On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (18 page)

“
The government has become that ‘other’ which is no longer trusted,” writes Dr. Mai Yamani, a Saudi sociologist, in
Changed Identities
, interviews with some seventy young Saudis on their attitudes toward social change. In Saudi Arabia, youth are supposed to practice silent obedience. But for this generation of twenty-something Saudis, youthful optimism
has been replaced by concern for their livelihoods and contempt for a government that fails to provide. As a result, the young use religion as a sword against authority, confronting their elders and, by extension, the regime for religious and social hypocrisy, Dr. Yamani writes.

Young people in any Saudi city drive past princely palaces that often stretch for blocks and ask how such opulence squares with the Prophet’s example of humility and equality among believers. “He is not a perfect Muslim who eats till he is full and leaves his neighbors hungry,” the Prophet said in a well-known hadith. How can the Al Saud claim to represent Islam and so visibly violate this basic religious tenet? they wonder. They also hear their religious imams condemn any human likeness as sinful, yet they see life-size pictures of Al Saud rulers in the foyers of every public building in the kingdom. The young also question the sincerity of religious leaders whom they see as sycophantic shills for the Al Saud.
In mosques, they hear sermons condemning mixing of unrelated men and women, yet some senior religious scholars endorse King Abdullah’s namesake university, where such mixing occurs. Some of those scholars also lecture to mixed audiences when they go abroad.

How can a film festival be permitted one year in Jeddah and banned the next? Why does Jenadriyah, the annual national festival celebrating Saudi culture, allow families to attend one year and ban them the next, forcing men and women to attend on separate days?
Why did the kingdom spend a reported $100 million to build the King Fahd Cultural Center and use it primarily for commercial events or rare cultural programs that never focus on Saudi Arabia?

Above all, they see daily reminders of hypocrisy at home. Why, they ask parents, is it permissible to watch a movie on television, yet public cinemas are forbidden? Why is it okay for one hundred thousand Saudi students abroad, at government expense, to mix in Western universities, but not permissible for those same universities to open mixed-gender branches in the kingdom, as they have in other Gulf sheikdoms like Qatar, which would enable many more young
Saudis to obtain a quality education? Why can a young Saudi, however furtively, exchange cell phone numbers with a girl and even video-chat online with her, yet if they dare sit together in public, both risk harassment by the religious police? How can it be wrong for young Saudis, who increasingly meet on Facebook, to hold hands before they are married? “
Facebook opens the doors of our cages,” says a young single Saudi man in his midtwenties, noting that the social network is the primary way men and women meet in the kingdom. “The young understand it is part of nature to have a boyfriend or girlfriend, and we should not pretend it isn’t happening.”

One father who has had to field queries from his children counsels patience. “
I saw things change in my lifetime,” he tells his sons. “I used to go to cinema. Maybe you will see them change in your life too.” This father, who like so many Saudis doesn’t want to be publicly identified, predicts that cinema will return to Saudi sooner rather than later. “The religious will decide they can make money owning cinemas showing Islamic films,” he says. “Gradually we will get cartoons like
Tom and Jerry
, then animated children’s movies like
Toy Story
, and finally adult movies like
Ocean’s Eleven.
” So religious greed will restore cinema—clearly, cynicism in Saudi isn’t limited to the young.

“
The young are at a crossroads,” says a thoughtful Jeddah-based businessman and father. “They see life in the West, and also the Saudi Arabia of tradition. They need guidance to know how to choose the best of the West, but they don’t get guidance. Instead, what they see here is a gap between religion and life. If religion is preached rigidly and practiced another way, it confuses the young.”

A number of young Saudi adults are trying to bridge the gulf between religion as preached in the mosque and life as seen on the Internet. It is another of Saudi Arabia’s many paradoxes that in a country where religion and state are one, far too often religion and life are separate. Ahmad Shugairi, a Saudi businessman in his thirties, is trying to help young people connect religion and life. “
Religion here is just a ritual,” he explains, “not a way of life.”

