arabia did not send a female team to the Beijing Olympics for reasons of “decency”—athletic costume in almost every Olympic contest except shooting is considered too revealing. Women’s sports clubs are criticized by traditionalists as “leading to the spread of decadence”—though three of the conservative sheikhs who argued for the ban, Abdul-Rahman Al-Barrak, Abdullah Al-Jibreen, and Abdul Aziz Al-Rajhi, have recently suggested a way by which it would be possible for a woman to take exercise in an Islamic fashion. “A woman can practice sports at home,” they said, “and there are many ways to do that: she can, for example, race her husband in a deserted area, like the Prophet Mohammed—peace be upon Him—who raced with his wife Aisha twice.”
The Mabahith continue their work as the social control system, the Ministry of the Interior’s own private monitoring service on dissent and the national mood. It released Fouad Al-Farhan from jail after 137 days, but, at the time of this writing, seven of the dissidents on whose behalf he protested remain behind bars. By Western standards this is deplorable. By Saudi standards it is an improvement on Fawzia Al-Bakr’s 1980s experience of disappearance without a trace. Today the Mabahith operate according to defined protocols—the spouses and families of those detained, for example, must be notified within twenty-four hours—and their work is the subject of increased public comment.
Even more scrutinized are the activities of the religious police. In late 2008 a number of religious policemen were awaiting trial on charges that ranged from harassment to the unlawful killing of a suspect taken into custody—though no one reckoned that the religious courts would treat them with the harshness that secular folk felt they deserved. At the heart of the Saudi state lies the bargain between the religious and the royals, and though the misalignments in that delicate balance have inspired the problems of the past thirty years—inside the Kingdom and beyond—that fundamental deal is also the reason why the royal family has weathered the storm. Looking ahead and wondering what might assist the cohesion of this complicated society as it rattles into the twenty-first century, it would seem unwise to abandon the grounding of religion.
Among the Shia in the east the steps to reform continue, albeit at pigeon-step pace. Tawfiq Al-Seif is working with Jaffar Shayeb and Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar for Saudi Arabia to adopt more flexible interpretations of the Koran—what Muslims call tafsir.
“There is a verse in the Koran that says that in order to be strong in war against your enemies you have to prepare ‘swords and horses,’ ” says Tawfiq. “Well, if you take that literally nowadays and go into battle with swords and horses you will find yourself hopelessly weak against your enemies. So here is a case where everyone would agree that you have to reinterpret what the Prophet said. Literalism can only represent the outside of things, and in the last thirty years it has taken us badly off the path. We must search for the value that lies inside the words. What the pious Muslim—Sunni or Shia—should be asking himself today is not what the Prophet did then, but what he would do now if he were confronted by the realities of modern life.”
Ahmad Al-Tuwayjri, one of the framers of the 1992 Memorandum of Advice, believes it is very possible for Wahhabism to reform itself and lead the way in new directions.
“In the beginning,” he says, “Wahhabism was an extremely progressive, reformation movement that shook up a world of superstition and blind imitation. Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab tried to correct the fundamen tals in a way that was dynamic and modern for its time. It is only in the twentieth century that the dawah wahhabiya [Wahhabi mission] became identified with those who pull backward and refuse to change.”
The man who spent forty days in prison after he presented the Memorandum of Advice in 1992 now has a successful law practice in the Saudi courts and is working with activists from other countries to create a World Forum for Peace.
“People talk as if there are only two ways for us in the Kingdom,” says Al-Tuwayjri, “to imitate the West slavishly or to preserve everything and resist any change. But there is a third way, the way of ijtihad—to find out and follow the truth. If our Muslim scholars do not lead the way and have the courage to change, they will be left behind and Islam will pay a heavy price. Our current king, Abdullah, is a good man. We know that he is reform-minded. But as of 2008, I have to say that the political institutions are evolving too slowly.”
Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz thinks the same—at eighty-six, he is an old man in a hurry. For more than thirty years his most cherished ambition has been the creation of an internationally prestigious college that will bear his name, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology (KAUST), a graduate-only, Arabian equivalent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The world’s leading scientists and scholars will gather and mingle freely on its campus, dreams the king—men and women, East and West, all united in their pursuit of learning.
The inspiration for Abdullah’s romantic ambition is the Bayt Al-Hekma, the House of Knowledge, which flourished in Baghdad between the ninth and thirteenth centuries as the center of study in the Muslim world—in the entire Western world, in fact. It was the Bayt Al-Hekma that kept civilization alive as Europe endured the travails of the Dark Ages. Mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, geography, zoology, and philosophy all survived and thrived in these centuries thanks to the Arab House of Knowledge: from its Kitab Al-Jabr (Book of Equations) came the study of what we call algebra. The ideas of Galen, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid, and Hippocrates were researched, preserved, and embellished by the Bayt Al-Hekma, so it was Muslim scholars who passed on the raw material that inspired Europe’s intellectual rebirth at the end of the Middle Ages. Without the Arab House of Knowledge there could have been no Thomas Aquinas, no Bacon or Galileo.
This is the early Islam to which modern Muslims should look back and aspire, thinks King Abdullah—to an age that was characterized by tolerance and the pursuit of knowledge. The scholars of the Bayt Al-Hekma followed inquiry wherever it led, opening their minds to new ideas. To understand the miracle of God’s universe is to understand God’s handiwork, they believed, and following in the tradition of that big idea, KAUST aims higher than the processing of international graduate students. The university represents the king’s considered response to the joyless and totalitarian aspects of Salafism—the starting point, he hopes, of a trickle-down change of educational attitudes that will eventually illuminate every madrasa in the land.
In the spring of 2007, Abdullah offered the state oil company, Aramco, almost any sum they needed to pick up his project and make it happen. KAUST already has a $10 billion endowment to match that of MIT, and is heading for $25 billion, according to the Financial Times, which would place its wealth in the world second only to that of Harvard. In the king’s view Aramco has always been the most efficiently managed Saudi enterprise in or out of government, light-years ahead of the tradition-bound Ministry of Higher Education. Abdullah had originally intended that the campus be located on the cool, green plateau of Taif, above Mecca, but was persuaded to shift it to the site of the proposed new economic city that bears his name on the Red Sea coast. His one proviso was that he wanted to see the students and professors at
work on the campus in two years’ time—September 2009.
A few months later the king decided he would like to inspect the progress of his university, so he called up the royal bus, his preferred manner of transport. It is a nightmare for his security detail. A bus makes a very large target. But the king enjoys the laughter and camaraderie of bus travel. There are jokes and songs when you travel on King Abdullah’s bus, and, high above the road, you also get a very good view.
The bus rattled up the coastal highway from the royal palace in Jeddah, drawing to a halt outside the new King Abdullah Economic City a hundred miles away.
“Where’s the university?” asked the king, getting down from the bus.
When he discovered that this was a preliminary, courtesy stop at his new economic city, he got straight back on the bus, leaving a bewildered reception committee in the dust. He had come to see where his students would study, and when he reached the correct site, to discover nothing much more than palm trees and sand, he was not pleased. He pretended to show an interest in the plans and projections hurriedly unrolled for him, but his family could see that he was both angry and depressed.
