Whether the Saudis publicly recognize it as such, the level of intolerance demonstrated by the Wahhabis is vastly greater than that found in other sects of Islam. Historically, the Wahhabis isolated themselves in their perceived purity. They rejected foreign ideas and foreigners themselves to such an extent that to travel the Nejd in the nineteenth century was to invite death at the hands of religious fanatics. So enraged were the people when Gertrnde Bell, the intrepid British Arabist, arrived in Hail in 1913 that she was allowed to leave unharmed only by the grace of being a woman. As late as the 1940s, the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger was forced to skirt the territories claimed by especially zealous tribes of the Hadramaut, who would kill any infidel who broached their boundaries. In the early 1950s, the increasing numbers of Westerners brought in to develop the oil industry were confined in their own town in the Eastern Province to keep them out of sight in order to protect Abdul Aziz from the wrath of the pious. Yet the Saudis do not see this as intolerance. Dr. Mujahid al-Sawwa, an Oxford-educated former professor of Islamic law and comparative religion, speaks for those in the kingdom who regard themselves as enlightened: "Islam believes in religious tolerance. You just have to practice your religion in private." *

The inability of not just the Saudis but all Moslems to accept other religious groups has always puzzled Westerners. There is a school of thought among Western experts on Islam that postulates that there is a great binary division between Islam and the West that is impossible to broach. According to the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss,

[Islam] is based not so much on revealed truth as on an inability to establish links with the outside world. . . . [Moslems are] incapable of tolerating the existence of others as others. The only means they have of protecting themselves against doubt and humiliation is the "negativization" of others, considered as witnesses to a different faith and a different way of life. . . The truth is that contact with non-Moslems distresses Moslems.**

For those of us who lived with the Saudis, their particular hostility to other religious groups seems to express a great fear that somehow the beliefs and the legalisms of Wahabbism will not stand up to examination by or exposure to other ideas. In reality, religious intolerance is another form of the Saudis' all-consuming need to preserve their honor and their traditions.

While in some respects a revolutionary, Mohammed largely re flected the pure Arab culture of the Arabian Peninsula. Few of his mles and practices have changed significantly since his time. Saudi Arabia's religious tyrants claim nothing has changed, and furthermore they are determined to see that whatever accommodations Saudi Arabia makes to modernization do not undercut the tenets of their very existence. Much of the history of Saudi Arabia since 1974 involves the House of Saud's attempts to force Westerners to conform to the Saudis' religious dictates and, at the same time, to make some politically acceptable concessions to its Western work force's own religious needs in order to recruit and hold its technical expertise.

*Atlanta Constitution, May 25, 1985.

** Quoted in Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University hess, 1981), p. i6.

The religious issue is greatly complicated by the House of Saud's own agenda for modernization, which in itself is in conflict with the royal family's long-time political needs. The House of Saud was built on religion and sustained by political stability. The peace Abdul Aziz brought between the warring tribes contributed to the interests of those outside Wahabbism and added their acquiescence to the kingdom of the al-Sauds. But the devoutly religious were the core of the House of Saud's support. How far the leadership could stray from Wahhabi doc trine has never been seriously tested. Through the reign of King Faisal, the innovations that were introduced into the society were tenuous until the leadership felt secure in their acceptance, or at least toleration. As the House of Saud became swept up in the oil boom, the constraints of religion began to seriously clash with the goals of modernization. Fearful of revolt, a fear justified by the religious uprising in Mecca in late 1979, the House of Saud probed at the religious issue but never directly challenged it.

How to address the religious bigotry of the Saudis while catering to the religious demands of the Westerners constitutes a whole chapter in the annals of the oil boom. It is only one of the many ongoing conflicts between tradition and progress that continue to grip the kingdom. The religious question represents the broader struggle of Saudi Arabia to come to terms with the twentieth century, a century in which God's special providence pumped from beneath the sands of its desert no longer permits the Saudis to remain isolated in their own intolerance.

As Islam orders the life of the Saudis, Islam impinges on basic as pects of the foreigner's life. Religion regulated our days. It governed what we ate. It controlled our behavior. It determined, to a large ex tent, our recreational activities. Those who could not or would not adjust went home.

