On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (33 page)

Finally, the royal family is absolutely convinced of the indispensability of its absolute rule. To a man, the scores of princes I’ve met over many years—even those who criticize the government and advocate change—invariably conclude by saying, “We are the glue that holds the kingdom together. Without us, there is chaos.”

If these tried and true tactics have kept the kingdom stable in the past, why shouldn’t they work now and in the future? Conceivably, they will. However, there are numerous reasons they likely will not. The most important can be summed up in one equation: the gap between aged rulers and youthful subjects grows dramatically, as the information gap between the rulers and the ruled shrinks. The average age of the king and crown prince is eighty-three, yet, as already noted, 60 percent of Saudis are under twenty. Thanks to satellite
television, the Internet, and social media, the young now are well aware of government ineffectiveness and wealth inequities.
A new survey of Arab youth taken before and after the revolution in Egypt found that 59 percent of young Saudis rated the wealth gap as a major concern, even ahead of concerns about unemployment (57 percent). Across the kingdom, they can see princely palaces covering city blocks that are protected not by private guards but by Saudi soldiers paid by the government.

Moreover, the multiple crises of the past five decades—Gamal Abdel Nasser’s enmity, the attack on the Grand Mosque, hosting unpopular U.S. troops to repulse Saddam’s threat, challenges from religious conservatives, and terror attacks at home—did not coincide with generational succession and all the risks it entails for family unity. The combination of aged rulers and intrafamily jockeying for future power consumes the limited energies of the senior princes and makes any decisive policy steps far less likely, even though mounting social pressures require bold—and inevitably risky—actions.

Further complicating future Saudi stability is the declining credibility of both the Al Saud and their religious supporters. Over the past decade, as Saudis of all ages and persuasions have gained access to information, these two pillars of stability have been tarnished by images of royal decadence and religious hypocrisy. Greater awareness has eroded what might be called the “satisfied center”—those Saudis who traditionally believed what they were told by their rulers and the religious establishment. They now know better.
The new pan-Arab youth survey found the sharpest drop in confidence about the direction of their country among Saudis. Still, some 62 percent (down from 98 percent a year earlier) said their country was going in the right direction. But the downward trend is clear.

Ironically, deep divisions and distrust among Saudis, long exploited by the regime to bolster its rule, now pose a reverse risk for the Al Saud. For example, as the gap between religious conservatives and modernizers widens, the Al Saud rulers
find it ever more difficult to balance between competing agendas.

Finally, the Al Saud penchant for consensus and for buying off critics to minimize opposition not only has slowed decision making but also over time has packed the bureaucracy with competing interests, leaving almost every aspect of society and the economy crippled by inefficiency and corruption. Securing decisions on almost anything is extraordinarily time consuming, all the more so with a king and a crown prince who were ill for most of the past fifteen years, and who now are old and ill. Arguably, not since King Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975, has the kingdom had a confident, activist monarch interested in modernizing and developing Saudi Arabia. Faisal’s short-lived successor, Khalid, didn’t want to be king, and Fahd, who followed in 1982, was so spooked by the new theocracy in Iran and by the attack on the Grand Mosque that he largely abandoned reform inside the kingdom to please the religious establishment.

In his still-seminal 1968 book,
Political Order in Changing Societies
, the late Sam Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard, examined the challenges of political change with striking relevance to Saudi Arabia. Modernizing monarchies, he wrote, initially can absorb the upwardly mobile individuals in society. Eventually, however, traditional contempt for private-sector jobs in such societies, and the government’s inability to absorb all the educated people that its modernization produces, inevitably lead to disaffection among middle and lower classes left behind.
One way to postpone this disaffection, he wrote, is to slow modernization and reform, “coming to an accommodation with the traditional elements in society, and enlisting their support in the maintenance of a partially modern but not modernizing system.” This is precisely what the Al Saud have done. But as Huntington also predicted, monarchies like the
Al Saud “will lose some or all of whatever capability they have developed for policy innovation under traditional auspices before they gain any substantial new capability to cope with problems of political participation produced by their own reforms.”

