Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  As Fawzia Al-Bakr reached her family home in the company of her polite but unsmiling escorts, she tried to warn her teenage brother.

  “Wasalu zuwwar al-fajr!” she whispered—“The dawn visitors have arrived!” Her brother’s eyes opened wide with horror.

  The plainclothes officers escorted her up to her bedroom, where they searched through her desk and cupboards.

  “They took all my notebooks and files,” she recalls. “I told my mother it was something to do with missing exam papers.”

  It was not until Al-Bakr found herself at an office of the Interior Ministry that she realized the full danger of her situation.

  “There was a crowd of other women who had been brought in, with a lot of policemen milling round, and I thought I must be dreaming. Then they started reading out the names—‘the prisoner Fawzia Al-Bakr.’ I nearly fainted. One of the women had to hold me upright.”

  The new prisoner was issued a blanket and a dirty gown, then locked alone in a cell inside the ministry building.

  “The food was atrocious. It was prepared by bedouin women who looked after us. They were very nice ladies, but also very simple. They could not read or write. I think they were the wives of soldiers or National Guardsmen.”

  In the small hours of every morning, at around 2 A.M., the police summoned Al-Bakr for questioning. One of the bedouin women escorted her to the interrogation room.

  “They were very civil. There was no suggestion of torture or intimida tion, but they kept on asking the same things. The interrogators changed, but the questions they asked were the same: ‘Have you seen these leaflets?’ ‘What do you think of the government?’ ‘Do you belong to Al-Haraka Al-Wataniya [the National Movement]?’ ”

  Al-Haraka Al-Wataniya was a group of liberals who were campaigning for reform in the late 1970s and early ’80s. They were particularly opposed to the conservative trend of social policy since Juhayman, and because political gatherings were forbidden in Saudi Arabia, they were, by definition, an “underground” organization. Academic and intellectual, with a high proportion of members who had completed their educations in the West, they included freethinkers and atheists who liked to label themselves “Communist,” risking the fierce shariah law penalties on those who renounce their faith. But their agenda did not extend far beyond talk.

  “I’d turned down invitations to join various organizations—there was one called Al-Islahiyoon [the Reformists]. I just wasn’t interested in joining things. I only wanted to write my columns. But I was obviously campaigning for the same sorts of changes as the Reformists, the National Movement, and all the others. Who wouldn’t, the way things were going?”

  After a week the women were moved from the ministry cells to villas in the Riyadh suburb of Suleymaniya.

  “I think they’d pulled in so many people they couldn’t cope. There was a great panic in those years after Juhayman and the Shia riots. The government was overwhelmed. They must have rented these villas—compounds built for expatriates. They were quite comfortable, we each had our own room. But the windows were blocked, and we could not meet with each other. We spoke to each other through the lavatory pipes. I got to know one woman, Zahrah, a Shia, an artist—she could not stand being on her own. She was screaming all the time. And every night they’d take me for the same questioning for two hours or more.”

  The worst thing for Al-Bakr was having no contact with her family.

  “They had no idea where I was, if I was dead or alive—whether I would ever come back. My father went every day to Prince Salman’s office. Nothing—they wouldn’t tell him anything. It was terrible for them.”

  Making the family feel the pain was part of the Mabahith technique.

  “It’s good to get the family involved,” explains a currently serving Mabahith officer. “It means that they’ll probably put pressure on the troublemaker when he (or she) comes out of detention. We have also found that while many detainees might be willing personally to go back inside again, they moderate their behavior for the sake of sparing their family—particularly their mother.”

  The assistant professor kept up her own spirits by trying to memorize the Koran, the only book she was allowed.

  “It was good for my Arabic language. You can use any experience that does not break you to build yourself up. One lady tried to commit suicide, so they took all our mirrors away. That was surprisingly difficult, not being able to see yourself. After a time you begin to wonder if you are still there.”

  One day, with no warning, after nearly three months of detention, one of the female guards came to tell her to pack up her things.

