Since Christmas I had been sending my most incriminating notes out of the kingdom with special friends who mailed them on from New York. What was left was composed largely of newspaper clippings, government publications, and the all-important computer disks containing my research. While I packed my worn flight bags to go into hiding one more time, Dan returned to the hospital to apply for an exit visa for Cohn. Afraid of arousing suspicions by abruptly leaving Saudi Arabia earlier than scheduled, I turned my fifteen-year-old son into an international courier. The night he left for home, I bundled my remaining material into school notebooks and put them in Cohn's cavernous backpack. At the very bottom, I laid two tough plastic cases containing the computer disks on which two years of research were recorded. As it was the end of the school year, many expatriate children were leaving Saudi Arabia, often traveling alone. The chances of Cohn's being stopped were minimal. Still, my stomach was in knots as I stood on a balcony at the airport and watched him go through immigration and security. When his flight was called, he ran his arms through the straps on the backpack, turned, and with a big grin on his face waved good- by. The next morning, knowing he was safely in London, I had nothing to do but wait until my departure date.

I spent much of that time walking, as I had done when I first arrived in Saudi Arabia. In 1978 the excitement of the oil boom and my fascination with the duality of twentieth-century technology in a feudal society had drawn me into twisting, narrow streets. In 1984 I walked on wide sidewalks that ran along multilane roads. As I walked, I took in the changes wrought by the oil boom. The hospital was no longer on the edge of the desert. Large walled-in villas stretched out from it in every direction except into King Faisal's garden which still retained its tranquility. Most of his former date grove was occupied by the new Palm Villas where I now lived. A new wing was being added to the hospital and a grand new entrance opened onto a six-lane divided thoroughfare. The quiet that used to fall with the night was gone as cars and trucks raced by under the amber glow of the arching incandescent lights lining the streets. The only thing that still stood undisturbed was the ruins of the villa on the corner, a quiet reminder of Faisal's assassination and the fate of those who strike against the House of Saud.

On Oleya Road, the City Supermarket, the queen of the markets in 1978, struggled to compete with the Greenhouse, Panda, Safeway, and A&P. The fruit and vegetable stands with their flats of broken eggs were still in business, but the traffic was so fast and heavy that it was no longer safe to cross the street to browse among their produce. The office buildings that had gone up in the early eighties were now mostly empty, as contracting firms, those business creatures so unique to the boom times in Saudi Arabia, quietly died. In the new concrete-block Dirrah souqs, the fabric shops were deserted. Except for those in Baatha, the gold shops now had more Western customers than Saudi. Even the vegetable souqs beyond the main mosque had lost their climate of frenzied activity. The area next to the Bedouin women's souq had been turned into a secondhand market where lower-class Saudis swapped used clothing and dented household goods.

I found leaving Saudi Arabia for what I felt would be the last time less difficult than it had been in 1980.1 shared the general realization that for most of the Westerners the Saudi experience was over. More and more Saudis were moving into jobs formerly held by Westerners. The business opportunities were largely gone and companies were pulling their people out of the kingdom. But even more, there was somehow the sense that it was the proper time to end the large-scale Western involvement in Saudi Arabia. The Westerners had done what they could best do for the Saudis - build a physical infrastructure and frame the organizational models for a modern country. It was time for the Saudis to take control.

The Westerners had done miraculous things for Saudi Arabia. We had also done great harm. We too often expected the Saudis to live up to our expectations rather than their own. We expected them to change too fast. We imposed our own culture, largely in the material sense, on a culture of great pride steeped in long tradition. We were not al ways sensitive enough to the forces tearing at Saudi Arabia, as a people isolated for centuries was bombarded with such a variety of alien ideas. Too many among us cheated them for no other reason than naked greed. And too few among us ever extended the Saudis the proper respect for what they were - a fervently religious people, protective of their own culture, and deeply frightened of foreigners.

Dan and I ate our last meal in Saudi Arabia with our dear friend Phil Weaver. In an apartment identical to the one in which we had stepped that first night over six years ago, we reminisced about how we had arrived in the kingdom within months of each other and about the years in between. Together we had struggled with Arabic, shopped the souqs, and spent wonderful hours in the desert. Phil, like so many of our other long-time friends, was also planning to leave within a few months. Dinner ended. It was time to leave for the airport. I looked out one more time on Phil's riotous bougainvillea, which had mysteriously survived over all those years without ever being watered. Then I turned and walked toward the front door, past the hanging rug we had found in the hajj camp. With the luggage loaded, I climbed into Phil's GM Jimmy for my last ride through the gate of Medical City Village.

The drive to the airport was poignant. Partly this was because I knew that once this book was published I would never be allowed to return to Saudi Arabia. And partly it was because I was reflecting over an era. I remembered that first drive into Riyadh from the airport - the torn up road, the incessant activity of building, the feeling of confidence and promise. That night, at the end of the boom, we glided along on a four-lane highway interspersed with overpasses, along clusters of new houses, past strip shopping centers with flashing signs beckoning customers to buy the products of the West. The mud walls of the combination shops and houses that stood when I first arrived were gone, swept away by the hurricane of change. Gone also was that feeling of confidence in the future. As we passed by a residential neighborhood, there was the same quiet that I so acutely felt the night I arrived in Riyadh. But in 1978, the Saudis slept blissfully as their foreign workers built the new Saudi Arabia; after this night, they would awake to an uncertain world.

By outward appearances Saudi Arabia had achieved an authentic miracle in the desert in ten years. But would the miracle last? There was too much to manage and too little money, at least in the short run, and I wondered how much of the new Saudi Arabia would be re claimed by the ruthless desert. No one who spent the boom decade in Saudi Arabia can escape feeling that somehow he was a small part of a revolution that carried the kingdom from the past to the present. Having taken part in that revolution, I cared what was to come.

I was jerked out of my reverie when the car slowed under the graceful arches of the airport terminal. I was to leave Saudi Arabia by way of the pomp and grandeur of the new King Khalid International Air port. Cars lined up at the curb in an orderly fashion, while Filipino porters in iridescent orange coveralls loaded bags onto bright chrome luggage carts. Somehow this all seemed an anticlimax to my whole experience in Saudi Arabia. That feeling changed when I entered the terminal. It was bedlam. Expecting that night to see the new moon signaling the end of Ramadan and the beginning of the Eid al-Fitr holidays, Saudis, Egyptians, Sudanese, Pakistanis, Lebanese, and a few Asians and Westerners were all fighting their way to the crowded ticket counters dragging huge suitcases. There was mayhem among the ticket agents, who screamed at passengers screaming at them. After being shoved around in the swarm around the ticket counter for forty- five minutes, we succeeded in checking our bags and securing a boarding pass. As the immigration officer canceled that last exit visa in my passport, I glanced up and smiled. At the entrance to the departure gates a black-veiled Bedouin squatted next to her husband stretched out asleep on the floor. It seemed in some ways that all that had changed since I first entered the kingdom was that I was walking out of Saudi Arabia, holding my head high, in a knee-length skirt.

