Where church and state are one How long can Saudi Arabias puritanical version of Islam survive?
JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia It’s 12:23 p.m. on a recent Monday in the old marketplace of this historic port city on the Red Sea. A sonorous male voice over loudspeakers is filling the warm, humid air with the call to noon-hour prayers. The cloth merchant whose small shop is just in front of me drags a large blue covering over his wares. Around the corner the Seiko watch shop shuts down. And nearby the Citizen watch dealer also closes so that Muslims (in this country, that means everyone but foreign nationals who work on contract and a few visitors) may engage in one of their five required daily prayers. No doubt people in the capital of Riyadh are stopping work at the Saudi American Clinic, at Pepsi distributorships, at Starbucks, McDonald’s, Toys R Us and Baskin Robbins so they, too, may pray. (“Americans built this country,” says a Western diplomat in Riyadh. “Saudis paid for it.”) Here in the Jeddah market this noon, I see no mutawwa’in, the religious police, but they aren’t far away, and
