This work has been several years in the making. It is informed, in the background, by repeated visits to Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. More directly, in this writing I drew on the field notes of three visits that I made in 2002, then 2009.
I read the Saudi press on a consistent basis. The press is both censored and self-censored. Still, it provides a window onto the worldview of the rulers and their allies in the religious establishment. By Saudi standards, the press has grown braver and more open in recent years. There is more daring in taking on social and cultural issues than matters of high politics. Three daily newspapers were helpful to me. Al-Watan, a fairly liberal organ, owned and sponsored by a member of the royal clan, has been the most daring in the face of the conservative religious establishment. Two offshore papers also owned by members of the House of Saud are steady readings of mine, Al Hayat and Asharq Al-Awsat, both published in London. Of late, the bloggers have turned up in Arabia; this “cyber resistance,” tailor-made for a country not given to words and open dissent, has been illuminating. Two sites, Saudi Jeans and Saudiwave, have been quite helpful. There is an electronic liberal magazine, Elaph, which is unique and indispensable in the current Arab landscape, and I have repeatedly turned to it.
The fax reigned supreme when the “road to dissension” opened in Arabia in the 1990s. A huge volume of faxes and leaflets and petitions cluttered the machines; I accumulated them and drew on them. An enterprising scholar, Joshua Teitelbaum, wrote a fully documented and considered monograph on that turn in Saudi religious and political life, Holier Than Thou: Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Opposition (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2000). The Egyptian American scholar Mamoun Fandy sketched this period at some length in his book Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999).
An admiring author, Mahmoud al-Rifaii, wrote the story of the most prominent of the religious diehards of the 1990s in a book (in Arabic) whose title translates to The Reformist Project in Saudi Arabia, published in 1995, no publisher or place of publication indicated. This book is useful for all the petitions and leaflets that were a standard feature of that phase. In an earlier study, I covered this period of disputation and provided a translation of some of this literature and pamphleteering, “Shooting an Elephant: The Expedition and Its Aftermath,” in Joseph Nye and Roger Smith, editors, After the Storm: Lessons from the Gulf War (Lanham, Maryland: Madison Books, 1992), pp. 113–44.
The seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979—a signal event in recent Saudi history—has been extensively analyzed and described. Yaroslav Trofimov’s The Siege of Mecca (New York: Doubleday, 2007) is the most accessible account. Joseph Kechichian’s “Islamic Revivalism and Change in Saudi Arabia: Juhayman al-Utaybi’s letters to the Saudi People,” The Muslim World, January 1990, pp. 1–16, is particularly illuminating for the worldview of the leader of this rebellion. The traditional doctrine of Wahhabism, and the bargain between the rulers and the religious class, has a truly fine treatment in Christine Moss Helms, The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
Abdullah Thabit’s unique autobiographical novel The 20th Terrorist (Al-Irhabi 20) was published in Damascus (Al Mada Publishers, 2006). An experienced, tenacious journalist, Faiza Ambah, was the first to write of this novel in the American press in her dispatch, “The Would-Be Terrorist’s Explosive Tell-All Tale,” The Washington Post, July 26, 2006.
Matthew Levitt and Michael Jacobson covered the issue of terrorist financing in their monograph, The Money Trail: Finding, Following, and Freezing Terrorist Finances (Washington, D.C.: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, November 1, 2008). Oxford Analytica in 2009 had a brief report, “International Focus to Remain on Terrorist Financing.” The Government Accountability Office’s report, “U.S.–Saudi Counterterrorism Efforts,” 2009, takes up the question of financial support, and the measures undertaken to cut off support for radical causes. U.S. Treasury Department under secretary Stuart Levey has been for several years the American official with the deepest knowledge of the financing of terrorism. His remarks on the money trail in Saudi Arabia quoted in the text can be found in the monograph by Levitt and Jacobson.
Bob Woodward’s “first draft” of the history of the George W. Bush presidency has a convincing portrait of the evolution in Saudi thinking on Iraq. See Plan of Attack, published in 2004, and The War Within, published in 2008 (both New York: Simon & Schuster).
A trove of documents captured in Iraq by American forces—the so-called Sinjar Records—are a unique source of information about Saudis and other fighters who made their way to Iraq to wage a ferocious campaign of terrorism against the Iraqis and the Americans. Joseph Felter and Brian Fishman, of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, have a good summary of the data in their report “Al Qaeda’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq,” published by the Center in 2008. I went through the raw data for the backgrounds of the Saudi fighters, the money they brought with them, their route of entry, etc. The data was made available in 2007.