After ten years of breakneck development, Saudi Arabia is hovering in an uncertain twilight. Confronting a multitude of threats - declining oil revenues, sagging confidence, a bureaucracy and infrastructure both beset by decay - the exaggerated promises of the oil boom are rapidly fading away. Behind the walls of the palatial homes of the non royal rich and in the apartments of the new middle class, a disquiet lurks that is alien to the political experience of the Rouse of Saud. Facing the rising politicization of the middle class and dissatisfaction among much of the rest of the population, the Rouse of Saud is mired in its own internal struggles and burdened with a political system in capable of addressing the post boom era. Complex questions loom over the future of Abdul Aziz's dynasty, now that it is no longer master of a bottomless pot of gold. The first is how to equably divide the kingdom 's finite economic resources among a people whose expectations were fueled by ten years of unbelievable wealth. The second and more profound question is how a society turned upside-down by wealth and the invasion of foreigners is to be governed as it struggles to define itself. How well the al-Sauds accommodate to the new political and economic environment in which they find themselves will determine in what form the House of Saud will survive or if it will survive at all.

In its short history, the House of Saud has endured the early threats of intervention by European powers, two revolts of fanatical Moslems, drought, poverty, and the radical economic transformation of the kingdom in the decade following the '973 oil embargo. The royal family has succeeded in ruling a fractious, contentious people divided by family and tribe largely by personally identifying the monarchy with the religious and egalitarian values of the culture.

The House of Saud successfully contained liberal political dissent during the 1960s, and the golden days of the 19705 were to a great extent free of overt political opposition. With the exception of the dramatic Mecca uprising, the pockets of dissent that did exist were either weak and unorganized or were placated by government policy and revenues. Opposition groups tended to be specific and controlled. There were the Shiites, with their deep-seated hostility to their status as second-class citizens. The grumbling Hijazis still harbored animosities about the imposition of Wahhabi rule over the more freewheeling Western coastal areas. And the non-Shiites of the Eastern province were resentful at being shortchanged on developmental money and political appointments. Otherwise, the Saudis as a whole were so caught up in the consumer society that political conflict was virtually absent except for the ever-present religious question, kept under control largely by religious leaders beholden to the House of Saud.

During the oil boom, the monarchy benefited from rulers who were respected as individuals and, therefore, as leaders of the Wahhabi state. Exemplifying the image of the righteous sheikh, both Faisal and Khalid provided generously for their people. In much the same style in which Abdul Aziz fed anyone who came to his tent, the kings showered their subjects with money, and political participation stayed in the context of the petitioner appearing before the king at his majlis. While personifying traditional values that played to the conservative Saudi temperament, Faisal and Khalid at the same time were casting Saudi Arabia's whole economic and bureaucratic system in the mold of the West. Operating like an eastern Tammany Hall, the al-Sauds kept the religious leaders happy by enforcing religious law and providing financial support to the religious establishment. The small farmers and the Bedouins were subsidized and left alone. Middle-class merchants and up per-class families made hefty sums of money in a wide range of commercial activities. Young Saudis, many with no economic or political ties to the existing power structure, were pulled out of the cities and villages and sent West to study. In an era of galloping change, the quiescence of the Saudis' political behavior was the subject of endless speculation. Was it fear of reprisal? Were the Saudis by their nature apolitical? Or did the policies of the al-Sauds have to be considered highly successful? In retrospect, it appears all of these were factors. But the missing element in the continued success of the House of Saud's political formula was the realization of how much the policies of development were changing the society and, therefore, the balance of forces by which Saudi Arabia was ruled.

When King Khalid died in the summer of 1982, Fahd ascended the throne among predictions that Saudi Arabia's march toward modernization would advance at an even more rapid pace. Because Fahd in essence ran the government for the ailing Khalid and was known to be the foremost proponent of modernization, his reign was seen as marking Saudi Arabia's move to its post development phase. After Khalid's benign tenure, it was assumed Fahd would be a strong king. Instead, Fahd's reign is crippled both by the mountain of problems that have descended on him and by his own personal image.

Like every king in the lineage of the House of Saud, Fahd's personality and style influence the strength of the family and, therefore, its ability to rule. Because the king is the embodiment of the old tribal sheikh, who was chosen by his people for his piety, generosity, leadership, and courage, the image of the ruler is paramount to how well he can rule. Fahd, who is all but fatally tarnished by his early reputation as a high-rolling playboy, meets few of the criteria of a successful sheikh. An aura of corruption hangs around the king and his sons. He is identified not with the tribes and religious leaders but with the technocrats who are outside of the al-Sauds' traditional power base. His aloof personal style is vastly different from that of his predecessors. But most of all, Fahd is seen by his subjects as a high-living captive of the West. Although Fahd's public decorum in Riyadh is conservative, the people are contemptuous of him. They deride him as a hypocrite, a rogue masquerading as a pious Moslem. And because he is frequently absent from the kingdom, the population is quick to believe that the king is a heavy drinker and fond of foreign women.

While practicing a certain level of discretion, Fahd is nevertheless more public about the lavishness of his lifestyle than any king since the discredited Saud. While Fahd publicly claims that the royal family is a family of simple tastes and boasts of the pride he takes in being a "servant of God," he builds one elaborate palace after another. His palace on Spain's Costa del Sol has made Marbella an international playground. He has another palace in Geneva. He plays country squire on an elaborate farm outside Riyadh and has yet other palaces in Jeddah and Taif. Several years ago he built a house in Riyadh that is a near replica of the White House in Washington, D.C.* And now an official palace has been constructed between Riyadh and Diriyah, the original capital of the al-Sauds. In a disturbing throwback to the time when King Saud lived behind the walls of his own royal city within Riyadh, the new structure is actually a small city enclosed by high, thick, and fortified walls that run for several miles.

Unlike all the previous kings, who identified Riyadh as the heart of the kingdom, Fahd is restive in the capital. To escape the prying eyes of the religious authorities who place strict demands on his decorum, the king maintains a yacht the size of a luxury liner off the coast of Jeddah. Floating in the steamy waters just beyond the harbor, the yacht allows Fahd to stay in the country and, at the same time, live as he wishes. When the king escapes the kingdom, he flies in his private 747-SP, outfitted with two posh sitting rooms and a master bedroom decorated in pink and staffed with a cabin crew of eight comely women, mostly Western.

* Fahd never moved into this palace, which was begun when he was crown prince. The political repercussions of the Saudi king imitating the American president were too politically risky.

Fahd's elaborate lifestyle elicits more comment from Saudis than any other facet of his rule. Much of the criticism is directed not just at the king but at his sons, who are notorious for the number of government contracts they win and the margin of profit involved. There has always been some corruption in the royal family, which is related to the mores of the patriarchal rule established by Abdul Aziz. Before Faisal's reign, the state was seen as the property of the ruler and little differentiation was made between public funds and the king's private purse.

But the prince, in turn, was perceived as the father of his people, and his benevolence was based on the fairness with which he distributed material and abstract goods among his subjects. The sheikh of the tribe was not much richer than his men and his life-style was not that different from theirs. Avaricious rulers were held in contempt and often lost their legitimacy and their rule.*

Fahd seems to invite reproach through his family's extensive business interests and his various forms of self-indulgence. Unlike the revered Faisal and to some extent the kindly Khalid, Fahd and his sons appear shabby.

