Most Saudis had never been behind the wheel of a motorized vehicle before. In the absence of any licensing procedures, anyone who was able to careen forward while lying on the horn became a legal driver. Thousands of such ill-equipped motorists poured onto the roads to spread terror and desolation. There was such havoc on the streets that revolution, pestilence, and plague were minor concerns for the expatriates compared to the perils of traffic. 

The number of ways a Saudi could wreck a car were astonishing. Whole cars disappeared into construction ditches. Small Japanese buses, popular for transporting immigrant workers, became marooned on eighteen-inch-high concrete road dividers placed on the major thoroughfares in a vain attempt to keep drivers on the right side of the road. I once saw two cars hit the same utility pole within seconds of each other. The first car smashed into the base, bending it at a ninety degree angle. The second car, barreling down the street oblivious to impending doom, collided straight on with the end of the angled pole, forcing the slender metal cylinder through the windshield and on through the back window. There the car floated, suspended on the swaying post above the vehicle that had originally struck it. The driver, unhurt, still gripped the wheel. 

It was no safer to walk than ride in a car. In Jeddah, police records showed that 22 percent of all accidents were caused by drivers running down pedestrians. There were 17,000 cases of blood money paid to the families of victims of fatal car wrecks in 1976, and by 1977 an estimated 8o,ooo wrecked cars were piled on the city's streets. 

In 1978 Riyadh had traffic lights at only four major intersections. Rather than contributing to public safety, the lights became signals for the Saudis to honk their horns while they blasted through the intersection. The embryonic traffic laws only added to the general bedlam. Drivers turning left out of the left-hand lane were required to yield to drivers turning left out of the right-hand lane. And with only a minuscule police force, boys barely able to see over the dashboard of a pickup could speed down the streets with their black-draped mothers squatting in the back with the livestock. 

Traffic was a visible symbol of the organizational demands that rapid modernization had thrust on inadequate structures. Because urban areas were hardly more than market towns before the oil boom, they had been patched together with insufficient funds, borrowed technicians, and no planning. During the early part of the oil decade, when money was not a problem, it was easier to build a whole city from scratch than to try to integrate existing services. Riyadh's electrical system was part British, part French, and part American, none of which worked in concert. The primitive telephone system that existed had to be re placed before it could be expanded, causing delays in service of up to two years in some areas. When I lived in Doctors' Villas #4, the entire compound had a single telephone line, with an extension in each of ten houses. The electrical resistance was so great that the bells on the phones refused to ring, making it possible to call out but impossible to call in. The rare Riyadh telephone book that existed listed numbers by the name of the landlord and not the tenant. This eliminated all foreigners since only Saudis could own property. The telephone numbers of foreign government and commercial establishments were listed but freakishly arranged. The foreign consultants were under "O" for "organizations," Western Electric, Seimens, and British leyland under "C" for "companies," while the United Nations and the Ford Foundation were under "E" for "establishments." 

As for billing, the telephone office in al-Khobar was prohibited from sending out bills because of the absence of an adequate mail service. So when a customer's bill was due, the telephone was disconnected. But the failure to provide mail delivery was not totally the fault of the post office. In defense of his department, the mail supervisor in Jeddah announced, "We have plans to start door to door delivery of mail in Jeddah as soon as street naming is completed." * In the meantime, mail was picked up in one location, letters were mailed in another location, and stamps were purchased at a third. 

Many of these problems occurred because modernization in Saudi Arabia was not evolving slowly, building its own mechanisms by trial and error. Rather, the Saudis were jerked from a society organized around the family or tribe, in which people had little regard for time and where few demands were put on individual performance, and shoved into twentieth-century systems of organization that had little relationship to Saudi culture and that were managed by Westerners. After erecting grand buildings, the Saudis' Western managers stood aside to shake their heads arrogantly and chuckle as the Saudis, still accustomed to their desert culture, tried to learn how to use them. Public institutions placed colorful, graphic diagrams above toilets that instructed the user to sit and not squat on the seat. When public phones were installed on the street, the Saudis would drive up on the sidewalk and lean out of their car windows to use them. In hospitals equipped with the latest technology, the first Arabic phrase its foreign staff learned was "Do not spit!" 

The kingdom was forced almost overnight to create institutions, mechanisms, and procedures in every area of government and commerce just to cope with the distribution of its money. So much was thrown at the Saudis as the country struggled to create the rudimentary structures of a modern state that it is remarkable that the whole society did not rupture. It did not rupture in part because the Saudis refused to move too far away from their traditional way of life. As a result, development plans as envisioned by the leadership in the House of Saud and its Western advisers were enormously complicated at every turn by deep-seated values and by a religion frozen in the past.

*Arab News, February 6, 1984. 