Huntington, writing more than forty years ago, pinpointed the dilemma the Al Saud would face were they to pursue a policy of genuine reform. They aren’t, of course, and almost surely the current elderly leadership won’t.

A Saudi reform scenario would not involve democracy in any Western understanding of the concept. Most Saudis, deeply Islamic, aren’t seeking that. Even most of the aggressive modernizers seek only a constitutional monarchy, in which the Al Saud would still reign but within the parameters of a written constitution and by sharing some power with others.

What most Saudis I have met say they want is not democracy or even constitutional monarchy, but a government that is efficient in providing basic services and that is accountable for its decisions. They want transparency with the uses of the nation’s wealth and less corruption. They want rule of law, not of royal whim. They want to know they are being treated equitably with others in society and that punishments and penalties meted out don’t change at the whim of authorities or with the status of the offender.

Beyond that, many Saudi citizens want a more open society, still devoutly Islamic but free of some of the restraints imposed by religious fundamentalists and absent the daily harassment of the religious police.
One such Saudi, Khalid al Nowaiser, a Jeddah lawyer, called on the king (in an open letter published in 2011 by
Arab News
and
The Wall Street Journal
) to abolish the religious police, calling the organization “totally unacceptable, not only for a country that is a member of the G-20 but for any country that exists in the 21st century.” Al Nowaiser and other such Saudis seek more personal space: outlets through which to express themselves, civic organizations through which they can cooperate with like-minded citizens to bring change. In short, they seek to escape the labyrinth in which they feel confined. Finally, the young in particular want to be free to contribute to shaping society, not merely to play the role of puppets in a gloomy theatrical production and on occasion to receive favors bestowed by those in power. For most societies, these expectations would be modest; for Saudi Arabia, they are revolutionary.

Ironically, a model of this sort of open society exists in Saudi Arabia: it is Saudi ARAMCO, the national oil company. Within the gates of its walled compound near Dhahran, some thousands of Saudis, the overwhelming majority of its employees, work together efficiently and productively. They include men and women, Sunnis and Shias, managers and employees—and a small minority of foreigners. They function together in what relative to the rest of Saudi Arabia is a meritocracy: education is prized, hard work is expected, expertise is developed, and talent is recognized and rewarded. This island of ARAMCO, off limits to the religious police and largely isolated from the rest of Saudi society, offers visible proof that Saudis can be educated, enterprising, and efficient; can work together with purpose and pride; can employ the most modern technologies to operate in world markets; and can remain uniquely Saudi while also competing in the modern world. Religion on the ARAMCO compound is individual and largely invisible. A small, square glass-walled structure with no iconic minaret serves as a mosque for Muslim employees. Three school gymnasiums host Catholic, Protestant, and Mormon services, not only for Saudi ARAMCO employees but also for Christian expatriates in the surrounding area.

“We have a corporate culture that awards competence and training,” says Saudi ARAMCO CEO Khalid al Falih, the third Saudi to hold the top job since the company, founded by American oil companies in 1933 and initially led by Americans, was bought by Saudi Arabia in 1980. “
We are blind to ethnicity or sect. We have a highly industrious work ethic and integrity.” Asked if a minority Shia could one day be CEO, Al Falih instantly says, “Yes, he could. There are Shia vice presidents now.”

Sitting in the Saudi ARAMCO cafeteria with a mix of men and women, some of them veiled and others not, many young but some older, conversing across the traditional lines of gender, sect, tribe, and class, is unlike any other experience in the kingdom. These Saudis are not all Westernized; nor are they rebels against Saudi society. They have simply created a parallel society.

A woman, Nabilah al Tunisi, is in charge of the engineering on Saudi ARAMCO’s new $25 billion refinery and petrochemicals plant at Ras Tanura, a tiny protrusion into the Persian Gulf. One of the company’s vice presidents, Nadmi Nasir, a Shia, was selected to lead the creation and construction of the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology, a project the king entrusted to Saudi ARAMCO rather than his moribund Ministry of Higher Education.

