Michael Burleigh
SAPPHIC SAUDIS
Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia
By Rovert Lacey (Hutchinson 432pp £20)
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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 Hitory of Terroism' is available in paperback from HarperPerennial.