Oil, terrorism, spending sprees and a shaky alliance with the 'infidel' West
Claus von Bülow hails a brilliant study of the government of Saudi Arabia

13 November 2009

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia welcomes an uncomfortable-looking George W Bush on November 14 2008 AP Photo/Ron Edmonds

Inside the Kingdom
Robert Lacey
Hutchinson, £20

Robert Lacey has written a brilliant book: a book which has to be read by everyone who is interested in our future.

There have of course been confrontations between the Christian West and Islam throughout history. The Crusades, originally successful, but not with much moral credit. The expulsion of Muslims, who had been laudably tolerant towards Christian and Jews, from Andalusia. The victory of Don John at Lepanto and of Jan Sobieski at the gates of Vienna.

Today it is different. The Islamic world is profoundly religious and the consumerist West, sadly, is not. Some of the terrorist targets exemplify this: the World Trade Centre in Manhattan and the giant Video Shop in Riyadh.

The popular media have given up snippets of an image of the Saudis. Spendthrift princes - though their acquisitiveness must surely be curtailed since their shops close five times a day for prayers. Intolerant towards women drivers, though some western truck drivers are known to share that view. Some newspaper editors have recently grown very excited because oppressed women within Islam are becoming lesbian.

Robert Lacey deserves great credit because he concentrates on the history of the modern state of Saudi Arabia and its government.

He tells us of the stirring conquest by King Abdul Aziz of the three separate parts of the present Kingdom, Mecca and Medina, the centres of Islam, Riyadh the modern capital, and the Eastern Province where the hardworking Shias live on top of the largest oil field in the world. It is also important to understand the origin of Wahhabism, which is specifically Saudi, and of the Shias with their roots in modern revolutionary Iran, but also with a strong following in Iraq. The Saudi government is deceptively simple. The absolute ruler is the king surrounded by his large family of princes, who occupy almost all the principal offices of state, and who dance a perpetual game of precedence, which somehow succeeds in bringing the most talented to the top and indeed to the throne.

The king is advised by the Ulema, the supreme religious council and the ultimate authority on the interpretation of the Koran and of the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. The Mabahith is the religious police and the courts are also staffed by Wahhabi clerics. All this ran pretty smoothly from the establishment of the Saudi kingdom in 1932 to the temporary capture of the Holy Mosque in Mecca in 1979. This was also the year of the Khomeini revolution in Iran, and of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The expulsion of the Shah by Islamist fundamentalists obviously frightened the Saudi government and inspired terrorists everywhere.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan echoed around the world, but perhaps most strongly in Britain where it reminded many of "the Great Game" and the rivalry between Kipling's Imperial India and Tsarist Russia's intrigues.

Clearly successive invaders of Afghanistan have failed to read history since every invasion since Alexander the Great has failed. Young Muslims flocked from Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army and miraculously they succeeded. They were, of course, armed surreptitiously by Saudi Arabia, the United States and Pakistan and their sophisticated modern weapons were left behind after the victory and are now used by the Taliban. The most glamorous of the young Saudi volunteers was Osama bin Laden. Just like Che Guevara had become the pin-up boy for revolutionaries of the Left so the tall, dashing bin Laden would become the inspiration for many of his contemporaries, not only in Saudi Arabia but throughout the reformist fundamentalists in the Muslim world.

The defeat of the mighty Soviet army in Afghanistan was an important factor in the subsequent collapse of world Communism and the Soviet Empire. The quiet alliance between President Reagan and the Saudi monarch had paid off. It was quite a bonus for the pathetically modest down payment of a few thousand gold sovereigns which King Abdul Aziz had received for the concession which was to grow into the mighty Aramco.

The Kingdom was soon to need more help from another American president, George Bush senior. The American government had revenged the humiliation they suffered during the Khomeini-led Iranian Revolution by helping Saddam Hussein in the long and very bloody war between Iraq and Iran. Saddam was virtually given a green light for any ambitions he might have against his neighbours. He misinterpreted the message and invaded Kuwait which, within hours, brought him to the Saudi border.

America immediately formed an alliance against Iraq, and, after some hesitation, the Saudi religious council consented to the arrival of huge American armed forces in the Kingdom. In view of fundamentalism propaganda it is worth stressing that these "infidel" forces were located some 700 miles from the holy city of Mecca.

Whereas Saddam was obviously a brutal tyrant on his home territory, all the borders of the new countries and sheikhdoms were creations of the victorious Allies when they broke up the old Ottoman Empire after World War I. This also explains why so many of them failed to support Kuwait and Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion.

The other seemingly hopeless factor remains the state of Israel, the creation of yet another American president, Harry Truman. Robert Lacey tells us that the Saudi king really believed that Monica Lewinski's dexterity with President Clinton was further proof of Israeli influence in the White House.

We are also given exact quotations from important political and military advisers of Bush Senior, categorically stating that Iraq should not be occupied after the quick victory in Kuwait. We could have been spared the present situation in Iraq and in Afghanistan if Bush Junior had been as wise as his father. But we would not have been entirely spared outbreaks of Muslim terrorism, both inside Saudi Arabia and indeed throughout Africa, Europe, Asia and of course America.

It is imperative that we understand that this is a confrontation between fundamentalist Islam, a culture that is still profoundly religious, and our blindly consumerist society, which is not. Robert Lacey's fine book will help us understand the problem.

The three great monotheistic religions were each born under the desert sky where the stars are clearer and less polluted than in the West. Only astrologers read the stars, but we should read this book carefully.