A Forced Pause in Saudi Arabia’s Rush to Modernization

by Richard H. Curtiss

Saudi Arabia’s 29-member cabinet of technocrats meets Mondays, the third day of the Saudi Saturday-morning-to-Thursday-noon work week. Where the cabinet meets depends on the whereabouts of the King. In the summer months when the King and his court are in the Hejaz, which includes the booming, humid Red Sea port of Jeddah, the nearby mountain resort town of Taif and the Muslim Holy City of Mecca, the cabinet meets in cosmopolitan Jeddah. In the winter months, when the King and his court are in the Nejd, the high and dry ancestral province of the Al Saud family, the cabinet meets in Riyadh, the sprawling modern national capital.

The problem this November was that King Fahd Ibn Abdul Aziz, who loves Jeddah, lingered there while his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah Ibn Abdul Aziz, was escounced in Riyadh. A year earlier, for health reasons, King Fahd temporarily had turned over the running of the country to his brother in what many observers expected to be the opening move of a gradual transition of power from an ailing ruler to his designated heir apparent. Only a few weeks later, however, perhaps at the urging of his full brothers, dubbed the “Sudairi Seven” for the family name of their mother, King Fahd formally resumed most of the ceremonial and actual duties of ruling.

Therefore on Sunday nights in November, Saudi Arabia’s 29 cabinet ministers waited for a telephone call which would tell them whether King Fahd would chair the next day’s cabinet meeting personally or had designated Crown Prince Abdullah to chair it. If King Fahd convened the meeting, it would be in Jeddah. If Prince Abdullah chaired it, it would be in Riyadh. Since some of the cabinet members were staying in Jeddah and others in Riyadh, either way there would be a scramble of ministers for the one-and-a-half-hour flight to the site of the meeting.

Wherever the locale, however, the cabinet session is an assemblage of highly educated technocrats who travel from ultra-modern government buildings to immaculate conference rooms where they are presented with carefully prepared agendas buttressed by neat summaries of each of the issues scheduled for discussion.

This is Saudi Arabia today. Cabinet members, most of whom have earned, not honorary, American Ph.D.s, carry cellular phones in the pockets of their immaculate white robes as they glide in glistening Mercedes, Bentleys and Cadillacs from office suites full of the most modern equipment to business lunches in private clubs, luxurious hotel dining rooms or beautifully decorated new Thai, Chinese or Mexican restaurants. But in November they were not sure from day to day whether they next would assemble in cosmopolitan, relatively relaxed Jeddah, or severely spotless, ever-expanding Riyadh—and under whose direction.

If Saudi Arabia is therefore in a period of uncertainty, it’s a relative term. If the price of petroleum dips to $14, the government is slow to pay its bills. When the price of petroleum reaches $19 a barrel, the Kingdom continues to pay off on schedule the debts accumulated in 1990 and 1991 during the Gulf war, and Saudi manufacturers, merchants and entrepreneurs make expansion plans. It has been at both levels over the past two years.

Compared to almost any other country in the world, Saudi Arabia remains immensely rich. If the per capita gross domestic product of $12,000 in 1995 is still below countries of Western Europe, or even neighboring Qatar or the UAE, it is because Saudis have one of the world’s highest birthrates.

This high birthrate represents a statistical economic drag in the short run, but it is solving the country’s underpopulation problem in the long run. Saudi Arabia, with about 25 percent of the world’s known oil reserves, now has 17 million residents, of whom at least 60 percent are Saudis and the remaining 40 percent are guest workers and their families.

One of the problems that Saudis discuss far more than the transition schedule within the royal family, or the presence on their soil of U.S. air crews responsible for patrolling no-fly zones over Iraq, is the steady expansion of the country’s commercial sector. Saudis, who for centuries have hosted the world’s largest annual pilgrimage, are natural entrepreneurs, and right now they have a lot of money to invest.

Foreign visitors are struck by the proliferation of giant, air-conditioned luxury shopping malls, complete with waterfalls, grottoes, and groves of tropical greenery, targeted at the well-heeled Saudis, and less spectacular but equally large “popular markets” aimed at the guest-worker population. As the retail malls multiply, Saudis ask, where will the necessary customers come from?

To a foreign visitor’s suggestion that one way to keep the consumer facilities expanding is to allow more guest workers to bring their families with them, Saudis generally respond, “That is not consistent with the national plan.” That plan is based on maintenance of the country’s high birthrate and gradually replacing the non-Saudi temporary residents. To date, it’s working.

Similarly, when visitors want to talk about political developments, most Saudis look either uneasy or bored. It’s a subject that seems to be of far greater interest to foreign journalists than to the Saudi man in the street, who isn’t exposed to the topic in the local press. That’s not particularly surprising.

Every Saudi knows that the Al Saud family has ruled in the interior of the country for most of the past 200 years. The modern kingdom has had only five rulers since its unification between the World Wars by the late King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, father of all four of his successors. In the same period, the U.S. has had some 14 presidents.

