Inside the Kingdom (46 page)

As the panic-stricken pupils turned and headed back to their smoke-filled classrooms to retrieve their gowns, they jammed the route of the girls who were trying to escape. Confusion and terror reigned behind the blocked doors. To the disbelief of firefighters who arrived from Mecca’s Civil Defense Department, girls who escaped by one door were being bundled back inside by the mutawwa through another. They even prevented the firefighters from entering the building.

“We told them the situation was dangerous, and it was not the time to discuss religious issues,” said one Civil Defense officer, “but they refused and started shouting at us. Instead of extending a helping hand for the rescue work, they were using their hands to beat us.”

Desperate parents who tried to help were also turned away. Meanwhile, trapped inside the burning building, fifteen girls died and more than fifty others were injured.

The Saudi press has a long and dishonorable tradition of averting its gaze from unpalatable facts—and, to be fair, of having its gaze forcibly averted by the authorities. But the scandal of the Mecca fire was too much.
Al-Watan
(“The Nation”) had set up an incident team to cover precisely such emergencies: five reporters zeroed in on the officials and their flustered stonewalling, while another five gathered stories from survivors and eyewitnesses.

“They really brought in the information,” recalls Qenan Al-Ghamdi,
Al-Watan
’s founding editor. “Well before the end of the day it was clear that the death of those fifteen girls was the fault of no one but the Directorate of Girls’ Education—so that is what we wrote.”

Other newspapers and TV reported similarly, their spontaneous outrage spiced with resentment at decades of busybodying by the religious police. Here was the ultimate example of how distorted the priorities of the mutawwa could be.

“It was the chance to get revenge,” recalls Dr. Saud Al-Surehi, an editor on
Okaz
.

For the crown prince it was a chance to institute change. His half brother, the governor of Mecca, Abdul Majeed bin Abdul Aziz, was one of the progressives in the family. He visited the burnt-out school, interviewed the firefighters himself, and confirmed the truth of the story. Within a week Abdullah had summarily removed all Saudi girls’ schools from the care of the religious authorities. The Kingdom’s schools for girls would henceforward be supervised like those for boys, by the Ministry of Education—and as this book went to press in the spring of 2009, Abdullah appointed a woman, Norah Al-Faiz, a long-serving teacher and educational administrator, as deputy minister in charge of girls’ schooling. She is Saudi Arabia’s first woman to hold ministerial rank.

With the tragedy of Mecca coming just six months after 9/11, Crown Prince Abdullah finally took full control of the Saudi government. Removing the girls’ schools from the hands of the clerics was the blunt assertion of a new direction. His other brothers and rivals had never defied the sheikhs so directly. But Abdullah had a long-standing religious and tribe-friendly reputation. His conservative credentials were impeccable.

Another sign of his enhanced power was the appearance in the cabinet of Dr. Ghazi Algosaibi, the outspoken ambassador who had derided “Big George” and “Little George” the previous year. A poet and novelist whose books were regularly banned for their skeptical, “secular” attitudes, the jovially rotund Algosaibi was never afraid to take on the religious establishment. The clerics had been delighted when, after a short spell as minister of health, the liberal technocrat was dispatched by Fahd to foreign service, first to Bahrain and then to London, where he managed to ruffle Jewish sensibilities by publishing an ode of heartfelt mourning for a female Palestinian suicide bomber. In 2002 Algosaibi’s return as head of the newly created Ministry of Water was greeted with a howl of outrage from the conservative websites.

It was a step too far for the ulema, and they mounted a counterattack. They had been complaining for some time about the minister of education, Mohammed Al-Rasheed, who had introduced technology into Saudi schools and had been giving more time in the curriculum to science and math, which had meant a cutdown in the number of religious lessons. Al-Rasheed had also stirred controversy in the past by proposing that girls’ schools should have exercise facilities for sports and physical education. Girls were like boys, he suggested, in their need to develop “a healthy mind in a healthy body.” This was taken as the ultimate proof of the minister’s degeneracy, and a campaign developed to remove him from his job. How could such a dangerous “atheist” be entrusted with the upbringing of Saudi womanhood?

In vain did Al-Rasheed, who had started his education in a religious school in the pious Nejdi town of Majmaa, go on television to reassure people that Islamic traditions would not be changed. When it was discovered that he had traveled to a Beirut conference that was attended by female delegates from Saudi Arabia, lurid website stories depicted the minister as a lothario who had lured innocent Saudi women out of the Kingdom by plane—“May He Be Cursed by God!” ran one headline. Thousands of telegrams addressed to “Crown Prince Abdullah, the Royal Court, Riyadh,” protested against the presidency of Girls’ Education being surrendered to someone who had “no ethics.”

