Brothers:

I hesitated to send along article because of its length.  While cleaning out 
old computer files, it surfaced and I reread it.

Its worth at least a quick skim for insight it provides into the Byzantine 
politics of Saudi Arabia.

Charles

--------------------------------
How to Confront a Theocracy
The most effective way to address the human rights disaster in Saudi Arabia 
may be to let Muhammad do the talking.
By Jeff M. Sellers | posted 07/03/2002


I was sent to these Arabs as a stranger, unable to think their thoughts or 
subscribe to their beliefs, but charged by duty to lead them forward and to 
develop to the highest any movement of theirs profitable to England in her 
war. If I could not assume their character, I could at least conceal my own, 
and pass among them without evident friction, neither a discord nor a critic 
but an unnoticed influence.
—T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Every year Saudi Arabia lands on or near the top of lists of violators of 
religious freedom, and every year the royal family that rules the kingdom 
could not care less. The United States has formed an alliance with this 
intransigent opponent of human rights for reasons that parallel the charge 
given to Lawrence of Arabia. Leading Saudi Arabia forward into unfathomable 
wealth by developing its oil industry, the United States has found the 
partnership profitable for both economic and geopolitical interests.

U.S. oil companies arrived in Saudi Arabia a generation after Lawrence 
helped lead Arabs in their revolt against World War I–era Turks. Like the 
Christians who often work for these and other companies, Lawrence had no 
illusions about the limits of his ability to assume Arab character. But he 
did defer to his host culture, accepting its ways as a point of departure, 
and his example in war may yet have something to teach us about spiritual 
battles for human dignity.

Beheadings Every Friday
In 1992, December 25 fell on a Friday, the Muslim day of rest, when pastor 
Oswaldo "Wally" Magdangal was to be hanged in the Saudi capital of Riyadh 
for blaspheming Islam. Shari'ah law requires beheading for "apostates"—those 
who renounce Islam—as well as for murderers, and no Friday passes without at 
least one such execution in the public square following the noon prayers, 
rights organizations say. Hangings are reserved for "blasphemers" like 
Magdangal. Foreigners of non-Islamic faiths can worship legally in private 
in Saudi Arabia, but the 42-year-old Filipino pastor was arrested after his 
growing house church had become too noticeable. On December 23, Magdangal 
wrote out his last will and testament for his wife and young daughter.

Religious police had tortured every part of his body in trying to force him 
to renounce his faith in Christ. Embracing Islam would have won his 
immediate release. Initially the religious police, or muttawa'in—a vigilante 
force with a hierarchy and membership extending into government and other 
sectors—beat him throughout 210 minutes of mocking interrogation. They 
handed him a pencil and paper and demanded names of other Christians he 
knew. He refused.

"Eventually I was so weak, they placed the pad of paper in my lap, and they 
forced the pencil into my hand," Magdangal told CT. "I was weeping, and I 
said, 'Lord, you've got to help me here,' and I began to write the names of 
Billy Graham, Charles Spurgeon, and others. After a few days, they were so 
mad, because they'd been all over Saudi Arabia looking for those people."

During interrogations—which included flogging of his back, his palms, and 
the soles of his feet—the muttawa'in did not state charges against him. Only 
when he answered that he agreed with an article predicting the ultimate fall 
of Islam in Christ for the Nations magazine (which the muttawa'in found in 
his home) was the basis for the eventual blasphemy charge established.

Magdangal was not allowed to speak during his high court trial, which Muslim 
clerics held in secret.

"I was shaking with pain; I was trembling with fear," Magdangal says. "I 
kept asking them to get my wife, but that led them to tell me in strong 
words to stand silent—not to say a word or I would suffer the consequence of 
every word I spoke. That's when I just broke down, and I just wept and 
wept."

By then the lower court had read some charges—preaching a message different 
from the Qur'an, "building" a church—but only hinted at the blasphemy 
charge. Magdangal would learn of the blasphemy verdict before he knew the 
charge itself: a muttawa'in officer interrogating him, Lt. Bader Alyaya, 
said his case had become "very serious" and that he was going to be hanged.

"He motioned around his neck like a noose, and then he pulled the noose 
above his head in a motion with his hand," he recalls. "I knew that people 
guilty of blasphemy are hanged to death for three days, to send a strong 
warning to the Muslims not to turn to another religion, and for Christians 
to not try to reach the Muslims."

