Inside Saudi Arabia

By SCOTT MACLEOD/RIYADH

When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turned up at an ornate royal palace in Saudi Arabia last week, he shook hands with ailing King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud and then exchanged views about the war on terrorism with Crown Prince Abdullah, who runs the kingdom's day-to-day affairs. Rumsfeld might have got a somewhat different perspective if he had stopped by al Masaa, a cafe in the heart of the capital, where patrons hail Osama bin Laden as an Arab hero.

The terrace is crammed with young men, some in traditional cotton robes and Bedouin headdress, others in Western jeans and T shirts. They are watching teenage drivers peeling rubber through traffic, calling friends on cell phones and discussing Osama. Sipping cappuccinos and downing milk shakes, they admit to mixed feelings about last month's devastating attacks on the U.S. because of the innocent lives that were taken. They even wonder whether it was really Osama who did it ("I hope that it was," says one). Mostly they express glee that the strikes made the U.S. pay a price for what they see as arrogant meddling in the Middle East, particularly in supporting Israel against the Palestinians.

"Osama is a very, very, very, very good Muslim," says Feras Bukhamsin, 24, a bank clerk. Agrees Bader, 25, a businessman who declines to give his full name: "He's a good guy. He has millions, but he doesn't care about money or himself. He's just looking to get justice for the Arabs." The other six Saudis around the table, some recently returned from studies in the U.S., nod their heads.

What kind of ally is a country whose leaders profess solidarity with the U.S. but whose people--apparently some of them, anyway--commit mass murder on American soil, or sit around Riyadh coffee shops applauding those who do? Answer: an uneasy one. As it moves toward military action, the U.S. remains concerned about popular unrest in Arab and Islamic states around the world, including Saudi Arabia. (It was concerned enough, in fact, that alarms went off on Saturday, when a bomb exploded outside a shop in the Saudi city of Khobar, killing two. Initial reports, however, were that the incident was unrelated to the Sept. 11 attacks.) And as in the Gulf War, the U.S. has a tricky balance to strike between its long-term, irrevocable commitment to Israel and its short-term interest in placating the Arab street. Washington clearly sees a need for buttressing friendly Muslim regimes in the crisis. Former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Wyche Fowler warns against assuming that "monarchs can do anything they want without consequences from a restless or dissident citizenry."

While the focus since Sept. 11 has been on the war between bin Laden and the U.S., the largely ignored core of the struggle is bin Laden's appeal for the hearts and minds--not to mention the oilfields containing 25% of the world's reserves--of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. For several years, a new generation of Saudis, including Islamic militants and youths grumbling about corruption and economic decline, has increasingly challenged the al Saud clan's fitness to rule. Now, by hitting the U.S.--and by using as many as 15 apparent Saudi hijackers in daring suicide operations--bin Laden is the man of the hour for many. Even moderate Saudis adamantly opposed to terrorism find themselves agreeing with bin Laden's complaints against the U.S. Young Saudis, eager for bolder leadership, are glued to Arab satellite-TV channels for the latest bin Laden news.

As bin Laden's admirers appear to grow in number, the question is again being asked: Can the Saudi royals withstand the increasing pressures undermining political stability in the most vital energy-producing region of the world? They have an excellent record. King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (generally known as Ibn Saud) founded the nation in 1932 after conquering fierce rival tribes on the Arabian Peninsula. Since his death in 1953, his four successors have weathered a variety of crises, from Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's nationalist agitation and the Iranian revolution to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. But some Western diplomats now fear that one of the secrets of the al Sauds' success in keeping a firm grip on power, the relatively free hand given to Islamic militancy in the kingdom, may have sown the seeds for a generation of Osama bin Ladens.

The strong fundamentalist influence in Saudi Arabia today is rooted in a potent mix of religion, tradition and politics. Though the al Sauds trace their prominence back to the 16th century, they acquired real political muscle in 1744 after forming an alliance with Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab, a puritanical Muslim leader who advocated a strict application of Islamic law. The fortunes of the two clans have been inseparable ever since, with the al Sauds largely running the temporal show and holy men descended from Abdul Wahhab, known as the al Sheikhs, providing the religious legitimacy for rule in the land of Islam's birth. Many of Ibn Saud's successes, including the capture of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, owed much to the fierce fundamentalist Wahhabi tribesmen known as the Ikhwan, or brethren.

