COLUMN ONE : Can Saudis’ Old Ways Survive? : Americans in the desert kingdom are challenging its secretive, conservative culture. Change seems inevitable, but some fear a loss of innocence.

The lobby of the Marriott Hotel here calls to mind the rollicking bar of the movie “Star Wars,” an unlikely menage of intergalactic travelers brought together at some distant outpost for a cup of cheer.

Amid gleaming glass elevators, roving bellhops and potted plants, dozens of Kuwaiti refugees call helplessly after errant toddlers. Saudi businessmen in flowing white robes and headdresses bend in intense conversation over cups of tea.

Americans in desert-camouflage fatigues haul their gear to the door for the next bus out, while an off-duty American nurse, one leg slung over the arm of a couch, pores over a romance novel. A Kuwaiti man on the next couch strains to read her T-shirt. It says: “Caught Between Iraq and a Hard Place.”

Indeed. Saudi Arabia, the guardian of Islam’s two holiest shrines and one of the most conservative religious domains on Earth, has become host to the U.S. armed forces. It is a society that nurtures an intensely private, religious, tribal tradition spanning hundreds, in some cases even thousands of years. But in the narrowing wedge between an American troop presence of more than 60,000, an influx of nearly 200,000 refugees and a veritable siege of foreign journalists, the squeeze is tightening by the day.

In a country where women are forbidden to drive, American servicewomen pilot jeeps through the streets of Riyadh. Despite traditions that keep Saudi women mostly sequestered, Cable News Network filmed three women, unveiled, and probed their private thoughts about job aspirations and family responsibilities. American business people hosted raucous parties for foreign journalists with free-flowing bootleg liquor. The Saudi royal family has greeted visiting journalists and congressmen who asked pointed questions about women’s rights and political reform.

A growing number of Saudis are becoming convinced that, no matter what the outcome of Iraq’s invasion of nearby Kuwait, long after the Americans have gone home, the guns are put away and the Kuwaitis are resettled, Saudi Arabia will emerge from the crisis a remarkably different place.

“Saudi Arabia will never be the same after this,” said a prominent, American-educated academic, and he added a hint of the misgivings that have accompanied the eagerness of many Saudis to turn the American influence into what many are now calling a Saudi glasnost --the Russian word for openness. “I think we’re losing a lot of our innocence. . . . Drastic, catastrophic change always has catastrophic consequences. Whenever you have a revolution, something good dies.”

But a number of reform-minded Saudi businessmen, government officials and academics are using the invasion of Kuwait as an opportunity to open the secretive kingdom’s doors permanently to the West. “Of course there will be change. There has to be. By example, we will change,” said a young Foreign Ministry official. “We are in a crisis, and crisis breeds opportunity.”

The American military has worked so hard to keep soldiers isolated from the populace that their presence is barely perceptible in most parts of the kingdom. Rest and relaxations leaves in town are out of the question for units camped in the desert. In Dhahran, military officials eat in field kitchens or in a hotel restaurant next to the base. In Riyadh, most women soldiers cannot leave their hotels except in groups of four, and then only if they wear the conservative, form-shielding dress that is required of Muslim women.

Still, rumors are circulating all over Riyadh. According to one making the rounds this week, an American servicewoman whose sleeves were rolled up near the elbow was pinned to a wall by the Saudi religious police and her arms were painted black. Air Force personnel say they were told that three servicewomen were caught sunbathing in Riyadh, allegedly prompting the Saudis to close down a warehouse near where they were seen. A Saudi newspaper printed an account of an American couple who sparked outrage by kissing in public.

U.S. military officials say they have no evidence that any of the stories are true, but for the reactions they elicit, they might as well be. In Dhahran, women in hotels have been abruptly handed booklets about the proper role of the Muslim woman and how to dress appropriately in an Islamic country, in clothing which, according to one booklet, covers a woman’s hair, neck, arms, legs, feet “and preferably even her face.”

“We may be late in greeting you, but better late than never,” the booklet says. “We need your help to preserve our culture.”

Saudi Arabia’s ruling Saud family originally gained power through an alliance with an ultra-conservative, almost Calvinistic brand of Islam known as Wahhabism that frowned on smoking, drinking and virtually any contact between unmarried members of the opposite sex. Even today, as guardian of the two holy Muslim shrines of Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia’s brand of Islam is among the most conservative in the world.

While modern, Western-educated Saudis chafe at the restrictions, government officials say the mainstream, still largely tribal populace supports the kingdom’s insistence on strict Islamic values. Advertisements for liquor are blacked out of magazines, and most articles about Saudi government or life style are ripped out of foreign newspapers before they are placed on the stands.

The religious police roam parts of the country with megaphones, ensuring that all businesses close down five times a day for prayer, and women are occasionally approached in supermarkets or shopping malls by policemen armed with switches who give a whack to anyone showing too much leg. There have been cases of the religious police raiding private homes searching for liquor. Doctors at the university hospital in Riyadh were recently asked to get longer stethoscopes so that women could place the instruments on their chests themselves.

“A young kid who’s barely out of his diapers who’s trying to tell us what is good and what is bad,” scoffed a prominent Saudi businessman who hopes a new glasnost might mean an end to the reign of the religious police.

