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The House of Saud's eternal
dilemma
By John R Bradley
Descendants of former US president
Franklin D Roosevelt and Saudi Arabia's first
king, Ibn Saud, celebrated this month in Miami the
60th anniversary of the first Saudi-US summit at
the Suez Canal's Great Bitter Lake, where the
foundations were laid for a "special relationship"
between the two countries based on an
oil-for-security alliance.
What
no one realized on February 14, 1945, of course,
was that the foundations of that "special
relationship" were being laid on 
active fault lines, and that a
seismic shift would one day shake it all down to
the ground again.
Pulling in one direction
was the internal demands of the Wahhabis, already
given control by Ibn Saud of the kingdom's
schools, mosques, religious police, media and,
ultimately, the government itself. Pulling in the
other direction was the crucial alliance with the
United States that Ibn Saud formalized in his
meeting with Roosevelt. The seeds of future
instability were thus sown, with the al-Saud torn
on the one hand between the jihad-inspired Wahhabi
religious establishment needed to impose order at
home and, on the other, a Western colonial power
the Wahhabis saw as their eternal enemy, but which
Ibn Saud recognized as the guarantors of his own
security, and therefore survival.
There
were many warnings of that seismic shift in the
six decades after the Bitter Lake summit. They
included the assassination of the liberal King
Faisal in 1974 by an Islamic extremist and the
Mecca uprising by anti-Western radicals in 1979.
Then it finally came on September 11, 2001, an
attack carried out by mostly Saudi hijackers who
had been recruited by Saudi dissident Osama bin
Laden.
One of the aims of that attack was
to drive a wedge between the al-Saud and the
United States. Since September 11, the eternal
al-Saud dilemma - of having to prove its Islamic
credentials at home while demonstrating, to the
West, its modernizing instincts and eagerness to
reform - has grown so difficult as to appear for
the first time near impossible.
That
difficulties were evident became clear earlier
this month when partial elections were held in
Riyadh. Only men were allowed to vote, and they
were electing officials for only half the seats on
town councils that have absolutely no power.
Still, the fact that elections were taking place
at all was seen by Islamists as too much of a
concession to US interference in the internal
affairs of the kingdom. They were explicitly
condemned in such terms, in an audio tape issued
in December by none other than bin Laden.
The al-Saud regime, which now understands
how the Western media works well enough to be able
to manipulate it, quietly appointed just one day
before the Riyadh elections took place - meaning
when everyone was looking the other way - an
ultra-conservative religious leader, Abdullah bin
Saleh al-Obaid, as the new education minister.
Amazingly, only The Wall Street Journal
picked up on al-Obaid's appointment, and even in
that article he was mentioned only briefly.
Al-Obaid's appointment was, one would
wager, among the most significant political
developments inside Saudi Arabia since the
September 11 attacks. It showed, first of all,
that the local elections, rather than being proof
of the spread of democracy in the wake of the war
on Iraq, had merely provided a cover for the
al-Saud to pacify the Wahhabis by appointing one
of their own as the head of what it considers the
most important ministry. But it also put the final
nail in the coffin of a now truly dead and buried
domestic reform agenda.
Unlike the town
councilors, the education minister wields a great
deal of influence, not least over the minds of the
next generation of Saudis already steeped in a
school curriculum that oozes anti-Semitism and the
celebration of jihad.
Although he went to
university in the United States, those two
subjects - anti-Semitism and jihad - surely remain
close to al-Obaid's heart. From 1995 to 2002, he
headed the Muslim World League, the parent body of
the International Islamic Relief Organization
(IIRO). Both are seeped in Wahhabi ideology. The
US Treasury Department has proposed the IIRO for
designation as a terrorist entity. In an essay on
terrorism that is part of a 2002 book on Islam,
al-Obaid blamed "some mass media centers that are
managed and run by Jews in the West" for reports
linking terrorism and Islam.
The minister
al-Obaid replaced, Mohammed al-Rasheed, was a
committed reformer who managed to achieve some
successes, despite the fact that all the odds were
heavily stacked against him. He was regularly
damned on Islamist websites as a "secularist" who
"took women to Beirut", a city religious
hardliners see - and not without some
justification - as a cesspit of Western liberal
ways. There was, almost needless to say, no
substance to either allegation.
