On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (6 page)

Saudis’ overwhelming desire to conform, to pass unnoticed among the rest of society, is surely a boon to Al Saud control. If Westerners love individualism, most Saudis are literally frightened at the mere thought of being different. To be different is to attract attention. To attract attention is to invite envy from peers and anger from family. It is one of the many paradoxes of Saudi Arabia that a society determined to see its collective self as unique from other Islamic countries, and surely from the West, is made up of individuals each so fearful of being unique. “Saudis do not control their own behavior,”
explains a U.S.-educated Saudi. “Society does. Now that we have moved to cities, it is the family rather than the tribe who controls our behavior with unwritten rules. So we do not have freedom or we will lose the support and protection of our family.”

Imagine a life spent anticipating the unspoken desires of an extended family and acquiescing to the unwritten rules of society. This need for conformity forces Saudis to wear multiple faces and change them multiple times each day. The need to adapt and fit in is stressful, so most Saudis tend to reduce the stress by keeping primarily to those they know, thereby reinforcing their isolation from others who aren’t members of their extended family or tribe. “Americans have one face,” says the Saudi who studied in the United States. “We have multiple faces—two, three, four, five, six faces. Our views depend on which face we are wearing, and which face we are wearing depends on who we are with. Saudis don’t have the same views here that we have in Paris.”

Young Saudis, however, are increasingly frustrated with this consuming focus on appearance and pervasive social conformity, and they are much more willing than their parents to try to discover who they are rather than just follow the dictates of parents, teachers, imams, and royal rulers. “Our minds are in a box,” says a middle-aged Saudi businessman. “But the young are being set free by the Internet and knowledge. They will not tolerate what we have. No one knows how the spark will come, but things will change because they have to.”

Paradoxically, it is the Al Saud’s deft duplicity, their paternal dispersal of favors, their arrogant exploitation of religion for their own purposes, and their rendering of Saudis to powerless passivity that now threaten the family’s survival, because more and more Saudis—especially women and youth—now share a growing awareness of the rather non-Islamic tactics so artfully employed to cage them and they are determined to press for change that allows more freedom and more dignity for individual Saudis.

L
ulu, invisible in her black
abaya
, tugs open the heavy steel door of the high wall that surrounds her Riyadh home in the poor district of Suwaidi. The dusty street is empty, but she is careful to avoid exposing even a glimpse of herself to any passerby, as she ushers me onto a tiny concrete courtyard leading to the modest two-story home she shares with her seven children and her husband—every other day. On alternate days he is downstairs with his first wife of nearly forty years, with whom he shares another eight children, all older than Lulu’s brood, who range from ages five to twenty.

As we climb the bare tile stairs to her home, Lulu nods toward the ground-floor door as we pass and says simply, “
That is her home, and up here is mine.”

Lulu is a gentle woman in her early forties who speaks halting but passable English, learned as a student at King Saud University. Deeply devout and eager to win a convert to Islam, she has agreed to let me live with her to experience traditional, rigorously religious Saudi life. Converting an infidel to Islam, which means “submission,” entitles one to paradise, she believes, so religion is the centerpiece of her
conversation. While Saudis these days can access hundreds of satellite television channels, the Internet, modern shopping malls, and even illicit drugs and alcohol, her home is free of any worldly modernity. The family has one television and viewing is limited to Al Majd, a religious network that bans any appearance by women in its programming. Similarly, the family’s sole computer is used only under Lulu’s supervision and then only for homework, most of it studies of the Koran, or for accessing religious sites. The walls of her home, like those of any devout Wahhabi Muslim, are devoid of photos or any human representations because they are forbidden by this strict interpretation of Islam. She is the primary caregiver to her seven children and has no household help, as the salary of her professor husband can’t cover maids for both wives, and Islam requires that a husband treat his wives equally. Her life is that of a lower-middle-class Saudi: no frills.