Magdangal describes a sensation of fire or lightning striking him in the 
chest. "It felt like there was something within me that was getting ready to 
explode, and as I opened my mouth, the words came out: 'I shall not die but 
live and declare the works of my Lord, for no weapon formed against me shall 
prosper, for greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world,' " 
Magdangal says. "That's all I said. And then I bent over, and I wept, and I 
wept, and I wept."

Normally Saudi authorities do not tell the condemned of their sentence until 
the day of their execution, so as to forestall appeals and protests, 
Magdangal says. Sometimes the authorities go the extra step of leading 
prisoners to believe they are being released just before executing them.

Magdangal knew only that the Philippine embassy had filed protests of his 
detention, which went unheeded, though soon Amnesty International also was 
monitoring his case. As executive secretary to the Saudi director of Defense 
and Civil Aviation, Magdangal had close friends high in the Saudi 
government, including members of the royal family—and even in the 
muttawa'in—who only gradually had become aware of his arrest. Muttawa'in 
officers warned each of Magdangal's high-level friends to stop advocating 
for him.

The threats worked. But a general secretly told Magdangal's wife to inform 
Fidel Ramos, then-president of the Philippines, that the case had become 
"very serious."

"The reality is that in Saudi Arabia the majority of the people, even those 
in the government, are not aware that the Muslim clerics are persecuting 
Christians," Magdangal says. "Even among the Muslim clerics, not all of them 
are aware that some of their colleagues are persecuting Christians."

Fresh off victory from Saudi soil in the Gulf War, the U.S. Congress and the 
White House joined with human-rights organizations to appeal for Magdangal's 
life—unbeknownst to him. By December 23 he had settled in his heart that he 
was going to be executed.

"I was heavily burdened for my wife and my daughter," he says. "I pictured 
myself hanging between heaven and earth, and I said to the Lord, 'I would 
ask you to order the Devil himself to deliver my spirit to the gates of 
heaven. And when I take my first step inside the gates, before you separate 
me from the evil, give me the privilege to strike the Devil right in his 
face.' "

Magdangal then prayed that if he were spared, he would be a voice for the 
persecuted. Shortly before midnight, the prison commander arrived with 
orders to deport Magdangal. "Even at that point, from the prison to the 
airport, I was very terrified because the two officers with me were 
interrupted on their radio by Muslim clerics who were yelling, fighting my 
release, and telling them to divert the car and bring it somewhere else to 
kill me," he says.

Now president of Christians in Crisis, an advocacy group based in 
Sacramento, California, Magdangal later learned from a friend high in the 
muttawa'in that military advisers were vying with clerics for the ear of 
King Fahd bin Abdul al-Aziz Al Saud—whose mandate in Saudi Arabia, the 
clerics reminded him, was to uphold Shari'ah.

"The war was still very fresh, and Saddam Hussein was still a major threat," 
Magdangal recalls. "The military advisers were saying, in essence, 'King, we 
are under such pressure from the friendly nations—what is one person 
compared to what we are facing from Saddam Hussein, and all the benefits 
that might be diminished as a result of executing this person?' "

King Fahd ordered Magdangal to be expelled within 24 hours. According to 
Magdangal's muttawa'in contact, 500 Muslim clerics resigned their state 
posts in protest.

September 11
Magdangal believes the advent of U.S. sorties against Iraq in the Gulf War 
triggered a wavelet of Saudi persecution of Christians that led to his 
arrest. Islamic leaders, fearing closer ties with the United States would 
tighten the rein on them, decided to attack Christians while they could. 
They would not arrest him until months later, but muttawa'in raided 
Magdangal's house hours before U.S. bombing began.

A decade later, the U.S.-Saudi relationship is much more contentious as 
America pressures its key regional ally, largely in vain, for cooperation in 
the "war on terrorism"—and this as the two countries hold opposite 
allegiances in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict raging in the foreground of 
the Saudi conscience. It is virtually impossible to know what effect the 
convoluted and secretive U.S.-Saudi relationship might have on persecution 
levels in Saudi Arabia, but kingdom observers see signs that the royal 
family is steadily corralling the religious police.

Charles W. Freeman Jr., president of the Washington-based Middle East Policy 
Council, was U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. He 
believes the uprightness of Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abd al-Aziz Al Saud, 
half-brother of the stroke-impaired King Fahd and to some extent the de 
facto ruler, will favorably influence the muttawa'in.

