National Agenda : Saudi Arabia’s Exiles Challenge a Closed Society : The dissidents want the kingdom to be more democratic and more Islamic.

The latest and perhaps most dangerous challenge to the House of Saud is a portable telephone that Mohammed al Massari carries in his pocket around the fashionable hotel lobbies, restaurants and offices of London.

It rings every 10 minutes or so, and it’s always a caller from somewhere in Saudi Arabia--dialing through a New York exchange so the call can’t be traced--with tidbits of damaging gossip about the royal family, a report on the arrest of an opponent of the Saudi regime or simply a word of encouragement. “Thank you for what you’re doing,” said one caller from Riyadh on a recent afternoon. “We all support you.”

Al Massari works for the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, whose office in London is a virtual guerrilla warfare center, a network of computers, files and fax machines that transmit reams of sedition into the remote desert kingdom, one of the most closed societies on Earth.

The London operatives say 300 faxes a month go to Saudi government offices (the military was recently ordered to keep fax machines turned off unless a specific document was expected), and 300 more go to various merchants, intellectuals, businessmen and clerics who in turn copy them and re-fax them, in numbers totaling more than 100,000, throughout the kingdom; the committee claims, with great delight, to have recently acquired the number to the fax machine in the bedroom of Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan ibn Abdulaziz, brother of King Fahd.

In recent weeks, Prince Sultan might have awakened to find these bits of propaganda at his bedside: that Saudi Arabia was secretly supplying the southern Yemenis with tanks and other military assistance in neighboring Yemen’s civil war; that the number of pilgrims who died in an accident during the recent hajj pilgrimage was 10 times more than the government reported, or more than 2,200; that King Fahd and his brothers had in April received salary payments of 100 million Saudi riyals, about $27 million.

To the worry of both the Saudi monarchy and many Western governments, this particular opposition organization is an Islamic group bent on making the rigorously Islamic nation even more fundamentalist. Yet its calls for democratization and an end to corruption have attracted the interest of Saudi liberals pushing for greater freedom and public participation in government.

Nor are the committee’s activities the only sign that not all is well in the kingdom, one of America’s most important allies in the Arab world and its major partner in staging Operation Desert Storm, the 1991 war that drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait.

In recent weeks, two Saudi diplomats have gone into hiding in the United States, one from the Saudi consulate in Houston, the other posted to the Saudi mission at the United Nations in New York. Both are seeking political asylum and claiming harassment by the Saudi government.

“I join my voice to the increasing number of moderate academics from our great nation who are no longer able to tolerate the breaches of basic human rights, including the right to freedom of expression and political association, by the present regime in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” said Ahmed al Zahrany, second secretary at the consulate in Houston, in an announcement in late June.

Mohammed al Khilewi, the U.N. envoy, in a letter to Saudi Arabia’s senior cleric, Sheik Abdulaziz ibn Baz, began his announcement of opposition with a quotation from a Koranic verse that has been frequently circulated in underground cassette tapes in Saudi Arabia, to the fury of the royal regime: “Kings, when they enter a country, despoil it, and make the noblest of its people its meanest; thus do they behave.”

Khilewi said that within hours of sending the letter he received a phone call from the Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, offering to send his private jet to take him to Washington, where they would discuss the issue in a private suite at the Watergate Hotel.

“Based upon my experience, I understood this to be an attempt to kidnap me and return me to Saudi Arabia for the treatment accorded to vocal opponents of the regime,” Khilewi said in a statement to the press after he went into hiding.

Opposition to the House of Saud has simmered off and on for years, especially in the hot desert north of Riyadh where Saudi Arabia’s most radical clerics hold sway. But in the years since the end of the Persian Gulf War, opposition to the regime has reached unprecedented levels, mostly invisible because so few Western observers are granted visas to visit the kingdom, a number of Saudi analysts say.

“I think the U.S. government is mistaken to underestimate the degree of support for the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights and the extent of opposition in Saudi Arabia. There has been a sea change just in the past year,” said Aziz abu Hamad, a Saudi who studies human rights issues in the kingdom for Human Rights Watch, a U.S.-based organization.

“I have talked to many people in Saudi Arabia, and I am convinced there are many people in Saudi who support more radical means to achieve the Islamist goals,” Hamad said. “Some of them discuss the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights as too optimistic about the possibility of change without violence.”

