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Saudi Arabia
The Society and Its Environoment
SAUDI ARABIA IN THE 1990s was a society of contrasts. After three
decades of intense modernization, the country's urban infrastructure
was highly developed and technologically sophisticated. Excellent
hospitals, clinics, schools, colleges, and universities offered
free medical care and education to Saudi citizens. Shopping malls
displayed Paris fashions; supermarkets sold vegetables flown in
from the Netherlands; restaurants offered Tex-Mex, Chinese, or
haute cuisine; and amusement centers with separate hours for male
and female patrons dotted the urban landscape. Suburban neighborhoods
with single-family houses and swimming pools hidden behind high
walls ringed commercial districts, and satellite communications
made a telephone call from Riyadh to New York as fast and as clear
as a call to New York from Connecticut.
Massive oil revenues had brought undreamed-of wealth to the kingdom.
Affluence, however, proved a two-edged sword. The dilemma that
Saudis faced in the 1990s was to preserve their cultural and religious
heritage while realizing the advantages that such wealth might
bring. The regime sought to acquire Western technology while maintaining
those values that were central to Saudi society.
It was not an easy quest. The country has its roots in the Wahhabism
(see Glossary), an eighteenth-century reform movement that called
for a return to the purity and simplicity of the early Islamic
community. It was the alliance between the Wahhabi religious reformers
and the House of Saud (Al Saud) that provided the Arabs of the
peninsula with a new and compelling focus for their loyalties
and helped to forge the unification of the peninsula under the
leadership of Abd al Aziz ibn Abd ar Rahman Al Saud.
The kingdom was rooted in religion-based conservatism stemming
from the Wahhabi reform movement. The strength of conservative
opinion grew even as the pace of economic change increased. Religious
conservatives and modernizers disagreed on what kinds of technology
might be used appropriately and how best to use the kingdom's
vast wealth. The dichotomy between the two was at the heart of
much of the country's political affairs. There was, nonetheless,
unanimous accord that Saudi Arabia's modernization--whatever form
it might take--reflect its Islamic values.
Massive urbanization and the altered economic situation have
fueled both the forces of change and conservatism. Urbanization
brought with it new social groups--students, technical experts,
and a vast corps of foreign workers among them. The government
has made every effort to insulate the population from the influence
of the foreign community; the task grew more difficult as the
number of non-Saudis in the work force increased. Expansion of
educational and economic opportunities polarized those who had
pursued secular studies and those who had pursued religious studies.
Although Saudi Arabia stood with one foot firmly placed among
the most highly developed nations of the world, the other foot
remained in the Third World. Almost one-third of the population
lived in rural areas very distant from developed urban centers,
some living as nomadic and seminomadic herdsmen, and some as oasis
agricultural workers. Other families were divided, caught between
the devaluation of local products and the rising cost of living
that accompanied development. Men went to distant towns to work
as drivers, laborers, or soldiers in the Saudi Arabian National
Guard, and women were left to tend family plots and livestock
and raise children. Medical care and schooling were available
to much of the population but were often located far from rural
areas. For many rural people, lack of knowledge, a lack of incentive,
illiteracy, physical distance, and bureaucratic obstacles limited
access to the resources of Saudi Arabia's burgeoning society.
Saudi Arabia's population also presented a picture of cultural
contrasts. On the one hand, Saudi people felt a strong, almost
tangible conviction in the rightness of trying to live one's life
according to God's laws as revealed through the Quran and the
life of the Prophet Muhammad. On the other hand, the interpretation
of what it meant to live according to God's laws had assumed different
meanings to different groups of people: some wished to adjust
traditional values to the circumstances of the present; others
wished to adjust the circumstances of the present to traditional
values. In no aspect of Saudi society was this tension more manifest
than in the question of the role of women. The conservative view
favored complete separation of women from men in public life,
with the education of women devoted to domestic skills, whereas
the liberal view sought to transform "separation values" into
"modesty values," allowing the expansion of women's opportunities
in work and education.
Politically, the early 1990s saw unprecedented expressions of
political dissidence born of the economic imbalances and shifting
social boundaries produced by the development process. In petitions
to the king for reform in the political system and political sermons
in the mosques, Saudis have sought representation in government
decision making. They have begun to ask who should control the
fruits of oil production, who should decide the allocation of
resources, and whose version of the just society should be rendered
into law? But among opposition voices there was another contrast:
some demanded representation to ensure that the governing system
would enforce sharia (Islamic law), whereas others demanded representation
to ensure protection for the individual from arbitrary religious
or political judgments.
The Persian Gulf War of 1991 has exacerbated these contrasts:
as Saudi Arabia becomes more dependent on the United States militarily,
the need to assert cultural independence from the West becomes
proportionately greater. As Saudi Arabia abandons traditional
alliances in the Arab world in favor of closer ties with the West,
the need to assert its leadership as a Muslim nation among the
Muslim nations of the world becomes greater. In the early 1990s,
tradition and Westernization coexisted in uneasy balance in Saudi
Arabian society.
Data as of December 1992
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