In
reality, al-Rasheed was hated and smeared because
he tried to expunge from religious textbooks
material offensive to Christians and Jews, in
addition to chapters celebrating jihad; and he had
English as a foreign language introduced, despite
fierce protests by the Wahhabis.
Presumably, al-Obaid, despite his own
knowledge of English, is not inclined to further
any of those tasks. Indeed, it should not be ruled
out that he may even set about reversing
al-Rasheed's legacy, such as it is. After all,
al-Obaid is unlikely to feel moved to order the
deletion of his own words in his 2002 book. And
lest we have forgotten, we should remind ourselves
that we are talking here about a curriculum in
which - to take but one example - a passage in one
text book, which al-Rasheed had removed, taught
8th-grade students "why Jews and Christians were
cursed by Allah and turned into apes and pigs".
As it turned out, the al-Saud need not
have worried about the backlash over the Riyadh
elections from the Wahhabi religious
establishment. All seven seats in the capital were
won, to everyone's surprise, by candidates who
were not only avowed Islamists, but were even
blessed with the semi-official backing of the
religious establishment.
Behind the
scenes, though, there was a much more subtle power
struggle taking place inside the splintered ruling
family.
In March 2002, 15 schoolgirls died
in a fire at their school in Mecca, after they
were prevented from fleeing the building by the
religious police because they were not wearing
their veils. Two weeks later, a royal decree was
issued that relieved the head of the General
Presidency for Girls' Education of his duties. It
also merged that 40-year-old agency, which was
under the direct control of the religious
establishment, into the Ministry of Education,
which answered only to the education minister.
At that time, the word reform was in the
air, and the reformists appeared to be in the
ascendancy. And it was the pro-reform Crown Prince
Abdullah, who then enjoyed a reputation for being
a liberal, who had insisted on the decree being
issued.
An outsider forever struggling to
assert himself in the face of stiff opposition
from the conservative princes known as the Sudairy
Seven, who as full brothers do their best to keep
Abdullah on the sidelines, Abdullah had seized the
initiative in the wake of the popular outrage over
the school fire. For the first time since taking
over the day-to-day running of the kingdom after
King Fahd was incapacitated by a stroke in 1995,
he had outmaneuvered them.
These days,
with the US-led invasion of Iraq, the anti-Saudi
media campaign in the West, and the ongoing "war
on terror" perceived by most Saudis - rightly or
wrongly - as a war on Islam, Abdullah is back on
the sidelines, and his reform initiative has
effectively been abandoned. How painful it must
now seem to him that all his 2002 royal decree
managed to achieve, by abolishing the Presidency
for Girls' Education, was to pave the way for a
Wahhabi zealot to control not only girls'
education, but that of boys as well.
It
would be tempting to conclude, given all this,
that the Saudi elections were a complete waste of
time. But as that paragon of American politics Tip
O'Neill once said, all politics is local, and so
ostensible involvement of the Saudi people in
decision-making on the local level is a meaningful
first stage: crawl before walk; walk before run.
And by introducing any kind of reform,
even if in the short term it only serves as a
cover for empowering the Wahhabi establishment,
the al-Saud is playing a dangerous game. The genie
of democracy is now out, and the long-term
implications of that fact are far from clear. By
holding democracy up as a value, the al-Saud has
created a new criteria of judgment and evaluation,
one that is open-ended.
The regime is thus
caught, once again, on the horns of a dilemma. On
the one horn, to allow democracy to flourish is to
allow debate, the questioning of policies and the
completion of ideologies antithetical to monarchy,
whether liberal or fundamentalist. On the other,
to draw back, after making promises about
democracy, by having the form but not the
substance, or even eliminating the form, will lead
to charges of hypocrisy and fear for the people's
will.
As always, how the regime will react
is impossible to predict. However it does, though,
it is certain to make either the liberals or the
fundamentalists the beneficiaries, albeit for
different reasons. Only one thing can be said for
certain: 60 years after that historic meeting at
Bitter Lake, the al-Saud will continue to try and
square the circle of appeasing the anti-Western
Wahhabis at home while pacifying those infidel
allies abroad.
John R Bradley is
the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a
Kingdom in Crisis. He has reported extensively
from Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East for
many publications, including The Economist, The
New Republic, Salon, The Independent, The London
Telegraph, The Washington Times, and Prospect. His
website is www.johnrbradley.com
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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