In the Kingdom of the Pure: [Not applicable]

By Peter Boehm

A fascinating description by German journalist Peter Boehm of his experiences while teaching English in Saudi Arabia. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781071519004

Peter Boehm

Peter Boehm worked as a foreign correspondent for the Berlin daily paper die tageszeitung (taz) for almost ten years, based in Nairobi, Tashkent and Los Angeles. He has also worked for a number of well-known German-language newspapers and has produced features for public radio stations. He has also written (in English) for the Independent newspaper and for the Christian Science Monitor. Peter's experiences from his travels have also formed the subject-matter of a number of books and plays, of which Africa Askew - Traversing the Continent is just one. Peter Boehm can be found on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Peter-Boehm/121666391323734

Book preview

In the Kingdom of the Pure

Peter Boehm

––––––––

Translated by Robert E. Anderson 

In the Kingdom of the Pure

Written By Peter Boehm

Copyright © 2019 Peter Boehm

All rights reserved

Distributed by Babelcube, Inc.

www.babelcube.com

Translated by Robert E. Anderson

Babelcube Books and Babelcube are trademarks of Babelcube Inc.

IN THE KINGDOM OF THE PURE

By

Peter Boehm

Text copyright © 2013 Peter Boehm

All rights reserved.

––––––––

Translated by

ROBERT E. ANDERSON

Table of Contents

§ 1 – A Prayer for Rain.................................................................................................................1

§ 2 – Here, the Old Rule...............................................................................................................5

§ 3 – Why the Arab Spring Never Reached the Kingdom.................................................................17

§ 4 – The One Man Opposition....................................................................................................34

§ 5 – Work: A Hard Lot...............................................................................................................49

§ 6 – Mail? Mail!........................................................................................................................62

§ 7 – Housemaids in the Kingdom: A Horror Story..........................................................................66

§ 8 – The Cottage Builder...........................................................................................................77

§ 9 – The Others: Shiites in Saudi Arabia.......................................................................................92

§ 10 – Women at the Wheel – Will That Come This Year?.............................................................115

§ 11 – Car City, Car Country......................................................................................................125

§ 12 – Interviews with Foreign Women.......................................................................................135

§ 13 – What's It Like to Sleep with Darth Vader?..........................................................................143

§ 14 – Prayer: Pumping for the Lord...........................................................................................149

§ 15 – The Terrorist Factory, or a Warning to Expatriates..............................................................157

.............................................................................................................................................175

§ 1 – A Prayer for Rain

Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, is located in the middle of the desert. Thus, it does not rain often, not even in the middle of January. That's why I was surprised when I saw the weather forecast on the internet one evening predicting real rain for the next day.

Early the next morning, the imams cried out prayers for rain over the loudspeakers on the mosques throughout the neighborhoods. The newspapers said that, after a long drought, the King had directed them to pray for life-giving water along with the faithful. Apart from a few imams in private mosques, the King, the leader of the faithful, is the one who hires and pays imams.

The rain came as forecast. But it came so abundantly that water was soon knee-high in the streets. Our students asked us to let them go home two hours early in order to avoid the expected traffic jam. The water had now accumulated over a wide area where there had previously been wide, flat streets. Our minibus slowly made its way home from our school through gigantic puddles – small lakes, really – and small rivers. A small pond that we had to give wide berth to because we didn't want to get our feet wet stood right in front of our apartment block for several days – until a tank truck finally showed up and siphoned it right off.

Jeddah, the port city on the Red Sea, was once again completely under water. More than 120 people drowned after heavy rainfall in December 2009 – with most of them, according to official figures, dying miserably in their own cars.

Why is it such a big problem, I wondered, when it rains in the Kingdom? The reason was easy enough to understand. The cities in the country have no drainage systems: rainwater just can't run off. But, why was that? Even after the dozens of newspaper pages that journalists churned out on the subject, I still wasn't clear why the cities didn't have any sewers.

A European civil engineer I desperately sought an explanation from told me that the city planners originally simply overlooked them. How often does it rain in the desert? But as the cities grew, however, and the paved areas expanded and water had less and less space to drain off, they were forced to change their minds.