Like all Wahhabis, Lulu follows the Hanbali school of law, the most conservative of Islam’s four schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Unlike the other schools of law, which employ consensus (
ijma
), analogy (
qiyas
), and other rationalist methods to decipher God’s will, the Hanbali tradition relies almost exclusively on a literal interpretation of the Koran and Sunna for guidance. While Wahhabi religious practice is considered austere by most Muslims, the Islam practiced by Lulu and her family is strict even by Wahhabi standards.

By choice, Lulu rarely leaves home. She has no interest in the world outside her home, where her focus is on serving her husband and ensuring that her children follow a strictly religious path. As the days go by, it becomes clear Lulu not only accepts but welcomes the confines of her life. She has no aspiration beyond living life in a way that pleases Allah and ensures her entry to paradise. An essential element of achieving this goal is serving every need of her husband, a professor of hadith, the thousands of stories about the words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad, collected and passed down by his contemporaries as a guide for devout Muslims’ daily lives. If her husband should be dissatisfied with her or, even worse, be somehow led astray, the fault would be hers. “
Men are in charge of women,” says the Koran. “So righteous women are
devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband’s] absence what Allah would have them guard.” Serving Allah means serving her husband.

Lulu’s children, including teenage girls, admire and obey her. I ask Lulu if she wants her daughters to have opportunities she did not have. “No, I pray they have a life like mine,” she says instantly.
Her eldest daughter, a student at King Saud University, says, “She is dedicating herself to helping us have a life just like hers.” The daughter, dressed in a modest floor-length skirt and long-sleeved sweater even at home, speaks with deep reverence, not the sarcasm that a Western teenager might use.

Lulu and her household illustrate the deep and genuine commitment of a majority of Saudis to their religion. Most Westerners, who live in an aggressively secular environment, would find it impossible to imagine the pervasive presence of religion, which hangs over Saudi Arabia like a heavy fog and has been a source of stability, along with the Al Saud, for nearly three centuries. But the growing gap between Islam as revealed in the Koran and Islam as practiced in the kingdom is undermining the credibility of the religious establishment and creating divisions among religious conservatives and between them and modernizers. As a result, the religious pillar is cracking, with serious implications for the kingdom’s future stability. But for devout Muslims like Lulu, these troubling divisions simply mean redoubling their effort to follow the true Islam by adhering strictly to the example set by the Prophet Muhammad fourteen hundred years ago.

Even small children in Saudi Arabia can be preoccupied with religion. An hour outside Riyadh in rocky desert terrain, a Saudi family concludes a daylong outing. A bright full moon illuminates the black line of silhouettes in prayer. Ahmad, six, and his father, brother, and sister bend, straighten, and prostrate themselves in unison in the direction of Mecca. I sit alone nearby on a blanket beside the dying embers of the fire, where we cooked chicken kebab for dinner. Observing my failure to pray, a concerned little Ahmad comes over and says, “I need to teach you something.” Sure, what is it? I say. “Do you know what to say when the angel of death comes?”
he asks earnestly. Assuming my ignorance, this sweet child immediately provides the dialogue that the dying can expect to have if they want to transit successfully from death to the hereafter:

“
The angel asks you ‘Who is your God?’ and you say ‘Allah,’ ” prompts Ahmad. “Then he asks ‘Who is your Prophet?’ You say ‘Muhammad.’ What is your faith? You say ‘Islam.’ Then he asks ‘What is your work?’ and you say ‘I heard and believed in Allah.’ ” It is impossible to imagine a child of that age in any other society on earth being similarly concerned about the hereafter—for himself, let alone a stranger. And Ahmad is the child of open-minded parents educated in the United States.

As both Lulu’s and Ahmad’s stories demonstrate, the emerging divisions and debates have not diminished the omnipresent ritual of religion. Every airport, shopping mall, and government or private office building includes a large area spread with prayer rugs indicating the direction of Mecca, so worshipers know where to kneel and pray. Every hotel room has a sticker on the wall or bed or desk with an arrow pointing toward Mecca. Even new cars often include complimentary prayer rugs so travelers can stop alongside a road and pray. The sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer begins in the predawn hours and is heard four more times throughout the day and evening from mosques so numerous that the effect in cities is a chorus of prayer calls in surround sound. All retail businesses close several times a day, supposedly for thirty minutes but sometimes longer, while men go to pray in designated public locations or at mosques. (Women pray at home, as the strict segregation of sexes means they are not permitted in mosques, even though they were during the Prophet’s time.)