The panoply of prohibitions on non-Moslems at times causes serious and expensive problems for foreign contractors. Bell Canada, responsible for the kingdom's telephone system, maintains offices in both holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Since the cities are barred to Christians and other non-Moslems, the company is plagued with the problem of trying to match an employee's skills with his religion to keep the in-town offices functioning. Since it is seldom able to keep them fully staffed with Moslems, auxiliary offices and housing compounds for non-Moslem employees are maintained on the outskirts of the cities. These people live in a type of exile, for they cannot enter either city. To shop for food, the women living near Mecca take a bus to Jeddah, an hour away, several times a week. For the employees in Medina, more than 3oo miles from the nearest accessible large town, the company maintains a general store and operates a grueling once-a- week shopping excursion to Jeddah.

The Westerner who succeeds in enjoying life in Saudia Arabia under the conditions imposed by the Wahhabis does so by honing a keen sense of humor. For me, life was a quest for any situation that, no matter how frustrating or infuriating, might enter the annals of oil- boom comedy. Among the classic tales circulating among the expatriates was the story about the first modern hotel built in Mecca. The structure was designed by a Western architectural firm, but when building actually began, the Saudis, it is said, refused to allow the supervising architect into the city. Instead they insisted that he stand on a hill outside of town and direct the work through a telescope. And then there was the word play involving the Saudi weekend. Since the Moslem day of rest is Friday, the weekend is Thursday and Friday. On Wednesday afternoon the Westerners gather to celebrate "TAIW" - "Thank Allah It's Wednesday." But few instances of life in the Moslem theocracy gave me as much pleasure as the tug of war over "near beer." Of all the stories that I was sending out of Saudi Arabia at the time, the roller coaster fortunes of imitation beer was my favorite.

Saudi Arabia's prohibition on alcohol includes wine, cider, and beer as well as hair tonic, ordinary rubbing alcohol, alcohol-based insect repellent, and medications containing alcohol. When large numbers of German workers began to arrive in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s, the Saudis faced yet another problem of bringing Islam and modernization into some kind of equilibrium. The ban on beer severely hindered the recruiting efforts of German companies and threatened to hobble some of the Saudis' favorite construction companies. To placate the Ger mans while at the same time protecting the Islamic purity of the kingdom, enterprising beer companies, who had been eager to break into the rich Saudi economy, came up with the idea of near beer. The non alcoholic brew approximated the taste if not the kick of beer. During the spring and early summer of 1979, Schlitz staged a massive ad campaign aimed at the expatriate market, claiming that the taste of beer could now be purchased in the kingdom. Large, colorfully painted delivery trucks, precious in this period of shortages, were put on the road. The supermarkets that catered to Western tastes cleared their shelves to receive shipments. With everything in place, Schlitz, along with the Swiss brewer Moussy, sat back waiting to rake in their profits. As predicted, cash registers happily rang as the expatriates lined up to buy.

In August the religious authorities struck back. Under pressure from the Wahhabi fundamentalists, the government banned nonalcoholic beers, "wines" (fruit juice in a fancy foil-wrapped bottle) and "champagnes" (carbonated grape juice). The reason: consumers might imagine intoxication precipitated by a taste reminiscent of alcohol. Perhaps it was more than reminiscent. Some, primarily manual laborers, were lacing their pseudo-beer with cologne, the only product containing significant amounts of alcohol that was sold in the country. Consequently, the jail population markedly rose on weekends, and by Saturday empty lots in the major cities were strewn with an exotic array of empty beer and cologne bottles.

