Inside the Kingdom (12 page)

“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.

It therefore follows that the fundamental duty of the state is to make sure that its citizens end up in the right place. As laid down by the Saudi Basic Law, the objective of the Saudi state is nothing so transitory as personal earthly freedom. It is to make people good Muslims—the
hisbah
that Sheikh Bin Baz had proposed as a mission to his Salafi protégés: command the good, forbid the bad. Schools start the job with children, and mosques continue the shaping into adulthood—with practical assistance from the local Committees for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the groups of state-subsidized vigilantes known to Westerners as the “religious police.” In 1980 these bearded zealots were the government’s obvious allies in the post-Juhayman campaign of godliness—as well as potential sources of disaffection that needed to be bought off.

People noticed that imams and religious folk seemed to have more money to spend from the early 1980s onward. The petrodollar went pious. Saudi clerics were shoeless no longer, with the religious police benefiting most obviously from government injections of cash. They started to appear in imposing new GMC vans, with their once humble local committees of
mutawwa
(volunteers or enforcers) taking on the grander, “Big Brother” aura of their original, collective name—Al-Hayah, “the Commission.” They developed attitude to match.

“In the old days,” recalls the scholar and media businesman, Abdullah Masry, “you’d see the shopkeepers kneeling outside their shops at prayer time. People were free to follow their own spiritual practices as ordained by their faith. Now the religious police told everyone that they had to lock up and go to the mosque.”

In Jeddah, the recently constructed French hotel, the Sofitel on Palestine Road, had opened a pair of segregated gyms. They had separate entrances for men and women, but within months of the opening, the busy women’s gym was closed down. “Single women going alone into a hotel building?” remembers one of the female members sardonically. “
Haram!
The ultimate sin!”

The segregation was extended to the humblest coffee shop, with separate entrances and screens creating an area known as the “Family Section”: men were allowed to enter only if they were accompanied by a related female—their sister, mother, wife, or adult daughter—which, ironically, gave a certain power to the women. This separation had always been the rule in Nejd. Now it was extended with strictness all over the country. Music shops were closed down, and Jeddah’s ancient tradition of the downtown street vendors and sweets makers singing songs to celebrate Ramadan was suppressed.

It was difficult not to cause offense. Western women had always worn modest versions of Western dress. Long-sleeved, high-neckline Laura Ash ley muslins suited the bill perfectly. This gave expatriate gatherings the character of a
Little House on the Prairie
costume drama, with a preponderance of pastel greens and pinks. But now foreign women started to cover their costumes with the black
abaya,
Saudi-style. Westerners were clearly starting to feel uncomfortable, and Samar Fatany noticed the difference in her foreign colleagues.

“They couldn’t mix and mingle with Saudis—it became Them and Us. I had some great friends at the radio station, two Australian women. But they decided to leave. It wasn’t fun anymore. In fact, it became distinctly edgy. Then I was stopped from reading the news.”

One year Saudi TV had broadcast footage of the immensely popular Lebanese singer Fairuz with a strange black lozenge on the screen masking her chest, to conceal her crucifix. Now she, and all other women, vanished completely. The religious police became more and more evident, harassing people on the street.

“You couldn’t walk around with your husband without your ID cards,” remembers Samar. “They would accuse you of infidelity.”

Sometimes even ID cards were not enough. Muslim women do not surrender their names on marriage—they keep their own family names throughout their life. So when Samar Fatany and her husband, Khaled Al-Maeena, turned up in Riyadh for a conference in the early 1980s, they encountered trouble at the check-in desk of the Radisson.

“They were very polite,” remembers Al-Maeena, “but they said they needed proof we were married. It so happened I’d just written an article for
Al-Muslimoon
[“The Muslims”]. That was the holy of holies when it came to religious things. But it wasn’t good enough. I had to go to the police station with a male friend so he could swear that my wife was my wife.”

The House of Saud had executed Juhayman. Now they were making his program government policy.

CHAPTER 6