Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  “ ‘This is as we suspected,’ said the friend in triumph. ‘This book shows the sin that they are truly plotting to accomplish in this building.’ Everyone else agreed. So we started stacking the rooms with petrol and with gas canisters.”

  The jobs in the group had been carefully apportioned. The person who poured the petrol did not light it, and this time the job of striking the crucial match had been handed to another newcomer. As with the video store, the results were devastating.

  “The building was burnt out,” Mansour recalls. “But this time I did not feel happy as I had the time before.”

  He did not have long to contemplate his remorse. In less than ten weeks—early in January 1992—Mansour and his friends were tracked down by the Mabahith and found themselves in the dock facing Sulayman Al-Muhanna, a venerable and sheikhly figure who was the senior judge of all the Riyadh courts.

  “My son,” the sheikh inquired with an apparent sympathy that Mansour had not expected, “are you feeling guilty or not guilty for what you have done?”

  “I did not do anything wrong,” replied Mansour defiantly. “And if I said I won’t do it again, I would be a liar.”

  He then launched into a recitation of all the hadiths and authorities that justified his taking action in the stopping of sins—to be cut short by the judge.

  “I am not here to argue with you,” said Sheikh Al-Muhanna, who had suddenly become a great deal less sympathetic. “I am here to sentence you.”

  He dispatched Mansour and his fellow fire bombers to prison for sixteen years.

  Mansour Al-Nogaidan and his fellow arsonists-in-the-name-of-God were the most spectacular protesters in an unprecedented fusillade of protests that marked the Kingdom’s reaction to the Gulf War. After a decade of domestic docility, Fahd’s welcoming of U.S. troops seemed to have broken some kind of spell. If the king could overturn the conventions, so could everyone else. Women claimed the right to drive, while forty-three liberal reformers from Jeddah, Riyadh, and the Eastern Province, the much imprisoned Mohammed Saeed Tayeb prominent among them, set out their ideas for comprehensive democratic reform in a petition they submitted to the king. The House of Saud brushed this off as elitist and Westernized—“Just what you’d expect from Jeddah,” in the dismissive words of one Nejdi thinker. But then came a double onslaught from the Wahhabi heartland, Khitab Al-Matalib (the Letter of Demands) signed by fifty-two religious figures, many of them Sahwists, followed in May 1992 by a still stronger document, Mudhakkarat Al-Nasiha (the Memorandum of Advice). These petitions did not place the accent on Western-style democracy, which was not a priority for men who sought wisdom in the Koran rather than in the fickle and earthly will of the people. “Consultation” was the watchword, along with judicial and administrative reform—particularly of government corruption—more accountability, the restoration of Islamic values, and a reduction of the expatriate labor force.

  The Memorandum was drafted and presented by Dr. Ahmad Al-Tuwayjri, a member of an intellectual clan who had made their name in government service. His father had run the royal office of telegrams for Abdul Aziz for a period and then for his eldest son Saud, tapping out the Morse code messages through which the Saudi monarch communicated with the outside world.

  “On summer nights we slept up on the roof,” remembers Al-Tuwayjri, who spent much of his childhood in Taif. “My father kept the radio beside him to listen to the BBC, and sometimes he’d switch the channel, so we could listen to [the singer] Umm Kalthum, or to other poems and Egyptian music.”

  As an undergraduate at Riyadh’s King Saud University, Al-Tuwayjri had campaigned unsuccessfully for the formation of a student union, confirming his reputation as a troublemaker when he returned from America in the mid-’80s: he gave a lecture that not only deplored the rigidity and intolerance of the religious establishment, but called for a Majlis Al-Shura that would represent the collective wisdom of the community.

  Such a Consultative Council was one of the key demands of the Memorandum on which Al-Tuwayjri, now the Dean of the College of Education at King Saud University, worked with other academics and religious figures in the months following the Gulf War. Many of his friends hosted weekly forums in their homes, where men sipped tea and coffee together and often shared a light supper while they debated the issues of the moment.

