BOOK REVIEW: Saudi life seen in wider context

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By Martin Sieff

INSIDE THE KINGDOM: KINGS, CLERICS, MODERNISTS, TERRORISTS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR SAUDI ARABIA

By Robert Lacey

Viking, $27.95, 404 pages

Reviewed by Martin Sieff

Robert Lacey has enjoyed in his long and distinguished literary career the bouquets and the brickbats of the establishment of Saudi Arabia. "The Kingdom," his classic history of the founding and early decades of the Saudi state, was banned in Saudi Arabia after it was published 30 years ago. Yet Mr. Lacey has lived in Jeddah for the past three years and enjoys exceptional access to the circle around King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, whom he clearly holds in affection and the highest regard.

"Inside the Kingdom" benefits from all the strengths of Mr. Lacey's exceptional access and experience but does not suffer from the usual drawbacks of such familiarity. Mr. Lacey speaks frankly and does not minimize the contradictions, pressures and potentially extremely serious security, social and even existential problems that threaten Saudi society and the Saudi state.

Mr. Lacey is outstanding at explaining the rhythms and sequence of modernization and reaction in recent Saudi history. The deeply traditional and fiercely anti-Israel, even anti-Semitic, King Faisal bin Abdul Aziz was the key figure in ensuring the effectiveness of the oil embargo by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and the quadrupling of global oil prices after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Yet that event precipitated a vast flood of Western goods and services into Saudi Arabia that forever ended the old, deeply conservative, religious Bedouin culture that Faisal deeply cherished.

After Sept. 11, 2001, as Mr. Lacey acknowledges, the Saudi establishment and public opinion alike were admiring and complacent about al Qaeda and their own black sheep, exemplified by Osama bin Laden and the 15 out of 19 suicide hijackers who seized those airliners and flew them into their targets on that fateful day.

However, Saudi complacency ended with three loud bangs in the al Qaeda terror attacks of 2003. Since then, the Saudi state and an alarmed and threatened Saudi middle class have joined ranks against the Islamist extremists.

Mr. Lacey is excellent at putting accurate but usually misconstrued small facts about Saudi life and society into wider and better contexts. It's true that Saudi authorities behead rapists and murderers. However, in a nation of 23 million people, carrying out 73 executions a year on average since 1985, when those executions have been authorized by legal due process, is hardly a war crime, and Saudi life, especially outside the cities, remains remarkably secure and peaceful. Mr. Lacey also pointedly notes that the continued practice of public executions in Saudi Arabia is in significant part intended to deter misbehavior by the enormous and rapidly growing underclass of Yemeni immigrants (by some calculations, as many as 400,000 a year) into the prosperous Desert Kingdom.

Mr. Lacey also acknowledges the often petty officiousness of the Saudi religious police. However, he notes that this has to be seen in the context of the continuing rapid modernization and transformation of a nation that was still predominantly rural, Bedouin and even illiterate as recently as half a century ago. It is telling, he notes, that Saudis, especially young people, are now suffering from a plague of diabetes because of their passion for the cheap Western-style fast foods that have proliferated across their country.

Also, Mr. Lacey has not lost the wonderful gift he employed so well in "The Kingdom" and "Ford: The Man and the Machine" of illustrating profound trends through fascinating personal stories and often hilarious anecdotes. He quotes the famous statement by Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the exceptionally effective Saudi ambassador to the United States, that the U.S.-Saudi relationship was like a Catholic marriage that would last forever and could not be broken, however many rows and strains it had to endure on the way.

But Mr. Lacey then quotes Foreign Minister Prince Saud bin Faisal as telling an interviewer in 2005, "It's not a Catholic marriage. It's aMuslim marriage." His point, Mr. Lacey explains, was that a Muslim husband is allowed up to four wives, so the Saudis did not want to terminate their close relationship with the United States, but they also had concluded it was time to look for additional partners. This story helps explain why it is a pleasure to recommend this important, welcome and most timely book.

Martin Sieff is chief global analyst at the Globalist online magazine. He is the author of "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East" (Regnery, 2008) and the upcoming "Shifting Superpowers: The New and Emerging Relationship Between the United States, China and India" (Cato, 2010).