Sunday October 14, 2001 The Observer
Each day of American bombing in Afghanistan is raising the temperature in the Arab and Muslim world. The gap is widening between the rulers, who have joined President George Bush's war on terrorism, and the ruled, who are incensed by Washington's military strikes against a poor and defenceless Muslim state.
This is most obvious in Osama bin Laden's homeland, Saudi Arabia - extraordinarily important in strategic, economic and religious terms. It occupies four-fifths of the highly strategic Arabian peninsula and shares borders with Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
With 262 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, Saudi Arabia possesses a quarter of the global total, the highest in the world, and more than twice that of the next country down the list, Iraq.
Last year the Saudi oil production of 9.1 million barrels per day (bpd), ahead of America's 7.7m. According to the latest BP Statistical Review of World Energy, at the present rate of extraction Saudi oil reserves will last more than 100 years, and those of the United States less than 10.
Unsurprisingly, last year the US imported foreign oil to meet 57 per cent of its needs, nearly double the figure in 1983. And Saudi Arabia topped the list of foreign suppliers.
In the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Saudi Arabia is the number one oil exporter. It is able to control the price of oil, a commodity on which the health of Western economies depends. Historically, when oil prices reach record highs, recession in Western economies follows 12 to 18 months later. With oil prices reaching a peak in August 2000, we are now entering a recessionary period.
On top of that, Saudi Arabia has Islam's first and second holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina - the birth and death places of the Prophet Muhammad - the former being the site of the Kaaba, containing the sacred Black Stone, and the latter the mosque with the Prophet's tomb.
'What many people overlook or don't know is that Saudi Arabia is not an ordinary Islamic country,' said Wahid bin Zagar, head of an affluent merchant family of Jeddah. 'It is the heartland of all Islamic countries.'
Little wonder that Saudi Arabia has emerged as the coveted prize being fought over by the US and its radical Islamist foes in the region. This fight is being conducted in an environment of rising anger in the Arab and Muslim world - from Indonesia, where the US embassy has been shut, to North Africa via the Gulf monarchies.
An increasing number of Arabs are airing their anti-American views publicly and, shedding their fear of the local secret police, identifying themselves. 'The Americans say their target is Bin Laden, and then they strike at innocent people in Afghanistan who have nothing to do with terrorism,' said Samar al-Naji, a bank clerk in Amman. 'They strike Muslims while ignoring the acts of Israel, a terrorist state, which is demolishing Palestinian homes and killing women and children.'
The situation in Saudi Arabia is becoming fraught. An American-trained Saudi lawyer, who works with international corporations in Jeddah, told the New York Times : 'Osama bin Laden has been called the conscience of Islam. What he says, we like, we agree with it.'
In the words of another Saudi attorney in Riyadh: 'No one likes US policies, and young people see bin Laden as a hero because he is the underdog confronting the [sole] superpower.' Indeed, many Saudis, young and old, are calling bin Laden a modern-day version of Saladin, who retook Jerusalem from the Crusaders.
Regrettably for America, Bin Laden is in a win-win situation. Those who know him say he has a large, loyal bodyguard and that he will never surrender. If he is killed, he will become a great martyr - paralleling Che Guevara in the secular world.
A BBC correspondent found 'mild-mannered men' in the backstreet corner shops of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia's largest port city, agreeing with his claim that the West was persecuting Muslims, and referring to Iraq as 'a once proud nation pummelled by air raids and reduced to poverty by Western-backed sanctions'. Ordinary Saudis allude to the number of Iraqi children - estimated in WHO and Unicef reports at between 500,000 and one million - who have died because of the 11 years of sanctions, a fact that has hardly impinged on the Western psyche.
Then there are facts about the life and deeds of 44-year-old bin Laden, born into a family in Jeddah whose business assets amount to $5 billion. The way many Saudis see it is that, for the sake of Islam, he abandoned his affluent lifestyle at home for a peripatetic existence in the caves of Afghanistan to participate in the anti-Soviet jihad.
This has turned him into cult hero among young Saudis. In a country where half of the 14 million nationals are under 18, this is a sign that the autocratic monarchy can ignore at its own peril.
The young population is set to strain the social system which has been managed by the House of Saud by throwing petrodollars at problems. A decade ago joblessness among Saudi nationals was unheard of: now the official unemployment rate is 18 per cent and rising. An advertisement for 10 jobs at the Riyadh military academy resulted in more than 1,000 applicants turning up, with several getting injured in the melee.
>From the early Eighties, when Saudi Arabia's per capita annual income
was on a par with the United States' $28,000, the figure has fallen to
below $7,000. With young educated Saudi nationals struggling to find
jobs, there is growing resentment at the dissolute ways of the members
of the royal family, put at 30,000 at the last count.
So when Bin Laden and his associates attack the royals for siphoning off the oil riches of the country, and investing their huge fortunes in the American stock markets and real estate in the US and Europe, their words fall on receptive ears.
But, alarmingly for Washington, Bin Laden has support also among rich Saudi commoners, some of whom contributed generously to the anti-Soviet jihad in the Eighties through him. Most of them have continued to back his al-Qaida movement as a hedge against the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy.
The US government's inclusion on Friday of Yassin al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman and investor, in the list of those who support terrorism indicates that Washington is alert to the above fact.
The US alleged that al-Qadi has run a foundation whose trustees have included some of the kingdom's most prominent families and which has funnelled millions of dollars from Saudi businesses to Bin Laden.
The second plank of Bin Laden's attack on the House of Saud is that the personal behaviour and lifestyle of many senior royals are un-Islamic. They gamble, fornicate and consume alcohol at home and abroad. They are, in Bin Laden's terminology, 'hypocrites' - those who claim to be proper Muslims but are not.
As the royal house has traditionally worked in tandem with the religious establishment of the Wahhabi sub-sect of Islam, it has always managed to obtain from the 20-strong Council of Senior Ulema, any fatwa - religious decree - it wanted.
On the eve of the 1991 Gulf War, for instance, the council issued a fatwa saying that it was legitimate for the Saudi ruler to invite non-Muslim troops to help defend the kingdom.
Now, however, on the issue of the use of Saudi soil for the staging of US air strikes against the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the ruler has not sought any fatwa from the council. Yet that did not stop the Grand Mufti of Mecca, the holiest city of Islam that is barred to non-Muslims, from declaring that 'this issue [of terrorism] calls for new policies, not new wars'.
While most senior ulema remain loyal to the House of Saud, this is not the case with the younger, junior ulema. Many share the popular opposition to the presence of US troops on the basis that they are defiling the holy soil of Arabia. Some of them, indeed, agree with Bin Laden when he compares the US troops in their country to the Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan in the Eighties.
In the final analysis, the current battle in Afghanistan is about the future of Saudi Arabia - who administers it and how.
· Dilip Hiro is the author of 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (HarperCollins). His latest book is 'Neighbours, Not Friends: Iraq and Iran after the Gulf War' (Routledge).