Yet the worst of Fahd's image problems may be his inability to project himself as a man with the soul of a Bedouin. In contrast to Khalid, who was happiest among the Bedouins, Fahd prefers the city. When he does venture into the desert to meet his subjects, he moves in a procession of Mercedes eighteen-wheel trucks, which includes his private operating room and clinic. After three years as king, Fahd in the spring of 1985 uncharacteristically spent weeks in the desert with the Bedouins. It was as if he had suddenly recognized that he had lost touch with the core of the al-Sauds' support and was trying to reestablish the House of Saud's traditional roots. As the mastermind behind Saudi Arabia's massive modernization effort, Fahd may have moved too far from the average Saudi's perception of his king to restore the aura binding ruler and ruled. For Fahd has been as much corrupted by the oil boom as many of his subjects. While Abdul Aziz rode with his Bedouin army on a saddle made of rough wood covered with the skins of Nejdi sheep, Fahd rides forth to meet his people on a saddle of fine leather custom crafted by Louis Vuitton.

* A. Reza S. Islami and Rostam Mehraban Kavoussi, The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1984), p.78.

One of the major facet's of Fahd's lack of political authority is that the political constituency with which he is identified is not part of the power configuration with which the House of Saud rules. Fahd's reputation was built through the middle class, a creation of the oil boom. Faisal drew on his image of piety. King Khalid identified closely with the Bedouins. Abdullah, the current crown prince, is allied with the National Guard and the traditionalists in the country. Fahd's only identity has been with the technocrats, a nebulous group in terms of the power configuration, and the expanding middle class. Yet Fahd's partnership with the middle class has neither been lengthy nor intimate. While Fahd was championing the middle class during his tenure as crown prince, he was operating in a climate of almost unlimited wealth, in which the king's generosity to all segments of the society involved few choices. Fahd simply devised the mechanics for spreading enormous amounts of money among a small population. As long as the interests of the middle class did not clash with the prerogatives of the royal family, Fahd was free to push for the expanded political input of non royal family members, such as Hisham Nazer and Ghazi Algosaibi. But by the time Fahd became king, the economic slowdown was beginning to cause a clash between the interests of the royal family and those of the middle class. Caught between Saudi Arabia's foreign and economic problems and the quarreling between the various factions of the royal family and the population, Fahd, rather than ruling as a strong king, is immobilized.

Few expect Fahd to enjoy a long reign. His health is imperiled by obesity and the al-Saud family history of heart disease. Always a tall man of wide girth, Fahd is now so fat that he moves in a wheelchair if he is required to walk much farther than a few steps. Just as Fahd succeeded Khalid after only seven years, it is probable the House of Saud will once again need to choose a new king following a relatively short reign. And once again the royal family and the religious leaders will undertake the precarious and imprecise process of selecting a man to head the House of Saud.

The uprising at Mecca, the Islamic resurgence triggered by the Iranian revolution, and the blighted hopes of rapid economic development have all combined to strengthen the power of the traditionalists, led by Crown Prince Abdullah. No longer do the progressives among the senior princes rule almost alone. And the old political theory of Fahd and the Sudairi Seven rolling over Abdullah and the conservatives has collapsed.

Abdullah, tall and thin, with a small beard extending from his chin, looks like a king. Except for his speech impediment, he commands the presence of the tribal sheikh. Though Fahd is more competent to deal with the outside world, Abdullah has brimmed with self-confidence ever since the Mecca uprising resurrected the fortunes of the traditionalists in the House of Saud. Abdullah's picture is now spread across newspapers and public buildings, unlike during the boom years, when he was largely ignored. As if orchestrating them himself, conditions have seemed to conspire to ensure that Abdullah's visibility remains high. His long-time opposition to rapid modernization has been vindicated by the forced reduction in development projects dictated by the economic recession. The rise of Islamic political groups on Saudi Arabia's borders has strengthened Abdullah's fundamentalist constituency to the detriment of the progressives. But it is in foreign policy that Abdullah's rising stature has been the most noticeable. Often condemned by Westerners as being anti-West, Abdullah is an ultranationalist who believes the kingdom should shun alignment with either of the superpowers. Even at the pinnacle of the Saudi-American alliance, it was Abdullah who was outspoken in his opposition to the kingdom's dependence on the West for its defense. As the American alliance has come increasingly into question and the anti-West campaign of Iran more strident, Abdullah has been sent in search of new allies for the vulnerable Saudis.

Part of the reason for Abdullah's diplomatic activity is the nature of his tribal connections. Abdullah's mother belonged to an important family of the Shammar tribe, whose tribal lands and relationships ex tend into both Syria and Iraq. Therefore, Fahd has wisely used Abdullah as a major emissary to Syria ever since he became king. With ties to Syrian president Hafiz Assad, Abdullah is regularly sent to Damascus to buy Syria's intervention with Iran as well as the Saudis' various leftist enemies. Nevertheless, the old animosities and political rivalries between the progressive Fahd and the traditional Abdullah still live. Abdullah, confident in his own power base, refuses to pay court to Fahd. He voices clear opposition to those policies of the king that dilute the power of the family or the traditionalists. And to Fahd's displeasure, he continues to command the National Guard, a post Fahd believes Abdullah should have resigned when he became crown prince. Yet neither the Sudairis nor Abdullah can unseat the other without destroying the all-important balance of power in the royal family and within the military.

Abdullah in all probability will become king in his turn, upsetting the predictions during Khalid's reign that the Sudairis would never tolerate him on the throne. But Abdullah, approaching his mid-sixties and having suffered a heart attack, also might not rule long. Fahd and Abdullah as individuals are much less important than the power bloc each represents. The House of Saud without either of the two men will still be racked by the philosophical division between the progressives and the traditionalists and the power rivalries between the competing factions within the family. And since each group has a vested interest in control of its own military power, it will be with Abdullah's death that the real struggle for power within the royal family will ensue. For at that point, perilous decisions will have to be made about control of the National Guard and the Ministry of Defense and Aviation (MODA).

Unless the progressive branch of the family can force him to strike a bargain at the time of his ascension, it is assumed that Abdullah as king will retain control of the National Guard, either himself or through a commander he appoints. With Sultan due to succeed Abdullah as king, authority over both the Ministry of Defense and Aviation and the National Guard comes up for grabs at Abdullah's death. The natural order of promotion could move Prince Naif, now minister of the Interior, to the National Guard, opening up the Ministry of the Interior to his deputy, Ahmed ibn Abdul Aziz, a Sudairi. The Ministry of Defense and Aviation, never in the traditionalists' power constellation, would go to a progressive. That would put the Sudairis or their allies in all of the power points: the National Guard, the Ministry of the Interior, and MODA, a situation intolerable to the Abdullah faction. On the other hand, if control of the guard went to Abdullah's son at the time Abdullah became king, the long-delayed power shift to the second generation of Abdul Aziz's descendants would be set in motion, challenging the orderly succession of Sultan.

For the House of Saud to avoid a period of destructive infighting, some decision about the distribution of military power must be made at the time Abdullah becomes king. In this compromise, the succession of Sultan will also have to be determined, for Sultan will have problems laying claim to the kingship. First, Sultan as defense minister is a bitter foe of the Abdullah faction. And second, Sultan is the most pro-Western of all the senior princes. His sons are Western educated. One of his sons, Bandar, is ambassador to the United States. Sultan himself is the most active and vocal member of the family in support of the American alliance. And like Fahd, he has essentially no roots in Saudi Arabia's political system outside of the non traditionalist military.

