du
eurozine
du
2002-12-01
Summary for du 12-2002
While the world is busily blowing itself to bits, there is a calm in the eye of the storm: in the country that houses the two sites holiest to Muslims, Mecca and Medina, and under whose soil lies a quarter of the world's known oil reserves. But with its vast wealth and authoritarian way of life, Saudi Arabia has itself managed to create some enormous tensions, not only in its immediate regional vicinity but all the way from Indonesia to New York, where they exploded with world-historical force on the 11th of September 2001. The fifty years of bloody conflict in and around Palestine, too, have been fed not only by the violence and humiliation of a seemingly endless Israeli occupation, but also by the glaring discrepancies of the Arabic world, particularly in Saudi Arabia.
"du" wanted to find out more about the kingdom on the Arabian Peninsula, and has spent a good year getting a fix on it and its (increasingly less) isolated inhabitants, producing in the process an overview of its religious and political culture as well as the report of a cautious attempt to get closer to everyday Saudi experience. And we have an incredible dossier of photographs to show for it, glimpses of life by Samer Mohdad, who has spent a year among Saudi Arabians.
We've also had an international team of writers on the road: Egypt's political novelist Sonallah Ibrahim, for example, who traveled from Cairo to Mecca, where in his turn Ziauddin Sardar, a Pakistani-born writer and filmmaker, reports on his apprenticeship as a city-dweller and Muslim outsider. In Washington, meanwhile, Jane Mayer of "The New Yorker" has updated her important essay on "The House of bin Laden"; the Saudi political scientist Mai Yamani has contributed an article, and Muyassir Shammari has interviewed the grand mufti. From Paris, the Tunisian writer and scholar Abdelwahab Meddeb gives us a primer in Saudi Arabia's Wahhabite form of Islam, while Victor Kocher in Riyadh has tried his hand at deciphering Saudi domestic politics, and Volker Perthes writes about the strategic relationship between Saudi Arabia and the US. Arnold Hottinger, for his part, has spent a lot of time among the Beduin tribes, and provides us with some privileged glimpses of their life. We read public letters to the crown prince by Noorah al-Khereiji in protest of the continued archaic status of women in Saudi Arabia, even as five female Saudi writers have their premiere in German translation. Meanwhile, Andreas Langenbacher went undercover and camped out by the city walls of Mecca and before the Prophet's sepulcher mosque in Medina, on the trail of previous exponents of industrial espionage into Saudi Arabia's booming trade in holiness. And of course, there is an account of the kingdom's other great business, oil, by Urs Gehriger, who gives us a war-gaming forecast for the volatile region.
As Iris Glosemeyer writes in her useful chronology of
the country, there are records of inhabitation of the Arabian Peninsula as early as 6000 B.C.E., although inquiries into the pre-Islamic period have long been taboo for Muslims. With Rome's conquest of Nabataea in 106 C.E. the area found its way incontrovertibly into the annals of the West, having previously enjoyed the status of bystander to Alexander the Great's march to the Orient. But Roman influence was confined to the coast of the Red Sea and the area north of the Nafud Desert in what is today upper Saudi Arabia, and the Peninsula continued to slumber in the wings of history until the flight of Mohammad from Mecca to Medina in 622. With the inception of the Islamic age, the Peninsula was to become the cradle of a revolution, the sponsor of the Muslimization of a swathe of the world from the Western Sahara to Southeast Asia.
Saudi Arabia itself, meanwhile, would have to wait several centuries for its birth, reverting to the obscurity of desert fiefdoms and oasis guerrillas while the Caliphs moved their center of operations to Baghdad not long after the Prophet's death in 632. In
the middle of the 18th century, however, an alliance was forged between one of the severest of Islam's interpreters, Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, and the Emir of Dir'iyah, Muhammad bin Saud, who now styled himself Imam, or worldly and spiritual leader. This was an alliance that was to prove successful both religiously and politically (and it was one of al-Wahhab's
chief intellectual achievements to eradicate the line between these two spheres of endeavor in the Muslim world). With the murder of the Emir's son Abdul Aziz in 1803, the process of Saudi conquest was carried on by his son, Saud, who brought Mecca, Medina, the northern Yemenite region and Oman under family control, and began to look around for new territory.
