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Crossing the Kingdom

Portraits of Saudi Arabia

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Can Oil Bring Happiness?

ALTERNATE VISIONS OF SAUDI ARAMCO

A piece of the United States that just landed on Saudi Arabia.

DHAHRAN IS HOME TO THE SAUDI ARABIAN OIL COMPANY, better known as Saudi Aramco, the national oil company of Saudi Arabia. With an estimated value of 10 trillion dollars, Saudi Aramco is the world's most valuable corporation. Saudi Arabia produces more oil and has more oil reserves than any other country in the world. In the words of a former president of the company, "Oil is a gift from God, but the recovery of oil is the work of men. What's good for the well-being of Saudi Aramco and Arabia is good for the well-being of the whole world." Or as another Saudi Aramco executive put it much more simply: "Oil brings happiness."

Many international travelers approach Dhahran by flying into Bahrain and then driving twenty-five kilometers over the Persian Gulf on the King Fahd Causeway to Saudi Arabia. But Dhahran is also served by the King Fahd International Airport, which was completed in 1990, just in time to serve as a storage facility for American military aircraft during the First Gulf War. The route from King Fahd Airport to the Aramco camp in Dhahran follows King Fahd Road, a three-lane highway through the desert. At night bonfires cast flickering orange light on the SUVs and tents of Saudis camping in the sand. During the day, tall transmission lines can be seen running across the flat expanses of rock, gravel, and sand to the horizon. Along the highway are mounds of construction debris, parking lots filled with oil tankers and dump trucks, and storage yards lined with rows and rows of pipes stacked in neat triangular piles. Exit signs are marked "Desert Access," and off in the distance small herds of camels graze. A large sign at one construction site announces that the work there is being done by the Binladin Group, one of the largest construction companies in the world.

The Aramco camp in Dhahran is bordered on one side by the U.S. Consulate and the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, and on the other by King Abdulaziz Air Base. The sound of Royal Saudi Air Force jets taking off and landing often fills the air. The camp is a city unto itself with its own education and transportation systems, its own radio and television stations, its own banks and mosques, and its own library, hospital, and heliport. Security at the camp is high, because as an Aramco public relations officer put it: "There are ultraconservative people here who grate at the presence of foreigners and who are hostile to oil. They might do harm."

The Aramco compounds — there are several others nearby — have their own rules, their own culture. They aren't really a part of Saudi Arabia. Men and women work together; women are allowed to drive and are not required to wear ankle-length black abayas or hijabs covering their hair, as they must in public everywhere else in the country. It's as if Saudi culture itself can't penetrate the tight security — the fences, gates, and checkpoints — that surrounds the camps. People living in the camps are both isolated and protected from the Saudi Arabia that lies outside. The Aramco camps represent an unsettling fusion of two very different visions: an idealized American suburb of the 1950s, on the one hand, and a utopian community of cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, on the other. In the difficult balancing act between the two, the scales are definitely weighted in favor of American suburbia.

Aramcons, as Saudi Aramco employees refer to themselves, can be quite explicit about the nature of the community they inhabit. When they try to describe life in the camps, they stress the same qualities they would if they were describing life in small-town America. The camps are safe; you know your neighbors; they're good places to raise a family. Publicly at least, Aramcons almost always speak positively about Saudi Arabia, but they really don't live there. They sound enthusiastic about Saudi culture, but they never really experience it. One American expatriate, who had worked for Aramco for twenty years but never learned Arabic, referred to "this place" — the Aramco camp in Dhahran, not Saudi Arabia — as the "fifty-second state." The fifty-first, she explained, was Israel.

In the nearby cities of Damman and al-Khobar, the streets have Saudi names: Prince Talal Street, Omar ibn al-Khattab Street, and Gulf Cooperation Council Road. Inside the Aramco camp, they have American names: Geode Lane, Apple Street, and Easter Avenue. The walls and fences that surround the camp, like the desert beyond, are hidden from view by large green hedges. At points along the hedges, stand grottos of artificial rock; from the top flow cascades of recycled wastewater. Wide sidewalks run along quiet streets laid out in a neat pattern of rectangular blocks. Green, well-watered lawns with stands of tall palms and imported shade trees lead up to the front doors of modest single-story homes.

Early one morning before the heat of the day in May 2012, people were out walking, jogging, and riding bicycles. An American woman wearing a large sun hat and running clothes, her face flushed from power walking, told me how much she enjoyed living in Saudi Arabia. A few minutes later a professionally dressed Saudi woman expressed a very different perspective: "Saudi Arabia is a difficult place to live," she said, "especially for a woman. I like my independence." She didn't have a driver, she explained, so she was walking to the next corner to catch a bus to work.

