Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  THE IMAM AND THE DATE FARMER

  There was once a farmer who inherited an ailing and broken-down grove of date palms and who toiled long and hard to restore the palms to shape. He cut back dead branches, enriched the soil with camel droppings, and diverted a watercourse—to produce, after a year, a bountiful crop of luscious dates.

  “What a glorious harvest God has provided!” remarked the long-bearded imam at the village, nodding his head in pious pleasure as he passed by the grove one day. “Al-hamdu lillah! [Thanks be to God!]”

  “Al-hamdu lillah, indeed,” replied the farmer. “You should have seen the harvest when God was the only one doing the work!”

  Unlike his predecessor, who could “vanish” on occasions for weeks at a time, Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz works hard, on a timetable that is predictable, but also eccentric.

  “We’re all on the same schedule,” says one of his young advisers, ruefully shaking his head.

  The new king sleeps twice every day, the first time between ten or so in the evening and one o’clock in the morning, when he rises for a spate of hard work through the small hours. Then, following the dawn prayer, he goes back to bed for a second rest from which he awakes around 9 A.M. In his younger years a certain amount of his morning work had been done in his swimming pool, where he would plough stolidly up and down, doing the lengths that his doctors prescribed for his health, while pausing to execute official business from time to time. Aides would bring papers for his attention, and the crown prince would come to the side of the pool to study them, dripping gently in a mist of chlorinated water vapor while he considered his decision. As his duties grew more onerous, the practice stopped. Abdullah has learned the importance of keeping business and relaxation separate. But the young prince’s poolside ponderings betrayed his inherent impatience: No delays, thank you, let’s get the job done.

  Under the influence of “T-1,” the historically-minded Abdul Aziz Al-Tuwayjri, Abdullah had long been concerned with building up Saudi national feeling. Quietly rebutting Wahhabi claims that they were the core of the Saudi polity, Abdullah and Al-Tuwayjri had helped develop a folklore festival in the 1970s and ’80s around the annual camel race at Janadriyya, to the northeast of Riyadh. Abdullah had a farm near the track, and as owners and tribesmen gathered every February for the camel equivalent of the Kentucky Derby, the crown prince started inviting them to linger for displays of cooking and craftsmanship and traditional dancing. The gathering proved a hit. It was quite hard to find legitimate, public ways to enjoy oneself in post-Juhayman Saudi Arabia, and crowds came from the most obscure corners of the Kingdom. Janadriya grew rapidly, and when Al-Tuwayjri started inviting some of Islam’s cutting-edge thinkers to present their views the festival became seriously intellectual.

  From the Wahhabi point of view, it was seriously subversive. The Moroccan philosopher Mohammed Abid Al-Jabiri, whose work changed the thinking of Monsour Al-Nogaidan came to argue for an empower ment of reason if Arab culture was to survive in the modern world. The Algerian Mohammed Arkoun was invited to advance his advocacy of Islamic humanism—another philosopher playing with ideas that were anathema to the Wahhabi establishment. On the unlikely basis of a camel track, the once stuttering crown prince was starting to provide a secular counterweight to the crushing domination that religion had come to exercise over Saudi culture, and it was difficult for the clerics to argue with his patronage. The festival was the only place in the Kingdom where girls and boys danced together in public, but they wore national costume, and T-1 explained how the music and dancing were prized examples of ancient tribal tradition. The local arts and crafts of Qateef were displayed at Janadriya by folk who might well be Shia rafada (rejectionists). But that was irrelevant to the values of the festival, where diversity, including religious diversity, was welcomed inside the cadre of national sentiment. Who could possibly disagree with that?

  The one area where the religious had been able to check Abdullah’s promotion of secular loyalties had been in the celebration of Saudi National Day, September 23, the anniversary of Abdul Aziz’s proclamation of the Saudi state in 1932. Only God could grant holidays to Muslims, in the opinion of the ulema. A well-known hadith described how Mohammed had reproved his followers when he arrived in Medina to find them celebrating two local, secular festivals left over from the “days of ignorance.”

