Inside the Kingdom (20 page)

If you did not have fun in the reign of King Saud, you would never have fun.

If you did not go to prison in the reign of King Faisal, you would never go to prison.

If you did not make money in the reign of King Khaled, you would never make money.

If you did not go bankrupt in the reign of King Fahd . . .

. . .

What could be done? Some of the younger princes dared to suggest that the time had come to enact the long-promised Basic Law with its Majlis Al-Shura (Consultative Council). This would be one step at least, they argued, toward change and reform. But Fahd would only smile at them.

“I used to say that very same thing to my brother Faisal,” he would recall. “I would urge him to sign the Basic Law and enact the Shura Council. But now that I’m in the same position that he was, with the document in front of me, I feel the same doubts. What did my brother know, I wonder, that made him hold back?”

Fahd had, in fact, set in train the construction of a grandly domed building that could house the Consultative Council at some time in the future. Actually to fill the building with argumentative councillors, however, was a step too far. The reluctant reformer decided instead to curry more favor with the religious establishment. In 1984 the presses of Medina’s massive $130 million King Fahd Holy Koran Printing Complex rolled into action. That year, and every year thereafter, a free Koran was presented to each of the two million or so pilgrims who came to Mecca to perform their hajj, evidence of Wahhabi generosity that was borne back to every corner of the Muslim community. The Kingdom’s seventy or so embassies around the world already featured cultural, educational, and military attachés, along with consular officers who organized visas for the hajj. Now they were joined by religious attachés, whose job was to get new mosques built in their countries and to persuade existing mosques to propagate the dawah wahhabiya.

“No limit,” announced a royal directive, “should be put on expenditures for the propagation of Islam.” The government allocated more than $27 billion over the years to this missionary fund, while Fahd devoted millions more from his personal fortune to improve the structures of the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina. Vast white marble halls and decorative arches were raised by the Bin Laden company at the king’s personal expense to provide covered worshipping space for several hundred thousand more pilgrims.

To set the seal on this campaign, Fahd decided to award himself a new title. King Faisal had liked to be known informally by the ancient style of
khadem,
or servant, of the two holy places—Al-Haramain Al-Sharifain, the mosques of Mecca and Medina. The much-venerated title went back to the time of the caliphs, and in 1986, while opening the new television station in Medina, Fahd announced that he no longer wished to be known as king, but wanted people to address him in future by “this title that is closest to my heart.”

His surprise announcement provoked disrespectful ribaldry. “His Majesty says ‘Don’t Call Me Your Majesty,’ ” ran the imagined headline of an imaginary Saudi newspaper, while foreign humor concentrated on the Ministry of Information’s decision to upgrade the translation of
khadem
from humble “servant” to the more pompous “custodian.” To American ears the result was quite the opposite, since “custodian” conjured up the image of a downtrodden man with a mop and a bucket. A cheeky young U.S. diplomat seized on these janitorial connotations to draw a cartoon that depicted a forlorn-looking king kneeling on the floor in a sleeveless vest and ragged pants, scrubbing away while a long-bearded cleric supervised him sternly.

“Be careful, Fahd,” the imam was saying. “Mind that you clean the place properly!”

The point of the cartoon, which hung in a private office in the U.S. consulate in Jeddah for many years, was to wonder who was pulling the strings in Saudi Arabia. The more complex challenge, which involved the essence of Saudi survival, then and now, was to work out how religion could “ground” a fast-changing society with the heavy anchor it needed in a world of flyaway secular tendencies. The ancient and modern contradictions in King Fahd’s character were easy to laugh at, but they were the contradictions that lay at the very core of the Saudi soul.

CHAPTER 11

Into Exile

K
ing Fahd liked to start his meetings with a lengthy soliloquy. He would launch into a cascade of thoughts and meditations that could go on for as long as forty minutes, spitting out ideas and volubly soaring with riffs and jinks that displayed the nimbleness of his mind. The royal speeches struck one British ambassador as resembling the diatribes delivered by the soapbox orators at Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park—except, of course, that no one in Saudi Arabia was allowed to stand up and deliver speeches in the street. King Fahd was the only soapbox orator in his Kingdom.

The king had another, more practical, speech that he liked to deliver to his provincial governors, less a diatribe than a briefing. Since the days of Abdul Aziz the Kingdom had been administered by local emirs who operated as regional mini-kings, sitting in majlises, hearing grievances, settling disputes, and passing on the regulations that arrived from Riyadh. In the early days these viceroys had often been trusted chieftains and magnates from local tribes, but as the Al-Saud multiplied, increasing numbers of the family were dispatched from Riyadh to the provinces—and were treated, on the whole, to a warm reception. People liked the idea of taking their problems to a prince who could pick up the phone and get straight through to the king or one of his senior brothers.

On this principle, Fahd dispatched his son Mohammed to govern the Eastern Province in 1984. Several years previously, immediately following the riots and bloodshed of 1979, he had tasked his American-educated younger brother Ahmad, the deputy interior minister, to come up with an emergency program of reform.

