Inside the Kingdom

by Robert Lacey

  It was over by the time my car had drawn level with the scene. Saudi executioners pride themselves on performing their duties swiftly and efficiently, with a single wheeling blow from a razor-sharp sword. I could see the headless body still kneeling, bizarrely upright beneath the awning, while the suddenly subdued spectators turned back toward their abandoned cars. Vivid stripes of red blood ran down the brightly laundered white cotton robe in which the condemned man had met his end.

  My driver sized up the victim’s white costume in a glance.

  “Afghan,” he said—and drove on.

  Public execution is the dark side of life inside the Kingdom, the medieval spectacle that is both pilloried and fondly gloated over by the Western media. In fact, very few Saudi men (and still fewer Saudi women) have ever witnessed an execution. Public beheadings today are disciplinary displays intended to make a point to the ever-swelling community of migrant workers—some ten million, legal and illegal, in a population of twenty-eight million—and the grim deterrent seems effective. By day or by night, you can walk the streets of any Saudi town without fear of muggers. People leave their cars unlocked. Gun crime against or between locals is virtually nonexistent, and if you raise the issue of capital punishment with Saudis, many will ask why their rate of executions, some seventy-three per year since 1985, according to Amnesty International, makes them so much more barbaric than the United States, where the rate has been forty-two per year over an equivalent period (China, of course, dwarfs both countries in this gruesome respect). With regard to voyeurism, they will point out that every U.S. execution chamber features its own viewing gallery, and that in June 2001 the U.S. government painstakingly assembled no fewer than three hundred people to witness in person, and on closed circuit television, the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.

  They are on less solid ground when it comes to defending their country on questions of torture and detention without trial. Until quite recently the calculated infliction of pain was a tool routinely deployed by the Saudi secret police—in 2002 a group of largely British expatriates, some of them involved in the illegal alcohol trade, were shamefully tortured by the Mabahith when they were falsely accused of bombings that were actually the work of Al-Qaeda. King Abdullah has tried to put a stop to that. His human rights commissions are charged with pursuing all complaints of prisoner abuse—according to recently released detainees the first question in their nightly interrogations has often been “Have you been tortured or threatened today?” This reflects the influence of Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, whose “soft policing” techniques have been praised by foreign security experts. But the fact remains that the Saudi government claims the right to detain its citizens without charge for six months. As this book goes to press in the spring of 2009, there are at least eleven political prisoners, a group of Jeddah liberals and their associates, who have been detained without trial for nearly two years.

  When Fouad Al-Farhan drew attention to the plight of these men in his popular Arabic blog, he was arrested himself—on December 10, 2007, International Human Rights Day.

  “I came out of a coffee shop,” he recalls, “to be surrounded by this group of guys in tracksuits and running shoes—no uniforms in sight. It was all very polite and even respectful in a weird way. No one would have known I was being arrested, unless I chose to make a scene or try to escape—in which case they were dressed to catch me very quickly. They looked like they were a running club who had come to invite me to the gym. They took me home to say good-bye to my wife and family while they rooted round in my books and my PC to get a profile of my politics.”

  When Al-Farhan told his captors the significance of the date, they thought it was a huge joke.

  “Well, come and enjoy the anniversary with us!” said one of them. “We’ll bake you a cake in prison!”

  The food in the recently completed Mabahith jail north of Jeddah turned out, in fact, to be remarkably good—in line with the rest of the facilities. Al-Farhan was assigned his own air-conditioned cell, about ten by eleven feet, containing his own WC and shower. Prison rumor credited the creature comforts to pressure exerted by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in their post-9/11 visits to Saudi Arabia.

  “Everything came from America,” recalls Al-Farhan. “The handle on the WC was stamped CALIFORNIA. It did not happen with me, but I have heard of political prisoners in Riyadh who would pick up the phone when they received visitors and would order a huge plate of rice and kharoof (sheep) to be delivered to their room.”

  In the middle of this almost surreal material comfort, Al-Farhan discovered there was nothing that he could control for himself.

  “I was totally helpless,” he recalls. “Like a baby or an invalid. If I wanted the AC up or down, or even the lights on or off, I had to ask on the intercom for the guards to do it for me. I was at their mercy. When I did not cooperate with the questioners once, they just left me in my cell for thirty-two days. I have to say that no one hurt me or threatened me, and that I got my three meals a day. But they played with my mind. I went crazy with fear and self-doubt. I now know that a human being cannot live by himself for very long—I certainly could not. When they did finally call me for questioning again, I was actually grateful.”

  Fouad’s interrogators were concerned that he had a friend—a “mole”— inside their organization. In the prewritten letter that he had arranged to have posted on his blog if detained, he gave the false impression that he had had advance, inside knowledge of his arrest, and this worried the Mabahith very much.

  “Here I am trying to hunt down Al-Qaeda,” said Prince Mohammed bin Nayef in the course of one long conversation with the troublesome blogger, “and now I have to search out security leaks among my own men.”

  Prince Mohammed insists that Al-Farhan was not detained to limit his freedom of expression, but for security reasons. The blogger had been speaking out on behalf of a group of reformers whom the ministry accused of raising funds for anti-American insurgents in Iraq, and, once arrested, his blog was kept going by the exiled Tunisian activist Sami bin Garbiah, who is the scourge of the Tunisian government. Fouad says that these were only pretexts for government unhappiness with his writing, and points to the focus his captors placed on one of his most popular—and notorious—blogs, a list of the ten Saudis that he most disliked and least wished to meet.24

  “That is not the Saudi way,” his interrogators chided. “Be polite. You should be respectful to others in the community. You were creating discord”—using fitna, the shariah law term that denotes disagreement or “division among the people.”

  Fitna provides the legal justification for the Saudi system of detention without trial. Under shariah law the ruler is responsible for preserving harmony in the community, so if “those that govern” determine that you pose a threat to the security of society or to public order, they are required to detain you for the sake of the community as a whole. It is a divine duty. One American ambassador who was negotiating with Prince Nayef in the 1990s about the detention of a U.S. citizen recalls the normally impassive interior minister throwing his arms into the air to proclaim, “I can do nothing except as God commands!”

  The ambassador’s interpreter must have shortened or conflated several things that the prince probably said. The interior minister would have pointed out that the prisoner had been either detained or sentenced according to the law, that the law in Saudi Arabia is the law of God, and that the prince was an instrument of the law. But it comes down to the same thing. If, as a country, you adopt the Koran as your constitution, then all your wars must be holy wars, those who die for their country are all holy martyrs—and the secret police are doing the work of God. Habeus corpus is not a shariah concept.

  “They kept telling me they were respecting my rights,” recalls Fouad Al-Farhan. “They came to my wife and gave her thirty thousand riyals (about $8,000) to help with her living expenses, and when I came out they gave me forty thousand ($11,500) to compens
ate me for my loss of business, though I lost ten times that. To get out I had to sign a statement promising to be a good Saudi citizen and not to write online criticizing the Saudi government. They make everyone sign something like that, so if you ‘mis behave’ again, they can wave it at you, saying that you’ve let them down. All through my time there they kept reminding me that I had not been physically or mentally abused, and that is true. But what does that mean? The world stopped for me for 137 days. I was not allowed to read any books or newspapers. Months after my release I discovered that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated. I could never go out once and see the sun. Isn’t that mental—and physical—abuse?”

  The much-imprisoned reformer Mohammed Saeed Tayeb, who is also campaigning on behalf of his fellow constitutionalists in prison, puts it another way.

  “We have never used violence. We have never taken up weapons. The only thing we did was to have a different opinion, and for that we got put in prison.”

  Saeed Tayeb’s prison tally to date is five spells behind bars adding up to more than seven years, and at the age of seventy, he was still banned from leaving the country.

