Editor’s Note:
Today we provide for your consideration part one of our exclusive interview with British historian Robert Lacey, author of “Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia,” published in October. It updates the story of Saudi Arabia Lacey began telling in 1981 with the landmark book “The Kingdom.”
The interview focused on what he calls Saudi “Glasnost,” the current pace and scope of reforms in Saudi Arabia and about the conflict between progressive elements and the religious establishment. Mr. Lacey was interviewed by phone and email from his base in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by Patrick Ryan during December 2009.
“Saudi Glasnost”
A Conversation with Robert Lacey
[SUSRIS] Thank you for taking time to talk about your new book, “Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia” and your perspectives on recent developments. Let’s start with the struggle in the push and pull of modernity and traditionalism. Can you talk about the current conflict between progressives and the religious establishment?
[Robert Lacey] Well, we’re right in the middle of it at the moment. The creation of KAUST, King Abdullah’s new university that opened this fall, has had a great impact, more rapidly than anyone expected. The reactions for and against gender mixing — the educating of young men and young women side by side on this campus — has provoked some angry debate across the Kingdom.
What you see at the moment is the next stage. SUSRIS has covered Sheikh Al-Shethri, a senior cleric, speaking out against gender mixing, and how he was sacked by the King from his influential position on the Ulema, the Council of Senior Scholars. Since then we’ve seen Sheikh Al-Ghamdi, head of the Hai’a in Mecca, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in the Kingdom, the Hai’a, speaking out for it and praising KAUST. He has been supported by Sheikh Abdul-Rahman Al-Sudais, a much more major figure, one of the imams of the Grand Mosque, who has preached a sermon in support of KAUST. On the other hand, Sheikh Salih Al-Fawzan, a senior member of the Ulema has written a letter in the opposite direction, supporting Al-Shethri — and Al-Fawzan has not been sacked.
The liberals here are taking great heart from the way in which conservative religious figures are fighting each other so bitterly. There’s the feeling that change is coming in this area. But like everything in the Kingdom, it is going to take time, and that makes a lot of sense in my opinion. The pattern in tradition-based societies where change goes too fast is often counter-revolution — and then change can go backwards.
Apart from the controversy over the launch of the KAUST and its coeducational policy, there is a very interesting experiment at the other end of the education spectrum, in kindergarten through grade 2. This fall there is a trial of mixed gender elementary schools in 15 private schools for girls that will accept boys, not in the same classrooms but in the same facilities. The experiment is something that has been little noticed — some private kindergartens have quietly been “mixing” for years — but it has the blessing of the new Minister of Education and is an indicator of reforms that lie ahead.
[SUSRIS] What is the impetus for the reforms you talk about?
[Lacey] As I say in my book — and this may be a difficult thing for Americans to take — 9/11 was the best thing that could have happened for the cause of reform in Saudi Arabia, since it showed the tragic consequences of yielding too much power to religious extremists. The Saudis are no better than anyone else at apologizing — you know how we all have friends who can’t actually say “sorry” but nonetheless demonstrate they are sorry through their behavior. Well, that is what is going on now — though, to be sure, these reforms are being primarily pursued for their own sake and for the needs of facing the future.
One of the big challenges, however, will arise when the current surge of higher education produces tens of thousands of new graduates. That’s just a few years away. Will the economy have the jobs for all these educated and innovative, alert, young people who are being taught — many of them in America — to think more independently? The economic cities, the new mega-cities, are supposed to provide the solution; they are supposed to be ready with the jobs for the graduates produced for the “knowledge society.” But for all sorts of reasons the economic cities won’t be ready any time soon. So there’s a danger that the explosion of qualified graduates is going to create dissatisfaction and redundancy. KAUST has surprised everybody with both the speed with which it was completed and the social impact it has had — but that puts the economic cities on their mettle. Either they buck up, or some alternative must be found — and I can’t see what that alternative might be.
[SUSRIS] If developments like KAUST and fights over questions like gender mixing have heartened liberals, do you see the progressive movement as having the initiative at this point?
[Lacey] In the ’80s and ’90s there was government-sponsored conservatism in Saudi Arabia. Now there is government-sponsored liberalism — Saudi ” Glasnost.” So the conservatives are currently on the back foot. But they consider they are fighting for crucial traditional values and they are fighting with pull and with passion. We saw their power this summer with the battle over cinema, and the shutting down of the Jeddah film festival, which had been operating for three years. Every discussion you have with people in Saudi Arabia is about what I call the speedometer. How fast should this car be travelling?
[SUSRIS] What about the “odometer”? How “far” should the car go?
[Lacey] That’s the heart of the matter. Let me tell you there was quite a lot of popular support here recently for the severe punishment handed out to the so-called sex braggart, who boasted about his sex life on television. A lot of Saudis thought he had gone too far. There are many aspects of western culture — particularly its overt sexuality — that most Saudis just don’t want to see happen in the Kingdom.
