There are signs that Saudi Arabia, long bound by rigid social norms and an austere interpretation of Islam, has begun to take the first tentative steps towards real reform
IT WAS SOMETIME after midday prayers on February 14th. Along the pristine streets of Riyadh, the Saudi religious police known as muttawa were busy checking on florists and gift shops to make sure no one was selling red roses or anything else that could be construed as flouting the national ban on Valentine’s Day.
I was sitting in the office of one of Saudi Arabia’s estimated 5,000 princes, listening as he bemoaned the glacial pace of change in this, one of the most conservative societies on Earth. He had been educated in the US and Europe in the late 1960s, returning home fired by the ideas then shaping the West. Over the next four decades his idealism would gradually be replaced by – if not quite cynicism – then something approaching tempered resignation. Suddenly the prince’s phone rang. It was a friend telling him to turn on the state-owned television channel.
What the dour-faced TV presenter announced that afternoon was the greatest reshuffle Saudi Arabia’s mildewed establishment had witnessed in years. The octogenarian King Abdullah swept a broom through his sclerotic government, naming several reformers to key posts in the cabinet and judicial system; ousting hardline leaders from religious bodies including the increasingly controversial muttawa; and appointing the first female deputy minister for education, the highest political position ever held by a woman in Saudi Arabia.
For some it was the long awaited promise of far-reaching reform. For others it marked change they never expected to see. “Not in my lifetime at least,” said one female professor and long-time activist. But there were also some for which it signified a dangerous lurch away from the pillars of tradition they hold dear.
Even before last month’s shake-up of officialdom, there were signs that Saudi Arabia, a desert kingdom long bound by rigid social norms and an austere interpretation of Islam, was slowly, almost imperceptibly in the eyes of the outside world, beginning to embrace change.
You could see it in the list of tentative firsts Saudis have observed in recent years – the first female pilot in a country where women are not allowed to drive; the first public film screening in a nation where cinemas are prohibited; the first concert in a public setting for a mixed gender audience despite the kingdom’s strict code of separation between men and women who are not related; even the first all-girl rock band – four college students whose single Pinocchio became an underground hit last year, with hundreds of Saudis downloading the song from the group’s MySpace page.
You could read about it in an emboldened national press – where many of the journalists are young Saudi women – or online on the scores of vibrant and often provocative blogs that make up Saudi cyberspace. You could sense it in the buzz created by Princess Ameera, the glamorous wife of Saudi billionaire tycoon Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, in January when a photograph of her unveiled appeared in a local newspaper to accompany an interview in which she declared that she was ready to drive.
And most of all you hear it in conversations with the very people who hold the keys to the kingdom’s future – young Saudis.
Saudi Arabia is one of the youngest nations in the world, with some 75 per cent of the population under 30 and 60 per cent under 21. This generation – fed by the internet, satellite TV and mobile communications – and its knowledge of a world beyond Saudi Arabia’s borders presents an unprecedented challenge to the status quo.
In 2005, Rajaa al-Sanea, then a 24-year-old dental student, published her first novel, Girls of Riyadh. A candid telling of the lives, loves and longings of four young women living in the Saudi capital, it caused a sensation at home and throughout the Arab world. "Everyone knows that Saudi Arabia is a very conservative society; that females are covered from head to toe and they are not allowed to do this or that. Few people know that there are others who are looking for change and want more rights," she says.
“Nowadays many are getting educated outside Saudi Arabia and they are exposed to other societies through the internet. We see what’s going on with these societies and we want to improve and change. These are the people I wanted to write about.”
FOUAD AL FARHAN is one of Saudi Arabia’s most celebrated bloggers. Last year he was held for more than four months without charge after using his blog as a platform to call for political reforms. “Before the internet and satellite TV, we were so closed as a society,” he told me when we met at a cafe in Jeddah, a city on the Red Sea long considered the country’s most cosmopolitan. “The only information available was through school, the mosque and the media, all of which were tightly controlled. This generation is totally different – all points of view are available to us.”
And that generation, as it negotiates a path between tradition and participation in an increasingly globalised and interconnected world, challenges the stereotypes often held by outsiders, says Hind Al Juhani, a spirited 23-year-old graphic designer. I met Hind, her finance student sister Nora, and her mother Henan, at Andalus, a popular book-lined cafe owned by Ahmad Al Shugairi, the thirtysomething TV preacher whose hip style and moderate, inclusive approach to Islam has garnered a huge following among young Saudis. “Saudis are characterised as either extremists or those who want to be completely Westernised and liberal, but that leaves out all the people in between who, while respecting other cultures, want to have their own unique Saudi identity,” she says.
Hind will soon leave for postgraduate study in Leeds as part of the King Abdullah scholarship programme. She notes that women far outnumber men in this year’s crop of scholars and argues, like her sister, that the rights Saudi women seek now were present in the first days of Islam: “When we let our culture and traditions get confused with our religion, then we have a problem.”
Change, all three agree, is inevitable – “My daughters will definitely drive in this country,” says Henan – but they stress that it has to come from within.
That change must come from within Saudi society, and slowly, is something you will hear from most reform-minded Saudis. “No Ataturkian method will work here,” as the disillusioned prince put it.
