dispatches
Inside Saudi Arabia
"This is one of the only countries in the world where the government wants change more than the people do."
Updated Friday, April 18, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
From: Nicholas Schmidle
Subject: Blogging in Support of the Saudi Government
Posted Thursday, April 17, 2008, at 4:00 PM ET
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia—In the pre-Internet age, Raed al-Saeed would be punching above his weight. Last month, the 33-year-old Saudi posted a six-minute film on his blog that has thrust him into a millennial debate previously waged by only mullahs and popes: Can religion be evil? "My goal was not to make me or my blog famous," said al-Saeed. His intentions were more subtle: "Don't be brainwashed into judging a religion by one video made by someone who hates that religion." I met al-Saeed last week in the grassy courtyard of a luxury hotel in Riyadh, where we sat around a wooden picnic table in the late afternoon while songbirds crooned from nearby trees. Al-Saeed wore a black T-shirt and baggy blue jeans. A surfboard-shaped Bluetooth device poked out of his right ear.
Al-Saeed's film, called Schism, opens with a series of militant-sounding passages from the Bible (including 1 Samuel 15:3 and Deuteronomy 20:16), followed by footage of Christians saying and doing cruel, irrational, and inexcusable things in the name of God and country. For instance, there is an audio clip of President George W. Bush describing the war on terror as a "crusade"; excerpts of adolescent evangelicals pledging to die for God in the 2006 documentary Jesus Camp; and video of coalition soldiers beating teenage boys in Iraq as their colleague, laughing, rolls the tape. When we met last week, al-Saeed's film had been viewed 3,000 times; a week later, the number had jumped to 250,000.
Al-Saeed insists that he didn't make the movie to malign Christians or to exacerbate differences between Muslims and Christians. But he felt it was his duty to defend his fellow Muslims against the blatantly anti-Islamic film produced by Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders. The Dutchman's film, Fitna (which means "schism" in Arabic), takes belligerent-sounding verses from the Quran and couples them with Hezbollah fighters marching and saluting like Nazis, al-Qaida henchmen sawing the heads off foreigners in Iraq, and imams swearing jihad against the West. Wilders implies that the Quran, which Muslims consider the literal word of God, sanctions the murder that some extremist Muslims commit in the name of Allah. "I got angry and pissed off at people who see all Muslims like that," said al-Saeed. And he wasn't the only one. At the United Nations earlier this week, several Muslim countries protested Wilders' film, and, in scenes reminiscent of the ones that followed the 2005 publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper, demonstrations broke out in cities across the Islamic world.
The Internet is often praised for its ability to connect hundreds of millions of people around the world. But al-Saeed's blog exposed another dimension of the Web: how a single, husky Saudi who lives with his parents can speak for masses around the world—in this case, 1.2 billion Muslims.
There are an estimated 500 blogs in Saudi Arabia. They create a thriving source of information online, despite the best censoring efforts of the country's conservative religious establishment. Censorship here is intrusive, though inconsistent. Upon arriving, I conducted an informal study and found the that Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, YouTube clips of public beheadings in the kingdom, and Esquire magazine were all blocked, while the full line of Victoria's Secret "Angels" models was on display. Of course, hackers, bloggers, and other computer-savvy types can always elude the censors and break through firewalls without being tracked. According to Dr. Abdulrahman al-Hadlaq, who heads the Counter-Radicalization Unit at the Ministry of Interior, young Saudi extremists are increasingly recruited into terrorist networks through the Internet. On one popular DVD, titled Secrets of the Mujahideen, jihadis share tips for penetrating pesky Internet filters and maintaining anonymity.
Saudi bloggers comment on a range of topics, from Islam to economics to the growing number of foreign workers in the kingdom, most of whom are from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. (Officially, the government estimates that slightly more than 6 million of the country's 27 million residents are expat laborers, though the percentage could be much higher.) The Saudi government has never come out and said what bloggers can and cannot say, so most of them learn as they go. Fouad al-Farhan, a 32-year-old blogger, learned the hard way when he was arrested and detained last December. Neither the police nor the Interior Ministry have officially charged al-Farhan, though many assume that his criticisms of the kingdom's harsh detainee policy for alleged terrorists landed him in trouble. He has spent at least two months in solitary confinement. Authorities blocked his blog and other sites dedicated to his case (such as freefoaud.com). Human Rights Watch and the Committee to Protect Journalists have repeatedly raised al-Farhan's case, though he remains behind bars.
But not all bloggers are fighting the establishment. "There are two kinds of bloggers here," al-Saeed explained. "Those who are pro-Foaud, and those like me. I blog, but I support my government. So people charge me with working for the secret police." In particular, al-Saeed supports the vision of King Abdullah. Abdullah took over in 2005 and initiated a program of economic and social liberalization. I asked al-Saeed whether Abdullah could succeed in imposing change on society from above, especially one as traditional as Saudi Arabia. "It is impossible to make everyone happy," he said. Some liberals accuse Abdullah of moving too slowly, while some conservatives accuse him of moving too quickly. Ultimately, al-Saeed suggested, the king reacts to the will of the people. "He will do whatever the majority wants."
As the afternoon wore on, waiters hustled between the wooden tables, setting out placemats and silverware, and an exterminator wielding an industrial-sized fumigator blew clouds of noxious gas meant to wipe out the insect population before dinner. I asked al-Saeed whether he felt free to speak his mind in cyberspace. "I talk about wanting more freedom of speech on my blog," he said, "but there are limits to freedom of speech everywhere." A cloud of bug-killing gas floated in our direction, and we jumped from our seats. Before we parted, al-Saeed added, "In America, you can't talk about the Jews. And in Saudi Arabia, there are limits to freedom of speech, too."
