On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (21 page)

The prince reportedly is out of favor with King Abdullah for abruptly resigning as ambassador to the United States in December 2006 after only fifteen months in the job. That resignation was prompted by intrafamily intrigue that pitted him against his cousin, brother-in-law, and ambassadorial predecessor, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who continued to meddle in high-level Washington affairs after being replaced by Prince Turki. Their power struggle to play point man in the all-important U.S.-Saudi relationship was a rare example of internal family infighting becoming public. Such factionalism and friction are not infrequent within this family, but it almost always is camouflaged from public view.

Regardless of the state of the prince’s intrafamily relations, these days, with his vast international experience, he is clearly another of the kingdom’s wasted assets. With the region in revolution, this wise diplomat spends his time welcoming a succession of foreign academics and policy consultants to the King Faisal Foundation to deliver lectures; traveling to speak to international audiences; writing in prominent global newspapers; and occasionally watching his son Abdul Aziz race Formula One cars.

The prince began his international learning as a fourteen-year-old student at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey in 1959. He recalls being lonely and wanting to go home for the Christmas holiday break. He wrote his father seeking permission to visit, but the late King Faisal’s response wasn’t what he hoped. “
We miss you too but you are there for an objective,” his father wrote. “Patience is required for the best things in life and it won’t be long until summer. Tomorrow comes more quickly than you think.”

Recalling his father’s continual efforts to teach his sons by example, Prince Turki now says, “Fortitude, endurance, and patience: these were my father’s example.” He acknowledges he has been less austere with his own sons. Upon graduation, the prince ambitiously enrolled in Princeton University, majoring in engineering. The coursework proved too challenging.
“When I failed at Princeton, my father said to me, ‘I am not going to say you have to finish your education. You have to finish studying for your sake, not mine.’ ” The chastened prince continued undergraduate studies at Georgetown University, where he washed dishes at Clyde’s, a popular Georgetown bar, then pursued additional study in Great Britain and returned to the kingdom to be appointed an adviser in the royal court in 1973. Four years later he replaced his uncle as head of the General Intelligence Directorate, Saudi Arabia’s CIA.
In that post, the very young prince was instrumental in working with the United States to help funnel Saudi money and U.S. arms to mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan after the Soviets invaded in 1979.

Prince Turki, like other sons of King Faisal, exudes quiet dignity. At his desk or in public appearances, he wears a
bisht
, the soft flowing cloak atop a man’s
thobe
, which gives a more formal look. Indeed, Prince Turki is simultaneously formal yet friendly, conveying warmth with his candor and with eyes that smile even when his face doesn’t. He is at ease discussing international politics or Saudi customs and history. All his adult life he has made a special effort to educate the West on his country, his religion, and his family. Given his deep knowledge of both his country and the West, he is adept at explaining them to each other.

Prince Turki insists the kingdom is changing and modernizing—and no longer just from the top down, as when his father imposed television, and education for girls. “
In the fifties to the nineties change happened vertically, with the leadership initiating it,” he says. “Today change happens both vertically and horizontally, through dialogue, the media, and social networking.”

Asked what kind of Saudi Arabia he expects to see a decade from now as a result of these avenues for change, Prince Turki gives a politically correct response: “I hope to see a thriving country that is open to everyone on an equal basis and where meritocracy is the rule.” Is this really possible without tensions flaring between moderates and traditionalists? “No society ever progresses without disruptions,” he says. “Look
at the United States with a civil war, a struggle over civil rights and women’s rights. One of the kingdom’s accomplishments is that it has so far avoided major upheavals.”

And so far it has also avoided any serious change. With revolutionary upheaval all around Saudi Arabia, intractable problems at home, and aged, infirm rulers, maintaining stability now requires more than exploiting differences to divide and conquer. It requires learning how to bridge these deep divides among all Saudi citizens, including youth, women—and even a surplus of sidelined princes.

