The Kingdom of Silence - a job at a Saudi newspaper offers a rare look inside a closed society
Reporter at large, New Yorker Jan 5 04 48-73
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The oldest Bedouin was a delicate man with long fine fingers and a pointed goatee that gave him a noble and slight stylized appearance. His round wire-rimmed glasses caught whatever dim light there was inside the pavilion, making it hard to read his eyes. I was drawn to him, perhaps because of his intellectualism and his romantic, revolutionary air. The man who was killed was his cousin. I asked him what force had pulled his relative to Iraq. “It’s when you have this power inside you – and in this closed country you can’t get it out – that you want to go to such places,” he told me.
His cousin couldn't find a job, he continued, and he didn't have the connections to get into the military. He himself had experienced the same problems. "Since the first Gulf crisis, I graduated with a good major, and the government promised me a lot of things," he went on. "I have the ambition to have a Ph.D. or a great job, and I suddenly found that the government put a new rule. They stopped any new government employment! The price of electricity and gas doubled, and the phone, and even rice and sugar. But they said be patient, we have to pay the price of the war. They promised it was just for a short period. Its been thirteen years now! I graduated seven years ago and still have no job." He said he often thought about becoming a martyr himself, like his cousin, who must have gone directly to Paradise. "Paradise is better than this miserable life!"
I asked him what he had studied in school.
"Library science."
With all their talk about martyrdom, there was another dark thought in their minds. "It might be government policy to send these guys to Iraq, instead of having them here, acting up," the oldest one said.
"Who are you talking about?" I asked. "Who is sending them?"
"Somebody who wants to make moral points around the world. They want to have these guys get killed instead of staying in the country and helping it out."
The others nodded. They saw a conspiracy between the clergy and the government - plot to eliminate them, the unemployed Saudis. "Its been a holocaust for young people, what's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan," the librarian said.
These young men recognized the pointlessness of jihad, at least the way it was being promoted by the bloodthirsty clerics - who were, after all, government employees. There had to be a reason that the government would allow such dangerous talk, and in the minds of these young men the reason was that they were expendable. And a part of them said yes to that. They wanted out, and the only exit was Paradise.
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