On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (9 page)

“
Things that used to be
haram
[forbidden] like music are now everywhere,” says a professor at Imam University, one of
the kingdom’s premier religious schools. “We memorize the Koran but we don’t live it.” This man is offended to see the government erect a huge new mosque across from a run-down hospital, and to see a popular Saudi blogger imprisoned for exposing government corruption in an arms deal with Britain. “During the whole of Islamic history, these [the Council of Senior Ulama] are the most corrupt religious authorities.”

A colleague, who confesses to fighting his brother to prevent him from committing the offense of listening to music, says, “We have replaced religion with ritual. Imam University teaches people to memorize, not question.” The insistence that Muslims never ask “how” or “why” dates from at least the tenth century.
During the first two centuries after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, Islamic scholars debated a range of religious issues, but that pretty much ended in the tenth century. “The efforts to explore the content of faith by reason had led to a confusing mass of theories and views that threatened the community’s harmony,” wrote German scholar Tilman Nagel. So questioning “how” or “why” became forbidden and remains so in Wahhabi Islam.

Glaring contradictions abound. For instance, fatwas from religious
ulama
forbid the use of gold- or silver-plated dinnerware or utensils. “If anyone drinks from vessels of gold or silver, it is as if the fire of Hell is rumbling in their stomach,” one fatwa quotes the Prophet as having said.
The Prophet further said, “Do not drink from vessels of gold or silver and do not eat in plates made from them. They are for them [unbelievers] in this world and for you in the Hereafter.” Yet it is common for members of the royal family to dine at home with silver utensils on food served on gold-rimmed china and to drink from gilded goblets and teacups. Such ostentatious display of wealth, and the contradiction with the Islam practiced by the Prophet, who ate with his right hand from a communal plate of food, disturbs religious purists. “We have become just consumers,” laments the Imam University professor. “This leads to corruption and destruction.”

This growing lack of respect for senior religious authorities, coupled with the increasing availability of other Islamic
views to Saudis, is prompting more independent thinking and action in the daily lives of young Saudis. The globalization of the workplace also is altering religious habits. One young Saudi in his twenties who works as a salesman for an international company describes his soul searching over whether to shake hands with a female on whom he was paying a business call for his company. He consulted his imam not once but twice; each time he was told that shaking hands is
haram
, or forbidden. In the end, he decided to shake the woman’s hand anyway as he felt it was simply good manners. “I shook her hand, and I don’t feel unclean,” he said.

Islam is a religion of doing, not hearing or preaching; of active faith, not passive belief. Like fundamentalist Christians, pious Muslims believe they will be accountable to God at a final judgment day for everything they do on earth, so they want to know precisely what God commands and to please him in all things. The stakes are high.

The Koran speaks repeatedly and graphically of the rewards in store for righteous believers and of the torments awaiting wrongdoers.
Those who live by Allah’s commandments “will be honored in gardens of pleasure on thrones facing one another. There will be circulated among them a cup [of wine] from a flowing spring. White and delicious to the drinkers; No bad effect is there in it, nor from it will they be intoxicated. And with them will be women limiting [their] glances, with large beautiful eyes.”

By contrast, those who have not led humble, obedient lives will find themselves in hell. “
We have made it a torment for the wrongdoers. Verily it is a tree that springs from the bottom of the Hellfire. Its emerging fruit is like the heads of devils. And indeed, they will eat from it and fill with it their bellies. Then indeed, they will have after it a mixture of scalding water. Then indeed, their return will be to the Hellfire.”

Even before this final judgment day, Muslims believe, every human being—believer and nonbeliever—must undergo a so-called “grave trial” immediately after death. Once in the grave, the believer’s soul is borne up by angels through
seven heavens, whereupon God records the person’s good deeds, and the Angel of Death conducts the grave trial asking, “Who is your God? What is your religion? Who is your prophet?” If the believer successfully answers, a window on paradise is opened for the individual with the words, “Rest in tranquillity.”