I
lliteracy has never shamed Saudis.
No less an exemplar than the Prophet Muhammad could not read or write. For nearly two decades, the Angel Gabriel spoke Allah’s revelations to Muhammad, who repeated them to his followers. As with Muhammad, hear and repeat is the foundation of all Saudi education.

To this day, the concept of educational inquiry is barely nascent in Saudi Arabia. Students from kindergarten through university for the most part sit in front of teachers whose lectures they repeat back to them like echoes. Small wonder, then, that schools are just one more tool for constricting and controlling the minds and lives of Saudis.

Public education in the kingdom did not begin in earnest until the 1960s.
At that time, only 2 percent of Saudi girls and 22 percent of Saudi boys attended any sort of school. As a result, even today, it is common for cabinet ministers and successful businessmen to be the sons of illiterate parents. Since those days Saudi Arabia has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on education and today spends a larger share of gross domestic product on education than does the United States. Yet the results can only be called catastrophic.
In comparison with students around the world, Saudis repeatedly perform at or near the bottom. Nearly half of the kingdom’s
schools are in run-down rented buildings.
Native Saudi male teachers in K–12 come from the bottom 15 percent of their university classes.
This helps explain why almost half the kingdom’s higher education faculty is imported, mostly from other Muslim countries. Better-qualified men choose more lucrative careers, and highly qualified women are not allowed to teach male students. Altogether, in oil-rich Saudi Arabia, good education is one thing money cannot buy.

Saudi Arabia’s failed education system matters for reasons that go far beyond wasting good minds.
In a country where more than 60 percent of the population is under twenty years of age, the result is a huge pool of uneducated young men who are not qualified for the jobs they seek and a similarly large pool of better-educated young women who are not permitted to take jobs for which they are qualified. As a result, excluding the Saudi military, there are more than twice as many foreigners employed in the kingdom as Saudi citizens.
More alarmingly, unemployment among twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds is an astounding 39 percent—45.5 percent for women and 30.3 percent for men. (The official unemployment rate is said to be 10 percent.)

The implications of these sorry statistics aren’t just educational and economic—they also involve national security, always the predominant concern of the ruling Al Saud family. These millions of uneducated and undereducated, unemployed and underemployed youth make up the pool within which the extremists trawl for recruits, with their line and lure that the Al Saud are selling out Islam to the West. Sadly, that line did not disappear when Osama bin Laden’s body sank into the Arabian Sea.

For all these reasons, education has become a high priority for the regime, with money the least of the obstacles. Education spending has tripled this decade.
At 137 billion Saudi riyals ($37 billion) in 2010, it now accounts for more than 25 percent of the country’s annual budget. To underscore his determination to reform the kingdom’s failing education system, King Abdullah named his nephew and son-in-law, Faisal bin Abdullah, a Stanford University graduate, as the new
minister of education in 2009 and appointed the first-ever Saudi woman of ministerial rank, Norah al Faiz, as deputy minister of education. To encourage modernization in higher education, Abdullah ordered construction of the first ever co-ed university, which he placed under the management of Saudi ARAMCO to keep it free of influence from his own moribund Ministry of Higher Education.

All these efforts at reform, however, have simply intensified the battle between traditionalists and modernizers over education. For the religious establishment, controlling education is at least as important as controlling women because education is a key instrument for perpetuating a devout, conservative Islamic society. Most Wahhabi religious leaders see education as simply an extension of religion and want it to consist of mostly Islamic theology and history. Indeed, to some of these religious purists, studying science, foreign languages, or anything about the rest of the world is not merely irrelevant but also distracting and even dangerous, luring Saudi youth to worldly wickedness.

In the West, God is virtually unmentionable in public schools, and in America at least, even perfunctory school prayer is banned. By contrast, in Saudi Arabia all the public schools are religious, and the state mandates daily intensive studies of the Koran, beginning in first grade and consuming roughly half the school day.
At the elementary school level, religious studies average a total of nine periods a week, while math, science, geography, history, and physical education combined average only twelve periods a week. In a Western country, a devout family might opt to put its child in a religious school to avoid a purely secular education. In Saudi Arabia, the child of a more secular family that chooses a private school still is required to spend much of the school day studying Islam.
Indeed, Saudi educational policy states that one of its objectives is to promote the “belief in the One God, Islam as the way of life, and Muhammad as God’s Messenger.”

