Among the first to arrive to witness the beheading of a man convicted of murder were busloads of workers from the many Korean construction companies building the modern Riyadh. The coaches, parked around the perimeter of the square, looked like tour buses wait mg for their customers to visit the local sites. The crowd continued to grow, becoming largely Saudi. Policemen clad in drab olive uniforms and cocky berets touched with red patrolled its edges, methodically striking their truncheons against their open palms.

As the noon prayers at the mosque drew to a close, an unheralded procession of vehicles slowly pulled off King Abdul Aziz Street into Justice Square and stopped in front of the ornate building housing the governor's office. In the lead was a distinctive black and white police car, followed by an ominous-looking black van and two buses. As soon as they stopped, the buses quickly disgorged their cargoes of policemen. Armed with submachine guns, the men immediately formed a barrier between the assembled crowd and the execution site. With the area secured, an officer emerged from the lead vehicle. Standing on the running board and supporting himself with his right arm crooked against the roof of the car, he drew a small microphone close to his mouth and began to read the order of death. As he read, the doors of the black van quietly swung open and the convicted man, a white blindfold wrapped around his bare head, his hands tied behind his back, stumbled out, held between two men. It was here that he met his executioner, an enormous black man clothed in a finely woven and intricately embroidered ebony cloak, which hung from his massive shoulders. An ornate broadsword sheathed in a heavy gold scabbard lay tightly strapped against his barrel chest. The docile prisoner, seemingly resigned to his fate, knelt on the black asphalt. When one of the guards lightly touched his neck, the condemned man dropped his head forward. Silence descended on the excited crowd. The executioner dramatically unsheathed his sword and fleetingly held it above his head for the crowd to see. He then took one step forward. With the grace of a dancer, he raised the sword to its apex and swung it down in a perfect arch until metal met flesh. The crowd shouted its approval as the head dropped from the body, sending fountains of blood spurting from the severed arteries. I stood halfway between the mosque and the execution site. I had chosen my position carefully. Stationed behind a stout Chevrolet, one of the few cars parked in the square, I felt protected from the crowd, which becomes highly agitated at the moment of the beheading. Surging forward, the Saudis often mock Westerners and force them to the front, in full view of the dismembered body. As soon as the condemned man's body was tossed into the van for removal, the police, who had been placidly patrolling the square, waded into the crowd, swinging their truncheons. People scattered in all directions while the police shouted the order to disperse. Glancing around me, I realized that I was trapped between the car and the fleeing crowd. Although the impatient policeman approaching me was striking people with his raised club as he waded through the throng, I could not move. I felt no panic, somehow believing that he would not strike a foreign woman, especially since I was swathed completely in black, my hair tightly bound in a heavy scarf. At that instant, a racking pain shot through me as the truncheon landed across my back just below the shoulder. I turned, desperately trying to escape, when a second blow struck me across the ribs. All at once an escape route opened up and I fled, clutching my arms around my battered body. Within minutes the square was as empty as it would have been on a normal Friday after noon.

Westerners are often shocked by what they consider the brutality of Islamic law as practiced in Saudi Arabia. Unmodified by the philosophies and practices of modern legal systems, the undergirdings of the Wahhabis' law remains as it was in the seventh century - a combination of Hammurabi's code, tribal justice, and Mohammed's teachings. The logic and writings of the great Arab intellectuals were added during the Islamic empire. What emerged was the Islamic body of law known as the sharia. There are four formal sources of this law: the Koran; the Sunna, the sayings of Mohammed written down by his followers; ijma, the consensus of learned scholars writing on particular issues not clearly defined by either the Koran or the Sunna but which have been validated by tradition; and qiyas, decisions deduced by analogies. * Together they form the sharia, which serves as the constitution of Saudi Arabia as well as the authority on which every rule and regulation is based.

The Koran was born in a primitive time to a primitive people who were controlled more by tribal traditions than by any code of law. Yet through the centuries of the Islamic empire, the sharia underwent great speculation and innovation in Alexandria, Baghdad, and the other centers of Arab learning. The intellectuals of the time regarded the sharia as a type of common law from which to develop an ever-expanding legal system. Combining the teachings of Mohammed with the thinking of the Greeks, the Islamic scholars of the ninth century worked through the same logical order that Maimonides undertook for Judaism in the twelfth century and Thomas Aquinas set out for the Christians in the thirteenth century. But the creative thought of the Arabs stopped on the eve of the Renaissance in Europe.

As a result of the desolation wrought by the Mongol invasion (1219-1258), or perhaps because of the repressive domination of the Ottomans, the legal systems of the Middle East ceased to be creative. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the imposition of European rule throughout much of the Arab world, Islamic law began to imitate rather than instruct the West. In Saudi Arabia, cut off from contact with either the West or the Arab world, the sharia did not develop at all. It has stood unmodified since before the fall of the Islamic empire.

*There are several schools of thought in Islamic law, which explains some of the deviations in legal practice from one Islamic country to another Saudi Arabia's ulema chiefly follows the Hanbali school, but decisions may incorporate jurists from other schools where no precedents exist.

Unlike Western law that ensures the public order but also guarantees the rights of the individual, protects commerce, and defines the functions of government, the sole mission of the sharia is to protect the social order. Since the goal in the treatment of any person who violates the rules is never rehabilitation but the defense of Islamic society, the idea of justice is inseparable from the idea of punishment. Therefore, punishment becomes organically related to the social order, pacifying a deep fear among Moslems that the rejection of punishment will eventually involve the rejection of order.

Under a simple and ancient code of law based on the philosophy of vengeance, only a few deeds - theft, rape, adultery, and murder - are defined as crimes. But for these the punishments are drastic and public. In Riyadh, when a thief's right hand is cut off in public by the executioner's sword, a string is tied to the middle finger and it is hung from a high hook on a streetlight in Justice Square for all to see. This public display, appalling to Westerners, is an integral part of the philosophy of punishment. It announces the thief's transgression to the community and casts shame on his family. It enforces discipline in a basically undisciplined society. And it is emotionally satisfying to the needs of the faithful.