  “ ‘Khalas!’ she said—‘It’s finished’—I could go home. Some official phoned my family to say I was coming out that night, and they were all there to greet me, my cousins and my aunts—it was a wonderful party.”

  Great was the rejoicing at the university.

  “My boss, the dean, Dr. Mansour Al-Hasmy, gave me a special award—Honorary Employee of the Year. He made a big deal of it. He wanted to make a public point on the campus about freedom. And he worked really hard to get me a scholarship the next year to go to the University of Oregon. The newspaper, Al-Jazeera, had also been supportive—they had kept sending me my paychecks all the time I was inside.”

  But her mother found it hard to celebrate.

  “My mother is a loyal Saudi citizen, but to this day she is mad at Prince Nayef.”

  From the traditional, family point of view, Fawzia’s three months behind bars had been a social catastrophe.

  “What angered my mother most was that it had ruined my marriage prospects. What family would allow their son to marry a girl who had been to prison?”

  IN SEARCH OF THE ORYX

  The gazellelike oryx is Arabia’s most graceful form of wildlife, and, according to an old Saudi joke, the survival of the oryx became a matter of concern to the Ministry of the Interior. So they called in the world’s top security forces, America’s FBI and Britain’s SAS, to see if they could track down a specimen—while also inviting their own secret police, the Mabahith, to show what they could do.

  After a day, the FBI reported in. “We’ve located an animal a few miles from our camp. We’ve got it in our sights. Give us the word and we’ll pull the trigger.”

  A day later, the SAS called. “We’ve got one surrounded, but she appears to be pregnant. We recommend approaching with extreme caution.”

  But from the Mabahith came no word—not that day nor the next. After a week of waiting, a search party was sent out, which eventually located the elite corps of Saudi detectives, miles from the oryx grounds, all huddled around in a circle, menacing a frightened rabbit. One of them was holding the rabbit up by the scruff of the neck, while another was indulging in the Mabahith’s then nationally notorious form of torture—beating the prisoner hard with a stick on the soles of its feet. This tactic is said to derive from a saying of the Prophet that punishment should leave no mark on the body, so as they walloped away at their victim’s leathery soles, Saudi interrogators could comfort themselves with the reflection that their torture was truly “Islamic.”

  “Come on, come on! Stop wasting our time!” the interrogator was shouting at the captive rabbit. “We know the truth! Admit that you’re an oryx!”

  The work of the Mabahith was scarcely more subtle in real life. Working as Riyadh editor for the English language newspaper Saudi Gazette, the young American journalist Peter Theroux noticed how his office telephone would go dead at crucial moments.

  “It was as if certain phrases triggered a cutoff,” he remembers. “An American woman once rang me offering a story about strange things that her husband was discovering at a military facility. The moment she mentioned the name of the base, the phone line went dead. She rang back, and the connection cut out again the moment she mentioned the name.”

  It was not the sort of story that Theroux would have touched with a barge pole, in any case. He had soon learned the so-called red lines (k
hutoot hamra) within which the Saudi media had to operate. There were a set of undefined but generally understood conventions—the Palestinians could do no wrong, the Israelis could do no right, there should be not a whisper of dissent about the king or the religious establishment, and there should be no “bad news” stories that might make readers discontented. It sometimes seemed that too many paragraphs about the Kingdom’s appallingly high rate of traffic accidents could be judged seditious.

  To avoid any doubt, the editors in chief of all the newspapers were summoned to a monthly meeting at the Ministry of Information to discover the red lines of the moment—some papers actually published photographs of their editor with the minister “discussing the topics of the day.” Peter Theroux remembers the outcome of one such discussion in the spring of 1982 following the horrific, Guernica-style destruction of the flourishing town of Hama by the Syrian government that February. Intent on eliminating the Muslim Brotherhood, the Assad regime had organized the brutal murder of ten thousand or so opponents, and as many more innocent bystanders. Hama remains a backwater to this day.