But there is no tranquillity for the nonbeliever. His soul is ripped from his body and borne aloft by angels, although he is not permitted to view heaven. Instead, he is returned to his grave for trial. Two angels squeeze his body relentlessly as he fails to answer their questions. He is shown his place in hell, and then the angels hit him so hard his body turns to dust, only to be immediately restored and again hit so hard he crumbles into dust, and so on forever until Judgment Day.
Only martyrs are spared the grave trial and allowed to go directly to paradise. Small wonder, then, that jihad appeals to devout young men.

Still, while many Saudis are focused on the afterlife, it is entirely possible to lead a largely Western lifestyle in this birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad—and a very small minority does. While restaurants are limited to serving nonalcoholic beer and wine and “Saudi Champagne” (a mixture of apple juice and Perrier), some private homes of the wealthy feature full liquor cabinets and, in more limited cases, large, well-stocked wine cellars. Children in these households often attend modern schools with international curricula, where girls’ sports teams are acceptable, and teenage boys and girls are allowed to mix in their family homes. The children study voice and dance, listen to music, and watch television. The mothers watch Oprah Winfrey, visit spas, and contribute time to charity work. The fathers gather to drink and talk and watch soccer in each other’s homes. These are, in effect, the Saudi version of the “millionaires and billionaires” in the United States who so trouble President Obama.

Many Saudis can’t afford, or won’t risk, indulgences like alcohol or prostitution while inside the kingdom but are eager to partake of them during travels abroad. Millions of Saudis cross the King Fahd Causeway that connects the kingdom
to Bahrain, a sheikdom where they can enjoy cinema, alcohol, and prostitutes or just the pleasure of dinner in a relaxed environment with friends both male and female. Indeed, Saudis give proof to the old saying that opposites attract. The United States—which prides itself on individualism, not conformity, on openness, not secrecy, on rule by institutions, not by a royal family—seems to hold a special attraction for many Saudis, even those who condemn its morals. In this as in so many other things, Saudis see none of what Americans would call hypocrisy in saying one thing and doing another.

By “promoting good and forbidding evil”—even if occasionally indulging in some forbidden conduct—the majority of Saudi society continues to be committed to a righteous way of life and to exhibit a rectitude in public that these Saudis see missing in most Western nations, especially the United States. Isn’t it better, such Saudis ask, to condemn extramarital sex, even while indulging in it occasionally, than to have more than 50 percent of all infants born to unwed mothers, as in the United States? Isn’t it better to drink in private than to have open bars, alcoholics, and drunk drivers menacing the roads?

Saudi society of today is reminiscent of a simpler time in the United States when husbands and wives may have cheated on each other but didn’t divorce; when a majority of Americans went to church even if the sermons didn’t guide their conduct during the week; when unwed mothers were embarrassed about their condition; and when Americans didn’t spill their most intimate secrets on Facebook or on reality TV shows. A healthy level of hypocrisy helped keep guardrails on society so that young people were presented—if only in public—with an ideal model for life.

Saudi Arabia, assaulted by technology and globalization, tipsy from a population explosion that has left more than 60 percent of its citizens age twenty or younger, and clinging to religion as an anchor in this sea of change, is trying to preserve a way of life exhibited by the Prophet fourteen hundred years ago.

For the Al Saud, navigating between those Wahhabi clerics
who insist that true religious orthodoxy is one of austere rules (not coincidentally interpreted by them) that must govern every aspect of social life, and those more liberal Saudis who insist that the true Islam of the Prophet is a kinder, gentler religion that loves learning and life, is a pressing challenge. It is compounded by a generational change in Al Saud leadership that can’t be far off, given that all the remaining brothers who could be king are nearly seventy years old or older. So far, the royal family has chosen to let various voices compete in the marketplace of Islamic ideas rather than try to reconcile competing versions of orthodox Islam. But the longer these contending strains of Islam continue, and the more divided Saudi society becomes, the harder it will be for the Al Saud to reclaim the religious legitimacy that has largely cloaked them since the founding of their dynasty.

