Saudi Arabia

If I were of a cynical nature, I might suspect that this volume possesses an agenda beyond explaining the world’s most important and least predictable Muslim country to Westerners. But an awkward combination of a pretentious title and a lightweight style employed by its author should not distract Saudi-watchers and other interested readers from the importance of this work. 

Karen Elliott House acknowledges candidly the long roster of criticisms of the Saudi kingdom that have accumulated since the shock of September 11, 2001—including the fact that 15 of the 19 terrorists attacking the United States that day were Saudis. In 2006, the author retired as publisher of the Wall Street Journal, while her husband and boss, Peter R. Kann, left his position as chief executive officer of Dow Jones & Co., and House allows that, when writing this account, the then-Saudi ambassador granted her a five-year multiple-entry visa. This leaves the impression that On Saudi Arabia is intended to assist the Saudis in disowning al Qaeda, disavowing other excesses, and promoting a clean slate and new accounts for the land and its absolute rulers.  

To emphasize, House has admitted the truth of nearly every complaint about Saudi Arabia advanced since 2001. As she makes clear, Wahhabism is—notwithstanding the denials of radical clerics, Saudophile academics, and other superficial media commentators—the official interpretation of Islam in Saudi Arabia, and House refers insistently to the sect by that name rather than by the less contentious term “Salafism.” (As she puts it, “Salafis [is] a more politically correct term for Wahhabis.”) While “Salafi” denotes an emulator of Muhammad and his companions and successors in early Islam, “Wahhabi” refers to an extremist sect that emerged in Arabia only 250 years ago. The first is an abstract ideal; the second is an ideology with a bloody and oppressive history.

House traces the latter-day rise of terrorist incitement and recruitment inside the desert monarchy to the Saudi trauma of November 20, 1979. It was then that a band of Wahhabi fanatics took over the Grand Mosque in Mecca. After an ineffectual siege by authorities, the structure was retaken with the help of French commandos.

The raid on the Grand Mosque had been led by a Wahhabi preacher, Juhayman Al-Uteybi, who was captured and beheaded along with his followers. But, in House’s words, while the royal house of “Al Saud killed Juhayman and his cohorts,” they “adopted [Juhayman’s] agenda of intolerance, spawning yet more radical Islamists and eventually their deadly attacks on the United States on September 11.” Toward the end of her account, House additionally stipulates: “After the 1979 triumph of Ayatollah Khomeini and the establishment of his theocracy in Iran .  .  . the late King Fahd shoveled money into spreading radical Wahhabi Islam around the world.”

The author confirms the reforming tendencies of King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, who took power after the death of Fahd in 2005. She describes Abdullah’s patronage of modern universities, and recalls that the United States, after 2001, demanded “controls on Saudi largesse to Islamic groups that funded terrorism.” Such financing, she intimates, was cut back at King Abdullah’s order. She emphasizes that most jihadist foot soldiers are products of the Saudi middle class but are not necessarily intense in their religiosity, and that many are motivated by a desire to escape a repressive home life, or are mere adventurers.

Much of House’s survey of Saudi society focuses on well-known flashpoints of internal contradiction: the execrable status of women, the unsuitability of religion-centered education for Saudi youth seeking employment, and the large share of the populace comprising foreign workers (“Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Filipinos, and others”) who have no rights. The latter totals one-third of the country’s population, according to a 2010 interview House conducted with the Saudi minister of labor. Her account of how women adjust to Wahhabi demands that they cover their entire bodies, hair, and faces, as well as their subordination to men, is disappointing in that she concentrates on female interlocutors who are left anonymous, or given cover names, and who seem often to accommodate Wahhabi limits on their personal lives.

The U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, James Smith, told the Arabic news outlet Asharq Al-Awsat that American foreign policy will now change after President Barack Obama's reelection. Smith made the comments at an election night party at his residence. 

For the first time in the history of the Olympic Games, Saudi women are being allowed by their ultra-conservative government to compete. As the Saudi athletes marched in the opening ceremonies in London, the women’s faces and open arms showed a joyful sense of emancipation from the yoke of political, religious, and traditional marginalization. By the standards of free and advanced societies, the advance is small, but by Saudi standards, it is a gigantic step forward, with far-reaching implications for Saudi Arabia and the international community.