Foreign workers were also out in force — Filipinos, Bangladeshis, and Pakistanis — sweeping the streets with long palm fronds, cutting the grass with power mowers, and just sitting on the curb talking. Each group wore a different color uniform — orange jump suits, blue overalls, or khaki pants and yellow shirts. Few of them spoke Arabic or English. They worked for companies owned by Saudis and managed by Arabs from Egypt or Lebanon. One Saudi I spoke with explained what he called this "caste system" with no hint of awkwardness or embarrassment. "Arabs are more expensive than Pakistanis," he said, "but the least expensive are Indians and Bangladeshis."

It's true. There are people from all over the world living in the Aramco camp in Dhahran. It is a cosmopolitan, multicultural community. People here all live in the same place, but their lives are separated by occupation, class, language, and culture. An American housewife, who doesn't know that the long white robes Saudi men wear are called thobes, walks along a sidewalk as a Bangladeshi worker sweeps leaf litter from the gutter nearby. Later that afternoon, when the call to prayer sounds, a Saudi man stops jogging and kneels down on the grass by the side of the road to pray. Members of three very different cultures living together, but yet apart.

Steineke Hall serves as a guesthouse for the Saudi Aramco Residential Camp in Dhahran. It's named in honor of Max Steineke, the American geologist whose persistence and determination led to the first major discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938. Well Number 7, "Prosperity Well," a local landmark, still stands nearby, a powerful symbol of the company's humble origins and its ultimate success. The laundry list for the dry cleaner that serves the guests at Steineke can accommodate clothes worn by people from all over the world: abayas, aprons, bathrobes, bishts (long robes worn by Arab men), blouses, coveralls, dresses, jackets, overcoats, pajamas, safari suites, saris, sarwalls (loose trousers from South Asia), scarves, shirts, skirts, slacks, slips, smocks, thobes, ties, T-shirts, and wool vests.

The channels available on the new flat-screen televisions in the guest rooms also meet the needs of a very cosmopolitan clientele: CNN, Fox News, and HBO from the United States; ABS-CBN, BRO, and IBC from the Philippines; CNBC Arabiya, Dubai Sports, and KSA 2 (the Saudi English-language channel); the BBC, CCTV from China, PTV from Pakistan, and Yemen TV; not to mention religious channels like Iqraa TV, which advertises itself as a "safe haven" for Muslim families around the world. One evening, a young Saudi waiting in the Steineke lounge was so upset by a romantic scene on an American movie that he went to speak to the Filipino clerks at the registration desk nearby. He warned them to monitor the television more carefully to make sure that nothing inappropriate was being shown.

A few blocks from Steineke Hall is the "commissary," the supermarket that serves camp residents. In addition to several Saudi newspapers in Arabic and English, a stand near the checkout counter has newspapers in many other languages and many different scripts: Al-Ahram from Egypt; Abante, a Tagalog tabloid from the Philippines; the Chandikra Daily and the Madhyaman Daily, two Malayalam newspapers from the state of Kerala in India; as well as USA Today and the International Herald Tribune. The cashier at the checkout counter couldn't tell me much about himself in his limited English — "Philippines ... twenty-three years ... budget ... sacrifice for children" — but the pain and loss his words couldn't fully convey were clear from the expression on his face.

A short walk in the other direction is Kings, the center of camp social life, where the Dhahran Recreation Library is located. Kings also has places to eat out — in public — a Chinese restaurant and an Olive Garden. Unlike like other restaurants in Saudi Arabia, neither provides separate seating areas for "men" and for "families." In addition, Kings has a coffee shop, an ice cream parlor, a bowling alley, a woman's exercise room, and one of Saudi Arabia's only movie theaters, where members of the Aramco community, men and women, can sit together and watch Aramco-approved films. These facilities surround an open area where Aramco's Little League teams used to play baseball, until camp managers made a controversial decision to turn the area into a small park where Saudi families could enjoy picnics on the lush green grass. According to one young Saudi I spoke with, Kings is "a very Saudi place," one of the most "Saudi" places in the whole camp.

Ar-Rabiya is the most exclusive residential area in the Aramco camp. Most Aramcons are provided housing on a rental basis only, but in ar-Rabiya senior executives can buy their own homes. In the past, most senior executives at Aramco were Americans, but this is no longer the case. Almost all the residents of ar-Rabiya now are Saudis. Their large houses are surrounded by beautifully landscaped yards full of flowering shrubs and trees — prices start at 400,000 dollars. Ar-Rabiya also has a fully staffed recreation hall that serves food and provides a space for informal social gatherings.