  “Everyone agreed,” remembers Al-Tuwayjri, “that things had gone wrong and that something had to be done.”

  As reform plans were discussed in the forums, Al-Tuwayjri looked for a balance between the conservative and moderate proposals. It was a sign of the prevailing sense of crisis that the Consultative Council, once mis trusted by some as a secular or even Western innovation, was now generally desired with certain safeguards. Every constituency saw the council as the means to advance its own particular cause with the government. Having invited ideas from forums outside Riyadh, and particularly from those in the Wahhabi heartlands of Unayzah and Buraydah, Al-Tuwayjri eventually produced a manifesto that covered three pages. University colleagues helped him boil it down to a single sheet of bullet points, and having secured the signatures of some distinguished religious sheikhs, he took it to his mentor, Abdul Aziz Bin Baz.

  “Sheikh Bin Baz was one of the most open-minded people I have ever known,” says Al-Tuwayjri, “the very opposite of the ‘flat earth’ reputation that was played upon by the newspapers. His name suffered from the pressures he was put under by the government, and also by the sheikhs, to issue some truly weird fatwas. Sometimes he tried to reconcile the impossible. But I can tell you that he was a great scholar—with a very kind heart. I remember the look of dismay and sadness on his face when I told him about two of the lady lecturers in my college who were sacked after the driving demonstration. His color changed. He was the person who intervened with the king and got them their jobs back.”

  Now Al-Tuwayjri went to Bin Baz’s house in Al-Shumaysi with the final draft and read out its calls for reform.

  “The sheikh listened very carefully, then he signed straightaway. The document contained criticism, but it was loyal criticism. It was working within the system to achieve change, so that was acceptable to his principles. He always wanted to be patriotic.”

  Delivering the Memorandum was more difficult.

  “We decided on a small delegation: Sheikh Abdul Muhsin Al-Ubaiqan [a conservative religious scholar], Sheikh Saeed bin Zuair [another fundamentalist sheikh whose radical views had previously landed him in prison], and Muhsin Al-Awaji [a fundamentalist]. They all got in a car and went round to the palaces. At Fahd’s and Sultan’s they were told to leave the document. Nayef and Salman each invited the petitioners in and received the Memorandum personally.”

  Then there was silence.

  “The Memorandum,” says Al-Tuwayjri, “took them completely by surprise. They were stunned. The ideas had come from everywhere—from north, south, east, and west, and from people of real weight, men who were very devout and conservative. There were famous judges, academics, successful businessmen, and ulema, headed by Bin Baz of all people. It was a consensus of people who mattered. We had worked very quickly and quietly, so the Mabahith had not got wind of it—or perhaps they did not imagine that we would actually present it.”

  After two days, the delegation that had presented the document received calls from Prince Salman’s office proposing a meeting two days hence. But in the meantime, details of the Memorandum had leaked. A wide circle of people had read its suggestions, and the meeting was abruptly canceled.

  “It was the leaking of the details that got them really mad,” recalls Al-Tuwayjri, “the fact that the contents of the document—and the names on it—got spread around. For them the fact that people knew about it was a betrayal. By the time a group of us got to the governor’s office to see Prince Salman he was furious and a conflict started in minutes.

  “Luckily both sides realized that they were there to solve a problem, not create another one. After all, nothing in the Memorandum was actually
against the royal family. It was about helping them—about offering them expert consultation and advice. That’s what we stressed. In the end the meeting went on for an hour, and it all ended quite reasonably.”

  As governor of Riyadh, Prince Salman had been chosen by the senior group of Al-Saud brothers to negotiate a compromise that saved some royal face. The petitioners were absolutely unwilling to retract a word, but they were prepared to apologize for the unintended way that the Memorandum had been leaked. For their part, the government agreed that a committee should be established to act as the vehicle for accepting well-intentioned suggestions and complaints, and to start the ball rolling, the king announced the establishment of the Consultative Council more or less at once. Fahd had had the plans on his desk, as part of the so-called Basic Law, for more than a dozen years—a sixty-seat, all-male, nominated chamber with limited powers of scrutiny, whose building had already been completed. In 1980 he had promised the Shura after the seizing of the Grand Mosque. Now “crusader” troops and some domestic agitation had brought to pass what Juhayman could not.