  “Allah has substituted what is better for you,” declared the Prophet. “The Eid Al-Adha [the day of sacrifice, marking the end of the pilgrimage] and the Eid Al-Fitr [the breaking of the fast at the end of Ramadan].”

  So these two Eid celebrations, both religious, were the only officially sanctioned holidays in Saudi Arabia, and for decades the sheikhs successfully resisted attempts to add September 23 to the short list of official con gés. But with the accession of Abdullah the battlefield changed. If the king wanted a holiday, the king could grant it, and whatever the clerics might mutter, the people approved. Since 2006 the night of September 23 has become an occasion for national mayhem in Saudi Arabia, the streets blocked with green-flag-waving cars, many of them sprayed with green foam for the night.

  The people were Abdullah’s trump card. He was already the first Saudi ruler to have presided over elections. Admittedly the voting, held in the spring of 2005, was only for local, virtually powerless municipal councils—and then for only half the seats on those; women were not allowed to stand for office or to vote. But the male electorate got the chance to eat large quantities of mutton for three weeks, since Saudi electioneering proved to revolve around lamb and tents. As polling day approached, vacant lots and building land were taken over by gaudy and beflagged encampments where the candidates held court, inviting voters inside and plying them with mountains of rice and whole roasted sheep.

  “It was rather a wonderful time,” remembers one defeated liberal candidate fondly. “For three weeks the newspapers carried more photos and stories about nonroyal Saudis—us the candidates—than they did of princes and ministers. I felt for a brief moment as if I actually owned my own country.”

  The results of the voting proved the truth of what Fahd once prophesied about elections—it was usually the religious who won.19 Candidates with Western sympathies or any suspicion of secularism lost out heavily to hard-line conservatives who were endorsed by the local religious establishment. Imams and holy men made their opinions felt through “golden lists” of religiously approved candidates, sent out to voters on their cell phones—text messaging was clearly not bidah (unacceptable innovation) if it served God’s cause. The vote also provided statistical backing for the analysis that informed observers had long maintained—that for all their faults, and quite contrary to their stereotypical reputation, the House of Saud provided a minority force pushing for Western, secular change in a Kingdom of largely retrograde caution.

  “How old is democracy in your country?” Abdullah asked a French reporter who sounded skeptical about the short-lived Saudi voting craze. “And how long did it take to reach its present stage? We too will get there by the grace of God.”

  The voting process for which Abdullah had to fight hardest was inside his own family, where he sought to bring transparency to the way that Saudi kings and crown princes “rose” to the top. From earliest times, and as in other princely families around the Gulf, the Al-Saud chose their leaders in the bedouin fashion: a conclave of elders would decide who was most fit for the job. There was no automatic right of blood succession. This was similar to the succession of England’s Anglo-Saxon kings, in which a family council would consider the pool of available aethelings—those whose blood and family connections made them “throneworthy”—and would then decide who was throne-worthiest of all. Thus Alfred the Great, who saved Wessex and England from the Vikings at the end of the ninth century, was chosen over the sons of his elder brother Ethelred, because he was judged to possess superior leadership qualities.

  In the same fashion, the Al-Saud family councils had skipped over fallible candidates like Mo
hammed, Khaled’s cantankerous elder brother, and had actually deposed the controversial Saud in 1964. The one fixed rule, enshrined in the Basic Law with which Fahd had established the Majlis Al-Shura in 1992, was that the succession had to pass through the line of Abdul Aziz’s thirty-five sons, their precedence being decided by their age, while their competence was judged on undefined grounds by their peers. This was where the shenanigans began. With seven active and powerful voices, the Sudayri brothers exercised a disproportionate sway in the process, and the new king sought a voice for the rest of the family. He also wanted to ensure that decision making could never again be paralyzed as it had been in the years of Fahd’s decline.