As a result of this educational philosophy, supported by parental and societal pressure, most Saudi students, even
university graduates, choose education in soft subjects like religion, sociology, and Islamic history rather than the academic disciplines and practical skills that would equip them to compete in the private sector, where real jobs are available, rather than in the stagnant public sector. Worse yet, most Saudi students emerge even from college or university having learned how to memorize rather than how to think. In Saudi Arabia, religion is not a matter for deliberation and debate, in the classroom or anywhere else. It is Allah’s word that must be learned and then lived. Tellingly, the entire subject of philosophy, in which questions would be the core of a curriculum, is banned in Saudi.

Saudi schools weren’t always so fundamentalist. Tewfiq al Saif, a businessman in Qatif, contrasts his education in the 1960s, a time of relative relaxation, with the education his son received in the 1990s—and still would receive today. The father recalls his Jordanian-born teacher making him master the Koran, including the prevailing Wahhabi view that Shias (the minority sect in Saudi but the majority in Qatif) are heretics. Because young Tewfiq was a Shia, the Jordanian teacher told him, “Just write it, you don’t have to believe it.”

When his son attended school a generation later, his Saudi teacher taught that Shias are heretics and ordered the boy to go home and convert his parents to Sunni Wahhabism. Al Saif eventually sent his son abroad for education, but the majority of Saudi families aren’t so fortunate. The fact is that all too many Saudi students emerge from school knowing little more than the Koran and believing not only in the tenets of their own religion but also that most of the rest of the world is populated by heretics and infidels who must be shunned, converted, or combatted.

In Saudi Arabia, the religious establishment does not merely exert a powerful influence on education; education is its wholly owned subsidiary. Education began with boys memorizing the Koran with religious scholars. It was not until 1951 that public education (still only for boys) began to be available in what then were big villages like Riyadh and Jeddah, and even then the teachers were mostly religious
scholars. Any family seeking a better-rounded education for its sons sent them abroad, primarily to Cairo or Beirut. At that time, Prince Faisal bin Abdul Aziz, who was viceroy of the Hejaz (later King Faisal), was confronted by angry religious leaders, who accused the schools in Jeddah, the largest city of the Hejaz, of teaching magic (chemistry) and atheism (physics). Faisal called the director of education before the religious leaders and asked if he was indeed teaching chemistry and physics. “Yes,” he said. “I have to teach those subjects to get students into Cairo and Beirut universities.” The wise prince said to the director of education, “Don’t teach chemistry. Teach the nature of substances. Don’t teach physics. Teach the nature of things.” Faisal crossed out the titles on the sheaf of handwritten teaching materials his education director held and wrote in the new ones.
The religious leaders departed, pleased with their prince’s devotion—and Saudi boys continued to learn chemistry and physics under a new name.

In the 1960s, when Faisal became king, he championed the creation of public schools across the kingdom for boys—and also girls. The largely illiterate nation had few qualified teachers, so the government dispatched emissaries abroad, mostly to Egypt and Jordan, to recruit teachers with substantive skills who also were devout Muslims. A hallmark of King Faisal’s reign was an effort to create an Islamic alliance in the Middle East to counter the Arab nationalism of Egypt’s president, Gamel Abdel Nasser.
When Nasser, a nationalist strongman and sworn enemy of Saudi Arabia, turned on his country’s conservative Muslim Brotherhood, King Faisal welcomed those religious conservatives into Saudi Arabia as scholars and teachers, reinforcing the fundamentalist hold on the young Ministry of Education, founded in 1954 under his predecessor and half-brother, King Saud. It’s a grip that has yet to be broken.