"Particularly under Crown Prince Abdullah, the muttawa'in are very much 
subdued and on the defensive," Freeman says. "And one of the reasons he's 
able to rein in some of the more fanatical elements of the Saudi populace is 
that he himself has a well-justified reputation for being a pious and godly 
man."

The government recently struck a blow to the clerics following a March 11 
fire at a girls' public intermediate school in Mecca. As 835 students and 55 
women teachers fled the building, several members of the muttawa'in beat 
them back because they were not wearing their long black cloaks and head 
coverings. They also beat civil defense workers trying to rescue the girls.

This interference reportedly caused some of the 14 casualties. The 
government not only fired the head of the General Presidency for Girls' 
Education—a powerful institution controlled by the clerics—but also 
abolished it in function. The regime folded it into the Ministry of 
Education, according to Virginia Sherry, associate director of the Middle 
East Division of Human Rights Watch.

"This is an incredibly radical move, and this full-scale critique in the 
Saudi press of the religious police is a new development," Sherry told CT. 
"There's been no indication that the government is going to publicly rebuke 
the religious police, but I was completely surprised that heads rolled and 
that with one pen stroke the entire agency was abolished."

In addition, since September 11 the Saudi government has instructed clerics 
to preach a more tolerant version of Islam, Sherry notes. "There's 
speculation as to whether or not that's posturing for a Western audience, 
but it's also clearly intended to rein in the clerics," she says.

Freeman, who has also been assistant secretary of defense for international 
security affairs, says Abdullah is trying to find ways to open the kingdom 
and make it more tolerant, even in the area of religion.

"Certainly the discovery that Osama bin Laden was able to recruit Saudis to 
his cause—his cause being to overthrow the Saudi monarchy, with the attack 
on the United States being merely a means to that end—actually set off quite 
a bit of soul-searching in the kingdom," Freeman says.

A slight easing of religious intolerance could emerge from such reflection, 
both Freeman and Sherry say. Freeman notes that Abdullah has considered 
allowing Christian organizations with medical programs to help attend to the 
thousands of wounded Palestinians who are treated in Saudi Arabia. And he 
calls a speech that Abdullah gave to the Gulf Cooperation Council last 
December "very remarkable, because it reflects a spirit of soul-searching 
and self-criticism that is not too often seen among leaders anywhere, much 
less in the Arab world."

Whether such setbacks for the muttawa'in make them more dangerous or less to 
underground churches in Saudi Arabia is a murky matter. Traditionally, such 
cornering of the religious animal can cause the muttawa'in to strike with 
more ferocity.

"The religious authorities and their police force are putting constant 
pressure on the civil authorities to be more Islamic—including to act 
stronger against Christian activity," says one rights advocate based in the 
United Kingdom. "At the moment, and as a result of September 11, the 
government is more vulnerable to pressure from the religious elements."

'morally Depraved' Critics
The clerics' power—including the leverage to topple the government—cannot be 
discounted. In the royal family's precarious position between the forces of 
modernity and traditional clerics, Saudi rulers generally have tried to 
appease religious dissidents rather than clamp down too severely, says 
Dudley Woodberry, a pastor in Riyadh in 1976–79 and dean emeritus and 
professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary.

Indeed, The New Yorker reported in its October 22, 2001, edition that 
electronic intercepts of conversations in the royal family show the regime 
is so insecure that it has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in 
"protection money" to fundamentalist groups that would otherwise overthrow 
it. Some of the Saudi funds went to Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda group, 
according to the report.

"The dilemma one faces," Ambassador Freeman told CT, "is that those who are 
most opposed to the royal family are either themselves murderers, that is, 
morally depraved people, or they resemble the followers of the late 
Ayatollah Khomeini in their vision of a future that is even less tolerant 
than the prevailing one. That is, the dissidents who are sitting in London 
are not arguing for a more open and tolerant society; they're arguing the 
opposite, as Khomeini turned out to do for Iran."

With restive, unemployed youth stuck in a cracked economy increasingly 
filling their ranks, Saudi extremist groups could lash out at the 870,000 
Christians among the country's 7 million foreign workers (nearly a third of 
the country's population). If the response of a Saudi underground church to 
queries by Christianity Today is any indication, fear still weighs heavily 
in the atmosphere—all members felt answering questions could jeopardize 
their safety. One Western man daring to reply anyway said that since 1998, 
the Christian community has been through several periods of arrest, 
detention, and deportation of leaders.