  “When we, the constitutional reformers, come out of jail, the government does not give us rewards as they give to those violent terrorists. We are not given a job, or a car, or a new wife—we do not even get the dialogue and discussions that those extremists are granted. The last time I saw Prince Mohammed bin Nayef I said to him, ‘I want to be in their basket! ’ He smiled at me. ‘No, no, no,’ he said. ‘That is not your thobe.’ He was very friendly. ‘I am quite sure things will be all right,’ he said. ‘Try to be patient. Things will be happening, inshallah.’ ”

  Prince Nayef’s son has promised that the Saudi system of travel bans is in the course of revision by the Ministry of the Interior. In the future, he says, bans will only be issued for security reasons that have been certified by a judge—in the middle of March 2009 he phoned Mohammed Saeed Tayeb to tell him that his ban had been lifted: Mohammed was now free to travel.

  “Where are you planning to go?” asked a friend of the ancient agitator.

  “Anywhere in the world,” replied Saeed Tayeb, “so long as there are no reformers there.”

  FINDING THE RIGHT PATH

  A pilgrim was delayed on his journey to Mecca, and when he finally caught up with his companions, he discovered that they had already made their first visit to the Grand Mosque to pray. He found them back at their hotel taking tea together around an open-air table at the edge of the souk.

  “It’s easy to get there,” they said, pointing to the jumble of alleys and shops that made up Mecca’s souk in the old days. “Set off in that direction. Turn left at the incense seller, and you’re sure to reach the Mosque.”

  The pilgrim had had a stressful journey. He was eager to pray. He felt he needed to commune with his God. So he set off at once into the colorful maze of little shops, and when he found the incense seller he turned left. But he had only gone a short way down that passageway when he found another incense seller—and another one after that, who was located beside yet another junction. Each time, the pilgrim stopped to ponder the correct route to his destination. Which one should he choose? What if he chose the wrong path, got lost, and missed the cherished spot at which he aimed?

  After carefully navigating the twists and turns of the marketplace, the traveler was delighted to find himself at an entrance to the Grand Mosque, where he entered and said his prayers. Returning joyfully to take tea with his friends, he told them of his navigational problems and of his eventual good fortune—to be gently informed that any route he might have chosen would have landed him at the huge Mosque. Choose your own incense seller. There are many paths that we can take to reach our God.

  It is early September 2008, and the pilgrims are flying in to Jeddah. Every seat on the plane is occupied, the women wearing black robes and headdresses, the men swathed in white pilgrim towels.

  “I am responding to Your call, oh Allah, I am responding to Your call. I am obedient to Your orders. You have no partner . . . ”

  The men are chanting with their heads bowed—some of them in unison, some of them bent over into their own, intense, privately mouthed prayers. The public-address system crackles: The plane is still thirty thousand feet above the ground, but now, reports the captain, we are about to enter the area of holiness that surrounds Mecca. This is the pilgrims’ last chance to wash and to change into their towels. The chanting gets louder; the excitement is mounting—Ramadan is due to start tomorrow.

  Most people have heard of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim man or woman must try to make at least once in their lives. Less well known is the migration inspired by Ramadan, the holy month of fasting, when the devout travel to spend the whole of that month in Mecca. Every hotel, apartment block, and boarding house in the city is booked, and the Grand Mosque overflows with visitors. Up in Medina the story is the same. A prayer said during Ramadan is worth double the prayer said at any other time, and a prayer said in either of the two holy cities is worth double that. So in terms of storing up credits for heaven, this is bumper bargain time—multiple mileage-point upgrades.

  In one sense, Ramadan is all about subduing your appetites. Saudis cherish the tale of the battle of Badr, fought in Ramadan two years after Mohammed’s migration to Medina, when a small force of fasting Muslims defeated a much larger army of Meccans who had been fully fed.

  “When you can control your hunger, you can control your human desires,” says the student Ahmed Sabri. “And when you control yourself, you are strong.”

