Assessing the Saud Dynasty

...Such nonsense would be dismissed were it written about, say, Cahformans, but thanks to the phrase "these Arabs" it is deemed permissible So is generalizing some behavior of the Saud family into an Arab racial trait In one instance, the disdain of several Saudi princes for American sailors showing off their ship's hardware is declared a symptom of intellectual idleness and lack ot curiosity, attributable to "Arab fatalism ' This paves the way for La-cey's view of Faisal's attitude toward Israel Because the king fatalistically believed that events are controlled by evil forces beyond his reach, he was suspicious of all Jews and therefore his hostility toward Israel Lacey is capable ol entertaining Unlike The House of Saud, though...

...Do they find answers to their problems...

...Assessing the Saud Dynasty The House of Saud: The Rise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World Bv David Holden and Richard Johns Holt, Rmehart & Winston 569 pp $19 95 The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa'ud By Robert Lacey Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 656 pp $19 95 Reviewed by Timothy Mitchell Near East Studies Department, Princeton HOW SOLID is the House of Sautf Richard Johns concludes that the world's wealthiest monarchy may have fewer than five years to reign—an unsettling possibility, since Saudi Arabia supplies one third of all the West's oil and any peril to the royal family is felt to endanger the West as well Jimmy Carter acknowledged this by reviving Franklin D Roosevelt's 1943 declaration that the defense of Saudi Arabia lay within the sphere of America's vital interests Ronald Reagan has reiterated the claim and sought to insure the royal family's defense capability by offering it awacs and pushing ahead with the $75 billion Rapid Deployment Force Yet the American attempt some months ago to obtain agreement that the Soviet Umon poses the paramount threat, and to orchestrate an appropnate response, was greeted with the Saudi retort "You are just arms salesmen, and we pay cash ' So it is timely to have two new considerations of the clan sitting on the world's largest petroleum reserves Richard Johns and the late David Holden (who was murdered in Cairo while working on The House of Saud) have between them over 30 years of experience as journalists in the Middle East Their background is evident in their thorough account of Saudi oil politics and the kingdom's involvement in wider regional affairs The great merit of their work over Robert Lacey's is the understanding it provides of exactly what could topple the regime The most recent wobble in royal authority came in November 1979, when nearly 200 armed men seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca and demanded a return to the militant piety on which the Saudi state had earlier grown to power Those who took the Mosque surely were emboldened by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's attacks on the profligacy of the family that protects the Holy Places of Islam But it is important to note that they were Sunni Moslems, not Shi'ites, as in Iran, and were drawn from groups having their own longstanding grievances While the battle for the Mosque was still being waged, riots broke out in the oil-producing area on the other side of the country, where the Shi'ites dominate the local workforce Yet there, too, although events in Iran undoubtedly had an influence upon Saudi Arabia's quarter of a million adherents of the sect, the workers have a long history of unrest As Holden and Johns clearly show, the regime's difficulty in coordinating its two jealously independent security forces, the Army and the National Guard, constitutes another weak spot Coup conspiracies have been uncovered among the military more than once, and the royal family has always had to play off one force against the other It certainly felt unable to rely exclusively on either one in the midst of the Mecca crisis Ultimately, however, it is the internal discontent that provides the most fertile ground for Soviet penetration of Saudi Arabia Holden and Johns pay particular attention to the varieties of this opposition Apart from Shi'ite dissatisfaction with failing to prosper at the level of those who live off their labors?the rulers in Riyadh and the businessmen of Jedda—an increasing number of foreign workers presents the royal family with a strong threat In the '60s and early '70s attempts were made to limit their number Nevertheless, today the Saudi proportion of the country's workforce has dropped from over 90 per cent to barely half, producing an ominously large (albeit easily deportable) mass of second-class immigrants with no rights of citizenship They include over a quarter of a million Palestinians, one reason Riyadh insists that the Israeli/Palestinian issue, and not the Soviet Union, is the greatest external menace to Saudi stability Probably more serious for the clique that controls such a disproportionate share of the nation's power and wealth is the problem of satisfying an increasingly articulate and ambitious middle class Ever larger numbers of young Saudis are being educated and amused abroad Once back home, they seek political and social clout as well as a share in making money When the economy is rapidly expanding, as was the case during much of the '60s and '70s, space for them can usually be made A sudden setback in growth, as in the late '60s and in '78-9, destabilizes the regime On such occasions, the middle class has found disgruntled allies in the Armed Forces and among the lesser princes of the House of Saud itself The Saud family is vast, and these books contain in their appendices helpful guides to its most prominent members Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia and father of the present generation of rulers, had at least 45 sons by more than 20 wives Within this enormous clan, over the last two decades power has been concentrated around the domain of one of Ibn Saud's wives, Hassaal-Sudain She was connected by marriage and friends to King Faisal, her younger brother, Kamal Adham, was Faisal's closest adviser and the go-between for the Washington-Cairo-Riyadh link established after the death of Ga-mal Abdel Nasser inl970 Most important, her seven surviving sons, headed by Crown Prince Fahd, have managed to monopolize the country's key posts The majority of the remaimng notable positions have gone to commoners like Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamam, rather than to other princes Thus as a younger royal generation pushes upward, there is plenty of potential for palace intrigue Both The House of Saud and The Kingdom describe in detail how the Sauds successfully exploited a fundamentalist religious ethic for their own purposes Lacey dwells longer on what he calls "this story of great deeds performed in the name of religion,' and correspondingly less on the politics of the later period Holden and Johns are more specific in reporting the coercive application of religious laws in the last few years, the enforcement of stricter sexual segregation and additional limits on the activities of women Strangely, these two works tend to dismiss the effect of socioeconomic factors on events in Saudi Arabia Neither mentions, for example, that a majority of the participants in the Meccan uprising were from the tribes of the Southwest That is the region where many of the pressures of Saudi society—disparity between urban and rural life, migration to the cities, rapid economic development accompanied by inflation?have been most pronounced It is also where the sudden economic setback of 1978, when the government somehow outspent its own enormous income, was very sharply felt Yet the three authors see the seizure of the Grand Mosque solely in terms of its outward manifestation the revolt of Islam against the West And near the end of The House of Saud, Holden and Johns approvingly quote the US State Department's "foremost expert on Saudi Arabia," who comes up with the same analysis The underlying source of Saudi discontent, according to this expert, is the impact of Western technology and modernization on traditional Islamic society But concurring with this assessment is risky To blame the West for violence against a regime that enjoys a tight monopoly on power—t hat suppi esses religious, intellectual, moral, and political tiecdom in the name of Islamic "tradition"—is to come dangerously close to conniving in the rhetoric of the rulers Perhaps it is unfair to expect a critical perspective from Robert Lacey, who is spellbound by monarchs (his previous book was Majesty, a best-selling silver jubilee celebration of Britain's House of Windsor) Lacey lived in Saudi Arabia while working on The Kingdom and gained some useful material from interviews with members of the royal family to supplement his written sources and personal impressions Very frequently, what strikes him most is the mystenousness of what he is trying to describe or explain power flows among members of the ruling group, "by some inner family osmosis" The Sauds deal with dissent by "their own mysterious mechanisms " It is not primarily force or religious discipline that binds Saudi society together, it is an occult entity that Lacey labels "thread of consent" Lacey ends his story with a Saudi family on a picnic, and again we are asked to read something into their inscrutability "Do they catch wind of some secrets, these Arabs, as the desert breeze blows...

...What does this communion with emptiness tell the men and women of the Kingdom about themselves and about the world in which they live...

...The Kingdom does little indeed to help us understand the Saudi rulers or the discontent that imperils them...