Kingdom of Contradiction
Everything Saudi Arabia has, it has earned—or taken.
Saudi Arabia: A Modern History, by David Commins. Yale University Press, 384 pages.
The first cars came to Riyadh in 1923, more than a decade before oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia. Two teams of camels dragged them across the ad-Dahna desert to Ibn Saud’s palace, where they were kept for his private use. The founder of the Saudi kingdom treated his modern acquisitions as toys. He loved to tool about in his automobile, followed by his children and a retinue of servants on horseback, and bivouac in the desert about ten miles outside of town.
But Ibn Saud soon found more practical uses for the cars. Throughout the 1920s he forcefully consolidated Saudi power in the Arabian peninsula by leveraging to his advantage a combination of local alliances and strategic partnerships with European and American powers. He was pragmatic and ruthless. In 1929, when the Bedouin tribes challenged his rule—their leaders felt, understandably, that Ibn Saud had abandoned his Muslim subjects in favor of the infidel British—the king drove to meet them in person. Flanked by his son Saud and his brother Muhammad, he met the enemy on the plain of Sabilla. The Bedouin had rifles and rode on camels. The Saudis had machine guns mounted on trucks. The battle was over in about half an hour. The House of Saud faced no serious challenge to its rule for another 50 years.
Saudi Arabia has always been a kingdom of contradiction. Or, to put it more precisely, the House of Saud has thrived on contradiction and used contradiction to maintain its regional influence. The origin of this highwire act is the subject of David Commins’s recent history, which considers the progress of Saudi power from the late 17th century to the present. Commins argues that in all phases of its history, Saudi Arabia has relied on external means to build and maintain its strength. First it was booty stolen from travelers, then taxes on pilgrims to Mecca, and, finally, in the 20th century, foreign aid and oil sales. “In large measure, the history of Saudi Arabia is the story of how its leaders shored up their position by tapping material and symbolic resources,” he writes. “In doing so, they changed internal dynamics in ways that brought forth new challenges.”
The most significant of these challenges is religious. Commins is one of the leading American experts on Wahhabism, a fundamentalist movement whose rise is inextricably linked to Saudi conquest. Perhaps for that reason, he presents the kingdom’s history as in large part a struggle between more strict Wahhabists, who disdain impure outsider influence, and the more relaxed princes, who often see the pragmatic advantages of doing business with the vast majority of people who do not adhere to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab’s teachings. For most of Saudi history, the conflict consisted of intramural fighting with other Muslim powers. But when Chevron discovered oil in Saudi Arabia in 1938 (after years of a regime-backed search), the situation became much more precarious. How can a regime that does the majority of its business with the infidel maintain legitimacy when its official policy is outright hostility to the infidel? And, even more pressing, how can an absolute monarchy survive prolonged contact with a nation, the United States, whose very existence is inimical to autocracy?
The answer to these questions turns out to be relatively simple: embrace contradiction and hope for the best. Commins usefully illustrates this strategy, which originated under Ibn Saud, by citing an absolutely hilarious New York Times headline from 1926. It conveys the bizarre situation in which the Saudi ruler found himself at the dawn of the oil era: “KING IBN SAUD WOULD MAKE ARABIA GREAT. Warlike but Benevolent Ruler Wants His Country to Be the Leading Moslem Power. FAVORS MODERN METHODS. Goes In for Autos, Good Roads and Sanitation, but Insists on Religious Precepts.” That final insistence, however, was not as severe as it could be. In Ibn Saud’s race to catch up with the other Gulf States, where oil had been discovered first, he sidelined many Wahhabist clerics who feebly warned that adopting European and American ways would erode trust in a people who had over the course of two centuries conquered the most of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of religious revivalism.
The naysayers would not be vindicated until 1979. The revolution in Iran transmitted a destabilizing shockwave from Persia to the Arab world. In Saudi Arabia, it released five decades of resentment toward the crown over religious compromises, suppression of Bedouin independence, and, more generally, the economic inequalities that plague every petrostate. Soon the resentment turned to revolt and in November of that year, a group of millenarianists, who claimed to have beheld strange, messianic visions in the desert, seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and declared the coming of the Mahdi in the form of their leader Muhammad Abdullah al-Qahtani. It took two weeks for the Saudis, in an embarrassing collaboration with French special forces, to retake the mosque and put an end to the Mahdi’s celestial reign.
The immediate effect of the uprising was for the regime to impose stricter enforcement of its laws and Wahhabi religious norms. A longer-term effect, Commins writes, was the creation of a generational divide between those who had come of age before the uprising and those who had not. The former group were brought up with the expectation that Saudi Arabia would manage an integration into an American world order; the latter recognized the improbability of that proposition. That divergence in opinion was put on full display after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The majority of the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, and in the eyes of many American observers, this was enough to condemn the kingdom. The House of Saud recognized its disadvantage and went to great pains to soothe the suspicions of the imperial power.
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At the same time, however, the regime was aware that it had raised a whole generation of young men to despise that very power—and that it needed their support for its own continuance. Commins characterizes the situation with dramatic understatement: “The Sauds had to find ways to balance ties to Western powers with commitment to Muslim causes.”
In recent years, finding that balance has proved an awful trick. When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman became the de facto ruler of the kingdom in 2017, he made a great show of relaxing Wahhabist restrictions in areas that would play well with the American press (allowing women to drive cars, for example). At the same time, he strengthened his own position within the country by purging potential political opponents and diluting the power that the clerics had long exercised under the kingdom. The crown prince also entertains ambitions of a post-oil Saudi Arabia that functions like a desert-bound Macau, under the strict control of his own person. The result is a state of affairs incomprehensible to outsiders and only made sensible to those within by means of force.
This is the Saudi way. “If the rock will not come to Mahomet, then Mahomet must come to the rock,” goes the saying of Francis Bacon, spuriously attributed to the Prophet. But it could do well as a motto for the House of Saud. Nothing was given to the kingdom. Everything it is—everything it will be—is the result of acquisition, whether through the arts of peace or those of war, and, as is often the case, a simultaneous combination of the two.