Ironically, this breakdown in social cohesion brought about by modern development was foreseen nearly seven centuries ago by Ibn Khaldun, an Islamic social thinker (
A.D.
1332–1406). An historian, he sought to understand the basic causes of historical evolution that he believed were embedded in the economic and social structure of societies. Often described as the founder of sociology and demography, Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian, in his
Muqaddimah
(An Introduction to History) outlines two main types of society: primitive and elementary society (
jawam al-bedoun
) and civilized and complex society (
jawam al-hazari
). He found
asabiya
, or social cohesion, greatest in primitive tribal societies. He saw the increasing power of the ruler and of government institutions that characterizes more complex societies, as well as unnecessary consumption and indulgence in luxury by the population, as features that inevitably would lead to a decline in social cohesion and a sense of individual alienation from society. This fourteenth-century analysis pretty accurately sums up the divisiveness and alienation in today’s Saudi Arabia.

A
child born in Saudi Arabia enters a harsh and divided society. For millennia, Saudis struggled to survive in a vast desert under searing sun and shearing winds that quickly devour a man’s energy, as he searches for a wadi of shade trees and water, which are few and far between, living on only a few dates and camel’s milk. These conditions bred a people suspicious of each other and especially of strangers, a culture largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty. Even today Saudis are a people locked in their own cocoons, focused on their own survival—and that of family—and largely uncaring of others. While survival in the desert also imposed a code of hospitality even toward strangers, life in Saudi cities shuts out strangers and thus eliminates any opportunity and thus obligation for hospitality toward them.

Walk down the dusty and often garbage-strewn streets of any Saudi residential neighborhood, and all you will see are walls. To your right and to your left are walls of steel and walls of concrete. Walls ten or twelve feet high. Western neighborhoods offer grassy lawns, flower beds, front steps, and doorways that seem to invite you in, but Saudi Arabia’s walls are there to shut out strangers—and to shut in those who live inside. The higher and more ornate the walls, the
more prosperous or princely are the occupants. But rich or poor, royal or common, Saudis are shut-ins.

If America is a messy melting pot of nationalities, races, genders, and sexual orientations all mingling with perhaps too few guardrails, Saudi Arabia is the precise opposite: a society of deep divisions and high walls. Imagine an entire society living within a maze of myriad walls that block people from outside view but, more important, separate them from one another. The walls of this metaphorical Saudi maze are those of religion, tradition, convention, and culture. As with any maze, there are narrow pathways meandering through, but most Saudis have neither the curiosity nor the courage to explore, much less seek to escape, their prescribed warren.

Inside this labyrinth, the people present a picture of uniformity. From the king to the lowest pauper, men wear identical flowing white robes. Their heads most often are draped in red-and-white cotton scarves, usually held in place by a double black circle of woven woolen cord. Similarly, women—when in public—are invisible beneath flowing black
abayas
, head scarves, and generally full-face veils, or
niqab.
The society presents a somber cast as men move about their daily business, because laughter and visible emotion are discouraged by Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia. Encouraged—and everywhere visible—is prayer. When the call to prayer sounds, as it does five times daily, men leave their beds or their work to kneel in rows and prostrate themselves in unison toward the holy city of Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad.

Like the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus for King Minos to imprison his wife’s son, the walls of the Saudi maze have been constructed by the Saudi ruling family, the Al Saud, and its partner, the religious establishment of Wahhabi Islam, to maintain their joint control over Saudis—and to keep them isolated enough that they cannot coalesce around common frustrations.

Beneath the surface, however, cracks in the facades of control and conformity were beginning to show well before revolutionary winds swept from Tunis to Cairo to Tripoli and across much of the Middle East. The regime faces growing
challenges from still largely docile reformers and, more seriously, from religious fundamentalists who view the Al Saud as princely puppets of the infidel West and the religious establishment as hirelings of those princes. Meanwhile, the placid surface of traditional society no longer can constrain or conceal its many internal divisions based on tribe, class, region, and Islamic sect. These traditional divisions have been compounded by more recent ones including the growing gaps between rich and poor and between conservatives (who cling to religious and cultural traditions) and modernizers (who believe Islam and greater individualism can coexist). While Saudis still may be publicly passive, they are neither happy nor harmonious.