Riyadh, Saudi Arabia - When Saudi intellectuals got together this month to discuss reforming the education system, they needed armed security officers to protect them.
"Some people said they were going to teach me a lesson here," Abdullah al-Ghodami declared defiantly, challenging the Islamists attending a seminar in Riyadh.
"I want a lesson now then -- I'm a pupil waiting for this lesson," he told the hall where police officers lined the walls, keeping an eye on the roomful of hardline sheikhs and their supporters, sporting beards and loose-fitting head-dresses.
The Islamists were on the lookout for liberals who they fear are advancing in a plan to compromise the integrity of what they consider to be Saudi Arabia's Islamic Utopia -- a country which lives by uncompromising rules of public morality.
Mobilising their troops through the Internet to attend Ghodami's speech, they had promised to "teach him a lesson".
Ghodami is famed for promoting the use of the word "modernity" in Arabic, to the disapproval of Saudi conservatives who believe the word implies Western values, which they oppose.
The soft-spoken writer is typical of the oil-producing kindgom's small but increasingly prominent liberal elite, who appear to have the ear of top Saudi royals.
At the seminar, he addressed the sensitive subject of reforming the religion-heavy education syllabus -- a topic that goes to the heart of the acrimonious divide between Islamists and those who label themselves reformers.
"We don't have to take the question of changing education syllabuses so sensitively and use charged terms (to attack each other)," Ghodami told the gathering. "The syllabus right now is not good enough, so please don't defend it," he beseeched.
When the seminar was over, the security officers clustered in front of the podium to prevent any trouble, and the speakers made a quick exit, speeding away in their cars.
TENSE ATMOSPHERE
Although reforms appear to be moving at a snail's pace, the tone of debate between the Islamists and liberals has sharpened since King Abdullah, a supporter of cautious political and economic reform, took power in the U.S. ally last year.
Overruling clerical fears of corrupting foreign influence, Saudi Arabia has joined the World Trade Organisation, women were allowed to vote in elections to professional organisations, and state television is now packed with women presenters.
"Our preachers were able to follow the secularists and block them... but now the secularists are marching on their path to Westernise the country," lamented Abu Lujain Ibrahim, a prominent hardline Islamist writing in an Islamist chatroom.
Education is just one area where Islamists see Western influence creeping in, with the help of a fifth column of Saudis whom they attack regularly as "Bani Alman" -- the secular tribe.
Washington has pressed Saudi Arabia to change the school syllabus which, with its demonisation of non-Muslim Westerners as "infidels", helped create a social mindset that produced 15 of the 19 militants who attacked U.S. cities on Sept. 11.
Western diplomats say religion still accounts for a third of daily education Saudi teenagers receive, and Saudi officials say it will take years to completely revamp the system.
Many Islamists, like Sheikh Mohammed al-Farraj, say the reformists are in cahoots with the West. They argue that a country that implements Islamic sharia law and lives by the Sunna, or "way of the Prophet" -- the essence of Sunni Islam -- needs no lessons from foreigners.
"We don't want reform imposed from outside, it can only come from inside," Farraj told the seminar. "But unfortunately, sometimes there are voices inside the kingdom who act in harmony with those outside, and this worries us."
Hidden from view, academic Hind al-Khuthaila offered her thoughts from a room next-door. Saudi's ultraorthodox version of Islam, called Wahhabism, prevents men and women who are not related from mixing together.
"What got us to this point where we need a security cordon in order to talk about culture and society?" she asked, her voice filtered into the hall through a public address system.
LITMUS TEST?
The question of whether women should be allowed to drive is emerging as a litmus test of how far social reforms can go.
The Interior Ministry refuses to license women drivers because Islamic scholars say driving is a physical activity that conflicts with women's divinely ordained role as homemakers, and that freedom to drive could lead to illicit relations with men.
Information Minister Iyad Madani -- seen as a reformer who is close to the king -- last month encouraged women to lobby traffic departments, saying there was no formal legal ban.
Most women would not dare drive for fear of the religious police, who patrol the streets, and also because the informal ban is so socially ingrained, especially in the larger cities.
Some key scholars have started to talk positively about easing restrictions on Saudi society -- such as allowing cinema -- but so far none have publicly backed letting women drive.
Lawmaker Mohammed al-Zulfi has led calls in the consultative Shura council to take action. He says he was surrounded by angry Islamists at one of the recent debates because of his opinions.
"I told them the Koran and the Sunna do not prevent it, and not allowing women to drive creates more social problems than preventing them," Zulfi told Reuters.
"The paroxysms of anger these people go into don't help the matter. They are a minority who are very loud, and they are tense now because of the open atmosphere (for debate)."