"Most of those began with Christians being 'too visible,' " he told CT. 
"These have been almost entirely Asians, and they pay the greatest price in 
terms of lost leadership, loss of income, and harassment from employers and 
religious authorities. Quite honestly, I do not want to answer your 
questions. Am I being overly cautious or gun-shy? I don't know."

Concerned that descriptions of his life in Saudi Arabia would provoke a 
crackdown, the Westerner nevertheless said he hoped this article would 
"inform Christians about the intolerant, close-minded attitude of Saudi 
Arabia and much of the Muslim world. Christians need to know this."

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom knew this well, 
recommending—unsuccessfully, given obvious diplomatic sensitivities—that the 
State Department designate Saudi Arabia as one of nine "countries of 
particular concern." The commission dismissed the Saudi claim that 
non-Muslims are permitted private worship. The Saudi definition of "private 
worship" is vague, and underground worshipers have been "arrested, 
imprisoned, deported and harassed by the authorities," according to the 
commission.

Appealing to Muslim Roots
Saudi Arabia tops the lists of religious freedom violators for the same 
reason its rulers don't care about such lists: In a theocracy entrusted with 
preserving a narrow Islamic "purity" and the shrines in Mecca and Medina, 
denial of religious freedom is integral to the country's cultural identity. 
As Crown Prince Abdullah has said, the two holy shrines are the "primary 
restrictions" on change. "Our faith and our culture are what drive the 
country," he once said. Somehow, though, other Islamic countries have 
cultures far more tolerant than Saudi Arabia's.

Saudi Arabia is a charter member of the United Nations, and yet it brazenly 
disregards the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which asserts the 
right to profess, propagate, and change faith. But U.N. ideals may not be 
the best starting point for transforming a medieval theocracy.

Saudi Arabia was founded on the Muslim equivalent of the 
Reformation—Wahhabism, which in the 1700s rejected the religious accretions 
of previous centuries to return to the authority of the Qur'an. Shari'ah is 
its constitution. Whereas the Christian Reformation eventually encouraged 
the separation of church and state, Saudi Arabia grew out of an alliance in 
1744 between the political emir, Muhammad ibn Saud, and the Islamic 
reformer, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab.

With religion and the state thus wedded, the U.N. Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights carries about as much weight in Saudi Arabia as a treatise on 
secular humanism would for conservative televangelists, Middle East 
observers say. Rather than start with institutions and documents that are 
Western in essence, better to address Saudis on their own terms—Islam's 
historical writings. Letters attributed to Muhammad in the Tabaqat of 
9th-century historian Ibn Sa'd, for example, allowed Christians in Najran 
(in today's southwestern Saudi Arabia) to have churches and priests. Fuller 
Seminary's Woodberry used to distribute copies of these letters while pastor 
of a house church in Riyadh.

"We circulated these letters basically to let the government know that at 
least Muhammad had allowed the Christians that were in the area to continue 
to worship and have priests as long as they were loyal citizens," Woodberry 
says.

Avoiding the unenviable position of trying to interpret Islam for Saudis, 
church members limited themselves to passing out copies of the letters.

"We did it first in English, and then I gave them Arabic copies as well," 
Woodberry says. "It uses the sources that are considered important to them."

Likewise, the Qur'an says Jews and Christians belong to a category of people 
protected from aggression. Some references in the Qur'an also suggest that 
the Sabeans, probably a gnostic group in south Arabia, were also protected 
people, Woodberry says. That extra category has enabled the government of 
Indonesia, for example, to protect the religious freedom of Hindus and 
Buddhists. And there is a plethora of history in which Islam peacefully 
coexists with other faiths.

How do such Islamic documents go over with those of the strict Wahhabi 
faith? "Wahhabism emphasizes going back to the original sources of the 
faith, the Qur'an and Muhammad, so it's very impressive to them if you can 
point out that Muhammad allowed the Christians the freedom to raise their 
children as Christians, and to have churches and priests," Woodberry says.

He does not dismiss appeals to the U.N. charter. But any international 
pressure, Middle East observers say, must be applied gently in light of the 
Muslim clerics' fury at the generally corrupt regime seen as too friendly to 
the United States. "We never felt that the royal leadership was that much 
against us, but their position was tenuous enough that they didn't want the 
same thing to happen to them that had happened to Iran when the Shah was 
overthrown," Woodberry says.