Saudi Arabia's criminal justice system, perhaps more than any other, encompasses the true philosophy of "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." In the customs of Arabia, a person convicted of harming his neighbor was punished by the same act suffered by the victim. In the late twentieth century, in a country committed to rapid modernization, traditions codified by the sharia and the opinions of its scholars still reign. In March 1984 a sharia court hearing a case from Jaizan ordered a man's left hand and the fingers of his right hand amputated after he inflicted similar wounds on his wife. The verdict was endorsed by the Supreme Judicial Council and approved by the king.

Under the law of the sharia, murder is a capital crime. Yet the choice of punishment for a man convicted of murder can be determined by a bargain that satisfies the victim's family rather than by society's fixed price for violating the rules. A murderer can escape the sentence of death by paying the victim's family blood money if that is the family's choice. But only the victim's family can decide, and justice will wait for its decision. In 1983, in two unrelated cases, the murderers in crimes committed in 1966 and 1968 were beheaded. In both instances, the implementation of the death sentence was delayed until the dead men 5 sons reached maturity to make their choices. In choosing death, the victim's family also has the right to administer it. A family who inflicts the punishment itself does so in order to satisfy its need for revenge in defense of family honor or to end a cycle of violence between feuding families. The most gruesome beheadings are those carried out by the victim's relatives where, lacking the professionalism of the public executioner, the condemned is repeatedly hacked and chopped until he dies.

The sexual transgressions of rape and adultery are also punishable by death. A man guilty of rape is considered to have committed the most vile crime that can be committed against society by robbing a woman of her sexual chastity. Adultery also is a crime against the whole society because of the threat it poses to the family and therefore to the social order. Of the sexual crimes, the punishment for adultery, death by stoning for a woman and beheading for a man, is the most fascinating and the least understood in the West.

Charges of adultery are never made lightly. Since the penalty is so severe, women are protected from unfounded accusations of sexual misconduct. According to the Koran, "Those who defame honorable women and cannot produce four witnesses shall be given eighty lashes." * Unlike the tribal rights of a father to put to death a daughter who has violated her chastity, death sentences under Koranic law are extremely rare. In Saudi Arabia, only one woman is acknowledged to have been stoned to death for adultery in the last twenty years. It is no wonder, since proof of adultery is on the accuser. This proof requires that either a woman confess to the adulterous act three times in front of a sharia court, or either four males or eight females who witnessed the actual penetration testify before the court. Just how difficult it is to convict someone for adultery was summed up by a Saudi delegate to a human rights dialogue with European jurists some years ago, who de fined the circumstances in which stoning applies. According to the Koran, this is "only when the culprit, prior to his delict, had contracted a legal marriage and if four witnesses known for their righteousness and their integrity were present at the accomplishment of the sexual act in a manner which would exclude the possibility of doubt: it would not have been sufficient, namely, that they had seen the accused completely naked and stuck together." *

*Sura 24.4.

Whether it is due to severe punishment or public humiliation, Saudi Arabia unquestionably enjoys a remarkably low rate of crime. With no fear, I walked the streets and alleyways wearing several gold chains around my neck and carrying generous quantities of cash in my shop ping basket. It was this freedom from the fear of street crime that expatriates almost universally point to as one of the pleasures of life in the kingdom. Yet although no one is mugged, there is crime in Saudi Arabia. In 1982 the Ministry of the Interior reported that in a population of over seven million (Saudis and foreigners), 14,469 crimes were reported during the year. But this number is deceptively large when viewed in the light of what is now reported as criminal.** Among the 1982 offenses, theft accounted for 30 percent of the total; possession or sale of alcohol, 22 percent; murder, 6 percent; attempted murder, 1.2 percent; manslaughter, 1 percent; threats to kill, 7 percent; assaults, 3.7 percent; suicides and attempted suicides, 0.2 percent; bribery, 3 percent; abductions, 4 percent; and moral assaults, 10 percent. This last category included "breaking into homes for immoral purposes, adultery or attempts to commit adultery, sodomy or attempts to sodomize, raping or malesting [molesting) women, running brothels, etc."

Although the legal system is designed to protect society, not the rights of individuals, it is a system in which every man is equal. But as in the rest of society, women do not share total equality with men. Even so, Mohammed, in a revolutionary act in the tribal society of the Arabian Peninsula, commanded a measure of legal rights for women. Saudi Arabia continues to hew exactly to those commands, and the principle that two women more or less equal one man still holds true in most of the kingdom's legal proceedings. A woman may witness a legal document if another woman agrees to witness it with her. In a trial, it takes the testimony of two women to match that of one man. But in civil matters involving her property, a woman alone has access to the courts. Most of a woman's other legal rights involve her marital rights and the custody of her children.

* The Economist, February 13, 1982, p. S-7.

**Although many of these actions exceed the crimes cited by the Koran, all threaten the social order and therefore fall under varying interpretations of the sharia.

*** Saudi Gazette, October 31,1983.

Beyond the general legal categories of criminal, sexual and marital, and what might be termed civil law, most of the sharia is concerned with religious practices. Since Islam is so legalistic, perhaps even more so than most orthodox sects of Judaism, there are minute legal rulings on almost every act a human performs. Yet few of these rulings are applicable to the needs of a nation-state functioning in the twentieth century. As the oil boom progressed, more and more claims for action pressed in on a government lacking few points of reference by which to create the rules and regulations necessary for conditions undreamed of in Mohammed's time. But the idea of the sharia as the only law of the land is something that no one, including the king, questions, at least not in public. In a speech before the student body of the King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in 1983, King Fahd asserted once again that the Islamic sharia is the greatest asset of the country and that Saudi Arabia will maintain its strict adherence to it for all time. So ingrained is the concept of religious law and governmental functions being the same that something as far removed from the religious sphere (in Western thought) as a water-use plan emerged from the Third Development Plan as the "Islamic Water Law."

