Young and Restless

Scented smoke from dozens of water pipes mingled with Lebanese pop music at Al-Nakheel, a seaside restaurant in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Saudi men in white robes and women in black abayas, their head scarves falling to their shoulders, leaned back on red cushions as they sipped tea and shared lamb kebab and hummus. Four young Saudi women, head scarves removed, trailed perfume as they walked past. Nearby, a teenage boy snapped photos of his friends with a cell phone. At an adjoining table, two young men with slicked-back hair swayed their heads to a hip-hop song echoing from the parking lot.

"Look around," said Khaled al-Maeena, editor in chief of the English-language daily Arab News. "You wouldn't have seen this even a few years ago."

Saudi Arabia, long bound by tradition and religious conservatism, is beginning to embrace change. You can see it in public places like Al-Nakheel. You hear it in conversations with ordinary Saudis. You read about it in an energetic local press and witness it in Saudi cyberspace. Slowly, tentatively, almost imperceptibly to outsiders, the kingdom is redefining its relationship with the modern world.

The accession of King Abdullah in August has something to do with it. Over the past several months he has freed several liberal reformers from jail, promised women greater rights and tolerated levels of press freedom unseen in Saudi history; he has reached out to marginalized minorities such as the Shiites, reined in the notorious religious "morals" police and taken steps to improve education and judicial systems long dominated by extremist teachers and judges. But a look around Al-Nakheel suggests another reason for change: demography.

Saudi Arabia is one of the youngest countries in the world, with some 75 percent of the population under 30 and 60 percent under 21; more than one in three Saudis is under 14.

Saudi Arabia's changes are coming not only from the authorities above, but also from below, driven by this young and increasingly urban generation. Even as some of them jealously guard parts of the status quo and display a zeal for their Islamic faith unseen in their parents' generation, others are recalibrating the balance between modernity and tradition, directing bursts of new energy at civil society and demanding new political and social rights. "We must face the facts," said al-Maeena, who is 54. "This huge youth population will determine our future. That's why we need to watch them carefully and train them well. They hold the keys to the kingdom."

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Saudi Arabia, home to a quarter of the world's known oil reserves, is one of the United States' key allies in the Middle East. Yet its baby boom was launched by an act of defiance -- the 1973 oil embargo, in which King Faisal suspended supplies to the United States to protest Washington's support for Israel in its war with Egypt and Syria. As oil prices rose, cash-rich Saudis began having families in record numbers. The kingdom's population grew about 5 percent annually, from 6 million in 1970 to 16 million in 1989. (The current growth rate has slowed to about 2.5 percent, and the population is 24 million.)

Those baby boomers are now coming of age. And as Saudi analyst Mai Yamani writes in her book Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia, "Their numbers alone make them the crucial political constituency."

Their grandparents largely lived on subsistence farms in unconnected villages where tribe, clan and ethnicity trumped national identity. Their parents (at least the men) worked in the burgeoning state bureaucracy and trained with the foreign engineers and bankers who flocked to the kingdom; they lived in an era when television, foreign travel, multilane highways, national newspapers and mass education were novelties. But the boomers live in a mass culture fed by satellite TV and the Internet, consumerism, an intellectual glasnost and stirrings of Saudi nationalism. "I'm not sure young Saudis grasp the enormity of the changes in just three generations," al-Maeena told me. "It is like night and day."

The boomers, however, did not grow into fantastic wealth. In 1981, the kingdom's per capita income was $28,000, making it one of the richest countries on earth. But by 1993, when I first met al-Maeena in Jeddah during a year I spent there on a journalism exchange program, the kingdom was recovering from both a long recession (oil prices had dwindled) and a war on its border (the Persian Gulf war of 1991). Per capita income was declining rapidly, and boomers were straining the finances of a largely welfare-driven state. Government jobs and scholarships for foreign study grew scarce. (In 2001, per capita income was a quarter of what it had been in 1981.)