At first glance, the idea of militant fundamentalists in a country whose Islamic practices are already the most rigorous in the world is a bit confusing.

The Saud family’s power comes by way of a historic alliance with the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect of Islam. But the new wave of Islamists in Saudi Arabia, joined by more militant Islamic voices in neighboring Egypt, Jordan and Algeria, claim Saudi Arabia is practicing a false brand of Islam.

Islamic critics are happy enough that the Saudi Arabian monarchy requires the veiling of women, bans alcohol and intermingling of the sexes and prohibits women from driving. But they are critical of Saudi economic policies that allow interest on banking (considered usury by the Koran, Islam’s holy book), too heavy a dependence on the West in foreign, defense and economic policy and a legal system that is not fully based on the Islamic Sharia law.

Like more liberal critics of the regime, they are demanding an end to inefficiency and corruption in the government administration and to the continuing favoritism toward members of the royal family.

Saad al Faqih, London office director of the committee, complained that the Saudi government has attempted to lump the whole opposition movement with fanatics.

“They try to confuse the fundamentalists and the new educated Islamists. I will not accept to be labeled as backward and without culture,” said Faqih, a medical professor and surgeon.

“The truth is they have a lot which does not fit in with Islamic teachings, especially things that have to do with the relationship between power and the people. . . . I believe we have achieved our aim of telling the people that Islam does not justify a political dictatorship.”

The Saudi regime reacted with immediate alarm when the committee was formed inside the kingdom in May, 1993--with some cause. For instance, one member of the new committee, subsequently suspended, was a sheik who advocated killing the country’s Shiite Muslims. (The majority of Saudis, and the ruling family, are Sunni Muslims.)

The London-based Massari, now the group’s official spokesman and son of a senior cleric in Saudi Arabia, says he was awakened at 2:30 one morning when his front door was broken down by a group of police officers. The officers rushed up to the bedroom with pistols drawn and took him away handcuffed and blindfolded.

Nearly every day during the next six months, Massari says, he was beaten with a bamboo cane on the back and feet. Officers would spit in his face, pull on his beard and call him a “criminal insect.”

Massari, then a professor of theoretical physics at Riyadh’s King Saud University, was later joined in prison by 12 other professors. Six members of the group lost their government jobs, and the detainees were released from prison only after signing statements promising to undertake no other campaigns against the government.

That is when they began quietly plotting to leave the country, Massari said.

Shortly thereafter, the committee announced it had opened shop in London. Nearly a dozen of Massari’s relatives and associates in the kingdom, including his 19-year-old son, have since been arrested. Faqih’s wife has been forbidden to travel outside the country.

Opposition leaders claim the United States stays largely silent about human rights issues in Saudi Arabia because it fears encouraging Islamic fundamentalism and because Saudi Arabia has become an increasingly important trading partner.

Ray Mabus, the former Mississippi governor recently confirmed as ambassador to Riyadh, said contracts worth more than $10 billion have been announced in the past few months between U.S. companies and Saudi Arabia.

“These contracts are going to have an enormous impact on our economy and will create or save thousands of American jobs,” Mabus said.

Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) raised the issue during Mabus’ confirmation hearing.

“We will make a huge go-round about Kashmir and India, and Tian An Men Square and China, and pay no heed whatsoever to what is surely the most autocratic regime on Earth,” Moynihan complained.

The Saudis have been largely officially silent on the issue, though Prince Bandar, the ambassador to Washington, in a recent newspaper commentary cautioned the West against intervening in issues it perhaps cannot understand.

“We come from an almost timeless culture and firmly hold to our religious faith. Islam for us is not just a religion but a way of life,” he wrote.

“We Saudis want to modernize, but not necessarily Westernize. . . . It does not help King Fahd, for example, to look good in the Washington Post . . . but not to work within the overwhelming consensus in downtown Riyadh and the rest of Saudi Arabia,” Bandar wrote.

“What Western human rights or other politically correct groups here may want doesn’t help King Fahd at all when the Saudi people have a strong differing view of their own, based on Islam and other basic ways,” he added.

“We don’t have to like all America does, and it doesn’t have to like all that we do.”