Reviews
The Economist
A QUARTER of a century after he published his first book on Saudi Arabia, “The Kingdom”, Robert Lacey returned to the country to write a sequel. He stayed for almost three years and seems to have talked to virtually everyone—princes and commoners, businessmen and bloggers—spending hours drinking tiny cups of coffee in cushion-lined reception rooms. The second book is richer, more considered and more damning than the first.
Picking up pretty much where he left off, Mr Lacey concentrates on the past 30 years, during which the kingdom experienced the cumulative effects of a succession of crises. First came the annus horribilis of 1979. An Islamic revolution toppled the shah in next-door Iran, an armed group led by a zealot called Juhayman took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca to proclaim the advent of the Muslim messiah, and the Soviet bear blundered into Afghanistan—events that heralded or hastened the apparently unstoppable rise of worldwide Islamic militancy.
If the 1980s were turbulent, worse was to come. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in the summer of 1990 prompted the Saudi monarch, King Fahd, to invite half-a-million infidel (mainly American) troops onto his soil. It was not only Osama bin Laden who inveighed against the “crusader” armies, spreading “like locusts” through the holy land of Arabia. For Saudi Islamists, their arrival was akin to colonisation and it provoked a fierce, and eventually violent, backlash against the House of Saud. Mr bin Laden and his ilk were set on the road that led to the biggest crisis of all, that of September 11th 2001. Your reviewer knows of no book that captures so convincingly the intimate connection between the kingdom and the rise of al-Qaeda and its jihadist ideology. Indeed, Mr Lacey argues that without the Saudi role the September 11th attacks would have been inconceivable.
All these events have been chronicled elsewhere, but what distinguishes Mr Lacey’s account is his use of Saudi voices—many of them, even in this most reticent of cultures, on the record—to anatomise a deeply rooted culture of intolerance. They describe how Juhayman and his followers, who in some ways were forerunners of al-Qaeda, huddled anxiously together to decide whether the Prophet would have approved of television (excoriated as the work of the devil), football (frowned on if the players wore short shorts) and banknotes (deemed idolatrous since they bore the portrait of the king). A former militant, Mansour al-Nogaidan, who in his youth burnt down a video store, tells Mr Lacey of his vilification when he recanted and took his erstwhile friends to task for their blinkered reading of the holy texts.
The voices of the victims are especially poignant. Mr Lacey talks to a woman university teacher and newspaper columnist who was held incommunicado by the mubahith (secret police) for three months because she was suspected, wrongly, of belonging to an underground group. He provides a fascinating account of how exiled members of the Shia minority, long persecuted as infidels and agents of Iran, negotiated with King Fahd to come in from the cold. He sheds a revealing light on what he calls “the principal Saudi battlefield—the battle of the sexes”. He portrays the misery and isolation of Saudi women who, despairing of their menfolk’s insensitivity, often turn to female companionship and sometimes lesbianism.
Mr Lacey conveys the simple, homely character of the current ruler, King Abdullah, relaxing on his farm with his horses or splashing with grandchildren in his swimming pool. At the same time he sees the king as a genuine if unlikely reformer, doing his best to bring about social and educational change and soften the edges of unreconstructed Wahhabism. It is an indulgent portrait but tinged with the realisation that the task is probably more than a man in his mid-80s, however well intentioned, can pull off.
This compelling book has one main shortcoming. Although Mr Lacey is well informed, the political analysis is sometimes naive. He sticks rather too closely to the cliché of a moderate House of Saud struggling to hold back the tide of extremism. This fails to take into account the complex ways in which members of the ruling family have used religion not only to confront their regional rival, Iran, but as a weapon in their own princely power struggles.
Copyright © 2009 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.
Literary Review
Sapphic Saudis
by Michael Burleigh
Most people probably have a dark mental picture of Saudi Arabia. It might include the segregation and seclusion of women; public beheadings; fanatical and ignorant Wahhabi clerics; the majority of the 9/11 hijackers; and Osama bin Laden, the most notorious Saudi of all time. We are reminded of the grimness every time we see the brave BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner on the news, paralysed from the waist down after narrowly surviving a cold-blooded murder attempt by jihadis in Riyadh in June 2004. The Saudis are unpopular in many poor countries like Ethiopia, where they imagine they can simply rent the local women like 4x4s or camels. In Europe and the US, at least outside a narrow society of arms dealers, thoroughbred enthusiasts and oil men, their 'Louis-Farouk' vulgarity was once mocked and resented; nowadays every Saudi is viewed as a potential terrorist. My own perceptions of the place have been shaped by two brothers-in-law who worked there for three years in the 1980s. A colleague of theirs had a nervous breakdown, from which he has never recovered, after being sodomised in a police station following a minor traffic altercation with one of the locals, who had greater wasta (or 'pull') than a foreigner.
