On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (3 page)

What unites conservatives and modernizers, and young and old, is a hunger not for freedom but for justice; for genuine rule of law, not rule by royal whim. They want a government that is transparent and accountable, one that provides standard services such as are available in far less wealthy societies: good education, jobs, affordable housing, and decent health care. Saudis of all sorts resent having to beg princes for favors to secure services that should be a public right. They also want to be allowed to speak honestly about the political and economic issues that affect their lives. Yet when a conservative professor of religion at Imam University, the cornerstone of religious education in the kingdom, dared to suggest on the Internet that Saudis be permitted to take public their pervasive private discussions on royal succession, he was jailed.

The country fundamentally is a family corporation. Call it Islam Inc. The board of directors, some twenty senior religious scholars who theoretically set rules for corporate behavior, are handpicked by the Al Saud owners, can be fired at royal whim, and have nothing to say about who runs the company. Al Saud family members hold all the key jobs, not just at the top but right down through middle management, even to regional managers. (The governors of all thirteen Saudi provinces are princes.) At the bottom of the company, ordinary employees are poorly paid and even more poorly trained because management doesn’t want initiative that might threaten its control. Imagine working for a company where you can’t aspire even to a regional management position, let alone influence those who control the company that determines your livelihood and your children’s future. Not surprisingly, the Saudi employees of such a stultifying company are sullen, resentful, and unmotivated. Most feel
no pride in their country but focus on getting even with their overlords by chiseling on their expense accounts and showing up late for work—in effect, by grabbing what they can get from their corporate masters. And given the widespread Saudi cynicism over the unholy alliance of profligate princes and pliable religious leaders, it is not surprising that many Saudis see the kingdom not as Islam Inc. but rather as Un-Islam Inc.

All this raises the question: Can the Al Saud regime reform in time to save itself? Are the royal princes capable of curbing corruption, improving government efficiency, and permitting people honestly to express themselves on taboo topics like religion, the role of women, and the royal family? Can they abandon a history of divide and conquer—of exploiting deep religious, tribal, regional, and gender divisions—and recognize that those divisions now threaten rather than enhance Al Saud survival? If so, can they begin to help Saudis bridge divides and reach a consensus that allows the kingdom to move forward, rather than flounder in perpetual checkmate? Or will the House of Saud prove to be a house of cards?

“
If we do not share responsibility and create action, we will face stagnation or catastrophe,” says Prince Saud bin Abdul Mohsin, a grandson of the founder and one of thirteen royal provincial governors. “This family has delivered for people in the past. But if we can’t do it now, they will not see the need for the family.”

O
ver the generations, the Al Saud princes have displayed remarkable skill at survival. In the eighty years since Abdul Aziz bin Al Saud used a combination of religion and ruthlessness to reunite Arabia under the Al Saud, his extended family has evolved as perhaps the most successful family enterprise in modern history—and certainly the wealthiest.

Saudi Arabia remains an absolute monarchy, the last significant one on earth. Its power centers all are controlled by princes. The king appoints the country’s senior religious leaders, all judges, and all 150 members of its toothless parliament. His relatives own the news media. No social or civic organizations that might be a breeding ground for citizen organization are allowed. Slavery was abolished only in 1962! Royals also control the kingdom’s oil wealth, which has subsidized—and subdued—Saudi citizens while enriching and entrenching the royal rulers. The wealth of the family, like its internal politics, is veiled from public view, a growing source of public anger. Yet as the royal family has expanded exponentially, as times have changed and outside information and infidel influences have seeped into the kingdom, and as a succession of aged and infirm kings have occupied
the throne, the Al Saud sovereign skills appear less and less adequate to the challenges at home and abroad.

How has an absolute monarchy and a royal family by now consisting of some seven thousand princes—sons, grandsons, even great-great-grandsons of the founder—continued to maintain near-absolute power amid the winds of change sweeping in from the outside world and the pressures boiling up from a young population?

One answer is the skill of the family at adapting the founding father’s strategy of divide and conquer from an age of manipulating desert tribes to a modern era of manipulating social groupings and foreign allies. Second, there is the family’s clever use of money—whether the limited gold coins in the founder’s portable money chest or today’s billions from oil revenue—to buy loyalty, or at least submission. Third, there is the pervasive and so often oppressive role of religion that preaches obedience to Allah, and inextricably to the Al Saud, who, unlike ruling dynasties in Western societies, are not simply a temporal power but also Allah’s instruments on earth. Finally, there is the somnolence of Saudi society itself. Notwithstanding the occasional terrorist who blasts onto the world stage, the society has been overwhelmingly passive, imbued from birth with a sense of obedience to God and ruler and with customs of conformity such that only the rarest of Saudis steps outside the strict social norms to leave his place in the labyrinth that divides Saudis one from another. Saudis vividly demonstrate Karl Marx’s axiom that religion is the “opium” of the people.

