The Loom of Time, page 22
Now the austere, conservative streak forged on the plateau heartland of Nejd, from where the Saudi royal family had originally emerged, reasserted itself. Movie theaters and other forms of entertainment were shut down. Courses such as geology, history, and science disappeared from school curriculums, and all that was henceforth taught was Islam and the story of the Saudi ruling family. The rulers also welcomed back into the kingdom Salafists and other Islamic ideologues, exposing Saudi youth to the very religious radicalism that had given rise to the Grand Mosque terrorists in the first place. Later on, in the 1990s, King Fahd, who followed King Khalid after the latter died, gave backing to the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan, in order for the Saudi regime to demonstrate its Salafi credentials. The kingdom that Ibn Saud’s galloping, ruthless genius had cobbled together from three disparate regions was now oscillating between extremes: from harsh religious orthodoxy to uncontrolled materialistic development accompanied by Westernization and back again to old-time religion.
It was this latest lurch to the religious right, begun in the aftermath of the 1979 assault on the Grand Mosque, that reached culmination in the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, in which fifteen of the nineteen plane hijackers were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Following a brief period of denial mixed with conspiracy theories, the Saudi government finally came to its senses. The kingdom’s rulers stopped appeasing the religious clerics, who would no longer dictate the cultural and moral agenda. While domestic terror attacks and consequent raids and crackdowns by the security forces would go on, the question of who was ultimately in charge had finally been settled (at least from the regime’s point of view), even if the resolution had taken decades to achieve. The regime had won and the religious ideologues had lost.
The resolution of who was in control was only relative, however. How could tensions not persist in a society undergoing rapid-fire modernization and postmodernization, kindling demands for more liberalization on one hand, and more fundamentalism on the other?
The stability of the ruling Al Sauds, in the face of all the upheavals in the Middle East in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including the Arab Spring, has always rested on the sheer survival skills of a large and diverse royal family with princely tentacles reaching out to all corners of the society, making for an informal domestic intelligence network all its own. This was buttressed by immense oil wealth, and the fatalism and obedience of a still deeply traditional people. Karen Elliott House, who has reported on Saudi Arabia for decades for The Wall Street Journal, writes that the kingdom, rather than a unified nation-state, remained still a “collection of tribes, regions, and Islamic factions that coexist in mutual suspicion and fear,” in which the Hejaz (the Red Sea region including the holy cities), Nejd, and the oil-rich east still eye each other warily. Meanwhile, an astoundingly large population of unemployed youth remain unqualified for jobs that often go to foreigners. What these young people and, in fact, all Saudis yearn for is dignity: a rule of law as opposed to arbitrary fiat, and a government that provides basic services with a semblance of transparency and efficiency. Yet, as House observes, “With seventy thousand mosques spread across the kingdom, only the religious are an organized force; moderates fear that power inevitably would be seized by the most radical. Whatever lies in Saudi Arabia’s future, it is not democracy.”[15] David Rundell, an Oxford-educated Arabist who spent his professional life as an American diplomat in the Arabian Peninsula, goes one better: “If a successor government [to the Al Sauds] came to power by the ballot, it would almost certainly be an Islamist populist regime.”[16]
It has often been said that regimes face their most dangerous period not when they remain rigid but when they undertake serious reforms, since such a process releases rising expectations that cannot wholly be met. Revolutions often happen when life starts getting better. This is precisely the period in which Saudi Arabia now finds itself under the reformist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
The potential for instability was driven by several factors. Ibn Saud had left no institutions except himself, and thus regime stability rested on managing the succession. Rather than a father-to-son-to-his-son system, the Al Sauds preserved stability for many decades by a lateral or horizontal succession, whereby the sons of Ibn Saud passed the kingship from one brother to the next, giving all the brothers of roughly the same generation a stake in the system, forming a veritable business-like partnership, in other words. But when Salman bin Abdulaziz came to power in 2015, he shortly removed his younger brother from the line of succession and eventually made his untested son, Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and heir to the throne, elevating him above more experienced rivals. Though such a change in the system had to occur eventually—after all, the sons of Ibn Saud could not go on living forever—there is no guarantee that the new line of succession will be as successful as the previous one in preserving stability, especially as hundreds of grandsons of Ibn Saud will be technically eligible for future status as crown prince and deputy crown prince.
Meanwhile, because Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS as he is known, is both autocratic and reformist, so much depends on his own person that were anything to happen to him the succession itself could be in doubt—unlike in March 1975 when King Faisal bin Abdulaziz was assassinated by an emotionally troubled nephew, and the crown passed smoothly and swiftly to his younger brother Khalid bin Abdulaziz.
Under MBS’s effective leadership as crown prince, Saudi Arabia has become a police state, where the sophisticated tools of repression, trained originally on Al-Qaeda in the 2000s, were now directed at perceived enemies of the system. At the same time, cinemas, theme parks, rock concerts, and satellite dishes are no longer banned, even as music is no longer forbidden and men and women can dine together. Saudi Arabia under MBS is both more autocratic and freer than ever before.