The backlash was not long in coming. The Ottoman Empire, in the person of its Egyptian representative Mohammed Ali, countered Saud's ambitions in what are now Syria and southern Iraq with the occupation of the freshly conquered Saudi lands in 1818. Thus ended the first Saudi empire, to be succeeded in short order by a second, under Turki and Faysal, brought low in its turn by internecine strife and feuding. The third and final Saudi empire was founded in 1926, when Abdul Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman, the great-grandson of Turki, the founder of the second empire, having reconquered Riyadh, declared himself King of the Hijaz (the region surrounding Mecca and Medina). In the ensuing period, Abdul Aziz consolidated his rule by putting down a rebellion of the same Wahhabite priest-warriors, or Ikhwan, who had helped to install him, and,
in 1932, unified the Peninsular provinces to form the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Al-Mamlaka al-'Arabiya as Sa'udiya), with its capital in Riyadh.
Glosemeyer gives us a thumbnail sketch of Abdul Aziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia and the father of the many princes currently in line to the Saudi throne by the rights of horizontal succession. "Abdul Aziz bin Abd al-Rahman bin Faysal bin Turki, born in Riyadh in 1880, at the age of eleven was forced to flee with his family the depredations of a rival clan and seek refuge in Kuwait. Not long afterward he set out to reconquer his family's territories, and, in 1902, he and his allies occupied Riyadh and ended the rule there of the Rashid family. Over the following decades, Abdul Aziz, known also as bin Saud, extended his rule over a great expanse of the Peninsula. Beginning in 1913, he used troops drawn from the ranks of Beduins steeped in the absolutist teachings of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab to spread fear among the Shiite Muslims of the area. When Abdul Aziz found himself forced to rein in these fierce men of god some years later, he became the first modern Saudi ruler to experience at first hand the contradictions between the uncompromising application of the Wahhabite doctrine and the political and economic realities of the world into which he had brought forth his kingdom. In addition to military skill and an instinct for regional politics, however, Abdul Aziz deployed a finely tuned marital policy to entrench his rule: he married the daughters of influential families and defeated tribal leaders (including the Rashids) and thus sealed dozens of alliances, with 45 legitimate sons sired on a total of 22 different mothers. Contemporary Saudi historiography celebrates King Abdul Aziz as the unifier of Arabia's tribes, a man who used a clever mix of force and diplomacy to usher in a new political age on the Peninsula. He was quite aware of the need to take both British and American regional interests into account, and his pragmatic ability to turn potentially explosive situations to his advantage is illustrated in the following anecdote: upon being informed that a British warship was approaching the Saudi port of Yanbu, he asked his advisers whether its arrival could be prevented. When he was told that this was impossible, he instructed the warship to be made welcome.
Before his death in 1953, Abdul Aziz signed a contract with the Americans for the establishment of a base in Dhahran, on the country's east coast, thus concluding decades of negotiation with foreign powers for exploitation of the country's enormous oil resources. (Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, had been formed in 1944.) Saudi Arabia was to wrest back control of its resources in the decades that followed, a movement that reached its nadir in the notorious deployment of the "oil weapon" in the early seventies, and the precipitation of a world-wide oil crisis; nevertheless, the founder king's sense of realpolitik continues to dictate Saudi foreign policy to this day.
But there is another crucial strain in the forces that created modern Saudi Arabia, the far more insular and suspicious force issuing from the teachings of Muhammad bin Abd al-Wahhab, the Islamic scholar whose radical interpretation of his religion was first conjoined so fruitfully (if also fitfully) with the tactical might of the house of Saud almost three hundred years ago. The most famous of the Islamic sages to have emerged from the Peninsula in early modern times, al-Wahhab is also the founder of the most powerful of the Saudi scholar families. Born the son of a scholar in 1703 in the central Arabian Nejd, as a young man al-Wahhab rose up against the perceived decadence of his co-religionists (many of whom had reverted, a thousand years after the Prophet's death, to pre-Islamic forms of animism) with a simple teaching, radical in its puritanism: There is but one God; Mohammad is his prophet; there are no intermediaries between God and humankind; God himself cannot be described; all forms of luxury, such as gold jewelry, music and tobacco, are forbidden; and all deviants from these teachings are to be considered infidels, and killed. The harshness of his commandments led to al-Wahhab's being driven out of his native region and seeking asylum in the Emirate of Dir'iyah, where he formed the alliance with Muhammad bin Saud that was to lead to the founding of the first Saudi empire.
