BOOK REVIEW His kingdom for a book Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis by John R Bradley
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Reviewed by Carl Senna
John R Bradley worked for two and a half years at the only English-language
daily in Saudi Arabia, where he was the first non-Arab editor. When he suddenly
left the Arab News without explanation, it was for reasons he does not reveal
in Saudi Arabia
Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis. As a result, the question that
hovers over the book is whether he can ever return.
Ostensibly, his reflection on his life in the kingdom includes a serious
question of whether the alliance of Western economic interests and the people
running oil-rich Saudi Arabia can survive.
Leaving aside the gaping hole in his narrative, let's focus on what he wishes
to tell us about Saudi Arabia's perilous political instability, the growing
challenges from forces hostile to Western oil interests, and the looming
international crisis.
According to Bradley, it was no accident that 15 of the 19 hijackers who
crashed the planes into New York City's World Trade Center twin towers on
September 11, 2001, were young Saudis. Although they were members of al-Qaeda
terrorist cells, the terrorists were also raised in the anti-Western Wahhabist
Islam of Saudi Arabia, which Bradley observes is "clearly out of step with the
21st century".
"The great unanswered question is: Who will the young, who make up 60% of the
population, side with? The Al-Saud [leadership] as it tries slowly to reform,
the radicals intent on overthrowing the Al-Saud or the limited number of
liberals seeking to reform the kingdom more quickly than the royals will allow?
... For too many youth the answer is not clear. Even more frightening, it is
clear that too many are likely to choose the side of the radicals." (p 100)
The kingdom, as Bradley sees it, is caught between the rising expectations of
its privileged but democratically inclined youth and a reactionary, violent
religious establishment. Hence the days of the House of Saud are numbered. And
with the fall of the House of Saud the mutually beneficial "special
relationship" between the United States and Saudi Arabia will end.
The half-century-old deal, brokered aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal
between US president Franklin D Roosevelt and the kingdom's founder Ibn Saud,
came three days after the close of the 1945 post-World War II Yalta Conference.
It was at the conference that Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin
agreed on their respective international spheres of influence, including the
division of control of the Middle Eastern oil trade.
Bradley's thesis is that the current threat to the Al-Sauds began in the 1945
meeting.
"It sowed the seeds of future instability, with the Al-Saud already torn
between a jihad-inspired Wahhabi religious establishment needed to impose order
at home and new ties to Western colonial forces - first Britain, then the
United States - that were essential to guarantee external security," he writes.
(p 67)
It is not a very original view, but still debatable. Still, one has to respect
what he writes since it is based on his uniquely privileged life in the
kingdom.
Before September 11, a Saudi Arabian visa for Western journalists was something
of a cachet. Until then a journalist visa to Saudi Arabia was difficult to
secure even for journalists from prestigious international newspapers. A visa
came with many bureaucratic restrictions, was for the limited stay of a few
months, and required official permission for internal domestic travel as well
as a government-appointed handler for trips outside one's province.
As the first Westerner to edit a Saudi newspaper, Bradley largely had a free
hand in what was published, where he traveled and whom he met - which adds to
the significance of his book. Unlike the book, however, as editor he was
presumably targeting Saudi readers while at the Arab News, we might assume.
Despite the book's reticence on the subject, there's no getting around the
curious way Bradley was hired. His tenure contrasted greatly with the
experience of fellow Englishman Charles Dalrymple Belgrave, who also found his
way to the region.
As with Bradley, Belgrave lucked into a plum job in the region, but in
British-controlled Bahrain, the island country next to the Saudi Arabia.
Belgrave found his position especially rewarding. Not only did he become the
adviser to the sheikh, but when he retired some decades later he was a Knight
of the British Empire and a very wealthy man.
In contrast, Bradley allegedly either left Saudi Arabia after two and a half
years after being forced to resign or he was fired from the newspaper. I
suspect that Bradley will deny the rumors about the reasons for his departure,
but he does not satisfy our curiosity in his book. (No one at the Arab News
responded to my e-mails concerning this matter.) In any event, Bradley was not
knighted, nor does he appear to have been financially rewarded by his former
employer.
Employment, generally, in the Persian Gulf region for expatriates is still
quite lucrative, although now it seldom leads to both a fortune and a
knighthood. According to Bradley, expat life in Saudi Arabia is no longer a
romantic idyll. Terrorist attacks against expats have increased. And official
prosecution of expats for crimes such as bootlegging, sexual deviance, drug
dealing and other abuses has also risen.
Bradley estimates that before the September 11 attacks, American and British
expats numbered about 50,000. (But when I was in Jeddah a year earlier, I was
informed by a local chamber of commerce member that the number was twice
Bradley's figure, though it did not include Western military personnel secretly
based in the kingdom.)
Meanwhile, for all he has to say about policy matters and for all his political
analysis, his book tends to be a personal journal. The result is that the
personal becomes a tool for buttressing his policy analysis.
For instance, in the opening chapter ("Liberal Voices of the Hijaz") we meet a
gathering at Iftar, the break in the Ramadan fast. The meeting is a
Jeddah-based group of young intellectuals and free spirits critical of the
government. There Bradley introduces us to Sami Angawi's lecture. Angawi, a
Hejazi, criticizes the Wahhabi ideology of cultural intolerance of other groups
in the kingdom, such as the Hejazis who inhabit the region of Hejaz.
Bradley interprets the lecture as such: "Angawi's message was clear: the roots
of global Islamic terror can be traced in a very direct way back to the
fanaticism of the Wahhabi, who to this day rule Saudi Arabia in partnership
with the Al-Saud ruling family." (p 6)
But he also writes that Angawi was "careful throughout the lecture not to
mention the Al-Saud by name". (p 6) And later Bradley draws the broad
conclusion that the September 11 attacks "increased the pressures on ...
fragile religious, tribal and regional alliances established during Saudi
Arabia's bloody formation, as was testified to by the content of Sami Angawi's
lecture ... now as great a threat to the survival of the Al-Saud regime and
unity of Saudi Arabia as were an obstacle to the establishment of the state".