All distribution ceased and the shelves of the supermarkets were stripped of beer. But then the back-pedaling began. The Saudi merchants, partners in the companies distributing and selling the beer, were unwilling to sit still while something as lucrative as the beer trade was taken from them. The elaborate network of family and tribal connections went into action, taking the entrepreneurs' complaints directly to the king. Within two weeks of the ban, the government announced that merchants would be allowed to sell their current stocks and then near beer was to disappear. Well, it did, for a while. As a result of the mysterious back room sparring matches that are always going on between the government, the merchants, and the religious authorities, near beer was kept under wraps for about a year and then slowly began to reappear in supermarkets. By now the incident is long forgotten, and the Germans continue to drink their near beer and build their buildings, the merchants go on ringing up their sales, and the religious authorities enjoy whatever tradeoff they received from withdrawing their objection to look-alike beer.

As entertaining as the episode was for the expatriates, it was yet another serious dilemma for the House of Saud, which often finds itself hostage to the intolerance of the Wahhabis. This intolerance of all things beyond their own strictly defined bounds of Islam has made even something as esoteric as archaeology a point of serious strife between the progressives in the government and the religious establishment. Archaeologists are stymied in their attempts to excavate the almost untapped treasure trove of ancient sites in Saudi Arabia by the refusal of the powerful religious leaders to allow any attention to be focused on the jahiliyah, the "ignorant days" before the revelations of Islam. As late as 1969, the government maintained a total ban on all excavations of the pre-Islamic era, a concession some claim was made in return for the religious leaders' acquiescence to economic modernization. Then in 1973, a young Western-trained archaeologist named Abdullah H. Masry was appointed director of Antiquities and Museums by King Faisal. By patience, endurance, and consummate political skill, Masry has done a remarkable job of restoring at least some of the Saudis' pre-Islamic past. He persuaded the government to pour millions of dollars into the exploration of hundreds of archaeological sites in an effort to unearth and preserve relics of the past. He established a small but expertly done museum on one of Riyadh's main thoroughfares and has overseen the construction of others around the kingdom. Masry continues to succeed largely because he ties his archaeology projects back into religion and the distrust of infidels. One of Masry's archaeology students at the University of Riyadh summed up the philosophy when he said, "The Koran has many references to the ancient cultures. We must study this history to see how they lived. European archaeologists have given the wrong impression of our people. We want to make a correction. We want to write our own history by ourselves." *

The archaeologists in Saudi Arabia have been successful in getting money and recognition because their work tends to counter the Saudis' image in the West as a tribe of ultra rich Bedouins with no cultural roots. But because of the deep political dispute between Israel and the Arabs, impossible obstacles remain to archaeological research that might turn up evidence of a long-ago Jewish presence in Saudi Arabia. A British archaeologist working on the eleventh century A.D. Nabatean ruins at Madain Saleh for Saudi Arabia's Department of Antiquities told me that Saudi Arabia has the last major unexplored sites of Biblical-era archaeology. Unfortunately, among the few artifacts unearthed are inscriptions in what appears to be ancient Hebrew. Since it is politically vital both domestically and within the Arab world for Saudi Arabia to distance itself as much as possible from Israel and the Jews, everything remains buried. Unable to bury the Jews, the Saudis simply refuse to allow them in the country.

* Robert Reinhold, 'Uncovering Arabia's Past," New York Times Magazine, August 23, 1981,

Islam, meaning "submission to the will of God," * followed Judaism and Christianity as the last of the three great monotheistic religions. At the very core of Islam is the concept of Allah, the one great God, the same God of Jews and Christians. The belief in the oneness of God dominates the theology of Islam, for Mohammed's great message was the direct relationship between God and man. In Islam, unlike Judaism and Christianity, there are no synagogues or churches, only places to pray. There is no priesthood. There are no sacraments. In orthodox Islam, there is no central doctrinal authority, for no man or institution stands between the believer and God.