  THE DONKEY FROM YEMEN

  Soon after the end of the Gulf War, the government of Yemen sent a peace offering to King Fahd—a donkey carrying two heavy baskets, one on either side of its back. One basket contained a beautiful and shapely woman, the other was stacked full of gold nuggets.

  “Wonderful!” cried the king. “I shall give the beautiful woman to my poor brother Sultan [the much married defense minister]. He doesn’t have enough of them. And I shall send all that gold to my poor son Abdul Aziz. He’s down to his last fifty billion riyals.”

  “What about the donkey?” asked his courtiers. “It’s so loud and stupid.”

  “Excellent!” cried the king. “Send it to the new Shura Council. That’s just what we need there!”

  The arrests started a month after Prince Salman had brokered the peace.

  “A group of officers from the Mabahith arrived at my house,” remembers Al-Tuwayjri. “They were dressed in thobes. They were extremely polite and respectful. But in Saudi Arabia we have no rights. They said they had orders to search my house and take me to headquarters. So that is what happened. There were seven or eight of us arrested and they took us all to Al-Haier [the Mabahith prison in the south of Riyadh].”

  Every night Al-Tuwayjri was cross-examined by three Mabahith officers.

  “They wanted to know if there was a plot. That was the purpose of the whole thing. They had been caught out by the Memorandum. Now they wanted to be sure we had not been conspiring to overthrow the government.

  “ ‘If I’d wanted to do some overthrowing,’ I told them, ‘I’d have worked in secret. I wouldn’t have gone to the government and given it my advice.’ ”

  The government justified the arrests on the grounds that Al-Tuwayjri and his friends had gone outside the protocols of shura (consultation). It was not the Saudi way to broadcast criticism in a way that might provoke agitation and dissent.

  “I hope that efforts will be confined to giving advice for the sake of God,” declared King Fahd. “If, however, someone has things to say, then he can always come to those in charge and speak to them in any region, in any place. As advice, this is wanted and desired.”

  “Trust your local prince,” in other words. After a week Al-Tuwayjri was transferred to join his fellow petitioners in a collection of cells with their own communal area.

  “I volunteered to do the cooking for everyone, and it made for quite a cozy atmosphere. After a time the officers would drop in for a chat and watch sports on the television with us. We were allowed to get books from the prison library, or send someone out to buy them. We had a sort of club going. It was almost sad when they sent us home after forty days. You hear terrible stories about the prisons in Egypt, Libya, Syria, and just about every other Arab country. On the basis of my own experience, I have to say that in Saudi Arabia we definitely have a better class of jail.”

  Al-Tuwayjri’s forty days of confinement reflected Fahd’s anger and frustration. The Saudi king had taken big risks and had acted with rare speed and decisiveness to save his country—only to be thanked with criticism from almost every quarter. His indignation was understandable. In addition to his domestic critics, a group of dissidents had started fomenting trouble in exile. Following the failure, as they saw it, of the Letter of Demands and the Memorandum of Advice, two radical academics from Riyadh’s King Saud University—Saad Al-Faqih, a professor of surgery, and Mohammed Al-Massari, who was chairman of the physics department—had relocated to London, where they made skillful use of the BBC and other international media to launch scathing critiques of the Saudi regime, and of Fahd in particular. The king’s well-documented taste for Western pleasures made him an easy target, eagerly taken up and spread by the early websites of the 1990s—and by a campaigning Palestinian journalist, Said K. Aburish, whose particular focus was the destructive influence of oil on the Arab character and culture. Fahd’s double identity illustrated this precisely, in Aburish’s opinion, and his book The Rise, Corruption, and Coming Fall of the House of Saud became a best-seller when it was published in London in 1994.