If Sultan cannot put together a strong enough coalition in the family to become king, the House of Saud will likely be reduced to intra-family squabbling while it searches for a leader acceptable to all. Yet the family has an instinct for survival and an enormous pool of personalities from which to draw for a ruler. The al-Sauds range from traditionalists in the mold of Abdullah to liberals like Talal, one of the "free princes" who challenged Faisal. Or there is the family mediator, Prince Salman, governor of Riyadh, who might emerge as a compromise candidate. Or an alignment of the grandsons of Abdul Aziz, known as the among the nephews is Saud al-Faisal, son of King Faisal and of the nephews," could compete for the throne. The most likely long-time foreign minister. The tall, distinguished Saud al-Faisal, who was educated at Princeton and would be assumed to be pro-Western, is nevertheless more closely associated with Abdullah's policies than those of the Sudairis. A nationalist who eloquently argues the case for a nonaligned foreign policy, he is also perhaps the most condescending of any of the leading members of the royal family about the Sudairis' opulent lifestyle. Unlike so many of their relatives, Saud al-Faisal and his brothers live sedately in sensible houses near their father's palace, where no hint of scandal has yet touched them. The al-Faisals, who all look remarkably like their father, hold a series of posts in the provinces and the central government. Riding on their father's reputation among the Saudis who staff the military, the secret police, and even the National Guard, the al-Faisals could be a formidable power bloc if they so chose. But in any of these scenarios, a deviation from the precarious balance of forces within the royal family threatens to bring the House of Saud tumbling down.

The royal family realizes it is in trouble. Even during Khalid's reign, the longevity and the legitimacy of the House of Saud was strengthened by its publicly restoring to the dynasty the deposed Saud ibn Abdul Aziz, purged from the history of Saudi Arabia by King Faisal. Government publications listing the kings of the House of Saud had omitted King Saud as if he had never existed. Then Khalid resurrected him. First Saud's picture began to appear in public buildings, placed in proper order between the pictures of Abdul Aziz and Faisal. Various government buildings and institutions began to carry Saud's name, the grandest being the King Saud University outside Riyadh. But it is not just Saud who is being promoted. When Fahd appears around the kingdom, people in the villages are turned out for the television cameras, waving palm fronds along his route. Considering the depth of opposition, these are ridiculous attempts to treat cosmetically the political problems that engulf the House of Saud at every level of the population.

The ten years of the oil boom (1974-84) were a period in which educational levels soared, when a principally agricultural and nomadic population became rapidly urbanized, when tribal and regional divisions were muted by a sense of nationalism, and when traditional values running the gamut from religion to the work ethic came under attack. At the same time, a people who had always prided themselves on their independence and freedom from authority became tied to an economic system dependent on the distribution of oil revenues by the central government.

The state, the private monopoly of the Rouse of Saud, clove unto itself all economic and political power and ruled by buying off interest groups that were holdovers from a fragmented tribal society. The House of Saud, so successful in tying the people to the person of the ruler, allowed no political philosophies or abstractions to develop, no impersonal rules and procedures. Its efforts to create new structures to deal with the new Saudi Arabia were aimed at neutralizing potential threats to its authority rather than mobilizing support for a modernizing nation. Consequently, responsibility for the economic downturn and its resulting impact on personal purchasing power is not, in the Saudi mind, attributable to history, circumstances, or simple luck. Having failed to develop any institutional supports, the House of Saud is held directly responsible for the state of the economy and the inequities in the distribution of wealth and power. To it falls the blame for policies that created artificial and unjust differences in a society that believes itself to be basically egalitarian. "Given the royal family has depended on a diffuse sense of legitimacy rather than a concentrated base of support, such as a party or a bureaucracy, its loss of legitimacy is even more destabilizing than it would be in other regimes that have solid organized support." * At the end of the boom era, the economic and political policies of the House of Saud are bankrupt. The population is dissatisfied and restive. And in Arabian society, when there is misery, rebellion is imminent.

Unlike the political unrest during the oil boom, which was isolated and contained, there is now either outright or measured opposition to the royal family in almost every segment of society. Some merchant princes who have suffered economically in the recession have become part of the political opposition. The middle-class entrepreneurs who feasted on the crumbs of the economically powerful have been left with trading establishments bereft of trade and in search of new economic allies. The technocrats and the urbanized element of the military are demanding political power. The tribal army and the traditionalists chafe under the Western-tainted policies of the House of Saud. There are certain lingering regional groups and isolated leftist groups who have always opposed the al-Sauds. And there are the Shiites. Each configuration has its own dissatisfactions with the government.

Outside the traditionalists, the most explosive group is the middle class, supported by elements of the regular armed forces. The largest element in the new middle class, and its backbone, is the educated technocrats. Although some questioned oil policy and the accelerated rate of development during the oil boom, all technocrats accepted the basic philosophy of modernization. Typically holding PhDs from UCLA, they were men who went West early in the oil boom and re turned to take up positions in the upper levels of the bureaucracy. For the most part, they were sons of urban merchants or other families who were outside the tribal power structure. Created by the oil boom, the technocrats had nothing to gain from the traditional order. In the political equation, they came to occupy an intermediate position between the wealthy entrepreneurs and the religious fundamentalists. As the oil boom rolled on, the technocrats who were no longer satisfied with being impotent cogs in the bureaucracy came to demand some political power as the price for their expertise in managing the bureaucracy. Believing they would be pulled into the process of decision-making by their mentor, the crown prince, they waited for Fahd to become king.

* Islarni and Kavoussi, The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, p. 78.

Yet when Fahd did become king, the political equation remained the same and the position of the technocrats even declined. In contrast to the 1970s, students returning home from foreign schools in the 1980s found that they did not rocket into high-level government jobs as their older brothers had. With government expansion limited to jobs with no other purpose than creating employment; the most recent wave of the educated elite has been wedged into mid-level positions with little hope of advancement. Stagnating economically and politically, the middle class's lingering illusions that the House of Saud was willing to share power were shattered in 1984 when Ghazi Algosaibi, minister of Health and leader of the technocrats, fell from power.

The political upheaval at the King Faisal hospital at the time I left Saudi Arabia was, on the surface, a struggle for control of the hospital. But in all its dimensions it represented a wide-ranging power struggle between the royal family and the new middle class. The antagonists were Nizar Fetieh, director of the hospital and guardian of the medical privileges and secrets of the royal family. On the other side was the popular Ghazi Algosaibi, minister of Health.

Through the 1970's and into the eighties, Algosaibi was a model and a mentor for the generation of young bureaucrats that emerged as a result of Saudi Arabia's development policies. The Western-educated Algosaibi was regarded as the most effective of the technocrat ministers. A leading intellectual and social commentator, he is considered among the best Arab poets writing today. Through his writing in both Arabic and English, he has publicly challenged such hallowed topics as the Saudi prohibition of women drivers and Henry Kissinger's basic understanding of the Middle East. But it is in his poems that he most effectively pricks the sacred cows.

Nurtured by Fahd, Algosaibi rose through the ranks of the Saudi bureaucracy to become minister of Industry and Electricity in 1975. He won the admiration of Saudis and Westerners alike by untangling the hodgepodge of electrical systems and launching Saudi Arabia's vast industrial projects. He sat on the Council of Ministers, where insiders say he was the most outspoken of the non royal members. A superb administrator, Algosaibi also had the reputation of being among the most incorruptible men in Saudi Arabia. Perhaps for this reason, he was moved to the Ministry of Health in 1982. In the post boom era, the Ministry of Health was potentially one of the most expensive government agencies, with a 1983-84 budget of $6 billion, and by common agreement one of the most poorly managed.