Mohammed had a limited knowledge of the scriptures of both the Jews and the Christians and incorporated parts of them, modified to fit the Arabs' own culture, into Islam. From the very beginning of his revelations, Mohammed saw Islam as the culmination of both the teachings of Christ and the beliefs of Judaism, which in the end would supplement both. Jesus is recognized as a prophet in Islam. Certain commandments about charity and love of fellow believers have their roots in Christian theology. Mohammed's descriptions of paradise as the reward of the believer parallel the Christian heaven. But it was from Judaism that many of Mohammed's basic tenets came. Midday prayers, facing Jerusalem to pray, fast days, and Friday Sabbath were all Jewish in origin. Mohammed took the concepts and changed the rituals. Moslems pray five times a day including midday, face Mecca rather than Jerusalem, observe a whole month of fasting rather than one day, and begin the Sabbath at midday on Friday rather than sun down. Even Jerusalem remained critically important in Islamic theology. According to Islamic belief, Mohammed was transported in a vision from Mecca to Jerusalem. There a winged horse stood atop the remaining wall of King Solomon's temple to bear Mohammad to heaven before returning him to his bed in Mecca. On the site of his ascent now stands the al-Aqsa mosque, the third holy site in Islam, while in its shadow the Jews of the world come to pray at the Wailing Wall, the same wall on which Mohammed's horse stood.

* A Moslem is one who submits.

Even the Kaaba is tied directly to Jewish tradition The existing Kaaba is believed to be the tenth such structure on the spot. Again according to doctrine, the first was built by the angels at the dawn of Earth. The second was constructed by Adam, father of man; the third by Adam's son Seth; and the fourth by Abraham (the father of all Moslems) and his son Ishmael. The present Kaaba is believed to have been built by the followers of Mohammed in A. D. 696.

Identical to its predecessors, the crude stone structure is forty feet long, thirty-five feet wide, and approximately fifty feet high. Imbedded in the exterior southeast corner, five feet from the ground, is the sacred Black Stone, the only specific object of veneration at the Kaaba. Seven inches in diameter, mounted in a silver frame, the Black Stone is presumed to have been part of the Kaaba since the time of Abraham. Among the theories about its origins is that it is a meteorite sent down from heaven at the time of Abraham. Regardless of its source, it has come to symbolize God's promise to the Moslems.

Jews, Christians, and Moslems all recognize the Abraham story in Genesis. Abraham through his faithfulness to the one God is the symbol in all three monotheistic religions of the perfect oneness between the heart of God and the heart of man. It is in God's promise to Abra ham's descendants where Jews and Moslems differ.

Abraham's wife Sarah had no children. In old age, she gave her Egyptian maid Hagar to Abraham as a wife. When Hagar conceived a child, Sarah in a fit of jealous rage sent her into the desert. God dis patched an angel to Hagar while she was in the wilderness, who told her to return to Abraham, where she would be delivered of a son. Ishmael was born to Hagar and Abraham when the patriarch was eighty- six years old.

Thirteen years later, God again came to Abraham. Sarah, many years past child-bearing age, would birth a son who would be called Isaac. God promised Isaac would become the father of nations and that Ishmael would beget twelve princes and also establish a great nation. Isaac remained with his father in the Hebrew nation. In Moslem tradition, Sarah forced Ishmael and his mother to once again leave Abraham's household to wander in the wilderness near the present city of Mecca. When they were near death, God led them to the waters of the Zamzam well. Thus saved, Ishmael became the father of the Arab nation.

The very seeds of the Arab-Israeli dispute that has raged in the Mid dle East for much of this century lie in the Abraham story. To the Moslems, God's covenant is with their ancestor, Ishmael. To the Jews, God's covenant is with their ancestor, Isaac.

Yet the Moslems' conflicts with the Jews always have had more political than theological overtones and date to the earliest days of Islam. The Prophet exiled to Medina by his struggles with the Quraish, the tribe that dominated Meccan commerce and controlled the lucrative traffic in pilgrimages to the Kaaba, appealed to the Jews to support him. The Jews were willing to forge a political alliance but refused to accept an Arab as a prophet. Mohammed, furious at his rejection, increasingly saw Islam less as an extension of Judaism and more as an "Arabized" creed, rising out of Arab culture and tradition.