In Jeddah, for example, that was only about ten years ago. Except. The government funds for the planned wastewater construction projects disappeared into the pockets of any passing prince and/or his cronies. No sewer systems were therefore built, so that Saudi cities are accordingly now under water whenever it rains.

But I had one more question. Was it really the prayers of the faithful that brought the rain?

That's what I asked the young Saudi man at the reception desk of our apartment block the day after the deluge. He thought a bit, then said, The Lord will not abandon us.

I asked the next person, my supervisor at the college. He had studied in England and had lived there for eight years. He rolled his eyes and spoke pensively. But of course: the whole country prayed for it.

Only the human rights activist Mohammed Al-Qahtani gestured wearily. He is a sort of one-man opposition group in the country, one of the very few Saudis who will speak informally with Western journalists. Without thinking, he said, The show always stops here just before it starts to rain.

Welcome to the Kingdom of the Pure! For some, Saudi Arabia might look like a great big show. But the country sees itself as the answer given by God to the question of governmental organization, however, an earthly paradise for the faithful. Until the attacks of September 11, 2001 shook Saudi Arabia's self-image – fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were young Saudi men – the country's clergy claimed that Saudi Arabia had the Perfect Islamic System.

That's similar to how others see it. For Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, head of the Pakistani Jamaat-ud-Dawah group, formerly the Lashkar e-Taiba, the organization responsible for the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks, Saudi Arabia is the best Islamic State, if not the ideal Islamic State. The Kingdom shares the ideology of radical Sunni fundamentalists, including Al-Qaida: Salafism, which is the belief that everything was perfect under the Prophet and the first Four Rightly-Guided Caliphs in the 7th Century A.D. Salafism is the foundation of the Perfect Islamic System.

That's why the Kingdom is the model for all Sunni fundamentalist systems. After the military coup in Khartoum in 1989, Hassan Al-Turabi and Omar Al-Bashir went to Saudi Arabia to implement their ideas. The states of Northern Nigeria wanted to introduce a Sharia-based court system? They were able to study its implementation in the Kingdom. The Afghan Taliban needed money? They introduced their Pakistani supporters to the Kingdom. Even though the Kingdom now plays down its role in the financing of the Afghan Taliban, Saudi Arabia was far and away the most important source of funding for Qur'an schools, whether through governmental grants or through funds from non-governmental welfare organizations.

The Taliban, on the other hand, created their notorious Ministry for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice under the direct inspiration of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice of the Saudi Religious Police.

Osama bin Laden grew up in the Kingdom and was deeply influenced by it. He only turned away from his homeland after he proposed in 1994 that the Saudi Royal Family send volunteer forces that he would assemble to the border regions threatened by Iraq. The Royal House, which had had bad experiences in 1980 from radicalized irregulars during the occupation of the Great Mosque in Mecca, declined his offer with thanks and instead allowed US troops into the country. That triggered the break with Osama bin Laden: the pro-Western foreign policy of the Royal Family was the decisive factor, not the domestic order.

But what does such a perfect system look like today, in the days of the information revolution?

The rain also gave the answer here. Modern technology and the divine can coexist peacefully and do not exclude one another. There were also weather forecasts in Saudi Arabia. And, my students also followed them and trusted them. Otherwise, they would have been bogged down in traffic. But they were at the same time convinced that prayer had had an effect on the rain.

Saudi newspapers write almost every day about such problems as building sewage systems, the lack of urban planning, the promise of a subway that never comes about and, yes, the inability of Saudi authorities to carry out basic community-based work. But they never question the Perfect Islamic System.

This conflict between Islamic doctrine and the challenges of modern economics and administration is argued over out in the Kingdom every day, often with the perfect system, sometimes through modernity, but the tensions are always there between them. Welcome to the Kingdom of the Pure.

§ 2 – Here, the Old Rule

Probably the most powerful man in the Arab world is a very old man. In one of his rare televised talks during the spring of 2011, King Abdullah looked extremely frail. He hobbled slowly through a few decrees. Talking obviously gave him trouble, and he could only read a few faltering sentences from his script. After a few painfully long minutes, it was finally over.

However, you don't see his age at all. His mustache is dyed a deep black, and his white shemagh, the cloth with which he always covers his head, hides his completely bald head.