For the past half-dozen years, Shugairi has been host of a popular television show called
Yalla Shubaba
(Come On, Youth). He knows something about alienation firsthand. As a young man living in Long Beach, California, he rejected religion and focused on fun. Then at age twenty-two, he abruptly decided to “stabilize” his life. He returned to the kingdom, married, began to read the Koran, prayed five times daily, and fasted during Ramadan. By his own admission, he swung from having no interest in Islam to what he describes as a fixation on the minutiae of religion, engaging like so many Saudis in debates on the proper length of one’s
thobe
or beard rather than on the essence of the Prophet Muhammad’s message. All this, he says, convinced him that most of his fellow Saudis were corrupt and not living their religion properly. He describes himself as having been perpetually angry and intolerant.

Then, like so many young Saudis these days, he began to watch and listen to religious sheikhs from outside the kingdom on satellite television and the Internet. In his case, they were moderate ones, though the airwaves also are replete with extreme fundamentalist sheikhs. Two moderates in particular caught his eye. One was from Kuwait and the other from Egypt. He began to hold weekly studies of the Koran with a few Saudi friends, and he developed what he calls “a more tolerant, updated, flexible view of Islam.”

It is this kinder, gentler Islam that he now seeks to propagate on his television show. “In the past we had two kinds of television—boring sermons from a sheikh, or sports. I want to provide spiritual and life guidance but make it fun. In the eighties religion meant praying in the mosque and reading the Koran. We want to change that so people understand that a religious person is successful and connected to God in this life.”

To do so, he sometimes shines a harsh light on Saudis as they are, to encourage them to seek change. For instance, in one show he went to the street to ask citizens to guide him to the nearest public library. None could. But when he asked directions to the closest shopping mall, everyone had a ready answer. He showed the contrast between shopping malls
teeming with young Saudis and empty libraries dusty from disuse. He holds up a mirror to the materialism and shallowness of Saudi life, which has made him a popular hero among the young, who see in him the candor and courage so lacking in a culture where appearances, however hypocritical, are everything.

“The old ways of rearing kids won’t work anymore,” he says, explaining why new efforts at guiding youth are essential. “This age group has enormous energy, and it can either be constructive or destructive, but you can’t suppress it. And they are a thousand times more exposed to the world than their parents.

“When I was young,” he adds, “if you wanted to meet a girl, you had to drive by, and if you liked her, you rolled down your window and passed your phone number—your family’s phone number. Then you went home and sat by the phone to see if she would call. Today, you see a girl, you exchange mobile phone numbers, and five minutes later you can be sitting in Starbucks”—at some risk, of course. While unrelated males and females are not allowed to meet, young people do so surreptitiously but frequently, finding in the thrill of evading the religious police an added excitement to meeting someone of the opposite sex.

Another prominent Saudi seeking to channel the restlessness of alienated youth is Prince Turki bin Khalid, a grandson of the kingdom’s late crown prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz. The young prince has founded a newspaper,
Al Shams
, specifically targeted at young Saudis. “
We cover everything from the perspective of the young,” he explains. “And we write about human interest, education, new habits, new trends—everything except politics.” The paper, with a modest circulation of sixty thousand, runs features on successful young Saudis who the prince hopes will be seen as role models for alienated youth. “We have a big problem with the system, equal opportunity and work ethic,” he says, proving that even some royals are well aware of the malaise that grips growing numbers of young Saudis. “If we could solve these things, we could soar, as we have many really smart young Saudis.”

Prince Turki was inspired to launch a publication aimed at the young by observing former U.S. president Bill Clinton, who as a presidential candidate successfully courted young Americans through MTV. The prince, a student at Georgetown University in Washington at the time, says he learned that “young people everywhere have more power than they think.” The prince sees today’s Saudi Arabia as emerging from a “darkroom” into the light. “At first you can’t see color until your eyes adjust,” he says. “That is what is happening with young people here; we are now seeing colors after twenty years in the darkroom. I don’t want alcohol. I don’t need cinema, but I want a Saudi Arabia that is colorful, tolerant, and proactive.”

Even at Saudi ARAMCO, the national oil company, which is widely acknowledged to attract the best and brightest young Saudis—and which offers them the most open environment in the kingdom—the generational divide is apparent. “
The young generation is demanding, impatient, and much smarter than my generation,” says Abdulaziz al Khayyal, a senior vice president at the company. “We took whatever jobs were offered because we had no choice. We needed to eat. This generation doesn’t need money, so talented young people want to have fun; they want to be challenged and feel they contribute something to their society, not just do what they are told. Today’s young want more action.”

