Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change

7/30/2019 Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change

1/14

Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change?Hugh EakinFont Size:AAA

On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Linesand Futureby Karen Elliott House

Knopf, 308 pp., $28.95

Saudi Arabia on the Edge: The Uncertain Future of an American Ally

by Thomas W. Lippman

Potomac, 307 pp., $29.95

Politics and Society in Saudi Arabia: The Crucial Years of Development, 1960

1982by Sarah Yizraeli

Columbia University Press, 336 pp., $50.00

James Hill/Contact Press Images

Portraits of King Abdullah when he was crown prince (left) and the late Prince Sultan (center), who was heir apparent when he died last

year, on the outskirts of Riyadh, September 2003

Its a funny place, Jeddah. Nobody knows the half of what goes on.

Hilary Mantel,Eight Months on Ghazzah Street

1.
http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/hugh-eakin/http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272168?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307272168http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272168?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307272168http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272168?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307272168http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272168?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307272168http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1597976881?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1597976881http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/3612http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/3612http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/3612http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/3612http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0231702701?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0231702701http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1597976881?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1597976881http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307272168?ie=UTF8&tag=thneyoreofbo-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0307272168http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=truehttp://www.nybooks.com/contributors/hugh-eakin/


2/14

On September 25, 2011, the aging ruler of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah, gave a

remarkable speech to the Majlis al-Shura, the formal advisory body to the Saudi

monarchy in Riyadh. Beginning in 2013, the king said, women would be

allowed to serve on the 150- member body; and beginning in 2015, they would

also be permitted to vote and run for office in municipal council elections.

To most outside observers, these moves were hardly worth noting. In 2011,

popular revolts were toppling autocratic regimes across the Middle East; even

fellow monarchies like Morocco and Jordan were amending or changing their

constitutions to show they would be more accountable to the people. By

contrast, the Saudi kings speech conceded no new authority to the Majlis al-

Shura, an unelected body with limited powers of consultation only, and Saudis

have shown little interest in the largely symbolic local councils, only half of

whose members are elected. Moreover, Abdullahs innovations, such as they

were, would only happen in the future: the 2011 municipal elections, which took

place a few days after the speech, were, as in the past, open to men only.

Yet in a country whose only written charter asserts the Koran as its basic law

and in which women have few legal rights, let alone the right to vote, the

announcement struck many as revolutionary. Liberal Saudis and women

activists called the decision historic, citing it as further proof that their nearly

ninety-year-old monarch was a reformer. For their part, members of thegovernment rushed to reassure the countrys powerful ulamathe religious

leadership, which adheres to the puritanical branch of Hanbali Islam known in

the West as Wahhabismthat the new women members of the Shura would not

mix with the men. The king himself, in making the announcement, carefully

noted that since the time of the Prophet, the Muslim woman has had valid

opinions and [sound] advice that should not be regarded as marginal. Even so,

prominent Saudi clerics suggested that the decree did not have religious

backing, and two days later, as if to assert their continuing writ, a court in

Jeddah sentenced a woman to ten lashes for driving a car.

Thus the kings revolutionary speech was also a deft maneuver to preserve the

status quo. On the one hand, the monarch was appeasing one of the countrys

most aggrieved constituencieseducated Saudi womenand openly

acknowledging that the countrys political institutions must evolve. On the other


3/14

hand, he left the Saudi system hardly more democratic than before, and by

raising the ire of religious leaders, reinforced the divide between the two

groupsliberals and Islamiststhat pose the greatest threat to the monarchy.

In effect, nothing has changed, Mohammad bin Fahad al-Qahtani, an

economics professor and human rights activist, told me in Riyadh last May. (Afew weeks after I spoke to him, al-Qahtani was put on trial for starting an

unauthorized human rights organization and could face up to five years in

prison.)

