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The self-effacement of an entire sex, and, in consequence, of sexuality itself, was the most unnerving feature of Saudi life. I could go through an entire day without seeing any women, except perhaps some beggars sitting on the curb outside a prince’s house. Almost all public space, from the outdoor terrace at the Italian restaurant to the sidewalk tables at Starbucks, belonged to men. The restaurants had separate entrances for “families” and “bachelors,” and I could hear women scurrying past, hidden by screens, as they went upstairs or to a rear room. The only places I was sure to see women were at the mall and the grocery store, and even there they seemed spookily out of place. Many of them wore black gloves, and their faces were covered entirely—not even a pair of plummy, heavy-lidded Arabian eyes apparent. Sometimes I couldn’t tell what direction they were facing. It felt to me as if the women had died, and only their shades remained.
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The oil wealth of the country runs first through royal pockets. Various businessmen and economists speculate that as much as thirty or forty per cent is skimmed by the Al Saud family. “We build forty-million-dollar palaces for even minor princes,” an architect told me. Those closest to the crown are staggeringly wealthy. “Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, a son of King Fahd, is in his early thirties, and his wealth alone could solve the entire unemployment problem of Saudi Arabia,” Mohsen Al-Awajy, a lawyer and a spokesman for Wahhabi dissidents, told me. “There are billions upon billions in his account. Nobody can challenge him. Nobody can ask the royal family, ‘Why?’”
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Since the mosque attack, religion has become a steadily increasing part of the Saudi school curriculum, so students have less exposure to science, art, and languages. “My kid is in the fifth grade,” Omar Bagour, a columnist for Al Madina and a professor of economics at King Abdul Aziz University, told me. “Out of twelve subjects, seven are pure religion. You tell me a system of this nature is going to bring into the labor force a highly qualified Saudi? Bullshit.” The religious establishment, however, wants education to become even more Islamic. “Educational systems of atheist nations and civilizations cannot be like the systems of a believing nation,” Saalih Ibn Humayd, a Saudi cleric, warned in a recent speech. “This country represents the power of Islam. . . . Any attempt to change this status will be vehemently opposed.”
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One day in Jeddah, I went across town to see Jamal Khashoggi, who was then the deputy editor of the Arab News, the main English-language competitor of the Saudi Gazette. We met in his office. He is a tall man with a trim beard and a pale, moon-shaped face. He had covered the Afghan jihad sympathetically, and had been a friend of bin Laden’s; but he had rejected the Islamist movement when it turned toward terror. After September 11th, he was practically the only Saudi journalist who addressed the cultural failures within Saudi society which contributed to that tragedy. “Despite the enormity of what happened, we are still in denial,” he wrote a year after the event. “We still cling to unlikely conspiracy theories and eye the truth with suspicion. The most pressing issue now is to ensure that our children can never be influenced by extremist ideas—like those fifteen Saudis who were misled into hijacking four planes on that fine September day, piloting them, and us, straight into the jaws of hell.”
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The absence of socialization between men and women struck me as a potent factor in terrorist fantasies. The hijackers who killed themselves on September 11th were propelled in part by the notion of being rewarded in the afterlife with the company of virgins. Such abstractions don’t seem quite so strange in a country where images of women piped through a satellite dish seem more vivid than actual Saudi women—whom the male reporters at the Gazette liked to call B.M.O.s, or “black moving objects.”
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There was a sameness to the stories of the hijacker pilots. They had become Muslim extremists in Europe and America—presumably as a way of holding on to their sense of who they were in the engulfing West. Their own cultures offered them no way to be powerful in the world. Traditionally, the Saudi government absorbed nearly all the university graduates, but after the oil shock of the mid-eighties the government, which became saddled with debt, could no longer hire as before. Unemployment and idleness became central facts of life for young Saudi men (as they had always been for Saudi women). Bin Laden gave young men with no control over their lives an identity, and a wanton chance to make history. “Death is better than life in humiliation!” bin Laden said.
That is a constant theme of bin Laden’s speeches. One of the critical documents in understanding his goals, and his appeal, is his “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” written in 1996, in which he cites the sources of Arabs’ shame. Although the “Declaration” calls on Muslims everywhere to fight “Jews and Crusaders,” the heart of its argument is a populist attack on the mismanagement of the Saudi economy. “Everybody talks about the deterioration of the economy, about inflation, and about the ever-increasing debts,” he writes. “More than three hundred and forty billion Saudi riyals are owed by the government to the people—in addition to the daily accumulated interest, let alone the foreign debt! People wonder whether we are the largest oil exporting country?! They even believe that this situation is a curse put on them by Allah for not objecting to the oppressive and illegitimate behavior and measures of the ruling regime.” In a country where discontent with the ruling family is widespread but rarely expressed directly, where resentment against the power and influence of the West is nearly universal, and where unemployment is creating a class of well-educated but idle young men, bin Laden’s words resonated so strongly in part because no one else would say them.
“Our society is confused,” Abdullah al-Shehri, the linguistics professor, told me during another Starbucks seminar. He was from the same tribe as three of the fifteen Saudi hijackers, but that scarcely sets him apart in a country whose inhabitants are so intimately bound together. “It bothers me a lot when I see things about our society that are negative or backward, which in the West are blamed on religion. You can easily look back at Muslim history, at the Umayyads and the Abbasids, and see how powerful Islamic culture was back then. What has changed is the mentality and the culture. Islam is a religion of tolerance, but now there is a sense of frustration and defeat that makes people hate others. For some, hate becomes their only weapon. If you can’t beat them, hate them.”
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http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040105fa_fact2
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