On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (5 page)

Abdul Aziz’s first royalty check exceeded $1.5 million. He was so delighted, he led a group of two thousand people in a caravan of five hundred cars to the oil fields to turn the tap to allow the first Saudi oil to flow into tankers for export. Having heard a radio report that man would one day reach Mars, a planet deemed as desolate as the deserts in Eastern Arabia, Abdul Aziz asked one of the American oil men, “
Do you know what they will find when they reach Mars?” Answering
his own question, he said, “They will find Americans out there in the desert hunting for oil.”

The succeeding Al Saud monarchs have lived more or less luxurious lifestyles, but the family as a whole has become infamous around the world for the profligacy of its numerous playboy princes. While Abdul Aziz would have disapproved of such profligacy, his strategy of using at least some of the kingdom’s wealth to buy the loyalty of its subjects continues to this day. Buying loyalty in Saudi Arabia is not, as in so many countries, a matter of greasing the palms of purchased politicians, since there are no independent Saudi politicians to purchase. Purchasing loyalty is far more pervasive than that.

Indeed, Saudi Arabia is a wealthy welfare state, in which the public pays no taxes yet receives widespread, if often poor-quality, services, from free education and health care to water and electricity and, of course, cheap energy.
At least 80 percent of the revenues in the Saudi treasury accrue from petroleum. All revenue, whether from oil, earnings on the country’s $400 billion in foreign reserves, or even traffic fines, flows into the central government in Riyadh—that is, to the royal family. No accounting is given to the public of either total revenues to the Al Saud coffers or total spending by the Al Saud—on behalf of the people and on behalf of the ever-expanding royal family. The public has no say in the formation of the annual government budget, which represents that portion of government spending that is disclosed publicly. The Majlis Ash Shura, appointed by the king to “represent” the people has no role in budget formation.
Fully 40 percent of the budget that is disclosed publically is labeled “Other Sectors” (including defense, security, intelligence, and direct investment of the kingdom’s revenues outside the country) and is opaque to the public. In sum, what the royal family takes in from national oil revenue and spends on itself is secret. Not surprisingly, Saudis increasingly are demanding not only that more of the wealth be spent on better government services, but also a transparent accounting of the nation’s oil revenue, which they believe belongs to the people, not to the royal family.

More important than these entitlements, which, as in all welfare states, the public largely takes for granted, is the largesse that the Al Saud directly distribute. From multibillion-dollar contracts passed out to powerful families like the Bin Ladens to the many royal charities sponsored by princes and princesses, from the King Abdullah Housing Development Fund to the Prince Sultan Humanitarian City, royal benevolence pervades the society in such big ways but also in myriad minor ones. A seriously sick Saudi waits outside a princely office for a letter that will admit him to one of the premier military hospitals. A reformed terrorist is the beneficiary of a new Toyota, an Apple iPhone, and a job arranged under the sponsorship of Muhammad bin Nayef, the prince in charge of fighting terrorism in the kingdom. A father wants a scholarship for his son to study abroad—he petitions a prince for the favor. A hungry mother wants to procure food for her family—she stands outside any royal household. The list of petitions and royal favors is as long as the line of supplicants who once gathered outside the desert tent of King Abdul Aziz seeking free meals and clothes. In those early days, the king would dip into his money chest and hand out gold coins when he had them, though there were never enough to go around. Nevertheless, the old king’s subjects undoubtedly were more appreciative of what little he had to give than modern Saudis are of the oil-funded welfare benefits now widely—but far from equitably—dispersed. “We have been made a nation of beggars,” laments one government official privately critical of the regime.

A third source of Al Saud survival is the pervasive and often oppressive role of religion. Indeed, if finely honed political skills and oil riches are essential components of the Al Saud survival kit, Islam is the monarchy’s survival manual. To many Saudis, the Al Saud royals are not merely a ruling family of a secular state like any Western royal dynasty but the religious exemplars of an Islamic community of believers. To find a Western analogy, one has to think back a thousand years to an age of Holy Roman emperors blessed by the pope—except in Saudi Arabia, the monarch is both emperor and, in effect, pope, or head of Islam styling himself as Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques.

