Word: riyadh
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...generation ago, vast swaths of the Arabian Peninsula lacked the basic infrastructure of a modern society-roads, running water, electricity. Today nearly half the country's 22 million people live in Riyadh or Jidda, and Saudis make up the biggest market for U.S. consumer products in the Middle East. When they're not fighting city traffic in Cadillac SUVs, middle-class Saudis frequent gleaming shopping malls lined with designer brand names from the U.S. In a country where women are required to wear full-length abayas in public, you can catch Sex and the City on satellite TV every Friday...
...Askar Enazy, a professor of international law in Riyadh and an outspoken critic of the regime, complains that the clerics "are allowed to run rampant. The al-Saud believe if they oppose them, it will undermine their own legitimacy as rulers. They had the opportunity to crush them many times before but chose not to." Mohammed al Odad is a government minister in Abha, but he is dismayed. "The fundamentalists have total control of the masses," he says. "It gets worse and worse." Parents say they are fed up with the Wahhabist school curriculum, which rears students on a diet...
...countries paid the price on Sept. 11. Yet far from challenging the Saudis' record of breeding extremism, the White House has from the start defended its oil-rich ally. As early as Sept. 24, Bush declared "the Saudi Arabians have been nothing but cooperative." Counterterrorism officials in Washington and Riyadh say they have worked closely together to liquidate al-Qaeda. According to U.S. officials, the Saudis have arrested more than 100 al-Qaeda members inside the kingdom, given American investigators access to interrogations of terrorism suspects and shared reams of intelligence on the Taliban and bin Laden's network...
...What the Sauds have not done is provide their people with an alternative to the insular world view peddled by the country's Wahhabist clerics. Saudi liberals like Professor Enazy who seek to counter the extremists still find themselves muzzled. Drinking coffee in the refuge of a Riyadh hotel room, Enazy says the government has warned him not to criticize the kingdom's religious establishment. "If I publish anything, I'll get kicked out of a job," he says. "And yet they allow the extremists to get away with anything they want." The U.S. has provided little support to those...
...With reporting by Massimo Calabresi and Mark Thompson/ Washington, Scott MacLeod/ Riyadh and J.F.O. McAllister/London