Saudi ARAMCO, founded and run by U.S. oil companies for more than four decades until Saudi Arabia purchased it in 1980, is a massive fenced city often called “Little America” because its wide streets, low bungalows, and grassy lawns resemble a California suburb. The Saudi ARAMCO compound features its own golf course, schools, cinemas, swimming pools, grocery stores, and library. Until religiosity gripped the kingdom in the 1980s, pork and alcohol were permitted on the premises, and Christmas was celebrated, complete with wise men riding camels to see baby Jesus. No longer. But today men and women continue to mix freely both at work and leisure. Women even are allowed to drive within the compound. Like many Western companies, Saudi
ARAMCO sponsors public service campaigns, including one to discourage driving while using a cell phone.

“I start from the view that talking on the phone while driving is against the law so one shouldn’t do it,” says Al Khayyal, who is responsible for the campaign’s message. His son, on the other hand, tells him that any such campaign simply will look silly, because no young Saudi ARAMCO employee is going to ignore a ringing cell phone just because he or she is driving. “I often ask myself if this youthful exuberance will diminish as they get older or will this young generation be like the sixties generation in the United States and stay demanding and self-centered all their lives,” Al Khayyal muses. My conversations with young people of all types across the kingdom convince me that this bulge of young Saudis is very likely to bring the kind of societal change in attitudes that baby boomers forced on America starting in the 1960s. America proved resilient enough to weather that generational storm. With all the entrenched rigidities of religion and regime, Saudi Arabia is unlikely to prove anywhere near as resilient.

Accommodating these rapidly changing attitudes and demands of youth is a challenge even at Saudi ARAMCO, the most international and professional institution in Saudi Arabia.
In recent years, the company has begun to allow young women to compete for its coveted College Preparatory Program, which accounts for 75 percent of all new hires at the company. The young women chosen for the program know that, on average, they outperformed men on the standardized test given to all applicants. They understand that they are privileged to be in the program, but none of them exhibits any sense of gratitude to Saudi ARAMCO for giving them an opportunity that they earned just as their male colleagues did.

In a country where young women are kept under constant family surveillance until marriage, these young women live in a dormitory on the grounds of the corporate compound. It is, of course, well supervised but still a big break from tradition. Here they attend classes to prepare for entry into foreign universities
to earn degrees mostly in engineering, management, or finance and eventual employment at Saudi ARAMCO in jobs typically held by males. They are taught, among other things, how to manage contemporary social issues such as handling confrontations with foreigners or explaining the
hijab
, if they choose to wear a head scarf when abroad.

At my meeting with a dozen of these young women, they discuss how different their lives are from those of their mothers. Most of their mothers are educated but do not work. The difference, the young women say, isn’t the absence of society’s rules, which still exist, but rather the willingness of their generation to break them.

“There are even more rules in society now,” says one young woman. “But it is no longer shocking not to follow them.” Most of these young women nineteen or twenty years of age have had their own e-mail accounts and their own cell phones since prepubescence. They believe opportunities will be much greater for them than they were for their mothers, but only if they persist. “We know the opportunities won’t come voluntarily,” says one. “
As Gandhi said, we have to make our own change, and we will.”

It is not just educated and privileged young women who push for more opportunity. In the poor, underdeveloped province of Jizan, in the south of Arabia near Yemen, Salim al Fafi, seventy-five, sits in the front yard of his large home in Faifa, a village atop a three-thousand-meter mountain an hour’s drive from Jizan City. Reaching his home in a four-wheel drive vehicle is like climbing a corkscrew. Al Fafi’s beard is white, but he proudly points to his youngest son, who at six is the same age as one of the dozen barefoot grandsons darting around his yard. From his mountain perch, he gazes contentedly at a big orange sun setting slowly over the green fields below and says he measures his pleasure by the size of his family: three wives, thirty-five children, and thirty grandchildren. While all the women are kept inside the house, even here in this bucolic, if primitive, world, new demands intrude. His greatest problem: his seven unmarried daughters are pressuring him to get them to school in Jizan
so they can receive an education. By contrast, none of his wives who grew up in the village is educated or even thought of becoming so.
Because he has no way to get his daughters down the mountain and into the city for schooling, he says he tells them to “just get married and have children.” For these young women, life has not yet changed—though clearly their thinking has.