Immediately after the speech, the traditional saber dance of the Saudi princes was shown. The King shrugged his shoulders and danced around the other men in their late seventies with bouncing steps. He swung his saber vigorously. However, the state television forgot to mention that the dance had been filmed a few years previously. The King has chronic back pain, says one Western diplomat. He can no longer swing a saber.

While the old, ossified regimes in other Arab countries tottered during the spring of 2011, Saudi Arabia has so far been the only country, other than Mauritania, where there have been no mass protests – with the exception of the Eastern Province, where a large Shiite minority lives. The entire leadership of the Kingdom is around eighty years old and is either ill, out of the country for months at a time, or even completely unable to govern.

King Abdullah can only do business for two or three hours a day, says Simon Henderson of the Institute for Near East Policy. He is arguably the most informed observer of the Royal Family.

The King is estimated to be ninety years old. Nobody bothered to write anything down in Saudi Arabia when he was born. That's why his exact age is unknown.

At the turn of 2010/2011, the King had to undergo a series of back surgeries and therefore spent several months in the USA. For a leading Saudi prince, however, he still has to be considered relatively fit. His predecessor King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995 and was sometimes no longer conscious even during public appearances. Today's King Abdullah then had to govern the country for ten years as Crown Prince. It was only in 2005, after King Fahd's mortal remains had finally entered the happy hunting grounds, that Abdullah finally became King himself.

The role of the good but totally absent spirit in the House of Saud was then taken over by Crown Prince Sultan. According to a report by the US Embassy in Riyadh that was published by Wikileaks, he had become incapable of all tasks in recent years. According to Simon Henderson, he was suffering from senile dementia and was in a chronic vegetative state. Before he finally floated into the Nirvana of Eternal Smiles, Crown Prince Sultan had been Minister of Defense for forty-nine years (in numbers: 49).

In 2011, when King Abdullah was treated for spinal surgery in the USA for several months, they pushed the demented Crown Prince into the Chamber of Ministers and had him chair the cabinet meetings. He didn't recognize anyone present. He finally wasted away in the fall of 2011.

Then, the Minister of the Interior, Prince Naif, who had held that office for more than thirty-five years (in numbers: 35), became Crown Prince. He was considered a hardliner and a favorite of the Wahhabi clergy. For a long time he was considered to be the most likely successor of the King. After only eight months as a Crown Prince, he was also wafted away to Heaven.

Then Prince Salman, who had previously been Governor of Riyadh, Crown Prince, and Minister of Defense for forty-eight years (in numbers: 48). At the age of seventy-seven, he is almost a little boy among the House of Saud.

The question still arises, of course, of how the wizened old men run their ministries if they are permanent inmates of foreign sanatoria or hospitals? Daily business is conducted by the sons of the ministers. Everyone knows that, says human rights and democracy activist Mohammed Al-Qahtani.

Yes, everyone does know that. After the death of the founding King Abdulaziz Al-Saud, the ministerial positions and Governorships were parceled out in subtly defined proportions among the families of his sons. The successor to the throne of the Kingdom is not the eldest son, as in the case of European aristocratic houses, but the succession migrated (and still migrates) from Abdulaziz's eldest son to the next oldest. This spared the Kingdom the problem of one dispute or war of succession or another, but it has the disadvantage that the rulers keep getting older. Moreover, there is a fragile balance between the families of Abdulaziz's sons that would be extremely dangerous to tamper with. That is why the ranks of the Saudi warriors die in office. It is easier for everyone involved. And also for the distribution of the power of families within the Royal Family – but more about this later.

If they do not argue with each other, then the Al-Saud hold Saudi Arabia in a tight grip. As the name of the country indicates, the Royal Family treats Saudi Arabia, including its twenty million subjects and ten million guest workers, as their own personal property. But it doesn’t see it that way. The Al-Saud would rather argue that they are simply clinging to the code of the Bedouin that has developed in the Arabian desert over the course of the centuries.

Thus, they do not treat the land as their property. No, but they do simply govern it in accordance with their own traditions. Among the Bedouin, the Emir has always been only one among equals. All Bedouins have always had the right to see their Emir and to explain their problems to him. For a long time, that was the only way for Saudis to secure their rights.