Despite the modernization that took place after the discovery of oil reserves in 1938, Saudi Arabia remains a land where rigid religious and traditional values are strictly enforced. Cinemas and discos are outlawed; men and women are separated in banks, schools and fast-food restaurants; women must wear veils and are forbidden to drive. Public-decency police known as muttawa comb shopping malls, searching for women whose loose scarves reveal a curl of hair and forcing store owners to shut during prayer times. Unforgiving Saudi justice is on view after the main prayer every Friday, when a swordsman beheads blindfolded murderers, sorcerers, drug smugglers and other criminals in Riyadh's "Chop-chop Square."

Though the Internet has arrived, the Saudis have pioneered ways of blocking access to everything from porn to political dissent. The parents of a newborn recently complained that they were barred from a site providing baby equipment, evidently because it also contained health information answering prohibited anatomical questions.

If such stories seem comical, there is nothing amusing about the raging anti-Western and anti-Jewish sermons that often blare out of the kingdom's mosques. Hard-liners in the pervasive religious establishment pose an absolute obstacle to liberalism, whether barring the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution or classes in figurative painting. An obsessive suspicion of Israel permeates Islamic teaching, Saudi-style. Earlier this year, a leading imam issued a fatwa against Pokemon, the Japanese animated series, after rumors spread that the name of one of the most popular characters, Pikachu, was a wily code for "be a Jew."

King Fahd, 80, will be remembered in Saudi annals as the great modernizer, a staunch U.S. ally who built hospitals and highways and spent billions upgrading the Saudi armed forces. To minimize friction with Muslim leaders, however, he constantly channeled some of the kingdom's vast oil wealth into religious causes. He carved out a place in Islamic history by supervising a $25 billion expansion of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The King also poured cash into scores of new Islamic universities, which began churning out thousands of fresh religious activists. "But something unexpected happened," notes a former Western diplomat in Riyadh. "Instead of this wonderful utopia, where young men were attracted to academia to learn about Islam, you got thousands of religious graduates who couldn't find jobs."

Some found what they considered a higher calling. King Fahd's most portentous move was his backing of the jihad against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The Saudis had supported Islamic political groups throughout the Middle East for decades, but the training of thousands of young Wahhabis was their first real taste of jihad. Among the recruits was a 21-year-old business administration graduate of King Abdul Aziz University named Osama bin Laden, a scion of a Jidda construction clan that made a fortune building the kingdom's infrastructure.

Bin Laden is not the first to challenge the al Sauds' right to rule. Fanatical Ikhwan, once allies of the al Sauds, rebelled in 1929, objecting to foreign influences such as the introduction of radio broadcasts, forcing Ibn Saud to crush them with loyalist tribesmen. In 1979 King Khalid harshly put down a fanatical group that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, in a violent two-week clash that left 127 Saudi troops and 117 insurgents dead. The message of all these groups has been the same: pure Islam has been corrupted by the al Saud rule.

Yet nothing has threatened to shake the foundations of the al Saud rule like the challenge posed by the latest generation of Islamic militants. While bin Laden never concentrated on building a political organization, he is loosely connected to like-minded comrades inside the kingdom, from fellow veterans of the Afghan war to a network of fiery young mid-rank clerics who share his views on fighting America and destroying Israel. It was the upshot of Saddam's invasion of Kuwait that ignited their anger. King Fahd's agreement to act as host to U.S. troops, bin Laden charged, revealed the al Sauds' inability to defend the kingdom and its unholy dependence on infidels. Al Saud fundamentalism was not correct enough for bin Laden, who decried the government's corruption and crackdown on dissident clerics. "The core of our disagreement with you," bin Laden wrote Fahd in 1995, "is your abandonment of the duties to the religion of the One True God." By then, bin Laden had fled the kingdom and been stripped of his Saudi nationality.

