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Karen House has written a book about this shrinkage after a brief "aperatura" to modern modes of activity. I was lucky to have lived in Saudi at the US Embassy as Political Military and later Political Officer for Internal Affairs during this "opening" from the late '60s until the 1979 Twin Shocks of the Mecca Mosque takeover and the Fall of the Shah of Iran. After that, the Saudi Royal Family decided that the better part of valor is discretion, and slowly closed like the giant clams one finds on the Red Sea bottom while scuba diving.
Of course, it was never "open for business" in the classical sense nor is it a hermit Kingdom like North Korea today. But with the death of King Fahd, the much more conservative King Abdullah has ceded to prevailing winds and allowed the country . Ms. House has a particular beef about how women are being kept in virtual purdah because of the Counter-Reformation slowly engulfing Saudi society. In Saudi Arabia, religious intolerance may be a feature, not a bug:
Saudi theocratic totalitarianism begins within the family. Ms. House offers vivid descriptions of the oppression and frustration faced by Saudi women. The Wahhabis' view is that, after kindergarten, the two sexes should never meet except in the home. Such limits have a devastating effect on the freedom of Saudi women to work or even to take a walk in their own neighborhoods.
In 2002, in an incident of startling cruelty, the Saudi religious police prevented more than a dozen girls from fleeing their flaming school building in Mecca, thus condemning them to burn to death because, while trying to escape the fire, their abayas and veils didn't fully cover them. The outrage that followed this incident led to certain reforms, but they have been insufficient to help most women get a better education or a job.
It is true that, in 2012, Saudi women were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time, and a few can now sell lingerie in department stores. But they are still denied the freedom to drive a car, a restriction that has led some brave Saudi women, Ms. House tells us, to stage "drive-ins" or test authority "by getting behind the wheel of a car and posting videos of their defiance on YouTube." These are small protests, she concedes, but they are telling: Clashes over the role of women in Saudi society serve as "a proxy war between modernizers and conservatives over what sort of Saudi Arabia both sexes will inhabit and over the role and relevance of the omnipresent religious establishment in Saudi society."
In defense of Saudi society, if it is a defense, the family unit is often much more grounded in Wahhabi tradition than the liberalizing segment of the Royal Family ever gave them credit for. Even when separate girl's schools were inaugurated in the '60's due to Prince Fahd's Minister of the Interior & Prince Sultan's Minister of Education efforts, the buses carrying the girls to school were stoned. They blacked out the windows of all the buses so the stonings ceased, but still.....
Ms. House shifts over to the international POV but then quickly reverts to the future of Saudi Arabia:
On the geopolitical front, Saudi Arabia cooperates to a substantial degree with the United States on its counterterrorism efforts, but the royal family hasn't challenged the Wahhabi management of the country's schools. It is the schools, Ms. House reminds us, that provide the doctrinal and emotional underpinnings for its young men—often unemployed and impressionable—to turn to jihad.
On the brighter side, Ms. House takes us to two promising venues where one can see a glimmering of what Saudi Arabian institutions might become if we are all very lucky: the campus of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (in the town of Thuwal) and the constructed suburban city, often called "Little America," that serves as the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company. Each place can be seen, Ms. House says, as an "innovative and international island in the largely stagnant Saudi sea." Saudi men and women work together, attend classes together, and learn to use advanced technology.
We can always hope, but the chances of reform at the moment seem limited. In June, Crown Prince Naif died, and his replacement at the top of the royal family's governing structure was taken by his brother, Prince Salman, an ultraconservative supporter of the Wahhabis. In the new interior minister, Prince Ahmed, and the new intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, there is little that is hopeful either. The Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia states that neither man "has shown any interest in human rights or political change in Saudi Arabia."
Woolsey, who writes the review, is not very knowledgeable about the Saudis, given that he has made only one trip and that in the '70s when I was still there. I visited frequently in the eighties and nineties and have met Prince Salman and Prince Bandar on more than one occasion [as well as King Abdullah] and unless they have changed, I doubt they have been really as conservative-leaning as he & House intimate.
On the geopolitical front, Saudi Arabia cooperates to a substantial degree with the United States on its counterterrorism efforts, but the royal family hasn't challenged the Wahhabi management of the country's schools. It is the schools, Ms. House reminds us, that provide the doctrinal and emotional underpinnings for its young men—often unemployed and impressionable—to turn to jihad.
On the brighter side, Ms. House takes us to two promising venues where one can see a glimmering of what Saudi Arabian institutions might become if we are all very lucky: the campus of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (in the town of Thuwal) and the constructed suburban city, often called "Little America," that serves as the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company. Each place can be seen, Ms. House says, as an "innovative and international island in the largely stagnant Saudi sea." Saudi men and women work together, attend classes together, and learn to use advanced technology.
We can always hope, but the chances of reform at the moment seem limited. In June, Crown Prince Naif died, and his replacement at the top of the royal family's governing structure was taken by his brother, Prince Salman, an ultraconservative supporter of the Wahhabis. In the new interior minister, Prince Ahmed, and the new intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, there is little that is hopeful either. The Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia states that neither man "has shown any interest in human rights or political change in Saudi Arabia."
Of course, they may have changed over the decades. Prince Ahmed, whom I also met on one occasion, certainly has not. He and his brother Crown Prince Naif, made a fearsome duo at the Ministry of the Interior. Woolsey ends on an optimistic note for the USA, given that fracking is releasing vast amounts of natural gas hitherto unexplainable to the markets----indicating that the old "Black Gold" of the Middle East may not be necessary to our economy in the near future. Here's his send-off:
Ms. House observes that, for decades, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have used their oil revenues to swell the public sector, hand out government largess and keep Saudi citizens dependent on the royal family. "Control trumps economic competitiveness," she notes. Is such an arrangement sustainable? The low price and ever wider availability of natural gas—the result of the hydro-fracturing of gas shale—could transform the world's energy sector, especially if cars are modified to drive on liquid fuels derived from natural gas. In such a scenario, the stultified, oppressive country that Ms. House portrays so well may find itself enduring a painful and chaotic transformation beyond the control of even its most stern leaders.
The Royal Family may crumple like crushed paper if the current dependency ceases, and the USA is the only country with giant amounts of "shale gas" being made available, and this over the strident noisy ignorance of the leftist goons in our Hollyweird celebritard universe. So the day of reckoning may still be far off for the feckless otiose Royal Family, though when it comes, it will not be pretty.
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