TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/092490/0924012.000

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                ╝C                                                            THE GULF, Page 38

COVER STORIES

Lifting The Veil


A secretive and deeply conservative realm, Saudi Arabia suddenly
finds itself on the sword edge of change

By LISA BEYER -- Reported by William Dowell/Cairo, Dean
Fischer/ Riyadh and Christopher Ogden/Washington


    Under ordinary circumstances, it would have been
unthinkable. A group of Saudi commoners telling their prince
outright that the country needed to be shaken up? Preposterous.
But these are extraordinary times, as the small group of
businessmen pointed out during a meeting two weeks ago with
Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh and younger brother and
confidant of King Fahd. "This is the biggest challenge we have
ever faced," said one entrepreneur, mindful of the menacing
forces of Saddam Hussein gathered just 300 miles to the north.
Said another, summoning his courage: "We have to confront our
internal issues."

    Two matters, the group asserted, demanded urgent attention.
First, the nation's defenses must be stiffened. Prince Salman
nodded in agreement. Second, the businessmen said with some
trepidation, the people of Saudi Arabia must have a greater say
in the affairs of the land. The prince, reported one
participant, listened to this second petition, "but he didn't
like what he heard."

    It was remarkable that he heard it at all. The candor of
Salman's visitors was a manifestation of how the tremor from
Kuwait has shaken the fixtures of Saudi society, one of the
world's most conservative realms. For the first time since the
visionary warrior-statesman Abdul Aziz, generally known as Ibn
Saud, proclaimed his kingdom in 1932, Saudi Arabia has been
confronted by the alarming threat of conquest. In coping with
that challenge, the country and its 14.5 million inhabitants
find themselves poised on the sword edge of change. The
modernization and enrichment of Saudi life produced by the
oil-price boom of the 1970s and '80s may one day look like a
mere twitch compared with the convulsions to come. "This impact
will be greater," says a senior adviser to the Saudi
government. "These changes won't just break the crockery but
the furniture and the walls too."

    Ripping the veil off their closely shrouded ties with the
U.S., the Saudis offered their territory as the base for the
greatest concentration of American troops since the Vietnam
War. A land that forbids its women to drive, to travel
unaccompanied, to wear Western garb or to expose anything more
than a scant flash of eyes and cheekbones is now host to
thousands of rifle-toting, jeep-driving female G.I.s clad in
fatigues. A country that generally bars Jews from crossing its
borders and that prohibits the open practice of any religion
other than Islam serves as temporary home to hundreds of
American Jewish soldiers and scores of U.S. military chaplains.
And a nation that used to allow no more than 20 reporters a
year to visit has suddenly found itself swamped by 800
journalists in the past seven weeks, all eager to explore the
kingdom's secretive ways.

    The foreign defenders have saved Saudi Arabia from Saddam
so far, but at the same time the influx of troops has
underscored the country's vulnerability. Like the boy who
called the bluff on the emperor's new clothes, the Iraqi leader
made it plain that Saudi Arabia was not quite the muscular Arab
power it appeared to be. "Saddam showed that we are a paper
tiger," notes an economist in Riyadh. "Our ability to defend
ourselves is a joke." That realization augurs a revamping of
the Saudi military. Less easily fixed is the breach of the
implicit contract between the princes and their lieges. Saudi
citizens may come to realize that if the monarch cannot ensure
their security, perhaps he ought not to be the only person
running things.

    So far, the royal family has faced remarkably little
challenge. In the early years, Abdul Aziz struggled to hold
together a scattered and widely disparate population of tribes.
But he and his successors -- sons Saud, Faisal, Khalid and now
Fahd -- were greatly aided in their task by the lucky presence
beneath their feet of the world's largest reservoir of oil. The
revenues from black crude -- which reached a high of $113
billion in 1981 and this year are expected to top $60 billion
-- have enabled the House of Saud to create a modern state
almost overnight and, in the process, buy the continued fealty
of its subjects. First-class medical care is free. So is
education from kindergarten to postgraduate levels. Each Saudi
family receives 750 sq. yds. of free land and a 30-year
interest-free loan of $80,000 to build a house on it.
Entrepreneurs get huge interest-free loans to start businesses.
And no one pays taxes. "A Saudi," King Fahd noted recently,
"has to be very unlucky, very stupid and very lazy not to do
well."

    While embracing modernity, the government has assiduously
eschewed its usual counterpart, Westernization. The House of
Saud has clung tenaciously to Wahhabism, the puritanical strain
of Sunni Islam that was the driving force of Abdul Aziz's
victorious Ikhwan (brethren) movement. The royal family, as
well as most Saudis, believe Wahhabi fervor unifies the
kingdom's diverse tribes. Though King Fahd is known not to
relish meeting his subjects, he devotes an entire day each
week, Monday, to conferring with the ulama, the country's
religious scholars.

