THE KINGDOM OF SILENCE.

"This is a newspaper?" I asked the cabdriver in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, as he pulled up in front of the lavish new headquarters of Okaz, the most popular paper in the kingdom. I had expected the usual dingy firetrap that characterizes newspaper offices all over the world, but this building loomed over the humble neighborhood like a royal palace. Workmen were still laying marble tiles on the steps as I entered a towering atrium. Envious reporters for other newspapers call Okaz's new headquarters the Taj Mahal. Saudi men whom I took to be reporters solemnly passed by, wearing crisp white robes and red checked head scarves. I felt out of place and underdressed.

Newspapers are a surprisingly good business in a country where the truth is so carefully guarded. Members of the royal family, Al Saud, are obsessively concerned about their image; they own or control most of the Saudi press, which dominates the Arab world. Within the kingdom, there are more than a dozen papers on the newsstands every morning. The most authoritative of them, and the most progressive, Al-Hayat and Asharq Al Awsat, are owned by Saudi princes but published in London. They are constrained by the same taboos that cripple all Saudi publications, however: nothing provocative can be said about Islam, the kingdom's official religion; the government, which is effectively led by Crown Prince Abdullah; or the royal family, which is headed by King Fahd. Another paper, Al Watan, partly owned by Prince Bandar bin Khalid, models itself on USA Today. But Okaz remains the national favorite. On the coffee table in the lobby was a copy of that morning's edition, January 28, 2003. It was like an Arabic version of the New York Post, filled with Hollywood gossip, and stories of djinns who haunt the sand dunes. Although ostensibly independent, Okaz is closely identified with Prince Naif bin Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, the Minister of Interior, who also controls the secret police and the media.

Up a flight of stairs, in a modest wing by itself, is the Saudi Gazette, an English-language daily published by Okaz, which had hired me for three months to help train young Saudi reporters. The job offered me a way of getting into the kingdom after more than a year of fruitless attempts to get a visa as a journalist. Working at the Gazette would also give me a vantage on the Saudi press, which had struggled for a decade to liberate itself from the bonds of government control. In 1990, just before the Gulf War, the government forced the media to wait a week before reporting on Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Satellite news coverage, which emerged as a force during that conflict, leaped borders, as did the Internet. The press gained a measure of freedom. Suddenly, there were stories about crime, drug use, divorce, even the presence of aids in the kingdom. For the first time, Saudis were taking a critical look at their country and its problems. But after September 11th the media retreated; as a result, it largely missed the biggest story in the kingdom's modern history, blinding itself to the danger within its own society.

Walking around the Gazette, I soon found Dr. Muhammad Shoukany, the deputy editor-in-chief, sitting in a dim office overlooking the newsroom. There was a television in one corner, and a Mexican soap opera was playing on mute. Like most Saudi men, he wore a white thobe, a shirtlike gown that reached his ankles. His head scarf, called a gutra, was folded on the couch, but he wore the white skullcap that goes under it, which gave him a pastoral air. He is a stocky man, with a round face and a narrow salt-and-pepper mustache. At heart, he is an academic, not a newsman, and he teaches courses in English literature at King Abdul Aziz University, in Jeddah. As we talked, it seemed to me that his eyes were almost retractable, receding into slitted boredom when the subject was not of interest to him, then bulging with excitement when he was fully engaged--as when he told me about his great passion, Joseph Conrad. "Some of the characters in his early stories come from the Hadhramaut, which is where the bin Ladens come from," Shoukany said. "Also, in 'Lord Jim' there is one of the earliest mentions in literature of a Wahhabi preacher. Conrad is definitely a man of our time!"

Shoukany assumed that I had come to the country with a set of stereotypes about Saudis. I had spent some time in the Arab world--my wife and I taught for two years at the American University in Cairo long ago, and I had travelled in and reported from the Middle East--but I had never been in the kingdom before. Most of my encounters with Saudis had been in Cairo or London, and these Saudis were either political dissidents or disaffected scholars. "All we ask is that you judge us on our own terms," Shoukany said.

He led me through the newsroom, where two dozen editors and typesetters, most of them Indian expatriates, were working on Apple G4s. I could see layouts for the next morning's paper on the screens. The readership of the Gazette is drawn largely from the millions of foreign workers, like these editors, who do much of the essential labor in the kingdom, from driving cabs to manning the oil fields. World and national news is at the front of the paper, with separate pages for the Indian subcontinent and the Philippines, where most of the expats come from. There is also a culture section, a sports page (primarily soccer and cricket), business news, and editorials. Most of the international news comes from wire services. On Friday, Islam's holy day, there is a page on Islamic teachings.

In a side room, at a long library table, four translators from Sudan were scanning the daily Arabic press for usable stories. One of them wore a white turban and another had tribal scars on his cheeks. A Yemeni and a couple of Bangladeshi teaboys in brown uniforms patrolled the floor. Beyond the main newsroom, behind a long wall of glass, the local reporters were waiting to meet me.