But despite the impatience with which outsiders viewed the royal family, it is likely that any regime that might replace the Al Sauds would be worse—and that’s if the kingdom did not crumble into chaos altogether, much as its northern neighbors Syria and Iraq have crumbled, on account of still-simmering separatist and regional sentiments. Indeed, both the West and the Saudis are stuck with the Al Sauds, who to their credit have never tried to destroy an existing class of merchants, capitalists, and landowners the way that postcolonial revolutionary regimes in the Middle East had. Those Westerners who yearn for a better system of government in Saudi Arabia should heed the late scholar of the Middle East J. B. Kelly’s fundamental law: every modernizing dictatorship is worse than its traditional monarchical predecessor.[17] Just look at Russia, where the Bolsheviks replaced the Romanovs, and Iraq, where the Baʽathists replaced the Hashemites. Saudi Arabia could be much worse than it is, given that for long stretches there was little to unite its diverse and rambling regions except for the Al Saud dynasty, whose roots go back to the early 1700s. Indeed, ruling through informal consensus rather than through institutions—with no robust parliament, no trade unions, and an apolitical military—the Al Saud family has been the “glue” holding Saudi Arabia together, somewhat in imperial style, writes the scholar-journalist Thomas W. Lippman.[18]
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Traveling to Saudi Arabia I had a fundamental question in mind that all my reading had made me especially curious about: how had urban life affected the Saudi mentality, and what were its implications for governance? For whereas the desert was key to the kingdom’s early decades, and had totally defined the experiences of storied personages such as Doughty and Lawrence, the cities were now where 84.3 percent of the 36 million Saudis actually lived, an increase from 50 percent in 1971. And as new city dwellers, the Saudis’ values and cultural characteristics just had to be in flux, at least to some extent. I thought of the Brazilianization that I had witnessed in Addis Ababa, and therefore wondered what cities like Riyadh and Jeddah would be like. Identifiable cultures and civilizations—and the Arabs constituted one such—begin in the desert and countrysides and end, according to the German historian and philosopher Oswald Spengler, “with a finale of materialism in the world-cities.”[19] Cosmopolitanism, which is inseparable from urbanism, is the essence of being landless and rootless, Spengler further implies. Could it be that the pure desert culture that Doughty and Lawrence experienced was even back then on its way to becoming a museum piece, and thus their observations were not only dated, but becoming wholly irrelevant? Or was it far more complicated than that: that desert culture with all of its traditions still existed in the cities, only in more diluted form? And if so, then to what extent?
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Countries usually surprise and delight upon the first immediate contact. Saudi Arabia does not. And that is its fascination. It is a hard country, at least I had initially thought, to be taken on its own terms; certainly not on the terms of a Westerner with his or her own cultural and historical baggage. Whereas Oman presents a forgiving and fragrant seafaring feast of Indian Ocean cultures, with essences of East Africa, Indonesia, and the Indian subcontinent layered atop its Arabian desert topography; and whereas Yemen is breathtakingly mountainous and beset by an almost pre-Islamic warlike tribalism, an upshot of its prison valleys; and whereas Egypt and Iran are complete, urban civilizations in their own rights, where Islam is not the whole story, Saudi Arabia is Arab and Islamic and nothing but. In opposition to the Gulf Arab sheikhdoms whose very wealth and smallness offer up visions of a glittering city-state cosmopolitanism, Saudi Arabia is just plain big, a universe unto itself, occupying most of the Arabian Peninsula, with several climatic zones. (There is actually snow in the mountains near Tabuk in the northwest during winter, while it is stiflingly hot in Asir by the Red Sea.) You can go days on end in Dubai, or even Abu Dhabi, without seeing an Arab, since the guest workers from the Indian subcontinent and East Africa essentially run all the hotels and many other facilities. There are many guest workers, too, in Saudi Arabia, but somewhat less noticeable, and thus you encounter Saudi Arabs much more. The outside world seems to matter less here because of such an infinite geographic reality. The signage, as in many countries throughout the world, is always in the local language and English, but unlike in the Gulf sheikhdoms the English translations in Saudi Arabia are not dominant to quite the same degree, and one’s ability to at least read the Arabic script is just more expected here. Saudi Arabia, at first contact in its inland plateau region, does not admit as much as, say, Dubai or Abu Dhabi to obvious outside influences.
The cityscape of Riyadh, the Saudi capital smack in the center of the country—and thus far from any sea—is pure and sterile: something bizarrely enhanced by the mathematical abstractions of its gleaming, glinting-in-the-sun skyscrapers. It is a quiet city, with very little street life in daytime and drivers who generally obey the rules and don’t use their horns. Speed bumps are everywhere: the opposite of the traffic chaos of Cairo. The long rows of global, upmarket stores are constructed of cement and concrete, and sit on dusty streets lacking sidewalks. The automobile is everything in Riyadh, as the dimensions of the roads and highways are simply too vast for walking. There is little hint of any atmosphere or aesthetic. There is only a drab bleakness, despite the flashy signage, vaguely reminding me here and there of parts of West Texas. Of course, the plethora of palaces and tinted Plexiglass hotel complexes scream money. There are, too, the occasional rows of cutting-edge restaurants reminiscent of Austin, Texas, augmented by a vibrant coffee culture in place of a bar scene. The relatively featureless plateau of Nejd, upon which Riyadh rests and which dominates the Saudi interior, is, in the way of other vast and featureless inland geographies the world over, essentially conservative, but it is a conservatism that I found under siege as Saudi society dramatically evolves.