Algosaibi's attempt to build a comprehensive health care system depended on bringing both the military and National Guard hospitals, controlled by Crown Prince Abdullah and Defense and Aviation Minister Prince Sultan, as well as the King Faisal Specialist Hospital, under the Ministry of Health.

Seeking to gain control over the military hospitals, Algosaibi claimed that he could operate the hospitals of MODA and the National Guard hospitals for much less than their current budgets. The implication was that the extra costs were going into the pockets of Sultan and Abdullah. He bluntly challenged Sultan on the propriety of a Spanish defense contract that the Ministry of Defense and Aviation had awarded with out a public bid. And for extra measure, he insulted Abdullah's close friend the deputy commander of the National Guard on the quality of his poetry. Ah of this was behind the scenes. Public was the row with Fetieh, director of the King Faisal Specialist Hospital.

Fetieh, a cardiologist of mixed Saudi and Syrian ancestry, had built an empire by taking care of the politically troubling drug and alcohol cases in the royal family and by catering to the whims of the daughters, wives, and derelict sons of the mighty. In November 1983 Fetieh became the subject of a scandal involving allegations of administrative malfeasance and a string of Western mistresses. Algosaibi seized the moment to force Fetieh out and win control of the hospital. In response, Fetieh mobilized his royal patrons against the health minister.

King Fahd's personal intervention in the dispute was drawn in early by Algosaibi. The relationship between Algosaibi and the king approached that of a father and son. It was Fahd who had shepherded the brilliant Algosaibi from the directorate of the railways into the Council of Ministers, where he reigned as the czar of the Third Development Plan's industrialization projects. By pitting the director of a hospital and his royal allies against the minister of Health and the middle class, the King Faisal hospital controversy brought into focus the whole question of whether or not Saudi Arabia would be able to move beyond its status as the personal fiefdom of the Rouse of Saud or whether the kingdom would continue to be controlled by the whims of the royal family and its cronies. Algosaibi became the test of the House of Saud's commitment to the expansion of some political power to the middle class.

Regardless of the king's affection for Algosaibi, irresistible pressures from the royal family were building for his dismissal. The senior princes wanted him out because he had trod on their turf; Fetieh's supporters blamed him for their doctor's problems. In March 1984, five months into the battle for power, Algosaibi published in the newspaper Al-Jazirah what will probably go down as his most famous poem. It was written in the style of a famous epistle to an Egyptian ruler by al-Mutanabbi, the tenth-century laureate of Iraq, in which al-Mutanabbi laments his disappointment in the ruler Ikhshidid Kafur. His poem was a plea to be released from his duties before he was further victimized by slander and backbiting from those around the king. Algosaibi's poem was written in the same vein and caused a storm of political discussion. Although Algosaibi never stated that it was addressed to Fahd, its content left little doubt.

Why should I go on singing while there are a

thousand slanderers and backbiters going

between you and me?

My voice is lost and you do not feel its echo

and I am used to seeing you enchanted when I sing.

Now, I barely see you between the crowds and I

do not see that smile which used to grace your

features.

Your eyes gaze at me and then turn away quickly

just like a stranger who is frightened and

cautious.

There are thousands of slanderers between you

and me.

They lie, you hear them and believe their

falsehoods.

They deluded you and you liked their

deceitfulness, but you used to abhor

the artificial perfume.

Tell the slanderers that I am coming with white

banner held high so that they may walk and run

in my earth.*

Within days, Algosaibi was fired. The dismissal, which was announced on the front pages of the newspapers, caused consternation among segments of the middle class. Evidently the king was concerned enough about the outcry that he subsequently appointed Algosaibi to the politically safe but trivial job as ambassador to the sheikhdom of Bahrain.

 

*AlJazirah, March 5, 1984.

Algosaibi's dismissal ranked as the major domestic political event in Saudi Arabia since the Mecca uprising. It marked the watershed in the Rouse of Saud's laudable ability to deftly balance political forces to hold its kingdom together. During the oil boom it was postulated that the senior members of the royal family were too astute politically to ignore the middle class's rumblings of discontent. Yet the Algosaibi episode demonstrated that probably no king has the ability to control the royal family to the extent needed to force any limitations on its power. Although the major decisions involving the kingdom and the family are made by the king and the senior princes, these decisions can be implemented only with the broad support of the total family. When two of the senior princes joined by a panoply of underlings in the royal family can combine to force a major political upheaval, the prospects of evolution to any type of representative government are dismal.

As if to underscore this truth, the best known of the technocrats, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's oil minister of twenty-four years, fell from power in October 1986. While speculation in the West focused on the effect on the kingdom's oil policy, Yamani's dismissal said a great deal more about the political climate in Saudi Arabia than it did about the Saudis' future moves in the oil markets.

Zaki Yamani became Saudi Arabia's oil minister in 1962 at the age of thirty-two. One of a handful of Saudis who on the eve of the oil embargo possessed a Western education and a knowledge of the outside world, Yamani became the protege of King Faisal. In spite of the stature his position afforded him, Yamani, over all the years that he served as oil minister, was never granted the privilege of decision- making. While he advocated sacrificing high prices to protect Saudi Arabia's share of international oil markets, oil policy was set by the senior princes. Yamani frequently left OPEC meetings to call Riyadh for instructions or to fly back to the kingdom for consultation. Nonetheless, he became an international superstar. A superb negotiator, he was a poised and graceful spokesman not only for Saudi Arabia's oil interests but for issues affecting the entire Arab world. It was the respect and recognition afforded Yamani that so irritated King Fahd and his brothers. As egotistical as he was competent, Yamani cast a long shadow over Fahd's troubled and lackluster regime.

Animosities between Fahd and his oil minister brewed over several years and his dismissal should have come as no surprise. Even the abruptness of the departure followed the model set by Algosaibi's dismissal. Purported to have heard of his ouster over the radio, Yamani was forced out more by the weakness of the royal family than by its strength. As the economic downturn stretches out, the royal family more and more adopts a siege mentality. Anxious of the future, usurpers of the respect and affection that the royal family regards as its own private reserve cannot be tolerated. So Yamani like Algosaibi was fired.

Ironically, the new oil minister, Hisham Nazer, is the third star in the triumvirate of commoners who reigned during the oil boom. Long time minister of Planning, Nazer directed all four of Saudi Arabia's five-year development plans. A Western-educated progressive, he draws support from the same constituencies as Yamani and Algosaibi. He was chosen partly because in a glutted oil market the royal family saw it as advantageous to create the illusion that oil policy is in the hands of someone other than an al-Saud. But more important, there were few men from whom to choose to fill the post. The bureaucratic structure of Saudi Arabia is such that men have positions, not responsibilities. Responsibilities remain with the senior princes. Consequently, the only men who can assume a post such as oil minister are the same ones on whom the House of Saud called when Saudi Arabia burst out of its medieval mold in the 1970's. These are also the same men, now joined by thousands of others who have been educated in the West, whose services are vital to Saudi Arabia but who still have no political power. It is as if the House of Saud can live neither with nor without the technocrats. Furthermore, by putting them into positions of power and then driving them out, the Rouse of Saud is creating its own political opposition with the brightest and the best of Saudi Arabia at its core.