As a result of the total unification of law and religion, civil law particularly has become corsetted in the attitudes and rulings of a I 3oo- year-old legal system believed to be universally and eternally valid. There is no clearly defined method by which a secular authority can firmly draw the line between what is God's and what is Caesar's. Under Islam, God alone is the lawgiver. Theoretically, the king has no right to legislate except under the authority the sharia grants the emir of the community to issue regulations to "enforce the commandments of the divine law [and] to implement whatever is deemed necessary for [the] good and well-being of his subjects." *

That Saudi Arabia has been able to function at all with its antiquated and ossified legal system is due to the wiliness of Abdul Aziz and the surprisingly flexible attitude of the ulema. When he merged his kingdom, Abdul Aziz inherited a legal system that was composed not only of the sharia but also of the Ottoman rules that had governed the Hijaz, the tradition of mediation by the emir that characterized the Nejd, and the tribal law of the Bedouins. Claiming to recognize only the sharia, Abdul Aziz very carefully and over an extended period of time reorganized the judiciary and vastly expanded his right to legislate by decree. Issues that fell outside the specifics of the sharia were left to the discretion of the king as long as the principles of religious law were upheld. The ulema tolerated these innovations largely because it recognized Abdul Aziz's sincere respect for the sharia and benefited from his willingness to incorporate the religious authorities into the political process.

*Quoted in Willard A. Beling, ed., King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia (London: Croom Helm, 1980) p. 113.

The system worked because Saudi Arabia's long seclusion behind the barricades of its deserts had protected it from "picking isolated fragments of opinions from the early centuries of Islamic law, arranging them into a kind of arbitrary mosaic and concealing behind this screen an essentially different structure of ideas borrowed from the West...." *

Because Saudi Arabia was never colonized, the ulema escaped the imposition of foreign law. It was spared the uncomfortable dilemma of either demanding the repeal of alien laws or producing an instant Islamic alternative. The institutions and basic laws of Saudi Arabia have remained indigenous, voluntarily adopted, while at the same time, the system of decree legislation for government administration has al lowed the role of government to expand to meet the needs and promises of the oil boom while paying due respect to the sharia.

To carry out its governmental decisions, the House of Saud has literally bureaucratized the ulema and incorporated it into the mechanisms of the state. Consequently, administrative matters often take on the force of religious law. For example, in October 1979 the Permanent Committee of the Board of Religious Guidance, the kingdom's highest religious body, was asked to issue a religious ruling that would forbid farmers to use white flour as animal feed. Because of government subsidies, the Grain Silos and Flour Mills Organization sold for $3.23 to $3.82 per bag flour that actually cost $23.50 to produce. Lazy livestock owners, taking advantage of the low price, raided supermarket shelves, loaded their pickups, and hauled away the precious flour to feed their animals. The committee for religious guidance decreed the obvious. The purpose of the subsidy was to make good flour avail able at cheap prices for the benefit of the human population. It was additionally pointed out that plenty of animal fodder was available at subsidized prices. The sole reason a religious ruling was necessary at all was that rural farmers could be brought to heel only by the authority of religion.

*Joseph Schacht. quoted in Soliman A. Solaim, 'Legal Review: Saudi Arabia's Judicial System," Middle East Journal 25 (Summer 1971): 406.

As the oil boom gathered momentum, the entire approach of defending an outdated legal code with decrees issued by the king but which lacked the force of law quickly clashed with the complexities of an increasingly sophisticated economy tied to the international economic structure. This structural and philosophical weakness was so basic to all aspects of the modernization of Saudi Arabia that the great conflicts between the law of Mohammed and the realities of the twentieth century became an integral part of the boom era. The duality inherent in the civil law built on the sharia combined with decree legislation has created a never-never land of contradictions and ambiguities that bears heavily on foreign contractors. Rules and regulations are born, changed, and die in dizzying sequence. What was valid last week no longer applies this week but may be resurrected without notice next week. Furthermore, it seems that 90 percent of the regulations are not written down. I have seen Western businessmen and their Japanese counter parts reduced to bundles of insecurities trying to find out what the law requires for them to operate in the kingdom. Since so little is written down or codified, Saudi lawyers generally advise their clients on the basis of their own experience and their all-important connections. Saudi lawyer Ahmed Audhali once said that his colleagues are very careful about writing anything down for their clients because other lawyers will claim it is incorrect. "And who knows what is correct."*

In an attempt to streamline the adjudication process, commercial courts, labor courts, and other tribunals with limited jurisdiction have been created to hear cases involving decree legislation. But since all matters relate back to the sharia, any case can go to a sharia court. Western businessmen are well advised to stay out of the religious courts, where for every precedent there is an equally strong opposing precedent, making decisions totally unpredictable. The courts hearing decree legislation cases are somewhat better but are also unpredictable. In these courts, the king becomes the ultimate judge. "If you want to get to the King, you can dispute everything that went before. **

*Middle East Economic Digest (April/May 1983): 14.

**lbid.

But as with so much else in Saudi life, this tactic has its limitations. In one case, a German party in a labor dispute refused to accept a compromise settlement. Instead, he hired a Saudi lawyer who took the dispute to the king. The king heard the arguments and nodded, indicating agreement with the German national. With this, the opposing party went to another Saudi lawyer, who for half of his opponent's fee also took his client's case to the king. The king heard his side of the story and reversed his prior opinion, leaving the original ruling of the court standing.

So confused are all of the regulations in the courts governing decree legislation that it is usually easier to seek forgiveness than permission. Compromise is the essence of the courts because, like everyone else, judges in Saudi Arabia abhor making decisions. Instead, reflecting the tribal philosophy that disputes are best settled by reaching a consensus, the courts push litigants into compromise. And the foreigner is wise to accept the court's mediation. For any foreigner wishing to make money in a country whose government almost totally fuels the economy, a clear ruling in the foreigner's favor renders it exceedingly difficult for him to win any further business. A minister who has been embarrassed by an adverse decision in the court simply cuts off any further contracts to his antagonist.

