On 12th january 1980, at about the time a 22-year-old Osama bin Laden set off on his first journey to Afghanistan, Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi interior minister, held a press conference in Riyadh. The Saudi royal family had just passed through the most perilous few weeks of its existence, after more than 400 Islamic extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and held it for a fortnight against vastly superior government forces. Naif was anxious to show the world that his family, the al Saud (Saud's clan) was back in control.
On a table in front of the stage, the ministry had laid out some of the insurgents' weapons. They evoked a lost era of Arabian violence, before the wars of the 1980s and 1990s in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa-and Osama's money-modernised the fundamentalist armoury.
There was a nickel-plated AK-47, a locally made Heckler und Koch submachine gun, an SKS Carbine with a folding bayonet of 1950s vintage, all manner of sporting rifles, a single-barrelled Spanish shotgun, miscellaneous revolvers, and the curved Yemeni dagger known as a jambiya. After admiring these antiques for some time, one of the reporters remarked that the insurgents had been mostly bearded and asked Naif if the security forces intended to take action against men with beards.
Naif smiled. "Half the Saudi population has beards," he said. "Anyway, we will always respect people with signs of solemnity on their faces."
This bizarre exchange reaches to the heart of the problem of Saudi Arabia, which is also the problem of the middle east. Ever since forming an alliance with the fundamentalist Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab in 1744, the Saud family has depended like all successful Arab regimes in history on inspiring and manipulating religious fervour: what a previous generation of British intelligence officers used to call the "short-skirts-and-beard brigade." Yet whenever religious extremists threatened their authority, the Saud and their clerical allies have been content to invoke foreign aid in destroying them-from the biplanes and armoured cars of British Iraq in the late 1920s to the missiles now being fired from American and British ships at bin Laden's sites in Afghanistan.
Osama, who was born in Riyadh in 1957, but stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994, has pronounced the Saud to be religious apostates and American stooges and called for the overthrow of the regime. He has also all but admitted his implication in the suicide bombings of 11th September. Initially, the FBI suspected 16 of the 19 hijackers were of Saudi origin. Since then Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, has said at least five of those were cases of mistaken or stolen identity, and questioned whether "five or six Saudis out of 12 million... made it a domestic problem?" As if in answer, on 6th October, a bomb exploded in King Khaled Street in the eastern city of Khobar killing two Americans, with one newspaper suggesting that this, too, was a suicide bomb. On 9th October, a petrol bomb was thrown at the car of a German couple in the capital, Riyadh. A domestic problem seems to be exactly what it is.
In reality, 11th September has posed unsettling questions about the nature of Saudi Arabia and its foreign relations. The most urgent of these questions are: has the Saud family lost its grip on the fundamentalist impulses that have underwritten its rule since the 18th century? Has Saudi Arabia, which has been a force for stability, even decency, in international affairs for a century, turned into its opposite: a state that cannot master the contradictions at the heart of Islamic modernity and merely expels them, first to its neighbours in the middle east and now to the urban centres of the west? Finally, have the 5,000 princes of the Saud and their allies ceased to be an asset to the west and become a colossal liability, counted out not in money but in blood?
The modern Saudi state, which was revived by Abdul Aziz bin Saud in 1902 and became a kingdom in 1926, is blessed by what the interminable Arabic panegyrists of the 1970s called "the two gifts of heaven." The first gift is Islam, which means not merely the Koran and the strict Wahhabist interpretation of it, but the administration of two of the three holy cities of Islam: Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad was born, and Medina, where he is buried.
The Saud first took control of the two Holy Places in 1803 and then again in 1924 and are serious about their responsibility. The present King, Fahd bin Abdul Aziz, is known by the title "Custodian of the Two Shrines," while the government expends immense sums of money and bureaucratic time on managing the annual pilgrimage to Mecca of 2m or more Muslims.
Saudi Arabia's second gift from heaven is by far the largest estate of crude oil in the world, amounting to at least 260 billion barrels of what petroleum engineers called "proved" reserves, as well as almost certainly the world's largest reservoir of undiscovered crude oil. Ever since 4th March 1938 when the oil well Dammam No 7 blew in at 1,585 barrels a day, the two gifts have combined to draw the envious eyes of both the Muslim world and the west to Saudi Arabia.
Oil from Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, produced at the phenomenal rates of over 10m barrels a day for long periods by a well-managed and well-capitalised industry, has made possible previously unimaginable improvements in world living standards, above all in the west, and greased the wheels of free trade and globalisation.
At home, oil revenues permitted a rise in population far beyond historical levels, to what is claimed in the 1999 census to be over 21m native Saudis and immigrants. Government revenues rose from some £50,000 a year in the early years of the kingdom to about £100m at King Abdul Aziz's death in 1953 and £40 billion in the budget for this year; plus the creation of world-class oil and petrochemical industries and prosperous private trading enterprises, such as the Saudi Binladin Group. (The founder of this business, Muhammad bin Laden, a bricklayer from the Wadi Hadhramaut in Yemen, used in the 1940s to attend the court of King Abdul Aziz each day and sit as close as possible to Abdul Aziz. He built a palace with a ramp for the king's wheelchair in Riyadh, the main road from Jeddah to Medina and extensions to the holy mosques and pilgrimage sites. At his death in an air crash in 1966, he left his youngest son Osama a fortune generally estimated at $30m.)
