Grappling with the paradoxes of a closed kingdom

BOOK OF THE DAY: Inside the KingdomBy Robert Lacey, Hutchinson, 404pp; £20

GOOD BOOKS about Saudi Arabia are about as rare as hen's teeth. Most either tend to the luridly sensationalist or fall prey to Orientalist trappings. Very few manage to get under the skin of the place – hardly surprising given it remains one of the most closed societies on earth. Robert Lacey comes closer than most, with his latest offering proving a worthy sequel to his 1981 book, The Kingdom, which was banned by the Saudis. As with the first book, Inside the Kingdomis the fruit of years spent living in Saudi Arabia, not as a typical expat cloistered in compound life but as a well-connected writer who straddles the space between outsider and insider.

Lacey looks at how the past three decades have played out in the desert kingdom, beginning with the siege of Mecca in 1979 – an event whose convulsive impact on Saudi society is perhaps little understood or even known about in the West – and continuing to the existential shocks prompted by the first Gulf War and 9/11, before concluding with the octogenarian King Abdullah’s tentative efforts at reform.

The book grapples with the many paradoxes of Saudi Arabia, examining the often contradictory impulses of a society that produced 15 of the September 11th hijackers, all of whom were acting under another Saudi, Osama bin Laden. The latter’s antipathy towards the West was “a brew that only Saudi Arabia could have concocted”, Lacey argues, with 9/11 a manoeuvre “in an essentially Saudi quarrel – played out with American victims”.

Though the book contains some pertinent analysis of the internal and external forces shaping Saudi Arabia today, its tone tends more towards the journalistic and anecdotal. Lacey allows the voices of his interviewees, whether princely or ordinary, to speak for themselves, an approach which both enlivens and enlightens.

Lacey’s interviews with Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi intelligence from the 1970s until late 2001, help illuminate the murky saga which began with the kingdom’s sponsorship of the mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and ultimately led to 9/11. Prince Turki’s recollections of how Bin Laden became a serious thorn in Saudi Arabia’s side, and why Taliban leader Mullah Omar refused to concede to Saudi demands to hand him over, are of particular interest.

Lacey deftly traces the contours of the US-Saudi relationship, and follows its ebb and flow over the past 30 years. In a telling passage, he recalls how Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who became close to the Bush family during the two decades he spent as Saudi ambassador to the US, liked to compare the relationship between the two countries to a Catholic marriage: “There might be rows and dalliances . . . but the marriage would go on forever.” In 2004, however, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister begged to differ, saying the alliance was more akin to a Muslim marriage. “The Kingdom was not seeking a divorce . . . just looking for some extra partners,” as Lacey puts it.

He casts King Abdullah as a benevolent and essentially reform-minded figure who is all too aware of the deep religious and political fault lines that threaten his kingdom’s progress. But what will happen after the ageing monarch’s passing is another matter. Whether Saudi Arabia will continue on the shaky path of reform or seek refuge in its past is this insightful book’s great unanswered question.

Mary Fitzgerald is Foreign Affairs Correspondent. Earlier this year she reported from Saudi Arabia