The Aramco school system is based on the American model and offers education for students through the ninth grade. At that point, Aramco employees receive an education allowance to send their children to high school anywhere in the world. Classes are taught in English, and several different foreign languages are offered. Hardly any American students take Arabic, because when they go off to boarding school, it's more important for them to speak French or Spanish. There are also several internationally accredited private schools located outside the Dhahran camp.

Unlike almost all other American Aramco employees, an African-American woman we met had sent her son to a Saudi school. She wanted him to learn Arabic and really experience Saudi culture. "People at Aramco were really upset with me," she said. "They couldn't understand why I wanted to send my son to a Saudi school. But the world doesn't revolve around the United States any more. I wanted to give him an advantage." Several years later her son converted to Islam.

In the center of the Dhahran camp is the Rolling Hills Golf Club, founded in 1948 when Aramco executives decided to build the first golf course in Saudi Arabia. The original course was constructed by soaking sand with oil to create a surface with the consistency of concrete. Golfers carried small mats of artificial turf from which they played their shots. In the 1990s, Aramco built a luxuriant eighteen-hole grass course, complete with water hazards and rows of shade trees — all made possible by the camp's ample supply of graywater. Nine holes are floodlit for night play.

Two other sports play an important role in life on the Aramco camps — baseball and riding. For many years Dhahran's Little League team represented the Middle East-Africa Region at the Little League World Series. The Dhahran camp also has a world-class equestrian center known as the Hobby Farm; it used to be a real farm where Arab farmers grew food for the American workers. The Chuckwagon, a popular restaurant there, serves chicken nuggets, "good ol' American cheeseburgers," and kabsa, a popular Saudi dish of chicken and rice. Visible from the Hobby Farm, down a road that runs outside the camp fence, is a small restaurant that is said to serve the best camel meat in the area. Aramcons enjoy many other recreational facilities: a gym, a swimming pool, and athletic fields, as well as tennis, squash, and racquetball courts. Less than an hour's drive away on the Gulf Coast is Half Moon Bay, where Aramco employees can go fishing, sailing, and water-skiing.

The camp dining hall is just around the corner from Steineke. It serves three meals a day to camp residents and other Aramco employees who work there. Food is served cafeteria style, and there are several dining areas that provide spaces for mixed-gender seating, as well as separate seating for men, women, and families. On the menu for breakfast are pastries, donuts, hard-boiled eggs, fruit salad, beef sausage, and beef bacon, as well as feta, olives, lentils, fava beans, and strained yoghurt, known as labna. Men in informal business attire sit at one table; men in long white thobes and red-and-white checkered shemaghs draped over their heads sit at another. Two young women wearing black abayas, niqabs covering their faces, and stylish sunglasses are paying for their meals at the cash register, while a man wearing a thobe and a baseball cap stands holding his tray looking for a place to sit down.

One morning at breakfast I sat with a man who told me he was from Qatif, one of the oldest and largest cities on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. I knew that most of the people from Qatif are Shia. He described the protests that had taken place there several months earlier. "The people of Qatif just want better lives," he said, but the Saudi police overreacted and several protesters were killed. Then he told me about something that had happened to him when he was a student at Texas A&M: an American attacked him with a baseball bat. "Hatred twists people's brains," he said softly.

Several days later I shared a meal with a group of five or six young Saudi men. One of them, who was of African descent, told me that when he lived in the United States he had experienced more prejudice because he was a Muslim than because he was black. We talked about the meaning of skin color in Saudi Arabia and some of the negative terms used to refer derogatorily to people with dark skin. The worst word was abd, which means slave. He told me that discrimination against Shia was a much greater problem than discrimination against people with dark skin.

"The problem with the Shia isn't religious," he said, "it's political. The government's afraid that the Saudi Shia support Iran."

"If you want to know what it's like to be Shia in Saudi, ask Hussein," he added, gesturing to a young man across the table. So I did. Hussein looked a little taken aback.

"Among young people, among my friends, there aren't any problems between Sunni and Shia," Hussein said. "But among the older generation, Shia are definitely discriminated against. A high-level executive would never hire a Shia as his assistant. Some companies actually have directives not to hire Shia for positions in management or security."

"It's good here," said Hussein after a short pause. "We can't criticize the king and the princes, but things are getting better. We have restrictions; we know that. But we're cool. We love our king; he's good to us. We're all the same now. We're all one people; we're all Muslims."

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Excerpted from Crossing the Kingdom by Loring M. Danforth. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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