The malls, too, are vast, with space clearly not at a premium, unlike in coastal cities hemmed in by water and mountains. I see women completely covered in burkas, laden with designer shopping bags on each arm. Women here, if not in burkas, wear hijabs and abayas, which cover their hair and bodies. The men usually wear thobes and cover their heads with white or red-checkered ghutras, topped by black ropelike agals.
I stay at an efficient but traditional hotel in the business district, with a somewhat cozy brown and chrome ambience. Women leave their rooms in the morning in black burkas. In such an environment, the fact that alcohol is forbidden throughout the kingdom is but an insignificant detail, since it appears as wholly natural, and thus easy to adjust to: even if one is a wine-drinking Westerner like myself. As another Westerner who lives here explained to me: “When you are in Italy ordering pasta and veal, you expect to drink red wine. Here, amid the desert and Middle Eastern food, having a unique cultural experience, a visitor just does not expect it. Context is everything. And that’s why Saudi Arabia, though a dry country, has a future as an international tourist destination.”
These were all the quick impressions of a first-time visitor, mind you. A visitor who has been here before would have noticed striking changes. For example, one gets used to seeing women driving cars and walking alone in public. The women in full burkas flowing by me with their designer purchases at the mall were not signs of extremism or conservatism, but of liberal change, as men were not accompanying them. Both travel and reporting, among much else, constitute the art of getting beyond first impressions. And that happened quickly for me in Saudi Arabia.
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I drove to the northwestern edge of Riyadh and visited a large exhibition of contemporary art called Feeling the Stones, which was a dead ringer for contemporary art exhibitions I had seen in Austin, Texas; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Palm Springs, California. Adjacent to the exhibition hall was a slick coffee shop and fine dining. Here and there I saw Saudi women wandering around without hijabs even, their long black hair flowing. The artists had come from Saudi Arabia and from around the world. Their work was of a world-class standard, and was full of statements about political freedom, the struggle against racism, and the need for introspection and individual self-expression. This was an example of a cosmopolitan urban civilization implanting itself in what was once the desert of Doughty and Lawrence. Such exhibitions were unimaginable before the de facto reign of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, which began in 2017. It was of a piece with a recent four-day festival of electronic music here that had featured hundreds of international performances amid the new mingling of the sexes, designed to appeal to a Saudi population in which 70 percent were under thirty-five years old.[20]
The moral message of the art exhibition had come courtesy of a socially modernizing authoritarian state—a state that was still a far cry from the altogether brutal repression of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and the al-Assad family in Syria, but, nevertheless, it fell within the same category, and also at the very top lacked the formal, consultative basis common to all former Saudi rulers. (MBS consulted experts more than he did tribal and religious elements within his society.) Yet, would such exhibitions eventually be part of a process to open up Saudi Arabia at large politically, despite MBS’s virtual one-man rule? I was skeptical. Clearly, the country’s relatively small cultural elite was increasingly open to universal values. But while journalists have an affinity for the exceptional among us, societies are dominated by the vast average. The few are not indicative of the many. There is also the irony that tight political control at the top, which guaranteed security and public order, allowed for a safe space in order for a cultural elite to entertain its beliefs and even its illusions. Contemporary art especially, with its need for infrastructure and vast exhibition halls, required lots of money and security. Even in the United States, such exhibitions and the museums that housed them were often located in wealthy, crime-free areas. Thus, ugly as it may sound, there was not necessarily a contradiction between a hard authoritarian regime and a large exhibition proclaiming individual liberty. Feeling the Stones was interesting, but I was not wholly convinced.
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On the other hand, one might argue, what exactly was freedom?
A young Saudi, Mutrik Alajmi, told me: “I can renew my passport within minutes online without waiting in a long queue for hours at some inefficient government office. That’s a human right. Women, even after a long maternity leave, can still leave work early until their child is two years old. That’s a human right. Reducing corruption, even if it means arresting hundreds of princes and imprisoning them in the Ritz Carlton to set an example, that, too, is a human right.”
Sarah Al Tamimi, the young deputy president of a human rights commission, told me: “I was abroad for years and never thought I would move back to Saudi Arabia with all of its restrictions. But now I can go out with male colleagues and attend music festivals and go on camping trips in the desert. So why stay away?”
A middle-aged Saudi minister, Mohammed Al Ash-Shaikh, told me: “The government no longer imposes on you how to dress in public. That is an accommodation to global urban civilization. Isn’t the spirit of democracy giving the vast majority of the people what they want?”
He added: “The government has handled the COVID-19 emergency extremely well. It proved that it can deal effectively with a crisis. Everyone has a document on their smartphone showing their vaccination status. Isn’t that a human right?”