Saudi grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz al Ashaikh, left, holding hands with King Abdullah. The legitimacy of this marriage made in heaven between the Al Saud and Islam is increasingly being challenged by Saudis. (
GETTY IMAGES
)

Not only is the Saudi monarch effectively the religious primate, but the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam that he represents instructs Muslims to be obedient and submissive to their rulers, however imperfect, in pursuit of a perfect life in paradise. Only if a ruler directly countermands the commandments of Allah should devout Muslims even consider disobeying. “O you who have believed, obey Allah and obey the Messenger and those in authority among you,” enjoins the Koran in Sura 4:59.
A popular hadith quotes the Prophet Muhammad urging believers to “stick to obedience even if it is to an Abyssinian slave, since the believer is like a submissive camel, wherever he is led, he follows.”

In Sunni Islam, the sect that dominates Saudi Arabia and most of the Arab world, there is no single spiritual leader on earth. Rather, since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, God’s messenger and spiritual leader on earth, the community of believers was first guided by a Commander of the Believers, or caliph, selected from among the faithful, and in more modern times by consortia of religious scholars or sheikhs in each Islamic country.

Sadly for Islam, those who led the believers after the Prophet quickly abandoned his commitment to austere living and humble service to Allah in favor of using religion to procure power and personal profit, not unlike the Al Saud today. Only the first caliph, Abu Bakr, truly patterned himself on the Prophet’s life of sacrifice and service to believers. “
Obey me for so long as I obey God and His Messenger,” Abu Bakr said. “But if I disobey God and His Messenger, you owe me no obedience.” All three caliphs who followed Abu Bakr died violently, although they are, along with Abu Bakr, regarded by most Muslims as the four “rightly guided” caliphs.
Within fifty years of the Prophet’s death, Muslims murdered a succession of leaders; shot, trampled, and beheaded the Prophet’s grandson; and sacked the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, even burning and breaking the sacred Kaaba, the black stone believed to be the altar of Abraham, who is sacred to all three monotheistic religions. The saintly rule of the Prophet was supplanted by the temporal empire ruled by the fifth caliph, Mu’awiyah, son of a nobleman of Mecca who commanded the pagan opposition to the Prophet Muhammad when he was driven from Mecca. At Mu’awiyah’s death, he was succeeded by his son, setting up the same sort of dynastic pattern that persists today in Saudi Arabia. Mu’awiyah’s Umayyad dynasty lasted nearly one hundred years before being conquered by the Abbasids, who accused his heirs of abandoning the true Islam.
The conquerors invited the surviving Umayyad rulers to dinner, and after pleasantries, by prearrangement, the waiters locked the doors and clubbed to death their ruler’s guests. The debauchery and cruelty of these early caliphs is reminiscent of some of Roman Catholicism’s medieval popes.

Not surprisingly, this depressing history has bred a political fatalism down through the centuries among many Muslims who believe that if just rule couldn’t be established even when the Prophet’s example was so fresh, there’s no possibility that it could happen now. This resignation to living under corrupt temporal leaders and focusing not on improving life on earth but rather on securing a better life in the hereafter helps explain why oppressive and greedy rulers reign for so long in so many Arab countries.

In today’s Saudi Arabia, the senior religious scholars, or
ulama
, are supposed to be the interpreters and arbiters of the teachings of the Koran and the Sunna, Muhammad’s life example. They are not regarded as holy men but simply men well versed in the holy book and in Muhammad’s life and teachings. While these men rise in the faith as a result of their scholarship and righteous living, the select group that form the Council of Senior Ulama, the body of some twenty scholars who advise the monarch on major religious issues, are appointed by the king. This council is the group to whom the Saudi king turned, for example, for the fatwa approving his request to invite U.S. troops into the kingdom in 1990 after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Similarly, it was senior members of this group who approved using violence inside the Grand Mosque of Mecca to evict the homegrown terrorists who occupied it for some weeks in November 1979. These appointed
ulama
, not surprisingly, often remind Saudis of their obligation to submit to their rulers—in this case, the Al Saud, who appointed them religious scholars—not exactly conflict-free advice.