This Saudi ARAMCO model may seem utopian, but even much more modest reform seems out of reach for the rest of Saudi society. While small reforms would satisfy many Saudis, for the Al Saud the perceived risks to their rule outweigh any potential benefits to society. Even opening the economy to more enterprise and competition would require greater openness in society and fewer rigid rules imposed by the religious. This, in turn, would mean accommodating to a more independent-minded citizenry, less dependent on royal largesse and less accepting of regime control. It is the dilemma of glasnost and perestroika. While some of the royals would welcome more economic reforms, they fear the demands for greater glasnost or transparency, that could result.

Specifically, what the regime fears are escalating demands from frustrated youth who, if given some opportunity for expression and enterprise, will want more. The government also worries about a domino effect, in which trying to satisfy the demands of one group leads to greater demands from others—from frustrated women, disenfranchised minorities, exploited foreign workers, and more. Above all, the royals are restrained by their reliance on religious conservatives, whom they dare not alienate. After all, without the imprimatur of Islam, the Al Saud risk being seen as just another Saudi tribe. Every action in Saudi society carries the risk of a reaction, and this is nowhere truer than in dealing with modernizers and religious fundamentalists.

Finally, any prospect of even modest reform would require a new-generation monarch who sees the risk-reward relationship in reverse, who believes the greater risk to the monarchy is the status quo, and who has the confidence, energy,
and longevity to see a reform agenda through. Some such princes with at least some of those qualities do exist among the grandsons of the founder. But given the royal family’s devotion to age and seniority, it is doubtful any of them will be given a chance to rule until it could be too late for reform.

A third scenario—and one that comes more naturally to the Al Saud than risky reform—is to clamp a lid on social demands, bow to the dictates of the religious establishment, and impose greater repression on Saudi society. There already is a precedent: King Fahd did precisely this in the 1980s, closeting women and suppressing critics. This scenario could result either from a deteriorating status quo or from an experiment with reform that unleashed more societal demands than the Al Saud could tolerate. It is easy to imagine a situation in which repression would be a tempting tack for the Al Saud, but it would entail its own set of risks. The direction of history in the Middle East these days is not increased repression. The Al Saud never have been reluctant to deploy harsh tactics—imprisonment without trials, torture, and even summary execution against selected opponents they see as serious threats. However, the regime has never had to resort to mass repression. It is not clear that the elderly brothers would have the stomach for clubbing youth protesters in the streets, much less turning out the military to shoot them. For all the criticisms of the Al Saud, they are not hated the way some other rulers in the Middle East were before they were toppled. They are resented, especially by young Saudis who neither fear nor respect them as earlier generations did. But were the family to engage in wholesale brutal repression to cling to power, today’s sullen resentment would explode among many Saudis into active hatred.

Conformity is such a strong strain in Saudi society that the Al Saud may never need to resort to brutal repression. Targeted repression of protest leaders, coupled with billion-dollar bribes to wide swaths of society, may prove sufficient. Saudi youth, however, seem determined to have a say in shaping their future, so they may not be intimidated by repression or seduced by traditional bribes. Almost certainly
a key determinant in how they will react in coming years will be the success or failure of revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. If, a few years hence, revolutions are seen to have yielded improvements in economic and political life, Saudis will be more likely to demand the same freedom for themselves. If the liberalization experiments have brought chaos without progress, even young, frustrated Saudis will be inclined to opt for stability. In short, failure elsewhere will mean success for the Al Saud monarchy.

A final scenario could result from any of the three already outlined—disintegrating status quo, failed reform, or repression—and that is collapse and chaos. However unlikely it seems today in a still-stable kingdom, no one can be completely confident that events will not spiral out of control in a country with no institutions to allow expression and resolution of differences. If, as seems likely, clinging to the status quo results only in further social and economic deterioration; if attempts at reform unleash excessive expectations—or prompt a harsh backlash by conservatives—and resulting repression inflames rather than suppresses opponents, then chaos could erupt.