In its first version,
the alliance itself barely survived al-Wahhab, who died in 1792.
In a portrait of this influential Koranic interpreter that amounts to a scabrous indictment of the very foundations of Saudi-style Islam, Abdelwahab Meddeb (author of
La maladie de l'Islam [Paris 2002], from which the essay translated and excerpted in this issue is drawn) identifies the sources of al-Wahhab's teachings in the work of Ibn Hanbal, the 9th-century co-founder of the literalist or Sunnite strain of Islam, as well as in the writings of Ibn Taymiyya, the 14th-century Syrian follower of Ibn Hanbal who dedicated his considerable talents to refining and polishing the word of Allah in a dark time for his people, beset as they were by the invasions of the Mongols, the disintegration of the Caliphate and the ravages of the Crusades. While Ibn Hanbal had striven for the unification of the Muslim community in a profound and undisturbed belief in the absolute truth of
the Koran, freed now from the trappings of allegorical exegesis, Ibn Taymiyya declared war on all forms of heresy, esoterica, sophistry and Greek theological influence, saving particular contempt for the Sufi school, whose mystical, human-potentialist interpretation of Allah's words he held a greater threat to Islam than that posed by Christianity: the latter, after all, demand belief in only one divine incarnation, while the Sufis preached the universal accessibility of the godhead. The quintessence of Ibn Taymiyya's doctrine, however, according to Meddeb, lies in his resounding call for the reconciliation of politics and religion, the harnessing of the power of the transcendent in the name of the terrestrial and the transformation of Muslim theology into holy war. In this way, Ibn Taymiyya argued, Islam would avoid the twin, complementary perils threatening its two main monotheistic competitors: namely, the tendency of the Jews, having been robbed of political and military potency, to retreat from the secular world, and the Christian community's equally erroneous tactic, the haughty consolidation of its worldly might to the detriment of its original spiritual mission.
For Meddeb, meanwhile, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teachings represent nothing more than an epigone's crib of the ideas of his two distinguished predecessors. While the Enlightenment was reforming the European mentality, and thus heralding the advent of modernity, al-Wahhab was setting out on a reactionary path that would ultimately plunge his part of the world back into the middle ages. (Meddeb interestingly compares Wahhabite legislation with the sternly Biblical 1650 legal codex of the Commonwealth of Connecticut, and draws a straight line between these two anti-modernist, puritanical projects.) The proof of the retrograde nature of al-Wahhab's mission, Meddeb argues, is to be found in the plagiaris-
tic character of his writings. "Look more closely at this doctrinaire thinker," writes Meddeb, "and one discovers a scrivener without the least shred of originality. One hardly dare accord him the status of thinker. His most celebrated book, the 'Kitab al-Tawhid' or 'Book of Unity' is
a congeries of quotations, the work not of a creative spirit but rather of a copyist. The rest of his copious, brief productions serve to confirm the suspicion that he is a miniaturist who is incapable of lending his chosen form the dignity of a genre. He is at pains to prove the stringency of his Hanbalian faith, and thus to surpass even his master in rigidity: for Ibn Hanbal was, for example, exceedingly tolerant in matters of excommunication and the pre-Islamic cult of saints, a fact noted by his disciple, Ibn Taymiyya himself. Here as in other matters we see the intensification of the Hanbalian movement enacted by al-Wahhab: from the relative tolerance of the 9th-century sage of Baghdad through the (always only theoretical) radical critique of the 14th-century Syrian theologue to the actual violence and destruction of ancient mausoleums wrought by the 18th-century Arab sectarian. In today's Saudi Arabia, as a result, there is not one single holy grave to be found, apart from that of the Prophet in Medina. A friend assures me that the least bit of archeological evidence of early Islamic life, or indeed of ensuing periods, in Saudi Arabia is immediately immured under cement. In an effort to preserve their faith, the Wahhabites do not recoil at defacing the traces of their own origins as a civilization. Their greatest fear, after all, is the confrontation between myth and historical document."