“We noticed the difference in a year or so,” recalls Clive Morgan of the Saudi British Bank. “Money was clearly being spent. The Shia areas of Qateef and Sayhat had always seemed to me the poor relations of the Eastern Province. Now they started getting modern infrastructure—new roads, hospitals, and schools.”

Fahd appointed the most successful and dynamic of his sons to take over where Ahmad left off. Deploying his own close family was a generally understood sign of the priority that the king attached to the job. One of the advantages of Fahd’s not having Wahhabism in his bloodstream was that he had no particular prejudice against the Shias.

“If you see a poor man come into your majlis, try to speak to him before you speak to the other people,” the king told his son. “Never make a decision on the spot. Say you will give your decision later. Never sign a paper sending someone to prison unless you are 100 percent convinced. And once you’ve signed, don’t change your mind. Be solid. You will find that people try to test you.”

Fahd was delivering his basic course in local leadership—Saudi Governance 101.

“If you don’t know anything about a subject, be quiet until you do. Recruit some older people who can give you advice. And if a citizen comes with a case against the government, take the citizen’s side to start with and give the officials a hard time—the government will have no shortage of people to speak for them.”

Fahd advised his son to get tribal disputes settled rapidly.

“Try to solve the problem in your private presence, not in front of other people. Take the two men to your office and sit them down quietly. Embrace them warmly—and don’t let them leave until they have embraced each other.”

For decades the Al-Saud had delegated their authority in the east to a tough old bedouin branch of the family, the Bin Jaluwi, notorious for their tendency to solve local difficulties with hearty lashings and the executioner’s sword. Mohammed bin Fahd—whose mother was a Bin Jaluwi
¹¹
—would set a very different style. American-educated and smoothly charming, he was at that time the royal family’s most successful businessman. His rivals in the Saudi brotherhood of merchants alleged that Mohammed had taken unfair advantage of his royal
wasta
(influence or connections), but they were not averse to using a little wasta of their own. Many a Saudi fortune, royal and nonroyal, derived from the commission charged to foreign businesses in these hectic years of infrastructure building. It was perfectly legal to charge commission—it was compulsory, in fact. Any foreigner who wished to operate in the Kingdom had to share a proportion of his business with a Saudi partner—which effectively put local wasta up for sale.

Now the king told Mohammed to hand the running of his business empire to his brother and sons and to devote his considerable energies to the cajoling of more government money into the east. Following the recommendations of his uncle Ahmad, Shia districts would benefit particularly. When the thirty-four-year-old prince arrived in Dhahran, he also brought an introductory sweetener from his father—a general amnesty for all Shia activists who had been detained since the 1979 riots. Hundreds of prisoners were released.

Ali Al-Marzouq was one of them. He had been politicized by his experience in the riots and had wasted no time in joining Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar’s IRO, the Islamic Revolution Organization—though he found, once he joined it, that the revolution of the title was intended to be spiritual.

“The Sheikh always told us,” remembers Ali, “that our aim must be to seek peace, and that we must learn to handle confrontation, both with other groups and with individuals, in a nonviolent way. We must learn to be calm.”

Ali became a dedicated disciple of his leader’s seemingly infinite pacifism. Some Westerners compared the tranquil and impassive Al-Saffar to Gandhi, whose philosophy he had studied. The sheikh looked rather like a Buddha as he sat straight-backed and cross-legged on the square cushions of his husayniya, wearing his turban and quietly teaching his followers. But Al-Saffar’s approach stemmed more fundamentally from the Shia tradition of quietism exemplified by Husayn at Karbala—the almost masochistic acceptance of whatever disaster life might throw one’s way.

“We always tried to follow the example of Husayn,” says Ali. “Abu Hadi [“father of Hadi,” the pseudonym of Hassan Al-Saffar] told us that acceptance was the way. But we also wanted freedom—freedom to discuss and publish our new ideas about Islam. After the intifada [uprising of 1979] we talked a lot about freedom, and I decided that I wanted to seek freedom for myself, the true, personal, inside freedom that Islam can give to the mind and the spirit. I would become a religious guy.”

Ali dropped out of high school and ran away to Kuwait, where there were seminaries that trained young Shia imams.

“My father brought me back [Ali was one of nineteen brothers and sisters—all by the same wife]. He said he wanted me at home and, like a lot of parents at that time, he felt afraid for me and for my questioning ideas. That was a very nervous time. One day my father took all the books and magazines he could find out of the house and buried them in the sand.”

In 1982 the nineteen-year-old Ali had gone “up the hill” to take a job at Aramco, whose main offices clustered on the Dammam dome around the oil well that had got the company started nearly half a century earlier. He worked in the transport department for a few months. But that Ramadan he took a holiday, traveling with a group of Islamic Revolutionary friends to the holy city of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran. Every evening they listened to lectures from Al-Saffar, who had fled the Kingdom soon after the intifada, along with the other leaders of the resistance movement. They made up a large and happy group of Shia Saudis, talking about home, fasting, and praying together through the rituals of Ramadan.

“We didn’t plot or organize anything,” recalls Ali. “But the Mabahith obviously didn’t like Shia leaving the country to go and talk with Abu Hadi. They presumed we had signed on as agents for Iran. As I got off the plane in Bahrain coming home, I was arrested.”