The divide-and-conquer pattern was set early by Abdul Aziz.
A strapping man in his twenties, Abdul Aziz rode out of Al Saud exile in Kuwait in 1902 to reconquer Arabia, which had been lost after family squabbles had cost the family its rule in 1891. For thirty years, Abdul Aziz used a combination of brutality and guile to subdue the Arabian Peninsula, an area nearly four times the size of France, and declare the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. Civil war in Saudi Arabia is not a dim and distant memory for Saudis but something elderly Saudis survived. While the
British supported Abdul Aziz with money and weapons, his dynasty is strengthened by the fact that it springs from Arabia rather than being imported and imposed by an outside power. Indeed, Arabia, unlike much of the Middle East, was never colonized by any Western power.

Abdul Aziz’s challenge was to establish his rule over an impoverished and backward Arabian Peninsula that had been fragmented for centuries by region and tribe, by urban and desert lifeways. He began by murdering the existing ruler of Riyadh in a predawn raid on his mud fort, Masmak, still standing in Riyadh, and went on to win the loyalty of townspeople who traditionally had been forced to buy their safety by paying off one or another warrior tribe to protect them. With the city dwellers fighting for him on the promise of security for loyalty, Abdul Aziz began to harness the loyalties of Bedouin tribes, which historically had survived by raiding towns, caravans, and other tribes. Realizing that these nomadic people could switch loyalties almost instantly, Abdul Aziz knew he had to find a way to control them.

Saudi Arabia preserves little history but is proud of its modern malls and skyscrapers.
Above
, the ruins of Fort Masmak, captured in 1902 by Abdul Aziz al Saud. (
ROGER HARRISON
)
Opposite
, the skyline of Riyadh, a city of 5 million, dominated by Faisaliah Tower, owned by one of Abdul Aziz’s grandsons. (
GETTY IMAGES
)

He used religion—just as his ancestors had. And he chained them to the land. He convinced the
bedu
to congregate in agriculturally oriented settlements called
hijra
and adopt a more sedentary life focused on the puritanical form of Islam promoted by Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, an imam who had teamed with the Al Saud to found the first Saudi state some 150 years earlier.
The imam had taught that belonging to the
umma
, or community of believers, took precedence over all other social bonds. Anyone who made a judgment based on anything other than the Koran was a
kafir
, or nonbeliever, Sheikh Abd al Wahhab had preached. This meant that tribal law must be subjugated to God’s law. Working with the imam’s descendents, Abdul Aziz harnessed his political ambition to their religious conviction.

All men who joined
al-wahhabiya
were called Ikhwan, or brethren, and were promised equal treatment regardless of their tribal origins or race, something new in Arabia. This latter-day
hijra
, or migration, was akin to the Prophet’s move from Mecca to Medina some thirteen hundred years earlier to escape his opponents and signified a renunciation of tribal bonds in favor of loyalty to the larger brotherhood of Islam. Abd al Wahhab wanted to purify Arabia for the one true God. Abdul Aziz, taking a page from his ancestors, wanted to subdue Arabia again for the Al Saud. It was, as the famous
Casablanca
line has it, “the start of a beautiful friendship.” Subjugating tribal loyalty to devotion to Allah—and of course to his temporal ruler—was the beginning of Abdul Aziz’s successful strategy to coerce, divide, and conquer, co-opt and coerce, persuade and punish.

As a founding father, Abdul Aziz looms far larger in the creation of modern Saudi Arabia than does even George Washington in U.S. history. George Washington’s ragtag army of colonists fought the British to free America, founded in part on the idea of religious freedom, to grow into first a confederation and then a federation of states. By contrast, Abdul Aziz fought not foreigners but his fellow Arabs with the help of his religious Ikhwan to conquer Arabia exclusively for only one religion (fanatical Islamic Wahhabism) and, of course, one family (the Al Saud).

Like Washington, Abdul Aziz was a giant of a man, towering above most of his fellow countrymen. Like Washington,
he exuded a courage and dignity that set him apart from and above his people.
But unlike Washington, who refused to be king and retired to his private estate after two terms as president, leaving no sons, Abdul Aziz ruled the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia until his death in 1953 and fathered forty-four sons by twenty-two wives, thirty-six of whom lived to adulthood. (He limited himself to no more than the four wives at a time allowed by Islam.
But he is estimated to have had brief marriages for political purposes to nearly three hundred women over his lifetime.) His elderly sons continue to rule the kingdom to the present.

To this day, the Al Saud princes insist they are the glue that holds Saudi Arabia together. As Cairo was engulfed in one of its many “days of rage,” one middle-aged prince assured me: “Without our family, this country would dissolve into chaos. Our people revere the family as you revere George Washington.” There is, of course, a big difference between citizens revering one remarkable man, whether he is Abdul Aziz or George Washington, and their extending that sentiment many decades later to some thousands of progeny who just happened to be born with the same last name.