The monetary and banking systems represent a case in point Throughout the history of Saudi Arabia, whether in the issuing of currency or the founding of a bank capable of performing international financial transactions, the mechanisms created by government had to balance the need for modernization with the Saudis' distrust of new ideas and the teachings of Islam. Abdul Aziz's monetary policy was able to stay within the confines of Islam. But after 1973, as more and more financial institutions were born and matured, his successors ruled on the side of modernization. The Western composition of the management of these organizations and their measured deviation from Islamic teaching, necessitated by the international character of banking in Saudi Arabia, became increasingly entrenched as the boom progressed. 

Considering Saudi Arabia's present position in the international financial markets, it is difficult to realize that the kingdom did not issue its own currency until 1935.* Before that time, the government operated on gold sovereigns, and Saudi families relied on the heavy, ornate jewelry of low silver content given to brides and on Maria Theresa coins. These large silver coins were originally an Austrian currency, with an established quantity of high-grade silver. They were popular throughout the Middle East, some claim, because they bore a profile portrait of the empress, not merely unveiled but displaying a magnificently full bosom in a low-cut gown. Maria Theresa died in 1780, but the coins continued to be hunted, carrying the date of her death. Shrewd Yemeni traders now counterfeit the coins for sale to gullible expatriates, but when I came to Saudi Arabia a few authentic Maria Theresa coins could still be found in the Bedouin souqs. Squatting on the dusty ground behind one of Riyadh's more odorous slaughterhouses, I spent many hours digging through the clutter of artifacts and junk to unearth Maria Theresa's image, sometimes as coinage and sometimes worked into the now abandoned Bedouin bridal jewelry. As serviceable as the forbade coins to circulate at a value above that of their metallic content. 

*The first Riyals were actually issued in 1928. They were thick, chunky coins, whose value nested on their silver Content, a concession to the religious authorities who believed that Islamic law forbade coins to circulate at a value above that of their metallic content. In 1935 Abdul Aziz was able to secure permission to issue a smaller Riyal. 

Maria Theresa coins were in backward Saudi Arabia, a currency and a banking system inevitably came to the kingdom. 

For the first thirty years of Saudi Arabia's existence, there were no banking statutes and no foreign banks. The financial affairs of Jeddah's small European community were handled through the trading firm of Gellatly Rankey. During the yearly hajj, when foreign pilgrims came into the kingdom, the Dutch Bank and the Banque de l'Indochine et du Suez were allowed to operate seasonal offices. But any banking business a Saudi had was done through the money changers in the bazaar. In 1938, in the aftermath of the early oil concessions, Abdul Aziz allowed the money changers Mahfouz and Musa Kaki to open the National Commercial Bank.* 

The Saudis' resistance to banks, enforced by the policies of the House of Saud, was rooted in the Koran's injunction against usury. Not only were banks in Saudi Arabia forbidden to charge interest, but it was considered unseemly for a country in which Islam's holiest sites are located to enter into financial arrangements with international institutions that made their living from loaning money at interest. And with the Saudis' xenophobia, there was a genuine fear among the rulers that the sheer economic power of Western banks, with their worldwide assets many times greater than those of Saudi Arabia, would make them impossible for the Rouse of Saud to control. 

But with the resumption of oil production after World War II, these attitudes and practices had to change. In 1950 the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) replaced Abdul Aziz's treasurer, Abdullah al Sulaiman, and the chest containing the national treasury that he stashed under his bed. One of the first problems to confront SAMA was how to store the government's money. Wildly escalating revenues that were $56.7 million in 1950 would reach $338.2 million by '955. SAMA's vault, which measured seventy feet by seventy feet with an eight-foot ceiling, was already overflowing with silver Riyals and gold sovereigns. To cope with the logistics of wealth, paper money had to be issued. The question was how. It would be extremely difficult to convince the people, most of whom acknowledged the sovereignty of the person of Abdul Aziz but had no concept of a nation-state, to accept in payment paper issued by some mysterious entity As in all innovative moves by the government, the change was tied to religion. During the hajj in 1953, Saudi Arabia issued its first paper money, not to the Saudis but to the pilgrims journeying to Mecca. The hajjis' money, brought from their home countries, was converted to paper pilgrim's receipts that could be exchanged for silver Riyals or converted back to foreign currency by either the pilgrim or a Saudi. Once the principle of convertibility of paper money was established, paper Riyals were introduced and their use gradually began to be accepted by most of the people 

*Only the third wholly indigenous bank to be established in the entire Arab world between 1938 and 1950, the National Commercial Bank made enormous profits when the oil boom hit because it had had the foresight to set up western-style banking facilities. 

