All but the country’s most hard-line Salafis see hope in steps taken since the then Crown Prince Abdallah began changing the country’s domestic direction eight years or so ago.
Hope, it seems, is the key word. Substantive, irreversible change is harder to put your finger on. However, a lively, even irreverent domestic debate is being waged in the semiofficial press and on the Internet. This debate incorporates arch-conservatives and is wide ranging. It includes sustained attacks on local authorities for the human suffering caused by the November Jeddah floods.
YouTube, Twitter and much Saudi website comment was alive with popular anger at the poor infrastructure and (non-) planning that resulted in the death of at least 130 Jeddawis in what one leading figure adamantly called “heavy rain”. There is also criticism of those ageing ulema (clerics), who have opposed co-education, and of the mutaw’a (religious police) for their periodic harsh treatment of Saudi nationals.
Against this backdrop, the king launched a commission of inquiry and had many Jeddah officials arrested. He has also promoted the kingdom’s first co-ed university, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), as an international symbol of change in the country and begun implementing legal reforms that are encouraging improvements in the position of women. However, the cynics are asking: what will really change in Jeddah and how high will the king’s inquiry actually go?
In this Red Sea port city part of the much-treasured waterfront has been walled off from the public for several years, attracting unusually abusive political graffiti. What is seen by many locally as the result of a corrupt property deal also typifies the behaviour deemed responsible for the “heavy rain” disaster when house-building was sanctioned in flood-prone valleys. (MEI II/4 p23)
After the launch of KAUST (and the king’s unceremonious sacking of its leading clerical critic), co-education and the position of women generally remain hot topics of conversation on the net and in the majalis (discrete, salon-like, discussion groups). In February, another, more minor, cleric issued a fatwa urging death on anyone sanctioning co-education. He has since been widely and officially rubbished, although not, seemingly, silenced. The atmosphere created by these practical steps and by the debate being allowed to happen seems to have affected government tactics more than policy.
For example, the king asked the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) to reconsider a controversial (and widely unpopular) lower court decision to annul a marriage on the basis of a complaint by the woman’s brothers that her husband had lied about his tribal antecedents. While not necessarily the definitive judgement for all future legal reference in such matters, the SJC overturned the decision.
This action fits with a wider environment in which the position of Saudi females is being actively debated, whether over child marriage, male guardianship or the recently proposed right of women to represent themselves in court on ‘family matters’.
Similarly, in Riyadh, the capital, in the conservative Al Saud heartland of Najd, the mutaw’a are not as overt a presence as they used to be. Such is the change in the national mood, one Saudi told me, that if challenged by the mutaw’a he “would fight”, which indicates a new confidence felt by more liberal Saudis in the current atmosphere. At a recent majlis in Jeddah, a senior mutaw’a official was in a feisty but defensive debate with less conservative Saudis about the role and behaviour of his organisation.
In Jeddah, the mutaw’a presence has always been much more subtle, but throughout the country the widespread disdain generated by an infamous series of publicly debated incidents in 2007-08 has clearly impacted on their behaviour. Furthermore, a small number of clerics have been publicly questioning traditional assumptions about the role of women in the workplace, currently a logistical nightmare, given the Wahhabi-inspired adherence to physical separation, and the ban on women driving.
The difference between debate, benign judgements and educational islands of progress on the one hand, and substantive political and legal institutional change on the other, is understood by all Saudi reformers.
They recognize that much of the current trend is reversible, or at least freezable, and that a future leader could decide just to leave the process where it is. A debate at the very top has already delayed the second round of elections to supervisory, though certainly not policy-making, local councils for another two years. “Frustrated” is how one leading Shi’a from the Eastern Province sums up his mood at the slow pace of change; but he and most of his fellow activists know that the king’s is the only game in town.
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