The same might equally be said of Saudi foreign policy. Mindful of the political

awakening sweeping through the region, the king has shown a degree of support

for uprisings elsewhere, from arming the rebels in Syria to reconciling with the

new Islamist leadership in Egypt. Yet the only direct intervention by Saudi

Arabia has come in neighboring Bahrain, where, in March 2011, a Saudi-led

force was sent to stave off a popular revolt and prop up the Bahraini monarchy.

Riyadh has also been using its influence in the Gulf Cooperation Council, the

alliance of autocratic Persian Gulf states, to pull together support for the

beleaguered royal houses of Morocco and Jordan. The White House has

remained silent. The US does more tradeoverwhelmingly in oil and

weaponswith Saudi Arabia than any other country in the Middle East,

including Israel, and depends on close Saudi cooperation in its counterterrorism

efforts in Yemen.

Indeed there are few signs that the Saudi monarchy is even contemplating

serious reforms. During a recent visit to several parts of the country, I spoke to

academics, journalists, members of the Shia minority, and young bloggers, as

well as clerics and government officials, and many were outspoken in criticizing

the government; one journalist who had worked for official media told me,

within minutes of our acquaintance, I cant wait for this regime to collapse!

But almost without exception, no one seemed to think that would happen

anytime soon. I asked one prominent womens rights activist why more Saudiswerent agitating for a full written constitutiona moderate reform that could

provide a more rigorous legal frame for continued Al Saud rule and that was

discussed publicly during a brief opening after the September 11 attacks. She

replied: No ones talking about it anymore. All the constitutional monarchists

have been jailed.


4/14

Among the many enigmas about the increasingly elderly group of brothers who

have ruled Saudi Arabia since 1953the year in which their father, Abdul Aziz,

the countrys modern founder, diedis how they have continually evaded the

forces of change. Despite Saudi control of the largest petroleum reserves in the

world, decades of rapid population growth have reduced per capita income to afraction of that of smaller Persian Gulf neighbors. Even the people of Bahrain, a

country with little oil that has roiled with unrest since early 2011, are wealthier.

Having nearly doubled in twenty years to 28 million, the Saudi population

includes over eight million registered foreign residents, many of them manual

laborers or domestic workers. Illegal migrants, who enter on Hajj (pilgrimage)

visas, or across the porous Yemeni border, may account for two million more.

With three quarters of its own citizens now under the age of thirty, Saudi Arabia

faces many of the same social problems as Egypt and Yemen. By some

estimates, nearly 40 percent of Saudis between the ages of twenty and twenty-

four are unemployed, and quite apart from al-Qaeda, there is a long and troubled

history of directionless young men drawn to radicalism. The country suffers

from a housing crisis and chronic inflation, there have been recurring bouts of

domestic terrorism, and the outskirts of Riyadh and Jeddah are plagued by

poverty, drugs, and street violenceproblems that are not acknowledged to

exist in the Land of the Two Holy Mosques.

On top of this, Saudi Arabia also seems to possess several of the attributes that

have led to broader revolt in neighboring countries. There is a restive and well-

organized Shia minority in Saudi Arabias Eastern Province, who have engaged

in a series of street protests since early 2011.1And young men and women all

over the country are exceptionally well connected by new media: only Egypt

ranks ahead in Facebook usage in the region; a higher proportion of Saudis now

use Twitter and YouTube than almost any other nation in the world. This has

made it easier to expose alleged corruption by members of the royal family, as

one anonymous Twitter user, Mujtahidd, with apparent inside sources, hasbeen doing, attracting more than 800,000 followers in the process. (A mujtahid

is a scholar with independent authority to interpret Islamic law.)

In stark contrast to the countrys youthful population, the Al Saud dynasty often

seems geriatric and disconnected. Though he has worn the crown for only seven
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-1http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-1http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-1http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-1


5/14

years, Abdullah was crown prince for twenty-three years before he became

king, and commander of the National Guard for nearly half a century. He has

not been in good health; his medical visits to the United States often generate as

much comment as his trips as head of state. Moreover, owing to Saudi Arabias

unusual system of succession, there is little likelihood that a charismatic youngreformer will soon ascend to the throne. The current monarch is supposed to

designate a successor, or crown prince, from among his younger brothersthe

remaining survivors of the founding kings thirty-seven sons by more than

twenty wivesbefore the monarchy passes to the third generation, many of

whose members are already middle-aged.

