Inside the Kingdom (57 page)

“Why can’t I send more of my sons to study in America?” asked King Abdullah when he welcomed Michael Chertoff, the U.S. secretary of homeland security, to his farm at Janadriya in the spring of 2008. By “sons” the king was referring to the thousands of young Saudis who had been denied visas to study in the United States in the aftermath of 9/11.

The American security czar shifted uncomfortably and was just starting to explain how his government had certain concerns about the dangers posed by young Saudi males, when the king cut him short.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “But think about this. Do you imagine that America can possibly be more concerned about the radicalizing of my sons that
I
might be?”

Chertoff was one of a miniflood of American visitors that spring, including President Bush, who flew on to the Kingdom after attending celebrations in Jerusalem to mark Israel’s sixty years of existence since 1948. In Riyadh there was another celebration—the seventy-fifth anniversary of U.S.-Saudi diplomatic relations, which had started with the signing of the oil contract in 1933. It was called the Oryx summit, because two of Arabia’s native antelopes were being sent to the National Zoo in Washington.

Abdullah took some delight in the comparative longevity of the two anniversaries, cupping his palms open in front of him, as if weighing the relative poundage of sixty or seventy-five years of friendship in the scales. He balanced his hands in the air for some time, moving them up and down—sixty, seventy-five—then grinned knowingly at the American delegation. The U.S.-Saudi split that Osama Bin Laden had hoped to accomplish had clearly not come to pass—and then, a few months later, came the presidential election of November 4, 2008, and the triumph of the new African-American U.S. leader with the oddly similar name.

Barack Hussein Obama’s transition team got a call from Saudi Arabia within hours of the candidate’s victory. Abdullah was due in New York just three days later for a special United Nations session of the Inter-Faith Religious Dialogue, which the king had initiated earlier that year in Madrid. His Majesty wanted to call and congratulate the new president-elect.

“Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” came the firm but courteous reply. It was a matter of protocol. If the king was arriving as a guest on U.S. soil, it meant that Obama should make the call to welcome
him
—and this way, the president-elect could prepare his agenda and have his interpreter beside him as he spoke.

The call came through within minutes of Abdullah’s landing at Kennedy airport on November 7. The king and his staff were in their limousines heading toward Manhattan.

“I have heard much, Your Majesty, about your preference for frank and plain speaking,” said Obama, who had clearly been studying his briefing notes. “That is the style that I appreciate and I look forward to the chance to talk together.”

The president-elect wished the Saudi king well with his interfaith gathering, and also with his participation in the G-20 gathering in Washington (Saudi Arabia ranks about seventeenth in the list of the world’s twenty most powerful economies, just behind Turkey and comfortably ahead of any other Arab country). The call went on for around seven minutes, and it finished with Abdullah expressing the wish that the two leaders might meet and talk face-to-face before too long—
“Inshallah”
(“If it be God’s will”).

“Inshallah,” echoed Obama, making use of the pious Islamic expression with which he was obviously familiar.

Later the king recounted some details of the conversation to a group of Saudis who had assembled to welcome him to Manhattan.

“I clearly heard him say ‘Inshallah,’ ” mused Abdullah to the little gathering.

“God willing,” he added wryly, “we shall make a Muslim of him yet.”

CHAPTER 32

Condition of the People

K
ing Abdullah loves the French game of pétanque, also known as boules. He acquired the taste in the sandy boulevards of Lebanon, and he plays it for hours. He roundly defeated Prince Charles when Charles visited the Kingdom in February 2004—but in the rules of
pétanque à l’Abdullah,
the king always wins.

The game is played in the desert, where the players take their ease on cushions ranged around the walls of a tall, plushly carpeted, open-sided tent. Outside on the sand is laid a small square of green baize marked with black arrows, and the target ball is thrown out thirty feet or so into the desert.

One by one the players rise from their cushions to take their place on the green baize and toss their single boule, which has their name attached to it with tape. As in the normal game of boules, the aim is to finish up closest to the target, and it is permitted—in fact, it is rather encouraged—to knock your rivals out of the way.

When every other player has thrown, the king steps forward, and this is where the normal game changes. For Abdullah has a deadly aim, he always throws last—and on at least one occasion he has been known to have
two
boules to throw. So that is why the king tends to win Saudi Arabia’s royal pétanque championship, and having won, he takes a little purse of gold and hands it graciously to the runner-up—since in this royal version of a plebeian game, the runner-up is, in a way, the winner.