Much of the confusion that reigns between the legalisms set down by the sharia and the decrees and regulations of a government no longer in the seventh century flows over into law enforcement.

There are two police forces, the religious and the civil. The matawain patrol the public morals and the police enforce civil law. But since all law is ultimately religious, there is a constant overlapping of jurisdictions. And in any jurisdictional conflict with the matawain, the civil police are rendered powerless. No one in the political sphere is willing to back its own police in a confrontation with religious authorities. Therefore, the religious police dominate unless the parties involved have sufficient political power to appeal the matter to a higher authority. This sets in motion the consensus process, which can reach the highest level of government and which, at some point, may or may not settle the matter.

Shortly after I arrived back in Riyadh, the al-Azizia area of Riyadh, the most Westernized section of the city, was being intimidated by a young, articulate matawah known as Sheikh Ahmed. Believed by the American embassy to be a dropout from Georgetown University, Sheikh Ahmed, accompanied by several followers, prowled the supermarkets and restaurants in the vicinity. With no official credentials stating that he had any authority, he swept through the aisles of the Euromarche, A&P, Safeway, and other Western-style stores, harassing Western customers. His targets seemed to be couples whom the sheikh suspected of shopping together without the benefit of clergy. For those he caught, he confiscated their iqamas ("work permits") and threatened the men with three days in jail and eighty lashes. For those who were married, he harangued the women for failing to cover their hair or for wearing dresses with open necklines or knee-length skirts. After seven people had been rounded up and driven off in a truck from the Safeway store the preceding week, the supermarkets in the area became so anxious that they began to stock abaayas at the door for their customers.

Women were not the only targets. Sheikh Ahmed took offense at the actions of men that violated the rules of Wahhabism. He viciously berated a man who was wearing gold jewelry and used his camel whip to switch the legs of a big, burly plumber dressed in shorts.

Then one night an American electrician at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital by the name of Ralph Baldwin refused to surrender his iqama when the sheikh scolded his wife for appearing in public without a head scarf. Sheikh Ahmed called the Riyadh police and Baldwin summoned help from the hospital security department charged with intervening between KFSR employees and Saudi authorities. When everyone had assembled on the sidewalk in front of the al-Johar super market, Sheikh Ahmed turned on Mike Field, the security department representative who had been sent by the hospital to try to rescue Bald- win. Releasing everyone else, the sheikh detained Mike, the real innocent in the entire affair. Field, realizing he had fallen into the hands of the matawain, begged the Riyadh police to intervene but they shrugged their shoulders and left. Afraid to resist, Field was locked in the back seat of a silver Datsun and driven to the al-Badr mosque, Ahmed's headquarters. There five more matawain joined the sheikh, who was by now threatening to lash his prisoner. Finally, in the early hours of the morning, the badly shaken but unscathed Field was abruptly re leased.

Eventually Sheikh Ahmed went too far. Staking out the gate leading to the nurses' housing at the hospital, the matawah would pick up women coming out to meet their dates and take the couple to his mosque for one of his discourses on sexual propriety. Late one night, a member of the U.S Diplomatic Corps brought his fiancée home. Just as he kissed her good night, Sheikh Ahmed stepped out of the shadows and grabbed him. Screaming his right to diplomatic immunity, the envoy was hauled off to the al-Badr mosque. However, before the night was over, the American ambassador reached the center of power, the senior princes, and the man was freed. Through the dark corridors of decision-making, the political leaders and the religious leaders reached an agreement to squelch Sheikh Ahmed. The last that I heard of him, he had been placed in a job at the Intercontinental Hotel - in public relations.

When the oil boom hit and the population of Saudi Arabia surged, a civil police force in the real sense of the word did not exist. The House of Saud, always nervous about creating organizations with any authority, had allowed either the matawain or the man on the street to do most of the policing. The principle of citizen's arrest was, and re mains, a highly developed art. Every Saudi man claims as an inalienable right the power to have anyone arrested on his word. The police usually comply by taking the "offender" to jail, where he can stay until his sponsor secures his release or the court judges whether or not the arrest was justified.

The whole law enforcement system terrifies Westerners, who constantly live with the possibility of landing in jail. An expatriate faces the threat of jail for anything from driving without a license to the possession of alcohol. Yet things have improved. During the early years of the oil boom, the police would determine fault in car accidents by rounding up everyone at the scene, drivers and witnesses alike, and taking them all to jail, where they would be detained until some resolution could be reached. Alan Miller was once held for four hours when he stopped at a police post to ask directions. And my friend Ian Dylan spent two days in jail in 1971 because his car was stolen.

Over the years since the oil boom began, a civil police system gradually has been put in place that, on occasion, can create some semblance of order out of the chaos. Always cognizant of the divisiveness within its kingdom, the House of Saud from the beginning centralized control of the police. Consequently, municipalities neither hire nor command their own police forces. Every policeman who patrols the streets works directly for and is answerable to the Ministry of the Interior Security Forces.

The major problem with the police is that they continue to be a law unto themselves until cases reach the courts. Although there is in every country the problem of keeping the police in bounds, seldom is this problem more serious than in Saudi Arabia. As in all areas of the society, the fierce individualism of the Saudis makes it extremely difficult for them to be molded into an organization with established rules and procedures. When a Saudi is given some authority, his ego demands that it be exercised. Regardless of the statement by the respected mayor of Jeddah, Said al-Farsi, that "municipality officials are expected to deal with citizens 'gently,' "* the Riyadh police on occasion can be seen dragging teenage drivers stopped for speeding out of their cars and caning them in the public eye.

Friends or relatives often use police and security officers to settle personal disagreements, especially with Westerners. I once talked to an American who worked for a Riyadh construction company as the receiving clerk, responsible for signing invoices for supplies received. The invoices then went to the accounting department for payment. Unfortunately, one invoice was lost in transit. Holding the receiving clerk responsible for nonpayment of his bill, the supplier had a friend in the Ministry of Interior arrest the clerk. The American stayed in jail for several days under interrogation about why he refused to pay his bills.

