Inside the Kingdom (59 page)

“The shariah is quite clear,” declared Sheikh Abdul Muhsin Al-Ubaiqan, himself a former judge and now a member of the Majlis Al-Shura. “If she had confessed to adultery, she would have been sentenced to stoning. As it was, she confessed without reservation to an improper premarital closeness.”

In the circumstances, the three Qateef judges, all devout Sunnis, considered that they were being lenient in sentencing this sinful young Shia woman—and the man with whom she had been in the car—to just ninety lashes each and two months in prison. As for the other defendants, the accusation of multiple rape was the allegation of one admitted sinner against a group of men who were all protesting their innocence—and who, if they turned out not to be innocent, could plausibly claim enticement by a woman whose looseness was now a matter of record. Kidnapping seemed proven, but who could tell exactly what had happened after that? It was her word against theirs. Considering the paucity of incriminating evidence, the judges could not possibly invoke the standard shariah death penalty for rape. Sentences ranging from ten months to five years, they considered, were more than harsh enough.

As the verdict was read out in court, the rapists sneered openly at their victim. She had been summoned to appear and stand alongside them not as their accuser, but as a fellow sexual offender. Fouad had secured Saudi justice for his nephew’s wife, but it was not the justice for which he had hoped.

To most Western readers, Fouad Al-Mushaikhis will seem a hero in this tale. But that is not how he appeared to many people in Qateef. As soon as news of the arrests began circulating, people had started to take sides—and not Fouad’s side, for the most part.

“Every evening when I got home from work,” he remembers, “there would be a group of friends and neighbors hovering around.”

Fouad would invite them in for tea, and after the preliminaries and normal courtesies had been negotiated, most of the visitors proffered the same piece of advice—“Just drop it. Don’t stir things up.”

His family begged him to abandon his mission, while his wife’s family threatened to take her away and impose a divorce. One of Fouad’s beloved uncles refused—and still refuses—to shake Fouad’s hand, his attitude reflecting that of a local sheikh, the firebrand Nimr Al-Nimr (“Tiger of the Tigers”), who publicly denounced anyone who would have a hand in surrendering Shia boys into the ungodly clutches of the Sunni legal system. Some of the rapists were related to Fouad’s own family, and their wives came to him pleading that he should drop the case.

“My husband has no sin in this,” said one in tears. “I give him no blame. He was just invited by a sinful woman.”

When the court issued its verdict, the sentences seemed very fair to the many segments of Qateef society who saw Fouad as a troublemaker. But for that very reason Fouad refused to give up.

“I told people, ‘The more you push me, the more I shall expand the circle.’ ”

His nephew Mahdi agreed. The boy was determined to protect his wife from being lashed. Uncle and nephew decided to appeal the court’s verdict, turning for reinforcement to the wider Saudi media and to Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, a controversial young Riyadh lawyer specializing in human rights. Two of King Abdullah’s cherished “agencies of civil society” were about to be tested as building blocks of modernity and reform.

“To start with,” says Fouad, “I had avoided publicity. I could see that it would upset the judges. But then I got a local journalist friend to write a general sort of article about rape victims and society’s response. He didn’t mention any names, yet we got more than seven hundred responses, and a lot of them brought up the case. It was clear that people knew about it even though nothing had then been published—and most of them were against the criminals. They wanted the death penalty. So that encouraged me. I decided to widen the thing still further.”

In the short term, widening the case seemed to make things worse. In November 2007, three judges of the General Court of Qateef agreed that the original sentences had not been severe enough—on anyone. They increased the sentences on the rapists to terms ranging from two to nine years. But they more than doubled the punishment of their victims, the Qateef girl and Hassan, to two hundred lashes and six months in jail. The judges also confiscated the professional license of her lawyer, Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem, on the grounds that he had tarnished the court’s reputation by talking to the press about the case. In a rare public statement, a court official explained that the woman’s sentence had been increased because of “her attempt to aggravate and influence the judiciary through the media.”

The case of the Qateef girl went international overnight. The U.S. State Department gave its views. So did Hillary Clinton in her presidential primary campaign, and a regiment of columnists in every language. The Qateef judges’ attempt to squash one young woman for publicizing her plight had exactly the reverse effect. In Saudi Arabia it became the issue everyone discussed. The idea that the victim was to blame and that she had somehow “invited” rape seemed to sum up the Kingdom’s perverse and topsy-turvy code of traditional values. Observers noted how King Abdullah had announced ambitious plans in October to reform the Kingdom’s entire legal system, reducing the power of individual clerics. Now it was November, and the clerics had struck back.