Despite Mohammed's rejection by the Jews, Jews are still recognized as "people of the book," loosely meaning monotheists. The current hostilities between Jews and Moslems stem from the creation of Israel in 1948 and its territorial expansion in 1967. Saudi Arabia, like the other Arab states, has never recognized the loss of Arab land to the Jewish state. To the Arabs, Israel is a threatening pawn of Western imperialism sitting on sacred Arab land. To keep its credentials high with its Arab brothers, Saudi Arabia does its share of verbal posturing on the part of the Palestinians. Maps in Saudi Arabia designate Israel as Palestine. Jerusalem is al-Quds. And the al-Aqsa mosque is the recipient of abundant pledges to wrest it from the grasp of Israel by jihad, or holy war.

Since it is politically vital both domestically and within the Arab world for Saudi Arabia to distance itself as much as possible from Israel, all Jews and any Christian whose passport bears an Israeli visa are banned from the kingdom. That is, unless a Saudi high enough in the government or with the right connections wants a particular person for a particular job; then arrangements, as always, can be made. The few Jews that I came across working in the kingdom were almost al ways there on short-term assignments. All observed an oath of silence about both their religion and ethnic group. I met several other people who I thought might be Jews, but according to the expatriates' code of honor I never asked.

Politics aside, Judaism, in one important aspect, is held in higher esteem than Christianity by the Saudis. Unlike Judaism and Islam, Christianity smacks of polytheism because of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. The whole central theme of Islam is the oneness of God. The prayer call declares that "God is great, God is great. I testify that there is no god but God." Obviously, in such a doctrine, there is no room for a savior, both all-human and all-divine, or for some ephemeral concept of a holy spirit dwelling in the trees, the sky, and the human heart.

In the days of innocence, when the few Westerners in Saudi Arabia were clustered in the ARAMCO compounds in the Eastern Province, the issue of the religious rights of foreigners was handled by confining the heretics and denying them any visible organized religious activity. It was a manageable problem until the boom decade scattered more and more Christian families across the kingdom. Many sought a Christian community, especially at Christmas time.

Christmas was always the most difficult time of the year for Western expatriates. Even for those of us who thrived on life in the kingdom, Christmas brought the dull, painful ache of homesickness. To make things worse, until the 1980s, expatriates were forbidden any kind of Christmas ornaments to moderate our loneliness. It was not only the religious symbols of Christmas that were banned but the nonreligious trappings, such as colored lights, tinsel, and Santa Claus. So stringent were the rules about Christmas decorations that in 1978 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers issued the following bulletin for its employees:

CHRISTMAS DECORATIONS: All employees are reminded that Christmas decorations may not be placed on the outside of any building, nor may they be placed inside a building in such a manner that they can be seen from outside. In this matter, as in many, cultural discretion and common sense must take precedence over personal desires.

I will never forget our first Christmas in Saudi Arabia. The temperature was 85 degrees and the mosque down the street had just installed a new loudspeaker so the prayer call was coming in especially loud. The few presents around our "Christmas tree" (desert weeds stuck in a pail of sand) were wrapped in an assortment of grocery bags colored with crayons and some aluminum insulation from an air-conditioning duct. On Christmas eve, Cohn hung his Christmas stocking from the evaporative cooler. Christmas day itself was dreadful. There was no contact with our families at home. The few international tele phone lines out of Saudi Arabia at the time had been inundated for two weeks by Westerners calling home. We all worked that day because it was a normal day in Moslem Saudi Arabia. As the sun went down, Westerners gathered for Christmas dinner. The group we joined happened to be largely Canadian. The same food we ate on a daily basis was made festive by a little extra seasoning and the addition of some dates or oranges for decoration. There were no turkeys available in the kingdom, but someone with connections at the Army Corps of Engineers arrived bearing a ham, which to us was as precious as frankincense or myrrh. As we ate and traded stories of Christmases past, an x-ray technician triumphantly appeared with an electronic keyboard and launched us into song writing. What emerged was a new rendition of "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas." It went something like this:

"I'm dreaming of a bleak Christmas, with every prayer call I hear. Where the date palms bristle, above deseit thistle, and sheep bleat, in the hcat." Bad as it was, we thought it was enormously funny at the time. Flushed with success, we went on to rewrite " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas" with the reindeer becoming camels named Abdul lah, Hamid, Nazer, Hisham, Said, Hassan, Bandar, and Muhsin.