King Abdullah’s remarks to the American diplomat Dennis Ross came from an account in the New York Times Magazine (August 2, 2009, “The Making of an Iran Policy,” Roger Cohen).
The Institute for International Finance’s “GCC Regional Overview,” September 28, 2009, provided a good summation of the economies of Saudi Arabia and the smaller states of the Gulf in the aftermath of the global economic crisis of 2008. Samba Financial Group in Riyadh provides quite thorough analyses in its Report Series of the Saudi economy. I relied on its “Saudi Arabia: 2009 Mid-Year Economic Review and Forecast,” published in June 2009.
On the question of the Shi’a in the Eastern Province, I had my field notes, and I read closely the following sources, several first-rate studies: Toby Jones, “Embattled in Arabia; Shi’is and the Politics of Confrontation in Saudi Arabia,” Occasional Paper Series, Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, June 2009; Toby Mattheisen, “The Shi’a of Saudi Arabia at a Crossroads,” Middle East Report Online, May 6, 2009. Particularly rich and insightful was Guido Steinberg’s study “The Shiites in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia, 1913–1953,” in Rainer Brunner and Werner Ende, editors, The Twelver Shia in Modern Times (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2001). There is an invaluable first-person account by the Shi’a writer and activist Fouad Ibrahim, The Shi’is of Saudi Arabia (London: Saqi Books, 2006). The unrest in the Eastern Province in 1979 is the subject of a first-rate essay by Toby Jones, “Rebellion on the Saudi Periphery: Modernity, Marginalization, and the Shia Uprising of 1979,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 38, 2006, pp. 213–3.
The place of the Hijaz and its people in the new Najdi-dominated order is taken up by the Hijaz-born writer Mai Yamani in her book Cradle of Islam: The Hijaz and the Quest for an Arabian Identity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004). Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh is a stab at feminist literature, and an example of its limitations (New York: Penguin Press, 2007). I drew on a first-rate account (in Arabic) of the education of women in Saudi Arabia, which translates as The Sedition of the Education of Girls, by Abdullah al-Washmi, published in Casablanca in 2009 by the Arab Cultural Center.
On the question of women and their education, John Stuart Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” written in 1869, can be found in J. S. Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 119–217. Joshua Muravchik has an illuminating portrait of the Saudi feminist Wajeha al-Huwaider in his book The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East (New York and London: Encounter Books, 2009), pp. 10–44.
Turki al-Hamad is a prolific, American-educated author and political writer whose work I have turned to and drawn on in this text. His “coming of age” autobiographical works, Adama and Shumaisi, published, respectively, in 2003 and 2005, were issued in London by Saqi Books. Also illuminating is his novel The Wind of Paradise (London: Saqi Books, 2005), an attempt to render, in fiction, the young terrorists who pulled off the attacks of 9/11, and the wider culture that produced them.
The Princeton scholar Michael Cook’s majestic work Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought (Cambridge, England, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) explains the philosophical underpinnings of Wahhabism and the manner in which the zeal at home became a substitute for expansion beyond the borders of the Saudi realm.
While reflecting on the ways of Saudi politics, I found a useful precedent in the historical patterns of Spanish—particularly Castilian—history. My remarks on Spain are drawn from the distinguished historian J. H. Elliott, particularly his book Spain, Europe, and the Wider World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009). The theme of the “good tsar” can be found in Paul Avrich, Russian Rebels: 1600–1800 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1976).
The “time of the Americans” in Arabia has been endlessly recalled and written about. One readable narrative that covers the encounter between the American pioneers and Arabia is Anthony Cave Brown, Oil, God, and Gold: The Story of Aramco and the Saudi Kings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999). Thomas Barger’s Out in the Blue, Letters from Arabia, 1937–1940 (Vista, California: Selwa Press, 2000) is, as my text makes clear, a son’s tribute to the wonder of the world that his parents found when the Americans first ventured into the Arabian Peninsula. Ameen Rihani is the Lebanese author cited in the text who came under the spell of Ibn Saud and gave him an account of Woodrow Wilson’s political fate, Ibn Saud of Arabia (London: Constable, 1928).
No author can escape the spell of the “classics” of travel literature on Arabia. William Gifford Palgrave’s Personal Narrative of a Year’s Journey through Central and Eastern Arabia 1862–1863 (London: Macmillan, 1868) is timeless. David Hogarth’s The Penetration of Arabia (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1904) is a book of real insight and beauty. The best such chronicle is Charles Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta (London: Jonathan Cape, 1926).