This is, of course, a fear not shared by the infidels, who have long been willing to brave the Wahhabites' infamous xenophobia in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the Kaabah. In an account that is by turns travelogue, book review and waking reverie, Andreas Langenbacher smuggles us with him around the walls of the holy city, his greatest contraband, like Heine's in pre-1848 Germany, contained in his mind (apart from one image of a bare-breasted Egyptian dancing girl, hastily expunged from his copy of a pilgrim's biography). Accompanied by the memory of his famous predecessors, both actual (Ludovico di Varthema, Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Richard Francis Burton, and of course T. E. Lawrence) and imagined (the German adventure-novelist Karl May, or the Swiss cartoon character Globi), Langenbacher errs his way through the outskirts of Islam's eponymous Mecca, coming away with only a fleeting backwards glimpse of the Prophet's sepulcher at Medina, and a flask of holy water from Hagar's well. But after all, thinks Langenbacher, "the chameleon lives on air and sunshine," as the Muslim proverb maintains, and he is himself one in a long line of masters of mimicry and disguise, of "adventure-loving pilgrims and counterfeit hajjis who brought us the first reports of Mecca. The Arabs called them writers-up of the country, and viewed them (appropriately enough) with suspicion. Were they magicians or spies, the harbingers of imperial exploitation? Should they be exposed, or killed, or pressed for presents of money or a lucky talisman? Were they on the lookout for something to fill the void left in their
own world by its dwindling commandments, taboos and boundaries, or had they set off with the intention of filling the holy places of others with their own rational mystifications?"
Meanwhile, as Ziauddin Sardar reminds us, non-Muslims are not the only foreigners who have been made to feel unwelcome in Saudi Arabia: and this despite the "fact," known to all Muslims, that Islam holds all of its faithful
to be equal. Indeed, in a sermon made on the occasion of his own final pilgrimage, the Prophet himself particularly insisted that Arabs were not to consider themselves superiors to non-Arabs. "But anyone who has lived as an expatriate in Saudi Arabia," writes Sardar, "has quickly been taught that the Saudis do indeed view themselves as superior to everyone else, that their sense of superiority runs a finely calibrated spectrum from Arab to non-Arab, and that origin and social class play a significant role in assigning category. We used to call it the 'Saudi sandwich': more precisely, Saudi society is like a thick, multilayered club sandwich. The top layer or slice is the royal family, the rulers of this quasi-totalitarian dynastic state, whose maxim is the absolute superiority of the House of Saud. Right below them, and sometimes indistinguishable from them, there are the well-to-do Saudi families, the bin Ladens, the Burghshans, the al-Shaiks and the al-Turkis. All of these families are connected to the royal family, whether by marriage or, indirectly, through business links, oaths of loyalty and other tribal rituals. The bottom layer of the sandwich consists in the impoverished Saudi Beduins and the even more straitened Yemenites, who would dearly love to become Saudis. Most of these hold positions as farash, as concierge or tea-wallah.