No additional innovations were demanded until after the oil embargo. When oil revenues deluged the kingdom in 1974, Anwar Ali, a Pakistani, was SAMA's financial czar. Among the earliest of the for eign advisers, Ali had been brought in from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1950's by King Faisal for the purpose of cleaning up the kingdom's financial mess, brought on by overspending. Abhorring risk and loving liquidity, he invested SAMA's funds almost entirely in government securities and corporate bonds in the West. Ali was among the first to recognize that if Saudi Arabia were going to live and to prosper in the outside world, then strict adherence to Mohammed's prohibitions on interest would have to be modified. Using the euphemism "return." Ali ignored the act establishing SAMA that expressly forbid the agency to collect interest on its assets. As petroleum income rolled into SAMA, its traders switched on their Telex machines and wired banks in the international money markets for quotes on interest rates. They deposited where rates were the highest. A philosophy quickly developed among money managers and princes alike: if collecting interest is sinful, then make the highest return possible on that sin. Ali's philosophy remains the cornerstone of SAMA's operation. 

During the financial frenzy of '974 and '975, SAMA's headquarters were located in a rustic converted apartment house near the airport in Jeddah. Outside, an old woman crouched on the steps selling nuts, which she measured out of a palm wood bowl with a tin cup, while inside, SAMA's hard-pressed staff was overseeing the local banking system, issuing Saudi Arabia's currency, opening letters of credit, paying the salaries of government employees, and managing the government 5 pension fund. This group often men controlled Saudi Arabia's billions of dollars in foreign reserves and had only recently shifted from posting its books manually to using simple bookkeeping machines. 

With the eyes of the international financial markets focused on Saudi Arabia, SAMA appeared as just one vignette of how ill equipped the kingdom was to absorb its wealth. The domestic economy had so few enterprises that there was nowhere to invest even a fraction of the country's income. Only a handful of Saudis had the education or training to begin to administer the largess. Nor had any plans ever been on the board that would have prepared Saudi Arabia for this harvest of money. The sudden surge of income caught the Saudis by surprise. Oil revenues per capita were less than $300 in 1970, a year in which the government budget had experienced a small deficit. That same year officials were predicting that oil income would grow by a healthy, but not disruptive, 54 percent by 1975. As it turned out, income shot up an astonishing 1,900 percent. 

By 1976, two years after oil prices skyrocketed, the Saudis were still debating their proper relationship with international financial institutions. There were still only fourteen foreign banks in Saudi Arabia, compared with forty in Abu Dhabi and fifty in Dubai, two of the city-states making up the United Arab Emirates, which commanded only a fraction of Saudi Arabia's income. Most of the foreign banks operating in Saudi Arabia were overwhelmingly managed by Westerners. Smarting under this Western domination of the banking system, all foreign banks were "Saudized" (stock sold to private Saudi citizens) between 1977 and 1980. Although the ownership passed to Saudis, the managers and much of the philosophy remained Western. 

The necessity for these banks as well as the National Commercial Bank to survive financially corrupted the spirit if not the letter of Islamic law. Using the same principle as SAMA did in managing its assets, banks gave their borrowers interest-free loans that carried a "service charge" that matched going interest rates. Demand accounts received no income, but time and savings deposits earned a fixed "commission" in lieu of interest, a rate that was very low compared to overseas deposits. This caused other problems. Offshore banking in Bahrain, protected from Wahhabi purity and spurred by the movement of Middle Eastern banking interests out of war-torn Lebanon, mush roomed. In February 1980, while Saudi banks were paying commissions in the range of 5 to 6 percent, depositors could earn 17 percent in Bahrain. Consequently, people were borrowing from Saudi banks at relatively low rates and depositing money in Bahrain to earn high interest. As a result, Saudi Arabian banks suffered a cash shortage for domestic loans. Through various currency manipulations and a lowering of reserve requirements, SAMA alleviated some of the competition. But the basic situation remained. Islam restricted Saudi banks from competing effectively in money markets by forcing them to keep their interest charges, under whatever name, low enough to prevent an outcry from the religiously pure. For the less religiously pure, capital went abroad to seek haven in high-interest-bearing accounts. 

While the banks endeavored to make a profit in Mohammed's world of no interest, the money changers remained an important part of the financial system. With the oil boom, they moved out of the souqs and expanded their businesses to include the newly arrived Westerners. Money changers were often located in the neighborhoods, operating out of storefronts and avoiding the pitfalls of usury by charging a simple fee for service. Their convenience and favorable exchange rates were the keys to their popularity. 

Checks were pioneered by the banks and money changers but did not gain acceptance until well into the 1980s. (Checks are still not accepted by merchants in the souqs.) Purchases had to be paid for in cash, forcing everyone to either carry large sums of money or make frequent trips to the bank. Considering that a hundred Riyal bill (about $28) was the largest denomination, the bulk involved in large transactions could be staggering. When we bought our first car, Dan carried the SR 24,000 to the dealer in a large brown grocery bag. My salary from Stanford Research Institute arrived as a stack of blue and white 100 Riyal bills sealed in a fat envelope. The King Faisal hospital also paid in cash until it was forced to go to payroll checks by the number of trucks required to move the payroll from the government treasury to the hospital. 

