On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (7 page)

From the first day until the last—and on subsequent visits to her home—Lulu is persistent in seeking to convert me to Islam. On my first day, she seats me before the family computer to watch an hourlong video of a fundamentalist Christian preacher from Texas explaining his conversion to Islam. When this example didn’t induce my conversion, she next issues a stern warning: “It is very bad to die believing Allah had a son,” she says, debunking Christians’ view that Jesus is the son of God. “
Allah
has no sons.” When I observe that
Christians, like Muslims, believe in one God and that a righteous life on earth is required to gain admission to heaven, she politely rejects any equation between the two religions. “It is bad for you to believe Christians have their religion and Muslims have theirs. No,” she says emphatically, “you must believe in Islam. Allah says this.”

Finally, when this conversion effort fails, a disappointed Lulu assumes it can only be fear, not any failing of Islam. “Why are you not a Muslim, Miss Karen? What stops you? Are you afraid of some people in your country when you go home?”

Lulu represents the cloistered and benign Islamic conservatism that the Al Saud and their religious partners, the Council of Senior Ulama, profess to believe dominates the kingdom. Lulu wishes she were in such a majority but says fewer than 50 percent of women any longer share her views and lifestyle. Lulu is not interested in the world beyond her walls—or even in the here and now—but only in the hereafter. She is far more concerned about whether God had a son than about which elderly son of Abdul Aziz will next rule Saudi Arabia. She is content to criticize those outside her walls who adopt modern ways she considers non-Islamic while focusing on preserving her family’s religious piety inside her walls. A greater openness in recent years has allowed some Saudis to choose a more liberal lifestyle—where men and women sometimes mix, where women can check into a hotel without a male relative, where there is even talk of women being allowed to drive; but if it were to become the new norm, Lulu would undoubtedly resist adapting with all her might. This is the challenge for the kingdom: how to accommodate those citizens who want more freedom to change and those, like Lulu and her family, who truly see change as a road to hell.

As old divisions among tribes, regions, genders, and classes grow ever more visible, religion’s ability to serve as a unifying force is becoming weaker. Indeed, rather than unifying Saudi believers, Islam is now becoming another source of division. This is true for at least four reasons.

First, the Al Saud have politicized Saudi Islam. For two
decades they used their religious establishment to support jihadists in Afghanistan and religious extremists at home. Then they abruptly switched course in 2003 to insist that the same religious leaders promote the regime’s campaign for a kinder, gentler interpretation of Islam, to undermine Islamic extremists, whom the Al Saud belatedly recognized as threatening their rule. This shift, which followed the terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists inside the kingdom in 2003, has led many Saudis, moderates as well as conservatives, to view the religious establishment, or Council of Senior Ulama, as apologists for the Al Saud and, worse, as indirect puppets of America. The Al Saud regime always has been the dominant partner in the relationship with religious leaders, but in recent years the religious partner has come to be seen as so openly compliant with Al Saud political needs rather than Allah’s commands that it has lost much of its credibility—and as a consequence, the Al Saud also are losing theirs.

Secondly, while Islam often is seen as a very literal faith, whose adherents follow the injunctions of the Koran to the letter, in fact, in the Muslim world, many interpretations of Islam exist. For most of Saudi history, religious scholars of the Wahhabi sect provided the only valid interpretations. But that is changing dramatically with the advent of the Internet and education. More Saudis are reading and interpreting the Koran for themselves. Thus, for example, women seeking more social equality are plucking verses from the Koran to justify an expanded role for women, even as fundamentalists cite other verses to justify keeping them sequestered and subordinated. In sum, the Al Saud and their Wahhabi
ulama
no longer have a lock on interpreting Islam.

Third, while the many muezzins call to the faithful in scripted words in perfect harmony, the religious voices reaching Saudi citizens these days through the Internet and satellite television are anything but harmonious. Saudi Islam has become discordant. On any given day, at any hour, Saudis are logging on to the Internet or tuning in to a satellite television channel, where they hear a wide range of Islamic voices preaching everything from modern and moderate Islam to
extreme fundamentalist and even violent Islam. While the regime tries hard to prop up and promote the authority of its official Council of Senior Ulama by, among other things, creating an official Web site for fat was by this group only (
www.alifta.com
), the regime has largely lost control of an increasingly diffuse and divided Islam. Thanks to the Internet, fatwa “shopping” is common among young Saudis.

Fourth, modern society presents a whole range of challenges that the Prophet Muhammad did not have to deal with and could not foresee. A youthful population with Internet access to the rest of the world has raised a profusion of issues that are taxing the theology and ingenuity of Islamic scholars. Sheikh Mutlag, a member of the senior
ulama
and an adviser to King Abdullah, surely didn’t expect, when he was pursuing his religious studies, that he would be called upon to issue a fatwa on the appropriateness of carrying into a toilet a cell phone that included downloaded selections from the Koran. He settled the issue by permitting cell phones in a toilet on the clever justification that the Koran is (or should be) completely “downloaded” into every Muslim’s mind at all times.

Senior
ulama
are usually stern and inaccessible where foreign females are concerned. But Sheikh Mutlag agrees to meet me to discuss the role of a religious scholar in the lives of Saudis. The sheikh is something of a homespun humorist—a latter-day Will Rogers, the Oklahoma cowboy commentator famous for quips such as “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we pay for.” In a similar vein, when a devout Saudi asked the sheikh if it was religiously permissible to eat a penguin, a remote possibility in Saudi Arabia, the amused Sheikh Mutlag responded, “If you find one, eat it.”