  “How could you ignore something as ghastly and inhuman as that?” recalls Theroux. “It was beyond dispute that the massacre had happened, and there was no doubt that our readers would be looking for some comment in the editorials. It was not as if Syria was any special friend to the Saudis. But the word came down from the ministry not to criticize: ‘Syria is an Arab sister. Bash Begin [Menachem Begin, the Israeli prime minister] instead.’ ”

  Theroux found humor the best recipe for survival, surprising visiting journalists by offering to guess the number of the room in which they were staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. He would always get it right—room 103. He had been allocated the same room himself when he first arrived in Riyadh. It was the room with the hidden microphones.

  Control became the watchword of the 1980s in Saudi Arabia—particularly for women. Freshly elected to the committee of a women’s charity in Jeddah, Maha Fitaihi decided to organize a forum on women’s issues and obstacles to development—until news reached the Ministry of Social Affairs, which supervised all charitable activities. They told her to change the subject or cancel the event. Saudi women did not suffer from any obstacles to their development, she was confidently informed by one of the all-male staff of the ministry, and whatever problems they might encounter could be solved by their religion. A lecture on women’s health issues, drugs, and AIDS provoked a similar response. “A few isolated cases don’t make an ‘issue,’ ” she was told, and an official letter soon arrived, sternly instructing her not to organize any further educational or awareness gatherings, unless they were focused on “Islamic” affairs.

  Up in Riyadh, Hatoon Al-Fassi encountered even more drastic difficulties when she tried to organize a graduation ceremony for her class at King Saud University. It was an all-female occasion—every mother had been allocated two tickets—held in the gymnasium hall on the male side of the campus. Through the year, Hatoon and her sporting colleagues had been visiting the gym every Thursday to train at gymnastics, volleyball, and handball, and the plan was for these sports to feature in the end of year celebrations.

  But Wahhabi religious orthodoxy was opposed to women’s sports. Reflecting this, there had never been organized sport or games for girls at Saudi state schools, whose control was handed to the religious establishment by King Faisal in the early 1960s. Energetic physical activity was considered harmful, in some unspecified way, to feminine bodily functions, and also involved the wearing of immodestly revealing athletic costume. For their sports activities, Hatoon and her athletic friends—graduates, for the most part, of the Kingdom’s private academies—dressed in tracksuits with long trousers and long sleeves. It made their volleyball hot, but respectable.

  The entertainment for the graduation evening involved the finals of the sporting tournaments, interspersed with folkloric music and dance from different corners of the peninsula, with a spectacular roller-skating exhibition whose participants (also in long sleeves and trousers) had been rehearsing for months.

  But as the program got under way, there came heavy knocking at the doors of the building. It was the religious police calling for the music to be stopped. The mutawwa did not actually enter the hall, but they kept patrolling noisily outside, their angry male presence intimidating the women trapped inside the gym. Hatoon and her friends tried to keep up the spirit of the ceremony with loud applause for the trophy presentations, but they found themselves whistling in the dark—literally. At 10 P.M. some malevolent male hand outside threw the power switch, and all the lights in the hall were extinguished.

  There was no female sports program at King Saud University the next year, and no music or dancing when the women’s degrees were conferred. There were also new attendance regulations. Women had to be on campus by eight in the morning, after which the gates would be closed until noon. No female undergraduate could leave the university between those hours, unless she was a wife or mother and could show a paper as proof—and the paper, of course, had to be signed by her male guardian.

  . . .

  In just a few years, it seemed, the triumph of the religious was complete—and it was marked by the increasing number of beards. In the immediate aftermath of the Grand Mosque siege, Saudi men had tended to trim their beards. They did not want to be associated with the hairy excesses of the rebels. But as the 1980s passed, facial hair made a comeback. Religious conservatives gloried in their long and luxuriant Islamic beards. Sprouting defiantly from every facial follicle, the Salafi beard became the badge of piety, superiority, and the capacity to inspire fear. You could easily identify the religious police as they advanced toward you in the street. They looked like a posse of menacing Juhaymans.