Beyond the issue of disciplining the police, the main problem in Saudi Arabia's law enforcement system is the general lack of organization. In late 1983 the long-term influx of foreigners, increasing crime, and the inexperience of the fledgling police establishment finally led the government to issue a set of detention laws that would apply to Saudis and foreigners alike. ** According to the executive order of Interior Minister Prince Naif ibn Abdul Aziz, the new rules "forbid arrest or detention of any one unless there is ample evidence calling for his arrest and stipulates that investigation should be completed within three days of detention." For the expatriate, the most significant provision is that a foreigner arrested in Saudi Arabia is to have his case reviewed by the governor of the province in which the alleged offense took place before the judicial process proceeds further. This procedure gives the governor authority to dispense quickly with cases of way ward expatriates, primarily Westerners, thus saving the government the embarrassment of formal protests about unjust detentions from foreign governments. Although they do not always work very well, the statutes are at least an attempt to get those accused out of jail, where they often languish for weeks without charges, and into the courts.

* Arab News, August 9, 1983.

**There is no right of habeas corpus in civil or criminal proceedings.

***Saudi Gazette, November 18, 1983.

The great frustration for Westerners embroiled in Saudi Arabia's legal system is time. There seems to be no procedure for notifying defendants when a case will be heard, or at least no procedure that has ever been explained to those who are not privy to the process. Instead, the defendant sits in jail or is denied an exit visa for months on end while he waits for his case to be heard.

According to most Westerners working with Saudi Arabia's legal system, it works reasonably well once the case makes it way into the courts. Furthermore, once in the court the accused is not subjected to a complex and convoluted trial. "Court procedures are intentionally made as simple as possible to enable the most ignorant Bedouin to come out of the desert, lay his complaint before the court and get a fair hearing." * There are firm judicial procedures established through a series of decrees issued between 1927 and 1975. A defendant has the right of appeal through a sequence of courts, with the Supreme Judicial Council as the final authority. And most would agree that a sharia judge is incorruptible, fervently believing that he will go to hell if he makes an unjust decision. Unlike the influence-peddling so prevalent in the rest of the society, a sharia judge will usually make a reasonably fair ruling, one not influenced by who the parties to the dispute happen to be.

There are in the sharia distinct philosophical similarities to Western Systems of law. A man is innocent until proved guilty. The burden of proof falls on the plaintiff. There is a system of appeals. And there is the concept that all men are equal before the law. However, procedures in the sharia courts differ from those in the West. All cases require the testimony of two witnesses who saw the actual act. In the absence of these witnesses, the plaintiff is allowed to take an oath swearing that what he claims is true. The testimony of Christians is admissible under a special oath: "In the name of God, who gave Jesus, son of Mary, the Holy Bible and made him cure the sick, the leper, and the deaf, I swear." Oaths are important in the judicial process, especially for a ward expatriates, primarily Westerners, thus saving the government the embarrassment of formal protests about unjust detentions from foreign governments. Although they do not always work very well, the statutes are at least an attempt to get those accused out of jail, where they often languish for weeks without charges, and into the courts.

* Behng, el., King Faisal and the Modernization of Saudi Arabia, p.116.

Moslem, for whom oath taking is a profound act, a personal trust between himself and Allah. Therefore, the court takes little responsibility in guarding against perjury, assuming that any person not telling the truth will be condemned by God to eternal damnation.

There is no jury in a trial and the judge participates in the case. In the lower Saudi courts, the qadi, or judge, sits on an elevated dais in the courtroom. The plaintiff and the defendant, sharing the same bench, face him directly. The role of the judge is not to arbitrate but to seek the truth and dispense justice. Consequently he often becomes a mediator, working out a compromise between feuding people. Since the sharia is at best vague on many situations in modern life, judges use the precedents of their own culture and their own reasoning to reach decisions. For the Saudis, these decisions are perfectly logical. For the Westerners, they are more often a total mystery. Back in the late 1960's, one of the few Westerners in Saudi Arabia was a British public health worker. He told me that one quiet Friday afternoon he was sitting in the mud house of a Saudi friend, drinking homemade alcohol. The house was situated alone on the edge of town, at the end of a road that was hardly more than a path. Lulled by the peace of the afternoon and the effects of the alcohol, he and his host drifted in and out of sleep. Suddenly, without any warning, the entire front wall of the house collapsed, hit by a Saudi driving one of the few cars in Riyadh at the time. When the lone policeman eventually arrived, he took everyone to jail. The case was heard the next day. The Englishman was sentenced to twenty days in jail and twenty lashes for drinking alcohol. The owner of the house was sentenced to twenty-five days in jail for locating his house in such a place that the driver could run into it. The only one who escaped without punishment was the driver of the car.

While I was working for Tom Krogh, the maintenance contractor, a Mercedes water truck rammed into one of his pickup trucks, totaling it. The case went to court, where the judge ruled that the driver of the water truck had caused the accident, but since he had six children he was more burdened with responsibilities than the owner of the pickup, who had only one child. Therefore, the driver was relieved of paying damages.

Passengers riding in a taxi involved in a wreck are responsible for the accident. The theory is simple and reflects the fatalism of Islam. If the passenger had not hired the taxi, it would not have been where the accident occurred.

Westerners who are veterans of survival in the kingdom are generally philosophical about the minor scrapes and monumental inconveniences generated by the legal system. Most people involved in negligible incidents realize they will be released from jail within a few hours or a few days. And since being in jail is so common, to be arrested carries no social stigma in the foreign community. This cavalier attitude radically changes when Westerners find themselves in jail on serious charges.

