Abdulrahman Alsadhan: A Saudi "David Copperfield"

By Richard H. Curtiss

A few years ago I listened as a Washington, DC after-dinner speaker described the thoughtfulness of a Saudi government official who had interrupted a business trip to travel to Montana to visit the speaker's aging father, who was worried about his son living in far-away Saudi Arabia. "My Saudi friend thought it might make my father feel better to meet a real Saudi," the speaker explained. "And it certainly did."

It sounds like the sort of warm, spontaneous thing my friend, Abdulrahman Alsadhan, would do, I mused. Only at the end of the talk did I learn that the speaker's friend was, in fact, my friend, the secretary general of Saudi Arabia's Civil Service Board.

A man who speaks English as easily as Arabic, yet never heard a word of the language until he was 12 years old, Abdulrahman Alsadhan's personal story mirrors his country's modem history. As a child, he had to drop out of elementary school because the four-mile round trip on foot from his village to the school in the town of Ablia in the mountainous Asir province was destroying his health.

Yet, only a few years later, he graduated from an intermediate school in Riyadh, the national capital, with the highest test score of any student in the entire Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Three years later, he repeated the feat, graduating with the highest marks of any high school student in the nation, and thus qualifying for a Saudi government scholarship at an American university.

Today he is the secretary general of the Kingdom's Civil Service Board, which codifies the laws governing the bureaucracy that is supervising his country's transition, within one generation, from a pre-industrial society to a major world economic power.

Abdulrahman Alsadhan visits the United States at least once a year, and plays an important role in the people-to-people diplomacy that underpins a relationship vital to both counties. Incredibly, he is haunted by the feeling that in establishing himself both as an influential official and a nationally prominent media commentator, he has always been "too serious, " and does not devote enough time to keeping up personal relationships with old and new friends.

The story of this warm and optimistic man whose personal empathy reaches out and embraces people from all walks of life in two vastly different cultures, is as complex as a novel by Charles Dickens. It begins with the unlikely union between his parents.

His father was a merchant from the Nejd, who traveled the country by camel from the northern desert plateau which, in this century, produced austere men of bedouin traditions hard enough and bold enough to unify the vast Arabian Peninsula. Abdulrahman Alsadhan's mother is from the Asir province, a mountainous area of tiny agricultural villages perched on the flanks of southern mountains that rise abruptly from the desert plains to the eternally cool plateaus of the Yemen. This is the Arabia Felix (Happy Arabia) that the Romans never stopped trying to conquer.

His parents divorced when he was very young. His memories begin after his mother had remarried. This period, when he walked daily from his grandparents' village to the elementary school in town, stopping for an after-school meal with his mother every day on his way home, he remembers as a strange mixture of idyllic rural life and urban striving for an education that eventually wore him down.

A Shepherd or a Scholar?

When he dropped out of school he became a shepherd. He read and memorized his Qur'an, the basis of village schooling in those days, and then, while his sheepdog; kept the flock from straying off land belonging to his mother's clan, he practiced writing letters. Eventually, the extrovert within him prevailed over the embryonic scholar, and he left the solitude of the herd to work with his cousins in the fields. While he enjoyed the sociability, he missed his books. In a village with no electricity, sleeping at nightfall and then going back into the fields at daylight left little time for reading.

He therefore arranged to join a caravan to Jizan, the Red Sea port to which his father had moved. To keep him from falling, the tiny boy was tied by the caravaneers into a saddle they improvised on a camel loaded with the agricultural products of the interior. After six days of traveling through the cool of the night and resting in whatever shade he could find in the heat of the day, he joined his father in Jizan and soon was enrolled in school there.

The remainder of his pre-teen years were spent shuttling between families. His mother meanwhile had had three more children, but she grieved in his absence. Each time he rejoined her family, however, he in turn pined for the schools, books and libraries which had become his obsession. He would rejoin his peripetetic father, who meanwhile had six more children by a second marriage and who continued to move from town to town.

Finally, there was a year with a brother in Zahle, Lebanon, in a boarding school run by Irish teachers. Horrified at having to deal with instruction in English, a language he had never even heard spoken, young Abdulrahman literally "arrived in tears."

A year later his father, who at age 50 had become a government employee, eventually settling in Riyadh, sent for his sons to leave Lebanon and join him. This time Abdulrahman "left in tears " at the thought of leaving behind the library and the orderly life of which his chaotic childhood had deprived him. To this day he is compulsively neat. A great deal of paperwork crosses his desk daily, but he is visibly bothered if even one item remains undealt with at the end of the day.

Settling in 1956 in the national capital, from his 13th year onward he began "a sort of a stable life. " His father proved to be a stern taskmaster. Young Abdulrahman was expected to study three hours a day, six days a week, after coming home from school. On Fridays, when there was no school, he studied at home. Even his daily after-school meetings with friends in the orchards and fields outside the then mud-walled city of Riyadh was for the purpose of study.

"We took books, and although we sometimes spent part of the afternoon just talking, " Alsadhan says, "we read and exchanged the books like the rarest of treasures."

