The killing of an Irish engineer, the latest in a spate of attacks on westerners, underlines the contradictions which threaten the stability of Saudi Arabia. David Gardner reports
At Harvey Nichols, in one of Riyadh's opulent shopping malls, the sharp desert light shimmers off the glass windows. A ring of concrete bollards and barriers surrounds this new ornament in Saudi Arabia's capital in the hope of stifling the compressed blast of any car-bomber tempted to shatter this latest symbol of the kingdom's brittle modernity.
Car-bombers, for the moment, appear to be contained. After a wave of suicide attacks that began with a triple explosion at a westerners' residential compound in Riyadh in May last year, Saudi police have foiled several serious attacks. As a result, Islamist terrorists are instead fielding small cells of gunmen, and directing them against expatriate oil industry executives, Saudi security forces, US military contractors, foreign journalists and, indeed, any random target who looks western.
In one little-noticed attack, for example, Jonathan Bengler, a German caterer working for the Saudi national airline, was shot dead on May 22nd this year, just after withdrawing money from an ATM. In a country where crime is rare, his money was not stolen. He was simply a westerner.
A year or so ago, the government was portraying this sort of incident as part of a bootleggers' battle to control the lucrative market in alcohol, banned in Saudi Arabia. No more. As the Arabic proverb goes, you cannot blot out the sun with your finger.
The new phase in the Islamist offensive in the birthplace of Islam has been enough to jolt even the ruling House of Saud out of denial. The wave of attacks suggests that the al-Saud family, which gives its name to the kingdom it rules as an absolute, theocratic monarchy, is in deep trouble. That is all the more so since only relatively recently did it publicly allow that it had a problem at all.
In the 18 months prior to the Riyadh compound attack, the al-Saud had struggled to come to terms with the fact - acknowledged everywhere except Saudi Arabia - that 15 of the 19 hijackers who immolated nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington on September 11th, 2001 were Saudis, and that their leader was a merchant prince of the kingdom, Osama bin Laden.
Even a year after 9/11, Prince Nayef, the powerful interior minister, was telling a Kuwaiti newspaper that the attack on New York's World Trade Center was a Zionist plot. When five western oil executives were killed at Yanbu, the Red Sea petrochemical port, on May 1st this year, Crown Prince Abdullah - the de facto ruler because King Fahd has been too incapacitated to run the kingdom since a stroke in 1995 - said he was "95 per cent certain" that Zionists were behind it. What other explanation could there be, this cui bono reasoning went, when such attacks turned international opinion against Muslims?
Now, however, the local franchise of bin Laden's al-Qaeda has swivelled its gunsights towards the heart of the kingdom where, plainly, they are still trained.
The May 29th attack at al-Khobar in Eastern Province, which contains the largest oil deposits in the world, was deadly in its sinister intent. Islamist gunmen attacked two foreign oil company office blocks and an expatriate enclave, killing three Saudi and 19 foreign civilians and nine Saudi policemen. They sought out Christian, Hindu and Buddhist "infidels" to murder, setting Muslim hostages free. Even though the attack turned into a siege, with Saudi security forces ringing the compound and commandos landing on the roof of the building where the gunmen still held more than 40 hostages, three of the attackers were able to, or allowed to, escape.
But the real chill of fear descended on the expatriate communities last month when Paul Johnson, an American technician working on Apache helicopters, was kidnapped and subsequently beheaded on camera, his death recorded for an Islamist webcast. The searching out of non-Muslims to murder at al-Khobar had badly rattled those in the gated compounds. Until then, most foreign workers were stoic about the possibility of suicide attacks, reasoning they were statistically more likely to die in, say, a traffic accident. But the obscene slaughtering of Paul Johnson, on top of the gruesome murders at al-Khobar, marked a psychological turning point: there is nothing abstract about being beheaded.
Throughout this period, the exultant chatter on the Islamist websites used by al-Qaeda followers was deafening. More ominously, Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, then leader of the self-styled al-Qaeda organisation in the Arabian peninsula, made clear that their tactics were to stampede western "infidels" out of the kingdom, and to destabilise world oil markets by targeting soft but neuralgic parts of the Saudi oil industry. Ultimately, the goal was to overthrow the House of Saud, and he called for an uprising against the "apostate" monarchy.