Some Westerners who go to jail have become trapped in disputes with their Saudi partners. The regulation requiring all business enterprises to be Saudi owned locks every foreigner into either an immediate or indirect relationship with a Saudi national or the Saudi government. On entering the country, the foreigner surrenders his passport to his Saudi partner and is dependent on him to obtain his visa to exit the country. The character and ego needs of the Saudi sponsor are crucial to the well-being of the foreigner. There have been hundreds of incidents of foreigners being held in Saudi Arabia by their employers. In any disagreement, the foreigner simply does not get out of Saudi Arabia or he stays locked in jail until the matter is settled to the satisfaction of the Saudi or is resolved months later by the court.* It is often the issue of Saudi honor that causes the Westerners so many problems. A Saudi partner has great need to maintain status among his peers. If his business is not as successful as the Saudi expected or if it falters, the Saudi will not bear the shame of failure. Charges of embezzlement fly and the foreign partner usually lands in jail.**

Although many foreigners find themselves in jail unjustly, there are those who are there because they are guilty of any number of transgressions. Every scam devised by man has probably been pulled on the Saudis. During the golden days of the oil boom, an appalling number of supposedly reputable businessmen and professionals inflated prices, forged invoices, sold low-quality goods at high-quality prices, and committed outright embezzlement, all under the guise of helping the Saudis modernize. At one time so many Westerners were stealing files from the Ministry of Planning to peddle to project bidders abroad that the ministry was forced to adopt a policy that amounted to holding hostages. None of its employees could leave the country unless another employee signed a paper assuming all of his debts and obligations in the kingdom in perpetuity. And that person could only leave if he were able to transfer his obligations plus those he had assumed from the first person to someone else.

* One of the great legends of the western experience in Saudi Arabia was the American who, unable to get out by other means, had himself crated as cargo and shipped out of the country.

** All of these disputes can be mediated. To stay out of jail, one contractor hid out in my house for six weeks until his Saudi partner agreed to apply for an exit visa in return for $40,000 he claimed was owed to him.

But even with all of the financial chicanery, it is the possession of alcohol that lands most Westerners in jail. In spite of all the import restrictions, Saudi Arabia is far from alcohol free. There is the quota of legal alcohol that the government allows the diplomatic corps to import. Then there are the bootleggers. Before the Mecca uprising, bootleg alcohol was relatively easy to buy, although at $75 to $100 a fifth very costly. Bootleggers, some of them Saudi, operated all over the kingdom and claimed a regular clientele. And then in about 1980, stocks of imported alcohol evaporated and prices shot up to $120 or more a fifth. A number of theories about the sudden drought emerged. Speculation swirled around Prince Turki ibn Abdul Aziz, deputy minister of Defense and Aviation and one of the Sudairi Seven. It was rumored that Turki had provided protection for bootleggers before his involvement became too blatant for the political health of the House of Saud, shaken by the Mecca uprising and the growing Islamic revolution. The story gained credence when the black market in alcohol shrank about the time he left the government "for health reasons." But in the end, it may have been Saudi Arabia's new security concerns that permanently crippled the bootlegging industry. The first winter after the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran War, roadblocks were set up on the highways and back roads leading into the cities, where trucks were stopped to search for arms. At about the same time, the first AWACS, whose mission it was to fly air surveillance for the defense of the kingdom, arrived in Saudi Arabia. On one of the sophisticated aircraft's first flights, it was reported to have spotted convoys of trucks transporting bootlegged whiskey across the desert. Suddenly the whiskey runs had become too dangerous for those supplying anyone but the most rich and powerful.

Westerners outside the privileged circle of diplomacy and unwilling to pay the exorbitant prices of the bootleggers make their own alcohol. Wine, being the easiest to formulate, is the most popular. Westerners line up at supermarket checkout counters with their shopping carts loaded with cases of grape juice. Securing themselves behind the locked doors of their houses and apartments, they mix the juice in five-gallon plastic jerry cans with sugar and yeast, smuggled through customs hidden in everything from guitars to the socks on their kids' feet. The mixture is allowed to ferment for three weeks or so, occasionally stirred with a broom handle. The finished, if grossly immature, product is then drained through rag filters into the empty grape juice bottles and corked.

Among these home vintners are the connoisseurs who rig up elaborate wineries in their bathrooms and regularly engage in fierce wine- tasting competitions. The beer brewers, largely British, stage random "Octoberfests" where everyone brings his home-brewed beer for judging. Those with no fear of "jake leg," the neurological disease that strikes from impure moonshine, distill a usually wretched concoction called sedeeqi, or "my friend" in Arabic.*

As a result of all of this illicit activity, Saudi Arabia has produced the world's largest breed of high-tech moonshiners. Stills are rigged with an elaborate array of pirated technology and the freshly distilled liquid is passed from bubbling jugs through a variety of sophisticated valves and filters, where it eventually drips into a boggling array of bottles. (I knew a high spirited, boisterous Canadian who colored his sedeeqi blue and poured it into Aqua Velva bottles, which he blithely carried through police roadblocks.)

Westerners brewing their own alcohol are usually left alone by Saudi authorities as long as the product is kept in the Westerners' homes and is neither served nor sold to Saudis. But as relatively open as home distilleries are, anyone caught with alcohol is punished. Most go to jail, although in 1978 a furor erupted when two British nationals were publicly flogged in Riyadh for selling sedeeqi.

Escaping a jail term often depends on the political clout of the detainee's Saudi sponsor. The more politically important a Westerner's sponsor is, the easier and faster it is to get him out of trouble, if the sponsor chooses to do so. Some Western companies maintain contracts with important princes who use their influence to have culprits guilty of minor offenses deported rather than imprisoned. But nothing is done for people like the employee at the Military Hospital in Riyadh, where a raid uncovered six thousand bottles of liquor stashed in his small dormitory room.

* Westerners insensitive to the mores of the society and the ever-increasing number of Saudis who speak English sport T-shirts that say "Sid-eeqi is my friend."

As the House of Saud has come under increasing internal and external religious pressure, the leniency of Saudi authorities toward home distilleries has waned. Companies like ARAMCO are integrating their formerly all-Western housing compounds with Saudis and other Moslems, making it difficult for company officials to choose to remain ignorant of illicit alcohol. If Moslem residents call in the local police, who themselves often prefer to be left out of issues involving minor violations of the alcohol laws by expatriates, employers will usually not intervene. The new atmosphere is forcing Westerners to pour their homemade alcohol down the drain when rumors spread of an impending raid by authorities, for there are few remaining protections from jail.