As he recalls those days, "when life was totally different from life in our country today, " he is sitting at his large desk in a wall-to-wall carpeted office in the modern civil service building. Along with one unsigned paper just delivered to his desk, however, there is a stack of books he has received just that morning from a bookseller, most of them Arabic translations of books published in the United States and Europe.

His voracious reading provides the basis for his weekly column of commentary in Al Yamania, one of Saudi Arabia's leading intellectual magazines, along with a steady stream of articles in daily newspapers.

It was his suddenly stabilized life in the national capital, plus this obsessive reading, that facilitated Abdulrahman Alsadhan's extraordinary scholastic record, and fostered journalistic talents as well. While still in high school he began producing a weekly page centered on youth concerns for Al Qassim, an early and prestigious Saudi newspaper.

A Drive to Excel

"I think it was the insecurity of my early years that drove me to try to excel at anything I undertook," he explains. "Sometimes I fantasize about what I might have accomplished if my education had begun much earlier. Before he died in 1984, however, I told my father that it was probably the hardships of my early years, which were very hard for him as well, that made me whatever I have become today."

Characteristically, this successful official and his wife still travel about once a month to spend a weekend with his mother, siblings and cousins in Ablia.

In the US, Abdulrahman Alsadhan was placed first by the Saudi Embassy's student affairs section into full-time English language courses at the University of Southern California. Initially, he took an apartment with other Saudi students. Soon, to their annoyance, he moved into a large house which a Los Angeles family had divided into individual rooms for student boarders. As a result, whenever he was at home he was speaking English with his landlord's family.

He passed the language examination in about half the time normally allotted for the purpose and stayed at USC for courses in government. Still he shunned the group houses frequented by the many Saudi students at USC. Instead, he took a tiny apartment just off campus, and, in his words, I endured the horrors of eating my own cooking for the first time in my life."

When most of his Saudi fellow students went home for the first summer, he quietly moved into a room rented from an American family in Santa Monica, took courses in French, and spent most of his time out of school conversing in English with his American hosts. His mastery of English, perfected in years of daily interaction with Americans, is total.

Abdulrahman Alsadhan returned to Saudi Arabia in 1968 after taking his BA with honors. He debated whether to take a job for a year or continue graduate work. His grades had been extraordinary and the Saudi government encouraged him to continue his studies at any university of his choice. He decided to return to USC, and took his MA in 1970. The Saudi government is extremely generous with its students abroad, paying their tuition and books and, at that time, a living allowance of $260 a month. He nevertheless took two minimum-wage jobs, first in the faculty center and then in the university library. The first job also provided a free lunch and the second "bought gas for the car I had acquired. "

The four hours per weekday and six hours on Saturdays and Sundays "improved my English, introduced me to the psychology of working, and even enabled me to send money home to my mother," he explains.

At USC, he served several times on the board of the Saudi Student Organization, usually as treasurer. He also was elected foreign student representative to the university's student government organization.

In 1970, he returned to Riyadh, where he took a job teaching at the Institute of Public Administration, the training academy for civil servants.

In 1976, he transferred to the Royal Diwan (the king's executive office), and the next year he was put in charge of day-to-day operations of an organization to codify civil service rules and regulations, which became the Civil Service Board. He has held the position for 15 years.

After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he was asked to join an 11-person "Saudi friendship delegation. " The group split into two- and three-person teams to talk to American audiences in nine different areas.

He was able to visit Southern California, where he looked up old American friends as well as participating in meetings with American audiences on military bases, in churches and mosques, and before a variety of groups, including Arab-American organizations. Upon return of the group to Saudi Arabia, he was asked to prepare a report to the Saudi government assessing the entire mission.

Never Too Little or Too Late

"Many criticized the mission as too little and too late." he notes. "In my opinion, when we set out to do something that important, it is never too little and never too late. "

He recommended that Saudis continue such missions, even after the Gulf crisis, because "not many people understand what we are doing. " He explains:

"We belong to different religions, yet there are basic things we all subscribe to such as respect for human life and respect for human rights. We have embarked on a very ambitious plan to use our resources for the development of our national life and for the betterment of individuals. We don't want that momentum to be interrupted. Just as we don't tell others how to conduct themselves, we want to be left to do things our way. When we want advice, and often we do, we'll ask for it."

He hopes participants in the next Saudi mission thank Americans "for doing a marvelous job and for becoming the champions of peace in the area. " He continues: "We are hoping that America will utilize this momentum to correct the misgivings in this region by addressing itself more responsibly and more consistently to the resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a manner acceptable to the Palestinians.

"If America commits itself to the cause of peace in the area, and if America uses its prestige, its power, its wealth and, above all, its moral power to bring about a solution to the agonies of the Palestinians, then I think that this will erase so many negative beliefs that have resulted from past practices of past US administrations. I can see many indications that America actually is embarking on such a course. I have every reason to believe that President Bush is about to begin an aggressive and a positive role in attempting to reach an honorable solution. We hope for it and we pray for it."

Summing up the recently completed Saudi friendship mission in which he played such a prominent role, Alsadhan says it was "a good exercise, a good experience, and we managed to capture some attention." It is a typically optimistic and understated assessment from a man who owes his legion of friends to that congenital optimism, and whose own remarkable personal accomplishments cannot possibly be overstated.

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.