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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"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.
I sensed the lethargy as soon as I entered the room. Cigarette smoke combined with a fluorescent pall to create a dense, subterranean atmosphere. Three young Saudi reporters greeted me with expressions that appeared welcoming but puzzled. I was also supposed to be training female reporters, but I hadn't seen a woman since I entered the building.
We sat down, and I asked them to tell me about themselves. There were two reporters named Hasan--Hasan Baswaid and Hasan Hatrash--but they were strikingly different. Baswaid, thirty-four, was tall and broad-shouldered, with sideburns and curly black hair, and omnipresent earphones for his mobile phone, which rang every few minutes, playing the theme from "Mission: Impossible." He wore jeans and a partly buttoned, untucked white shirt. His handsome face belonged on the cover of a romance novel. Hatrash, twenty-eight, was slight and short; he wore traditional Saudi clothes, a trim black goatee, and black glasses that tended to be at half-mast on his nose. Under his head scarf, however, there was a snaky mass of dreadlocks. At heart, Hatrash said, he was a musician, but that was a hopeless career choice in such a puritanical society. Both men had been working at the Gazette for several years; the third reporter, Mamdouh al-Harthy, had joined the staff only about an hour before I arrived.
"How do you like working here?" I asked them.
The two Hasans shrugged and looked away. "Maybe we can talk about this later, mon," Hatrash said. It was several weeks before I learned why he had a West Indian accent: he had honed his English by listening to Bob Marley songs.
The serendipitous assignment of training young reporters, I may as well confess, thrilled me. I suspected that behind the closed gates of Saudi society there was a social revolution in the making. With some guidance, I thought, these journalists could help inspire change. Confronted with the demoralized reporters in my charge, however, I didn't know where to begin. My duties were vague. I was to "mentor" the reporters by hanging around the office for part of each day, and teaching them some elementary techniques of investigative journalism.
"Don't expect too much," Shoukany had warned me. "You can assign them stories, do whatever you want. You have complete freedom." I wondered what he meant by that.
My first big task was to help the local reporters cover the 2003 hajj, which began in February. Each year, at the end of the Islamic calendar, more than two million pilgrims arrive in Jeddah on their way to Mecca, forty miles to the east. It is the largest annual human gathering in the world. It is also the biggest event for the local press to cover, and competition for stories is fierce. The Gazette was sending four reporters--most of the male staff--to cover it; Hasan Hatrash would lead the team.
In the past, the hajj has been the scene of numerous tragedies: stampedes, fires, air crashes, bombings, bloody riots, and epidemics. The pilgrims, coming from all over the world, invariably bring with them assorted viruses and bacteria, and by the time this hajj started, on February 9th, there had already been outbreaks of influenza and meningitis in the kingdom. Hatrash wasn't worried, though. He told me that he insured his immunity by eating small green native lemons. "They protect me against everything," he said.
The expectation of war in Iraq made this hajj especially tense. If the war began before the pilgrims got home, they could be stranded for months. The Saudi government's ambiguous attitude toward the Iraq crisis--officially condemning it, but allowing American forces to use Saudi bases as a staging area for search-and-rescue missions--left the kingdom open to political demonstrations by Muslims who opposed the war. The government, remembering disasters of the past, was determined to squelch any such dissent. One of the most significant moments in modern Saudi history came at the end of the 1979 hajj. Several hundred Islamist radicals, many of them students, took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca, using the holiest spot in Islam as a forum for challenging the authority of the royal family. King Khalid obtained a fatwa from the clergy that allowed government troops to retake the mosque. Two weeks of savage, hand-to-hand combat in the underground chambers of the holy site left a hundred and twenty-seven Saudi soldiers dead and more than four hundred and fifty injured. French commandos provided the Saudis with an unspecified "non-lethal" gas. When that failed to flush out the terrorists, according to the head of Saudi intelligence at the time, Saudi forces dropped hand grenades through holes drilled into the chambers. Amazingly, a hundred and seventy rebels survived; sixty-three of them were beheaded, in the largest mass execution in Saudi history.
This year, as many as half the pilgrims would be women--the highest percentage ever--but, curiously, the Gazette was not sending any female reporters to cover the event. According to Shoukany, I was supposed to have three women under my supervision, but after a week at the paper I still had not met them. By then, I had spotted a sign on the first floor marked "Ladies Section," but I had no idea who, if anyone, was behind the door. Shoukany assured me that female reporters were permitted to attend meetings in the conference room, but they missed the first session I called, at four o'clock on a Wednesday afternoon. "I learned they go home early," Shoukany said apologetically.
The following day, with the meeting set for an hour earlier, three black-shrouded figures slipped into the Gazette conference room. Once they were seated, the male reporters followed, arraying themselves on the opposite side of the table. I sat awkwardly at the head. The women were all in black abayas and hijabs--the obligatory robes and head scarves--and one of them veiled her face as well. Only a pair of gold-rimmed glasses peeked out from the mask of cloth surrounding her eyes. Hanging from her chair was an alligator purse with a long gold chain.