Maha al-Faleh, a woman in her early 20s who works in the recruitment department of a Riyadh bank, echoes the views of many. “We are a relatively young country and we are a tribal country so you can’t change things quickly – otherwise there would be chaos and things would fall apart,” she says. “We have our history and our religion . . . there are a lot of barriers when it comes to changing mentalities. The world must understand that we need to fight our battles in our own way.”
Not everybody was heartened by the possibilities that beckon following King Abdullah’s raft of new appointments last month. A vast swathe of Saudi society still clings to its conservative ways, fearing that change will mean the creeping Westernisation of a unique culture and identity anchored proudly in the land from which Islam emerged. “I support these big steps but I have met a lot of people who don’t,” says Ibrahim Al Kabaa, a finance student at Prince Sultan University in Riyadh. “They want everything to remain as it is, according to tradition and religion.”
One of those with deep misgivings over the changes stirring in Saudi Arabia is Soliman Al Buthi, manager of the Riyadh Municipality's environmental health department. Al Buthi, whose office bookshelves feature Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truthas well as countless tomes on the "war on terror", is battling to overturn a US government decision naming him a "specially designated global terrorist" for his role in the operation of a Saudi-based Islamic charity known as Al Haramain.
“What has happened since 9/11 is the West, and America in particular, is forcing things inside a conservative society that go against that society itself,” he says. “The changes happening in my country right now are not for the benefit of our society but to satisfy others on the outside. I tell you if there was a referendum on these changes, the majority would go against them because the people of this country are conservative.”
WHETHER THE FORCES of reform will trump the forces of conservatism in Saudi Arabia is a question mulled over by Muna AbuSulayman, a thirtysomething woman whose life in many ways epitomises the strides Saudi women have made, and the challenges they still face.
Once a co-host of one of the Middle East’s most popular talk shows, Muna was the first Saudi woman to be appointed a goodwill ambassador for the UN’s development programme and she is executive director of the Kingdom Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s business empire.
Muna is divorced and raising her children as a single working mother – no mean feat, she admits, in a country like Saudi Arabia. Only some 5 per cent of Saudi women work outside the home, and most remain bound by the strictures of a deeply patriarchal society and a legal system that treats them as little more than children.
“In any society there is always a push and pull between the conservative and liberal sides. In the end, a society will have to bow to the majority because the majority makes the rules,” says Muna. “Right now, what we don’t know is who constitutes the majority in Saudi Arabia, and to a certain extent I think we are afraid to ask that question. The conservatives are afraid they have lost ground, and the liberals are afraid that they haven’t as much ground as they thought they did.”
Then there are those who fit somewhere in the middle. “I would like to see my children grow up to enjoy more freedom than I have,” says Hisham (32), a retail manager in Riyadh. “But I don’t want freedom like you have in Europe or the US. There has to be some limits. I want freedom that at the same time allows us preserve what makes us unique.”
Others admit a sense of confusion, and even conflict, as Saudi Arabia charts its way through the 21st century. “There is a conflict between my head and my heart,” a middle-aged Saudi man who cheered King Abdullah’s decrees last month told me. “In my head I think I am more like a Westerner, but my heart pulls me in another direction.”
All eyes are now on King Abdullah’s new appointees. “The biggest question is what comes next,” says Khalid Al Dakhil, a sociologist at King Saud University. “These moves are simply laying down the infrastructure to make the system more amenable to change and reform . . . and sending the message that religion should not be a hindrance or obstacle to change.”
Those pressing for more are well aware that King Abdullah is in his mid-80s, and that the princes in line for the throne include several who are politically aligned with religious conservatives. Whoever succeeds the king may not be so inclined to continue on the shaky path to further reform. Mindful of this, some campaigners believe even the hard won victories of recent years should not be viewed as irrevocable.
“The shift has been phenomenal but just because we can do something now, we should not take it for granted that it will be like that from now on,” says Fatin Bundagji, who founded a women’s training programme when she worked at the Jeddah chamber of commerce. “There is always that cultural conflict going on within our society.”
This series was supported with a grant from the Simon Cumbers Media Challenge Fund
A RELIGIOUS-POLITICAL PACT THAT HAS LASTED OVER 200 YEARS
More than two centuries ago, Sheikh ibn Abd al Wahhab emerged from the deserts of Arabia with a mission to “purify” Islam as it was then practiced in the region. He made a pact with a tribal ruler named Muhammad Ibn Saud who pledged to support the puritanical preacher and his teachings. The sheikh’s austere interpretation of Islam swept central Arabia and later became known to the world as Wahhabism. The fortunes of the Saud family would ebb and flow over the centuries but that religious-political alliance endured. King Abdulaziz Al Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, breathed new life into the age-old pact, agreeing that legal, social and cultural matters would be decided by Wahhabi clerics while the royal family would take care of politics, security and the economy. Today the contours of that relationship remain intact but the covenant has been strained by the pressures of modernisation and terrorism.
The 9/11 attacks, and the revelation that 15 of the 19 responsible were Saudis – acting under another Saudi, Osama bin Laden – shook the country, as did a subsequent series of militant strikes within Saudi Arabia that left hundreds dead. Many Saudis began to wonder if some of the ideas on which their society was built – the notions of purity coupled with intolerance towards other sects and faiths – had contributed to an extremist worldview that had then led to terrorism. This, argue several activists in Saudi Arabia, was the greatest catalyst for the change their country is now experiencing.