Take, for example, the appearance in July 2009 of the religious police in one of the north Jeddah beach resorts from which they were previously excluded. That was not imposed from the outside. The Hai’a were requested by senior members of the community who felt that young people were getting out of hand: boys trying to pick up girls, young women dressing provocatively, loud parties and, worst of all, young people who were arrogant and dismissive — the security staff couldn’t cope. So these residents asked to have a religious policeman in the guardhouse to enforce discipline — you don’t play around with the Hai’a. So here’s a change, apparently a step backwards, coming from wealthy and Westernized middle-aged men who don’t like what they see happening, especially around their daughters.
In Riyadh the religious police have declared war on the new fashion fad among young men — low slung jeans that reveal undershorts or even bits of bare backside. It may sound trivial, but it’s an overt and rebellious western fashion statement that offends many Saudis, and it’s often associated with heavy metal T-shirts that carry Satanic images. So the religious police are rounding up young men on the streets and taking them home, and from what I hear, many parents welcome the backup in their own domestic battles with their rebellious teenagers. Isn’t this the sort of thing that local police chiefs used to do quite routinely in small town America?
It’s a reminder that Saudi Arabians want to pick and choose. They are not rejecting the modern world, but they hold this dream that the Islamic holy land — Saudi Arabia — can preserve old fashioned family values. After all, when you look in the Saudi Basic Law — what we would call the Constitution — it’s written there very clearly, that the purpose of the state is to encourage virtue, to discourage vice and also to preserve family values. So if you are going to lay down moral and social “red lines” you have got to have something like the religious police to enforce them. The Hai’a are not some some passing trend or eccentricity in Saudi Arabia. Love ‘em or loathe ‘em, they are right at the heart of what the Kingdom is all about. They have been there from the very beginning. All Saudis complain about the religious police — who likes the school prefects? — but if you then ask them if they’d like to do away with the Hai’a, most of them say “Certainly not.”
[SUSRIS] What concerns are there about the long-term commitment to reforms, especially given the age of the King and the health concerns of the Crown Prince, who only recently returned from a year-long medical hiatus outside the Kingdom?
[Lacey] While the Crown Prince was abroad, the King appointed Prince Naif, the long-serving Minister of Interior, as the Second Deputy Prime Minister and I agree with those who say this puts him in position for the throne behind the Crown Prince. The prospect of “King Naif” has been greeted with dismay by many western observers and by Saudi progressives who fear he will try to set the clock back — but I think the fear is exaggerated.
I have interviewed Prince Naif. He is certainly cautious and suspicious of the Israel-American axis and many aspects of the west — and in that he accurately reflects the instincts of the average Saudi. But he is a thoroughly hard-headed and pragmatic man who gets results. He has a very sophisticated staff of advisers, many of them western-educated to a high level. He has had a particular job to do as Interior Minister, and he has delivered. When I came to the Kingdom thirty years ago, there was a standard question that every journalist asked: “How long do you give the House of Saud?” Well, nobody asks that any more. Prince Naif has been a big factor in keeping his family firmly in control of their realm
And it was Prince Naif, as I revealed in my book, who broke a deadlock among members of the Royal Family deliberating a new electoral system for succession, the Bayaa or Allegiance Institution. You might have expected that one of the inner circle Sudairi princes, like Prince Naif, who already have their own very strong power network inside the family, would have felt threatened by this electoral expansion on the question of succession. But I am told it was Naif who backed King Abdullah on the reform and pushed it through. He is a man who likes to get things done. Look at his role as Minister of the Interior at facilitating and supporting his son Prince Mohammed’s much-praised program for the rehabilitation of radicals. The basis of that program is the implicit admission that the Saudi-Wahhabi system helped produce these extremists and must now try to un-produce them. Prince Naif has since started his own personal equivalent of that, the ambitious new “Mind Security” program which has got very little attention in the West, but which he inaugurated this year and which directly targets religious extremism as a matter of Interior Ministry policy.
We should remember how 20 or 30 years ago Western observers feared the advent of Prince Abdullah. He seemed a dark and rather rough figure who had a considerable military power base in the Saudi Arabian National Guard. Few would have foreseen his role in social, political and economic reforms, his religious interfaith initiative, the national dialogue, more rights for women, a women deputy education minister being named. You would never have forecast these things for Prince Abdullah. In the same fashion, Naif may convey a “backwoods” image, but that is in the context of the whole family’s shrewd instinct for balance and their track record of survival. They are like a huge one-party state — not democratic, but highly skilled at reflecting and juggling different interest groups. Many religious conservatives are reassured to see Prince Naif so prominent in the Saudi power structure — and at the moment that is actually helping the acceptance of reform.
