“Such a silly debate,” my Saudi dinner partner volunteered one evening, nursing a drink in a dry country. “My wife exercises all she wants in our gym at home.” And the millions of ordinary Saudis without home exercise equipment? Not mentioned that night. Nor were the women who are forced to wear the veil and barred from driving, nor the guest workers intimidated by creepy anti-vice police into praying five times a day while the princes party in London and Aspen. The topic instead was why the American media have it out for Saudi Arabia.
You can see why the Saudis are puzzled. For decades, the royal family has stayed in power by playing a complex double game. The regime nuzzles up to the United States (which buys 25 percent of its oil from Saudi Arabia and protects it militarily) while placating joyless clerics with a taste for persecution and violence. Until now, the game worked well enough. Beyond some tsk-tsking about hypocrisy, no one in the United States much noticed it.
But the fact that 15 out of 19 hijackers on September 11 were Saudis has disrupted the old balancing act. So has the Internet, where translations from Arabic on Web sites like MEMRI.org let the rest of the world know what Saudis and other Arabs are saying to each other. Inside the global village, it’s hard to talk out of both sides of your mouth.
So while both the U.S. and Saudi governments insist their cooperation on fighting terrorism is strong, the overall state of relations between the two countries is tense. For every story about the Saudis’ arresting suspected terrorists or cracking down on money laundering, five others suggest lax oversight of extremist charities and yet more involvement by Saudi nationals in the events of September 11. The regime is stung by the American press, anxious about seeking admission to the World Trade Organization, opposed to war with Iraq but nervous about being left behind by the United States. Its solution is another lavish public-relations offensive. But this time it won’t work without some real, substantive changes.
I met a few thoughtful Saudis who get this. “We are re-examining ourselves,” says Hassan Yassin, a former government official with long experience in the United States. “And we should listen to some of the criticism.” But Yassin reflects the common view that pushing too hard will create a backlash: “He who comes between the onion and the skin gets nothing but the stink.”
But sometimes making a stink is the only way to produce any change. The old, complacent American approach of winking at the regime is part of what allowed the problem to develop in the first place. Now, with the heat on, the Saudi regime is letting the press debate more reforms, urging schools to stress tolerance and telling the anti-vice police to back off a little. Change is coming, and not just because of U.S. pressure. Satellite TV is subversive. The Saudis are so upset about Al-Jazeera that the crown prince boycotted a Gulf states conference last month to protest the Emir of Qatar’s refusal to rein in his network.
At bottom, the House of Saud is still haunted by what happened to the Peacock Throne in Iran in 1979, when the shah was overthrown by radical clerics. They may be fighting the last war, but the princes are still more worried about the fundamentalists than the Westernizers.
Among the worried is Prince Saud al-Faisal, the longtime foreign minister and highest-ranking Saudi who will talk to the press. When I went to see him, he said all the right things about collaring more than 3,000 suspected terrorists and even cooperating with the United States against Iraq. But the foreign minister still did not seem to grasp the essence of what so angers Americans about Saudi Arabia these days.
Why, I pressed, had Prince Nayef, the powerful Interior minister, not apologized for saying in a recent Arabic interview that September 11 was a Zionist plot? Al-Faisal first offered the Saudi government’s official position–that “the hijackers were Saudis and were planted by Osama bin Laden, not by anybody else, in order to create an air of suspicion and to drive a wedge between us.” But then he defended Nayef’s right “to speculate on somebody [i.e., Israel] who may gain from the act.”
Here, again, was a sign of the Saudis’ trying to have it both ways. Nayef and his deputy (also his son) are well regarded by the United States for their help in fighting terrorism. Does he actually believe that “Zionist plot” nonsense, or was he just “playing to Peoria,” as an Interior Ministry official told me? Is he truly cooperating with the United States on Al Qaeda, or just going through the motions? Welcome to Saudi Arabia.
Nayef was falcon hunting in North Africa, so I went to see the author of another notoriously noxious sentiment. Ghazi Algosaibi, former ambassador to London, now minister of water, wrote a poem last fall praising a 17-year-old female Palestinian suicide bomber. Algosaibi added that he would like to be a “martyr” too, except that “my weight does not permit this.”
Who was this brutal buffoon, chewed out by the U.S. ambassador for his comments? It turns out he is a deft novelist (I read one of his books, with a racy theme) and, he would be horrified to know, a dead ringer for the late Israeli statesman Abba Eban, down to the British accent and subtle knowledge of Middle Eastern history. In a country that holds telethons for the families of suicide bombers, his views were unexceptional. But he never did answer my question: if suicide bombing works against Israel, who’s the next target of that tactic? The Saudi royal family?
The best place to sense the tension between the PR script and the truth is over at the once inaccessible Ministry for Islamic Affairs, which some Western critics believe is a nest of extremist enablers and funders inside the Saudi government. Deputy Minister Tawfeeq Al-Sediry seems like he got the memo. “We need more observation and more control” of the overseas madrasas (schools), mosques and charities, he says, adding that the ministry was sending new materials stressing a tolerant interpretation of the Qur’an to Islamic teachers around the world. Ministry officials, he says, must renounce violence. “If they don’t believe that, they have to leave this ministry, but we can’t go inside of their heads to know what they believe.”
No matter how much social change comes, that will always be a problem. And because Saudi Arabia is the keeper of Islam’s holy places, it will always live under Sharia (religious law). But that law can be made more inclusive and transparent. I met a compelling dissident named Ibrahim Al Mugaiteeb who is devoting his life to that cause. He says that talking to me could land him back in jail, but he’s determined to tell the world through NEWSWEEK that he has founded Saudi Arabia’s first human-rights organization, Human Rights First. “They’ll have to kill me to stop me,” he says. More likely, they will co-opt him. After promising under pressure in Geneva last year to allow a human-rights organization, the royal family founded its own group, which of course defeats the purpose.
Mugaiteeb doesn’t want the overthrow of the House of Saud, which would thrust the country into chaos. He is simply after the human values of free expression and association, which he argues would actually help stabilize the country. (Not to mention easing Saudi entry into the WTO.) But it’s a long road. No women have signed onto Mugaiteeb’s group yet out of fear of being seen as “Western puppets.” They aren’t quite ready to agitate yet, even for the simple right to play sports.