Using the money changers, the Westerners converted most of their Riyals into their own currency to send home. The remainder was de posited as operating cash. The al-Rajhi Establishment for Currency Exchange, the largest of the money changing operations, was typical of most businesses in Saudi Arabia during the 1970S - overcapitalized, with a poorly equipped staff. My branch was located in the basement of the hospital, a location that protected it from the matawain and allowed it to admit women. A cavernous free-standing safe, its black paint chipped by age, stood in the middle of the cramped quarters. The safe door always stood open during the workday, exposing bundle upon bundle of Riyals, dollars, pounds, francs, lire, rupees, and so on, tossed on top of each other in random order. The Egyptian bookkeeper, cramped in the corner behind the safe, thumbed through his great ledgers, posting his entries by hand. A Pakistani clerk pounded out money orders on an old Underwood manual typewriter, while his assistant slipped thin sheets of carbon paper in his receipt books. The only piece of modern banking equipment that the al-Rajhi possessed was a digital money counting machine. When I presented a withdrawal slip, manually verified in the ledger books, the Saudi cashier flexed his fingers, reached for a stack of Riyals, ruffled one end with a quick motion of his thumb, squared the stack, and loaded his machine. The lighted digits clicked in rapid-fire order, counting hundreds of Riyals. When the machine stopped, the money was unloaded and slapped on the counter. Flush with cash, I was prepared to function for another week in Saudi Arabia's supercharged economy. 

As the arduous building of structures and mechanisms proceeded, customs and traditions within Saudi society that did not fit the models designed by Westerners added another dimension to the development process. As an example, the concept of record keeping was alien to the Saudis, creating great frustration for the Westerners putting their systems in place. Despite the emphasis that is placed on family in Saudi culture, a Saudi seldom has a family name. A man is simply known as Ahmed ibn Mohammed ibn Abdul (Ahmed son of Mohammed son of Abdul). Only the most important and established families, such as the al-Saud, al-Zamil, and al-Sheikh, claim a last name in the Western sense of the term. Furthermore, a woman does not assume her husband's name but remains Jameelah bint Hassan ibn Ahmed (Jameelah daughter of Hassan son of Ahmed). As the country modernized, the absence of last names created a bureaucratic night mare in everything from school enrollments to social insurance records. There are probably thousands of Mohammed ibn Abdullahs presently in Saudi Arabia, with more being born each day. And with the absence of any address or other secondary means of clarification, people were left to stand on their names alone. Perhaps the most crucial area for matching a name with the right person is medical records. In its early days, the King Faisal Specialist Hospital realized that in one respect Orwell's 1984 had arrived in Saudi Arabia ten years early. Everyone had to be identified by number and number only. Every per son who was registered as a patient was given an identification number embossed on a plastic card. As far as the hospital was concerned, that person did not exist without that number. It was stamped on charts, prescriptions, braces, and even attached to babies. So trained did the Saudis become to the system that we once received a greeting card from one of Dan's patients who had painstakingly printed out his name in the Roman alphabet and appended his patient identification number to it. 

As the waves of change pounded the Saudis, forcing them to make all manner of accommodations to Western systems and structures, the government insisted that "the distinguishing mark of the Saudi approach to development is that its material and social objectives are derived from the ethical principles of Islam and the cultural values of Saudi society." * Tradition and progress were engaged in a titanic struggle to maintain an impossible equilibrium. Western advisers de signed mechanisms that would allow Saudi Arabia to function the way the Saudis believed they wanted it to function, and the culture, dominated by Islam, rose up to do battle against the kingdom's quantum leap into the future. 

One of the ways the government sought to keep Saudi Arabia on the path of tradition and religious orthodoxy was to ensure that the calendar continued to conform to Islam. Saudi Arabia functions on the Hijrah calendar, a lunar calendar that has no correlation with the Gregorian calendar. Hijrah in Arabic means 'migration," or, more descriptively, "flight." The first day of the first year of the Hijrah calendar corresponds to July 15, A.D. 622, the date that Mohammed and his followers fled from Mecca to Medina to escape persecution at the hands of the Quraish. Counting from this date, Saudi Arabia is now in the first decade of the fifteenth century. 

The Hijrah year, consisting of 354 days, is divided into twelve lunar months. One day is added to the last month eleven times in thirty years to make some accommodation to leap year. Therefore, on a thirty-year cycle, the Islamic calendar will be roughly just over two years shorter than the Gregorian calendar. Since each year is approximately twelve days shorter than the previous year, the seasons do not fall in the same Hijrah months from one year to the next. Proceeding through the cycle of the calendar, the hajj can take place in the gentle warmth of winter or the savage heat of summer. 

*Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Planning, Third Development Plan: 1400-1405, 1980-1985, A.D. (Riyadh 1980), p.3

The major difficulty with the Hijrah calendar is its imprecision. * Tradition holds that a month or a year cannot begin until there is a visual sighting of the new moon, confirmed by religious authorities. This means that Ramadan 8 could fall either on Tuesday, June 21, or Wednesday, June 22, depending on what day the new moon was sighted. Therefore, printed calendars and schedules must list future events and holidays as "tentative" or "subject to official confirmation." And it is impossible to accurately translate Gregorian to Hijrah dates in the future. While I was at the Ministry of Planning, I spent a week and covered an entire wall with charts in an attempt to devise some standardized way to convert the completion dates of contracts, using the Gregorian calendar, to Hijrah dates two, three, or four years in the future. In the end, every date remained tentative within three or four days since the date the new moon would be sighted escaped faultless prediction. Because Saudi Arabia has to live with the outside world whether it wants to or not, most paperwork carries two dates, the Hijrah and the Gregorian. Government documents, contracts, and the mast- heads of all newspapers read Saturday, March 10, 1984 and Jamad Al Thani 8, 1404. 

The growing nationalism that came in the wake of the petrodollars, rather than causing a drift away from the Hijrah calendar, led to a more rigorous enforcement of the Hijrah system. This made the dual Hijrah Gregorian calendar circulated by large companies the most popular advertising gimmick among expatriates. The only problem was that it would be at least two months into the new year before they came out since it was never possible to begin printing until the new moon was sighted at the beginning of Muharram, signaling the new year. 

The Saudis' high-priced Western advisers sought to bring order to traffic, they refined and expanded the banking system and other mechanisms under the constraints of Islam, and they worked around the calendar. These were largely structural problems. It was when working relationships reached into the realm of the Saudis' psyche and values that the partnership bogged down. Beyond their inborn Bedouin arrogance, it was the Saudis' use of language, their concept of time, and their lack of organization that so frustrated their Western work force. 

*Saudi Arabia is the only place I have ever worked where I checked the phase of the moon to see how long it was until payday. 

Much of this frustration rose from how the Saudis and the Westerners talked to each other. 

The role that formal poetry, prose, and oratory play in Saudi culture is totally alien to Western culture. Traditionally there is a strong attachment to language, originating in the Spartan life of the Bedouin. The Bedouin poet was the repository of tribal history. He expressed the ideals of manliness, gallantry, bravery, loyalty, generosity, and independence of spirit. Through his beautiful language, he spoke the oral folk literature, the stories, proverbs, and genealogy of his people. Used with great virtuosity even by the illiterate, the richness of Arabic combined with its cadence transforms the language into an artistic instrument that provides great emotional satisfaction to both the speaker and the listener. The Saudis are so enamored by language that poetry can arise in the most curious situations. An old Bedouin man suffering from a chronic disease appeared in Dan's clinic, where he was examined and sent to the laboratory for tests. After being taken through the perplexing world of blood samples, x-rays, and unveiled Western women in white uniforms, he was told to report back to the hospital in a week for the results and medication. When he returned, he entered the examining room, paused at the door, and launched into a lengthy, perfectly constructed poem. Through verse after verse, he rocked back and forth as he recounted how he had been plagued by this dreadful disease for twenty years. Praise be to Allah, he came to the famous King Faisal Specialist Hospital. Now, a week later, he lamented he was not yet cured. 

Among the Saudis, the skilled use of language commands the same prestige as virility. Language in the most mundane of circumstances becomes lofty and embellished with hyperbole. For example, the Arab News, reporting on an inspection of Jeddah made by an official of the Arabian Cleaning Enterprise, the company that collects trash, junk, and dead cats from the streets of the city, waxed eloquently: "Melk said that his drive during his brief stay through the most modern King Abdul Aziz International Airport and the lovely, modern, clean city amid the breathtaking architectural beauty of buildings, residential and commercial complexes and mosques, well-planned wide streets and gardens, was a unique experience to be remembered for a long time." * 

*Arab News, March 15, 1984

Because of his love of language, a Saudi is swayed more by words than ideas, and more by ideas than facts. The cultural propensity to say what sounds good, not what is necessarily true, causes untold problems for Westerners in every area, from foreign policy to simple contracts. For the Westerner, a simple yes or no is a definitive statement; for the Saudi, conditioned by exaggeration and over-assertion, the understanding of a brief, simple statement is beyond his experience and capacity. The single word "yes" means to the Saudi only "per haps." I saw many novice Western businessmen come out of meetings with Saudis believing that they had a contract, only to find that when it was time to sign the papers the Saudis' "yes" to the terms had only meant that they could still be discussed. Or as one weary businessman so aptly put it, "A signed contract is the signal for negotiations to begin." What many Westerners never learned was that a Saudi's eloquent exaggerations were never meant to be taken literally. Nor did the Saudi ever believe that what he said for effect was to be interpreted as fact. 

