Bedtime Fantasy Of Reform That Saudis Hope Will Come True

The Telegraph (UK) ^ | 7-17-2003

[blam]

Bedtime fantasy of reform that Saudis hope will come true

(Filed: 17/07/2003)

An ever bolder press is making modernisation more than just a Saudi Arabian dream, writes Patrick Bishop in Jeddah

In the the curious kingdom of Saudi Arabia, taboos are as plentiful as oil and escape is available only through fantasy. So when the well-known columnist Hussein Shobokshi wanted to conjure up an alternative world, he presented it as a bedtime story for his seven-year-old daughter.

The article described a vision of the future in which he arrives back in the kingdom to be picked up by his daughter at the airport. On the way home, he chats with her about an encounter with a female social affairs minister and a meeting with a Saudi citizen of Indian origin.

He tells her that the next day he plans to vote and visit the Grand Mosque to hear a religious discussion. He urges her to drive faster so he can watch the finance minister present his televised budget to the elected parliament.

Mundane to Westerners, in Saudi Arabia this vignette amounts to a thrilling - or shocking - fantasy. Women are not allowed to drive, let alone hold important posts. Citizenship is denied to immigrants. Religious teaching is intensely narrow and puritanical. No one can vote and there is no parliament.

When the article appeared earlier this month, it attracted hate mail and death threats but many more expressions of pleasure and support. Mr Shobokshi was heartened. "They said that I wrote what they've always wanted to say," he told a reporter. "That I've expressed their dreams of what Saudi Arabia could be like. They want this dream to be real."

Until recently, the ultimate taboo in Saudi Arabia has been the person of the stout monarch whose placid, goatee-bearded features beam down over his subjects from a hundred thousand portraits.

Private grumbling at the shortcomings of 82-year-old King Fahd and his deeply conservative brothers is nothing new. But, increasingly, Saudis are willing to express their criticisms to outsiders.

At the same time an ever bolder press is, obliquely but effectively, giving voice to the anger, resentment and frustration that bubbles under the surface of one of the world's most deferential societies.

The government has had little choice but to accept that there is an appetite for reform that will have to be blunted. "There's a realisation that we need to change," said a minister, adding cautiously that "it will have to be on our terms in our own way".

The momentum for change was boosted last month when a forum of intellectuals and clerics presented a petition to the de facto ruler, Crown Prince Abdullah.

It called for wider political participation, fairer shares of oil wealth, modernisation of education and curbs on the kingdom's fundamentalist preachers, including restricting their right to declare jihad. The publicity given to the initiative in the state-controlled media showed it is being taken seriously.

In one important area, the government has already begun to act. For years, preachers have been allowed to propagate hate against the West, Christians and Jews, as long as the royal family was left alone.

Extremist clerics acted as recruiting sergeants for Osama bin Laden and al-Qa'eda; 15 out of the 19 September 11 hijackers were Saudis. But in recent months, about 1,000 imams have been removed from their mosques and sent for "re-education".

The campaign was accelerated after the suicide bomb attacks in Riyadh on May 12 which killed at least 35 people. Last month, three radical clerics who supported the terrorists were arrested.

A crackdown on fundamentalists will not be enough to ease pressure for change. Saudi Arabia now has a population of nearly 20 million nationals, 42 per cent of whom are under 14. Every year 100,000 men and, increasingly, women leave university. Less than half get jobs, many of which are non-productive state sinecures.

It is economics, too, rather than burgeoning liberalism, that is forcing a reconsideration of traditional restrictions on women. Declining incomes mean that women are having to go out to work.

"The government has to act," said one woman campaigner. "They must see that if they don't things, will only get much worse." However, the intricacies of the power relationships between members of the al-Saud dynasty complicate the issue.

Crown Prince Abdullah is widely liked and respected for his comparatively simple lifestyle and piety, especially when compared to the king, who took an entourage of 400 to Marbella last summer.(...and spent $6 million a day there)

Abdullah is regarded as being a supporter of moderate reform. However, his ability to manouevre is heavily restricted by the influence of his half-brothers, members of the so-called "Sudairi Seven" group which includes the ailing king and is far less sympathetic to change.

There have been other occasions when liberalisation seemed inescapable, notably after the first Gulf war. The monarchy succeded in dodging the issue. It has shown itself remarkably efficient at hanging on to power, perhaps because it has imbibed one of the key lessons of history: that conservative regimes are at their most vulnerable when they start to reform.

[cavtrooper21]

From such modest beginings...
Maybe there is hope.
No wonder the Wabbists and conservitive Moslems preach holy war. The harder they preach, the more people walk out on them.

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