Arabic satellite television was in its infancy, and state censorship was pervasive -- in August 1990 the Saudi government prohibited the media from publishing news of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait for three days. But as the '90s progressed, technology forced change. Long-distance telephone service became affordable. The Internet began to shrink the world. Al Jazeera became a boisterous news channel breaking social, political and religious taboos. Many young Saudis began to feel they were living in a country with outdated institutions: an education system that favored rote learning over critical thinking, a religious establishment that promoted an intolerant brand of Islam and a government that was falling behind its neighbors in economic development.

"The 1990s were not a good decade for young people," said one young Saudi civil servant, who asked not to be named because he works for the government. "We didn't have the secure jobs of our parents' generation, and our government was basically incompetent and getting too corrupt." In the private sector, employers preferred skilled foreigners to newly minted Saudi college graduates. "We were just sitting still while everyone else seemed to be moving forward," the civil servant added.

Then came September 11, 2001, and with it the revelation that 15 of the 19 men who launched the attacks on the United States were Saudis -- acting under the auspices of another Saudi, Osama bin Laden. "That event and the [West's] anti-Saudi reaction made me feel more nationalist," said Khaled Salti, a 21-year-old student in Riyadh. "I wanted to go to America and defend Saudi Arabia in public forums, to tell them that we are not all terrorists. I wanted to do something for my country."

Ebtihal Mubarak, a 27-year-old reporter for the Arab News, said the attacks "forced us to face some ugly truths: that such terrible people exist in our society and that our education system failed us." She called May 12, 2003, another infamous date for many Saudis: Al Qaeda bombed an expatriate compound in Riyadh that day, killing 35, including 9 Americans and 7 Saudis. A series of attacks on Westerners, Saudi government sites and Arabs ensued, leaving hundreds dead. (In late February, Al Qaeda also took responsibility for a failed attempt to blow up a Saudi oil-processing complex.)

Most violent opposition to the ruling al-Saud family comes from boomers -- jihadists in their 20s and 30s -- but those extremists are hardly representative of their generation. "When we think of youth in this country, two incorrect stereotypes emerge," Hani Khoja, a 37-year-old business consultant and television producer, told me. "We think of the religious radical who wants to join jihadist movements, like the 9/11 guys, or we think of extremist fun-seekers who think only of listening to pop music and having a good time. But the reality is that most young Saudis are somewhere in the middle, looking for answers, curious about the world and uncertain of the path they should take."

In dozens of conversations with young Saudis in five cities and a village, it became obvious that there is no monolithic Saudi youth worldview. Opinions vary widely on everything from internal reform to foreign policy to the kingdom's relations with the United States and the rest of the West. Regional, ethnic and religious differences also remain. Young Saudi Shiites often feel alienated in a country whose religious establishment often refers to them as "unbelievers." Residents of Hijaz, a cosmopolitan region that encompasses Mecca, Jeddah and Medina, regularly complain about the religious conservatism and political domination of the Najd, the province from which most religious and political elites hail. Some Najdis scorn Hijazis as "impure Arabs," children fertilized over the centuries by the dozens of nationalities who overstayed a pilgrimage to Mecca. And loyalty to tribe or region may still trump loyalty to the state.

But despite these differences, the kingdom's baby boomers seem to agree that change is necessary. And collectively they are shaping a new national identity and a common Saudi narrative.

Ebtihal Mubarak is one of several talented female reporters and editors on the Arab News staff. That in itself is a change from my days at the paper more than a decade ago. In recent years the News has doubled its full-time Saudi female staff and put more female reporters out in the field. Mubarak reports on the small but growing movement for greater political and social rights for Saudis. Persecution by extremists is a common theme in her work. As she surfed Saudi Internet forums one day last fall, she came across a posting describing an attack on a liberal journalist in the northern city of Hail. "A journalist's car had been attacked while he was sleeping," she said. "A note on his car read: