America From Abroad : Suddenly, It’s OK to Be a Yank in Saudi Arabia : It took a near-war to do it, but the friendship has come out of the closet. The Americans’ freewheeling cowboy image has transplanted easily to the land of the Bedouin.

There used to be a rule of thumb at American diplomatic receptions here: If you want 20 Saudis to show up, invite 100. If you want 50, send out 300 invitations. Call them several times to make sure they are coming.

Things had a way of not clicking. There was the time they invited a jazz combo to play George Gershwin, and the Saudis complained about “Jew music.” Or the time the American Embassy decided to celebrate the Southern tradition with a Cajun band, and the religious police sealed off the entire Diplomatic Quarter. Some Saudis fled the embassy that night in the trunks of cars.

So, it has come as some surprise to diplomats recently that American receptions and dinner parties are suddenly the hot ticket in Riyadh. Now, you invite 100, and 90 show up. In one of the most sheltered and conservative Muslim countries in the world, it’s OK to be American.

“Association with Americans isn’t tainted the way it might have been three months ago,” said one official. “It doesn’t seem as daring as it was. I think, if nothing else, there’s a new kind of friendship that’s come out of all of this.”

With more than 100,000 American troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and American television network cameras probing every private corner in the kingdom, the Saudis are increasingly unabashed about their American flirtations.

They’re buying Hard Rock Cafe T-shirts commissioned by American journalists, the ones that say “Kuwait City: Under New Management.” They motor down Pepsi Cola Street in the Persian Gulf city of Khobar mouthing the lyrics to a Tone Loc rap tune with their fingers drumming on the dashboard. They order their Hardee’s cheeseburgers with extra barbecue sauce on the side and push back their head scarfs from their cheeks to plow into a Baskin Robbins ice cream cone.

Americans, who launched the old Arabian-American Oil Co. (Aramco) more than half a century ago and helped build the kingdom’s massive oil industry, are nothing new to Saudi Arabia. Liking Americans is really nothing new to Saudis. Perhaps it’s just that, like the little-discussed but longstanding political links that prompted the deployment of American troops here, the friendship has come out of the closet.

“The Saudis have always felt a kind of affinity for the Americans,” said one Saudi government official. “Let’s face it: The British are obnoxious, the Germans are a little bit like a mechanized tank division, the French are impossible.

“There’s something in the Saudi psyche that’s very similar to what’s in the American psyche,” he said. “Maybe it’s because the rest of the world looks at us the same way. The world sees the Americans as cowboys, you know, wild savages out on the range, and the Saudis are Bedouins who roam the desert. And the world resents both of us in a way, the Americans because of their innovation and productivity, and the Saudis because of their money.”

At the camel market in Al Hasaa last month, an American television crew filmed an old Bedouin who was bringing his prized breeding camel to market. He had recently named him Bush, he said, after the American President. “This camel is strong,” he said, “he is fierce, he is intelligent, he is a leader of camels.”

Where politics used to be a subject politely avoided at most mixed social gatherings, an American in Riyadh says now he can’t stop the Saudis.

“There are people that I would try to start a conversation with two months ago who wouldn’t even want to start. They’d say, ‘Why do you want to talk about the Arab-Israeli problem? I know what you’re going to say, you know what I’m going to say. Why are you doing this? Why are you wasting both our time on this?’ Now, they want to talk.”

What do they want to talk about?

First, several Americans living here said, the Saudis want information. What’s going on? Is Saddam Hussein going to withdraw from Kuwait? Is there going to be a war? When? How bad? Will Saudi population centers be hit?

Also, said one American official, the Saudis “have their own agendas they want to push. Number one is, why don’t you hit Saddam, hit him hard, and what are you waiting for? Then they say, when all of this is over, don’t forget to do something about Palestine.”

Americans in the kingdom, who are used to a dour reception when they fly into Saudi airports, have described being robustly patted on the back by airport officials when returning to this country since the deployment of American troops. One American woman said she was waiting in line behind several Saudi women to use a public restroom when one of them asked her nationality. “Al Hamdulilleh! (Praise God!)” the Saudi exclaimed when the woman said she was an American. “Go to the front.”

