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You still have to accept all the restrictive rules. “You know, high level,” he goes on, and involving only “fully educated” groups. “No backpacking stuff,” says Prince Sultan bin Salman, the tall and chatty former astronaut who is the president and chairman of the Saudi Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. But they aren’t opening their arms unless (with a few exceptions) you are part of a special tourist group. Now, six years later, the Saudis are trying yet again. Finally, belying the fact that Arabs consider hospitality a sacred duty, there was the no-loitering kicker: “All visitors to the Kingdom must have a return ticket.” After New York congressman Anthony Weiner kicked up a fuss, the anti-Semitic language on the Web site was removed. The site noted that visas would not be issued to an Israeli-passport holder, to anyone with an Israeli stamp on a passport, or, just in case things weren’t perfectly clear, to “Jewish people.” There were also “important instructions” for any woman coming to the kingdom on her own, advising that she would need a husband or a male sponsor to pick her up at the airport, and that she would not be allowed to drive a car unless “accompanied by her husband, a male relative, or a driver.” Needless to say, there would be no drinking allowed-Saudi officials even try to enforce no-drinking rules on private jets in Saudi airspace, sometimes sealing the liquor cabinets. The Web site of the resulting Supreme Commission for Tourism was “a disaster,” one Saudi official abashedly recalls, shaking his head. Three years after 9/11, in 2004, the Kingdom decided to give the tourism business another try, this time hiring a public-relations firm to get things rolling. Now, with bin Laden’s attacks, the bargain the royals struck with the fundamentalists-allowing anti-Western clerics and madrassas to flourish and not cracking down on those who bankroll al-Qaeda and terrorism-had borne its poison fruit. The royals doubled down on the deal when Islamic fundamentalists took over the Grand Mosque, in Mecca, in 1979. To this day the Koran is the constitution of Saudi Arabia, and Wahhabism its dominant faith. The warrior al-Sauds got religious legitimacy the anhedonic Wahhabis got protection. Back in 1744, the oasis-dwelling al-Saud clan had made a pact with Mohammad bin Abdul Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi sect, which took an especially strict approach to religious observance. The news cut to the very character of the Saudi state. But on 9/11 the passageway narrowed again as Saudi Arabia and the United States confronted the reality that Osama bin Laden and 15 of the 19 terrorist hijackers were Saudi nationals. Leslie McLoughlin, a fellow at the University of Exeter’s Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, led tours to the Kingdom in 20, and both groups included affluent and curious Jewish men and women from New York.
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The Saudis had already cracked open the door slightly for some degree of cultural tourism.
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He wanted to encourage more outside contact and to project an image other than one of religious austerity (with bursts of terrorism). Crown Prince Abdullah-now the king-was a radical modernizer by Saudi standards. Robert Lacey, the Jidda-based author of The Kingdom and Inside the Kingdom, explains that only when revenues from the hajj pilgrims fell drastically, during the Depression, did the Saudis allow infidel American engineers to enter the country and start exploring for oil.īefore 9/11, Saudi Arabia was in fact gearing up to welcome, or at least accept, a trickle of non-Muslim visitors, dropping a handkerchief to the world. Saudi Arabia has long kept not just its women but its very self behind a veil.
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But, for non-Muslims, it’s another story. Millions of Muslims flock to Mecca and Medina annually. Saudi Arabia is one of the premier pilgrimage sites in the world, outstripping Jerusalem, the Vatican, Angkor Wat, and every other religious destination, except for India’s Kumbh Mela (which attracts as many as 50 million pilgrims every three years). It’s the most bewitching, bewildering, beheading vacation spot you’ll never vacation in. No wonder they call this the Forbidden Country. So I can only see a dead woman if I’m a dead woman? “Women can be buried there,” he conceded, “but you are not allowed to go in and look into it.”