On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future (8 page)

In recent years, the senior religious scholars have publicly criticized first the king and then each other over the issue of the religious rectitude of men and women mixing. The king’s firing in 2009 of Sheikh Shetri, a member of the senior
ulama
who criticized the mixing of men and women at the king’s new namesake university, unleashed the unholy spectacle of other compliant
ulama
suddenly discovering and disclosing that, lo and behold, the Prophet himself had mixed with women, even to the extent of allowing unrelated women to wash his hair. Then the head of the Hai’a, or Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, in the holy city of Mecca, Sheikh Ahmad Qasim al Ghamdi, not only supported men and women mixing in public places but also said he instructed his
mutawa’a
, or religious police, not to interfere with such mixing.
The grand mufti, the kingdom’s senior religious scholar, then got involved and (according to Saudi newspaper reports) told Sheikh Al Ghamdi to stop making statements about religious issues that aren’t his concern.

This display of discord played out in the media and became fodder for conversation and comment across the country. Under pressure from religious conservatives, the
head of the Hai’a in Riyadh fired his chief in Mecca late one Sunday night. So the public was treated to the added spectacle of the king’s appointee firing the king’s defender. This paradox was not lost on King Abdullah, so things got worse.
Within hours of the firing of Sheikh Al Ghamdi, the Hai’a issued an embarrassing retraction: “The information sent out today concerning administrative changes at some Hai’a offices, particularly those concerning Mecca and Hail, was inaccurate, and the administration has requested editors not to publish it.”

It was too late. Both the firing and the retraction had become major news, not only on the Internet and television but even in the controlled print press. Outraged conservatives went to Sheikh Al Ghamdi’s home, demanding to “mix” with his females. The sheikh also reported receiving angry text messages, and still other outraged opponents scrawled graffiti on his home.
In another unprecedented move, the unrepentant Sheikh Al Ghamdi went on television after Friday prayer, when most Saudis are home relaxing, to defend himself and say of his fellow Saudis: “Most people want to be more religious than the Prophet. I don’t expect to change them. They are fanatics. I just want to tell the truth because the relationship between men and women is not war.”

While this kind of open, divisive debate is taking place within the official religious establishment, that establishment also is coming under external attack from respected fundamentalist and also moderate religious scholars. At the moderate end of the spectrum is Sheikh Salman al Awdah, once such a fierce fundamentalist that in the 1990s he was jailed for his virulent criticism of the regime. Since then he has moderated his views, helped the regime try to dissuade young Saudis from turning to terrorism, and been granted a weekly television show that became hugely popular with young Saudis, most of whom want to live a genuinely devout life, not one focused simply on the minutiae of religious ritual so popular in the fatwas of the elderly Council of Senior Ulama.

About fifty years of age, Sheikh Salman’s intense face is framed by a heavy black beard, and his penetrating eyes look straight through his rimless glasses at an interlocutor who asks what led to his change in religious views. “
There is only one change,” he says. “I am getting older and more logical in my thinking.” This former religious extremist has become a multimedia phenomenon with a Web site (
IslamToday.net
), a newspaper column, videos, books, and lectures in addition to his television show. The sheikh dispenses advice on contemporary issues and temptations—and along with it, criticism of the society and by extension the Al Saud and their religious establishment. On just one Friday television show, the sheikh criticized the kingdom’s education system as a failure, accused the government of insincerity and inadequacy in its latest plan to create a high-tech revolution in the kingdom, and charged the religious leaders with being more interested in building mosques than in building clinics to serve the poor. “
Saudi society is slow to change and has no plan,” he tells a visitor to his home. “So what is coming is a spontaneous change. My project is to teach the young to be honest and deal with each other in a good way. If we can change the young, they might change the country.”

Islam in Saudi Arabia has many faces. The late blind grand mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz believed the world was flat and was the unchallenged voice of Wahhabi Islam until his death in 1999. (
REUTERS
)

Islam in Saudi Arabia has many faces. Sheikh Salman al Awdah, among the most prominent of today’s proliferating religious voices, is popular among Saudi youth for challenging Wahhabi orthodoxy. (
ABDULLAH AL SHAMMARI
)

At the other end of the spectrum from this charismatic moderate is a deeply conservative imam who leads a much more private life but whose critiques of the regime, while less public, are thus free to be even more acerbic. The imam, who asks to remain anonymous, seeks to block out evil and live an austere, ascetic life focused on serving others. He drives a beat-up old car and wears a plain brown
thobe
cut above his ankles to indicate avoidance of extravagance. When meeting with guests in his home, he himself serves the coffee and tea that are obligatory expressions of hospitality. The imam is surrounded in his study from floor to ceiling by books, which he pores over to perfect his knowledge of authentic Islam. Sporting a frizzy, uncut black beard, a hallmark of conservative religious Muslims, he refuses to shake hands but is willing to converse on Islam and even seeks to convert me. He sums up his approach—and that which he clearly proposes for others—this way: “One who believes in God sees this life
is short and he must live for the next life. Some others think this is the only life so they are corrupt and greedy.”