A Westerner's legal problems seldom arise from the failure to be warned about the seriousness of breaking Saudi law. Western embassies post notices throughout the country describing the severe penalties for offenses related to drugs and alcohol and for financial malfeasance. Large companies hold orientation sessions that stress the differences between Saudi law and the laws of their own countries. Most listen, many do not. Americans particularly have difficulty in accepting the fact that the U.S. government has no jurisdiction in Saudi Arabia. There is some illusion that the American eagle will spread its protective wings over its citizens foolish enough to flout Saudi law. As one weary' ARAMCO official stated, "We try to prepare them but many don't take our counsel to heart."*

Conditions in the jails of Saudi Arabia vary. Only the rare facility is heated in winter or cooled in summer, and all serve as a haven for Saudi Arabia's enormous fly population. In the urban jails, a brief stay is usually spent in a massive cell with as many as five hundred men, who share the one toilet that dominates the center of the room. One complained that his cell was so overcrowded that for four days he was unable to find space to lie down. Those who are held for weeks or months awaiting trial are most often provided clean, if spartan, accommodations and adequate food but nothing else. ** Clothing, toiletries, and reading material are furnished by the prisoner's family or friends.

* Quoted in Judith Miller. "Americana in Saudi Prisons Say They Are Being Abused," New York Times. October 17, 1983.

**women are housed in separate, less austere quarters. The female jail population is quite small compared to that of males and is predominantly composed of Africans and Asians. The most startling aspect of women's jails is that the inmates bring their children with them.

Jails in the smaller communities are primitive and the treatment of prisoners often harsh. But everywhere prisoners are treated as a serious threat to the social order. Westerners being moved anywhere outside of their places of incarceration are handcuffed and clamped into irons. A prisoner at Diriyah who was paralyzed and desperately ill from urinary problems was put in leg irons and chained to his hospital bed.

Curious to find out what it is like to be locked in a Saudi jail, I posed as a visitor to an incarcerated Westerner and went behind the forbidding walls of Riyadh's Malaaz jail.

When I entered the small, cramped visitors' room, it was dark except for the thin shafts of strong sunlight that forced their way in through the narrow ventilation spaces near the roof. The room, enclosed by thick mud walls and a single metal gate, was not much larger than ten feet by ten feet and smelled damp. The prisoners, an assortment of Westerners in khakis and sport shirts, sat huddled together on the dirt floor, which was partially covered with cheap, grimy rugs. After introducing myself to the men, I sat down on the hard-packed dirt, which was strangely wet and cool. Conversation moved around the circle clustered about me, as each man recounted for perhaps the hundredth time the circumstances of his running afoul of Saudi law. They were typical stories. There was the overweight Eugene, who claimed he had been in jail for four months awaiting a decision on whether or not the over-the-counter diet pills he had purchased in the United States and which were discovered in his luggage by customs officials constituted a drug offense. Wayne was there because customs officers had found a marijuana cigarette in his coat pocket, placed there "as a joke by my friends at my farewell party in the States." Neal was only nineteen, a construction worker. On his first trip into Saudi Arabia, he had tried to smuggle in a "commercial quantity" of marijuana and had been caught. Walter, a slight, middle-aged man, fidgeted nervously and whined about his arrest for selling sedeeqi. The common denominator among the men was that they were scared. Except for one brief contact with an embassy official, who could do little but acknowledge their plight, they were alone, lost in an alien legal system.

Eugene and Wayne were eventually freed and deported, but Neal and Walter went to trial and were sentenced to terms in prison. Several months later I went to see how they were faring.

The al-Hair prison stands alone on the rocky landscape southwest of Riyadh, its walls rising starkly out of the desolate waste of the desert.

It was Thursday, visiting day for women. I stood with the other female visitors who hugged the prison wall, trying to capture the shrinking shade. Every major population group in Saudi Arabia was represented. Arab women clutched the hands of small children. Westerners carried grocery sacks filled with magazines and paperback books. And Asians stood by passively, delicately holding small baskets of fruit. Eventually two benign-looking Saudi guards appeared at the high narrow desk just outside the gate that served as a check post. After they examined our sacks and purses, we were allowed to pass through the gate into a large bare area that stood between the walls and the barracks where the prisoners were housed. Rounding the first building, I saw the inmates standing in a long, tall covered cage set in a concrete slab, strikingly similar to the cages in a zoo. Unlike in Malaaz, where I sat down with the prisoners, I stood outside the cage in the broiling sun while the men clung to the metal bars.

The prisoners whom I interviewed had surprisingly few complaints except boredom and uncertainty about when they would be released. Most were somewhat philosophical about their plight. Neal, the young drug smuggler I had first met in the Malaaz jail, had adjusted to prison life. Deeply chastened by the experience, he spoke of going home someday and putting his life in order. Walter, the bootlegger, was there too. Badgering me for everything from extra clothes to intervention with the American embassy, he said he was not sure he could last through his year-long sentence. With the exception of Walter, the prisoners generally agreed that they were treated reasonably well. Except for being confined in an alien culture, most said they would rather be in prison in Saudi Arabia than in the United States because of the absence of what they termed "hardened criminals."

Yet the charges of physical and psychological abuse that are lodged against Saudi Arabia's prison system by Western governments are too often true. Torture of prisoners is not permitted or condoned by official government policy. But as in so many other areas of the kingdom's day-to-day functioning, there are few people in positions of authority and those who do have authority are routinely absent from work. A prison guard can cane prisoners on the soles of their bare feet for weeks before the line of command can grind into action to order it stopped or to punish the guard.

