Saudi Arabia: the devil we know, and the one we fear

The house in Madinah where the Prophet's son, Ibrahim, was born to Mariyah al-Qibt (Mariah the Copt). In 1997 it was was a pile of rubble.

WHEN I first visited Saudi Arabia in the 1980s it was like no other place I had ever travelled to. I landed in Jeddah early one January to perform an ‘umrah, the minor pilgrimage.  I was anxious, but starry eyed just as any first timer to the homeland of Islam would be.

I have the fondest memories of my first ‘umrah, but it also educated me about the house of Sa’ud. Outside my hotel in Makkah, which was opposite the Bab ul-Salam gate, I would see the morals police, the mutawwi’un, in action. One day, they forcibly dragged a hapless, squirming pilgrim out of a phone booth during the call for prayer.

The indiscriminate demolition of Makkah and Madinah in the name of progress had just commenced, and there were still lots of the old buildings with their exquisitely carved wooden mashrabiyyah. In Madinah, I could walk a few minutes from my hotel and still find shaded date palm groves.

It was on the ziyarah, the visit to the historical sites of Madinah, that the shocking truth emerged. The sites were in a state of neglect and entry to them was often forbidden by padlocks. In any other country, other than Saudi Arabia, these precious historical places would have been preserved. It was like the pope locking up the Sistine Chapel, or the Orthodox Church allowing the Holy Sepulchre to fall down.

Here, in Saudi Arabia, they were being deliberately allowed to go to dust before being bulldozed into oblivion. Over the next two decades, we would see over 300 sacred sites disappear.

But then, Saudi Arabia is a country named after a family that is only accountable to itself. The abridged history is that in the late 1700s the house of Sa’ud joined forces with a wayward and shunned cleric, ‘Abdullah ibn al-Wahhab, to stamp its tribal authority.

The wily Bedouin chieftain, Ibn Sa’ud, realised that Ibn al-Wahhab’s innovative reduction of Islam to primitive absolutes could be the opiate of his ikhwan, his camel cavalry of half-naked desert brigands. They would go on to conduct massacres across the region in the name of faith, but in reality political ambition.

It was Ibn al-Wahhab, condemned by even his own family, who deemed that honouring historical relics and sites was polytheism, and that they had to be destroyed. Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s dictum was as blunt as a cudgel: you were either for him, or against him – which meant that being an infidel, your blood became permissible. This was a violation of the Qur’anic principle – reflected in Chapters 2 and 109 – of live and let others live.

On my first visit, I was exposed to Saudi society via family ties. It was through them that I learnt there were Hijazis, who unlike the Saudi Najdis, were descendants of the Prophet, the Quraysh and the four Caliphs. They were people who hailed from the western regions, which included Jeddah and the Holy Cities. They were not Saudi, and hated being called so. They would celebrate the Prophet’s birthday (banned by the authorities) in secret.

I remember mentioning the name of the king in a restaurant and being immediately silenced. “Don’t ever do that again!” urged my host. He explained that a neighbour’s son had publically criticised the royals.  He had been detained and had disappeared without trace.

Indeed, as appalling as it may sound, the question arises as to why we should ever be surprised by the fate of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, brutally mudered inside Istanbul Saudi Embassy? Fear and loathing – and enforced disappearance – has been on the Saudi street for decades, at least since the 1980s.

After a second visit to Saudi in 1997, and witnessing further scorched-earth obliterations of our Islamic heritage, I initiated a series of programmes called ‘Notebooks from Makkah and Madinah’ on Voice of the Cape, and then wrote a book of the same name in 2005.

In it, I warned of our fast diminishing heritage and the growing monster of Saudi extremism injecting itself into the Sunni mainstream. It was a very lonely space. No one seemed to care enough, and there were few voices speaking out.

It is my view that we in the Muslim world – greedy for royal handouts since the 1970s and often compromised by them – are chiefly instrumental in our own decay and intellectual demise. Future generations will go on pilgrimage and not find any heritage; nor will they have any sense of our history, or understanding of our rich academic and legal traditions.

But now the dollar donations are drying up, and Saudi Arabia – with its missionary zealots having foisted an Arabised curse called Wahhabism upon us all – has to face its own demons, Al-Qaeda and ISIS blow-back, a youth bulge of 60% and a gathering clamour of domestic discontent.

Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, a callow 33 year-old seen as a benign reformer by deluded journalists such as Thomas Friedman, has not proved to be the man of the hour as everybody had hoped for. He has turned out to be a despot, prone to political impulsiveness and brutality, particularly in war-torn Yemen – which has been reduced to mass starvation by his intervention.

For Saudis right now, their future is bleak – and presents a curious Hobson’s choice of two devils:  the one we know, and the one we fear. The one we know is the royal family being able to hold the country together with genuine reform, despite its internal divisions, and albeit with very frayed authority in a country where the centre has to hold.

The second, the one we fear, is what I call the ‘Syria-Libya option’. This will be an uprising met by bloodshed and a failed state scenario, with the central Najdi tribes and jihadi groups turning on each other in a bloody battle for diminishing resources. In the latter scenario, the oil price will most likely rocket to beyond 300 dollars a barrel, and plunge the world deep into economic crisis.

The only positives are that the US, Saudi Arabia’s biggest ally, can no longer afford to look the other way, and that the world – because of the enforced disappearance of a journalist – is finally seeing Saudi Arabia for the pariah state that it has always been. And as calls for Crown Prince Bin Salman’s head grow louder, we can only hold our breaths and hope for the best. 

Also published in Muslim Views, Cape Town.