Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis

I bought this book after reading this review by the ever-reliable William Grimes in The New York Times, although it contains some errors uncharacteristic of his usually top-notch writing. For instance, he says Asir is in the southeast, whereas it is obvious once you start reading the book that it is in the southwest. But other than that it gives a good overview of what this fascinating book tries to achieve (at least judging on the first half of it, which is all I have so far read). THE NEW YORK TIMES August 17, 2005 A Glimpse of Forces Confronting Saudi Rule By WILLIAM GRIMES Western reporting on Saudi Arabia has been in attack mode ever since Sept. 11. Not since the Borgias has a ruling family received such bad press as the House of Saud, and the United States-Saudi connection is probably the one that Americans would most like to sever, if it could be done without raising gasoline prices. In "Saudi Arabia Exposed," John R. Bradley, a British journalist who spent two and a half years as a newspaper editor and reporter in Saudi Arabia, will not make Americans feel any better about the Saudi royals, whom he calls "perhaps the most corrupt family the world has ever known." But he does provide a highly informed, temperate and understanding account of a country that, he maintains, is an enigma to other Arabs, and even to the Saudis themselves. The book's accusatory tabloid title does not reflect its tone. "Inside Saudi Arabia" might have been better. Mr. Bradley, although based in Jedda, traveled far and wide throughout the country in an effort to map the regional tensions and cultural distinctions that make Saudi Arabia much more diverse and complicated than the smooth propaganda of its government would allow. The House of Saud and the religious establishment, fired by the puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism , hold sway in the central region, al-Najd; elsewhere rifts and tensions abound. Mr. Bradley's heart is in the Hijaz, and the lingering cosmopolitanism of Jeddah, whose great merchant families tend to take a much more worldly view of politics and religion, including (with one notable exception) the bin Ladens. When the Saudi religious police objected to the use of a plus sign instead of an ampersand in a company's name because it resembled a Christian cross, a writer for the region's main newspaper, Al-Medina, suggested that perhaps the symbol should be replaced with a "tasteful Islamic crescent" in the country's math books. In the 1920's and 1930's, Ibn Saud created a unified state from the disparate tribes of present-day Saudi Arabia by force, imposing a brand of Islam that, in many areas of the country, is regarded as alien. In Asir, on the border with Yemen in southeastern Saudi Arabia, Wahabbism has been accepted only reluctantly. Mr. Bradley sees women driving pick-up trucks, and in the remote hills he encounters a strange sect known as the flower men, who wear garlands of flowers and herbs and douse themselves in perfume.

This book by veteran Middle East journalist John R Bradley is worth the money for just the chapter on the Asir region and the ideological/regional/religious background of the Saudi hijackers on 9/11. Also excellent are the insights into the bizzare Bin Laden-Bush-Al-Saud entanglement, the hypocrisy and duplicity inside the state-controled media, and the exploration of how Saudi Arabia is an empire in the same way the Soviet Union was -- inhabited by people who are historically not Wahhabis and in fact remain (in the author's view) in many ways resistant to Wahhabism. Bradley doesn't appear to recognize the fact, but with its clear distinction between the tyrannical regime and the oppressed people, there is a strong message in theis book about how the Saudis might be natural allies of the West if it chose to overthrow the Al-Saud regime... Very highly recommended!

This is according to most reports the best book on Saudi Arabia that has yet been written. It does not content itself with looking at the royal family, but attempts to take a look at the Saudi people in all their complexity. Surprisingly what Bradley finds is not the stereotypical picture had in the West of a wholly submissive and subservient people who are pleased to be ruled by the House of Saud. In fact what Bradley finds is a people eager for a degree of freedom and autonomy, one which is oppressed by the royal family 's corruption . In an interview on FrontPage Com. in which he spoke about the book and the situation in Saudi Arabia Bradley said that what is needed now is a real effort to help democratic elements in Saudi Arabia come to the fore. He criticized the Bush Administration for caring only for oil supplies and short- term convenience, thus appeasing the Saudi ruling house, and not really being true to the Democratization of the Middle East program it itself has espoused. As Bradley a veteran Arabic speaking journalist who traveled throughout the kingdom in his research on this book, sees it the Saudi people suffer from a regime corrupt as the former Soviet one, a regime in which privilege and power are held by one huge clan suppressing millions of people. This work thus provides both a very detailed picture of the way people actually live in Saudi Arabia, and political prescriptions as to how to alleviate the situation of a disenfranchised and tyrannized majority.

I agree with the first reviewer: Who needs another hatchet job on Saudi Arabia when we already have Baer, Gold, Aburish et al, none of whom have ever been to Saudi Arabia? They're useful in their own way, but there's no substitute for an Arabic-speaking journalist who has spent years inside the place. I've never been to Saudi Arabia, either, but it's always in the news, and when king Fahd dies it will be all over the news 24/7. So I thought I'd read this with the hope that I could better understand what's going on there. It didn't disappoint. In fact, when I'd finished it I couldn't believe it covered such a broad canvas -- from slums to royalty, from cities to the outer regions. There's a trip to Asir, where most of the hijackers came from, and where the author encounters "flower men" in the mountains. And a really fascinating trip to the northern frontier province of al-Jouf where there is a low-level rebellion taking place against the Al-Sudairy branch of the ruling family. He links all of this to a recurring theme of loyalty bought and loyalty earned: how because the loyalty the Al-Saud have from their subjects is "bought" it can never be relied on, and they will turn away from their princely masters as soon as the time is right... SAUDI ARABIA EXPOSED is written so beautifully and unpretentiously that you just keep turning the pages, mesmerised by a cinema-like series of stark images... John R. Bradley doesn't say it in exactly these terms, but his argument seems to be: everyone who says the Al-Saud are the buffer between the West and the extremists have got it wrong. It is the Al-Saud who USE the extemists to oppress the Saudi people, who historically are not Wahhabis and mostly hate the royal family. So the Al-Saud are the extremists, and opposing them will empower the anti-Wahhabi forces. Sound revolutionary? Well, this book may leave you with a lot of sympathy for the Saudi masses, who Bradley says want to throw off the Wahhabi ideology in the same way those in Eastern Europe wanted to throw off Communism. By avoiding the usual cliches about the kingdom being a "kernal of evil" and all the rest of it, Bradley -- by encountering the reality first-hand over a number of years -- has been fantastically subversive: this is the book the Al-Saud will not want you to read because it demystifies the kingdom and shows that there is near-universal resistance to their rule by people who also oppose the rigidity of Wahhabism. If it is read as widely as it should be, SAUDI ARABIA EXPOSED will change the way people in the West think about the kingdom. A truly remarkable, groundbreaking book...