Caught between these two slices of Saudi bread are the foreigners, who are in turn organized into a strict hierarchy. At the top and thus just beneath the favored Saudi families come the Americans, with their high incomes and their many privileges. [Indeed, in his article on the nexus of common interests binding Saudi Arabia to the USA, Volker Perthes notes that the American influence may even extend to matters of royal succession.] The next layer is made up of Europeans of varying provenance, Britons, Germans, French, Swiss and Scandinavian. When I lived in Saudi Arabia in the seventies, and continuing on into the eighties when Saudi Arabia was still a prosperous country, the western foreigners lived a life of luxury and abandon. They came for the money, the sun and the legendary parties, complete with contraband whisky, and they were seldom disappointed. It was the rare westerner in Saudi Arabia who realized that the non-white foreigners around them were leading a very different life: the Egyptians and the Palestinians are settled quite a ways lower down in the Saudi sandwich, although, because they can speak Arabic, they are still considered above the Pakistanis, the Indians and the Bangladeshis, who are for the most part employed in the humblest sectors. Below them come the Filipinos, imported as auxiliary labor or servants, the South Koreans, who do construction work and live in their own areas, and finally the black Africans, the takruni, mostly from Ethiopia, Somalia or Sudan, who have come to Saudi Arabia as pilgrims and then stayed on, mostly illegally." The Saudi way with foreigners, Sardar notes, has indeed both religious and racist motivations: while a white foreigner is generally treated with respect, and a white convert to Islam is considered proof of the creed's superiority, and thus worthy of a slightly higher status, non-white, non-Muslim foreigners are liable to the contempt of all, and are often forced to convert to Islam. Hardly a worse fate than the droit du seigneur routinely practiced upon his Filipina house-girl, by the way, by your average Saudi patriarch.
Nor are race and religion the only axes along which Saudi life is lived. Victor Kocher calls the kingdom "a hegemony of the old against the young," and outlines the attempts and failures of the Saudi rulers to come to terms with the revolutionary forces massed against it, both outside its boundaries and within them, in the form of a dissatisfied, often religiously extremist new generation. The most notorious of the Peninsula's prodigal sons, of course, is Osama bin Laden, who illustrates in his very biography
the incredible tensions riving Saudi society. In her "New Yorker" exposé of "the house of bin Laden," originally published a year ago and now updated and translated for this issue, Jane Mayer sketches the remarkable parallels between the Saudi royal family and that of the Kaida chief, tracking down relatives of Osama bin Laden's in Switzerland, the US and Saudi Arabia itself. Many members of the religious ascetic's family enjoy extraordinary international privilege among the jetsetters and high rollers of the global moneyed class; indeed, the fam-ily's wealth and influence stem from a particularly Islamic marriage of the secular and the spiritual, in Osama's father's contracts to develop the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and his subsequent winning
of road-construction commissions across the kingdom. Muhammad bin Oud bin Laden, Mayer learned from interviews, while a devout Muslim, was by no means a fanatic, nor was he to the manner born, his forefathers having most likely been Yemeni slaves or common laborers. But he was to found a family with excellent multinational connections, as well as to bring forth a scion dedicated to disrupting such a global flow of capital in the name of an unforgiving faith. Mayer gives us this brief sketch of the holy terrorist's worldly development, and of the ambivalence that runs deeply through his family, and indeed through Saudi culture: "Osama, who was born in 1957 and was raised largely in the seaport of Jidda, would have been bombarded by anti-Western material from Egypt, which, by 1977, when Anwar Sadat was making a separate peace with Israel, had become a center of radical dissent.
In Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, King Faisal was assassinated, in 1975, by a worldly nephew, an act that further stoked suspicions of the West. Bin Laden has cast himself as a messianic religious authority, but his degrees are in civil engineering and economics. Several sources close to the family hint that Osama had wanted to play a major role in the company after college but was marginalized by other brothers, either because he lacked business skills, as one source contends, or because he tried to mount an unsuccessful takeover from his elder brothers. Either way, bin Laden was not welcomed at the helm of the Saudi Binladin Group. In early 1979, as he was finishing college, the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah; the following November, the radical movement swept into Saudi Arabia itself, with the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by armed Islamic extremists. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that same year gave Osama new direction and purpose. On the advice of the royal family, he threw himself into providing financial, organizational, and engineering aid to the mujahideen, who were also heavily funded by the United States. In 1989, he returned home to Saudi Arabia a hero. But, in 1990, when American troops came to the aid of Saudi Arabia, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, bin Laden turned against the throne for inviting infidels into the Islamic holy land. When bin Laden turned against the United States, his fortune was still interwoven with the family's, which was invested in many American businesses. 'It's not as cynical as it sounds', Jack Blum, a former special counsel to
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said. 'I've met some of the bin Ladens. They're quite nice. You'd have no problem at dinner with them. They are themselves conflicted. They are a contradiction. If you tried to peer into their souls, you'd see two of them.'"