(p 10)
Drawing on Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) by T E Lawrence, Bradley seems
to approve of its orientalist prejudice. For Lawrence, Arabs were:
Semites
[who] had no half-tones in their register of vision. They were a people of
primary colors, or rather of black and white, who saw the world always in
contour. They were a dogmatic people, despising doubt, our modern crown of
thorns ... They knew only truth and untruth, belief and unbelief, without our
hesitating retinue of finer shades. This people was black and white, not only
in vision, but by inmost furnishings: black and white, not only in vision, not
merely in clarity, but in apposition. Their thoughts were at ease only in
extremes. They inhabited superlatives by choice. (p 93, Bradley)
Obviously the form of address and the focus of Bradley's policy analysis, like
those of Lawrence, are directed to a Western audience. One critic notes, "For
all his efforts to get to know the Saudi people, Bradley's acknowledgements
include not a single Saudi name." [1]
But it would be a grave mistake for Saudis and other interested parties to
dismiss Saudi Arabia Exposed out of hand. Even a broken watch, the
saying goes, is right about the time twice a day.
A graduate of London University, Bradley found an interest in Arabia and Arabic
studies. He traveled to Cairo after graduation to further his mastery of
Arabic, and found an editorial position at the largest newspaper, Al-Ahram. But
Egypt was always, he tells us, merely a convenient rest stop on a longer
Arabian itinerary; all along, so it appears, his eventual destination was the
kingdom.
"While I was not one of those expatriates who believed they were always
destined to live in Saudi Arabia, what I did share with such folk was
romanticism about the kingdom as a land that was intriguing," Bradley writes in
his introduction. (p xiii)
His opportunity came one day at Al-Ahram when he overheard a conversation
between two colleagues. One of them, whom Bradley does not identify by name,
disclosed that he had been an editor at the Arab News. Having intercepted that
conversation, Bradley introduced himself to the stranger and persuaded the man
to write him a letter of recommendation for a position at the Arab News.
To his surprise, luck was with him. The man agreed to his request. That
aggressive pursuit landed Bradley the job at the Arab News. Not only that, when
he got his visa, he found that he did not have to undergo many of the
bureaucratic obstacles that blocked other journalists from traveling to Saudi
Arabia. (The country was then beginning to relax the entry requirements for all
foreign journalists.) Moreover, his journalist visa did not have the usual
restrictions on where he could live; he was even free to travel to most of the
kingdom (with the exception of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and a few
others, probably defense-related areas).
Freedom to live in the working-class neighborhood of Jeddah enabled Bradley to
observe the kingdom's socially disadvantaged. And life in his al-Ruwais
neighborhood showed him extreme poverty among the non-European, non-American
expat community, and the Saudi underclass - "almost all of them ... poor ...
black ... an early hint of how the endemic racism in Saudi society is not
directly exclusively at Third World immigrants". (p xiv)
All the features associated with Third World slums existed in al-Ruwais - drug
dealing, male and female prostitution, black markets, bootlegging, illegal
immigration, abusive work conditions, pornography, exploitation of women, etc,
Bradley writes.
And there are fascinating encounters described later on showing some of the
fascinating tribes of al-Jouf, and the flower men near the border with Yemen.
The value of Bradley's book is in his descriptions of the seldom-publicized
places and tribes of the kingdom, sketchy as the descriptions often are.
But the main weakness in Bradley's book, more than its structural or conceptual
execution (or his misconceived equation of Saudi ethnic discrimination with
Anglo-Saxon white racism), is its oversimplified view of the country and the
people. And while he acknowledges there is "more than one Saudi Arabia" (p
xvi), he still assumes a monolithic, unitary Wahhabism.
No less than Lawrence warned us:
Pray God that men reading [Seven
Pillars of Wisdom] will not, for love of the glamour of strangeness, go
out to prostitute themselves and their talents in serving another race ... A
man who gives himself to be a possession of aliens leads a Yahoo [brutish]
life, having bartered his soul to a brute master: he is not of them. He may
stand against them, persuade himself of a mission, batter and twist them into
something which they, of their own accord, would not have been. Then he is
exploiting his old environment to press them out of theirs. Or, after my model,
he may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then
he is giving away his own environment pretending to theirs; and pretenses are
hollow, worthless things. (p 31, Seven Pillars of Wisdom)
On the whole, Saudi Arabia Exposed would be a far more valuable account
of the kingdom had Bradley developed it as an autobiography in linear
chronology. As it stands, his narration confuses a personal with an analytical
tract; and, broken and circuitous, the development lacks a dramatic pace. For
instance, a promising meeting Bradley has with a Hejazi, Western-educated
teenager - who rants anti-Western sentiments to his Western friend, while
indulging in Internet pornography - turns out not to be about him and Bradley,
but about Bradley's musings on Saudi youth's cultural schizophrenia.
The people Bradley identifies or describes by name-dropping or disguising names
serve merely as devices or pretexts for establishing his authority in
discussing political policy. Not Saudis, but broad foreign policy for Western
governments is the real purpose of this book. Yet since Bradley omits footnotes
and all too often leaves out the names of his sources, even Westerners may not
fully trust his book's interpretation of Saudi Arabia and its people.
Leaving aside the gaping hole in his narrative, let's focus on what he wishes
to tell us about Saudi Arabia's perilous political instability, the growing
challenges from forces hostile to Western oil interests, and the looming
international crisis.