The welcome hasn’t been all warm. At the mosque in Riyadh’s diplomatic quarter, the sermon two Fridays ago lambasted the presence of foreign troops in the land of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina. An anonymous cassette tape with a similar theme has circulated in religious circles throughout the kingdom.

Islamic groups have thrust brochures into the hands of American female journalists and servicewomen explaining the proper role of women in Islam. A Los Angeles Times reporter was detained for more than an hour by the religious police in Riyadh for attempting to interview a Saudi government official to whom she was not married.

The reception reflects what has always been Saudi Arabia’s love-hate affair with America and things American, a romance that lures thousands of Saudis to the United States for college educations and holidays but drives them just as surely home again later to the relative solitude of the desert kingdom.

“A lot of us really admire Americans’ way of living: better houses, better education. I want CNN,” said Mohammed Ishgi, a Chamber of Commerce official in the Red Sea port city of Jidda. “But there is what you might call an American cultural danger to us. Because they show us another way to look at things. They tell us we might do things differently. You must know that education is a weapons system. It can go either way.”

In dozens of interviews with Saudis throughout the kingdom, they say there is a lot to love about Americans: They are easygoing, open to learning about new cultures, good business people, eager to please. They are also brash, impatient, not particularly hospitable, bent on handling things in public that Saudis would prefer to handle privately. They are constantly fixated on time, several said. “The Americans always say, ‘Why do tomorrow what you can do today?” grinned one Saudi. “We say just the opposite.”

Saudi business people complain that Americans lack sophistication. “Canada is international,” said one, “and Mexico is international. Beyond that, they don’t know anything.”

Americans are the foreigners who have the easiest time adapting to the kingdom, said well-known businessman Khaled Olayan. “But I talk to an American from Chicago,” he said, “and you can see the difference in mentality from one who has lived overseas. You talk about Europe, and he says, ‘Yeah, I was in Germany, I was stationed there in World War II, and I took my wife there one summer on holiday.’ How can I talk to him about 1992, the changes that it’s going to bring to Europe? He doesn’t understand. . . . Americans travel, and they go and look for a hamburger place.”

Americans, say the Saudis--who nearly always appear in public in either a white robe, known as a thobe, for men, or a long, black abaya, for women--are obsessed with appearance. American women, one Saudi complained, wear abayas in an attempt to conform to conservative Saudi culture, but, unlike Saudi women, tie them in a knot at the chest, drawing attention, he said, to their breasts. “Why bother?” he asked. A Saudi man fixing an appointment with an American woman was told she would be the one in the blue and gold trousers and the blue shirt with yellow trim.

“I’ll be the one in the white thobe, “ he deadpanned.

“A lot of people don’t like Americans because they think they are the best in the world. Because they are strong, they are proud, but they don’t realize they are using their power in the wrong way,” said one young Saudi businessman. “We have a saying: ‘If you are strong, be meek.’ If you are trying to show your power, you lack self-confidence. A lot of Americans here, they think because they are American, they will be better than Saudis, no matter what is my education. This is a major point.”

Saudis also complain that many Americans live in the kingdom for years without learning any Arabic or getting any sense of the Arabs’ political sensitivities. Many Americans living in the kingdom, said some, express support for Israel because it is their government’s policy--without considering that an Arab is much more likely than an American to be personally affronted over a political dispute.

“It really makes us feel we are not friends to the Americans,” one Saudi explained. “Saudis, they look at it not just as politics. We are brothers to the Palestinians. We are Muslims. Some of us also blame the Americans who agree with us but who did not practice some resistance to this kind of policy. Many Americans are careless about this issue. They come here to make money, and they don’t care about the political issue.”

