On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (11 page)

In more recent times, when the late King Abdul Aziz conquered Arabia and declared the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he sought to establish a stable state with himself in charge. To do so, he needed to remove the tribal leaders’ freedom to switch loyalties—and warriors—to whoever promised the most booty. The king pledged that if the tribes fought only when he ordered and against whomever he ordered, he
would provide for all their needs. To ultimately render tribes incapable of marauding, he persuaded them to settle down to raise crops rather than to pursue the dangerous and often desperately poor life of raiding. Most important, his regime took possession of traditional tribal lands and territory, making them state property, which then was redistributed, often to the very same tribal chiefs. But the state retained the right to repossess the land if a tribe didn’t obey.
Thus, tribal raiding was no longer a livelihood but a crime. The king and his family had become the arbiters of power and prosperity.

To this day, the pull of tribe and tradition can lock even the most educated and seemingly sophisticated Saudis in corners of the labyrinth. Such is the case with Abdul Rahman bin Humaid, who graduated from Harvard in the spring of 2003 and went on to earn a Ph.D. in international legal studies from American University. His goal was to serve Saudi Arabia as a diplomat wherever in the world he was needed. Instead, the spring of 2010 found a still youthful Abdul Rahman working in a dusty Saudi National Guard outpost in his birthplace, the small industrial city of Yanbu.
There he heads the same tribal National Guard unit that once was commanded by his father and, before that, his grandfather.

What happened? With his Harvard degree and Ph.D. in hand, he had launched his diplomatic career in 2004 handling congressional affairs for the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C. He and his young wife were enjoying walks along the Potomac and movies and dinners out with friends. Suddenly in 2007, his father was killed in a car accident. The young diplomat went home for the funeral. As tradition requires, he paid his respects to King Abdullah, then supreme commander of the National Guard, who had sent his condolences to the family. At their meeting, King Abdullah summarily appointed Abdul Rahman commander of his tribal
fouj
, or group of warriors on government retainer. It was not an offer—it was a royal request that tradition required him to accept. In that instant, Abdul Rahman’s career in international diplomacy was replaced by one of adjudicating internal tribal disputes. His tribe, the Utaiba, is the kingdom’s
largest, with 3 million members; as one of Arabia’s so-called
asil
, or noble tribes, it can trace its origins back to one of the original tribes of Arabia.

“Be patient,” Abdul Rahman recalls King Abdullah telling him. “You will face a lot of problems.”

Asked what kind of problems he has faced, Abdul Rahman says they range from internal tribal disputes to more mundane requests. “Sometimes someone wants me to translate a letter from American Express,” he says. “Whatever it is, I try to help.”

Abdul Rahman is sitting in the air-conditioned meeting room where he receives guests and tribal supplicants. A handsome man who resembles a young Omar Sharif, he is surrounded by photos of his father and grandfather and supported by a gaggle of uncles and sons. As
fouj
commander, he is, of course, wearing the traditional red-and-white scarf and white
thobe
, not the Western suits he donned in Washington. “I enjoyed going to Congress,” he says, “but duty calls. My grandfather did this job. My father did too. So why not me?”

Later, over coffee with his wife, mother, and eight sisters, I ask him if his role as commander is for life. He says, “Who knows?” But here is a clue that the idea of being a diplomat hasn’t yet died. In a country where most men wander to work late and spend most nights chatting with male friends, Abdul Rahman is an exception. “I try to keep everything like in America,” he says. “I rise early and get to the office by eight and come home for lunch at twelve thirty or eat with my men; then home to visit my wife and children by three so I can have dinner at seven thirty and be in bed by nine thirty.” It is a Potomac River schedule on the shores of the Red Sea. Yet Abdul Rahman is in Yanbu, not Washington; duty has prevailed over dreams; he has been relegated to a comfortable corner of the Saudi labyrinth.

Saudis, from poor supplicants at royal offices to impressive servants of the regime like Abdul Rahman, are accustomed to receiving their livelihood from the ruler. The unspoken but implicit social contract still is that rulers provide stability and prosperity, and the ruled obey. So far prosperity has
been sufficient to secure most people’s acquiescence, even as many grumble these days about too much religion, too much dependence on the United States, too much corruption among the princes, too great a gap between rich and poor, too much unemployment among the young. Perceptive Saudis also mutter about the reemergence of tribal loyalties because the regime, rather than create a spirit of nationalism, has sought to ensure control by keeping citizens divided and distrustful of one another, and by encouraging tribal leaders who still meet weekly with senior princes to compete for Al Saud loyalty and largesse.

Today’s Saudi Arabia thus is less a unified nation-state than a collection of tribes, regions, and Islamic factions that coexist in mutual suspicion and fear. A resident of the Hejaz, the relatively cosmopolitan region encompassing the port of Jeddah and the holy city of Mecca, the kingdom’s two international melting pots, resents the fact that men from the Nejd in central Arabia, and the original home of the Al Saud, occupy all key judicial and financial jobs in the kingdom and are allowed to force their conservative customs and religious views on all Saudis. Shia Muslims from the oil-rich Eastern Province, even more than the Sufi Muslims from Jeddah or the Ismaili Muslims from the impoverished south of Saudi Arabia, resent the total domination of the Wahhabi philosophy over every aspect of life and the pervasive discrimination against them. Tribal loyalties also divide the population, as few individuals ever marry outside their tribe. The preferred marriage partner is one’s first cousin. A Saudi instantly can tell, from an individual’s accent and name, the tribal origins of another Saudi. Social life consists almost entirely of family, and family connections are almost always within one tribe. Thus even the most modern and relatively liberal of Saudis who may mix at work with coworkers of various tribal backgrounds most likely is married to a cousin and socializes almost exclusively with other relatives.

