We attended our first Christian service together in Saudi Arabia at the American Embassy. A Presbyterian air force chaplain preached the sermon. His message was entitled, "Why I Believe in Infant Baptism." For Al, only three days in the kingdom, it was a jarring reminder that he was in for some surprises. I, Al's wife for only three weeks, was less upset. I had lived in Saudi Arabia for most of the last twenty years and was aware of the uniqueness of the place!

Al soon learned about the restrictive religious culture of Saudi Arabia. Expatriate Christians meet for worship on Fridays at various embassies, the only legal places for Christian worship. Although there are many underground house groups, there are no visible churches in Saudi Arabia. All religions other than Islam are proscribed. Openly carrying a Bible on the street can get you expelled from the kingdom on twenty-four hours' notice. Or jailed. Or fined, if you are lucky.

Now that the Taliban have been routed, Saudi Arabia is almost certainly the most intolerant and religiously reactionary kingdom on earth. One cannot call it a nation; it really is a kingdom, ruled by a feudal royal family whose possession of power is rooted in oil and Islam. In terms of their hold on power, Islam is more important than oil. Thus, the king's official title is "Protector of the Two Holy Mosques."

The royal family governs, not by suffrage-there has never been an election in Saudi Arabia-but by an arrangement with a group of 200 imams who are the direct descendants of the great eighteenth-century Arabian, the imam Wahhab. In about 1760 Wahhab entered into an alliance with the Al Saud royal family, giving the Al Sauds the right to govern as long as they were willing to promote and protect his particularly rigid and austere form of Islam. This 250-year-old compact is still in force today and is the basis for the royal family's grip on power.

Clearly the vast oil income has been very useful to Islam, for the Al Saud family is the most lavish donor to Islam in the world today. Last year when Crown Prince Abdullah traveled to North Africa and Latin America, he dedicated numerous mosques, which his family's beneficence had built. The worldwide evangelistic effort of Islam is largely funded by the Saudis in support of conservative Wahhabism.

Saudi society is saturated by Islamic rules and practice. Five times a day the loudspeakers in the minarets call people to prayer. All shops, schools, factories, gas stations close; everything but traffic stops for the half hour of the prayer time. Mosques are being built on almost every street corner so that no one needs to walk more than five minutes from home to pray. Religious police from the "Presidency for the Protection of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" prowl the streets in GMC Suburbans, watching for infractions of religious rules.

In most ways Saudi Arabia is more like sixteenth-century Reformation Europe than like modern-day western culture. As modern-day Anabaptists, we mused endlessly on what it means to be followers of Jesus in Saudi Arabia. We asked, for example, what is the content of the "good news" in a society where religion and state are one, and where total intolerance of all religions but Islam is enforced with draconian vigilance? Should we mimic George Blaurock and enter our neighborhood mosque for prayer? Should we write letters to the editor of the English-language daily Arab News and challenge the Saudi-Islamic gender apartheid?

There was never a lack of opportunity to discuss religious questions with Saudis. We were witnessed to continuously. A story Al loves to tell illustrates the forms such witness often takes.

"On the last day of our stay in Saudi Arabia I needed to run an errand. It was a hot day, 125 degrees Fahrenheit. After walking a block or two I realized I would not be able to make it on foot so I hailed a taxi. As I got in I complained about the heat. The taxi driver immediately wanted to know whether I was a Christian and if I had read the Koran. Learning that I had been reading the Koran, he wanted to know what I thought about it. Did I agree with the Koran?

"Knowing that I had my exit visa safely at the apartment, I made bold to say that I did not find the Koran as interesting as the Bible, and that I especially disliked the Koranic understanding of women. For the rest of the trip the driver lectured me on the true place of women in the scheme of things, and when I got out he said, 'When you got into the cab you complained of the heat. You should know that unless you submit to the teachings of Allah in the Koran you will burn in hell and it is 170 degrees hotter in hell than it is here in Riyadh today.' "

There are many areas where Anabaptism could inform and become good news for Saudis. It would end the outrageous gender apartheid practiced against women in Saudi Arabia. Women have no legal rights, and almost no opportunity for self-development. Another would be to end capital punishment; two hundred fifty people a year are decapitated for various capital crimes each year in the public squares of Riyadh and Jeddah.

Above all, it would end the corrupting assumption that "might makes right." Almost all relationships in Saudi society are based on the dependency of the most powerless on persons more powerful. Power for self-aggrandizement is a fundamental norm of the Saudi social system. Most human beings are tempted by materialistic gratification, but in Saudi society there are almost no norms which at least call into question such an ethic. The meager two-percent tithe, which is one of the five pillars of Islam, is a minor challenge to self-gratification.

Anabaptism could help Saudi believers transform their communal (tribal) identities from ethnocentric ("my tribe right or wrong") to embrace new forms of community which transcend and therefore transform the meaning and practice of their communal ethic. Most of all, Wahhabi Islam needs the transformation of divine grace, and the substitute of agape for the strict, austere legalism of rewards and punishments which lies at the heart of Islam. The remote Allah must become the Allah of love and shalom, the exemplar of forgiveness and reconciliation.

Our challenge in Saudi Arabia was not unlike the dilemma of sixteenth-century Anabaptism: How to build a visible church in a society where no visible church is tolerated? But we are not sixteenth-century Anabaptists; we are circumspect twenty-first-century middle-class Mennonites. Saudi Arabia made us face the reality of how remarkably our understanding of faith requires a culture of tolerance and freedom. In the absence of tolerance and freedom, deliberate acts of kindness, personal witness, and a devotional piety became our modus operandi: Christ in us and through us.