The self-effacement of an entire sex, and, in consequence, of sexuality itself, was the most unnerving feature of Saudi life. I could go through an entire day without seeing any women, except perhaps some beggars sitting on the curb outside a prince's house. Almost all public space, from the outdoor terrace at the Italian restaurant to the sidewalk tables at Starbucks, belonged to men. The restaurants had separate entrances for "families" and "bachelors," and I could hear women scurrying past, hidden by screens, as they went upstairs or to a rear room. The only places I was sure to see women were at the mall and the grocery store, and even there they seemed spookily out of place. Many of them wore black gloves, and their faces were covered entirely--not even a pair of plummy, heavy-lidded Arabian eyes apparent. Sometimes I couldn't tell what direction they were facing. It felt to me as if the women had died, and only their shades remained.
The reporter with the alligator purse was named Najla Fathi. It was a surprise to learn that Najla and her female colleagues were far better educated than the men on the staff, most of whom had not finished college. Najla, for instance, had obtained a master's degree in political science from the University of Louisville, in 1995. "And I haven't been outside the Arab world since!"she said. Her tone suggested anger or defiance, or even an attempt at humor, but it was maddeningly difficult to read her intentions without access to her facial expressions.
I wanted to get the Gazette reporters like Najla started on investigative stories while Hatrash and his team were covering the hajj. There was one piece I was particularly keen on. In March, 2002, a fire had broken out in the Thirty-first Girls' Middle School, in Mecca, a dilapidated four-story building that held eight hundred and thirty-five students and fifty-five teachers. According to initial reports, the fire had begun in the kitchen at about eight in the morning, creating panic. The only exit was locked; an elderly guard had wandered away with the key. Fifteen girls were trampled to death; more than fifty others were injured, some having jumped from the windows. According to eyewitnesses, a number of people had rushed to put out the blaze, but they were turned away by a representative of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice--the country's religious police--because the girls were not wearing their abayas. (The director of the commission denied these accounts.)
Female education, which was introduced in 1960, was born in controversy. Although females now outnumber males at the university level, only six per cent of women in the over-all population are employed, a statistic that has led religious conservatives to argue that education is "wasted on girls." After the fire, the head of the Presidency of Girls' Education announced that it had been "God's will." He said this at a press conference at which he awarded each reporter an expensive lambskin briefcase. I was told that he was later photographed surveying the ruins of the school in his ministerial robes; the pictures captured him stepping absent-mindedly on the abayas that had been left behind.
But it was the detail about the religious police blocking the rescue of the girls that sent the country into a paroxysm of introspection. Ever since the 1979 attack on the Grand Mosque, the muttawa'a, as these government-subsidized vigilantes are informally called, have become a far more invasive presence in the country. The lesson the royal family had drawn from that attack was that it could protect itself from religious extremists only by empowering them. The muttawa'a prowl restaurants and shopping malls and amusement parks, making sure that businesses have closed for prayer time and chastising women whose attire fails to meet their standards of modesty. They have been known to shoot up satellite dishes and break into private homes. The muttawa'a are usually trailed by official policemen, who are at their command.
The Saudi press made history by writing about the fire without first asking the Ministry of Information for permission. For several weeks, the government stood aside and simply let the press be free. "When will we ever be ashamed of our attitude towards women?" the editor of Al Riyadh asked his readers. "We ascribe all of society's ills to them. . . . Does the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice care about our wives, sisters, mothers and daughters more than we do?" The Gazette, which rarely criticized the government, demanded an investigation of the religious police and prosecution of those responsible for the deaths of the girls. By Saudi standards, the coverage was so relentless that even reformists were troubled. Eventually, the Interior Minister summoned the editors-in-chief of all the newspapers in the country and told them that the stories must stop. They immediately did.
For Saudi journalists, the drama over the girls' school was both liberating and disconcerting. It confirmed that the Saudi press could play a dissenting role. But some said that, ultimately, the story had proved to be a setback; the government sharply reduced the zone of freedom because it had been so alarmed by the popular fury the story had unleashed.
Near the end of the Thursday meeting, I suggested assigning a one-year-anniversary story about the event. I wanted a woman reporter to write it. "The question is, after a year, have things really changed?" I asked.
"Of course they have," Najla said impatiently, leaning on the table with what must have been her chin resting on her fist. "Everybody knows this. The head of the Presidency of Girls' Education was fired. They merged that department into the Ministry of Education. These are huge changes."
"To me, they seem like symbolic changes," I said. "The girls died because they were locked inside a ramshackle, overcrowded building with no fire escapes. Is the government actually building safe schools for girls? Are the teachers conducting fire drills? Are girls still locked inside?"
One of the women, Sabahat Siddiqi, shyly spoke up. "I will do this story, if you will tell me how," she said. I suggested that Sabahat talk to civil-defense authorities to see if they have improved fire safety, and to the Minister of Education to determine if the government had followed through on its pledge to build safe schools. I advised her to go to...
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