  The king was no bookworm, but he did understand the power of television. Satellite TV dishes had started appearing on Saudi rooftops in the early 1990s and had provided Sahwah activists with another focus for their anger. The dishes were routes, declared the sheikhs, by which foreign decadence was being channeled directly into Saudi homes, corrupting the minds of the young—and of women, in particular—with frivolity and alternative, non-Islamic lifestyles. Particularly ardent zealots, including members of the religious police, had taken out their hunting rifles to aim potshots at these very visible symbols of Westernization, and the regular civil police had not shown much energy in pursuing them.

  Sheikh Bin Baz came to see the king to explain the outrage that good, pious Muslims were feeling about the satellite dishes, and Fahd—whose every palace had at least one huge satellite dish—was all sympathy. Satellite television should be banned, he agreed. In 1994 an official decree made it illegal to manufacture, import, or install the dishes, and as the ban took effect a number of princes jumped into the now very profitable dish-importing business. For ordinary customers, buying a princely dish meant buying a certain immunity.

  The biggest investment of all was in the production of television programming to be broadcast on the burgeoning satellite networks. The government controlled the Kingdom’s terrestrial TV channels through the Ministry of Information—the main studios were inside the ministry’s Riyadh compound, where the tall, onionlike TV tower provided a proud symbol for the ministry on all its letterheads and leaflets. Satellite television would obviously bring reporting and ideas into the Kingdom that were beyond royal control—unless the royal family controlled the satellite stations. So in the early 1990s Fahd began to invest in the TV business through Abdul Aziz and Khaled Al-Ibrahim, brothers of the king’s now favorite wife Al-Johara (and therefore uncles of young Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, the much indulged Azouzi).

  “The king realized,” says one of his kitchen cabinet, “that television, and these satellite channels in particular, were going to have a profound effect on how Saudis came to think. It was their window to the outside world. It would open their eyes to everything. There was no way to stop it in the long run—banning satellite dishes was just a gesture. So why not try to have some sort of control or influence?”

  Thinking of control and influence, Fahd also turned his gaze eastward. He had an inner circle of contacts that he would call, often in the small hours of the morning, to test out ideas or to request instant policy papers. It was the king’s telephone think tank, and in the months following the Gulf War Fahd started using his early-morning phone calls to solicit ideas on how to deal with the long-standing problem of his subjects who were Shia.

  CHAPTER 18

  In from the Cold

  Soon after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, in the summer of 1990, Iraqi agents started
appearing at the ancient, blue-tiled shrine of Zaynab in Damascus. Shias had been visiting the shrine for centuries to honor Zaynab, spirited sister of the martyred Husayn (see the glossary, page 342). Since leaving Iran, Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, leader of the Saudi Shias in exile, had set up his headquarters here, and it was to the sheikh that the Iraqis now came with a message from their president.

  Saddam had always had a special place in his heart for the interests of the Saudi Shias, explained his emissaries, and had decided to offer Sheikh Hassan a radio station of his own in Iraq. This would enable the sheikh to beam his spiritual messages directly to his oppressed followers inside the Kingdom, while also encouraging them to rise up against the tyranny of the House of Saud. Along with the radio station there would also be funds to help support the expenses of the sheikh and his movement—and, perhaps, even, the use of a plane. Sheikh Hassan and his group of Shia exiles were being recruited to join Saddam in his anti-Saudi war effort.

  “It was not worth even the effort of responding”—says the sheikh today with a sniff—“the idea that Saddam Hussein genuinely cared about the rights and worship of the Shia people.”

  “We rejected the approach out of hand,” says Tawfiq Al-Seif, who was then the sheikh’s deputy. “We’d left Iran in order to prove our independence. Our loyalty was not to Iraq, but to a reformed Saudi Arabia.”

  By the summer of 1990, Sheikh Hassan was heading the most effective opposition the House of Saud had faced to that date, thanks to the movement’s change of emphasis following their departure from Iran. Al-Saffar and his followers had abandoned the theme of Islamic revolution with its connotations of Khomeini. They were now presenting themselves in more universal terms, as the International Committee for Human Rights in the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula—a hot button to press in these months that saw the collapse of the Soviet Union.