In 2006, King Abdullah established an allegiance council made up of senior

princes to ratify succession decisions, a step that also seems designed to

reinforce conservatism. Two of Abdullahs successive crown princes,

themselves in their late seventies and mid-eighties, respectively, have died in

the past year; the current crown prince, Abdullahs half-brother Prince Salman,

is a comparatively young seventy-six. Meanwhile, there are now some seven

thousand princes in the ever-growing royal family, each getting some share of

the mostly hidden national budget.

Faced with such intractable challenges, can the US-backed regime survive? Two

new surveys of the country, both written since the Arab Spring by veteranAmerican journalists, arrive at dramatically different answers. Karen Elliott

House, a former managing editor ofThe Wall Street Journal, sees a country

whose people are seething with discontent and whose leadership reminds her

of the dying decade of the Soviet Union. In her bookOn Saudi Arabia: Its

People, Past, Religion, Fault Linesand Future, she envisions a potential

crash when the crown passes to the third generation.

Covering much the same ground, however, Thomas W. Lippman, a former

Washington Postreporter who has been traveling to Saudi Arabia for more thanthree decades, finds scant evidence that any substantial portion of the Saudi

population wants to replace the regime. In Saudi Arabia on the Edge, he is

generally bullish about a monarchy he regards as surprisingly adaptive and

exceptionally well armed with cash. For better or for worse, he writes, the


6/14

outside world can assume that the House of Saud will standprovided that oil

revenue continues to flow into its coffers.

2.

Contrary to its desert image, Saudi Arabia is a highly urbanized country in

which five large metropolitan areasRiyadh in the center, Jeddah, Mecca, and

Medina in the west, and Dammam on the Persian Gulfaccount for more than

two thirds of the population. Riyadh, the Saudi capital, is a Houstonian sprawl

of offices, malls, and SUV-clogged thoroughfares; it is possible to miss the

Grand Mosque if you are not looking for it. More affluent districts are filled

with American fast food chains, British department stores, and French

hypermarkets. Scruffier neighborhoods, like Bathaa in Riyadhs Old City,

feature the usual array of outdoor market stalls, electronics stores, and long-distance call centers, many of them clearly catering to a large immigrant

population from South Asia. Seen from a car window, there is little to

distinguish it from large cities in many other countries.

And yet at ground level, everything is different. The SUVs are all driven by

men, many of them foreigners: since women are forbidden to drive, it is

standard for middle-class households to employ a driver; but it is frowned upon

for women to be chauffeured by Saudis (or other Arabs) who are not their

husbands or fathers. Though women can purchase the latest upscale Western

fashions at almost any Saudi mall, they are expected to wear a blackabaya at all

times and may be harassed by the Committee to Prevent Vice and Promote

Virtue, the countrys religious police, if their hair shows just outside their veils.

And in downtown Riyadh, not far from one of the main shopping districts, is a

square where public beheadings sometimes take place.


7/14

Mike King

Lippman and House are both sensitive to these disconcerting contrasts. Yet the

contradictory insights they draw suggest how hard it can be to get a handle on

the Saudi regime. For example, looking at the proliferation of fatwas by

different Saudi clerics on issues like gender mixing, Lippman sees a system in

which rules of behavior and appearance are not fully codified, allowing theruling family to use religion to tighten or loosen its grip as needed; while House

thinks the monarchy has largely lost control ofan increasingly diffuse and

divided Islam.

Regarding Saudi women, however, House finds appalling evidence that some

are subjected to virtual slavery, in which wives and daughters can be

physically, psychologically, and sexually abused at the whim of male family

members, who are protected by an all-male criminal system and judiciary.