Although the middle class as a whole lacks the cohesiveness to act as a revolutionary class, its growing alienation contributes to the atmosphere for insurrection from other groups sharing similar interests. The urbanized elements of the regular armed forces have certain of the same goals as the middle class. There are also the long-held grievances of the populations of the Hijaz and the al-Hassa, which fit into the same mode as those of the middle class.

But it is not only the progressives and the non-Nejdi Saudis who are at odds with the Rouse of Saud. Insurrection from the other part of the military, the National Guard, could come on behalf of a religious rebellion against the societal decay of the oil boom. The kingdom's traditionalists are indignant about how much the development policies of the boom weakened the Saudis' religious values. Fewer Saudis are praying in the mosques. Western words such as "sandwich," "bus," and "radio" have crept into Arabic, corrupting the purity of the language of the Koran. Artistic expression that was conveyed through religious calligraphy has been superseded by such outrages as the six teen-foot-tall Carrara marble sculpture of a prince's thumb that dominates a thoroughfare in Jeddah. Traditional Saudi society, rather than being defined by its fierce defense of the standards of Wahhabism, has become marked by apathy, alienation, and political opposition to the policies and behavior of the Rouse of Saud.

The state encompassed by the Rouse of Saud is no longer seen as the defender of the faith but as the creator of artificial and unjust differences. Religious leaders including Sheikh Abdul Aziz ibn Baz have fallen to charges that by putting their knowledge of theology and jurisprudence at the service of the Rouse of Saud, they have become as corrupt as the rulers. This has wide-ranging implications for political stability For in the absence of a religious hierarchy, the authority of the ulema has depended on its ability to cultivate a relationship with the masses. Historically, the ties between the learned scholars who comprise the ulema and the people have served as a conduit of support from the people to the Rouse of Saud. But during the oil boom, the ulema's close association with the House of Saud severely damaged its credibility with the traditional Saudi. If a revolt of the traditionalists comes, it will not be instigated by the ulema but will originate, as it did in the Mecca uprising, with marginal elements of the religious community claiming to represent the purity and certainty of religion.

The nature of the fundamentalists' opposition is drawing in others, for religious unrest is not limited to the fanatics of the ilk of the Ikhwan or the rebels at Mecca. Although the average Saudi does not frequent the mosque as often as his father did, the urbanization of the Saudi population has increased the pull of religion among all those who migrated to the cities during the oil boom. The passive symbols of religion have taken on new meaning and importance as "the detribalized city dweller looks to religion as a cultural map to guide him through the unfamiliar and expanding city." * In an alien environment, religion has been revived and strengthened to suit the emotional needs of the believer. Even among the educated classes there is a worry that in creasing Westernization will soon relegate religion to the subordinate position Christianity occupies in the secular nations of the West. In essence, there hovers within every Saudi the fear that the price he paid for the gifts of the West was his soul.

* Islami and Kavoussi, The Political Economy of Saudi Arabia, p 88

That leaves the position of the Shiites, the most readily identifiable of the opposition groups, to be pondered. By the Shiites' numbers, geography, and the disdain with which they are regarded by the rest of the Saudis, the Rouse of Saud can move its military against them with impunity. There are perhaps 150,000 Shiites, conveniently congregated in settlements around Dammam, Qatif, Dhahran, and Ras Tanura. With the tacit support of the Saudi Wahhabis and Sunnis, the House of Saud has used force against the Shiites in the past, specifically during the labor unrest of 1956 and during the rioting in 1979. But since 1979, it has become obvious that although a town such as Qatif cannot defend itself against tanks, the Shiites command their own sources of power. Through their willingness to do manual labor and their ambition for education, the Shiites have become heavily concentrated in both the oil fields and the management of ARAMCO. If the Shiites chose to rise up in support of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini or simply because they hate the other Saudis, they could close down oil operations. This possibility terrified the Rouse of Saud particularly between 1979 and 1984. But when Iranian planes threatened Saudi Arabia, the Shiites, as a whole, seemed to have cast their lot perhaps not with the Rouse of Saud but with Saudi Arabia. Although isolated acts of sabotage do occur, the real threat of the Shiites against the Rouse of Saud is not so much physical violence as it is the spiritual appeal of the Islamic revolution.

It is tempting to write off the House of Saud as another victim of the greed and avarice for power that too often seems to characterize Middle Eastern political regimes. Saudi Arabia's ruling family has always been regarded as something of an anomaly. The Arabist D. G. Rowarth, writing in 1925, said,

I see nothing in the circumstances or constituents of the present Wahhabite expansion to promise it a longer life than has been enjoyed by early Nedjean ebullitions These, to take only one test, have prevailed in Mecca for ten years on the average. . . I prophesize therefore, that Arabia is not in for more than a decade, at the most, of Wahhabite domination outside the Nejd. *

The House of Saud has endured and it will not easily be dislodged. The royal family is a massive corporation, fanning out across the kingdom. It holds the governorships of the provinces. It is integrated into all elements of the armed forces. Its righteous pray with the religious leaders and fund their work. Its members command the major positions in the bureaucracy. Its secret police are in place in every organization and institution. The carefully built system of checks and balances between the military forces and the National Guard, each representing not only a different political bloc but a different style of life, frustrates the military from uniting against the political system. That leaves the opposition, although far-ranging, fragmented and leaderless and all but fatally handicapped by a culture that shuns planning and organization and seems incapable of sustaining any emotion-charged activity beyond a short span of time. Without an external invasion or a military total rebellion is likely to dislodge the House of Saud.

That is not to say the regime is secure. To the contrary, the empire of the al-Sauds is tottering. The House of Saud is sitting on top of a political system on the verge of collapse. The political system in its present form in all likelihood cannot endure. The question is how it will change. With the various factions of the family snarling over the skeleton of the al-Saud dynasty, one or the other may eventually pro duce a king. But the future of the House of Saud in some respects is a question not so much of whether it will survive but whether it can rule.

Unless the Rouse of Saud can produce a strong leader, it may simply crumble. Political opposition in the Arabian Peninsula has long employed its own unique weapon - noncompliance. Traditionally, tribal alliances held as long as one man could command the loyalty of all. A sheikh rejected by his people had no choice but to withdraw, for he could not force his authority. The same mechanism is inherent in the new order. Saudi Arabia is built of private empires that respond to a personal relationship between the leader and his followers. These empires might be tribal or bureaucratic or military, but all are dependent on personal relationships and economic reward. With a scant population, no large underprivileged class from which to draw manpower, and a social structure that is not built on class suppressing class, it is all but impossible for the Rouse of Saud, with its fear of mercenaries, to rule through armed repression. And economic repression offers the royal family no better chance of forcing cooperation. Although the Saudis are now tied into a cash economy fueled by oil and distributed by the government, an embargo on government payments to the people is perhaps the most risky move the rulers could make.

*In Ragaei El Mallakh and Dorothea El Mallakh, eds. Saudi Arabia: Energy, Developmental Planning, and Industrialization (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1982). p.99.

Money has been the glue that has cemented the al-Sauds' kingdom since before the oil boom began. As the economic downturn exacerbated the Rouse of Saud's political problems, so could an upturn in oil prices help mollify some of the opposition. In a glutted market, the princes of the Rouse of Saud prefer to hold production down to force oil prices up. But if its partners fail to abide by production quotas and if non-OPEC producers continue high levels of production, then the Saudis must either support prices by cutting their own production or they must once again flood the oil markets to try to force the others into line. For oil income is directly tied to the political survival of the Rouse of Saud. With the next cycle of petroleum shortages predicted to hit in the early 1990's, the Rouse of Saud is faced with feeding the appetite of its family and placating its subjects until oil shortages per haps alleviate the money crunch.