  Abdullah had worked out the shape of a family electoral council to be known as the Bayaa, or “Allegiance Council,” named after the bayaa (oath of allegiance) that princes and all Saudis swore to the king. Each son of Abdul Aziz would have one vote, to be exercised by the son himself during his lifetime, then by one of his sons or grandsons after his death or in the event of his becoming king or crown prince. This meant that the council would have thirty-five members at the time of its formation, but would go down to thirty-four after the death of Fawwaz bin Abdul Aziz, since Fawwaz had no sons. The council’s function was to meet after the death of a king or a crown prince to decide the succession—and to adjudicate on cases of medical disability in office. If Abdullah predeceased Sultan, Sultan would become king and would summon the Allegiance Council to approve a crown prince. If Sultan predeceased Abdullah, then Abdullah would summon the council. In each case the king would submit his own nomination for crown prince, but the members of the council had the power to reject this choice and to come up with one of their own.

  The cut-and-dried functions of the council made perfect sense to Abdullah. But for that very reason, a number of the more traditional princes were not happy—the idea that the family’s innermost deliberations should be semiexposed to popular scrutiny was demeaning. The brothers gathered one night during Ramadan to discuss the project, and as the dawn prayer approached there seemed to be a deadlock; then Prince Nayef spoke up. Often thought of as a conservative, the minister of the interior was cast in the popular imagination as an opponent of Abdullah’s—but not on this occasion.

  “It makes sense to me,” said Nayef, echoing the king and brushing aside the suggestion that the discussion be continued on another occasion. “We should do it now.”

  So as the prayer calls were starting, the royal staff passed the news of the council’s creation to the official Saudi Press Agency, where it hit the wires around 4 A.M. Insomniac television viewers were treated to the council’s voting processes being explained by a hastily briefed reporter with dawn rising behind him.

  A year later, on December 9, 2007, the Allegiance Council met for its founding session in a swirl of incense and dark, gold-trimmed robes. There was much nose kissing and shoulder nuzzling—when they get together, the male members of the Al-Saud kiss and embrace to a remarkable degree. Eighteen surviving sons of Abdul Aziz’s were represented,20 and the gathering watched as the sons of their nineteen dead brothers came forward, group by group, to announce which of their number they had chosen to exercise their late father’s vote. It was a moving occasion. The sons of Faisal had chosen Khaled, the outspoken, reforming governor of Mecca. The sons of Sultan had chosen Khaled, the hero of the Gulf War. Mohammed bin Fahd represented the sons of the late king. Here were future kings and crown princes as yet unchosen—the proof that the House of Saud, in its own terms at least, could hang together and go on doing its job.

  The question was, could Saudi Arabia? The Kingdom had weathered the enforced austerity of the Fahd years, but the extremist attacks of 2003 indicated the fault lines—several hundred young men who expressed their disagreement with other people by bombing them, backed up by a significant number of their elders who claimed to speak for God while issuing death threats and fatwas. Religion had caused misery. As King Abdullah later remarked, “Terrorism and criminality would not have appeared . . . except for the absence of the principle of tolerance.” Saudi Arabia had handicapped itself grievously with its culture of accusation.

  To try to change this culture Abdullah had convened in June 2003 the first National Meeting for Intellectual Dialogue. The Dialogue, which was endowed with a secretariat and a full constitution, was one of the fruits of 9/11 and held its first meeting, appropriately, a few weeks after the start of the Al-Qaeda attacks in Riyadh. Abdullah addressed the opening session, sternly admonishing the participants to speak courteously to one another, and to “respect the opinions of others.” To pacify the ulema, always wary of any rival forum, this initial gathering consisted entirely of men who were clerics. But they were not all Wahhabis. Also invited were religious leaders of the Kingdom’s Shia, Sufi, Ismaili, and Maliki Muslim communities21—which prompted Safar Al-Hawali, one of the Awakening sheikhs, to decline his invitation. He denounced the inclusion of these “deviants,” to the fervent approval of the conservative websites. Yet his well known Awakening counterpart Salman Al-Awdah not only attended the Dialogue and listened respectfully to the other delegates—he offered Sheikh Hassan Al-Saffar, the Shia leader, a lift afterward in his car. The image of the two bearded clerics talking together, one in his agal-less headdress, the other in his turban, conveyed Abdullah’s message precisely.

