The Gulf: Lifting The Veil

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Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been unthinkable. A group of Saudi commoners telling their prince outright that the country needed to be shaken up? Preposterous. But these are extraordinary times, as the small group of businessmen pointed out during a meeting two weeks ago with Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh and younger brother and confidant of King Fahd. "This is the biggest challenge we have ever faced," said one entrepreneur, mindful of the menacing forces of Saddam Hussein gathered just 300 miles to the north. Said another, summoning his courage: "We have to confront our internal issues."

Two matters, the group asserted, demanded urgent attention. First, the nation's defenses must be stiffened. Prince Salman nodded in agreement. Second, the businessmen said with some trepidation, the people of Saudi Arabia must have a greater say in the affairs of the land. The prince, reported one participant, listened to this second petition, "but he didn't like what he heard."

It was remarkable that he heard it at all. The candor of Salman's visitors was a manifestation of how the tremor from Kuwait has shaken the fixtures of Saudi society, one of the world's most conservative realms. For the first time since the visionary warrior-statesman Abdul Aziz, generally known as Ibn Saud, proclaimed his kingdom in 1932, Saudi Arabia has been confronted by the alarming threat of conquest. In coping with that challenge, the country and its 14.5 million inhabitants find themselves poised on the sword edge of change. The modernization and enrichment of Saudi life produced by the oil- price boom of the 1970s and '80s may one day look like a mere twitch compared with the convulsions to come. "This impact will be greater," says a senior adviser to the Saudi government. "These changes won't just break the crockery but the furniture and the walls too."

Ripping the veil off their closely shrouded ties with the U.S., the Saudis offered their territory as the base for the greatest concentration of American troops since the Vietnam War. A land that forbids its women to drive, to travel unaccompanied, to wear Western garb or to expose anything more than a scant flash of eyes and cheekbones is now host to thousands of rifle-toting, jeep-driving female G.I.s clad in fatigues. A country that generally bars Jews from crossing its borders and that prohibits the open practice of any religion other than Islam serves as temporary home to hundreds of American Jewish soldiers and scores of U.S. military chaplains. And a nation that used to allow no more than 20 reporters a year to visit has suddenly found itself swamped by 800 journalists in the past seven weeks, all eager to explore the kingdom's secretive ways.