Both authors lament the Saudi education system, which in the clutches of the

religious establishment has produced what Lippman calls a lost generation of

young Saudis. But Lippman argues that the king has embarked on an education

revolutionpurging school textbooks of inflammatory material, spending

nearly $4 billion to establish a top-flight coed university north of Jeddah, and
http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-graphic/87


8/14

sending more than 100,000 young Saudis abroad to study; while House

maintains that the governments vast outlays have produced few results (Saudis

still perform near the bottom of international tests) because the religious-

educational bureaucracy remains largely impervious to reform. The two books

concur that the Saudi government has made hardly any progress in weaningitself from oil. For House this shows how unproductive, dysfunctional,

brittle, and ossified the economy has become. Yet Lippman observes that

the steady flow of crude has allowed the regime not only to withstand the Arab

Spring but also to spend hundreds of billions of its revenue preparing Saudis

for a post-oil future.

Where does all this leave the Al Saud monarchy? Is continued rule by what

House calls more old men intheir eighties a symptom of imminent collapse or

of exceptional longevity? Certainly, in Jeddah and Riyadh, it is not difficult to

find young people who are acutely aware of the freedoms they are denied, and

House is probably correct to see multiplying troubles ahead:

High birthrates, poor education, a male aversion to manual labor or service

roles, social strictures against women working, low wages accepted by foreign

labor, and deep structural rigidities in the economy, compounded by pervasive

corruption, all have led to a decline in living standards. Many of [the] young

feel their future is being stolen from them.And yet apart from the Shia in the Eastern Province, young Saudis have shown

remarkably little interest in taking to the streets.2Confronted with this paradox,

House reverts to an unpersuasive account of the national character. Saudis, she

insists, are overwhelmingly passive and largely somnolent; pervasive

social conformity has made them sullena word she uses throughout her

bookbut unable to turn grievances to action.

But there is hardly anything passive about the countrys burgeoning political

blogosphere, its growing population of young professionals with American

degrees who are bridled by Saudi traditions, or even its leading clerics, some of

whom not only issue opinions at odds with the regime but have themselves

become powerful voices for reform. After spending years in jail, for example,

former radical preacher Salman al-Awdah decries the inability of the leadership


9/14

to connect with youth and tweets to nearly two million followers about the need

for change.

In Jeddah, I met young artists and underground filmmakers who gather in

private homes to discuss politics and screen movies in defiance of a general banon cinemas. Even Buraydaha deeply religious town in the center of the

country that, according to House, is so conservative that parents there protested

the introduction of girls schoolsnow has a local womens organization that

has taken on womens rights issues, microcredit schemes, and legal advocacy.3

More important, then, is the matter of how the Saudi government has been able

to prevent such social activism from turning against the regime itself.

3.

To a remarkable degree, Western assumptions about Saudi Arabia still begin

and end with the Rub al-Khali, or the Empty Quarter, the vast barren expanse

engulfing the lower third of the Arabian Peninsula that ranks as the largest sand

desert in the world. It was on the fringes of the Empty Quarter that oil was

discovered in the 1930s, and it was through experiences among the nomadic

Bedu (Bedouins) here that twentieth-century explorers like Wilfred Thesiger

introduced Arabia to Western audiences.

From this basis emerged the story that has been taken for granted until today:spurred by the Standard Oil Company of California, a former subsidiary of John

D. Rockefellers Standard Oil, the US government entered into an unshakable

alliance with the House of Saud, a powerful tribal dynasty from the Najd

(Central Arabia) heartland whose hegemony could be traced back to the

eighteenth century. They started by building the US-owned Arabian-American

Oil Company (Aramco) in Dhahran, near Dammam on the Persian Gulf, which

provided for the orderly exploitation of the worlds greatest fuel supply. (The

Saudi government acquired part-ownership of Aramco in the 1970s and tookfull control in 1980.) And then they used Aramco itself to transform what House

describes as an impoverished and backward land into an advanced nation with

almost miraculous speed: Americans provided the skills and bureaucratic

expertise; Saudi oil provided the cash; and the Al Saudbacked by the zealous


10/14

followers of the Islamic reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703

1792)gave cultural and religious legitimacy to the whole enterprise.