The crown prince gave way.

“It’s time for you to relax,” he told Al-Rasheed at a gathering in which the royal family convened to show their sympathy and support for him—but also their helplessness in the face of the concerted efforts of the country’s fundamentalists. Abdullah handed the education portfolio and its new responsibility for girls’ education to Dr. Abdullah Al-Obaid, a former rector of the Islamic University of Medina.

Al-Obaid’s track record was, in fact, little less “progressive” in Saudi terms than that of his predecessor. He had started his educational career in the 1960s opening up girls’ schools for King Faisal with detachments of armed troops. He can recall supervising one school where there were only two pupils for an entire year—the little daughters of the headmaster and the school caretaker. “Then suddenly,” he remembers, “
everyone
wanted to get their girls educated.” He was also well qualified to supervise modern curriculum reform, having gained a Ph.D. in the subject from the University of Oklahoma.

Unlike his predecessor, however, Abdullah Al-Obaid sported a long beard and chose
not
to wear an agal, the double black rope ring of the camel herder, on top of his headdress. Going agal-less is one of the trademark signs of a Salafi, based on the belief that the Prophet never wore the camel-rope rings of the bedouin on his head. It is a generally recognized signal of piety and “Wahhabi-ness.” So the religious community concluded that Dr. Al-Obaid was one of them, and that, for the moment, the education of Saudi womenfolk remained in safe hands. As minister of education for seven years Al-Obaid began a number of new teaching initiatives before being replaced in Abdullah’s cabinet reshuffle of February 2009. His successor was Faisal bin Abdullah bin Mohammed, a sparky and original-minded prince who founded Al-Aghar (“The Forehead”) think tank to investigate ways of making Saudi Arabia a knowledge-based society. The prince happened also to be Abdullah’s direct nephew and son-in-law, the clearest possible sign of the importance the Saudi king placed on the formidable task of modernizing his country’s educational system.

In the months after 9/11 Mansour Al-Nogaidan discovered what the religious establishment could do to someone who incurred their wrath. In his post-Salafi career as a journalist he had been attacking his former mentors with all the bile and bite that he had deployed when he was one of them—and now they bit back. A Salafi website published his mobile phone number, and he was inundated with insults and threats that ranged from beatings to murder. Day after day, by day and by night, the poisonous text messages came flashing up on his screen, till he cracked.

“It was a bad message on a bad day,” he recalls. “I can’t remember exactly what it said—‘You enemy of God. You miserable gay. You homosexual. ’ It was something like that, and I’d had enough. ‘Go to hell!’ I thought. So I texted back, ‘You whore.’ ”

Three days later Mansour found himself summoned to attend an immediate court hearing. Insulting someone is an offense under Islamic law, and his phone correspondent, a religious teacher whom he did not know, had filed a charge that enabled a local religious judge to give effect to all the angry website promises of punishment.

“You are anti-God,” the qadi (judge) declared indignantly, gesturing at a thick file of Mansour’s recent writings.

“I just received a bad text message,” replied Mansour, “and I replied.”

Saudi judges are trained essentially as religious scholars, and Mansour understood the capriciousness with which they feel free to interpret the religious law. The “insult” charge was clearly just a pretext for some angry clerics to get their hands on him. But he was not expecting what came next.

“Seventy-five lashes,” said the judge.

Mansour left the courtroom not knowing whether to laugh or cry.

“I did you a favor,” said the judge. “I usually give eighty.”

In the weeks that followed Mansour wrote letters to the senior princes. One powerful brother was willing to have the sentence wiped, he was told, if Mansour was willing for his part to compose an
isterham,
a plea for mercy. But the condemned man did not feel inclined to beg. His religious enemies were clearly exploiting a technicality to get their revenge for his criticisms of them—and if they were exploiting their power, then he could exploit his. Hearing of his plight, the
New York Times
had offered Mansour the platform of the Opinion page, and late in November 2003 he wrote an article, in Arabic, which the paper translated and presented under the headline “Telling the Truth, Facing the Whip”:

In the paragraphs that followed Mansour hit out at “our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace.” How could this be true, he asked, “when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims?” The Kingdom must change course. “To avert disaster we will have to pay the expensive price of reforms.”

For two days Mansour heard nothing, then he was contacted by an official. The wali al-amr, he was told, had a message for him. He had made a very grave mistake in going public, and in a foreign newspaper at that. This was not the Saudi way. Mansour had aggrandized himself, and had also harmed the reputation of the country.

“Well, I have a message for ‘those who govern,’ ” shot back the fiery young reformer. “If they leave the mosques and the law courts of this country in the hands of those religious extremists, then both the country and its reputation will be harmed still more.”