  Every face of authority seemed to be conspiring to shut down Saudi society in the early 1980s. In fact, the Mabahith and the mutawwa answered to different masters. While the Mabahith were government officials taking their orders from the Ministry of the Interior, the mutawwa were comparatively unregulated: their network of local committees for the “promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice” gave them the character of freelance vigilantes, taking their cue from the local pulpit. A strong king or local princely governor could have called them sharply to heel. But following the capture of the Grand Mosque, there was not a member of the royal family inclined to do so.

  CHAPTER 10

  Stars in the Heavens

  In June 1982 (coincidentally the month that Fawzia Al-Bakr went to prison) old King Khaled died. His personal 747, a huge white and green Boeing jumbo jet, contained an operating theater equipped with the latest heart-monitoring and resuscitation devices with links to his surgeons in the Cleveland Clinic. Yet the precautions failed to save him. Venerable, bluff, and widely loved, Khaled had been the Ronald Reagan of Saudi kings.

  Now it was time for a touch of Nixon. Saudis appreciated the competence of Fahd the Leopard, but few felt great fondness for him, and the new king made a bid for sympathy in his first broadcast to his people. He was now responsible, he said, for ruling “in accordance with God’s revelation,” and he had to confess that he found these divine requirements a heavy duty—his heart was “trembling,” he said, “for fear of failure and retribution.” Fahd warned of the problems ahead, and of the threats from the great powers hatching plots “to divide and fragment” the Arabs. “What is most to be feared,” he cautioned, “is that they will attack us from within by the sowing of dissension and driving our citizens to extremism.” He did not suggest that the impetus to extremism might be coming from inside the Kingdom. The enemies were all outside. Saudi youth, in particular, “must not imitate the lost youth of the West and be carried away by corrupt pleasures.”

  The fearful and almost apologetic address was an opening gesture by the liberal-minded king to appease the religious conservatives.

  “If an election were held here tomorrow,” Fahd once confided to a colleague, “Bin Baz would beat us without even leavi
ng his house.”

  This basic awareness was drilled into every young member of the House of Saud.

  “Without exception,” says a minister who has worked with the family for many years, “they are brought up to have respect and to show respect toward the religious scholars.”

  This respect was in singular contrast to the ill-disguised contempt that the Shah had shown toward Iran’s mullahs.

  “I have no doubt that Fahd has gone to heaven,” said one of his admirers after his death. “It is only fair. His life on earth was such hell being perpetually polite to those religious fanatics.”

  One aspect of Fahd’s purgatory was that the new king felt obliged to rein in some of his pleasures. In the early 1980s he had accepted the gift of a rakish twin-funneled luxury motor yacht from his friend John Latsis, a Greek shipping tycoon whose Saudi oil-refining and construction business, Petrola, owed much to the favor of Fahd. Complete with its own helipad and disco dance floor, the Abdul Aziz, later the Prince Abdul Aziz, was the longest yacht in the world, and Fahd liked to moor the 482-footer off Marbella, on the southern coast of Spain, where Latsis helped him raise a huge white-pillared palace that was a bizarrely accurate replica of the White House in Washington. Helicopters hovered overhead, and private jets flew in to nearby Málaga every day with exotic flower displays and a never-ending supply of wealthy visitors. When the Saudis came to town, calculated one local publication, their combined spending contributed $10 million per day to the resort’s hedonistic economy. It was small wonder that the mayor of Marbella announced that he was proposing to name a street in the Saudi monarch’s honor.

  Once he became king, however, Fahd felt able to make only one trip to Marbella—his family had to go and have the fun without him. The king confined himself to the palace that Latsis built him on a man-made island off Jeddah, and when in Riyadh he was an austere Wahhabi, receiving the ulema every Tuesday as his predecessor had done, with Sheikh Bin Baz sitting beside him in pride of place.