On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines - and Future Read Online Free PDF

the government met the challenge with massive force, killing hundreds and arresting thousands, many of whom remain incarcerated without trials nearly a decade later.
    Like Abdul Aziz, his sons strongly prefer to co-opt rather than to confront, to buy rather than to bully, to deflect rather than to directly deny. But in extremis, they are willing to employ pretty much the same harsh practices as neighboring Arab rulers or Abdul Aziz himself. Saudi Arabia is replete with secret police, surreptitious surveillance, grim prisons, and torture chambers, even if this is an aspect of the regime that most Saudis manage to avoid.
    Since becoming king in 2005, Abdullah, more than any modern Saudi king, has sought to introduce modest reforms to please modernizers and to blunt the kingdom’s image at home and abroad as a breeding ground for fanaticism. Among other things, he has advocated that women be allowed greater opportunities—a handful of prominent females for the first time even joined a monarch’s official entourage for foreign visits. In 2011 he announced that women would be appointed (by him) to the Majlis Ash Shura and would actually be allowed to vote in 2015, albeit only in elections for municipalcouncils, powerless bodies first elected in 2005 to help defuse Western criticism of the kingdom in the wake of 9/11. Still, women are expected to be segregated from men in the Consultative Council and participate only by closed-circuit television. Being members of the council may be one thing; mixing with male members is another.
    King Abdullah also began sending a flood of Saudi youth abroad for education—more than one hundred thousand attend foreign universities now, roughly half in the United States.In 2009, to reinforce his call for improvements in the kingdom’s notoriously poor education system, he established King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), the new gender-mixed research university, a first in Saudi Arabia, with an endowment reported to be second only to Harvard’s.
    When one of the senior religious
ulama
had the temerity to criticize this unprecedented mixing as an infidel innovation forbidden by Islam, the mild-mannered king promptly fired him, a modern form of his father’s beheadings. The sacking of this sheikh had the desired effect of prompting supportive statements on KAUST from other tame religious leaders, but it angered religious conservatives who see the approval of gender mixing as yet further prostitution by a religious establishment that puts pleasing the king and retaining its privileges ahead of pleasing Allah. Always careful to balance, the king, who had secured
ulama
approval for gender mixing at his elite university, did nothing to curb the country’s religious police from roaming the kingdom’s streets and harassing ordinary Saudis mixing with anyone of the opposite gender.
    As is clear by now, the regime perpetually performs a delicate minuet, dancing closer at times to the religious establishment and at other times to modernizers, but always focused on retaining Al Saud control. None of King Abdullah’s reforms, of course, provides any real sharing of power by the Al Saud who, even as revolutions have toppled regimes all around them, still appear determined to salve Saudis’ frustrations with money alone rather than with meaningful political freedoms.
    Indeed, the second source of Al Saud survival is money. Abdul Aziz understood this well even in the pre-oil era, when he had little of it. Until the discovery of oil in 1938, his only sources of modest revenue were a tax on pilgrims making the hajj to Mecca; the
zakat
, an annual tax on wealth and assets of Muslims required by the Koran; and a small subsidy from the British. All this he freely dispersed at his daily
majlis
to a succession of tribal chiefs and other supplicants. He regularly fed thousands at his palace from huge communal trays of rice and mutton and passed out clothes to the needy from his basement