    In keeping with the Wahhabi tradition, liquor, pornography
and gambling are forbidden. Movies and dancing are also not
permitted. Videos, books and publications are heavily censored;
copies of this issue of TIME, for example, are certain to be
banned from the kingdom. The Saudis enforce Islamic laws of
justice to the letter. In the city squares, the hands of
thieves are chopped off, adulterers are stoned to death,
murderers and rapists are beheaded, and lesser offenders are
flogged.

    The 1970s produced a few sprouts of freedom. Women appeared
on TV for the first time, and educational opportunities for
them were expanded. But the overthrow of the Westernizing Shah
of Iran by the Ayatullah Khomeini's followers in 1979 froze the
budding trend toward liberalization. Later that year, the royal
family was shocked when 250 armed religious extremists occupied
the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Their defeat took two weeks and cost
229 lives. Suddenly the regime became more devout. Executions
were stepped up. And the mutawa, the religious police, gained
greater influence. Its members patrol the streets carrying
slender sticks and striking transgressors, such as women who
show too much skin or shopkeepers who don't close their
shutters quickly enough for the five-times-a-day prayer
sessions required of all Muslims.

    While keeping the lid on personal liberties, the House of
Saud has also held on tightly to its monopoly on power. Within
the Saud clan, which includes 5,000 princes, there is
considerable consultation. Still, government is a closed shop.
There is not a single elected official and not a single
political party.

    Saudis do have access to their leaders, even to the King,
through the majlis, a regularly scheduled consultation. In
these sessions, held throughout the kingdom, subjects petition
the royals for favors; they might, for example, ask for money
to send a sick relative abroad for medical treatment or for the
mediation of a land dispute. In a complex and modern society,
a handful of senior princes, no matter how conscientious,
cannot possibly contend with the myriad demands of their
subjects. Nonetheless, even the kingdom's small knot of
reformists do not want to depose the House of Saud. "The royal
family is important for the stability of the country," says a
liberal intellectual. "But we do want a parliament."

    In 1980 Fahd proposed creating a Consultative Assembly of
appointed members. He even built an imposing marble-and-glass
chamber for it. But then he waffled on establishing the
assembly, and now the building stands vacant on the grounds of
the King's al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh. In any case, such a
body would not satisfy the nascent band of dissenters. "That's
merely a halfway house," says an intellectual.

    Even if the royals do retain their undiluted authority, many
Saudis would like to see curbs on their abuses of privilege.
Paying huge commissions to princes is the price of doing
business in the kingdom. "They already receive allowances from
the government that allow them to lead easy lives," complains
a prominent businessman, "and yet they shake us down."

    Nepotism is rife even in the armed forces. "Every commander
has some link to the royal family," notes Anthony Cordesman,
Washington's foremost expert on the Saudi military. "Loyalty
to the House of Saud is the critical factor, not military
proficiency." According to U.S. advisers, many of the princely
pilots fly only when they want to. During scrambles early in
the crisis, a discouraging proportion of them called in sick.

    On top of this, the 65,700-man military is simply too small.
Pentagon experts reckon the country should have a standing army
of at least 100,000. Fahd's family has been leery of a powerful
military; for internal security it relies on the 35,000-man
National Guard, a tightly knit organization based on tribal
loyalties. Still, the government has moved to expand the
regular military. Earlier this month, Fahd asked for
volunteers. Thousands of Saudis responded, displaying a degree
of patriotism not often seen in the heterogeneous state.

    More vocal than the calls for political and military reform
are pleas for social change, especially for women. With an
increasing number of women attaining university degrees,
complaints of meager career opportunities are rising. Because
Wahhabism forbids the free mixing of the sexes, educated women
are mainly confined to jobs in teaching, nursing and social
services that do not put them in contact with men. "We have got
to change," says a well-educated Saudi woman in Dhahran. "Some
fear that we are like sponges that would soak up the negative
with the positive from the West. But it is only by being
educated and exposed that we are going to find our own
identity."

    Given the pressing demands of the current crisis, King Fahd
has asked women to volunteer to perform "human services and
medical services." This, he added, would be in the context of
"fully preserving" Islamic values. Still, say some Saudi
watchers, men and women will inevitably be thrown together in
the workplace, just as American men and women were during the
World War II mobilization.

    Few Saudis are interested in lessening the rigors of
justice. Even liberals tend to believe the country's methods
deter crime better than those of the West. The prohibitions on
drinking and other vices do not rankle much. Many simply get
around them by leading double lives: pious in public, more
freewheeling at home and on overseas forays. Bootleg liquor is
easily available. The euphemism for home-brew whiskey is
"brown," while gin is called "white"; at parties people will
say, "I'll have some brown in a Coke," or "I'll have some white
in a Sprite."

    One area in which binds have already been loosened is the
media. For days, the local press was not even allowed to report
the invasion of Kuwait. But now they have the unprecedented
freedom to blast Iraq, to record the schism in the Arab world
and to report on the troubles the P.L.O. has created for itself
by supporting Saddam. These liberties, however, have not been
extended to reports on domestic affairs.