While no such uprising is in prospect, the extremists have been able to expose the authoritarian government's weak grip on security. That really frightens people. "We know what the worst fears of the average Saudi are," says a government official. "He fears, above all, chaos."
This sense of a state of siege has pitched the government's weakly articulated reform programme into abeyance. Like most Arab rulers, the House of Saud tends to see the future as an antithetical choice between reform or stability, rather than between reform or revolt and eventual ruin. Campaigners for reform, meanwhile, always at risk of being flung into the regime's dungeons, feel undermined by the terrorist offensive. Mohsen al-Awajy, a leading Islamist reformer jailed during the 1990s, says: "Since the Riyadh bombings [of May 2003], consideration of almost all our demands for reform has been suspended - the situation makes it unwise for us to put pressure on the Saudi government."
Nonetheless, the ruling family has finally had to acknowledge publicly that al-Qaeda, incubated in great part by the fanatical Wahhabi strain of Islam that the al-Saud have imposed as the kingdom's sole creed, was its problem too. As the al-Khobar slaughter continued, Crown Prince Abdullah vowed to crush "this corrupt and deviant group" in Saudi society, and warned that "those who keep silent about the terrorists will be regarded as belonging to them".
In a regime where members of his own family and leaders of the clerical establishment share the same hostility towards the west, and towards Muslims who do not subscribe to Wahhabi extremism, this was - at least at face value - a huge statement. If taken to its logical conclusion, it would require the House of Saud to re-examine its relationship with the Wahhabi clerical establishment - the historic compact that is the foundation stone of the Saudi state.
In the past 50 years, as Saudi Arabia emerged as the world's largest oil exporter, the Muslim fundamentalist state has remained essentially static, while its subjects have been dragged headlong into modernity. But it is a modernity that rests on the shakiest foundations, divorced from the western culture that produced it and in conflict with the culture it inhabits. Near Harvey Nichols at the mall, for instance, La Senza, the lingerie chain, has an outlet. It is identical, in all respects except the slightly gaudier range, to a similar shop anywhere else. But there is one fundamental difference. Because women may not mix with men outside their family and are kept in a combination of seclusion and segregation, it follows that they cannot work in a lingerie shop - which is therefore staffed entirely by men.
But probably it is in the field of education that cultural contradictions are most vivid. On the one hand, Saudi Arabia has an educated middle class, an estimated one million of whom have studied abroad - often to a very high level - and the kingdom has educated its girls for roughly the last generation and a half. But then turn to school textbooks, drawn up under the authority of the Wahhabi establishment, which drill into impressionable young Saudi minds the religious duty to hate all Christians and Jews as infidels, and to combat all Shi'ites as heretics.
This sort of teaching follows the theses of the theologian Ibn Taymiyya, a forerunner of Wahhabi thinking who died in 1328, who asserted the discretionary power of Muslim scholars and clerics to "correct" their rulers. "It is really not very difficult to understand how we got to where we are," says one reformist intellectual, asking rhetorically if there is any difference between the sectarian bigotry of an Osama bin Laden and the intolerant outpourings of the Wahhabi establishment.
The critical difference, of course, is that while the Wahhabi clerics' House of al-Sheikh props up the House of Saud, al-Qaeda wants to bring it down. Can it succeed? The short answer is no - at least in the short term.
In the past half century, the al-Saud have demonstrated an extraordinary resilience to frequent political emergency and massive social dislocation. They have managed the sudden access to great wealth from ownership of a quarter of the world's oil reserves - and a switchback of even more sudden oil price collapses. The kingdom more or less copes with the import into its closed society of foreign labour equivalent to one third of its population - not to mention millions of annual pilgrims to Mecca.