In March 2011, when the Arab Spring also appeared in Saudi Arabia, it was logical for some Saudi princes to insist that those who wanted to protest come to them and present their problems and suggestions for reform. As always, their doors were open to all. Didn't they always take good care of their fellow countrymen?

Of course, with twenty million Saudi citizens, that naturally seemed obsolete and, given the huge demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, the suggestion that the angry masses request an audience with their princes before sending them into the desert seemed ridiculous. But Al-Saud had always done that. Why would you change the system now all at once?

But, to begin from the beginning: in order to understand the relationship of Al-Saud to their subjects, we must go back to the early days of the Royal Family. The way it expanded its power over the Arabian Peninsula is instructive. Because the history of modern Saudi Arabia really begins with the daring raid of a young Al-Saud on Riyadh in 1902. At that time, this foray was a cross between a raid and a youthful prank, but today it is regarded as the founding act of modern Saudi Arabia.

In order to understand the relationship between religion and the Royal Family, we need to go back even further. As early as 1744, a fateful encounter occurred that still decisively shapes Saudi Arabia today. At that time, the radical Islamic cleric Muhammad Abd Al-Wahab made a pact with the Emir of the Al-Saud family reigning in Najd, one that still exists today.

The unity and uniqueness of God stands at the center of Wahhabi Islam. It is particularly directed at the Sufi variant of Islam, with its local saints and their graves and shrines. Essentially, Wahhabi Islam is hostile to anything that does not center on the worship of God.

The fundamental features of this pact are still operative today. The families Al-Saud and Al-Wahab joined together by marriage. The Al-Saud ceded religious authority to the Al-Wahab family, which today simply calls itself Al-Sheikh, the family of the religious founding father. In return, Al-Sheikh awarded Al-Saud the legitimacy of the ruler who represents the teachings of pure Islam. Even today in the Kingdom, the supreme clergyman, the Grand Mufti, who is at the same time the leader of the Supreme Council of Clergy, almost always comes from the Al-Sheikh family.

The beginnings of the state organization of Al-Saud in Najd, the plateau at the center of the Arabian Peninsula, go back to this time in the 18th Century. However, they had to wrestle for supremacy with their arch-rivals, the Al-Rashid from the north-east of the peninsula, for a long time. The Al-Saud were expelled by the Al-Rashid of Najd, the area around Riyadh, several times.

At the beginning of the 19th Century, the Al-Rashid allied themselves with the Turks. In 1818, Ottoman troops stormed the capital of Al-Saud in Ad-Diriya and expelled them from there. Today, the ruins of this first Saudi capital are located in a suburb to the north-west of Riyadh.

The Al-Saud therefore built their new capital, Riyadh, further to the south. In 1891, however, they were again expelled from there by the Al-Rashid. The Al-Saud went into exile in Kuwait, where the ruling family granted them refuge. King Abdulaziz, later the founder of Saudi Arabia, later grew up there. The Al-Saud denied them their livelihood through raids into Najd, the area around Riyadh.

Under the leadership of Abdulaziz, who was then 21 years old, the Al-Saud again undertook one of these raids against the Al-Rashid during the winter of 1901. In the desert, the riders decided to extend it to Riyadh. The current Saudi capital was at that time a small desert village with a few mud houses and a garrison.

Abdulaziz, with about twenty-five men, attacked the small Masmak fortress in Riyadh. First, the group stole into the house of one of their former servants opposite the fort. Then, in the morning, when the gate of the small garrison was opened, they attacked.

After a brief skirmish, Abdulaziz, who was then the first Saudi King, climbed onto the walls of the conquered fortress, raising the Governor's severed head up in the air and throwing it at the feet of the spectators on the ground. The modern Saudi state was born.

This Masmak fortress can still be visited today in the city center of Riyadh. This small fort of clay stands right next to the central mosque with a wide tower at each of the four corners. A small museum is housed inside.

In 1902, however, Abdulaziz, as Emir of Riyadh, was still only one of many regional rulers on the Arabian Peninsula. Initially against the will of Britain, but eventually with the help of that hegemonic power, he gradually eliminated his rivals on the peninsula. First of all, however, Al-Rashid, the rivals in the north, had to be defeated. The Sherif of Hijaz, the region around Mecca, Medina and the port city of Jeddah on the Red Sea, in the west of today's Saudi Arabia, next became