MY REPORTING ALSO led me to the home of a man whose relationship with the religious establishment was more conflicted. Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi had spent most of his life working for the Commission, helping to protect the kingdom from secularism, Westernization, and general religious laxity. Some of his tasks had resembled police work: catching drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that banned alcohol. But most of it focused on upholding the kingdom’s strict social rules on dress and ikhtilat, the hated gender mixing that opened the door to fornication, adultery, broken homes, orphans, and all-around societal collapse.
I met al-Ghamdi in a sitting room in his Jeddah apartment that had been decorated to look like a Bedouin tent, with burgundy fabric on the walls, gold tassels hanging from the roof, and carpets on the floor, on which al-Ghamdi prayed periodically. He was 51 and sported the same signs of a devout Saudi man as al-Sheikh—the long beard and bare upper lip. For much of his life, the beliefs of both men would have lined up, too, but al-Ghamdi had gone through a religious reckoning that had caused him to question his old life and the religious establishment that had defined it.
Little in his background foretold his future as a religious reformer. He had worked at the customs office in the port of Jeddah during university but quit after a cleric told him that Islam forbade collecting duties. After graduation, he studied religion in his spare time and handled international accounts for a government office, a job that required travel to non-Muslim countries. At the time, the clerics recommended avoiding infidel lands, so he quit.
He next got a job teaching economics at a technical school, but became so annoyed that the curriculum did not include Islamic finance that he quit that, too. When he landed a job with the Commission in Jeddah, he thought, finally, a vocation that matched his religious convictions.
In different positions there and in Mecca, he helped catch prostitutes and sorcerers, who could be beheaded. But over time he grew uneasy with the force’s methods, feeling that his colleagues’ zeal made them overreact, breaking into homes to hunt for contraband or humiliating suspects.
“Let’s say someone drank alcohol,” he said. “That does not represent an attack on the religion, but they exaggerated in how they treated people.”
He got a position reviewing cases and tried to report abuses. One case involved a middle-aged bachelor who received two young women in his home on weekends. The man did not pray at the mosque, so his neighbors suspected the worst. They called the Commission, which raided his house and caught the man red-handed—visiting with his own adult daughters.
“People were humiliated in inhuman ways, and that humiliation could cause hatred of religion,” al-Ghamdi said.
In 2005, al-Ghamdi was promoted to be the head of the Commission for the Mecca region, a big job overseeing scores of stations in a large, diverse area. He worked hard, but worried privately that the force’s emphasis was off. He returned to the scriptures and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and found a gap between what they contained and what the Commission was imposing. There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, for example, and no one had sought to stamp it out, not least the prophet himself.
Al-Ghamdi came to believe that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was actually Arabian cultural practices that had become mixed up with their faith. It was a startling conclusion, and dangerous for a man of his station. So he kept quiet, at least for a time.
IN 2007, SAUDI Arabia broke ground on a new pet project for the monarch, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which was supposed to grow into a world-class university on the Red Sea with the help of a royal endowment of more than $10 billion. To ensure international standards, King Abdullah insulated KAUST, as it was known, from clerical interference. Female students would dress as they wished, and classes would be co-ed.
KAUST followed the precedent of Saudi Aramco, the oil company, where the clerics had also been forbidden to tread, highlighting a great Saudi contradiction: As much as the royals preached Islamic values, when they wanted to earn money or innovate, they did not solicit the clerics’ advice. They locked them out.
Most clerics stayed mum on the plan, out of deference to the king, but one member of the top clerical body warned on a call-in show about the dangers of co-education. There would be sexual harassment. Men and women would cavort, distracting them from their studies. Husbands would grow jealous of their wives. There could be rapes.
“Mixing has many corrupting factors, and its evil is great,” declared Sheikh Saad al-Shathri, suggesting that the king would stop it if he knew.
But the mixing at KAUST had been the king’s idea, and he promptly fired the cleric.
The ordeal frustrated al-Ghamdi. He felt that the clerics were not supporting an initiative that was good for Saudi Arabia. So after praying about it, he put his thoughts in two articles about religious practices that were published in Okaz newspaper in 2009.