On the whole, psychological abuse is greater than physical abuse and comes from many sources. It arises primarily from the culture gap between the Westerners and their Saudi guards. A guard can make life miserable not because he is inherently mean but because he will harass prisoners to kowtow to his authority or fail to understand that prisoners want their mail when it arrives, not two weeks later. Even more stressful are the structural weaknesses of the whole administrative system that begins with a foreigner's arrest. The process of sorting out those who should stand trial and those who are unfortunate victims of circumstances is interminable. Prisoners live with a sense of being totally abandoned and powerless. One of the major complaints of Western embassies about the treatment of prisoners is the lack of access to their nationals. Just trying to find out where a foreigner is being held and getting in to see him is difficult. There is no centralized system that lists a prisoner's name, where he is being held, or what the charges against him are. Overzealous officials in the local jails make arbitrary decisions about who can be seen or who can receive mail or reading materials. Not surprisingly, it is the language barrier, for which the Saudis are not responsible, that can create perhaps the most severe form of psychological stress. A prisoner can spend weeks in a detention facility with dozens of men, none of whom speaks his language. Several years ago, a Korean hanged himself after being incarcerated for over a year in a jail where he was unable to speak to another soul.

Among the lawyers, representatives of foreign governments, and inmates whom I interviewed, there is a nearly unanimous opinion that inmates in the Saudi prison system are victims more of poor administration and bureaucratic red tape than of a deliberate government policy that orders the physical and mental torture of prisoners. But the reasons for poor treatment and long delays in the legal process are of little comfort to those caught in the system. Even so, there are those rare foreigners in Saudi jails and prisons who acknowledge they broke the law and willingly pay the price. The most interesting inmate I met during my rounds of Saudi jails and prisons was Jimmy, a Dutch citizen of Indonesian descent who had been a big-time bootlegger in Dhahran. An infectious smile lighted up his face when he frankly admitted that he and his wife recognized the risks in breaking the law and had made the decision to net all the money they could before they were caught and then to pay the consequences. They were eventually arrested. She was deported and he was sent to prison. When I talked to him, he was within a few weeks of completing a three-year sentence in the al-Hair. As Jimmy awaited release, his wife was preparing for his homecoming to the couple's palatial home in the Hague, which they had purchased with their earnings from their bootlegging empire. The Saudis have little patience with foreigners who violate their laws. While still comfortably low, Saudi Arabia's crime rate has risen noticeably since the oil boom began and the fault is laid on the foreigners Officials single out the foreign work force for certain types of crime, foremost among which is "bribery as well as bouncing checks and crookeries." * Like people everywhere, the Saudis are concerned about crime. But in addition, their society, firmly anchored in fundamental Islam, is one of the most rigorous law-and-order societies in the world. Among the antagonisms that have arisen between the Saudis and the Westerners is the conflict between the enforcement of Saudi law and the interests of Western governments in protecting their nationals. The Western press periodically exposes the predicament of Westerners in Saudi jails, prompting their embassies to increase their pressure on the Saudi government. The House of Saud then becomes nervous, fearing the issue will create a negative image of Saudi Arabia in the West, at the least, and affecting arms purchases from the West, at the worst. Therefore, the government periodically releases its Western prisoners. The February 1985 state visit of King Fahd to Washing ton provided an excuse to release Americans being held in Saudi jails. The move did not go unnoticed in Saudi Arabia. To the Saudis, the granting of amnesty was yet another indication that the House of Saud is willing to sacrifice the principles of its own people to preserve the kingdom's relationship with the West.

Confused and frustrated by the centuries-old legal code, Western business learned to accommodate during the oil boom. The contracts were lucrative enough and the threats to profits small enough to soothe the troubled waters. Then in 1982, when the oil glut coincided with the completion of major construction projects, the inadequacies of sharia law, from a Western viewpoint, surfaced. The issue was creditor rights. The Saudis chose not to pay their bills on time and the foreign contractors were left with no legal recourse. Since that time, increased pressures to modernize the legal system have come from the Western legal force working in Saudi Arabia as well as major Western financial institutions. The House of Saud can fend off these attacks from the West; its major problems are within the kingdom itself. Domestic business suffers as much as foreign business from the vagueness of the law. The increasing scope of government requires that regulations concerning everything from social security to berthing rights in the ports carries the force of law. Both the Saudi leadership and the new Western-educated middle class recognize that the sharia is inadequate for the kingdom's present stage of development. What is lacking is the political will to move the legal system off dead center.

* Saudi Gazette, November 1, 1983.

The fundamental problem of forcing an overhaul of an ancient code of laws is made even more difficult by the political needs of the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is locked into a political system that originally drew its authority from its defense of the Wahhabis' rigid teachings. The protection of the sharia as it now stands is a means by which the House of Saud continues to defend and justify its existence. Political parties and even petitions are banned on religious grounds. Labor unrest, such as the strikes of ARAMCO oil-field workers in 1953 and 1956, is squelched by citing the divisiveness that Mohammed forbid. With only the sharia's rudimentary laws on land tenure based on tribal grazing rights, land without clear title becomes royal property and is distributed to favored people to sell. To call the sharia into question is to call everything else about the al-Sauds' own particular form of the accuracy into question. The privileged position of the royal family be comes even more threatened when the new middle class voices its demands for constitutional government guaranteeing the rights of citizens.

It is not that the House of Saud is not cognizant of the resistance to its authority, especially coming from the educated classes. Ever since the 1950's, each time the regime has faced a serious challenge at home or abroad, it has promised to institute some form of constitutional government. It happened in 1958 in the succession struggle between Saud and Faisal; in 1962 during the Yemen war; in 1970 after a military coup d'etat failed; in 1975 after Faisal's assassination; in 1979 following the incident at Mecca's Grand Mosque; and in 1982 after King Khalid's death. And each time the promise is ignored as soon as the immediate crisis passes. "The fact that various Saudi leaders have felt it necessary to make those promises shows the extent of their aware ness of an unsatisfied demand that needs to be appeased. The fact that those who made the promises have been unwilling or unable to deliver on them betrays an ingrained opposition within the regime's power center that paralyzes its capacity for political adaptation." *

* Nadav Safran, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University press, 1985), p.227.