Oil revenues-disbursed through government and private business-also finance Islamic missionary work: building mosques in Nigeria, channelling money to Islamic resistance movements from Kashmir to Mindanao, and doling out pensions to any ex- ruler with half a claim to being Muslim from Siad Barre to Idi Amin. However, Saudi officials have always admitted that they lacked both the inclination and bureaucratic reach to find out whether these payments are spent on what they should be. Finally, Saudi Arabia's rulers have always been passionately concerned with the third city of Islam-Jerusalem-and the fate of the Palestinians evicted by Israel in 1948 and 1967. Saudi Arabia is the chief financial and political supporter of Yasser Arafat and his mainstream Fatah faction.
Yet, combined, the two gifts have become a curse. Long before the radical Palestinian leader George Habash formulated the notion in the 1970s that the "road to Jerusalem lies through Dhahran," Arab radicals cast sinister eyes on Saudi oil. In reaction, the Saud have looked to the west for protection. Reluctant to rely wholly on the US, where the Saud fear the Congress is too amenable to the supporters of Israel, Saudi Arabia maintains subordinate military relationships with Britain (which has supplied Hawker Hunter aircraft, Lightnings and Tornadoes for the air force, and has helped to train the National Guard since the 1960s), and France. These contracts are highly lucrative, both to the supplier countries and to their agents in the kingdom. The famous Al-Yamamah arms deal signed between Britain and Saudi Arabia in 1985 was worth £20bn-the biggest such deal ever entered into by the British state.
In addition, through an organisation known as the Foreign Liaison Bureau, headed first by King Faisal's brother-in-law, Kamal Adham, and then by his son Prince Turki al-Faisal, the Saud have had access to intelligence gathered by the CIA and Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. Even so, at times of crisis, the family has sometimes sought explicit western involvement. Under pressure from the Egyptian nationalist, Gamal Abdul Nasser, who was fighting a proxy war across the border in Yemen, King Faisal asked for the deployment of a squadron of US aircraft in 1963. In early 1979, as the Iranian revolution began to unfold, the US dispatched F-15 strike aircraft to tour air bases in the kingdom. These were followed in the next year by US-operated Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS) aircraft. In 1990, in response to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the Saud accepted the deployment in northern Saudi Arabia of over 500,000 American, British and other allied troops to oust him.
Saddam's defeat in 1991, with the usual lethal Arab cocktail of fine speechifying and military recklessness, killed off the old Arab nationalist threat to the Saud. At the same time, it provided a new provocation to the Islamic radicalism that the Saud had until then been able to manage.
Abdul Aziz and Faisal consulted the religious leaders, but never permitted them to block modernisation for the sake of it. The ulama (as the Islamic clerics are known) had to pronounce a specific innovation contrary to the Shari'a (Islamic law). That is the key to the character of Saudi Arabia even today, with its bland technical modernity and medieval moral economy: where, not so many years ago, one could be dragged out of a shop by the police and obliged to witness a beheading. Above all, self-proclaimed holy men were not permitted to trespass on the authority of the king as imam (leader of the Muslim community). When part of his army opposed innovations such as motor vehicles, aircraft, and telephones, sought to carry the jihad into British-mandated Iraq and then rose in revolt, Abdul Aziz smashed them in battle in 1929.
With the quadrupling of the price of oil in 1973-4 and Faisal's assassination, Saudi Arabia accelerated its modernisation. The influx of foreigners, with their attendant baggage of multi-million dollar contract bribes, student nurses on the razzle, bootleg whisky and Somali whores, placed the system under intolerable strain. The Saud, who had accepted the education of women in segregated schools and universities, found themselves unable to embrace the next step of allowing women to work in the general economy. Women are not equal in legal terms and continue to be regarded as a problem.
The first signs of strain first appeared in the seminaries (or Islamic universities, as they are known), which had been set up by the Saud as a refuge for the Islamist opponents of Nasser's secular Arab nationalism. It was an error which the family has had leisure to regret, and culminated in the attack on Mecca in late 1979 by students and tribesmen claiming that the Mahdi had returned to usher in the end of the world. The insurgents included at least one member of a prosperous Jeddah merchant family, and it is probably no accident that Osama was shipped off by his family to help fight the Soviets early the next year. The interior ministry has estimated that some 10,000 young men left Saudi Arabia to campaign against the Soviets in Afghanistan. From a closed society, with its boundless political innocence, elderly leadership, coercive conformity and limited commerce between the sexes, the experience of holy war in Afghanistan must have been more than exhilarating.