In the meantime, left with no tools of coercion and limited sources of persuasion, the Rouse of Saud must win the Saudis' consent to rule or it is left reigning over chaos. If it fails to gather in the disparate political groups that came out of the oil boom, the Rouse of Saud as now constituted will die. And whatever government replaces it - a leader rising from the ruins of the Rouse of Saud, an oligarchy of religious oppression, or a government representing the progressiveness of the middle class - it must be aggressively anti-Western if it is to rule. The Saudis have been a people without ideology beyond Islam. One of the major reasons the House of Saud survived the oil boom without obvious political opposition was that the Saudis fit none of the models for political dissent. Before the oil boom, there were no great class divisions. Everyone was poor except for the royal family and a few merchant families who were a little less poor than the rest. While the oil boom did create more distinct class divisions, there was still no proletariat, no oppressed working class. Rejecting communism as atheistic and Middle Eastern-style socialism as tainted by pro-Soviet political regimes, the Saudis proved barren soil for political ideas much removed from those of the House of Saud. There were no political institutions or traditions that could rally sufficient political support to overcome the restrictions on the press or political organizations. With no structured religious hierarchy in Wahhabism, even theology resisted being mobilized into a competing political movement. But the Saudis have now found an idea with which to oppose the House of Saud that is not dependent on sharp class distinctions or a competing political philosophy. That ideology is anti-Westernism. Anti-Western ism rose out of the oil boom, was nurtured in the economic downturn, and was inspired by the revolutionary rhetoric from Iran. Anti-Westernism is the force that can reach across region and class, traditionalists and progressives, air force pilot and Bedouin foot soldier, to unite the Saudis against the inequities and alienations fostered by the House of Saud.

Not since the Moslems broke out of the reclusiveness of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century have the Saudis faced a challenge to their sense of self comparable in magnitude to the one represented by their encounter with the modern West. As if to justify the anxieties their fathers felt when Major Frank Holmes first crossed the desert in 1922 in search of oil, the Saudis now realize that their culture has been inescapably altered by their embrace of Western technology and know- how. Although the frustrations of Western governments and the hostilities of the Western work force toward the insults and humiliations they have suffered at the hands of the Saudis are parallel to the Saudis' resentments against the West, in the long run, the West has always held the psychological advantage over the Saudis.

Much of the Saudis' confusion about Westernization has resulted from their inability to differentiate between the worth of the material benefits of the West and the worth of the traditional values of their own society. In the Saudis' quest for modernization, Western superiority in material, economic, technological, and organizational fields endowed the Westerners with superior power. Unable to resist imitating the West, the Saudis judged themselves by Western standards of organization and technical know-how that pointed up their own weak nesses. It was as if the Saudis imported criteria by which to judge their own impotence.

Furthermore, Western governments unwittingly contributed to Saudi alienation by encouraging the rapid development of Saudi Arabia as the solution to the problem of recycling petrodollars. But as a result, the Saudis are now left with excessive industrial and infrastructure projects that they cannot manage. The massive construction effort of the oil boom has left in its wake an infrastructure that stands as a symbol confirming the Saudis' sense of inferiority.

Having escaped foreign domination throughout its history, Saudi Arabia was finally colonized during the oil boom. It succumbed not to foreign conquest or economic imperialism but to Westernization that was chosen, bought, and paid for in the form of technology and technically skilled people. This colonization, under the name of modernization, disrupted family life, made women restless in their traditional roles, corrupted the devout, and subjected the society to the disdain of a large Western work force. By giving up that which was secure and predictable, the Saudis achieved several years of unbridled prosperity. But the policies of the oil boom failed to deliver easy solutions to the painful process of modernization. Instead they brought with them the breakdown of domestic political institutions and the cultural seduction of Saudi society, a society the Saudis believe is built on the timeless virtues of the desert.

Whether the gain of a modern infrastructure was worth the disruption of their society is not an issue the Saudis consider rationally. In stead there is a visceral reaction to what they see as a debasement of their values and, in a sense, of themselves. Saudi society in many ways has been turned upside-down, leaving a people deeply committed to their traditions awash in a culture they no longer understand. Old and new are locked in a curious collage in which everything has changed and nothing has changed. Veiled women wear abaayas over T-shirts and tight-fitting pants. A complete recitation of the Koran in space was an important mission of the first Saudi astronaut. The Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency has installed automatic teller machines at banks but requires that they close during prayer times.

Through the labyrinth of modernization, the Saudis have acquired the characteristics of a marginal people. "The marginal man is marginal, not because he is unable to acquire the intellectual thought processes of the culture to which he wants to assimilate, nor because he is unable to free himself of the thought processes of the culture on which he has turned his back. He is marginal because emotionally he is unable to identify with either of the two cultures." *

 

* See Raphael Patai. The Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1976), p. 190.

The Western presence in Saudi Arabia was so pervasive, reaching into every geographic area and touching every social class, that no Saudi escaped the cultural confrontation with the West. And the Westerners, just by the enormity of their presence, lay siege to most facets of Saudi culture. The Westerner, organized in his habits of work and thought, demanded that the Saudi, who found reward in leisure that allowed his mind to drift to the cadence of poetry, conform to the Western work ethic. The Saudis, who pride themselves on the purity of their Arabic, nevertheless had to learn English to survive in the multinational society created by the oil boom. Saudi education ceased to be training in the Koran. Instead, the scientific approach to problem solving, a concept absent in Arab culture, became the method by which Saudis were taught. The further a Saudi went in the educational process, the further he became separated from those Saudis who dealt with the Westerners only in the marketplace. And the more an educated Saudi came to live with Western culture, the more acute his sense of internal division became. The well-to-do spent months each year in London or on the Riviera and then returned to resume life under the dictates of Saudi culture. The middle class went West to earn degrees in technological subjects created by the West and then returned to manage Saudi Arabia's Western- built infrastructure with Western-style management techniques that are inappropriate to Saudi culture. The marginal Saudi was irresistibly attracted to Western culture while at the same time fearing and despising Members of the educated elite have become psychologically debilitated by their encounter with the West, leading them to withdraw from the culture they attempted to assimilate. Regarding the lower classes with disdain during the oil boom, the middle class now has a certain empathy with them, fostered by an economic recession in which all but the royal family are losing. Economic uncertainty has brought into play, more strongly than would have been possible during the boom, the concept of the equality of all men that is the cornerstone of Wahhabism.

Fundamentalism holds tremendous appeal as a vehicle of political opposition embracing all social classes against the Rouse of Saud. The emotional attraction to the eternal qualities of Islam has the effect of chipping away at the modernized Saudi's carefully constructed veneer. Islam restores the claims of his heritage over the false values he believes the West has imposed on his culture. It gives a philosophical basis for attacks on corruption, privilege, and the unimaginable for- tunes and the sexual liberties of the royal family. For the lower classes, never separated from the Puritanism of Wahhabism, religion provides their reason for railing against the class system that came with development.

