Word: kingdomful
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...integrity of the government." From Washington's viewpoint, however, pushing Fahd and family down the fast track to Westernization and democratization is a likely prescription for a Shah [of Iran]-like disaster. Swift liberalizations could easily stir religious extremists to revolt. "If there's an internal threat to the kingdom," says a U.S. expert on Saudi Arabia, "it's from fundamentalists on the right, not liberalizers on the left...
When U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld turned up at an ornate royal palace in Saudi Arabia last week, he shook hands with ailing King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz al Saud and then exchanged views about the war on terrorism with Crown Prince Abdullah, who runs the kingdom's day-to-day affairs. Rumsfeld might have got a somewhat different perspective if he had stopped by al Masaa, a cafe in the heart of the capital, where patrons hail Osama bin Laden as an Arab hero...
...such stories seem comical, there is nothing amusing about the raging anti-Western and anti-Jewish sermons that often blare out of the kingdom's mosques. Hard-liners in the pervasive religious establishment pose an absolute obstacle to liberalism, whether barring the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution or classes in figurative painting. An obsessive suspicion of Israel permeates Islamic teaching, Saudi-style. Earlier this year, a leading imam issued a fatwa against Pokemon, the Japanese animated series, after rumors spread that the name of one of the most popular characters, Pikachu, was a wily code...
King Fahd, 80, will be remembered in Saudi annals as the great modernizer, a staunch U.S. ally who built hospitals and highways and spent billions upgrading the Saudi armed forces. To minimize friction with Muslim leaders, however, he constantly channeled some of the kingdom's vast oil wealth into religious causes. He carved out a place in Islamic history by supervising a $25 billion expansion of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. The King also poured cash into scores of new Islamic universities, which began churning out thousands of fresh religious activists. "But something unexpected happened," notes a former...
...decades, but the training of thousands of young Wahhabis was their first real taste of jihad. Among the recruits was a 21-year-old business administration graduate of King Abdul Aziz University named Osama bin Laden, a scion of a Jidda construction clan that made a fortune building the kingdom's infrastructure...