The imam clearly puts the Al Saud in the camp of the corrupt and greedy. He seethes with anger at a regime that he sees as kowtowing to American infidels, encouraging the mixing of men and women, and leading corrupt lives focused on materialism rather than on the hereafter. “We are very weak,” he says. “If the royal family can’t renew itself, the regime will collapse. The young are attacking the government because it is loyal to the United States, not to Islam.”

One year after the spirited religious debate on gender mixing and shortly after the Arab Spring, Sheikh Al Ghamdi was fired and Sheikh Salman left the kingdom for what he said would be temporary self-imposed exile in South Africa. Only the imam, who never went public with his thoughts, remained unaffected by a new crackdown on religious debate imposed by King Abdullah in the wake of Arab Spring rebellions across the Middle East. Eager to ensure the support of religious conservatives inside the kingdom, the monarch imposed a ban on public criticism of the religious establishment, the very kind of open dialogue that he had encouraged for half a dozen years in his efforts to curb religious extremism in Saudi Arabia. But with Al Saud survival possibly at risk from an unhappy, frustrated populace, the Al Saud compass pointed once again in the direction of the religious.

Not surprisingly, Saudi youth have a difficult time navigating all these conflicting currents of Islam. Whether motivated by moderates or by fundamentalists, young Saudis are far more likely to question religious authority than were their parents a generation ago. Meanwhile the religious authorities are faced with the problem of trying to issue fatwas that are relevant to modern life yet more often end up merely pointing up the inadequacy of religious rulings to current issues confronting young people.

So minute and myriad are the issues where religion impacts daily life that the government has established an official Web site for approved fatwas to guide the faithful. The site (
www.alifta.com
) is intended to discourage young Saudis from following
fatwas
they find posted on the Internet from some unapproved sheikh at home or abroad who doesn’t represent Islam as propounded by Saudi Arabia’s religious scholars. For instance, one Saudi sheikh issued a fatwa condemning soccer because the Koran, he insisted, forbids Muslims to imitate Christians or Jews. Therefore, using words like
foul
or
penalty kick
is forbidden. The country’s grand mufti, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah al Ashaikh, rejected that fatwa and called on the religious police to track down and prosecute its author.
Using a few non-Arabic words, said the grand mufti, is not forbidden, as even Allah used some non-Arabic words in the Koran. (Not incidentally perhaps, the grand mufti understood that soccer is a national passion.)

The official Web site even allows believers to query the
ulama
, much as Americans of earlier decades used to write Ann Landers for advice on life. For example, one young man asked religious authorities whether, having masturbated during the daytime in Ramadan when he was a teenager (and didn’t know it was forbidden) and then having performed ablutions afterward, he had violated proper fasting and prayer.

The short answer: yes. “
First, practicing masturbation is
haram
[prohibited] and it is even more sinful during the day in Ramadan,” wrote the religious officials in fatwa number 10551. Furthermore, they noted, the young man would indeed need to make up with fasting and prayer for every day he masturbated during Ramadan, because masturbation invalidates his fasting and his prayer, making them void because he failed to cleanse himself with a bath prior to praying.

Not only is masturbation forbidden—so is shaking hands with women. The
ulama
insist the Prophet Muhammad said, “I do not shake hands with women.” Therefore, modern-day Muslims should follow that example. Ironically, those same
ulama
have ruled in another fatwa that touching a woman after washing for prayer doesn’t make one unclean and thus does not require repeating ablutions.
Similarly, it is acceptable to wave one’s hand to others while saying the Islamic greeting “Peace be upon you,” but it is forbidden to wave one’s hand as a substitute for the words of the peace greeting since waving is a Western practice.

More consequential life issues also are prescribed by the religion. For instance, Saudi religious scholars insist that a Muslim woman must cover her entire body in the presence of a man who is not a relative. While the Saudi religious authorities acknowledge, in a fatwa on veiling, that there is historic evidence of the permissibility of uncovering the face and hands, this, they say, was in practice before the revelation of Sura 33:59 requiring veiling (“O Prophet! Tell your wives and your daughters and the women of the believers to draw their cloaks all over their bodies”) and before the Prophet commanded women to observe it. Therefore the former is abrogated by the latter.

Some rules apply to all Muslims, regardless of gender. Any sexual deviancy is forbidden. So is any public display of affection between opposite sexes, whether related or married. The only acceptable display of affection in Saudi Arabia (in contrast to the West) is between two men, whose hand holding is seen as a display of trust. Eating only with the right hand is required of all Saudis, because the left is reserved for toilet functions or touching other unclean objects.

Despite its great rigidity, Islam also is pragmatic enough for believers to meet its requirements without excessive hardship. For instance, those who are ill or traveling may forgo fasting during Ramadan and make up for it by fasting another time. Similarly, if a worshiper has no access to water to cleanse for prayer, there is what amounts to a dry cleaning procedure. The process is called
tayammum
and involves rubbing a bit of sand on one’s hands and face or, if indoors, patting a cushion to make dust rise, a symbolic cleaning.

Educated, modern Saudis, especially the young, often chafe at the restrictive nature of Wahhabi Islam and even more so at the growing gulf between what is enunciated in mosques and fatwas and what is practiced by many of the ruling political and religious elite. Increasingly, traditional, conservative Saudis see the ruling authorities as corrupted, while more liberal Saudis see the same authorities as hypocrites who say one thing and do another.