Lying on my pallet on the floor of Lulu’s home, I awake at four
A.M.
when the muezzin in the nearby mosque begins to call
“
Allahu akbar,”
or “God is most great.” He repeats twice, “I testify that there is no god but God.” Then he adds, “Hurry to prayer. Hurry to salvation. Prayer is better than sleep.” Soon I hear the sound of men’s sandals clickety-clacking down the stairs outside my door, as Lulu’s husband and two
teenage sons rush to the mosque. The big steel door clanks shut behind them. Then silence.

A few hours later Lulu’s husband, sole driver of the family’s SUV, drops the children at a special school that focuses on teaching students to memorize the entire Koran by ninth grade. Along with study of more conventional subjects. Even when her husband and children are out, Lulu almost never leaves home. All her interests are there. Asked if she would like to drive, she seems genuinely puzzled. “Why would I want to drive? In Islam it is a man’s responsibility to drive his wife and children. Some women just want to drive to have fun. But this is wrong.”

When her husband is home, I am banished to my room, where I read the Koran to pass the time. A religious man like her bearded husband would never mix unnecessarily with a woman who is not a relative, even if she covers her body and face. Indeed, during the week I spend with Lulu, I see her husband only once—when he picks us up from a rare outing to her sister’s home. Fully veiled, I silently slip into the seat behind him, but we are not introduced and the conversation continues as if I were as invisible as Casper the friendly ghost.

Doing Allah’s will is Lulu’s consuming focus. At age nineteen, when her husband offered himself to her family, Lulu willingly chose to be a second wife. “Some men need another wife for many reasons, perhaps to keep from doing something bad,” she explains, clearly meaning adultery, though she doesn’t speak the word. “I prayed to Allah, ‘Let me do this if it is good.’ ” She is separated from the first wife only by a set of stairs, yet they rarely visit. “It is natural that sometimes there is jealousy,” she says, “if he gives her a gift or spends more time there. But I just say ‘
humdililah
’ [praise be to God].” She beats her breast with her fist for emphasis.

For someone accustomed to an overactive American life, the ennui in Lulu’s home is frustrating at first. After a few days, however, it begins to feel eerily similar to my youth in Matador, a tiny windswept West Texas town, in a home with strict religious parents—a father who read the Bible every night and a mother who, like Lulu, served him and was subservient to him. We had no television or telephone and few
escapes other than attending church every Sunday morning and evening. So boring was that existence that as a teenager I set myself the goal of emulating the town’s newspaper editor, who had ventured as far as California—a wider ambition wasn’t imaginable in my limited life, so I surely didn’t ever dream then of any place as distant or exotic as Saudi Arabia. My later fascination, over a thirty-year career as an international reporter and editor, was with the myriad places to which I traveled and the diverse people I met. Now here I was far from Matador but once again confined to a home focused only on religious asceticism similar to that of my family.

Clearly Lulu is a genuinely devout woman who sincerely wants to save me. Just as my father forbade shorts and pants, Lulu tells me that my pants and sweater are not pleasing to God. Lulu would no sooner wear a pantsuit even at home than run down the street naked, because anything that reveals the human form is forbidden. My floor-length black
abaya
similarly is gently criticized because it fits across the shoulders and features modest decoration on its long sleeves. Fingering the blue and orange stitching, she says, “This is wrong. Your
abaya
shows the body, and this decoration attracts men to look at you.” Outside the home, Lulu and her daughters shroud head to toe in shapeless black
abayas
that are akin to wrapping oneself in a black bedsheet. Before exiting, they also cover their faces with a separate black
niqab
, securing it firmly in a knot behind their head. The
niqab
features a slit for the eyes, but these devout ladies cover even that slit with another black cloth, which can be flipped up or lowered over the slit depending on whether one needs to see clearly.