In sum, division is a daily feature of Saudi life. While the cosmopolitan people of Hejaz resent those of Nejd for their power and provincialism, Nejdis see people of the Hejaz as a
polyglot people lacking pure lineage. Similarly, the people of northern Arabia, comprising tribes that traditionally looked toward Syria and Iraq, are seen as inferior, as are those of southern Arabia, with its historic ties to the tribes of Yemen. The people of these four regions remain distinct and divided to this day. Even when people move to major Saudi cities, many tend to seek out their own regional and tribal kin as neighbors. Regional racism is a daily fact of Saudi life.

Overlaid on these traditional divisions of Saudi society are more contemporary ones that result from the kingdom’s haphazard development and faltering modernization since the advent of spectacular oil wealth in the 1970s. Most Saudis only two generations ago eked out a subsistence living in rural provinces, but Saudi society has undergone a pell-mell urbanization over the past forty years with the result that fully 80 percent of Saudis now live in one of the country’s three major urban centers—Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dammam. In Riyadh, the kingdom’s capital and largest city, there are first-world shopping malls and third-world slums. Some royal palaces stretch literally for blocks behind their high walls that block out the less fortunate parts of Saudi society. In poorer neighborhoods, some Saudis live in tents beside barren patches of dirt, where filthy, barefoot boys play soccer on fields demarcated only by piles of garbage or live in ramshackle tenements often with little furniture and limited electricity.

Trapped between the wealthy and the poor is an increasingly fearful and resentful Saudi middle class, whose standard of living has slipped dramatically over the past half-dozen years. A 2006 Saudi stock market crash, coupled with rising inflation, has left them treading water and slowly sinking as they borrow money to try to maintain a lifestyle they cannot afford. Consider a Saudi schoolteacher who can no longer afford to buy a car, whose son cannot find a job and who spends too many hours a week lining up at dysfunctional government offices supplicating for services that all too often can be secured only with the signature of a prince or a bribe to a corrupt bureaucrat. A teacher who wants to be reassigned to work in a different school district can register with the Ministry of Education and wait three or four years for approval or, as one teacher describes, pay 5,000 Saudi riyals ($1,350) to one of the ubiquitous middlemen who make a living buying and selling approvals that ought to be routinely granted by a functioning government. This teacher in the Eastern Province is typical of an increasingly embittered middle class that no longer sees a path to upward mobility in Saudi society and is bitter at the daily indignities necessary to survive.

The growing gap between wealth and poverty rankles many Saudis. One of the hundreds of Al Saud walled palaces in Riyadh and throughout the country. (
KAREN HOUSE
)

The growing gap between wealth and poverty rankles many Saudis. Saudi tenements in Jeddah are all too typical. (
ROGER HARRISON
)

Other societies, too, have disparities between rich and poor, between old and new, between liberal and conservative, but in few if any societies are they so pronounced as in Saudi Arabia. These disparities are all the more glaring because Islam preaches equality of all believers. Other societies have social and political systems that at least offer mechanisms to bridge divides. Not so in Saudi Arabia, where there is only one law—Islam—and only one final arbiter of that law—the Al Saud king. Islam itself has become a major source of division as religious leaders offer widely divergent interpretations of Koranic scripture and thus of Allah’s will. Meanwhile, the Al Saud, whose legitimacy is rooted in their role as guardians of Islam, far from seeking to diminish divisions in society, continue to exploit them in order to protect and perpetuate their rule. And, like everything else in Saudi Arabia, the royal family itself, as we shall see, is increasingly divided.

So modern Saudis—divided and distrustful and increasingly frustrated over a social contract with the Al Saud that no longer serves them well—maneuver within their maze, most of them neither knowing how to escape from it nor actively seeking to do so while sullenly resenting the ways in which they are trapped.

O
f all the divisions in Saudi society, in none are the battle lines more sharply drawn than on the matter of the status, role and future of women. The Prophet’s first wife was a successful businesswoman, and his favorite wife led troops in battle, but today women themselves are the battleground. The intensifying clash over the role of women in Saudi society is about far more than whether women should be allowed to drive or, however well shrouded, mix with men in public places. It is not a war between the sexes, but rather a proxy war between modernizers and conservatives over what sort of Saudi Arabia both sexes will inhabit and over the role and relevance of the omnipresent religious establishment in Saudi society.

As Arab youths challenged authoritarian regimes across the Middle East in the Arab Spring of 2011, in Saudi Arabia, ironically, it was the women, not youth, who had the temerity to confront authority. This challenge amounted to some dozens of women repeatedly gathering outside the Interior Ministry demanding the release of their husbands, brothers, and sons imprisoned for political reasons. Some dozens of other women staged a succession of “drive-ins” to protest the continued ban on women driving. Some were arrested; others were ignored. Still, courageous individual women across
the kingdom have continued unannounced to test authority by getting behind the wheel of a car and posting videos of their defiance on YouTube.