Despite the restrictions surrounding Christmas celebrations, the for- tunes of the Christians actually had improved by the time I arrived in Saudi Arabia. It had taken a former governor from the heart of the Southern Bible Belt of the United States to win some concessions for the Christians from the Saudi government. John West, ex-governor of South Carolina, was appointed U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 1977 by the newly elected Jimmy Carter. To say West was an un known quantity when he arrived in Saudi Arabia is an understatement. The professional diplomats were horrified that Saudi Arabia's major ally was forcing a back-slapping, hand-pressing Southern politician on the austere Saudis. Despite the predictions of disaster, the jovial West, seasoned by years on the campaign trail, applied just the right amount of graciousness and diffidence to charm his hosts. Accustomed to religious politics in his home state, West was less hesitant than his predecessors had been to approach the Saudis about the plight of the Christians in the kingdom. Using his access to King Khalid to speak on behalf of the Christians, West is said to have told the king that Americans had great respect for Islam and he was sure that the king, in turn, had respect for Christianity. Furthermore, because the Saudis were such religious people, he knew that they wanted to attract morally upright people to their labor force and that this was greatly hindered by the government's ban on religious activity for non-Moslems. To his credit, King Khalid, exhibiting a great deal of courage in risking the rage of the religious zealots, agreed to allow a loose, clandestine or ganization of Christians to function in the kingdom. The rules were strict and the government warned that any deviation would result in withdrawal of the privilege.

The ground rules were: there could be no public organization that even faintly resembled a church; there could be no publicity connected with any religious function; there could be no proselytizing among either Moslems or non-Moslems; the availability of Christian religious groups could not be used in recruiting Western labor, nor could new employees be informed of the existence of Christian worship by an employer. In return, the Christians could meet as long as the purpose of their meetings did not become known to the Saudi population. The Christians were permitted to bring in ministers for the major cities of Riyadh, Jeddah, and Dhahran. For the political purposes of the House of Saud, the visa for the Protestant minister in Riyadh listed him as an employee of Lockheed, and the Catholic priest was officially a social worker with the British consulate. The ministers and priests in the three major cities were circuit riders for Christians living on outlying construction sites. Rather than using horses, though, they used air planes provided by private companies.

By 1978 the Christian community was in full swing, or at least as active as it could be under the rules. I had been in Saudi Arabia for several weeks before word filtered through about when and where the Christians met. In Riyadh the Protestants were housed in a combination basketball court and movie theater for U.S. military personnel training the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), located not far from the King Faisal hospital. The Catholics held mass in the British diplomatic facilities. "Keep a low profile" was the watchword. Since the SANG compound in Riyadh was on a main thoroughfare in sight of a large mosque, we had to park on side streets and come in the back gates so the religious authorities would not become unduly curious about the presence of a large number of cars. Photocopied maps giving directions to the services carried no heading and were passed between interested parties like state secrets passing between spies. Church bulletins handed out at the door were collected following the service to be burned. When an attempt was made to compile a directory of partici pants, many refused to have their names listed for fear of reprisals if the list got into the hands of the Saudis

The Christian community in Saudi Arabia may well have reached its zenith at Christmas of 1978. In January 1979, the shah of Iran went into exile and the fortunes of the Christians in Saudi Arabia fell with him. Fear of repercussions from the "Islamic revival" touched off by Khomeini's victory haunted the House of Saud. As fear of the Shiites escalated so did fear of the Christians. The House of Saud increasingly came to see any religious activity other than that of the Moslems as political subversion. Modifying the comfortable understanding that the Christians had with Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh, the Ministry of the Interior moved in to supervise the Christians.

The problems of the Christians were not entirely a result of the Islamic revolution in Iran. The Christians, knowingly and unknowingly, brought on some of their problems themselves. On the Easter Sunday following Khomeini's triumph in Iran, the Catholics in Riyadh held a sunrise communion service behind the concrete wall of a Corps of Engineers facility off of Pepsi Road. They assumed they were hidden and, therefore, safe. But what the priest failed to anticipate was the Saudi in an adjoining two-story house who, upon rising for morning prayers, was greeted at his bedroom window by the Eucharist. It did not take long for the news of this affront to Islam to reach the religious authorities, who went directly to the king.

