JEDDAH - One humid evening last Ramadan in the lush garden of a villa belonging to one of Jeddah's oldest merchant families, something once unheard of happened.
A select gathering of Saudi men and women sipped orange juice, fanned themselves and listened to a lecture attacking the country's austere brand of Islam known as Wahhabism.
It was delivered by Mr Sami Angawi, the self-proclaimed Sufi leader of the Hijaz. The region, which runs along the Red Sea, contains the two holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina.
While presenting a slide show, Mr Angawi told of how Wahhabism had eroded the historic Hijazi urban culture of tolerance and diversity.
Gasps of outrage were heard as one image showed the private house in Medina of the Prophet Muhammad in an advanced state of decay. The rubble was reduced to dust under the giant wheels of yellow bulldozers.
The climax of the slide show was a photograph of a beautiful Ottoman building in Medina. Its roof had just been crushed by the arm of a crane.
Then, on the left of the screen, an image appeared of the Buddha statues in Afghanistan being destroyed by the Taleban.
Finally, an image of the World Trade Center in flames slowly came into focus between the first two photographs.
Mr Angawi's message was clear: The roots of global Islamist terrorism can be traced back to the fanatical puritanism of the Bedouin zealots known as the Wahhabis.
The fact that 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers on Sept 11, 2001 were Saudis shook the historic oil-for-security deal that had stood since Feb 14, 1945 when the kingdom's founder, King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, met president Franklin Roosevelt on a US battleship in the Suez Canal.
Mr David Aufhauser, the Treasury Department's general counsel and the senior US official responsible for tracking terrorist financing, recently labelled Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi doctrine the epicentre of global terrorist funding.
Saudi Arabia's multibillion-dollar global spending on Wahhabi propaganda, he said, 'is a combustible compound when mixed with religious teachings in thousands of madrasahs (Islamic religious schools) that condemn pluralism and mark non-believers as enemies'.
Senators Jon Kyl and Charles Schumer subsequently accused Saudi Arabia of deceiving its American allies.
'The House of Saud has for decades played a double game with the United States, on the one hand acting as our ally, on the other supporting a movement - Wahhabism - that seeks our society's destruction,' they wrote in an article published in the Washington Post last August.
It's not surprising then that Mr Angawi and other anti-Wahhabi Saudis have been accused by hardliners of having a pro-American agenda.
They have been condemned on Islamist websites as infidels, and self-appointed Wahhabi clerics have issued religious fatwas against them.
Yet they have hope in the ruling House of Saud itself. Crown Prince Abdullah, a reformist, took over the day-to-day running of the government in 1995 when his half-brother, King Fahd, suffered a stroke.
Early last year, a visit by the Crown Prince to a slum in a Riyadh suburb was broadcast live on Saudi television. It focused public attention on deprivation and inequality as never before.
The day after the visit, newspapers ran a picture of an elderly man in his shabby house, a finger pointing at Prince Abdullah's face as he lectured the leader on the hardships of hundreds of thousands of Saudis.
This image has come to define a new era in which social issues are openly debated. Not since the days of Prince Abdullah's father, King Abdul Aziz, has a Saudi leader seemed so at ease among his people, and so willing to listen.
Wahhabism's origins can be traced to the back-to-basics ideals of an 18th-century scholar, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab. His birthplace, Najd, is also the ancestral home of the Al-Saud dynasty.
The Al-Saud family and the descendants of Abdul Wahhab have ruled the kingdom in an uneasy partnership for seven decades.
Followers of Abdul Wahhab, the ikhwan or brotherhood, had fought alongside the Al-Saud dynasty to help it conquer the land that was unified as Saudi Arabia in 1932.
In Taif in the 1920s, for example, the Wahhabis carried out a slaughter of what they called the 'little infidels' of the Hijaz despite protests from King Abdul Aziz.
Some in Mr Angawi's audience were old enough to recall the carnage. Their sons and daughters, grandsons and granddaughters - wearing modest but colourful traditional Hijazi dresses instead of the all-enveloping black gown of the Najd - have grown up with stories about Wahhabi massacres in Taif.
In 1931, the king also put down a rebellion in the eastern Hasa region by a group of ikhwan leaders.
The rebels considered the king insufficiently Islamic because he had allowed the Shi'ite minority to practise their rites in private and had signed security pacts with Britain, the main colonial power in the region.
So King Abdul Aziz made a pact with less fanatical Wahhabis who still make up the religious establishment. It allowed the Al-Saud dynasty to run the government and take care of the budget, national security and foreign policy.
In return, the Wahhabis were permitted to impose a strictly interpreted Islamic social order and run the education and judicial systems according to their principles.
The king was using the Wahhabi doctrine to pacify a diverse and often rebellious people spread across a largely desert country the size of western Europe.