Meanwhile, what one Arab, long-resident in Saudi Arabia, called the "euphoria" of the 1970s-the whole world beating its way to the Saudi door, double-digit economic growth, unlimited horizons, peace and justice for the Palestinians-evaporated in the austerity brought on by falling oil prices and the political deadlock in the middle east. The enthusiasm of the first generation to do their higher education in the US-such as Saud al Faisal, or his brother Turki-was not shared by students who passed out of undistinguished Saudi universities into a glutted labour market. A section of youth was in revolt against the hypocrisy of its parents, rather like the 1968 generation in western Europe, but, unlike the Trotskyists from bourgeois homes, their parricide expressed itself in radical Islamist form.
Osama returned to Saudi Arabia in 1990, but immediately fell out with the Saud over the stationing of western forces for Operation Desert Storm. Among the US and British forces left behind in Saudi Arabia to police the no-fly zones in Iraq, the radicals also had rich targets. A colossal truck bomb at US military housing in Khobar in 1996 caused both British and Americans to be hastily redeployed at the more secure desert location of Kharj.
In response to the changed environment, Fahd tried carrot and stick. As a carrot, he revived the majless al-shura, or consultative council, that had been pretty much in abeyance since the 1920s. Though it cannot initiate policy, only consider topics sent down from the cabinet, its all-male membership has been increased in stages to number 120 today. As a stick, the regime in September 1994 arrested two popular preachers, Salman al Aula and Safar al Hawali, and warned of severe punishment for actions that disturbed the peace. Society became noticeably more repressive. The religious police, known as the "society for the encouragement of virtue and discouragement of vice" or mutawwain (those who obey), who enforce attendance at the mosque and the dress code, ceased to be the joke that they had become in many people's eyes. "In the 1970s," said one of Saudi Arabia's long-standing foreign observers, "if a mutawwa beat the legs of a professor's wife, Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh, would have clapped him in jail. They can't do that now." In an eloquent letter to the Guardian in early October, June Thomas, a former senior employee of the Riyadh Military hospital, said it was not just the behaviour of the mutawwain but the general rudeness of Saudi young men that had made life intolerable for foreign women.
Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995 and since then his half-brother, Abdullah, commander of the National Guard, has led the country, supported by Fahd's full brothers Sultan (minister of defence) and Naif (minister of interior). These men are in their 60s and 70s. All run their own intelligence operations, focusing on threats to their own position, none of which is particularly effective, say western intelligence sources. Meanwhile, on 31st August, there was a thunderclap. That evening the official gazette reported that Turki al-Faisal, one of the chief channels between the Saud and successive US and British governments, had resigned as director of general intelligence. His replacement by Prince Nawaf, an obscure and elderly associate of the Crown Prince, with no intelligence experience, did not inspire confidence. Set against that, there is every sign that the key relationship between Prince Saud al Faisal, the foreign minister, and Crown Prince Abdullah is unimpaired.
For the second time in a generation, the US and Britain have gone to war to destroy the enemies of the al Saud clan, without much in the way of public acknowledgement or thanks. Yet for officials in the US and Britain, the alternative to the Saud is too appalling to imagine. "Without the al Saud," a senior British military officer said to me back in 1982, "we might as well all go home." If Osama were now to return, Khomeini-like, in triumph, the consequences for western interests would be incalculable.
"The division in Saudi Arabia," says a former British ambassador in exasperation, "is not between a repressive or liberal regime, it is between a repressive regime and one even more repressive." Indeed, the so-called "campaign for the defence of legitimate rights," a Saudi opposition group that attracted some liberal support in Britain in the mid-1990s, was a cynical mistranslation of the Arabic. It should have been the committee for the enforcement of religious proprieties and, indeed, the group has since split with one faction openly sympathetic to Osama.
The Saud believe that parliamentary democracy would dissolve itself into a clerical dictatorship at once and that the Saudi masses are far more conservative than the ruling elite. Unlike Iran, which sought to preserve elements of its parliamentary tradition in its Islamic constitution of 1979, inland Arabia has no tradition of representative democracy. Instead, the country has become a species of machine for generating serious Islamic heresy, whether the apocalyptic fantasies of Juhaiman in 1979 or the bloodthirsty xenophobia of Osama. As Jamal Khashoggi, deputy editor of Arab News in Jeddah, has written: "We have to admit there is a problem of fanaticism, locally."
Yet as far as this writer can tell, on the basis of many conversations with Saudi residents, for every Saudi who exults in American suffering at Arab hands there are many who are profoundly ashamed that a Saudi from such a respectable and generous family could wreak such havoc on the world and bring both Islam and Saudi Arabia into such disrepute. If that is true, the Saud may have more room for liberalisation and democratisation than they claim. Above all, what Saudi Arabia and the world need, in place of suicidal fatwas based on hyper-literal readings of isolated Koranic verses, are the learned and sincere Islamic scholars of olden times.