    Some Saudi liberals seek U.S. support for their campaign for
change. "We hope the American presence is not just protection
for the status quo," says a businessman. "We assume it will
bring an improvement in the integrity of the government." From
Washington's viewpoint, however, pushing Fahd and family down
the fast track to Westernization and democratization is a
likely prescription for a Shah-like disaster. Swift
liberalizations could easily stir religious extremists to
revolt. "If there's an internal threat to the kingdom," says
a U.S. expert on Saudi Arabia, "it's from fundamentalists on
the right, not liberalizers on the left."

    Speculation that Saudi Arabia will be quickly transformed
by the influence of all those Americans on its soil is probably
also misconceived. In recent decades Saudi Arabia has absorbed
several hundred thousand Westerners, many of them oil-industry
experts, without being significantly changed by their presence.
One reason is that the foreigners have been kept secluded in
luxurious fenced-in compounds that look remarkably like
American suburbs.

    Similarly, great pains have been taken to isolate the
American troops from the Saudi public and minimize cultural
clashes. Alcohol and pornography are forbidden to the
Americans. Their bases are located away from cities and towns,
and when they must venture into settlements, they are under
orders to wear civilian clothing and to go unarmed when
possible. Violations of this rule have evoked complaints from
the Saudis, though both sides are eager to downplay such
frictions.

    Still, the huge American troop presence cannot help jolting
Saudi composure. Says an intimate of the royal decision makers:
"They know you can't get into bed with an elephant without a
shock to the system." That is especially so now that the affair
is out in the open. In the past the Saudis insisted on an "over
the horizon" policy toward the U.S. -- they wanted protection
but preferred that it be invisible. Faced with Saddam's
legions, Fahd quickly changed his mind. Even as U.S. Secretary
of Defense Dick Cheney flew to Riyadh immediately after the
invasion of Kuwait, Fahd conferred with key royals and decided
to accept American troops if Cheney made a convincing case.
When the Defense Secretary said President Bush was prepared to
help defend the kingdom, Fahd replied, "That's what I thought.
Come."

    In addition to shoving Riyadh decisively into the Western
camp, the gulf crisis has forced the Saudis to rethink
relations with their fellow Arabs. According to Western
diplomats, Riyadh has decided to financially squeeze the
P.L.O., once a big recipient of Saudi largesse, as punishment
for its support of Saddam. Yasser Arafat, whom King Fahd
dislikes anyway, has asked three times to visit the kingdom but
has been turned away. Angered by King Hussein's vacillations on
the gulf crisis, King Fahd has refused calls from the Jordanian
monarch, who also ranks high on the Saudi dole list. By
refusing to condemn Saddam, the Yemenites have so infuriated
Riyadh that Defense Minister Prince Sultan hung up on President
Ali Abdullah Saleh when he phoned recently.

    Some observers believe a new troika of power linking Saudi
Arabia, Egypt and Syria will emerge in the region. U.S.
analysts in Washington are doubtful. As they see it, Riyadh has
been burned so badly by its neighbors that it is likely to
resist Arab alignments and instead rely more on the West.

    Whatever the realignments in foreign policy, Fahd and his
family will find them easier to swallow than the changes in the
country's internal order that some Saudis are just beginning
to push for. As Prince Salman's cool reaction to the
businessmen in Riyadh suggests, the royals show no willingness
to relinquish their monopoly on power. Over time, however, they
may see little choice. "It is our tradition to accept
authority," says a Saudi professional in Dhahran, adding
significantly, "unless the legitimacy of authority is lost." Now
that the once closed kingdom has been shocked into opening its
doors to the outside world, King Fahd may discover that his
people will yearn for a greater say in how their lives are run.


____________________________________________________________ THE
DESERT KINGDOM


    With his capture of Riyadh and expulsion of the Rashidi
dynasty in 1902, the mighty emir-warrior Abdul Aziz, also known
as Ibn Saud, began to cobble from the desert tribes of Arabia
the country that would eventually bear his family's name. In
1913 his fighters seized the eastern territory. Next fell the
western province of Hejaz, then the mountainous turf along the
Red Sea. Abdul Aziz proclaimed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in
1932. By his wives, whose numbers have been estimated at
between 30 and 300, he had 43 sons -- the daughters were
considered hardly worth counting. King Fahd is the fourth son
to sit on the throne.

    The kingdom encompasses 88 major tribes, ranging from the
dagger-carrying Nejdis of the central region to the ornately
adorned people of Asir in the south. About 85% of Saudis are
Sunni Muslims, almost all of whom subscribe to the puritanical
Wahhabi sect. An additional 5% to 15% are Shi`ites. The
population is often put at 14.5 million, but that figure, which
includes some 4.5 million foreigners, is thought to be inflated
by the government to mask just how few Saudis actually live in
an area one-fourth the size of the U.S.