Arabia In Disarray - Part II
By Mustapha Marrouchi
02 March, 2007
Countercurrents.orgAny visitor to the Saudi Arabia will notice how the kingdom is obsessed with control: no political parties or independent publications are allowed. Yet this obsession, as in other strict Muslim countries, only rebounds. Whisky (for years imported on a weekly flight from Manchester by a now deceased elder brother of the King) flows freely at closed social gatherings, even if some at least of the imbibers break off for prayer. Hi-fi shops are illegal, as supposedly violating Islamic precepts, yet videos, cassettes, and journals of all kinds circulate underground. Conversation switches easily from the exalted to the most basic anatomical issues–Saudi males of an older generation seem especially interested in the facilities offered in London for reinvigorating their genitals: there are plenty of jokes about transplants. A growing social unease on the part of men is mirrored in two striking changes. One is the growing pressure from women. They are almost entirely absent from the public space in Saudi Arabia, fleetingly glimpsed in black cloaks at shopping malls, or being driven around town by male drivers and relatives. At universities, women students have to follow lectures over video link-ups, and conduct tutorials by telephone. Yet levels of education among Saudi women are high–higher in many cases than among men. It is believed that more than 65 per cent of the graduates from Riyadh University are women. Certain areas of economic activity–namely, the banking sector, have divisions entirely staffed by women. And there is a large network of social organizations in which women are active. Many Saudi women have traveled abroad, and have daily access to foreign media. Books on gender relations range from assertions of the orthodox Islamic position to studies of “Women and Discourse,” replete with quotes from Julia Kristeva, Marylin French, and Laura Mulvey.
The official Saudi obsession with control produces visible tensions. An example is the restriction on the representation of the human form in the media. It has no Koranic authority, but, in Saudi Arabia and, in an even more extreme form, in Yemen, it has become part of public morality. Thus on the advertising billboards around Riyadh no human faces are visible: an ad for car seat-belts shows a headless midriff, one for a four-wheel drive shows a male, his head covered in a head-dress. In government offices, however, or on postage stamps, portraits of the Saudi kings and princes are prominent. Similar gradations operate in the press. In the Arabic-language Saudi press, no photographs of women are allowed on the front pages, and only those of pre-adolescent girls are placed inside; in the English-language press, women, suitably covered, are permitted; in the Saudi-funded Arabic press, printed outside the country but easily available in the kingdom, unveiled, adult women are portrayed freely. On television, sitcoms containing unveiled women are shown, but only in domestic settings and without any males being present.
Other signs of these undercurrents are to be found in literature. Perhaps the greatest surprise is the size of the bookshops. The pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia is the original source of the Arabic language. Traditionally, Saudi literature was entirely in verse, which still has an important place in contemporary life. But so, now, do the novel and the short story, as in the work of the exiled novelist, Abd al-Rayman Munif, whose brilliant Pillars of Salt portrays the corruption of dynastic rule in a thinly disguised Saudi Arabia. Ghazi al-Ghoseibi, a former minister and former ambassador to London, has seen two of his novels, An Apartment Called Freedom and The Madhouse, banned in his own country. They provide a rare insight into the world of the nationalist intelligentsia. The former is set in Cairo during the Fifties, while the latter follows the trail of an Arab who goes to America, falls in love with a woman and ends up in a Lebanese asylum. Women writers tend to publish short stories, focusing on themes such as alcholism, arranged marriages, male privilege in all its forms, and the denial of individual freedom by family, society, and state.
Faced by all these pressures, the Saudi regime has tried to accommodate change without giving up its privileges. A consultative assembly, along with a set of provincial assemblies, was set up in 1992. The regime has also tried to refashion its ideology. In the past it presented itself as an alliance of the tribal elite, Al-Saud, and their religious counterparts, Al-Shaikh, but nowadays little or no mention is made officially of the religious origins of the regime in the 18th-century revivalism of Abdel Wahab. It has sought instead to give itself a new, more conventional national identity: thus in 1986 the King took the title of Servant of the Two Holy Places (i.e. Mecca and Medina; the third, Jerusalem, is more a bone of contention, given the claims to it of the King of Jordan, whose family the Saudis ousted from El-Hijaz in the Twenties). There are clear limits, however, to this process of change. Neither the King nor any possible successor seems able to tackle the abuse of financial and other power by the princes of the royal family. US Embassy officials talk resignedly of the $14 billion or so of revenue, about a third of the total, that is “off budget,” i.e. unaccounted for, and stories circulate about commissions, or nisbat, specially allocated tanker cargoes and arbitrary land seizures by princes. One prince has cornered the market in courier services, another in car sales, others declare themselves to be the owners of land where building-work is about to begin. As social and economic pressures mount, this issue of funds unaccounted for will become paramount.
In addition, Saudis live in a state of tense expectation, fearing that one or other group of Islamists will stage a coup or that the Government will use them as a pretext to declare martial law and duck out of political reform. “We know the countdown to something very bad has begun,” one dissident wrote, “but not the timing. Rather than face down minority zealots by opening up the political system, the Government uses them as bogeymen to control the vast majority who hate and fear them. President Anwar a-Sadat tried this tactic and was gunned down by fundamentalists. The Algerians abused it and were swamped.” Joining a political party is a state crime. So is criticizing the Government in public. The Government public health warning to Saudis, unspoken but widely understood, is this: an Islamist regime would be infinitely more unpleasant for you than we are, so stick with us. To fundamentalists the King says: if we let the people loose, you will have a hard time. Voice your opposition, if you must, privately. In other words, as the dissident put it, “for the majority of Saudis politics is a spectator sport”–and the fundamentalists are used to make sure things stay that way. Meanwhile their power increases daily, fed by everyday frustrations: overcrowded hospitals, sporadic water supplies, chaotic schools, low salaries, growing unemployment, and–since 1982–recession, despite the post-Gulf War boom. With no other outlet for public discontent, a minority religious sect is broadening into a political movement.
Any further process of liberalization will encounter resistance both from A’Nughba Malaki, or royal elite, and from Al-Ahli, the popular constituency below. “Seventy per cent of the people in this country are not living in the 20th century,” one exasperated Arab resident commented recently in an interview that appeared in Le Monde. Those who have attended the almost weekly carnivals associated with public executions in Riyadh report no lack of public enthusiasm for them, while opposition to any increased freedom for women comes as much from men who feel threatened by their competence and growing assertiveness as it does from the princes at the top. It is easy to foresee a dramatic future for this world of uncertainty, rumor, and amazing oligarchic wealth. There are certainly those who would like to see some form of upheaval, whether initiated by the militant salafiin within, or by the Iranians. An estimated 15,000 Saudis went, with official and US blessing, to fight in Afghanistan; they now form a discontented and experienced nucleus, represented in extreme form by Ousama bin Laden, who is still threatening the world from his hideout somewhere out there. In 1979, a group of armed tribesmen seized the holy mosque in Mecca and held it for two weeks. In 2001, 14 of the 17 highjackers came from Saudi Arabia. Yet there could also be another future, one in which the power and greed of the princely caste is gradually but firmly brought under control thanks to far greater co-operation between the princes and the rest of the society, both male and female. There are impressive assets on which to build–enormous wealth in the ground, an increasingly educated society, a substantial public service sector, and a significant, if not majoritarian, liberal middle class. The Saudi family business cannot go on forever, and if it does not change it will court ruin. That at bottom is the fate of the kingdom of sand and mirth
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