[nasional_list] [ppiindia] The House of Saud's eternal dilemma
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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GC01Ak02.html
Mar 1, 2005
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 rights reserved. Please contact
us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)
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