Wealth and terror 
Cover story 
Lindsey Hilsum 
Monday 1st May 2006 

          Saudi Arabia's government is finally making moves to "re-educate" Islamic extremists - but a new generation of jihadis is ready to take their place. Lindsey Hilsum reports from Riyadh 
          The call to prayer echoes through the mall and everyone is forced to stop shopping. The shutters come down on the Riyadh branch of Harvey Nichols, the largest in the world. With oil at over $70 a barrel, Saudis have plenty of money to spend on expensive perfume and overpriced fashion to wear under the black abaya. Architects expect the "new age" King Abdullah Economic City, planned to rise in concrete and glass from the desert outside Jeddah, will cost more than $30bn. On the Corniche, Jeddah's waterfront, young men vroom past on Hollisters, extremely pricey cruising bikes, all shining chrome and roaring exhaust. 

King Abdullah has been in office for nine months now, presiding over the biggest oil boom since the 1970s. But he knows how precarious it is. In February, an al-Qaeda cell tried to drive a suicide car bomb into Abqaiq, the terminal processing two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's oil. If the attackers had succeeded, production might have been paralysed and oil could have soared to $100 a barrel or more. In his most recent State of the Union speech, President George W Bush talked of diversifying from oil as a way of reducing dependence on an unstable Middle East. 

"There's a realisation that the world is changing and Saudi Arabia has responsibility," says Nawaf Obeid, a security consultant to the Saudi government. "It's a global issue. The ulema - the clerics - have no choice." 

That doesn't mean an end to prayer-breaks in the mall, although many in the easygoing coastal city of Jeddah are clamouring for a more relaxed attitude to Islam. It does mean clamping down on ultra-conservative clerics who, for years, have openly taught in the country's schools and mosques that it is no crime to kill infidel Jews and Christians, and that Muslims who follow a more liberal line are takfir - guilty of apostasy. 

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of young Saudi men fought in Afghanistan, first against the Russians and later for the Taliban. As long as the violence remained outside the kingdom, the Saudi authorities did little to stem the flow of fighters, and failed to curb Saudi clerics preaching violence, even after it was established that 15 of the 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 were Saudis. Al-Qaeda had long condemned the House of Saud for its close relations with the US, but - until a series of attacks in 2003 - the royal family had somehow thought the tensions would not translate into violence inside the kingdom. 

That has changed. Saudi officials refuse to accept that Wahhabism, the extreme form of Islam which has dominated the kingdom for 70 years, provides a theological justification for terrorism by preaching the absolute renunciation of all non-Muslims. None the less, in the past year, the government has barred a thousand clerics from teaching, in the first concerted move to foster a more tolerant brand of Islam. Moderate imams have been deployed to enter the chatrooms of radical jihadi websites and persuade extremists that their ideology is wrong, as part of a campaign called al-Sakinah (Tranquillity). Yet according to Khaled al-Maeena, editor of the English-language newspaper Arab News, roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the Saudi population resists change, and conservative clerics still wield influence. 

"It's a cultural thing," he said. "And it's about power. They're a hydra-headed monster. They control education, the pulpit and the media. Until now, the government turned a blind eye, but 9/11 and the attacks in Riy-adh gave them a cudgel." 

In municipal elections last December - the first polls for public office held in the kingdom - conservatives gained the majority in Jeddah. The government was reduced to appointing liberals to the un-contested seats, a sign of how far politics has shifted. 

The Saudi authorities are keen to show visiting journalists the prowess of their special forces. At a training facility in the desert outside Riyadh, half a dozen armed men in balaclavas creep around a small concrete hut, kick down the door, chuck a grenade into the room and - guns blazing - leap on a "terrorist" waiting inside. They storm a jumbo jet, jump through flaming hoops and shimmy down a rope hanging from a camouflage-painted tower. 

It gets a little more real at the interior ministry control room, where dozens of operatives monitor police cameras around the city. The 2003 wave of car bombs and suicide attacks on compounds where foreigners live persuaded the government to invest in a state-of-the-art surveillance system that lets it track suspect vehicles and communicate instantly with police patrol ling the city. Moving red lights on a map projected on to a giant screen show the location of police units; CCTV tapes are retained for six months so that intelligence officers can trace car registrations. 

But the most important element in Saudi Arabia's anti-terrorism campaign is conducted out of sight of CCTV or foreign journalists. For two years, in a programme kept secret until a few months ago, psychiatrists and Muslim clerics have been holding sessions at Saudi jails, trying to "turn" some 750 young Saudi men who, the authorities say, espouse a violent jihadi ideology. The young men have been arrested and held without trial under a system that is criticised by human-rights groups, but which may hold the key to overcoming al-Qaeda and similar groups in Saudi Arabia. 

