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Saudi Arabia: Slow-Flying Carpet

4 minute read
TIME

Islam last week marked the end of the 1,333rd pilgrimage to Mecca. As 1,250,000 Moslems left for home, they carried with them from Mohammedanism’s most devout observance the echoes of a noisy political feud between Saudi Arabia’s monarch, King Saud, and Egypt’s dictator, President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In the struggle for supremacy in the modern Arab world, the ancient ways of Saudi Arabia are slowly changing.

Plots & Propaganda. Saud and Nasser are parted by more than the Red Sea.

The ruler of oil-rich Saudi Arabia (estimated annual revenue from oil: about $400 million) regards Nasser as a Marxist firebrand whose form of “Arab socialism” defiles the Koran; Nasser denounces Saud as a feudal overlord and satyr who keeps his people in bondage. Each morning Radio Cairo broadcasts prayers for the quick demise of the “antisocial, reactionary, squandering, lecherous, oligarch Saud. his family and supporters.” In retaliation, Saud, who once financed a $5,000,000 plot to kill Nasser, this year barred delivery of the kiswa, the canopy for the holy Black Stone in Mecca that Egyptian craftsmen had spent almost a year weaving. Making a new 800-yd. embroidered covering for the shrine has been a prerogative of Cairo each year since the 17th century, but months ago Saud announced that because last year’s kiswa “was made of inferior cloth” and quickly faded, Egypt need not bother to send a new one.

Thus, last month, when an Egyptian ship docked at Jidda with a fresh canopy and a boatload of pilgrims who flaunted 5-ft. colored portraits of Nasser, King Saud became furious; police announced that the pilgrims could land, but the holy carpet could not. In the end, neither did! Budgets & Bureaucracy. Saud is well aware that Nasser’s propaganda has awakened millions of illiterate Saudis to the world beyond their desert peninsula. Nowadays, anti-Saud pamphlets are appearing on the desks of civil servants and army officers throughout the country. In addition, hundreds of young, well-to-do Saudis, many of them schooled in the U.S., return home to infect the rising generation with a yearning for modern life. Faced by these pressures, Saud is slowly responding. To outsiders, progress is almost imperceptible; for Saudi Arabia, any change is significant.

Until recently, the country’s budget was recorded by longhand in a grey, clothbound ledger by an old friend of Saud’s father. Now there is a published annual budget, and last year Saud established a national economic planning board, with a former officer of the World Bank acting as adviser. But the adviser’s plan for a $10 million survey of northern territories is snared in a maze of royal bureaucratic procedure; out of $70 million earmarked for development, $50 million is unspent.

By contrast, the royal family had no trouble disposing of its personal allotment of $60 million yearly—not counting bonuses, gifts and bribes from foreign businessmen.

Obedience & Opposition. King Saud’s greatest progress has to do with education. In a population that may range from 3,000,000 to 10,000,000 (no one is sure because there has never been a census), about 150,000 are now students; new schools are going up at the rate of 100 a year. Poor families are paid about $20 a month for each child in class.

Over the strenuous objections of the mullahs (religious leaders), the government has established eight schools for girls. This revolutionary change was instituted partly at the behest of wealthy fathers, whose daughters remained ignorant and single while young, educated Saudis were marrying Turkish and Egyptian girls. Now Saudi Arabia’s young ladies learn, among other things, the Koran, penmanship, “obedience to your father and husband,” arithmetic. Geometry is out; so are history and geography because, according to common religious belief, “the world is flat and immovable.” At prayertime, members of a special morals police still form flying wedges along the streets of Riyadh, the capital, flaying Moslems who are not in the mosques.

Saud’s modest reforms have sharply divided the King’s closest advisers. The mullahs, whose support he needs, are opposed to anything except the status quo.

Crown Prince Feisal, an aristocratic ascetic who, several years ago, rescued Saud from bankruptcy through elementary fiscal reforms, favors change, but demands strong royal rule. Another brother, Prince Talal, who served as Finance Minister from 1960 to 1961, advocates nothing less than a constitutional monarchy.

Caught in the three-way struggle is King Saud, 60, whose dilemma was likened by a sympathetic Saudi Arabian official to that of a man who has swallowed a razor: “He can neither push it nor pull it out.”

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