To enforce Saddam's continued isolation, some 6,000 U.S. troops remain in the kingdom, and the eviction of the "Crusader" forces is one of bin Laden's oft-repeated aims. Bomb attacks at U.S. facilities in Riyadh in 1995 and at Khobar Towers in 1996 left 24 Americans dead; bin Laden's role in the blasts, if any, is sketchy. The Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S. left Saudi officials almost as stunned as they were by the roll of Saddam's tanks 11 years earlier. "What shocks me most," says a Saudi diplomat, "is why they hit America and not us."

Caught between America and bin Laden: for Saudi rulers there could hardly be more uncomfortable terrain. Hence, the Saudis have been lobbying Washington against broad attacks on terrorist bases in the Middle East and downplaying the possible use of the state-of-the-art Prince Sultan Air Base near Riyadh for strikes. In the belief that President Bush's seeming ambivalence toward the Palestinian cause helped inflame tensions before Sept. 11, the Saudis are appealing for much stronger U.S. pressure on Israel to accept a Palestinian state. "Wake up, and look at what you are doing in the Middle East," Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud, an investor with more than $11 billion in U.S. holdings, said to TIME last week. "Arabs and Muslims have become frustrated."

Saudi officials bitterly complain that America's automatic backing for Israel makes close Saudi ties with Washington a hard sell for their people. Still, much could be done to get the House of Saud in order and head off internal threats. While Crown Prince Abdullah, 78, has been instituting economic reforms and trimming perks like free air travel from the estimated 30,000 members of the extended clan, the public still gripes about rampant official corruption, ranging from taking commissions on arms deals to muscling in on private businessmen. Sclerosis in royal succession is also a problem: because tradition hands the reign from one son of Ibn Saud to another, the current King, 80, and the next three in line are all well past Western retirement age.

The collapse in the kingdom's per capita income, from more than $15,000 in 1981 to less than $7,000 today, poses challenges with no easy solutions for a nation of 17 million Saudis. For the first time since the oil boom of the 1970s, a generation of Saudis is growing up with shrinking educational and job opportunities. Many are Islamic militants, a potential pool of recruits for bin Laden's army. Mai Yamani, a Saudi research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, is monitoring the impact of the Sept. 11 attacks. "What worries me is an Osama bin Laden syndrome," Yamani says. "Is there going to be a radical trend that will grow?" To help ward off that chance, the Saudi government is already working to turn down the heat. During Friday prayers last week, for instance, the Imam of Mecca condemned terrorism and warned about "the spreading of evil on this earth."

Thus far, there have been no anti-American protests like the Muslim demonstrations last week in Pakistan and Indonesia. Saudi security is tight and justice swift, proven tools for discouraging potential agitators. Royals led by Crown Prince Abdullah seem keenly aware of the need to defuse tensions between the government and radical Saudi clergy. In 1999 Prince Naif, the Interior Minister, eased a tense standoff by freeing two militant imams, ideological allies of bin Laden who had been detained in 1994 for agitating against the government. Abdullah keeps an ear cocked toward public opinion: earlier this year, angered by U.S. inaction on the Palestinian problem, he pointedly declined an invitation from President Bush to visit the White House.

Saudis say they will be watching to see if U.S. military action in the war on terrorism produces a backlash on the streets of Riyadh and other Saudi cities. Most feel antigovernment sentiment will be contained by security clampdowns and a Saudi aversion to trouble. "Less than 1 in 100 would like to see bin Laden in power," says Riyadh ophthalmologist Osama Alem, 42. "People look at what the Taliban did to Afghanistan and ask, 'Would you like to be living there?'" Yet the warning signs are there, and not just among religious fanatics. Steering his leather-seated Mercedes through Riyadh's neon-lit shopping boulevards, Saudi journalist Omar al Zobidy is the picture of the Western-educated Saudi yuppie. But his rant against America is all bin Laden. "We are Arabs," al Zobidy cries as he speeds through an intersection. "Osama makes us feel like we are still alive. He is changing the balance of power."