The House of Saud has also confronted great political challenge. It managed to resist the pan-Arabism of Gamal Abdel Nasser, when Nasserism was sweeping all before it from Syria to Yemen, as well as Ayatollah Khomeini's attempts to export Iran's Islamic revolution. The family came through the trauma of deposing the incompetent and spendthrift King Saud in 1964, and the assassination of his successor, King Faisal, by a disgruntled nephew in 1975. It also managed to survive the 1979 seizure of the Great Mosque at Mecca by Islamist fanatics - a huge blow to the ruler's prestige as keeper of the holy places. And it was confident (or frightened) enough to risk allowing more than half a million foreign troops on its soil - the birthplace of Islam - during the 1990-91 Gulf crisis.
Many have bet against the House of Saud, forecasting its demise in a paper trail of books, articles and diplomatic dispatches stretching back decades. Yet here it still is. The immediate threat to its survival, moreover, should not be exaggerated. In what has been a bloody spring in the Arab world, the same number of people were being killed in a week in Iraq, or a month in Gaza, as have died in more than a year in Saudi Arabia since the triple suicide bombings in Riyadh last year.
Even so, the government has shown limited ability to get a grip on security, amid widely discussed fears that al-Qaeda cells will try to assassinate a senior prince in the hope of triggering a crackdown and widening the conflict. "If anyone wants to kill a member of the royal family, it's not very difficult," says one of its members. "Tradition obliges us to keep an open house to anyone who wants to approach us."
One Saudi diplomat close to the crown prince says the government "does not want to overreact - we must avoid widening the circle of sympathy for these people".
It is unclear how numerous "these people" are. Saudi Arabia sent some 20,000 volunteers to the jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan - many of them recruited by Osama bin Laden. But these so-called Arab Afghans are giving way to a second generation of fighters, inspired rather than directed by al-Qaeda.
"These are not the mujahideen who fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These are people who set their face against Saudi society before they left," (to fight in Bosnia, Chechnya and now Iraq) says Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who advises Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former intelligence chief who is now Saudi ambassador to London.
Abdulaziz al-Muqrin is a case in point. Until he died in a shoot-out after the beheading of Paul Johnson, Muqrin had been behind most of the recent mayhem in the kingdom. According to Mohsen Awajy, the Islamist reformist who has been trying to mediate between the government and the insurgents, Muqrin fought in Bosnia and took part in the failed assassination attempt on President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt in Addis Ababa in 1995. Extradited to Saudi Arabia, Muqrin was subjected to "intolerable torture", says Awajy. "After his release, he acted as a revenger, not a mujahid. He is very simple-minded, with no political brain. He has the gun, but no mind to control this gun," Awajy said, speaking only days before Muqrin's end.
They are "a minority within the minority" of Islamist insurgents who believe they can overthrow the al-Saud by demonstrating their inability to deliver security or spread prosperity. But Awajy cautions that they are dangerous because "they have already decided to die and want to kill as many people as they can before they do so. Let us recall that it took only 19 individuals to change the face of the planet on September 11th."
Nevertheless, some Saudi security experts and Islamists believe the second-generation insurgents are close to buckling. "This summer will see the last of them," says Khashoggi. "They have not only lost a lot of people. They have lost infrastructure, their safe houses, and the weapons, explosives and cash they must have built up over years."
Against that, Saudi Arabia provides almost laboratory conditions to incubate thousands of bin Ladens and Muqrins. That is its strategic dilemma.
The backdrop could hardly be worse. Unconditional US support for the al-Saud is far from guaranteed after 9/11. Yet that alliance is the main reason bin Laden and his kind see the Saudi rulers as apostates. Meanwhile, the Saudi public for which they both compete is being radicalised daily by US policy in Iraq and Israel - conflicts broadcast live on satellite television, and which make a compelling case to many Saudis that Washington is indeed leading a war against Muslims.
Inside the kingdom, such opinion polls as there are show the main preoccupation to be jobs. Per capita income, at about $8,000, has fallen to a third of the level of 20 years ago. Nearly two-thirds of the population is under 25, yet the oil-dominated economy creates few jobs to employ them, while a bloated monarchy squanders fabulous public wealth. Military spending, for example, is about three times the average for a developing country and is used as a mechanism for distributing power and wealth within the top ranks of the House of Saud - around 5,000 princes strong.