Abdullah used to spend a lot of time camping in the desert with his falcons. Now he favors the comforts of his farm north of Riyadh, where he keeps his Arabian horses in neat white courtyards of hacienda-style stables. The huge picture window of his sitting room is arranged to give him a view of the animals as they graze around a lake. He likes to sit watching them on Thursday mornings, the beginning of the Saudi weekend. It is the one morning he gets some time to relax—though his staff are only happy when they see him emerge to take some exercise in his brightly colored, thick-soled athletic shoes. A daily walk and a daily swim help keep the Angel of Death at a distance.

As in the declining days of Fahd, there is a whole power structure around the king that is hugely concerned to keep their patron alive—though in Abdullah’s case they are joined by most of the Saudi population.

“He is our Muawiyah,” says Hala Al-Houti, thirty-four, a Jeddah business executive, one of the new generation of Saudi working women. “We can only hope he never loses hold of the thread.”

The early caliph Muawiyah, who had been a scribe to the Prophet, once said that he would not draw his sword where a whip would suffice, nor use a whip where his tongue was enough—and that if he should ever find himself connected to his people by just a single strand of hair, he would never allow it to snap. As the people pulled, so he would give way with them; only when they relaxed the thread would he try to pull them gently in the direction that he thought it best to go. Governance Muawiyah-style was a delicate matter of mutual respect, and it is a mark of the Saudi school system that while it signally fails to teach its children how to think for themselves, it does instill snippets of classical learning like this.

The modern Muawiyah keeps in touch with his people from his book-lined study in Riyadh. Above his desk hang some richly embroidered black-and-gold Koranic inscriptions, of which his favorite comes from the “Thunder” sura: “God will never change the condition of a people until they change it for themselves.” This is the basis for Abdullah’s belief in bringing changes to Saudi society.

There is also an entire wall full of television screens—one huge flat screen, surrounded by twenty or more satellite monitors, all displaying the channels that the Saudi population are watching at that moment. Each monitor has a number, and if something catches the royal eye, Abdullah presses that number on the control pad beside him. Instantly its sound becomes live and the image switches to the main screen. Sitting alertly in front of his video bank, this eighty-six-year-old Arab could be navigating the starship
Enterprise
. He puffs on an occasional Merit cigarette as he samples what his people think.

To back up the king’s personal sampling, full-time teams of researchers watch all the TV channels systematically and write daily digests that are read out to Abdullah every night. Parallel teams monitor the published press and also the radio, particularly the grievances on the call-in shows, while a fourth, rather more geeky group, scans the ferocious and often hostile fundamentalist bloggers and websites. Together they make up a quartet of polling outfits to rival that of any U.S. presidential candidate. Early in 2008, for example, the teams warned Abdullah of the grassroots anger engendered by widespread inflation. Dr. Mohammed Al-Qunaybit, an eloquent Shura member and newspaper columnist, appeared on television to express his vivid disappointment with virtually every area of the king’s domestic policies.

“The king’s advisers,” said Dr. Al-Qunaybit, “are creating a cloud of confusion around him.”

Dr. Al-Qunaybit was only saying what most people were thinking, and his case was strengthened when Hashim Yamani, the commerce minister, was questioned about the rising cost of rice. Once an exotic foreign delicacy, rice (and particularly basmati rice) has become, with prosperity, the staple of every Saudi meal, but the minister dismissed the question with the insouciance of Marie Antoinette.

“There are nineteen types of rice,” he responded. “And it is not compulsory for people to eat the most expensive.”

The Saudi system may not be democratic, but it usually seeks to be responsive. Abdullah acted quickly to increase food subsidies and raise government salaries, then brusquely sacked the minister of commerce. But he also let it be known that the people’s tribune, the eloquent and critical Dr. Al-Qunaybit, should moderate his acerbic tone for a spell. In Saudi Arabia it is the king, and the king alone, who throws the last ball.

One day late in 2006, Mahdi Al-Mushaikhis, an engineering student in the Eastern Province, came to his uncle Fouad in a troubled state. Some of the young man’s relatives had been receiving strange phone calls about his fiancée. The couple had been together only a few months. They had signed the
milka,
the formal plighting of the troth that permitted private time together and sexual relations, and until that moment Mahdi had felt very happy with his future wife. But the phone calls suggested she had been with other men. If that was the case, Mahdi did not wish to proceed to full marriage.

Fouad Al-Mushaikhis is a man to whom many in his family would turn for advice. A calm and sagely grizzled graphic designer in his middle forties, he is an activist among the Shia community in Qateef, in the Eastern Province, displaying all the self-composure of a man who went into exile with his fellow campaigners at the age of fifteen and had to parent himself through some very hard years. His right temple is scarred with a bullet mark, his personal souvenir of the 1979 intifada. Having returned to the Kingdom with his fellow exiles at the end of 1993, Fouad now mentors young Shia in the Qateef region, teaching them computer design at weekends and giving them personal advice.