Saudi Arabia: King Fahd and Islamic fundamentalism

LONDON (JP): "I don't know where (the fundamentalists) are, but I feel they are everywhere, except that we have them in a different form. They are not like in Egypt or Algeria where they have formed a political group or an opposition. But they have infiltrated the system. I feel they have just about reached middle management in the civil service, in the government. And once they reach the top, they will be in control."

Aisha al-Mana runs the hospital founded by her father in al- Khobar, about a ten-minute drive from the barracks in Dhahran where 23 American servicemen were killed by a truck bomb on 25 June. When I last saw her in January, all Saudi Arabia was agog about the November car bomb in Riyadh that killed only five Americans and two Indians. Now they really have something to worry about.

Al-Mana is not a dissident. Her father served as King Abdulaziz's translator in the heroic era of the 20s when he unified the kingdom. Although she was exiled from Riyadh in 1990 for taking part in the women drivers' protest during the Gulf War (it is illegal for Saudi women to drive), she remains a loyal supporter of the regime. But she is very worried.

The problem, in her view, is that the fanatics have been allowed to take over, especially in the school system. She takes her religion seriously, but she was stunned to discover recently that 30 percent of the time in Saudi primary schools, and 27 percent in secondary schools, is directly devoted to religious instruction. (Not counting history, which is mostly Islamic history, literature, which is mostly Islamic literature and others).

So why is it, in this most Moslem of countries, that young men are killing and dying to make it more 'Islamic'? What motivated the four young men, all Saudi-born Moslems, who were beheaded in Riyadh last month for the November car bomb? What motivated the men who drove the truck up to the perimeter fence in Dhahran this week?

In Algeria or Egypt, the Moslem fundamentalists are trying to overthrow authoritarian secular regimes. In Saudi Arabia, they are waging war against a devoutly Moslem ruling family that spends heavily on religion, chops off the heads or hands of criminals instruct obedience to Islamic law, and enforces extreme interpretations of Islam like the ban on Saudi women driving cars.

Sometimes, indeed, the regime's deeply conservative clerical allies are downright embarrassing to more enlightened Moslems. For example, Sheikh Bin Baz, the clergyman who heads the official Saudi religious establishment, has published an 'Islamic' treatise proving that the world is flat.

But the exalted position of the ignorant sheikh says a great deal about what has gone wrong in Saudi Arabia under the present king. He would not have been allowed to amass such influence by any of Fahd's predecessors.

Obviously, some of the current unrest in the kingdom is due to the stresses and strains that occur when a poverty-stricken, illiterate rural population is urbanized, educated, and boosted into the consumer society in a single generation. What has brought the matter to car bombs, however, is the deliberate handing over of Saudi Arabia's educational and cultural institutions to religious obscurantists of the most fanatical kind.

"The real danger does not come from the politically motivated extremists," explained a worried pro-regime liberal recently. "It comes from the brainwashing of our youth in religion, at the expense of real achievement, on which the extremists thrive."

The ruling Saud family is not a nest of fanatics. All the dominant figures of the royal family have been deliberate modernizers. But King Fahd, in power for the past 14 years, has modified the traditional family approach in dangerous ways.

In the past, Saudi rulers got away with imposing huge doses of modernization on a reluctant populace -- radio, television, mass education, and the like -- by arguing that these innovations were fully compatible with Islam. Their assurances were accepted because of the family's own obvious devotion to the Moslem faith.

An essential part of this strategy, however, was keeping the kingdom's Moslem clergy on a short leash: it would not do to have them question the official line on modernization. But if this is your strategy, then you had better be beyond reproach in your own Islamic piety. Which is where the current king ran into problems.

Fahd is a highly intelligent man whose real job was to prepare the kingdom for its re-entry to reality after the glorious 20- year holiday from economics it enjoyed at the height of the oil boom. If he had exploited his opportunity to curb the rapaciousness of the huge royal family and rein in the spreading corruption, things would be very different in Saudi Arabia today.

But Fahd was addicted to his pleasures, and deeply corrupt himself. (His private wealth is estimated at $20 billion, and he is famous for the huge commissions he puts in the way of his close relatives).

So he lacked the reputation for piety that would have let him simply ignore the protests of the more conservative ulema (clergy) at the kingdom's rapid modernization. Instead, he bought their loyalty by putting them in charge of education, culture, and public order. As a result, a generation is now emerging from the Saudi schools who have been indoctrinated in a paranoid view of the modern world. Unsurprisingly, some of them have turned to bombs.

It is not yet too late. Fahd briefly relinquished power in January, only to take it back in February. But he is a 75-year- oldman who has had two severe strokes, and sooner or later he will have to hand over the throne to Crown Prince Abdullah permanently.

Abdullah's personal probity and piety would allow him to strip the fanatics of their privileges very quickly, and a large majority of Saudis would not object. But the change-over needs to happen soon, for terrorism has a radicalizing logic all its own.