However, very little of this story turns out to be true. The Al Saud did not

consolidate power until the third decade of the twentieth century; and importantparts of Saudi society were highly developed (and not necessarily under

Wahhabi control) at the time oil was discovered. In the Hijaz region on the

western coast, there was a tradition of civil association going back for centuries.

Before the Saudi conquest, the cosmopolitan Red Sea port of Jeddah had sizable

populations of Indians and Europeans who together with powerful local

merchants traded in spices and other goods; and the holy cities of Mecca and

Medina had large corporations that drew revenues fromHajj services. In the

1920s and 1930s, these and other cities in the Hijaz had political parties, elected

councils, and a flourishing press.

For its part, Aramco was far from a benign instrument of enlightened

development, as the political scientist and historian Robert Vitalis has shown in

devastating detail.4Brutally exploiting the local population, it produced a

workers movement in the 1940s and 1950s that at moments threatened to

destabilize the country. Indeed, in the early years of oil, the structure of the

monarchy itself was open to debate: at the beginning of the 1960s, King Saud,

who had succeeded Abdul Aziz in 1953, briefly installed a reform cabinet thatincluded several commoners and set out to establish some form of

representative government.


11/14

Ahmed Mater/Athr Gallery, Jeddah

The Saudi artist Ahmed Maters Evolution of Man, 2010.Born in 1979 and trained as a doctor, Mater has said that artists must reflectwhats happening around them. Not...what people already know.

The reasons Saudi Arabia became the authoritarian US client state we know

todayrather than the more pluralistic society this early experience might have

foretoldis the subject of Sarah Yizraelis revelatory new study,Politics and

Society in Saudi Arabia: The Crucial Years of Development, 19601982. A

senior research fellow and Arabist at Tel Aviv University, Yizraeli has managed

to penetrate Saudi society from afar in ways that have eluded journalists and

scholars with more direct access. Although she is apparently barred from

entering Saudi Arabia as an Israeli citizen, she has long had a following among

specialists for her mastery of obscure Saudi and international source material.

Significantly, she focuses not on the much-studied decades since 1979, during

which an Islamist awakening pushed the regime to reassert its Wahhabi

credentials and impose sweeping restrictions on cultural life, but on the largely

neglected preceding era.

Intricate in its accumulation of detail and nuance, the story Yizraeli tells is

nevertheless stark in its conclusions. During the 1960s and 1970s, exploiting its

unprecedented oil wealth, Saudi Arabia was able to build with great speed a

technologically advanced, economically self-sufficient welfare state. Far from a

project driven by the US and Aramco, however, this radical transformation was

masterminded by the royal family itself (above all by King Faisal, who after a
http://www.nybooks.com/multimedia/view-photo/3613


12/14

power struggle succeeded Saud in 1964) and expressly designed to strengthen

its rule and neutralize any pressure for political reform.

Described by Yizraeli as defensive change, this strategy involved creating a

vast central administration that could co-opt competing factions of society evenas it broke down traditional tribal loyalties. Crucial to the state were the

assertion of the monarchys Islamic roots and the consequent need to separate

economic development from political and religious institutions, which could not

be tampered with; and the embrace of an ideal of broad consensus that served to

isolate and marginalize proponents of more radical reforms.

Equally provocative is Yizraelis careful dissection of US policy beginning in

the 1960s. Up to the early years of the Johnson administration, she observes, the

State Department assumed that economic and social development was supposedto produce representative government, and put constant pressure on the Al Saud

to open up the political system. So consistently did the American Ambassadors

to Saudi Arabiahighlight the issue of political and social reform, Yizraeli

writes, that at a meeting with then US Ambassador Hermann Eilts, Faisal once

responded by exclaiming: Does the US want Saudi Arabia to become another

Berkeley campus? But all this came to an abrupt end in the mid-1960s, when

Washington began to take a paramount interest in curbing the spread of

Nasserism and promoting the US-led industrialization that Faisal championed:Stop pushing the Saudis on internal reform, Secretary of State Dean Rusk

advised Eilts, the king knows what is in his own best interest.