Because the language is also a substitute for action, the Saudis and their Western economic planners were always at loggerheads over what the Saudis said their goals were and what their expectations actually were. When a Saudi verbally states a wish, intention, or demand, he expects it to bring about realization without any additional action. But when no action is forthcoming, there is no hue and cry, only the plea sure of making the statement once again. In reporting on Saudi Arabia, I trained myself to look at emphatic government statements not necessarily as policy but rather as exercises in mild polemics. It was only after an announcement had been repeated over months or even years that there was some expectation that what had been said repeatedly would at last become policy. I still view with wry amusement the columnists in the Western press who pontificate about the ramifications of an announcement the Saudi government has made about Saudi Arabia's firm stand on oil prices or its intention to fight a holy war. As for economic development, to plan a project was as good as achieving it. Many of the grandiose plans that rolled out of the ministries ex pressed some intention; they did not necessarily make a statement of action. The promise is the reality. The Saudi understood this, the Westerner never did. 

The Saudis can function perfectly well within the parameters of their linguistic style. It is matters of organization and the concept of time that seriously hinder Saudi Arabia's attempts to turn the kingdom into an efficient, functioning machine. Schedules and completion times drawn up by the Saudis' Western advisers are most often ignored, for the Saudis never take them seriously. The Saudis see Westerners living under the tyranny of time, which they have every intention of avoid mg. Unwilling to deal with time sequences or to concern themselves with precisely defined timing, the Saudis tend to float along, depending on the will of Allah. Bukarah, in-shaalah ("Tomorrow, God willing"), is more than a phrase, it is a state of mind. Procrastination permeates everything, from the local tailor shop to the airlines. Nothing infuriated me more than to arrive at the airport for a flight and to be told that it was not to leave as scheduled. When I asked the Saudia employee on the desk when the plane was expected to leave, the inevitable answer was "three days." Shrugging his shoulders at my pro testations, he would say, "Same, same" - loosely translated to mean, "Today, tomorrow, next week - it is all the same. 

Because of this attitude toward time, a Saudi cannot be depended on to plan ahead, keep appointments, or honor time commitments. The latitude the Saudis exercise in the realm of organization is a definitive characteristic of the country. An international hotel booking service has declared that the Saudis hold the record for "no shows" for reservations. The Ministry of Planning's move into its newly constructed building was delayed for months because no one had thought to order the furniture. And in 1978, in perhaps the most blatant example of procrastination, a newspaper reported that representatives of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Syria were just then meeting to discuss repair of the Hijaz railroad line from Damascus to Riyadh. Originally built by the Ottomans in the early i9oos, the railroad has been out of commission since it was blown up by Lawrence of Arabia in 1917. 

Some claim that the Saudis' aversion to planning is rooted in their language. Arabic has no future tense. Perhaps it is true that language reflects cultural values, for the attitude regarding organization and time is buried deep in the Saudi psyche. It is a throwback to the Bedouin's deep love of freedom. To be on time, to plan for the future, means that a man is not master of himself but a slave to circumstances. During the 1970's and on into the 1980s, there appeared to be no serious recognition that these attitudes toward organization were inconsistent with the type of economic development the Saudis were pursuing. With big contracts at stake, few Western advisers were willing to risk telling the Saudis that their national character was not responsive to the demands if a complex economy or a program of industrialization. For the truth was that if the Saudis were to succeed in increasing the value of their raw petroleum products and diversifying their economy, the whole configuration of the national character would have to undergo modification. While the top echelon of government dreamed of industrialization and the Western planners and builders created the machinery to accomplish it, the Saudis themselves stubbornly resisted attempts to put them in the work force. 

Wilfred Thesiger, the intrepid Arabian explorer, once said: All that is best in the Arabs has come to them from the desert: their religious instinct, which has found expression in Islam; their sense of fellowship, which binds them as members of one faith; their pride of race; their generosity and sense of hospitality; their dignity and the regard which they have for the dignity of others as fellow human beings; their humor, their courage and patience, the language which they speak and their passionate love of poetry. But the Arabs are a race which produces its best only under conditions of extreme hardship and deteriorates progressively as living conditions become easier. * 

The Saudis were pulled out of the desert by the oil boom and, like the Arabs of which Lawrence spoke, became dependent on a paternalistic welfare state and armies of foreign laborers. Like other values of the Saudis, the aversion to labor is also buried deep in the Bedouin tradition. Unlike in the West, achievement is not an important part of the Saudi value system. In a society where the maintenance of group cohesion is paramount, the drive for individual accomplishment is largely absent. But beyond the absence of ego satisfaction derived from labor, structured employment is in contradiction to almost every value a Saudi holds dear. Entering the work force compels a man to chose between the requirements of his job and the needs of his family. A job demands obedience to a set of rules made by men - an affront to God. Employment means a worker is expected to be in a certain place at a certain time, a restriction on his freedom of movement. An employee has to conform to the orders of those above him, a slight to his honor. 

*Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (New York: E. P. Dutton, I959), p 82.

With the right title and working environment, a Saudi can partially accept these restraints if their administration is lax. It is physical labor that is totally repugnant. A Saudi Will accept a position but not a job. A Saudi will ring the cash register in his shop but he will not sweep the floor. A Saudi will drive a truck but he will not repair one. A Saudi will be a bureaucrat but never a plumber. This is the great problem of development in Saudi Arabia. The absence of the work ethic permeates all of Saudi Arabia's development ambitions and explains much of the kingdom's dependence on foreign labor. 

All through the height of the oil boom, Saudi Arabia suffered acute labor shortages. Large numbers of foreign workers from both developed and underdeveloped countries were hired, while segments of the Saudi population were technically underemployed because they shunned the multitude of jobs available. As thousands of men were being brought into the kingdom to drive buses, man the post office, install telephones, and work as clerks, the reception desk of the Ministry of In formation, an extremely low priority need, employed a cadre of young Saudis. With the demand for labor being met by foreigners, every time I went into the ministry I observed several members of Saudi Arabia's precious manpower reserve lounging on sofas, watching Popeye cartoons on television. 

In 1980 there was one foreign worker for every adult Saudi in the population. Frightened by the number of foreign workers, the government publicly attacked the Saudis' prevailing attitudes about work. Minister of Planning Hisham Nazer repeatedly conveyed the government's hope that people's attitudes would change so that meaningful work, even of the blue collar variety, would be looked on with regard. In its goals for the Third Development Plan, the Ministry of Information stated: "One of the goals of [the] information services is to publicize the importance of labor as an activity with real religious and social value, in order to change the prevailing attitude toward certain trades and occupations which are held in low esteem. * By putting Saudis into the work force, the Third Development Plan hoped to limit expatriate manpower growth to a rate of 1.2 percent per year between 1975 and 1980, as compared with the standing estimate of an annual growth rate of 7 percent. 

* Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Planning. Third Development Plan, p.380.

Putting the Saudis to work depended first on education and training. Human resource development had been a major part of every economic plan. The first plan allocated $882.3 million to manpower training; the second plan, $6.69 billion; and the third plan $10.58 billion. But it was with its much-touted program of "Saudization" that manpower training became the battle cry of the Third Plan. Determined to train Saudis in the skills that the kingdom now demanded, the government dreamed that the foreigner could be replaced. However, the goals of manpower training were doomed from the start. Teachers and facilities for training were not adequate for the enormous breadth of the government's aspirations. Most of all, training was hamstrung by the recur ring reluctance of Saudis to work. Training statistics reflected the average Saudi's attitude toward acquiring a skill. During the Second Plan, the Presidency of Civil Aviation (PCA) instituted the Aeronautical Training Center in Jeddah. After employing twenty-three teachers to train air traffic controllers, seventy-four students enrolled for the course and only thirty finished. Registration for the next session of the same course attracted just thirty applicants. The Airway Training Facility, also run by the PCA, was staffed with twenty-seven teachers and had no students, while the Airport Maintenance Training Center employed eleven teachers and also had no students. Significantly, this was in the airline industry, a sector of the economy that is attractive to Saudis. 

The record of vocational education is even more dismal. In an at tempt to attract students into courses on welding, carpentry, refrigeration, car mechanics, electricity, and plumbing, the government during the Third Plan paid all educational expenses for the students and gave them a salary during training. To sweeten the attraction even further, graduates were promised a SR 200,000 ($58,823) interest-free loan to set up their own businesses. Yet there were few takers. 

Providing suitable employment for its citizens and meeting the demands of wealth and modernization combined to cause the bureaucracy to mushroom during the 1970's. Government was everywhere - in agriculture, education, health, telecommunications, aviation, rail roads, ports, housing, roads, judicial services, community development, even the Boy Scouts. Each activity commanded its own minis try, and each ministry contained dozens of departments and bureaus. Bedeviled by problems common to all bureaucracies, government assumed additional burdens imposed by inexperienced bureaucrats and the Saudis' own culture. The failure to do long-range planning was further corrupted by the demand for instant gratification that arose in both the government and the public. In behavior characteristic of the nouveau riche, bureaucratic judgments about projects to pursue and what to purchase were often guided by the desire for what was glamorous and impressive, not by what functioned. Furthermore, there was a strong tendency to believe that constructing a building built an institution. Few in government were willing to look beyond these physical structures to the critical need to develop qualified Saudi staffs who could make the institution function. 