Shortly, the first ruling against the Christians in Riyadh came down. Permission for the Christian Fellowship to meet was suspended. To circumvent the ruling, the congregation broke up into small groups, which secretly met in people's homes presided over by laymen. To keep the authorities confused, we met at a different villa or compound every week. Appropriately called "the Catacombs," these clandestine gatherings ended after a few months when we were allowed to resume activities as a united congregation at the Lockheed compound on the outskirts of Riyadh until more problems developed.

By Christmas of 1979, six weeks after religious opponents of the royal family took over the Grand Mosque at Mecca, the Christians were once against caught in the crossfire of religious politics in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, Lockheed withdrew the use of its compound. Al though never confirmed or denied, rumor was that an official in the Ministry of Defense and Aviation had threatened Lockheed with the loss of its contracts if Christian church services continued to be held on company premises. The fellowships in both Dhahran and Jeddah, previously immune from the problems the Riyadh group faced, began to confront similar restrictions. The clergymen were allowed to stay in the kingdom, but for the congregation it was back to the Catacombs. That is where we remained until I left Saudi Arabia in the late spring of 1980.

The unpredictable relationship between the Christians and the government of Saudi Arabia, intimidated by its own religious right, was a tug of war. Rules were laid down. The Christians accepted the restraints and then often breached them, either through overconfidence or error. But more often, government policy zigged and zagged through the minefield of the House of Saud's own political agenda. The erratic nature of the government's attitude toward the Christians appeared to be the height of hypocrisy to the Westerners. For the House of Saud, it was another exercise in balancing the demands of religion against the goals of modernization. It was a game that the House of Saud played well. Historically, the royal family has maintained the support of the Moslem fundamentalists by staunchly defending Saudi Arabia's traditional values and placating the religious establishment with grants and favors while gradually pushing the country in the direction of modernization. The technique that has been used time and time again when government policy and religious dictates clash is to initially accede to the demands of the religious power structure and then either divert attention to some other issue or cause the religious leaders to lose something they want.

The classic example of this process in operation was Abdul Aziz's tobacco tax. When Abdul Aziz took Mecca in 1924, the Wahhabis demanded that he banish tobacco sales, a major source of revenue for the merchants and, therefore, a source of taxes for the king. He did as the ulema * demanded. But the following year when the religious lead ers appeared for their annual stipends, Abdul Aziz informed them that since the tobacco tax was no longer coming into his coffers he could no longer pay them their allowances. As if by magic, tobacco appeared once more in the markets. In the case of the Christians, the on-again off-again status of their right of religious expression was a practical way for the House of Saud both to cater to the religious establishment and to avoid social conflict with Saudi Arabia's vital Western work force. It was the House of Saud's own unique way of insuring that modernization continued, while at the same time protecting the traditional values of its people and its own political survival.

* The ulema is the hierarchy of the religious establishment. Made up of the most noted and respected religious scholars in Saudi Arabia, the ulema regulates religious matters and issues rulings on legal questions. The power and symbolism of the ulema is such that the king holds highly publicized meetings with the group on a weekly basis.

In spite of the efforts of the rulers, the breakneck pace of moderni zation after centuries of rigid adherence to the traditions of the Wah habi sect of Islam was fraying the Saudi social fabric. During the 1970s, the House of Saud was sending young Saudi men to the West to study everything from business administration to physics. Grand schemes for economic development were coming out of the government planning bureaus. Upper- and middle-class Saudis traveled around the world. Any prospect of a bitter fallout from Saudi Arabia's bold moves to embrace the material benefits of the outside world was little imagined. It was all still too new and exciting. The small signs of disillusionment that were appearing were overwhelmed by consumerism and the excitement of acquiring automobiles, jewelry, luxury houses, and shop ping centers - the trappings of modernization. Even Islam was being commercialized by the new rising Saudi entrepreneurs. Advertising and sales gimmicks related to Islam increased every year. "Congratulations on your Pilgrimage. Ask for your gift from Citizen when you buy a Citizen Watch." Ramadan one year was ushered in by this ad:

