[wvns] Into the Saudi enigma

For many years, scholarship pertaining to Saudi Arabia's influence on world affairs was a comparative wasteland, but a number of serious studies have appeared since Lacey's The Kingdom was published in 1982. Hassan Ammar / AFP

Into the Saudi enigma
March 11. 2010

Robert Lacey's breezy new account of contemporary Saudi Arabia may not become a reference for serious students of the region, Robert Vitalis writes, but it marks a slight improvement on the decades of cliches that have defined a complex nation.

Historians love anniversaries. They make a good excuse for organising a conference, but even better, they are perfect hooks to pitch 800-word op-ed pieces to newspaper editors. These usually employ two basic arguments: the first explores the lessons that some past event suggests for the present (How Afghanistan is like Vietnam); the second considers the enduring impact that some key figure or signal event still has on our own time.

The second approach gets an airing in the preface to Robert Lacey's new book about Saudi Arabia, Inside the Kingdom, where he explains "why the House of Saud matters". "`What if?' is a dubious game to play with the past," Lacey writes. "But, on the basis of the evidence, it seems reasonable to suggest that without the historic achievement of the House of Saud, the horrors of September 11 would never have been inflicted on the United States, since Osama bin Laden's poisonous hostility to the West was a brew that only Saudi Arabia could have concocted. His attack on the Twin Towers was a manoeuvre in an essentially Saudi quarrel – played out with American victims."

It is an argument that Lacey forgets in the 300 pages that follow. The final sentence has no logical connection to the one that precedes it: Lacey makes no effort to explore the sources of bin Laden's ideas, and he lacks the equipment to compare them to the many other examples of "poisonous hostility to the West" that exist elsewhere – which would be necessary to demonstrate that only Saudi Arabia could produce an attack on the World Trade Center. (You would also have to ignore the lack of any Saudi connection to the first attack on the towers in 1993.)

Furthermore, from a marketing angle this concept is a real disaster, suggesting just about no ideas for pitching an op-ed. What milestone does one reach for in looking to commemorate "the historical achievement of the House of Saud" and the shadow it casts over the space where the World Trade Center once stood?

Op-ed entrepreneurs would be advised to focus instead on the lingering legacy, three decades later, of the tumultuous events of 1979: the fall of the Shah and the rise of Khomeini in Iran, the Soviet push into Afghanistan, and the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman al Utaybi and his followers.

The story of the two-week-long siege is where Inside the Kingdom actually begins, as do some other recent big books that end in downtown Manhattan. The one minor problem is working out how that event actually matters to a war launched two decades later by the bad Bin Laden, Osama, who back then was a rising if pious construction mogul.

1979 is also the year that Lacey, a Sunday Times reporter and court historian who had scored big with a best selling biography of Elizabeth II, quit his day job and moved to Riyadh. Three years later he published The Kingdom, which ends where the new book begins, with the story of the siege. In the original, the good Bin Ladens, who had done some renovation work at the site, are nowhere to be found. In the new version they are practically the heroes of the whole affair for supplying maps to the French commandos who ended the siege.

Scholarship related to Saudi was mostly a wasteland when Lacey published The Kingdom in 1982. "Despite the current importance of Saudi Arabia, most of the literature on the country falls into one of two categories – the apologetic and the ignorant," one young Saudi intellectual noted in 1981.

The 1970s had been a critical decade in Saudi Arabia: the years of the surge in oil prices, the launching of a Saudi state-building project and the Richard Nixon administration's deepening strategic and financial ties with the kingdom, even as King Faisal's government went ahead with the process of nationalising the US oil company Aramco. During this decade not a single political scientist produced a book about the kingdom in English. Over the course of the decade there were barely half a dozen new books on Saudi politics, and only two avoided the romance that oil companies and court historians liked to tell of an all-wise tribal chief and his sons leading their people out of the medieval era into the 20th century. Fred Halliday's Arabia Without Sultans (1974) and Helen Lackner's A House Built on Sand (1978) focused instead on the effects of capitalist development, the role of the US in bolstering the new oil-based authoritarian order, and the emerging class, regional, ethnic and sectarian divisions that characterised contemporary society.