“It’s not what they object to. It’s what they allow. Some of us say, ‘Just give us a list of what we can do.’ The problem is if you speak out against them, they can accuse you of being blasphemous, a charge you cannot challenge in a society like this. So most people just keep quiet.”

In fact, Saudis themselves have been ambivalent about what ought to be thrown out of the old traditions and what retained.

“We are part of the world, and the whole world is changing, socially speaking, for the worse, and I think the rate of change in Saudi Arabia has been much less,” explained a senior Saudi government official. “What protected us, I think, was strong religious faith . . . and the traditions of the desert.”

Many modern Saudis live lives of “well-intended hypocrisy” in order to try to maintain that balance, he said. “Like, some of us would rather wear jeans now, but we wear this (pointing to his robe) because Western dress is frowned on in our country. I smoke a pipe, but I wouldn’t smoke it in public, because people would frown on it. You see Saudis drinking abroad, and if you ask them today, ‘Would you legalize alcohol?’ all of them would say no. There are certain things you would like to do, but you wouldn’t like your children to do.”

Most prominent in the new glasnost, if it is a glasnost, is the Saudi media, which swung from an eerie silence in the days after Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait to unprecedented, strident criticism of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and detailed reporting of the American military build-up.

On the day after the invasion, one Saudi newspaper had prepared a huge headline declaring, “It’s War.” But a telephone call from the minister of information instead instructed the newspaper, according to one editor, to print only what was reported by the official Saudi Press Agency, known jokingly among some Saudi journalists as the “Sleeping People’s Agency.”

Hence, for days, Saudi newspapers made little or no direct reference to the invasion. The Saudi Gazette, quoting the SPA, said King Fahd was engaged in an attempt to normalize relations “between the two sister countries.” The Arab News talked about a “serious and dangerous new situation created in the region, and which is characterized notably by the use of force to settle a bilateral dispute.” One Saudi newspaper made no reference to the crisis at all and carried a front-page article about the strawberry crop.

Desperate for information, Saudis switched on Egyptian television, viewable in the Red Sea region, and bought Egyptian newspapers, which were selling at 10 times their cover price. Short-wave radios, through which British Broadcasting Corp. and Voice of America broadcasts could be monitored, were sold out of the shops.

The dam broke on Aug. 9, when King Fahd made a public speech bitterly condemning the Iraqi invasion, and the Saudi press has not been the same since.

Though foreign newspapers are still heavily censored, the Saudi press has carried detailed outside reports from the Associated Press, Reuters and other wire services detailing the military buildup and outside diplomatic efforts to resolve the crisis. Photographs of American servicewomen repeatedly appear on the front pages. Newspapers have bitterly editorialized against Iraq’s Hussein, breaking what editors said has been a longstanding rule against criticizing another Arab leader.

Arab News editor Khaled Maeena said Arab journalists must accept some of the responsibility for Hussein’s unchecked rise to power in the region.

“Suddenly, everybody has made Saddam out to be a tyrant. Saddam was a tyrant from a long time ago,” he said in an interview. “I think the time has now come for the Arab media to pinpoint these things and bear some of the responsibility.”

“Let us resolve that demagogues, dictators and tyrants like Saddam who bring with them personal and national agony will never rise again,” Maeena added in an Arab News column. “This will happen only if the media of the world, including our Arab media, dare to face the truth. And print it.”

Abdullah Hakeem has devoted his entire weekly arts and literature supplement at Al Medina newspaper in Jidda to the Persian Gulf crisis and says there may be no turning the Saudi media back.

“We’ve been conservative, journalistically speaking. Now we’re driven, one way or another, to an open era,” he said. “There will be other kinds of openness--journalistically, socially, politically. It’s necessary. It must achieve these results. Because what happened cannot happen again if these things work.”

The government has made some inroads in recent days, recruiting female Civil Defense volunteers and, three days ago, announcing that additional participation of women in government jobs would be sought as part of the defense preparation effort.

Though the job recruitment would be primarily in fields where contact with men would be limited, in medical and human services fields, one Saudi official said the step was key in many ways, the first of which was that it demonstrated that “women have a role” in the defense effort.

Also, increasing women’s participation in the workplace will inevitably lead to other changes, the official predicted. “If she’s a doctor, in a military situation, how’s she going to get to the hospital if she can’t drive? She will have men as patients, she will be working with other doctors who are men. You see? Everything will change. It has to.”

Some longtime observers of Saudi Arabia wonder whether the new wind blowing through the kingdom is a good sign of change or a storm that could eventually bring on a religious backlash. Much, they say, depends on how long the American troops remain, and the outcome of any military conflict that erupts.

“There are a lot of Saudis who look forward to this, that it will be a kind of glasnost, that this will herald a new, open Saudi Arabia,” said one Western diplomat. “But it depends. If this lingers on, if the Americans start to have disagreements with the Saudis over strategy, or if there’s a confrontation and (the Americans) start it and there are a lot of Saudi casualties, the whole picture could change.”

At Riyadh’s King Saud University, Profs. Mohammed Oteiby and Abdullah Faisal fretted last week over whether the new wind was fair or ill. Mostly fair, they concluded.

“Your daughter can’t drive,” Faisal told his colleague finally. “My daughter can’t drive. What should you and I do? Just sit? And wait? Or use some other sources from outside that might be able to help us effect change?”