“If I had been a judge in Qateef that day,” declared Ibrahim bin Salih Al-Khudairi, a judge on the Riyadh Appeals Court, “I would have sentenced all of them to death. The woman and her male companion were lucky not to get the death penalty.”

Listening to this sort of assertion in a TV discussion that had turned to debating the subject of the Qateef girl’s “honor,” Mahdi Al-Mushaikhis decided to put in a call.

“Since all of you are presuming to gossip and pass judgment on my wife’s ‘honor,’ ” he said, “I would like to point out that none of you know her. I do. Listen. I am her husband. I am going to tell you the truth.”

The firestorm of publicity got results. In less than a month Abdul Rahman Al-Lahem was given back his license to practice law, and a few weeks later King Abdullah announced pardons for the Qateef girl and Hassan.

“I never had any doubt,” says the controversial Al-Lahem—now a liberal, once a Salafi fanatic—“that in the end King Abdullah would put right everything that was wrong with this case.”

In his letter announcing the pardons, the king also set up an inquiry into what he called “the dark tunnel of iniquity” surrounding the rapists, their connections to the local police, and the faulty response of the judicial system—an inquiry that has still to report. Police investigations made it clear that the rapists, aged between twenty-six and forty-two, had long-established links with local drug and alcohol dealing. To both liberals and conservatives they represented the unacceptable face of modernization. Off-the-record, people close to the king disclose that Abdullah’s personal verdict was uncompromising: The men should all be beheaded.

So what does it tell us, this slip-sliding Saudi drama of old and new? At the end of a book, people expect some prognosis for the future, and on the subject of Saudi Arabia, the think tanks and foreign-affairs societies can offer statistics and analyses aplenty. I prefer to offer, and have chosen to end with, the messy human story of the Qateef girl, since it defined Saudi Arabia to the world for a moment, and still provides, in my view, the best route into the muddle of tradition and progress that makes up the Kingdom today.

Take your pick as to the story’s defining turn. You might select the exhilarating moment when Mahdi, a twenty-six-year-old student of petroleum engineering, picked up the phone to call MBC, the popular satellite broadcasting channel, to speak boldly to millions and to defend the honor of his wife. Here, in Saudi terms, was something very new.

You might select something very old—the interventions by the local prince-governor, Mohammed bin Fahd, and then by his uncle the king, who used their absolute powers to circumvent the established mechanisms of police and the law to secure the outcome that we in the West would certainly define as justice. In other chapters we have seen this arbitrary power deployed to ward off harm to Mansour Al-Nogaidan, the restlessly reflective Salafi, and to protect Mohammed Al-Harbi, the progressive chemistry teacher from Buraydah. So is autocracy the answer to the conundrum? Do we believe that benevolent despotism could or should offer Saudi Arabia the long-term way ahead?

Or you might reflect on the fact that, as this book goes to press, Mahdi is living separately from his Qateef girl, who packed her bags several months after the royal pardon and went back to live with her mother. Mahdi told her she had to leave. All his closest family—brothers and sisters, mother, cousins, and aunts—feel that his world-famous wife has brought unacceptable shame on their clan. The only dissent comes from his liberal and Westernized Uncle Fouad, who is still ostracized by many in the town. Everyone else in the family wants Mahdi to break off his marriage, and as of this writing, the young student, just graduating and starting adult life as a petroleum engineer, is under incredible pressure to act as his family requests. He has done his bit for her, after all—a great deal more than most other Saudi men would have dared. In the family-created, family-dominated Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the story of the Qateef girl does not have a Western happy ending. By the Saudi rules of the game, it has got to end in divorce.

Epilogue

S
hortly before this book was due to go to press, I was traveling by car toward Jeddah’s
balad,
the picturesque ancient “downtown” that was forsaken in the oil boom and the rush to the suburbs. Three decades of tumultuous Saudi development have unrolled since I first laid eyes on the old quarter’s crumbling array of carved wooden mansions, and I was just reflecting on the conflicting, push-and-pull progression of the Kingdom’s life in those years—when I hit the traffic jam. Excited men, largely Pakistanis and Asians, were halting their cars and leaping out toward the sidewalk, abandoning their vehicles, in some cases, where they stood in the street, in order to dash toward an awning in the parking lot of a mosque beside the palm-fringed lagoon. There I could make out security vehicles gathered around a tall white ambulance, where policemen in khaki uniforms kept the all-male crowd at bay. The sun blazed down from almost immediately overhead. My watch said eleven o’clock—the hour when Saudi executions are held.