Faisal' S Legacy

Religious politics and the new generation Faisal’ s Legacy Kai Bird - randfather was seventy-one years old a new class of independently wealthy Saudis, both of G when he met King Faisal. Saudi Arabia the extended royal family and of common bedu or was the first foreign land he ever lived in. It happened immigrant background, who have turned their backs on that when grandad came to visit us in Saudi Arabia the traditional Wahabi Muslim strictures against ex- eleven years ago, Faisal had just ousted his senile travagant lifestyles. King Faisal’s sudden assassination brother from the throne. Grandfather managed to have in March, 1975, ushered into power a younger genera- himself invited to a diplomatic function honoring the tion of the royal Saud family, men familiar with both new king-and there he shook the Arab monarch’s the West’s material pleasures and its amorality. Un- hand. A world’apart, no two men could have been doubtedly, many of the social hypocrisies practiced by more different, yet in some basic manner both were the royal family under Faisal’s conservative eyes will bred in the old, less mechanized world. Both men, the now become unneccessary. crusty and pious desert king and the retired Oregon lumberjack, had fought a harsh and unyielding land, leven years ago I witnessed Faisal’s sei- and both carried the visible scars of their hard lives. E zure of power in Riyahd, The bedu war- Grandfather had lost three fingers of his right hand riors and the royal family’s personal “White Army” in a sawmill accident during the Depression, and when (the present-day national guard being trained by a the two old men shook hands, Faisal asked, “Did you California company) flocked to the desert capital. lose your fingers in war?” Grandfather explained he Camels and hundreds of sleek Arabian horses be- had never been in uniform, but noticing the King’s decked with bright red, orange, and yellow cloth sad- right eye, which as he grew older had a strange squint, dles congregated outside Faisal’s palace. Faisal he asked, “And did you wound your eye in combat?” emerged in the wide-open courtyard unguarded and Since that time, eleven years ago, Saudi Arabia has alone; he was mobbed by the bedu, who waved un- spanned two centuries of modernization. During the sheathed swords above his head, chanting praises to next decade the country will become unrecognizable. Allah on behalf of their new king. The camel herds are disappearing, to be replaced by In 1964 Faisal attained power at the expense of the bedu-driven Ford pickup trucks. The semibitter carda- extremely conservative religious “ulema” leaders. mon coffee drunk by Faisal’s generation can still be While his brother, Saud, ruled the kingdom, every found in some Jeddah restaurants or out among remote school. every hospital built, each step to improve the bedouin tribes, but the national drink is Canada Dry standard of living in the country had to win the en- (Coca-Cola is on the Arab boycott list), if not smug- dorsement of the powerful religious councils. It was gled Black Label scotch. Driving north of Jeddah on the American oil company, Aramco, that benefited the newly paved highway to Jordan and Lebanon, one from this political stalemate. Because the religious occasionally comes across a piece of desert strewn forces in the country were reluctant to use the oil with broken glass4iquor bottles smashed by the re- revenues for any kind of modernization, the oil com- ligious police. A fifth of scotch is easily worth $25 on pany suffered very little pressure to funnel more of its the black market. profits inside the kingdom. During the 1950’s King These are only some of the more superficial signs of Saud used the royal family’s income almost solely for those extravagant displays of wealth so well carica- KAI BIRDis a freelance journalist who lived in Shdi Arabia tured in the Western press. as a teenager and has paid several visits there since. By contrast, when Faisal was assassinated March 10 King Khalid and Crown Prince Fahd (RNS) 25, he had ready for final approval a $140 billion Five Street,” and regular evening newscasts. Year Plan that will transform this theocratic society Unlike Kuwait, however, King Faisal did not create beyond recognition. The program, which has now been a royalistic welfare state. Education and medical approved by King Khalid, calls for the construction of facilities are free, and in the near future housing will be the world’s largest petrochemical complex, steel mills, subsidized. Government-subsidized sugar, wheat, and auto plants, consumer product factories, and a string of gasoline prices may well be the lowest in the world. desalination plants along the Red Se3 and the Arabian The government does not make a practice of subsidiz- Gulf to irrigate potentially fertile farmlands. King ing private business, and the Saudi citizen is strongly Khalid has said the money must be used to upgrade