His common touch and practical advice have made him popular with young Saudis, even though some of their elders consider him a buffoon. Those same traits apparently appealed to King Abdullah when he named Sheikh Mutlag an adviser on issues such as whether the kingdom should have a minimum marriage age for girls.
Public anger forced this issue on King Abdullah after a Saudi father married
his twelve-year-old daughter to his eighty-year-old cousin, who paid the father a dowry of 85,000 Saudi riyals (about $20,000).

While the sheikh declines to disclose his advice to the king, he does volunteer, “If there is harm to the girl, it is forbidden. This is what the Prophet Muhammad said.” When I point out that the Prophet Muhammad was betrothed to the six-year-old daughter of one of his righteous companions and consummated the marriage when she was only nine, an annoyed Sheikh Mutlag waves off any comparison. “Her mother and father and she all agreed,” he says. “And Aisha was not like a nine-year-old today.
The Prophet consulted her on all issues.” The sheikh then promptly excuses himself to pray. When he returns, he terminates the meeting, promising to reschedule in a few days. Of course, he never does. But what’s one little broken promise to an infidel?

Or perhaps he was just seeking to chalk up one credit with God.
Muslims believe that each human is flanked by two angels who record good and bad deeds. If a believer even thinks of doing something good, the angel records the thought as a single good deed. If the believer actually does what he or she says, God gives credit for ten good deeds. So perhaps this is why Saudis so often make promises even if they have no intention of keeping them. Partial credit is better than none at all.

There are myriad modern issues to which scripture offers no specific guidance. The religious scholars must find justification for any ruling they issue in the Koran, the hadith, or fatwas issued down through the ages, much as late medieval monks pored through scripture to debate how many angels could stand on the head of a pin, even as the Renaissance swept across Western Europe.

To understand where Saudi Islam is going these days, it is necessary to step back and understand its outlines and origins. As Muslims see it today, and have always seen it, Islamic law recognizes five categories of acts: those God requires of man, those recommended but not required (like visiting Medina after the required pilgrimage to Mecca), those God
prohibits (theft, alcohol, fornication), those discouraged but not forbidden, and last, those to which God is indifferent and neither rewards nor punishes. Only in this last category is man free to make laws governing conduct. Otherwise, these broad categories govern all legal and ethical conduct of devout Muslims—and of a truly Islamic nation.

There is considerable disagreement among Muslim scholars as to distinctions within and between categories. Religious scholars to this day study and debate fatwas, but all such rulings should find foundation in the Koran, or in the traditions and sayings of the Prophet and his companions, or in the scholarship of Muslim jurists in the first few centuries after Muhammad—in short, in events and judgments made more than a millennium ago.

What is authentic, of course, is sometimes a matter of dispute. The Sunna, the example set by the Prophet’s words, deeds, and practices, is considered the ideal and thus this pattern of behavior is practiced and passed on by pious Muslims. While Christians seek to emulate the sinless life of service that Jesus Christ, their spiritual leader, led on earth, they make no attempt to copy Jesus, the man, in his earthly personal habits, dress, or lifestyle. It is Jesus, holy figure of faith, who matters to Christians. Muslims, on the other hand, see Muhammad as only a man but one worthy of emulating in minute detail as a role model for daily life.

“
For nearly 1,400 years Muslims have tried to awaken in the morning as the Prophet awakened, to eat as he ate, to wash as he washed himself, even to cut their nails as he did,” writes Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Muslim scholar, in
Ideas and Realities of Islam.
“There has been no greater force for unification of the Muslim peoples than the presence of this common model for the minutest acts of daily life.”

The actual religious requirements of Islam are quite simple—in contrast to the requirements of religion in daily life. To be a Muslim, one has only to fulfill five requirements. The first is the
shahada
, or statement of belief: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Say those words, and you are a Muslim. The second requirement
is that a believer pray five times daily, an act of worship that reminds man that he must submit to God’s will rather than his own. The third is the requirement that every Muslim pay
zakat
, an annual tax of 2.5 percent on all his various forms of wealth, not simply his cash or income. The fourth is fasting during the holy month of Ramadan from sunrise to sunset. And finally, good Muslims must make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once in their lifetime if at all possible.

The obligatory Muslim prayers, or
salat
, are not requests for intercession or offers of thanks, as common Christian prayers are. While Muslims also offer this sort of prayer, or
du’a
, the
salat
is something very different. It is a precisely regulated, formal ritual that features bodily bending while repeating specific verses from the Koran and that climaxes in prostration to God in the direction of Mecca to demonstrate submission to God’s will.

The entire procedure requires nearly ten minutes and can be performed only after the worshiper has properly purified himself—and his heart—for the act of worship. This washing, or ablution, is a critical part of preparing for prayer; it requires the worshiper to wash his hands up to the wrist, rinse the mouth, clean the nose, and scrub the face, forearms up to the elbows, head (by rubbing a wet finger from the forehead to the nape of the neck and back), ears, and finally feet.
The Prophet is quoted as saying, “The key to paradise is prayer [
salat
] and the key to prayer is purification.”

When Muslims pray, they begin in a standing position and repeat the opening sura of the Koran:

It is routine for a Saudi—male or female—to interrupt a conversation to pray. Men go to a nearby mosque, while women cover themselves and pray wherever they are indoors. Other times, in public places, a man will simply roll out a prayer rug in the lobby of a hotel and fall to his knees as others continue to traipse past, scarcely taking notice of the prostrate worshiper. Occasionally, a host will simply prostrate himself across the room, leaving his guest to watch as he subjugates himself to Allah.

Against the backdrop of all this religious tradition and ritual, every decision taken in Saudi Arabia by anyone from the king on down involves religion. But religion cannot serve to direct society down a common path when the religious guides themselves are divided. So beyond the cacophony of Islamic voices now bombarding Saudis from television and the Internet is the even more serious spectacle of a religious establishment at war within itself.