The royal biographer Robert Lacey published The Kingdom in 1981. This was immediately banned in Saudi Arabia, after Lacey refused to emend passages dealing with the 1964 forced abdication of King Saud in favour of the prime minister and regent Faisal. The author says he did not return there for a quarter century, finally relenting so as to live in Saudi for the three years it took to research this beautifully written and thought-provoking update of his earlier book. It does not give one the slightest desire to visit the kingdom, but it does make the place less monochromatic than many Westerners probably imagine it, chiefly by some deft telling of individual Saudi stories and the insertion of some good Saudi jokes. The only minor criticism is that the helot army of foreigners who, with the exception of the industrious eastern Shias, do the hard graft in the kingdom, scarcely get a mention, except when the occasional Afghan is beheaded pour encourager les autres (Filipinos and Pakistanis).
Three themes are especially well handled. Lacey has a very good feel for the Anglo-Saxon aetheling structure of the ramified ruling dynasty, whereby the most competent, rather than the most senior, prince generally gets to the top, nowadays the octogenarian King Abdullah. Blood kinship is everything, and the princes are obsessed with their status, jostling to ensure that they are in precisely the right place in any line-up. Some of these men have nearly bankrupted a country in which there is no clear distinction between them as public and private individuals. If they want to travel they can bump every passenger off the jets of the national carrier. When in London or Monte Carlo they will hand out hundreds of mobile phones to their entourages, with the Saudi exchequer picking up the huge bills for calls home. Others are more austere, ordering retrenchment and sacking useless ministers appointed only by virtue of nepotism. Abdullah seems a relatively modest fellow, who travels by coach and likes a game of boules (which he always wins). He spends his days watching what his subjects are viewing on banks of TVs tuned to each channel, turning up the sound to note what is being said on discussion or phone-in programmes, while more technologically with-it flunkeys monitor the Internet. Like earlier reforming Saudi monarchs, he allows hope to spring eternal regarding such issues as women driving cars (custom, rather than law, forbids this) or limited consultative democracy, but little or nothing ever results. There is much talk of reform, but nothing of much substance seems to result from it.
Saudi Arabia is the product of a deal between the Saud dynasty and the Wahhabi clergy, until a decade ago epitomised by the blind Sheikh Abdul Aziz Bin Baz, the senior religious leader. He denied that American astronauts had landed on the moon, although he had to change his tune when a Saudi went along for the ride, but he still havered over whether the Earth was flat. Lacey is good on the pretensions of the clergy, who have their own cane-wielding religious police, which before 9/11 threatened to get out of control until the dynasty reminded them that they 'were not among those who govern'. Saudi Arabia is not like republican Iran, where the Shia ayatollahs ultimately rule, and so long as the Sauds survive, things are likely to stay that way. Although Lacey avoids the subject, this makes the dynasty responsible for the flood of clerical anti-Semitic propaganda, for who else pays the clerics' salaries and bankrolls the huge infrastructure of Wahhabism?
If the dynasty seems to have strengthened its grip on the clerics, it has also belatedly woken up to the local threat of the 'Angry Faces' it otherwise encouraged in Afghanistan. The ubiquitous Mabahith secret police and the army have killed a large number of Saudi jihadists, while the radicalised small fry are put through a deprogramming regime at the end of which they get a car, a wife, a TV and fridge, which seems to make them smiley. Although he does not pursue the matter at any length, Lacey has suggestive things to say about how sexual frustration and chronic unemployment may have contributed to the large number of Saudi holy warriors. Unfortunately he allows himself to be diverted into the byway (so to speak) of why lesbianism is rampant in the kingdom. Women spend a lot of time alone together, while men are bullies and brutes, naturally the products of over-indulgent mothers.
Lacey is also informative about why the US-Saudi relationship is not so special any longer, after the heyday of the First Gulf War and Prince Bandar's capers with Bush Snr, Powell and Schwarzkopf. Nowadays, Saudi Arabia buys most of its weaponry from China and Russia, or Britain, rather than the US. The kingdom ranks alongside Venezuela as a supplier of oil to the US, which gets most of its oil from Canada and Mexico. Fed up with the US combination of brusque treatment of its nationals and constant talk of human rights, the Saudis have embraced Hu Jintao and Putin, the leading lights of a new axis of sovereign autocracies. They also seem on the verge of an Egyptian-style cold peace with Israel, so great is their joint fear of Iran, with informal offers to switch off their radars should IDF fighter bombers choose that route to drop their JDAMs on Natanz and other targets. Saudi enthusiasm for the Palestinians palled after Arafat urged Saddam to go from Kuwait into the kingdom, though unlike Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian President, no Saudi prince ever pursued the PLO leader down a corridor shouting 'you jackal'. The limits of Saudi leverage are illustrated with Lacey's interesting material on their difficulty in persuading Mullah Omar in Afghanistan to relinquish bin Laden, even though they were bankrolling the Taliban via the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency.
On many levels Robert Lacey has written a highly accomplished book which should go into the bags of anyone who has to travel to the kingdom. It still did not make me want to go there.
Michael Burleigh's 'Blood & Rage: A Cultural History of Terroism' is available in paperback from HarperPerennial.