Even with a bureaucracy interlaced with hired Western experts, the Saudis became trapped in the personal relationships that govern their culture. Loyalties were to individuals and not to organizations. An organization became fixed in the Saudi mind as the person who ran it. Who got what in the way of services or government contracts in the private sector depended on who the recipient was and what connections he had. The fragile institutions that were in place became paralyzed and impotent because of 'exceptions" to their functions or procedures constantly made to accommodate personal connections. Bureaucratic activity was not task oriented; likewise, effort was re warded not on the basis of getting things done but rather on success in empire building achieved through trading favors. As a result, Byzantine maneuvers for power among bureaucrats were ceaselessly paralyzing government functions. In the power game, there was an overriding resistance to the delegation of authority. The rare subordinate who was willing to risk his honor to make a decision was restrained since a mistake on his part might reflect unfavorably on the honor of the person in charge. Moreover, by delegating responsibility, the per son in charge in effect surrendered power. But what occurred in the bureaucracy was only a reflection of decision-making at the top. Saudi Arabia's entire decision-making process was hamstrung by the senior princes. Any efficiency that might have developed in the bureaucracy was thwarted by the rulers, who so compartmentalized every function of government that no one except those at the core of power in the House of Saud ever had a grasp of the total picture. 

In the bureaucracy, the government paid miserable salaries to lower level civil servants and allowed promotion to be determined by family connections. Because of the low salaries, government employees were reduced to making most of their money by petty corruption, such as selling visas. Those higher up made considerably more in large-scale influence-peddling to foreign contractors. Consequently, every bureaucrat became some type of empire builder, protecting his own turf from the encroachment of others. 

With all of the government's claims of Saudization, there was little movement toward an assumption of even limited responsibility by the Saudis, even within the upper reaches of the bureaucracy. The Westerners who were recruited to teach the Saudis the skills they lacked most often became surrogate administrators. I saw Saudis from mid- level administrators to deputy ministers loll behind desk plaques engraved with their names and titles, drinking tea while their Western counterparts labored through the tangle of demands, priorities, and politics within the government. Although much in these situations resulted from a culture that has no work ethic, much was also the result of Saudi officials' being unable to come to grips with the complexities of the outside world and the highly technological infrastructure being built in Saudi Arabia. 

One of the basic reasons that Westerners played such an overwhelming part in Saudi Arabia's development efforts was that the international mechanisms of oil distribution and payment were almost entirely Western. The banks where the Saudis deposited their foreign reserves were either Western or were tied into the international banking community dominated by Western institutions. The technology the Saudis needed was Western. The highly trained people needed to operate that technology were in the West. Out of all of these Western sources and institutions, the Saudis came to believe that the path to all of their goals lay with Western methods and procedures. While endlessly claiming that development would proceed within the context of the culture, both government and business rushed headlong into recruiting Western expertise. The burgeoning bureaucracy on the outside appeared to be Saudi, made up of young men who had gone West very early in the boom and returned home to take dominant positions in government. But like construction and commerce, the nuts and bolts of government were in the hands of Westerners, who were putting together organizations based on Western philosophy and practice. And this Western expertise was committed to completing a job, not nurturing a technologically backward people into modernity while catering to their cultural norms. 

Some of the Saudis' problems with institutions developed during the oil boom arose precisely because these structures were devised by Westerners on Western cultural values. One of the philosophies behind manpower training was that technological advancement and social change would be better accepted by the population if the changes were introduced by the Saudis themselves, not their foreign servants. But be cause of the lack of qualified Saudis, managing the process of modernization and transferring technology became a highly complex problem that entailed not just the desired goal but all intermediate steps needed to reach that goal. University graduates could not be turned out without an elementary school system. Computers were useless without electricity. Air service depended on maintenance, and so on. In most countries that experience a measured rate of development, organizational models largely parallel the established social structure of the country. Indigenous management that rises up in developing nations is accustomed to how that society functions. This did not happen in Saudi Arabia. The Westerners, fascinated with their organizational charts and efficiency studies, were not cognizant of how close to the desert the Saudis still were. When I arrived in Riyadh, large parts of the city were still mud-walled hovels. Much of the population was illiterate. Almost all were devoutly religious. Many saw no value in the head long rush to development. Yet in the name of progress, government set lofty goals in every area of Saudi life and the Westerners implemented them. Impossible demands were placed on the average Saudi, and when he failed, condemnation from the army of Western advisers in the kingdom was poorly disguised. The attempts to develop Saudi Arabia without adequate concern for its religious and moral values gambled with the possibility that once the glamour wore off the Saudis might reject much of what had been thrust on them. This was the very reason that the leadership so tightly controlled social change, especially in the areas of religion and the position of women. Nevertheless, the Saudis increasingly saw modernization linked to the values and standards of the West. Modernization came to imply Westernization.