FT: Review: Inside the Kingdom
Muggle
By Eugene Rogan
FINANCIAL TIMES
Published: December 18 2009 23:27
Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the
Struggle for Saudi Arabia
By Robert Lacey
Hutchinson £20, 432 pages
FT Bookshop price: £16
In 1981, Robert Lacey produced a blockbuster exposé on Saudi Arabia at
the height of the oil boom. Part history, part current-affairs, The
Kingdom, spun a compelling narrative from 18 months of conversations
with powerful Saudis and expats drawn to the kingdom to make their
fortunes. Lacey’s book was quickly banned by the Saudis for shedding
too much light on how nearly limitless oil wealth had transformed the
once impoverished desert state.
Nearly three decades after his first foray into Arab Gulf politics,
Lacey decided to take another look at Saudi Arabia. He had spent the
intervening years writing on the British royals and European
aristocrats more generally, interspersed with three volumes of Great
Tales from English History
After this long hiatus, Lacey returned to the kingdom in 2006 on the
invitation of his original Saudi host. His commitment to study Saudi
Arabia up close, in conversation with the men and women of the
kingdom, has again paid off in a book of startling insights.
The events of 9/11 forced Lacey to reconsider the trajectory of Saudi
history. If his first book sought to shed light on the emergence of an
Arab oil superpower, Inside the Kingdom is more concerned with the
rise of religious extremism in Saudi Arabia.
Lacey’s thesis is quite simple. The modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia is
a partnership between the Saudi royal family and Wahhabism, an austere
interpretation of Sunni Islam that dates back to the 18th century.
Whenever the Saudi government encountered a major problem in society
or domestic politics, they responded by injecting more religion. The
result has been the gradual radicalisation of a marginal, but
increasingly dangerous, segment of Saudi society that has risen to
threaten both the Saudi monarchy and their western allies.
Inside the Kingdom opens in 1979 with the dramatic takeover of the
Grand Mosque in Mecca by Juhayman Al-Otaybi, and the Shia uprising in
the Eastern Province, inspired by the Islamic Revolution in Iran
earlier that same year. Ruling between 1975 and 1982, King Khaled took
counsel from the Saudi religious authorities and was won over by their
views. “Foreign influences and bidaa [innovation] were the problem,”
Lacey asserted. “The solution to the religious upheaval was simple –
more religion.”
Across the 1980s, the Saudi government encouraged religious study
groups in the mosques, and sponsored Koranic recitation competitions.
The reign of King Fahd (1982-2005) saw the commissioning of a massive
$130m printing press to print millions of copies of the Koran for
distribution to Saudi citizens and pilgrims to Mecca and Medina. And
the kingdom gave its full support to the pious young Muslims who
volunteered to fight the Soviets then occupying Afghanistan. These
were the days when Osama bin Laden was celebrated by his government as
a national hero.
Rather than generating broader support for the Saudi monarchy, the
promotion of religion gave rise to a new Islamic reformist movement in
the 1990s known as the “Sahwah” or “awakening”.
Many Saudis disregarded the new wave of religious politics. “But the
‘awakening’ was smiled upon by the religious establishment, and – like
the jihad in Afghanistan – its agencies received easy support from the
rich and vicariously pious,” Lacey recounts. “The government gave no
sign that it discouraged the development of this mystical and rather
wild strand in national life.”
The dangers of this policy to the Saudi monarchy became evident on
September 11 2001. The fact that 15 of the 19 suicide hijackers
involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or
on the airliner that crashed in Pennsylvania, were Saudis strained the
kingdom’s special relationship with the US to breaking point.
This, of course, was Osama bin Laden’s primary objective. What most
people in the west failed to grasp was that al-Qaeda’s ultimate target
was regime change in the Islamic world.
The Saudi response to 9/11 has been carefully calculated to contain
domestic Islamism. For King Abdullah, Lacey argues, “September 11 had
shown what happened when religion got out of hand. Rulers must rule,
and the religious must go along with that.”
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 made King Abdullah diversify Saudi
foreign policy to reduce the kingdom’s reliance on the US. As the
veteran foreign minister Prince Saud Al Faisal confided to a
Washington Post journalist that the Saudi-American relationship was a
Muslim, rather than a Catholic, marriage. “The kingdom was not seeking
a divorce from America,” Lacey elaborates, “just looking for some
extra partners.” The result has been a deepening of Saudi political
and commercial ties to China and Russia.
Much of this story involves two very thin slices of Saudi society: the
radical Islamists, and the Saudi royal family they seek to reform or
replace. Yet the real interest in Lacey’s book comes from his
exchanges with people representing the silent majority of the people,
Muslim but not Islamist, Saudi but not royal.
His three-year-long conversation with the citizens of the kingdom
presents western readers with marvellous insights into that complex
society, which remains no less suspicious of foreign scrutiny today
than when he first visited Saudi Arabia in the 1970s.
Lacey’s sympathetic engagement with the struggles, triumphs and
defeats of average Saudi men and women makes Inside the Kingdom both
compelling reading and an important contribution to building greater
understanding between Saudi Arabia and the west. One only hopes the
Saudi authorities decide not to ban this book.
Eugene Rogan is director of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s
College, University of Oxford. He is author of ‘The Arabs: A
History’ (Allen Lane
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