The Aramco compound in Dhahran is a little like driving into a small Midwestern American town. It is a complex of well-sprinkled lawns, neat houses and a grocery store with things like Heinz ketchup on the shelves. Unlike elsewhere in Saudi Arabia, women can drive in the compound. Even the electrical current is American, not Saudi.

“It’s a lot like living with Ward and June Cleaver. This is the 1950s, as it was depicted on TV. This is a place of two-parent families: The father goes home for lunch, the men play golf on weekends, the women belong to sewing circles,” said Noel Marie Cave, a schoolteacher at Aramco. “It’s the small town I guess I always wanted to live in. I just had to travel 8,000 miles to find it.”

In nearly 10 years of working and living in Dhahran, Cave says she knows almost no Saudi Arabians and has only infrequently been invited into a Saudi home. An Aramco government relations official who has also worked several years in the kingdom, Dr. Lucia Rawls, said she has visited a Saudi home only once.

Both Saudis and Americans admit that for all the years of harmonious working together in the country, despite professions that they enjoy each others’ company, the two cultures for the most part remain carefully segregated in a social sense, in large part by mutual choice.

“There’s no encouragement of mingling between Saudis and ‘expats.’ It’s almost a policy thing. You have to be careful about mingling with the Saudis. It’s not forbidden, but you’re going to have a lot of problems,” said Rawls.

Cave, as a single woman living in a strict Muslim culture, says she cannot afford to be openly friendly. “When you’re out on the street and you see a Saudi man, you never establish eye contact because that would mean something. You don’t say hello because that means something. It’s unfortunate. You’re in a nation you never really get to know.”

Cave said the Americans have perhaps done too much to avoid offending the Saudis--at the expense of not allowing the Saudis to learn who the Americans really are.

The Americans, for instance, never built churches on the Aramco compound (they meet discreetly in a plain house to worship). But they did insist on the right to buy pork in the compound. “The message to the Saudis was that our God was not as important as theirs,” she said. “It was a value to us to have pork, but it was not a value to us to have a church.”

Saudi officials have occasionally removed artificial Christmas trees from Aramco employees’ household shipments to the kingdom, and at Christmas last year, an Aramco official told Americans not to put up as many Christmas lights as they usually do. The Americans responded by festooning their houses even more brightly than before.

“I never heard a Saudi say, ‘You can’t have those lights up,’ or ‘That offends me.’ Somebody’s worried somewhere, and I don’t know who,” complained one Aramco employee. “There’s some knee-jerk reaction about what we think the Saudis think. I don’t know who this somebody is we’re afraid of offending.”

Indeed, many Saudis say they themselves often brush up on the wrong side of the religious establishment, and many of them say they worry about a new tide of conservatism that is turning many young Saudis against the West. Although large numbers of Saudis were educated at American universities during the 1970s and 1980s, Saudi Arabia’s own universities are becoming better equipped, and larger numbers of young students are obtaining their educations at home--and are losing, their parents fear, some of the kingdom’s openness to the outside.

“My son will be educated abroad, as I was,” said one senior Saudi official. “The West was where I learned there is no black and white. I lost my chauvinism, among other things, in the West. I found that I became more understanding of my society by seeing other societies.”

A mid-level government official in Riyadh was distraught last week when he arranged visas and bought airline tickets for his three children, who live with his estranged wife, to vacation with him in America. “I thought they would enjoy Orlando, you know, maybe Niagara Falls,” he said. “I spent a fortune on those tickets. And they tell me, ‘We don’t want to go.’ They refused to go. I was shocked. I said why? They had been last year. They had seen some things that upset them, I guess. I don’t know what. Ladies in miniskirts. Who knows?”

A professor at the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in Dhahran said he complained all last year about his teen-age son listening to Michael Jackson tapes with the volume turned all the way up. Then one day recently, he said, his son came home and told him he wasn’t going to listen to Michael Jackson anymore.

“Music is haraam (forbidden),” his son said.

“I took him into his room, and I picked up one of the Michael Jackson tapes, and I told him: “Turn it on. Now turn up the volume, and listen. Don’t ever stop listening to music.”