"For the blessed season of the Holy Month of Ramadan, good news for the citizens. The arrival of new models of the multipurpose clean ing systems by Filter Queen. Generous discounts during Ramadan." The Saleh bin Mahfouz Establishment of Jeddah sold a clock in the shape of a miniature mosque that announced the prayer calls. At the appropriate time the clock's two minarets lighted up and a recording by the late Sheikh Abdul Basit Abdul Samad called the prayers. A sophisticated honing device for locating Mecca was introduced one year during the hajj. According to its inventor, the Marsad Makkah could obtain the true azimuth of Mecca within seconds after the user programmed in a code and arched the instrument in the air above his head until he heard a distinct clicking sound. The slab-shaped instrument was available in two models: the standard version of polished chrome with gold edges, and the luxury model, studded in diamonds, with an emerald at the end of the directional arrow.

While most of the population was sampling the materialism of the West and some of the Saudi entrepreneurs were exploiting Islam, Sheikh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz, the blind president of the Islamic University of Medina and a major power in the religious establishment, remained the major spokesman for the other side of Saudi Arabia, the religious fundamentalists. Baz, who is the most public authority on Islamic law, has changed little since he declared in 1966 that the sun revolves around the earth. In an essay written to refute the heresy of the theory of the solar system taught at Riyadh University, Baz said: "Hence I say the Holy Koran, the Prophet's teaching, the majority of Islamic scientists, and the actual fact all prove that the sun is running in its orbit, as Almighty God ordained, and that the earth is fixed and stable, spread out by God for his mankind and made a bed and cradle for them, fixed down firmly by mountains lest it shake." *

Amid the tinsel of progress, the soul of Saudi Arabia remained with Sheikh Baz. Although not necessarily sharing the sheikh's mentality, the newly Western-educated elite continued to accept Islam as the cen tral focus of life, contributing to the power that Islam holds over the people of Saudi Arabia. Development was perceived in the physical sense and with the understanding that physical progress would not alter the force of Islam in the minds and hearts of the Saudis. A Saudi's emotional identification with Islam is rooted in the fact that Islam is not just a religion, it is a civilization and a culture; it is fundamental to a Saudi's perception of who he is and what his world is about. Even with their exposure to foreign influences, the Saudis held tenaciously to their traditions defined by religion. This reality created a situation in which every move toward modernization made by the government had to be justified in religious terms~

There is among the religious fundamentalists an all-consuming fear, which exists to a lesser degree among most Saudis, that foreign influ ences are breaking down this dominant position of religion in Saudi society. What the Saudis most fear from Westernization is not so much that it will cause people to abandon Islam in favor of Christianity but that, in an increasingly secular world, religion will take a secondary place in society as it has in the West. The religious leaders want Saudi Arabia to return to its insular existence, where their precepts are un challenged by conflicting philosophies and practices. At the end of the 1970's, the general population was ambivalent not about its own society but rather about what Saudi Arabia's contact with the West might mean to its way of life.

* Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud (London: Holt, Rinehart and winston, 1981), p.262.

Just how much Western ideas and Western ways were seeping into Saudi society was not clear. In fact, the oil boom had instilled in the Saudis a new pride. There was a reawakening to the possibility of a true renaissance, a society opened and enriched by the new, as the Moslems in their early days of glory had been enriched by the knowledge acquired through their conquests. But Saudi Arabia had never really participated in the zenith of the Islamic empire. As contact with foreign peoples increased, they retreated farther into their own culture, behind the legalisms of Islam. Except for pockets of enlightenment, the Saudis remained unshakable in their isolation until the last part of the twentieth century. As if suffering a repeated curse, they then faced once again, as they had in the age of the Islamic empire, the dilemma of how to respond to foreign ways. During the oil boom, Saudi Arabia was characterized by the struggle to apply its own concept of Islam, as defined by Abdul-Wahhab, to the modern world.