But fundamentalism also has an economic base. The wrath of the fundamentalists and the middle class coalesces around the foreign entrepreneurs, with their superior technology and skills, the Saudi middlemen who became rich in partnership with the foreigners, and the royal family, who provided the contracts and government money that made them all rich. The return to all things Saudi is becoming the rallying cry of those whose expectations were not realized by the prosperity of the boom. The appeal of the Saudis' own culture is part of the mechanism by which the Saudis seek to gain control of their own resources.

If foreigners were getting their way with the help of middlemen, it must be because of the fawning devotion to things alien; as for the success of middlemen, it must be the product not only of access to court but also of the willingness and capacity to move in the foreigner's universe: to discourse in a foreign language, to move easily in the foreigner's hotels and boardrooms, to allow one's unveiled wife to mix with infidels. Politics and culture intersect, and the only way to break the hold of the triangle on vast national wealth is to break it where it counts: challenge the ruling authority, reclaim the political system in order to perform the twin functions of cultural purification and economic autonomy. Those who lead such a revolt are never those anonymous masses ritually spoken of in radical polemics. They are comparatively better off, they have resources, they are articulate. *

In all traditional societies, there is a strong temptation to return to things one knows, things with which one is comfortable. "Yesterday's grand idee was the withering away of tradition, the triumph of that great universal solvent, modernization. In yesterday's imagery, societies were to leap, as if by magic, historical stages; they would move instantaneously from traditional society to the rational bureaucratic stage." **

* Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice Since 1997 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p.184.

**Ibid, p.139.

 

Today's Saudi is reaching not toward modernization but toward the security of Islam, the gateway back to the past.

Since 1979, Shiism has potently established its credentials as a culturally indigenous force that is both revolutionary and anti-Western. This gives the Islamic revolution, spearheaded by Iran, a broad appeal that cuts across the borders of states and even sects. In the immediate aftermath of the Iranian revolution, the fragile states of the Arabian Peninsula felt the powerful appeal of resurgent Islam. While these countries sought to reach some accommodations with militant Islam, Iraq attacked it across its common border with Iran. Throughout the bloody Iraq-Iran war, the Puritanism and anti-Westernism of the Iranian revolution has attracted the sympathy of many of Saudi Arabia's Sunnis and Wahhabis. Unlike the leftist revolutions that overthrew the Middle East monarchs in the 1950s, Khomeini and his Shiite followers attract Moslems for the reason that they are both anticommunist and anti-Western. And for segments of Saudi Arabia's population, the revolutionary philosophy of Iran is alluring because it is closer to the ideals espoused by Mohammed than those of their own Wahhabi rulers, who are so enamored of the West.

Iran poses a real threat to Saudi Arabia both militarily and ideologically. Events seem to conspire to keep this dual threat potent. In 1985 Saudi Arabia's fear of Iran's presence on Kuwait's border led the House of Saud to moderate its support of Iraq and to revert to its policy of buying off the kingdom's enemies. Over the next eighteen months, clandestine operations supplied Iran with refined petroleum and undetermined amounts of credit for arms purchases. While pursuing its own policy for its own reasons, Saudi Arabia in late 1986 was caught up in the public brouhaha surrounding the Reagan administration's arms deal with Iran. Every innuendo that linked Saudi Arabia to the affair added fuel to the widespread dissatisfaction within the kingdom, for the revelations coming out of Washington tripped anti-Western emotions and highlighted the shameless riches of Saudi middlemen suckled by the royal family. As a result, the Rouse of Saud became trapped in a scenario in which it appeared to have played lackey to American interests by funding the United States' covert operations in Central America and by perhaps committing the unforgivable sin of allowing itself to be come involved with the hated Israel in funneling American arms to Iran. These arms shipments were brokered by Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi, a confidant of King Fahd and Prince Sultan.

In the eyes of the Saudis, Khashoggi is the archetype of the middle man who acquired incredible wealth during the oil boom. Exploiting his ties with the royal family, Khashoggi became the agent for a broad range of Western products and weaponry sold to Saudi Arabia during the oil boom. His fat commissions skimmed the cream off the kingdom's oil revenues. Anyone making money on the scale Khashoggi did would have caused hostilities among the Saudis; but Khashoggi was especially resented because he is an outsider. Of mixed Turkish and Syrian descent, he has always been on the periphery of the tribal relationships that govern the kingdom, and few look on him as a true Saudi. Furthermore, his ardent embrace of Western ways and his flamboyant lifestyle have largely cut him out of Saudi society. Khashoggi personifies all that the Saudis detest in the Rouse of Saud and its cohorts.

With the House of Saud weakened by its own deficiencies and often discredited in its relations with the West, is Saudi Arabia likely to follow the Iranian recipe for change? In both Iran and Saudi Arabia enormous wealth and rapid economic development were suddenly thrust on a traditional society. Both have had monarchies that rule alone and have attachments to the West. Both have populations easily aroused by religious causes. Yet there are fundamental differences. First, the Rouse of Saud has not isolated itself from the people. While they live lavishly, the al-Sauds still have not surrounded the monarchy with the Oriental pomp and ceremony the shah did. Nor is there the adoration of the person of the king that the egomaniacal shah demanded. And rather than publicly rejecting religion in the name of secularization as the shah did, the House of Saud has assiduously cultivated the tie between Wahhabism and the monarchy.

Second, a highly structured religious organization, which was the vehicle for revolution in Iran, does not exist in Wahhabism. The ulema is made up of men learned in the Koran, not members of a religious hierarchy claiming great wealth and the titles of mullah and ayatollah. * And where in Iran the clergy controls great wealth, the collection of offerings is not part of the rituals of the Wahhabi mosque. Almost all the money at the disposal of the religious establishment comes directly out of the government's coffers controlled by the House of Saud. Finally, the Saudis' psychological makeup lacks the sense of martyrdom that characterizes Shiism. Although prone to short outbursts of highly charged emotional activity, the Wahhabis see no glory in dying in suffering.

* Similar in status to a priest and a bishop, respectively.

What Saudi Arabia and Iran do share is similar anger over the assault on their traditions that came with modernization. And there is the same profound desire for "Western detoxification" that turned the religious message of the Ayatollah Khomeini into revolution. Khomeini's success was due to the fact that there was not one but two revolutions, which occurred simultaneously. One was the liberal revolution of the middle class against the monarchy, and the other was the religious revolution of the lower classes against Westernization. The example of the ideology and militancy of the Iranian revolution could tear at the walls of class, tribe, and region and unite the Saudis against the Rouse of Saud. Militarily, Iran could force the Saudis into defeat on their borders, triggering a general uprising against the al Sauds. And ideologically, its campaign in the name of Islam against the pro-Western monarchies could cut across all of the checks and balances so carefully constructed by the Rouse of Saud for its own protection.

This is the challenge to the political system in Saudi Arabia. The struggle is not between the philosophies of the United States and the USSR but between Islam and the West. Mutiny against the established order will come. It may not take the form of an armed rebellion to overthrow the House of Saud, but there will ensue a rebellion of con tempt against the Westernization of Saudi Arabia. Trapped between the dissatisfactions of its own people and the military presence of a crusading Iran on the kingdom's borders, the Rouse of Saud vacillates between the past and the present. It is a game that it has played well but a game it cannot sustain. Political instability will linger as long as the men in power defend their existence with the symbols of Saudi Arabia's pristine past while serving as handmaidens to the West.