Ambassador Freeman also suggests appeals to the human rights inherent in 
Islam. He notes that the Qur'anic injunction to submit to Allah presupposes 
choice and liberty of conscience, and that "Islam is very clear that there 
can be no compulsion in religion."

Most Saudis, with the notable exception of some in the royal family, would 
counter that according to the hadith (teachings attributed to Muhammad) 
"there can be no two religions" in Arabia, but Freeman says this probably 
applied only to Mecca.

"There are so many other things said in the Qur'an about respect that I 
suppose the correct interpretation might be that there can be no 
proselytizing of the native population in Arabia," he says. "But I don't see 
why that should be interpreted as expatriates or temporary residents of 
Saudi Arabia being denied the right to worship as they consider right."

Freeman holds out hope that, with some loosening of religious controls, 
Christians could earn the right through social service ministries to be 
heard about human rights. "It might be that an offer by a Christian church 
not to proselytize in Saudi Arabia, but to inspire by example, to minister 
to those who are maimed in the intifada by the Israeli occupation, might be 
timely," Freeman says.

This indirect route, compared with direct protest, is a quieter, more 
concealed, less conspicuous influence. Supporting Abdullah's efforts to gain 
entry into the World Trade Organization, thereby opening Saudi Arabia to 
more outside influences, would be another way of indirectly promoting 
human-rights issues, Freeman adds.

There is, however, a place for overt protest. Though the effects of 
agitating for human rights are disputed—sometimes they result in more severe 
persecution—in the long term, it is usually helpful that rogue regimes know 
the international community is watching.

The Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, 
declined to answer questions posed by Christianity Today via e-mail—such as 
how he would advise Americans to address Saudi human-rights issues—but 
keeping such concerns before Saudi officials plays its part in the overall 
strategy. Polite, respectful inquiries about human rights can be sent to 
Prince Bandar at, believe it or not, topgun@.... (Top Gun is one of the 
ambassador's favorite movies, an assistant says. It also should be noted 
that since 1979, U.S. military sales to Saudi Arabia, including a state of 
the art command and control system for the Royal Saudi Air Force, total more 
than $50 billion.)

The Human Rights Game
To be sure, Saudi Arabia is "playing the human rights game," according to 
Sherry of Human Rights Watch. It has signed U.N. women's rights and 
anti-torture conventions, for example. And, last October 1, Saudi Arabia 
adopted its first written penal code.

Saudi officials have not made the new penal code available to rights 
organizations, but agency workers suppose it will give force of law to the 
Qur'an-based "administrative regulations."

These include the 23-year-old "regulation" against torturing prisoners. 
Amnesty International documented a 1996 case in which a Sudanese man signed 
a murder confession—by Saudi authorities forcing his thumbprint onto a 
declaration of guilt—after police suspended him by thrusting steel poles 
through his knee and elbow joints. He was later executed.

"The Saudis have a slew of administrative regulations on, for example, 
detention procedures, prison conditions, and access to prisoners," Sherry 
says. "The penal code might very well take all those regulations and codify 
them into something that is a law. Whether they're adhered to is a different 
matter."

Any such progress will come slowly, and criticism of the proud Saudis will 
not be the primary agent for change, says David E. Long, a retired foreign 
service officer who worked in the region.

By appealing to Saudi sources of authority and offering to serve in their 
social causes, Western Christians might, like Lawrence of Arabia, make the 
Saudis' struggle our struggle. That would entail finding a spiritual basis 
of mutual interest as powerful as the mundane one of oil for security. It 
also may mean identifying a common enemy—the Devil, as Magdangal prayed 
before he was to be hanged—rather than labeling each other as Satan. It's a 
lofty undertaking, but Long, a former counter-terrorism official and author 
of The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, notes that jihad has to do mainly with 
spiritual struggle.

"Jihad is the suppression of vice, maybe by force, and the encouragement of 
virtue, maybe by the sword, but nevertheless it's a broader concept," he 
says. "There's enough in Islam that is parallel and compatible with human 
rights that we could say, okay, fine, if you look at everything by Islamic 
law, but we encourage you to look at the human rights elements in 
Islam—after all, this is 'God's word.'"

Jeff M. Sellers is an associate editor at Christianity Today.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
July 8, 2002, Vol. 46, No. 8, Page 34






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