For Saudis, World Holds Fears, Lures

A prominent Saudi Arabian businessman recently brought some art books home from the United States and was held up at customs. What, the customs officer wanted to know, are these two naked women doing on the pages of one of the books?

“It’s Rubens,” the businessman explained. “It’s art.”

When that failed, he offered to let the customs officer black out the offending paintings. This was considered and dismissed.

It took two weeks and several phone calls to the royal family to get the book released. Now it stands on the top shelf of his library, but lately, he confesses, he has started worrying about the Rubens works.

“I can’t help but wonder,” he said, “what if the children see them?”

Such is the Saudis’ alternate fascination and fear of the world outside, an attraction that drives millions of Saudis to Europe, Asia and the United States to study, vacation and buy--and even more surely lures them home again to the sanctuary of a kingdom secreted in one of the world’s most formidable deserts.

Saudi Arabia, whose isolated pockets of shining skyscrapers and straight, wide highways are situated above an estimated one-third of the world’s oil reserves, has been able to afford to buy a kind of isolation that is virtually unmatched anywhere outside the Persian Gulf region.

Foreign entry visas are rare, except for the oil workers and domestic servants who make up about a third of Saudi Arabia’s population and live carefully shielded from the walled, shuttered retreats that most Saudis call home.

In this determinedly Muslim country, proud protector of the two holy shrines at Mecca and Medina, there are no theaters, no discotheques, no nightclubs, no bars, no movies. (The Koran bans all representations of the human form; television has been given special dispensation because it represents the human figure in motion.)

In an issue of the London Times that was on the newsstands here last year, the censors had removed the top half of a creation by the designer of the year, Rifat Ozbek. In the International Herald Tribune, a bottle of champagne had been blacked out in an advertisement for Thai Airlines. So had a photograph of two ballet stars, Konstantin Zaklinsky and Galine Mezentsva.

It is no wonder, then, that the Saudis had to think carefully before inviting U.S. troops to barge into their treasured domain to avert an attack from Iraq--a decision that carried the extra risk of having the Syrians again tag the Saudis as “America’s running dogs.”

“We are trying to keep our Islamic values and culture, but it’s very hard to maintain,” a government planning official said not long ago in an interview. “Our people can say we at least minimize the danger of foreign influence in our society, and we’re very proud of that.”

Indeed, the Saudis’ determination to shield themselves from outside troubles has been a determining force in their foreign policy for years. Lying right at the center of a global boiling point, Saudi Arabia has fended off potentially troublesome neighbors for years with its checkbook--sending $200 million to Jordan to help in the recent economic crunch there, aiding dozens of countries on the brink of crisis in Africa, supporting the Palestine Liberation Organization and funneling billions of dollars in loans to now-hostile Iraq during Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran.

The Saudis, say many who know Saudi Arabia best, would prefer to avoid trouble, and in a country that already provides its citizens free education, free health care, salaries for attending technical school and frequent scholarships abroad, can they not also purchase a little peace?

The Saudis cannot understand, for example, why they have had to lock horns repeatedly with the U.S. Congress to purchase sophisticated fighter aircraft and weapons systems that seem to them the natural elements of a wise country’s defenses in these troubled times.

“The truth of the matter is, these fights are driving us to distraction,” the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, told a group of McDonnell Douglas Corp. employees last year. “And they leave a bad taste in everybody’s mouth.”

The kingdom of Arabia, a formidable expanse of 850,000 square miles of scorched desert the size of West Europe, was united for the first time in modern history by a rambunctious, battle-eager Bedouin--with a harem of 22 wives--known as Abdulaziz ibn Saud, the first of the House of Saud. The Saud family paired, ironically, with the leader of the ascetic Wahabi Islamic sect, which shunned wine, good food and tobacco to form the dynasty that still rules today.

“Welcome to a country that is better than your own country,” the Wahabi leader was told as he walked into the Sauds’ palm-cooled village at Dariyah.

The Bedouin tradition remains. Saudis are fond of taking their pickups to the desert for long retreats, and even in urban neighborhoods large circles of men are likely to gather at the end of the road, where the desert begins, to smoke and talk quietly.

A few months ago, two Saudis were driving along the winding mountain road between Taif and Jidda when one of them, tired, pulled his headdress across the front of his face and went to sleep.

“Now,” the other one said solemnly, “he is on the camel.”

Among the other Arabs, the Saudis are viewed as impossibly arrogant and too rich for their own good. Egyptians complain about the thousands of Saudis who flock to Cairo in the summer months to escape the withering heat and strict traditions at home, reeling drunk through Cairo nightclubs and hiring young virgins from Egyptian villages to share their summertime villas.

“You know, the Saudi society, it’s a new society, they built it just since 1945,” said an Egyptian who occasionally has diplomatic dealings with the Saudis. “It all happened too fast, too easy. They’re always trying to be far from any conflict. They say, ‘If you want money, take what you want and go away.’ I don’t think they have suffered. Suffering, as you know, helps thinking. Without suffering, there is no feeling.”

Most Saudis seem oblivious to the contradictions that form the underpinnings of their lives: Women go out of the house shrouded in black, yet wear low-plunging cocktail dresses and spike heels to entertain at home. Stores roll down their shutters five times a day for prayer in answer to religious police with megaphones mounted atop their cars ordering them to the mosques, while pedestrians hide behind parked cars and store owners shrink to the back of their shops to hide.

Young Saudi men glide imperially along in their white robes and headdresses and refuse to be seen in public with unmarried women, but they throw off the robes and headdresses, grab a bottle of homemade wine and put on Beatles records once they get behind closed doors.

“We are really in contradiction, I suppose,” a man from Jidda said recently in Cairo. “When I’m in Saudi Arabia, I behave just like Saudis; I don’t do otherwise. The minute I get on the airplane, I wear Western clothes, my wife takes off her abaya and the hood, and we are different.

“I think that way the nine or 10 months I spend here, because it’s my home. And then, two months a year, I enjoy my life. When I come here, I just switch from 220 volts to 110.”