Thus the problems described by Western journalists, who now roam the once-closed country with ever-growing freedom, exist, but in a context of economic prosperity and relative stability that would be the envy of any of Saudi Arabia’s Asian and African neighbors. Further, the country’s rulers have made consistently sound political decisions.

Never colonized, they resisted the ill-conceived tide of “scientific socialism” and premature pan-Arabism that swept newly independent Arab countries in the 1950s and 1960s, leaving economic stagnation in its wake. In 1990 Saudi rulers turned to the United States for protection against both Iraq and Iran, but distanced themselves from U.S.-promoted shortcuts to Arab-Israeli peace not firmly rooted in the land-for-peace formula advanced in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242. In fact, it was the Saudi-authored “Fahd principles of peace” that led to Arab League acceptance of Resolution 242, opening the way to the now frozen “peace process.”

So it is neither foreign nor domestic political problems, but the incongruities of clashing modernity and tradition in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s that preoccupy the increasing percentage of Saudis who have lived, studied or vacationed abroad.

Clearly the nation’s physical infrastructure is basically complete, laid down in the 1970s when petroleum prices were high. Saudis everywhere enjoy clean water and sanitary sewage facilities. Residents of Riyadh. who once depended upon diminishing aquifers for their water, now receive water pumped from desalination plants in distant Jubail on the Arabian Gulf coast.

The country has two of the largest airports in the world, and established universities in its major cities. Those cities are linked to each other by superhighways. The cities themselves are criss-crossed by expressways where rare pot-holes are filled on the day they appear. Business and residential streets are scrubbed clean nightly, and garbage is collected daily before dawn.

Future and Past

But if the streams of traffic racing steadily and silently along wide streets resemble some idealized fantasy of the future, the life lived along those streets and behind the thousands of walled mansions marching inexorably out into the suburbs seems stubbornly linked to the past. Commerce stops five times a day at prayer time. From humble sidewalk shops to exclusive international boutiques in the glossiest shopping malls in the world, shutters come down for 5 to 15 minutes at a time, giving both shop keepers and shoppers two choices: join the prayers in conveniently located nearby mosques and prayer rooms, or sit on benches outside the shops until, suddenly, all of the shutters go up and the country’s hectic commercial life resumes.

Women are not permitted to drive vehicles in Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world with such a prohibition. Yet virtually all women from the country’s ruling elite and burgeoning middle class have learned how to drive and do so annually on long family vacations abroad.

Most Saudi women appear fully veiled in public, although they are continually rubbing shoulders in the streets and souqs with bareheaded women not only from the West but from other Arab countries. Further, most Saudi women promptly shed the veil on leaving their country. Foreigners are astonished at the transformation that takes place among Saudi women who board commercial aircraft returning to their country in modest Western dress, but debark heavily veiled and shrouded from head to toe in abayas, the flowing black all-purpose outer garments that resemble academic gowns with hems that extend to the ankles.

Most annoying not only to foreign residents but to many Saudi men and women as well, are the mutawi’in , morals police, who patrol the streets and souqs in pairs looking for an exposed female arm or ankle. What’s more, the mutawi’in are growing bolder, even bursting into palaces where cars are gathered in search of forbidden alcoholic beverages or mingling of unmarried and unrelated men and women. As the country modernizes physically and economically, it seems to some of its citizens to be receding into the past religiously and socially.

Contrary to Western stereotypes, however, the conflict is not between a reactionary ruling elite on the one hand and intellectual modernizers on the other. Most members of the Al Saud family, believed by now to number several thousand close relatives of King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, clearly are among the modernizers. By contrast, some among the intellectual leaders are the most ardent defenders of gender segregation.

The problem is that in Saudi Arabia, a sacred land to the one-fifth of the human race who are Muslims, there presently is a strong popular reaction to the almost unbelievable physical and psychological changes wrought in the past 30 years. For many Saudis in all walks of life, modernization has become synonymous with excessive Westernization.

It is no wonder. Saudi Arabia is a country where illiterate parents, who grew up living a lifestyle unchanged since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, have children with Ph.D.s from American universities and some of the same ideas that shock American parents of university students. In Saudi Arabia young boys routinely are presented expensive cars as soon as they are old enough to drive them, but still can’t go to a play or movie because there are no theaters.

A gulf yawns between the country’s traditional society, where the masses take direction from their religious leaders, the ulema, and the Western-educated elites and urban middle class who accept the status quo largely because they can afford long vacations abroad to escape it.

Ironically, because King Fahd and his Sudairi siblings are most identified with the modernization that has transformed the physical face of Saudi Arabia, they feel least able to effect further social change without jeopardizing national stability. By contrast, Crown Prince Abdullah, whose personal lifestyle is more traditional and conservative, may eventually prove to be in a stronger position to resume his country’s march into the 21st century.

Saudi Arabia today can only be described as in a period of social consolidation after a generation-long economic and educational great leap forward. Meanwhile, cabinet meetings will continue to be held weekly, sometimes in liberal Jeddah and sometimes in conservative Riyadh.