Inside Saudi Arabia
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Despite the modernization that took place after the discovery of oil reserves in 1938, Saudi Arabia remains a land where rigid religious and traditional values are strictly enforced. Cinemas and discos are outlawed; men and women are separated in banks, schools and fast-food restaurants; women must wear veils and are forbidden to drive. Public-decency police known as muttawa comb shopping malls, searching for women whose loose scarves reveal a curl of hair and forcing store owners to shut during prayer times. Unforgiving Saudi justice is on view after the main prayer every Friday, when a swordsman beheads blindfolded murderers, sorcerers, drug smugglers and other criminals in Riyadh's "Chop-chop Square."
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Though the Internet has arrived, the Saudis have pioneered ways of blocking access to everything from porn to political dissent. The parents of a newborn recently complained that they were barred from a site providing baby equipment, evidently because it also contained health information answering prohibited anatomical questions.
If such stories seem comical, there is nothing amusing about the raging anti-Western and anti-Jewish sermons that often blare out of the kingdom's mosques. Hard-liners in the pervasive religious establishment pose an absolute obstacle to liberalism, whether barring the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution or classes in figurative painting. An obsessive suspicion of Israel permeates Islamic teaching, Saudi-style. Earlier this year, a leading imam issued a fatwa against Pokemon, the Japanese animated series, after rumors spread that the name of one of the most popular characters, Pikachu, was a wily code for "be a Jew."
King Fahd, 80, will be remembered in Saudi annals as the great modernizer, a staunch U.S. ally who built hospitals and highways and spent billions upgrading the Saudi armed forces. To minimize friction with Muslim leaders, however, he constantly channeled some of the kingdom's vast oil wealth into religious causes. He carved out a place in Islamic history by supervising a $25 billion expansion of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The King also poured cash into scores of new Islamic universities, which began churning out thousands of fresh religious activists. "But something unexpected happened," notes a former Western diplomat in Riyadh. "Instead of this wonderful utopia, where young men were attracted to academia to learn about Islam, you got thousands of religious graduates who couldn't find jobs."
Some found what they considered a higher calling. King Fahd's most portentous move was his backing of the jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Saudis had supported Islamic political groups throughout the Middle East for decades, but the training of thousands of young Wahhabis was their first real taste of jihad. Among the recruits was a 21-year-old business administration graduate of King Abdul Aziz University named Osama bin Laden, a scion of a Jidda construction clan that made a fortune building the kingdom's infrastructure.
Bin Laden is not the first to challenge the al Sauds' right to rule. Fanatical Ikhwan, once allies of the al Sauds, rebelled in 1929, objecting to foreign influences such as the introduction of radio broadcasts, forcing Ibn Saud to crush them with loyalist tribesmen. In 1979 King Khalid harshly put down a fanatical group that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in a violent two-week clash that left 127 Saudi troops and 117 insurgents dead. The message of all these groups has been the same: pure Islam has been corrupted by the al Saud rule.
Yet nothing has threatened to shake the foundations of the al Saud rule like the challenge posed by the latest generation of Islamic militants. While bin Laden never concentrated on building a political organization, he is loosely connected to like-minded comrades inside the kingdom, from fellow veterans of the Afghan war to a network of fiery young mid-rank clerics who share his views on fighting America and destroying Israel. It was the upshot of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait that ignited their anger. King Fahd's agreement to act as host to U.S. troops, bin Laden charged, revealed the al Sauds' inability to defend the kingdom and its unholy dependence on infidels. Al Saud fundamentalism was not correct enough for bin Laden, who decried the government's corruption and crackdown on dissident clerics. "The core of our disagreement with you," bin Laden wrote Fahd in 1995, "is your abandonment of the duties to the religion of the One True God." By then, bin Laden had fled the kingdom and been stripped of his Saudi nationality.
To enforce Saddam's continued isolation, some 6,000 U.S. troops remain in the kingdom, and the eviction of the "Crusader" forces is one of bin Laden's oft-repeated aims. Bomb attacks at U.S. facilities in Riyadh in 1995 and at Khobar Towers in 1996 left 24 Americans dead; bin Laden's role in the blasts, if any, is sketchy. The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. left Saudi officials almost as stunned as they were by the roll of Saddam's tanks 11 years earlier. "What shocks me most," says a Saudi diplomat, "is why they hit America and not us."
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