Over recent decades, the Al Saud and their religious partners have engaged in a delicate tug-of-war. In the wake of the attack on the Grand Mosque in 1979, a shaken King Fahd, as we have seen, gave them near carte blanche over Saudi society. Beyond subjugating women, young Saudis were pressured to attend after-school training in religious fundamentalism, and over the next decade, the government gave billions of dollars to aid jihadists fighting in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia, spawning the global jihadists who two decades later brought down the World Trade Center and
then, more seriously to the Al Saud, carried their attacks into Saudi Arabia itself.

Only after the Al Saud felt themselves targeted in 2003 did the regime begin to crack down on these indigenous jihadists and on the religious fundamentalists in whose waters jihadists swim. The voices that preach a more radical and puritanical brand of Islam have been largely silenced in recent years in the name of antiterrorism. For instance, nearly two thousand mosque leaders were fired in the aftermath of terrorist bombings inside Saudi Arabia in 2003, for what the government regarded as supporting extremism. Furthermore, messages can no longer be posted inside mosques, a common recruiting place for extremists, without government permission. Friday midday sermons that touch on any controversial topic, such as jihad or politics, must be cleared in advance by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs.
The security directorate also monitors mosques, religious lecturers, and camps as well as schools. In short, the religious are scrutinized carefully by the regime’s security apparatus to ensure that their devotion to Allah also includes loyalty to the regime.

Like an earthquake-proof building, the Al Saud have long had the wisdom to bend ever so slightly at the moment of greatest pressure and then later reclaim, over time, most of what they yielded. And so the delicate dance between the royals and the religious, sometimes smooth and sometimes awkward, continues, but always with the Al Saud as the leading partner.
The Al Saud have taken a lesson from Mu’awiyah, the seventh-century caliph who, when asked to explain his long twenty-year rule given that three of his four predecessors had been murdered, said, “I place a hair strand between myself and the people. If they pull it from their end, I would loosen it from mine so that the strand would not break. If they loosened it from their end, I would pull on it from mine.” This explains why government decisions, such as allowing Saudis to vote, can be altered. As noted, the government allowed elections for toothless municipal councils in 2005 in part to please Western critics but postponed the same elections in 2009, agreeing to schedule them only in 2011, after the Arab Spring brought sweeping demands for more
participation by publics all across the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia. So there is no guarantee that women will actually be allowed to participate in the municipal elections due again in 2015. What the king promises, the king can postpone.

The combined effect of Al Saud survival skills, vast oil riches, and the religious requirement of obedience all add up to a largely somnolent and passive Saudi populace. The willingness, at least so far, of Saudi citizens to live with their lot is the ultimate gift to the Al Saud. However many resentments, however much the society may seethe beneath the surface, however divided segments of the society may be, the Al Saud have retained control. Indeed, Saudis have a joke that summarizes their society’s passivity.

The king decides to check the will of his people. So he sets up a checkpoint on a busy road. No one complains. So he asks his security officers to further test people’s patience by also doing an identity check at the checkpoint. Still no one complains. Determined to find the public’s limit of tolerance, the king asks the officer not only to stop the people and check their identities but also to ticket them. The line of cars grows ever longer on the busy Riyadh road, but still no public complaint emerges from a Saudi. So the king asks the officer to go one step further and slap those he stops, identifies, and tickets. Finally one Saudi man goes ballistic. The ruler asks that his angry countryman be brought before him to explain the outburst. “I have waited for hours in the queue,” the man tells the king. “If you are going to do this to us, at least get two officers to slap us so the line moves faster.”