But since Sept 11, the Al-Saud family has faced calls for change, not just from reform-minded Saudis in the Hijaz but also from the kingdom's many other aggrieved constituents, not least the tribes from the south.
Forty to 60 per cent of nearly 20 million Saudi subjects still identify strongly with a tribe.
'Tribe and family form the genetic map of Saudi society,' said Mr Mamoun Fandy, a member of the US Institute for Peace and a specialist on Saudi affairs. 'Everything else comes second. Whoever has the tribes in Saudi Arabia is the winner.'
The southern region of Asir, a remote mountainous land near Yemen, is still defined by its tribal culture more than any other region in Saudi Arabia. That region is where most of the Sept 11 hijackers came from.
Many of them have been eager recruits for Osama bin Laden because he shares their Yemeni-Saudi tribal roots.
Like him, they resent being ruled by a clan that they believe does not enforce its Islamic authority with sufficient rigour and, in many cases, lives by double standards.
One Asir tribe, the million-strong Al-Ghamdi, had an especially central role in Sept 11 and subsequent Al-Qaeda operations in Saudi Arabia. It produced four or five of the hijackers, and the cave in Afghanistan where the plan was hatched was named 'Al-Ghamdi house'.
When Osama wrote a poem praising the tribes of Asir, he made special mention of the Al-Ghamdis. The man visiting him in the video in which he reflects on the 'victory' of Sept 11 was called Sheik Al-Ghamdi.
Three or four from the Al-Qaeda cell that carried out the May 12 attacks in Riyadh last year were Al-Ghamdis, including the purported mastermind, Ali Abdul Rahman Al-Faqaasi Al-Ghamdi.
However, when his surrender was announced by the state-run Saudi Press Agency, Ali Al-Ghamdi's tribal name was omitted. Following protocol, none of the Saudi newspapers carried it the next day.
Instead, for the next month, they ran official statements and photographs showing tribal leaders from the Hijaz and Asir meeting Prince Abdullah and Interior Minister Prince Naif in Taif, the site of the Wahhabi massacres in the 1920s.
In almost identical speeches, all the tribal leaders pledged loyalty to the kingdom and its 'wise leadership'. The fact remains that Prince Abdullah is in a minority among the upper echelons of the royal family. Most of its senior members are closely aligned with the kingdom's religious establishment.
While King Fahd remains alive, Prince Abdullah does not have sufficient authority and support to carry through a reform programme.
From the time of King Abdul Aziz, the Saudi state has been characterised by a system of patronage and subsidies: first to tribal and religious leaders, then in the form of a generous welfare state.
However, most Saudis who came of age in the 1990s can no longer look to the state for support. The government can no longer afford to provide it. Per capita annual income is now US$8,000 (S$13,544), compared with US$24,000 in the 1980s. Newspapers are full of stories about substandard medical care.
Unemployment is as high as 30 per cent. And there are places for only 30,000 high school graduates in the six universities each year, though as many as 300,000 may have the qualifying grades.
The outside world is analysing how Sept 11 challenged the 60-year-old US-Saudi 'special relationship'. But it has remained largely unaware of the extent to which it also increased the pressures on those fragile internal alliances - religious, tribal and regional - already threatened by economic hardship.
By the beginning of last year, the word 'reform' was again on everybody's lips. A wide range of interest groups, from the most Western to the most traditional Islamic, sensed the time was right to push for change. So did Islamic radicals committed to overthrowing the royal family.
These groups included Hijazis like Mr Angawi, persecuted Shi'ites in the Eastern Province, emboldened Sunni Islamists, and businessmen, journalists and academics suffocating under bureaucratic constraints and censorship.
It was Prince Abdullah who, once again, took the initiative. This time, he accepted a petition signed by 104 prominent Saudi businessmen, intellectuals, academics and moderate Islamists.
It called for a new social contract based on the ideals of Islamic democracy and, eventually, constitutional rule.
Yet it would be hard to imagine a country in which the leaders are more out of touch with the people. Up to 60 per cent of the population is aged under 21, while all its leaders are over 70.
Those leaders had at least been able to enjoy beyond their borders the respect that oil wealth could buy. But that too changed after Sept 11.
The Saudis suffered a devastating loss of status on the world stage. Young Saudis studying and living outside the kingdom returned home complaining of the hatred and discrimination they had experienced as a result of the Osama connection, especially in the US.
After Sept 11, with rising resentment among ordinary Saudis at what they saw as a campaign against Islam in the Western media, the House of Saud found itself caught between a rock and a hard place - between maintaining its ties with the US and pacifying an increasingly unstable and anti-American domestic constituency.
The inherent contradiction in the Al-Saud dual pact in the 1940s, with the Wahhabis on one side and the US on the other, had finally come home to roost.