Meanwhile, mosques and classrooms spew out Wahhabi fanaticism, and Saudi Arabia has for decades been exporting these ideas by endowing mosques, schools and religious foundations abroad. If the jihadis establish a firm base in neighbouring Iraq, for example, it will in part be because Wahhabi proselytisers built bridgeheads in towns such as Mosul in the final years of Saddam Hussein's rule.
Finally, the Saudi leadership often appears paralysed, both by the difficulty of the choices it faces and a looming succession crisis. Although Crown Prince Abdullah is nominally in charge, while King Fahd remains alive, his brothers will seek to constrain his freedom of manoeuvre. Abdullah's loyalists dispute this. "I know of nothing the crown prince has really wanted to do that he has been unable to do," one says. But a former courtier says the crown prince's rivals, particularly Prince Sultan, the defence minister, and Prince Nayef, the interior minister, need to keep the stricken king in place. "In any normal country, Christian or Muslim, when the ruler is incapacitated he is replaced. But none of the brothers is willing to see King Fahd leave the scene. Because if Prince Abdullah succeeds, will he make Sultan crown prince? And if so, will Sultan keep defence? And if so, will he really stay in charge of the army? And so it goes on, right down the line."
One Saudi diplomat explains: "What we need is a 50-year-old prince who is open to the world. From where, when, or how, we don't know - we need a miracle." Crown Prince Abdullah, the repository of reformist hope, is 79; his imputedsuccessor, Sultan, is 76. There is no sign that the four main factions inside the al-Saud would agree to skip a generation and choose from among the 60-plus grandsons of Ibn Saud.
In response to numerous and voluminous petitions from Islamist reformists and liberals demanding change, Crown Prince Abdullah last year launched a "national dialogue". This raised the prospect of more open government, tighter financial controls, the gradual introduction of elections, and greater rights for women. Yet while he appears to have recognised the threat to his dynasty, not all his brothers see it that way. Dissidents summoned to Prince Nayef's office this year, according to one reformer present, were told by the interior minister: "What we won by the sword, we will keep by the sword." In March, Prince Sultan said publicly the kingdom was not ready for an elected parliament, because voters might choose "illiterates" (some form of partial municipal elections is now scheduled for this autumn).
Al-Qaeda and the clerics see as their principal adversary the Islamist reformers who advocate far-reaching change. "Al-Qaeda and the clergy are essentially doing the same thing in different ways - putting pressure on the House of Saud for being less devout than it should be. This paralyses reform," says Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Qassim, a former judge turned reformer. "The only way out of this is to dilute the link with Wahhabi fanaticism. The only way forward is to win the legitimacy of society itself - through political reform that does not depend on the approval of the clergy. If you make society part of reform you can overcome the clergy - it's the only way."
The demands of the Islamist reformers include free elections, freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary, a fairer distribution of wealth and a clearer foreign policy arrived at by open debate - in short, a constitutional monarchy. Only recently have reformers, liberal and Islamist, begun to break the taboo of speaking out about Wahhabism, though it is easier for the Islamists, since they can maintain credibly that they intend no separation between mosque and state, but a redefinition of the relationship between the al-Saud and the al-Sheikh.
"Saudi Arabia has to be an Islamic state; it is the birthplace of Islam. The question is: which Islam?" says Jamal Khashoggi who, before coming to the Saudi embassy in London last year, was fired as the editor of al-Watan, a relatively liberal Saudi daily, for publishing articles questioning the theological legacy of Ibn Taymiyya.
The Wahhabi establishment has been pumping the poison of bigotry into the Saudi mainstream for decade after decade. After 9/11, it became impossible to ignore that its signature ideas and al-Qaeda's were pretty much the same. It is hard to imagine how the House of Saud will survive much beyond the short term if their ideas stay the same.
Or, as one Saudi reformer puts it: "If this clerical establishment is incapable of imagining the solutions we need to modern problems, then the answer is clear - we have to find another establishment."