The Madness of Islam

Is it any wonder that Saudi Arabia is one of the world's most backward nations? Devotion to the religion founded by Muhammad, a schizophrenic who wrote a book in the 7th Century, explains it all. Based on the example of Saudi Arabia and the pending insanity plea from Major Hasan, the muslim who killed 13 and wounded 28 others at Fort Hood, it is becoming evident that to be Islamic is to show signs of mental illness.

Mixed-Sex Saudi University Hits Clerical Opposition

Nov. 25 -- Saudi Arabia, the only country in the world that forbids women from driving, isn’t ready to alter that, said Ali Suwaiyel, a 28-year-old Saudi banker.

“What’s the hurry?” he asked as he sipped a coffee in a Starbucks in Riyadh, wearing a traditional white Arabic robe and sunglasses. “What are the benefits?”

King Abdullah, 86, sees the need for speed in changing his country. He is creating secular universities, including a coeducational graduate school, and pushing for more science and technology in education. The king needs a well-trained workforce to diversify the world’s largest oil exporter from energy and create jobs for Saudi Arabia’s youth, more than 25 percent of whom are unemployed.

Failing to raise the fortunes of the almost 40 percent of the population under 15 would make the Islamic state even more susceptible to extremism, said Simon Henderson, an expert on the Gulf monarchies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Stability of world oil supplies depends on Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally.

A backlash by clerics, led in public by Sheikh Saad Bin Naser al-Shatri, is slowing those efforts, though the king dismissed al-Shatri from the country’s top religious body last month.

“We’re missing a lot of opportunities because of religious opposition,” said Jamal Khashoggi, editor of al-Watan newspaper in Jeddah. It is owned by Prince Khaled al-Faisal, governor of that province. “The conservatives are fighting back.”

No Film Festival

Al-Shatri publicly criticized the country’s first co- educational university in September. This followed the last- minute cancellation in July of a Jeddah film festival that had run annually since 2006. The Arab News said a cancellation order was issued by local authorities, citing festival organizers. Clerics in Saudi Arabia, where movie theatres are banned, maintain that musical and film performances are against Sharia, or Islamic law.

Under a pact between the ruling al-Saud family and the Sunni Muslim hierarchy dating back to 1744, Saudi Arabia maintains an austere brand of Islam in return for clerics’ acceptance of the crown, according to official history. The Wahhabi religious establishment controls the courts and dominates the education system.

Opposition

Prince Turki al-Faisal, whose father, King Faisal, introduced female education in the early 1960s and deployed soldiers to protect girls attending school, said there is similar opposition now.

“Any reform agenda will face resistance but that has not disrupted King Abdullah,” said Turki, 64, a former ambassador to the U.S. and U.K. and intelligence chief from 1977 to 2001.

To lure foreign academics and international students to his King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, known as KAUST, the Saudi monarch relaxed the rules.

Women don’t have to wear the abaya, a black robe that covers all but the face, and are allowed to drive in the fenced- off campus 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of Jeddah.

“This is something I never expected to see in my lifetime in Saudi Arabia,” Hommood al Rowais, 23, a student in a black baseball cap, blue shorts and a T-shirt who is the son of a Saudi diplomat in Washington, said in an Oct. 14 interview on the newly built campus.

Four New Cities

Abdullah also is building four industrial cities, including the King Abdullah Economic City near KAUST. The government says they will create 1 million new jobs by 2020 in a country whose population is now 28 million. The aim is to build energy-related industries such as plastics, petrochemicals, aluminum and steel. Saudi Arabia depends on oil exports for 90 percent of its revenue.

Saudi Basic Industries Corp., the world’s largest petrochemicals maker and a leading pillar of the drive to reduce reliance on oil, is listed as a research collaborator with KAUST in the field of catalysis on the university’s Web site. The technology allows more efficient use of raw materials in the chemicals and petroleum industries.

Saudi Arabia could increase manufacturing’s share of the economy from 11 percent to 16 percent within the next decade, according to John Sfakianakis, chief economist at Banque Saudi Fransi in Riyadh, the capital.

Religious Education

Elementary schools devote 31 percent of their time to religion and 20 percent to math and science, according to a report last year by Booz Allen Hamilton, a McLean, Virginia- based consulting firm.

The king faces difficulties too as he tries to modernize the religious-run judiciary to create a favorable environment for business and foreign investment. In 2007, Abdullah said Saudi Arabia would reform the legal system by establishing a supreme court and commercial and labor courts.

The future judges who can bring the system more in line with international norms are “now studying in school,” Bandar bin Mohammed al-Aiban, president of the government-run Saudi Human Rights Commission, said in an interview in Riyadh. “This will take a long time.”

Interior Minister Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz became first deputy prime minister, the third most powerful position in the country, in March. He is more wary of provoking clerical opposition than Abdullah, said Khashoggi.

Religious Police

The head of the religious police, Abdelaziz al-Humayyin, ordered stepped-up patrols in July. The police enforce separation of unmarried males and females and a ban on alcohol, and require Muslims to respect prayer times.

Just days after the Saudi monarch presided over a Sept. 23 inauguration ceremony for KAUST in which he called it a “beacon of tolerance,” al-Shatri said in a television interview that mixed-gender classes were “evil.”

Suwaiyel, the banker, said he thinks women will drive someday in Saudi Arabia, though not for 10 or 15 years. Granting them the right earlier “would cause a lot of friction,” he said.

“I believe Saudi Arabia is going to change but at its own pace,” he said. “The conservatives are resistant to change and they don’t want it right now.”