  The king’s aides spoke of their boss seeking to build up “the institutions of civil society.” Democracy could not be conjured out of the air. Twenty years was the time frame Abdullah set for achieving a full adult, male and female franchise in the Kingdom, in the course of which period he hoped that people would gradually learn how to exercise their democratic rights with respect. Cynics responded that twenty years might as well be two hundred—they would believe the unlikely sight of the Al-Saud actually surrendering their power and profit when they saw it with their own eyes. But Abdullah persevered. In 2005 he set up not one, but two domestic human rights commissions, one an official government body, the other an “independent” NGO—its independence being compromised by the fact that its funding also came from the government—and invited both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to send their inspectors to Riyadh.

  The king’s most wide-reaching reform to date has been to complete the process started by Fahd before his stroke, the accession of the Kingdom to the World Trade Organization. In a trade context this has involved the removal of various preferential tariffs, notably the discounts to the U.S. oil majors who founded Aramco. More profoundly, it required the passing—and enforcement—of forty-two new laws to impose international standards of arbitration, fiscal transparency, legal process, and the protection of intellectual property on the previous jungle of Saudi business practice. As a result of these reforms, Saudi business efficiency as measured by the International Finance Corporation, a division of the World Bank, rocketed in three years from thirty-fifth in the world to sixteenth, the highest ranking in the Middle East. Foreign businessmen on the ground struggling with delays and bureaucracy wondered what criteria could possibly have placed Saudi Arabia above Germany (twenty-fifth) and France (thirty-first) as places to do business, but in Saudi terms the improvement was tangible.

  The other consequence of joining the WTO (ahead of Russia or Iran, but behind all the other Gulf states) was the opening of Saudi Arabia to foreign investment. This has inspired a space-age plan to build six “economic cities” around the Kingdom, towering multibillion-dollar megalopolises of glass and steel that look for all the world like Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Many Saudis are uneasy that such gaudy, non-Saudi, and imitative projects should be made the focus of national progress. While the high-borrowing, high-spending “Dubai” model has been discredited by the economic problems of 2008-9, Saudi Arabia’s conservative fiscal policies have been vindicated by the crash. Domestic public debt (there is no foreign debt) is a mere 13 percent of GDP, with $513 billion in managed foreign assets, placing Saudi Arabia third in the world rankings to China and Japan.
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  Still, the futuristic cities, if they are ever built, promise to be traditional in one sense at least—the land for the first one, King Abdullah Economic City, on the Red Sea coast two hours north of Jeddah, was provided by members of the royal family, Azouzi and Prince Bandar among them, who all became partners in the project.

  There is only so much that one reforming monarch can accomplish in a country of entrenched habits with eighteen million natives and ten million foreigners (five or six million authorized, the remainder illegal), but King Abdullah keeps on trying. One outspoken writer and thinker—a member of the Shura Council—was worried to be summoned to the royal presence after he wrote an article that criticized the slow pace of reform. There were too many obstacles to modernization, he complained—lazy bureaucrats, wasta (elite influence, meaning royal and business corruption), and also the religious establishment: the sheikhs were getting in the way.

  “A good article,” Abdullah informed him approvingly. “You should write more like that.”

  “Thank you, tal omrak (may your life be long),” replied the writer, relieved not to be bawled out. “But I have to tell you that I am getting very seriously threatened for what I have said.”

  Like Mansour Al-Nogaidan and anyone else who was perceived to be undermining religious orthodoxy, the columnist had received dozens of hostile and even murderous text messages on his mobile phone in the forty-eight hours since his article had appeared.

  “I am happy to write more articles like that,” he said hesitantly. “But if I write them, who will give me protection?”

  There was a moment’s silence, then Abdullah looked him full in the face, his black beard jutting fiercely forward.