From: Nicholas Schmidle
Subject: What High Oil Prices Can Do for a Country
Posted Friday, April 18, 2008, at 7:09 AM ET
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia—From the outside, Effat College doesn't seem like a bellwether of change. The all-girls school in Jeddah, a port city on the coast of the Red Sea, is rimmed by unscalable high walls and an empty parking lot, resembling the scene of a freshly departed circus in Middle America. In many ways, the college's exterior illustrates conventional misperceptions—closed, drab, and unwelcoming—of modern Saudi Arabia. Perhaps the only thing less inviting is the bold, red lettering at the top of the form handed to visitors as they enter the kingdom, which reads: "WARNING: Death to Drug Traffickers."
But inside the walls of Effat College, female students stroll along the campus pathways with their heads and faces uncovered when male visitors are not around. Some of the students even play sports—something traditionally off-limits to young women in the kingdom. Two weeks after my visit, the college was due to host a basketball tournament, fielding squads from all over Saudi Arabia and even one from Beirut. I asked Dr. Rania Mohammad Ibrahim, an Egyptian professor at the college, if women shooting hoops didn't provoke the country's conservative clerics. "We must tread calmly," she admitted. "We are moving forward slowly, but steadily."
Saudi Arabia is considered one of the world's worst violators of human rights. International organizations regularly chastise the kingdom for its mistreatment of liberals, journalists, religious minorities, and especially women. In February, a U.N. report concerning women's rights in the Arab world found severe inequalities between men and women, highlighted by women's inability to seek legal protection from violent husbands—or to even drive a car.
But Saudi society is also in the midst of a minor social revolution, as several faculty members at Effat College could attest. Effat College was founded in 1999, in honor of Queen Effat, the wife of the late King Faisal. Faisal ruled from 1964 to 1975. The current king, Abdullah, fashions himself as a reformer, much like his half-brother Faisal. Soon after taking power in 2005, Abdullah flew to the Vatican to the meet the pope, and more recently he called for interfaith dialogue between Jews and Muslims. Such a statement is not taken lightly in Saudi Arabia, where anti-Semitism is rife. (One night at a dinner in Riyadh, a Saudi man informed me that Jews had funded Christopher Columbus' expedition to America.) "This is one of the only countries in the world where the government wants change more than the people do," said Faisal bin Abdur Rahman bin Muammar, secretary-general of the King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue.
If a government wants to implement wide-ranging reforms, it needs money. Fortunately for Abdullah, there's no shortage of that. With oil at $115 a barrel, and Saudi Arabia holding the world's largest oil reserves, Abdullah is flush with cash. (A gallon of gasoline costs around 73 cents here.) And yet, rather than relying solely on energy revenues for the future, the kingdom is striving to diversify. The Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority champions the slogan "10 in 10"—that is, to become the 10th most competitive economy in the world by 2010. In its debut on the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report this year, Saudi Arabia ranked 35th, surpassing Italy and Portugal. And in the 2008 "Doing Business" report, sponsored in part by the World Bank, Saudi Arabia ranked 23rd in the "ease of doing business" category, beating out Spain, Austria, and Israel. American economic gurus have taken note, too; Michael Dell of Dell Computers recently lunched at SAGIA's office.
Saudi Arabia's economic development depends on the labor of foreign workers. An estimated 27 million people live in the kingdom, of which at least 6 million are migrants from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. Saudis have always despised manual labor, perhaps because of confidence stemming from their oil wealth, or perhaps because the concept of royalty pervades society. Many Saudis live as if the world were their five-star hotel, with bellboys and waiters and maids always eager to please. In 1962, the kingdom abolished slavery, though human rights organizations argue that expat workers are subjected to inhuman conditions today. One Saudi man in his late 20s confessed that, should he take a scholarship to study overseas, he would end up spending thousands of dollars a year on underwear. At his home in Riyadh, his family kept a Filipino cook, driver, and maid who washed his briefs. "I don't know how to cook or to clean my clothes," he told me. "So, whenever I am in the United States, I just wear my underwear once … and then throw them away."
Saudis have had a tough time studying in the United States since 15 of their countrymen flew airplanes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Though glimmers of progress appear throughout the kingdom, the modern Saudi state is nonetheless founded on a strategic marriage between despotism and Islamic fundamentalism. A contract between the House of Saud and Mohammad bin Abdul Wahhab in the late 18th century made Wahhabism the state ideology. The agreement was signed in Dir'aiyah, a village of mud-spackled homes barely an hour outside Riyadh.
On the way to Dir'aiyah one afternoon, our car pulled beside a minivan loaded with female students. All the girls wore full veils over their heads and across their faces. Only their mascara-lined eyes shined through a slit of black cloth. One, sporting raspberry-colored bangles around her wrists, and another, her fingernails painted bright yellow, waved, smiled, and blew kisses in our direction. I assumed, from their conservative dress and the dilapidated minivan, that they were returning to households considerably more modest than the ones Effat College students went home to. Perhaps some of these girls, after a long day of hitting the books, were heading back to abusive homes.
But I could guess that few of the girls' mothers had the chance to go to school. Maybe this was the kind of slow, steady change Dr. Ibrahim referred to. Regardless of the pace, however, the girls' smiles and kisses reflected happiness. Oil, when it is priced at $115 a barrel, can do that for a country.
Nicholas Schmidle is a fellow at the New America Foundation and is currently writing a book about Pakistan. He traveled to Saudi Arabia this month as part of a New America Foundation delegation.Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2189366/