"The person has to agree to the programme," says General Mansur al-Turki, a spokesman for the interior ministry. Neat in his uniform and beret, he epitomises the professional image of policing that the Saudi government is trying to promote. "First a psychiatrist will see if the young man is ready to discuss. Then the cleric starts, because this is a religious problem. Someone who is very knowledgeable about religion must sit and talk to make sure he understands that what he believes is not right." 

If the detainee is open to rejecting his violent ideology, the Saudi government provides air tickets so that his family can visit him in prison. Later he may be allowed out to attend family events such as funerals. "In the terror cells, they are isolated from other ways of thinking," says General Mansur. "That's how their minds are controlled by those who recruit them. But when we get these young people, we isolate them from the terrorists who affected them. Through Islamic teaching, they come to believe that what they're doing is wrong." 

British diplomats see the Saudi programme as a model, and the head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, has visited Saudi Arabia twice in the past year to study the efforts to counter radicalisation. Although US diplomats still accuse the Saudi authorities of failing to block the channelling of funds to al-Qaeda, a senior British source says the mood has changed. 



"They were in denial for quite a long time, believing terrorism was an external disease, but 9/11 and attacks inside the kingdom opened their eyes. They feel pretty exposed," he says. 

Torture and execution are common in Saudi Arabia. During the denial phase, when the Saudi authorities refused to accept that Saudi nationals were mounting terror attacks inside the kingdom, a group of foreigners, including six British men, was falsely accused of terrorism and badly tortured before being released in 2003. Diplomats say they doubt that such gross abuse would occur today. "There are still means being used which could be classified as torture," says a consultant who is close to both the Saudi and US authorities. "That won't go away, because such methods are used in other countries, too. But there is real reform as well." Modern prisons are being built and, for the first time, a human-rights commission - albeit weak and closely allied to the regime - will have the right to visit prisoners. 

Four hundred graduates of the re-education programme have been released and are being monitored. Some of the 300 suspects believed to be hard-core are likely to appear before the state security courts next month, charged with operating safe houses or helping terrorists in other ways. It will be the first time anything other than religious justice has been used in Saudi Arabia, and the courts are expected to allow plea-bargaining so that those who co-operate with the authorities will not be executed. 

However, King Abdullah has disappointed those who were hoping for wider and deeper reform, aimed at freeing up society and not just ending terrorism. 

"We seem to move with the slowest," says Sami Angawi, an architect who has criticised the government for destroying historic buildings in Mecca and Medina and for not allowing diverse views of Islam. "If we do that, we will wait for ever. 

"We at least have to go with the average," he says. "What is happening is like smoothing, sanding and polishing, but the decor remains the same." 

The issue of women driving is once again emerging as a touchstone of how far the government will go. Everyone agrees that social custom, not the law, stops women from taking to the wheel, but it will require a royal decree before women dare defy the conservative elements who refuse to countenance such change. 

Conservative clerics rarely talk to foreign journalists, but Dr Ali Badahdah was keen to get his point across as he entertained a small group of British reporters at his house in Jeddah this past week. His conservatism signalled by his long beard and loose white head-cloth, he said there was nothing intrinsically unIslamic about women driving, but he feared where it would lead. 

"In Islam, there can be no sexual relations before marriage, but if you become free this will happen," he said. "If women start driving, especially young girls, it will break something. We know what will happen: it will lead to adultery and kidnap." 

Dr Badahdah is careful to condemn acts of violence, but sees reform as a western imposition to be resisted. His views are not unusual. "Rhetoric is still a problem," says Nawaf Obeid. "There is such deep conservatism in Saudi society, especially in the non-urbanised regions of the south and north. They still believe everything is a Jewish conspiracy." 

About 500 Saudi men are believed to have gone to fight in Iraq, and some fear that they could become like the generation of fighters who returned from the war in Afghanistan, reintroducing extremism to the kingdom. Such fears are the basis for what reformers regard as an excuse for delaying liberalisation. 

"If the reform is perceived as being in line with Islam, then it will be helpful in the fight against terrorism," says General Mansur. "But if it's seen as competing with Islam, you never know - it could encourage the extremists to do something again." 

Lindsey Hilsum is international editor for Channel 4 News 
          Read more from the latest issue of the New Statesman

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition. 
        
		
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