  Yet in another sense, Saudi Ramadan is like Carnival—ultimately a riot. The vast majority of the population fasts conscientiously from dawn to dusk, as required, and that is not an easy accomplishment, even if many choose to spend long stretches of the daylight hours asleep. Once the sun has gone down, however . . .

  It is day for night. The Saudis celebrate their God, who has given them the strength to fast—no food, no sex, and, most difficult of all, no liquid of any kind for more than twelve hours, not even a sip of water. They celebrate their religion with its complicated array of demands and rewards that, as they know in their hearts, no other religion can rival. But, most important, they celebrate the company of their friends and family. As the moon runs its course, they feast and chat, play games, laugh, joke, and pray, with the prayers getting longer and louder and ever more poetic as the month progresses. It is the “glory time.” There are Ramadan gifts, and gaudy Ramadan lights and decorations. The children run around getting far too excited. There is special Ramadan food. Shops overstock. People overeat. Ramadan is the Saudis’ monthlong, after-dark Christmas.

  The king, the court, and all the government ministers move to Jeddah for the month, doing business for abbreviated hours in the day, then shuttling up and down the highway to Mecca at night. Batches of prisoners get released—those who have not been convicted of drug offenses or crimes of violence. There are no executions. It is the season of “Ramadan breath,” since the rules do not permit you—or, more relevantly, others—to suck on a breath freshener to perfume the fumes from an empty stomach. It is also the season of the office party, when filing clerks and sales directors nervously nibble dates together over iftar, the sunset breaking of the fast. Without alcohol, the atmosphere of the Saudi office party is emphatically different from that of its ribald Western equivalent: it starts with everyone, from managing director to office boy, forming lines, kneeling down together, and saying their prayers. In Ramadan 2008 the governor of the Mecca region, Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, announced that, for the first time, it would be permissible for female workers to break the fast at such gatherings in the company of their male colleagues.

  Ramadan is the season when the Saudi TV channels stage special editions of their top-rated shows, the most popular of which is Tash Ma Tash—literally “Splash, No Splash,” or “You either get it or you don’t”—an irreverent, satirical mixture of Little Bri
tain and Saturday Night Live. For Ramadan in 2007 the series opened with its two comic heroes planning to open a new dish (satellite) television channel. They hired themselves a couple of busty blondes to present round-the-clock news—and the channel failed. They tried a “love advice” channel, then a music channel, and finally a psychic channel offering help against black magic, dressing the blondes in ever more alluring costumes (while also attempting to seduce the girls themselves). Nothing worked, until they had a brainwave—“Go Islamic.” They hid the girls completely behind veils and put on long, Osama-style beards to present a gloomy program called Repentance. The advertisers came flocking in.

  King Abdullah is said to be Tash Ma Tash’s greatest fan—and they need that level of support. From its first broadcast in 1993 the program has provoked the fury of the strictly religious community, earning fatwas as if they were Emmys. In 2000 the permanent committee of the grand ulema itself pronounced condemnation—with its creators, Nasser Al-Qasabi and Abdullah Al-Sadhan, receiving death threats from the terrorist groups whom they frequently lampooned. Tash Ma Tash has ridiculed Saudi tribes and tribal customs, bureaucratic delays and corruption, religious extremists, the religious police, greedy investors, wasta (influence and pulling strings), unfaithful Saudi husbands, arrogant Saudis abroad, ignorant Saudi teachers, the ban on women driving and the subjugation of women. One episode imagined a household where the women ruled the roost and the men were kept on their knees doing the housework all day. Fans of the show reckon it has become even more scathing since Ramadan 2006, when it moved from the official government channel to satellite TV in Dubai, and, in 2008, renamed itself Kullena Eyal Garyah (“We Are All Village People”). Yet in all its sixteen years on the air, Tash Ma Tash has never once made fun of a greedy prince or a pompous government minister.