The US political class was then in the midst of one of its periodic debates about the wisdom of deepening the "special relationship" with the House of Saud. The Nixon and Carter administrations had both banked on the royal family together with the Shah of Iran to provide for security in the Gulf while assuring the world economy adequate supplies of oil at the new, higher prices necessary for all the arms purchases and base building that protected the budget of a post-Vietnam Pentagon and that secured the future of the US engineering and contracting industries. Following the collapse of one of the "twin pillars" in the winter of 1978-1979, the conservative historian and defender of British imperial diplomacy in the Gulf, JB Kelly, wrote a scathing post-mortem of US policy and the derivative, "tireless campaign" to sell Saudi Arabia as a "dynamic, stable, forward-looking" US ally.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world's "enduring enigmas", Lacey writes at the beginning of Inside the Kingdom, whose paradoxes proved lethal for Americans, a "modern state fuelling violence that spiralled" far beyond its boundaries. Following the "what if" question quoted earlier, he tosses out a series of rhetorical questions with a speed that leaves those foolish enough to stop to work out the logic in the dust. "Think of the new words that we have had to learn in the past 30 years: Wahhabi, jihadi, Arab-Afghan, Desert Storm, fatwa, Al-Qaeda. What do they all have in common?" Wait, you think, as Lacey rushes ahead, it is a trick, because Desert Storm doesn't belong in that list, does it? Only now you are four behind in the quiz. "Which nation supplied 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11? One of the largest groups of foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan? The second largest contingent at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp? Plus several hundred terrorists and suicide bombers in Iraq?"

Lacey's new history of the kingdom follows the formula of the old one, mixing gossip, other people's scholarship, "jokes and folktales" tracing a meandering path from Mecca in 1979 forward, with brief detours to wherever Osama bin Laden and "vacationing jihadis" turned up in the years before the destruction of the Twin Towers. Parts one and two of the book cover some of the same ground as Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower and Steve Coll's Ghost Wars, so readers may already know where Lacey is heading, and those who don't get a chattier, easy to follow Saudi Arabian-centred version. Specialists will gripe about the occasionally mangled translation of an Arabic word (naksah does mean "setback" but not "disaster" or nakba) or odd rendering of an Arab name (Sayyid Qutb is more common than Qutub for sure).

The book does best when it looks at the years since 2003 – and it is the first of the popular histories to do so. Lacey discusses the relatively successful although not foolproof Saudi "terrorist redemption techniques" pioneered by Prince Muhammad bin Nayef, who last year escaped serious injury by an al Qa'eda suicide bomber pretending to give himself up. Lacey pulls together reportage, new scholarship and lots of interviews to tell the story of how the House of Saud defeated the latest challenge to its rule.

One critical development – at least for the state of our understanding of the Kingdom – since September 11 is told only in the bibliographical notes at the back of Lacey's book. He has relied on studies under way or recently published by a new generation of European and American scholars who have been living and working in the kingdom in the last decade.

In 2005 Fred Halliday judged the state of knowledge about the kingdom not much better than had been the case in 1981. Most work on the country, he suggested, was still either "mystified travel writing" or "officially inspired histories and biographies of the Saudi family". Among Halliday's small list of exceptions was a recent book by the French scholar Pascal Ménoret, The Saudi Enigma, which focuses its attention directly on the specious reasoning that has animated so many of the books written in the past nine years by journalists who travelled to Riyadh to find "the origin" of September 11. Complex historical events can't be "reduced to a single factor" but those eager to win adherents in the new war or to sell lots of books have little patience for complexity. In too many of the new tracts Islamism or Wahhabism has spread outward from Najd, fuelled by oil wealth, with Bin Laden as its vector. We turn Saudi Arabia into an "enigma," Ménoret says, by ignoring logic, rigour and the proper practices of the social sciences.

Lacey has apparently consulted Ménoret and a handful of his contemporaries, including Thomas Hegghammer, Stéphane Lacroix, Steffen Hertog and Toby Jones. This new research makes Lacey's book better (even as he ignores the critical edge of nearly all of it), and although the next monographs from Cornell and Harvard University Press won't put a dent in his sales, they make it less likely that Inside the Kingdom will make it onto reading lists and into the bibliographies of the works that matter to those taking up the study of Saudi Arabia 10 or 20 years from now.

Robert Vitalis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier.

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