the encouraged to earn his own living, though very few standard of living for as many Saudis as possible; he Saudis do any kind of menial labor. A Saudi will drive has ordered a crash program of hospital construction his own taxicab, he may run a small truck farming (ninety-seven new hospitals) and 100,OOO new housing business and sell vegetables, he may take a low-paying units in all parts of the kingdom. clerical job with the government civil service, but he Ten years ago such a comprehensive program would will certainly not work on a construction crew. Menial have been inconceivable. But since then the royal gov- labor is almost exclusively relegated to the alien work ernment has essentially immobilized what was once a force-up to one million Yemeni laborers, and several nomadic society; this has in turn weakened the conser- thousand Sudanese, Ethiopian, and Palestinian expa- vative religious institutions. The tribes have migrated triates. Excluding the civil service, the military, and to the cities for most of the year and are becoming the oil industry, the entire Saudi service economy is permanently settled in villages built with government- dependent on Yemeni and other foreign labor. staffed schools. Thousands of water wells were drilled There simply aren’t that many native Saudis to man and irrigation projects expanded to encourage the the vast industrial projects envisioned by King Faisal. tribes to remain ’year round in one settlement, but in While officially the government maintains there are many cases they have preferred the cities to the rural eight million people in the kingdom, most experts settlements. ‘believe there can’t be more than six million, includ- Few Saudis remain unaffected by rising material ing a million foreigners. Nevertheless, it was under expectations, which are now concrete and realizable. Faisal’s rule that so many foreigners were admitted Today there are 517,000 boys and 210,000 girls in into the kingdom over the strenuous objections of both schools, and many of these can expect to continue their the tribal and religious leaders of Mecca and Medina. studies in American or Middle Eastern universities. In conjunction with the new Five Year Plan it is ex- For more than a decade now these Saudi children have pected that an additional 450,000 and perhaps a mil- been watching television-Egyptian romances, lion new foreigners will work in the kingdom. The “Bonanza” dubbed in Arabic, a version of “Sesame presence of so many foreigners, both Christian and 12 / WORLDVIEW / SEPTEMBER 1975 non-Wahabi Muslim. even if concentrated in a few tober, 1973. But most important of Fakal’s external larger cities, is a matter of great concern to many policies .was his financial backing of the Yasir Arafat thinking Saudis. They want the best technical civiliza- wing of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO). tion money can buy, but even some of the modernizers Saudi backing of Arafat’s non-Communist, purely reject adoption of Western cultural norms that would nationalistic, Palestinian parry, el-Fatah, was not destroy the Saudi extended family system. Unlike Iran without consequences. Faisal gave strength and “re- or India, almost every Saudi student sent abroad for spectability” to this “moderate” Palestinian faction, training returns to the kingdom. and if a third state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ever imposed on the antagonists, it will owe nevitably Faisal’s progressive policies much of its success to King Faisal. I planted the seeds of impatience, higher as- Following the aborted coup Faisal internally coopted pirations, and resentment against the stringent taboos the progressive opposition by using the increased oil on liquor, dress, and a wide range of Western con- revenues from a gradual take-over of Aramco on train- sumer goods. Political opposition from Faisal’s left ing more petroleum engineers, economists, and air came from among the same students and professors of force officers. This new educated ilite, most often of institutions that benefited from the sudden growth of “commoner” background, naturally benefited from the educational system. If Faisal was an enlightened the “Saudization” of managerial level positions in the man of his generation, he was still an uncompromising oil industry. autocrat. Amnesty International estimates there may be An extremely conservative man in his personal five thousand political prisoners presently jailed inside habits and religion, Faisal was capable on a political Saudi Arabia, but this figure carries very little credibil- level of bridging the ideological gap to the Saudi ity with most observers. Reliable sources inside the “left”-that growing middle-class group of Western- kingdom assert there are fewer than a hundred Saudi educated commoners-engineers, military officers, nationals imprisoned on political charges.

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