They were the first volleys in a prolonged battle between al-Ghamdi and the religious establishment. He followed with other articles, and faced off on TV with noted clerics who countered him with their own evidence from the Islamic scriptures. His colleagues at the Commission shunned him, so he requested—and swiftly received—early retirement.
Once off the force, he cast doubt on other practices, arguing that it was not necessary to close shops during prayer times, force people to go to the mosque, oblige women to cover their faces, or bar them from driving. Women during the time of the prophet had ridden camels, which he argued was more provocative than driving SUVs. At one point, a woman asked him if she could not only show her face, but wear makeup. He replied, Why not? To prove that he meant it, he went on a popular talk show with his wife, Jawahir, her face bare and adorned with a dusting of makeup.
His arguments went off like a bomb inside the religious establishment, shaking the foundations of the social order that gave the clerics their power. Condemnation rained down from the senior ranks. Some attacked al-Ghamdi’s credentials, saying he was not really a sheikh. That was a dubious accusation because there was no standard qualification for sheikh-hood. Others questioned his résumé, arguing, correctly, that he had no degree in religion and pointing out, also correctly, that his doctorate was from Ambassador University Corporation, a diploma mill.
“There is no doubt that this man is bad,” a member of the kingdom’s top clerical council said. “It is necessary for the state to assign someone to summon and torture him.”
The Grand Mufti, who years later would beseech me to become a Muslim, addressed the issue on his call-in show, saying that the kingdom’s television channels should ban content that “corrupts the religion and the morals and values of society.”
The clerical attacks were loud, but the social blowback hurt more. Angry callers yelled at al-Ghamdi through his cellphone. He got death threats on Twitter. His tribe disowned him as “troubled and confused.” A mosque where he preached asked him to stop coming. Vandals scrawled insulting graffiti on the wall of his house. A group of men showed up at his door, demanding to “mix” with his womenfolk. His sons—he has nine children—called the police.
Al-Ghamdi had not broken any laws and faced no legal charges, but the attacks shook his family. The relatives of his eldest son’s fiancée called off the couple’s wedding, not wanting to associate their family with his. His sister’s husband left her after she stood by her brother. A boy at school taunted his 15-year-old son, Ammar, saying, “How did your mom go on TV? That’s not right. You have no manners.”
So Ammar punched him.
—BY THE TIME I met al-Ghamdi in 2016, the hubbub had mostly died down, although he kept a low profile because strangers still insulted him when he appeared in public. He was publishing columns in foreign newspapers, but was otherwise jobless—a cleric whose positions had rendered him unemployable in the Islamic kingdom.
It was a bad year for the Commission[“The Commission,” as Saudis called it, was deeply woven into the kingdom’s history as part of the alliance between the royal family and the clerics. It owed its existence to the Quranic injunction to build a religious society by encouraging good behavior and stopping bad.]. A video of its officers confronting a girl in a mall parking lot had gone viral. It showed her being thrown to the ground and yelping as her abaya flew up, exposing her torso. For many Saudis, “the Nakheel Mall girl” personified the Commission’s overreach. Then the Commission arrested a popular talk show host who had criticized religious figures, and photos of him appeared online in handcuffs with bottles of liquor. It appeared that the photos had been staged and leaked by the Commission in an attempted character assassination. The outrage grew.
Those incidents highlighted the irony of al-Ghamdi’s ordeal: Many Saudis, including important royals and even some clerics, agreed with him that the kingdom’s strictures had gone too far. One of them was MBS, who recognized that clerical control was a major barrier to his development plans. So in April 2016, a surprise royal decree stripped the religious police of their powers. Henceforth, they could not arrest, question, or pursue subjects except in cooperation with the actual police. And they were advised to be “gentle and kind” in their interactions with citizens.
When the news broke, I contacted a number of Saudi friends for their thoughts, but no one knew what to make of it. Was it for real? It seemed too good to be true, and the Commission too powerful to merely fade away. But over time we realized that, yes, it was real. With a single royal decree, MBS had defanged the clerics, clearing the way for vast changes they most certainly would have opposed.