[SUSRIS] You first wrote about Saudi Arabia in 1982. “The Kingdom” was banned in the Kingdom. Tell us about the prospects for your new book in that respect, and what you see happening with media openness in a general sense.
[Lacey] Well, “Inside the Kingdom” has already been banned in Bahrain. I asked my publisher what they didn’t like about it and the answer was the Bahrainis hadn’t read it. Just the fact that it was about politics and Saudi Arabia and the Royal Family, meant they weren’t going to touch it — more Catholic than the Pope. As far as the Kingdom itself is concerned, we are waiting to hear if permission will be given to distribute it. We shall just have to see what happens. In Britain we have the concept of the “Loyal Opposition,” and I hope that the quite numerous criticisms in my book will be viewed as friendly and constructive dialogue.
On the question of media openness I would say that the voices being heard in the Kingdom these days surprise many visitors. We’re seeing a lot of it at the moment in the reporting and opinion on the Jeddah floods of a few weeks ago. The coverage has literally opened floodgates of critical discussion in the press, focusing on corruption, incompetence, and mismanagement in a very frank way.
The Saudi press is filled with young journalists who investigate human rights abuses, young girls being married to older men, abuse and exploitation of immigrant workers. The press does not criticize the government directly — that is taboo now and in the foreseeable future –- but in these areas of social concern and human rights abuses young Saudi journalists go for it as freely as their Western counterparts. I have Saudi friends who went off to Dubai and elsewhere in the Gulf to work there thinking there would be more press freedom. They have returned saying there is less freedom, that there’s more interference in the other Gulf states than there is in the Saudi press. That’s not to say that there are not the very well-defined “red lines” that people know they do not cross. But there’s a constant and very exciting level of semi-private social discussion in the tradition of the “dewaniya” where men, and sometimes women, gather to discuss and debate. People are getting more outspoken and I think that is permeating the whole society.
[SUSRIS] You mentioned the recent flooding in Jeddah that claimed over 100 lives. As a resident of that city and observer of the local reporting of the catastrophe what are your impressions of the reactions in the Kingdom?
[Lacey] I was caught in the rain on the very first day. It was indeed a ferocious and frightful downpour. When you see an underpass from a brand new highway — something built in the last year or so — turn into a swimming pool because there’s no drainage or because the drainage wasn’t working, that indicts a whole range of people from municipal officials to the private contractors. The weather may have been a “God given” catastrophe, but the lack of human preparedness and practical measures was a failing for which specific men were responsible.
The traditional response would be for the King to promise money to the victims — and he has. But he has also accepted responsibility himself, for the fact that it happened on his watch. The challenge is to make sure all those angry criticisms and fine words are translated into real action.
You may recall the fire at a Mecca girls school in 2002 which resulted in 14 deaths, some a result of overzealous religious guardians who got in the way because the girls were not wearing correct Islamic dress as they fled. That tragedy produced results in terms of new leadership in women’s education. The hope is that the Jeddah tragedy will, in a similar way, produce change — though that is by no means certain. A young friend living in Mecca tells me that in the weeks since the floods he has encountered conservative preachers who are taking the microphone to give short, informal sermons, just two or three minutes, after the mid-afternoon prayer. They seem to be delivering a quietist message in which they instruct people not to be angry at ‘others’ and to accept what has happened as fate. They don’t seem to be organized, but who knows where they are coming from?
Next – Saudi Arabia’s leadership in the region and the world and its relationship with the United States.
About Robert Lacey
Robert Lacey is the author of “Majesty,” the classic biography of Queen Elizabeth II. A distinguished journalist with a love of history, he wrote the series “Great Tales from English History,” and was co-author of the best-selling “Year 1000.” In 1979, he moved with his family to Saudi Arabia for eighteen months to research “The Kingdom,” his penetrating study of the country’s complex and often paradoxical culture, which was banned in Saudi Arabia. For the past three years, Robert has been based in Jeddah and Riyadh, gathering material for this sequel — a completely new book which relates the Saudi role in the years of terror.
Source: InsidetheKingdom.net
About the Book – “Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia”
Commentary from Robert Lacey — “The Saudi Enigma” – “Larry King Live blog”
“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil-doer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky — “The Possessed”
I chose these words to open my new book Inside the Kingdom, because I needed to understand the tragedy of 9/11 and the nation that produced no less than fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on those planes. Saudi Arabia has never been a spot that wins much favor in the west. How can you love a country that charges you $70 or more for a product that costs less than $10 to get out of the ground – and then gives you terrorists as well?
But I wanted to go beyond that – to find out how the culture and religion of a society could go so wrong as to produce such a poisonous boiling-over of intolerance and hatred. In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist – its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their government on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops closed for prayer five times a day, executions in the street – and let us not even get started on the status of women. For many the Kingdom remains one of the planet’s enduring – and, for some, quite offensive – enigmas. [for more of this commentary Click Here]
..for the book:
“Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia“
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