Thus King Faisal, the robust defender of Al Saud absolutism who by the early

1970s had thousands of political prisoners in his jails, quickly became seen in

Washington as the ruler who modernized the kingdom. In effect, the US

endorsed a state-building strategy that brought American companies such as

Chevron, Bechtel, and Lockheed Martin billions of dollars of contracts and

investments while giving the monarchy and the religious establishment an ever-growing hold on Saudi society. This was a fateful decision. It fostered years of

disregard for human rights and an abysmal record of stirring up violent

jihadism, and both continue to this day.

When I met the current US ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James B. Smith, in

Riyadh last May, he couldnt have been clearer about the USSaudi


13/14

relationship: the three pillars, he said, are oil security, stability, and

counterterrorism; pressure on human rights and political change were

unproductive. Instead, Washington is actively embracing the mainstream of

Saudi youth who, however dissatisfied they may be with their leaders, are now

seeking to study in the US as part of King Abdullahs ambitious scholarshipprogram.

Certainly, sending young Saudis to American colleges should over time have a

liberalizing effect on Saudi society. But it also fits with a series of

innovationsincluding the private Red Sea beach clubs where Saudis can wear

Western attire, the causeway to neighboring Bahrain, where they can freely

indulge in alcohol (and other pleasures), or even the proliferation of gated

communities in the Saudi capital itself, where they can live beyond the purview

of the religious policeby which the regime can cultivate the most progressive

parts of society.

As Asaad Al-Shamlan, a political scientist in Riyadh, explained, what Western

eyes may regard as mere hypocrisy might be better understood as an intentional

strategy to alleviate social pressures. By granting Saudis a right to exit the

system, he said, the regime has effectively derailed momentum for reform. In

this view, by inviting women into the Majlis al-Shura in his 2011 speech, King

Abdullah may simply have been opening another escape valve in the establishedorder.

Perhaps as a result, the few dedicated oppositionists one encounters in Jeddah

and Riyadh have until now seemed less like the vanguard of a broader

movement than as outliers, rejectionists who have fallen through the cracks of

an all-encompassing system. (Not coincidentally, they are often punished with

travel bans that deny them Al-Shamlans right to exit.) Indeed, far more

young Saudis appear to be concerned about violent upheavals in neighboring

countries than about the repressive order at home. In a 2012 survey of Arabyouth in twelve countries, a disproportionate number of young Saudis55

percent, more than in any other countryidentified civil unrest as the

biggest obstacle facing the region against only 37 percent who said it was

lack of democracy.5
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-5http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-5http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jan/10/will-saudi-arabia-ever-change/?pagination=false&printpage=true#fn-5


14/14

If this is the case, then the continued viability of the Saudi regime will depend

little on the particular strengths or weaknesses of the current ruler and his

immediate successors. Far more important may be the question of whether the

overall approach of defensive changeby now deeply embedded in all areas of

Saudi society and backed by a vast state bureaucracy as well as an entrenchedreligious establishmentcan continue to persuade a majority of Saudis to

support or at least tolerate a repressive government in which they have almost

no say.

For decades, the parched kingdom has flourished on the promise that its leaders

could turn oil into water and provide the comforts and escapes of advanced

Western society without giving up the countrys ultra-traditional religion and

culture. With continued oil and US backing, it may continue to do so for years

to come. But as soon as Saudis start to believe that the promise is no longer

being keptthat the oil revenues that drive the whole operation can no longer

sustain domestic needs, a shift that some analysts believe could take place in the

middle of this decadethen the future for the Al Saud may be precarious

indeed.

Date post:	14-Apr-2018
Category:	Documents
Upload:	abdul-naeem
View:	220 times
Download:	0 times

Will Saudi Arabia Ever Change

Documents