Product Description

What happened in the Middle East's oil-rich powerhouse- while we weren't looking

Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox. It is a modern state driven by contemporary technology and possessed of vast oil deposits, yet its powerful religious establishment would have its customs and practices rolled back a thousand years to match those of the prophet Muhammad.

With Inside the Kingdom, journalist and bestselling author Robert Lacey has given us one of the most penetrating and insightful looks at Saudi Arabia ever produced. While living for years among the nation's princes and paupers, its clerics and progressives, Lacey endeavored to find out how the consequences of the 1970s oil boom produced a society at war with itself. Filled with stories that trace a path through the Persian Gulf War and the events of 9/11 to the oilmarket convulsions of today, Inside the Kingdom gives us a modern history of the Saudis in their own words, revealing a people attempting to reconcile life under religious law with the demands of a rapidly changing world. Their struggle will have powerful reverberations around the globe, and this rich work provides a penetrating look at a country no one can afford to ignore.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10029 in Books
• Published on: 2009-10-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780670021185
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Lacey (The Kingdom) delves into the paradoxes in Saudi society—where women are forbidden to drive but are more likely to attend universities than men—and why this nation yielded most of the terrorist team on September 11, Osama bin Laden and one of the largest group of foreign fighters sent to Guantánamo from Afghanistan. Lacey's conversational tone and anecdotal approach to storytelling and analysis gives us a vivid portrait of personal and political life in Saudi Arabia's public and personal spheres, the traditions that govern everyday life, the country's journey from relative liberalism on the tide of extreme oil wealth in the 1980s to a resurgence of traditionalism. Lacey shows us a land where the governing dynasty gives rehabilitated Guantánamo returnees an $18,000 stipend toward their marriage dowry, and 15 young girls died in a schoolhouse fire in 2002 because they were not properly veiled, and religious police forbade them to escape and prevented firefighters from entering the burning building. Lacey's eye for sweeping trends and the telling detail combined with the depth, breadth and evenhandedness of his research makes for an indispensable guide. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Rachel Bronson The fall of 2009 marks the 30th anniversary of three events that rocked the greater Middle East. In November and December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, U.S. hostages were taken in Iran, and extremists seized the Grand Mosque of Mecca. Political and religious extremism set in, and the United States was drawn more deeply into the region. The reverberations of that watershed year are still felt today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. Thus, the timing of Robert Lacey's "Inside the Kingdom" -- probing as it does the events of 1979 and their impact on Saudi Arabia and the world -- could not be better. Lacey begins the book with Juhayman Al-Otaybi and his followers seizing the Grand Mosque and argues that Juhayman represents a Saudi Arabian tradition of violent religious extremism that resurfaces almost every generation. In the past, Saudi leaders contained or eliminated the most extreme elements. In 1929, for example, when religiously fanatical Bedouin warriors threatened to attack British-backed Iraqi Shiites, King Abdul Aziz, the founder of the modern Saudi Arabia, crushed them at the Battle of Sibila. Later, in the mid-1960s, despite vehement religious opposition by some of his subjects, King Faisal introduced television and education for girls. But after the mosque attack and the other events of 1979, the Saudi leadership did not suppress local extremists. Rather, it espoused an austere religious viewpoint of its own for political gains. The tactic allowed the Saudis to recruit fighters for the battle against the Soviets in Afghanistan, a war defined by the Saudi leadership as a religious cause. The tactic also helped the Saudis counter Shiite Iran's growing popularity across the Sunni Muslim world. And it allowed the leadership to outflank those who seized the Grand Mosque by appropriating their cause. By the 1980s, radical Saudi clerics largely dictated the domestic agenda, and "no prince would have dared stand up . . . to contradict the say-so of a religious figure." This, according to Lacey, set the context for the violence of the next two decades. The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and subsequent events have caused the Saudi leadership to take another look at the more extreme and violent elements in its society. "September 11 had shown what happened when religion got out of hand," Lacey writes. This reassessment continued with the accession of King Abdullah to the throne in 2005. Widely regarded as deeply pious, Abdullah has little sympathy for the most extreme and austere religious interpretations. Lacey quotes Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, a key figure in Abdullah's fight against extremists -- and who himself has been a target of their violence -- as saying: "We are building a national consensus that extremism is wrong. . . . Whoever wins society will win this war." Lacey does a good job of encapsulating Saudi domestic history over the past 30 years, although he largely ignores the international context that allowed violence and extremism to spread and prosper. The Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, regional struggles between Arab states and, later, the Iran-Iraq War made religious extremism useful to many actors, not just the Saudi leadership, a point that is lost in this primarily domestic chronicle. "Inside the Kingdom" tells an important story but one that can be found in other accounts. There is little that is new here. Perhaps most disappointing is that, while acknowledging that "at the end of a book, people expect some prognosis for the future," Lacey prefers to end with a "messy human story" that shows the "muddle of tradition and progress that makes up the Kingdom today." Yet few other writers are as well-positioned as Lacey to give a prognosis. He has been watching the kingdom for 30 tumultuous years and has become a trusted source. He could have, indeed should have, been bolder in offering counsel on how to understand and approach the kingdom today. Still, the time is right to consider the impact of those seminal events and the geopolitical struggle they unleashed. The rest of the world has a keen interest in the outcome of Saudi Arabia's domestic struggles and in seeing that the pragmatists prevail over the zealots. In reminding us of this, "Inside the Kingdom" makes an important contribution. bookworld@washpost.com
Copyright 2009, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

About the Author
Robert Lacey is the author of twenty books, including Majesty, The Year 1000, and the New York Times bestseller The Kingdom. For the last three years he has been living in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

Customer Reviews

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain
Saudi Arabia is the proverbial "man behind the curtain," the guy who exerts power, wields influence, and manipulates events but seeks to remain largely anonymous. Trouble is, Robert Lacey keeps pulling back the curtain to reveal the secrets and mysteries of this most peculiar kingdom.

Thirty years ago Mr. Lacey published a history of Saudi Arabia called "The Kingdom," a book, by the way, that the House of Saud elected to ban. Mr. Lacey's new tome basically picks up where the last one left off.

Mr. Lacey's prose is enjoyable and his book is well structured, describing and explaining events in a logical and chronological sequence with digressions and thematic developments where appropriate. And after reading his book, I have gained a renewed appreciation for the Law of Unintended Consequences. We learn that the Arab oil embargo, which was precipitated by U.S. support for Israel during the 1973 war, resulted in unprecedented prosperity in Saudi Arabia which, in turn, caused a backlash among Islamic conservatives, which fostered the growth of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood where Osama Bin Laden found a home, who then went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, and so on and so on. Mr. Lacey also does a fine job of chronicling the evolution of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the Royal Family's genuine fear of the Shia extremists that control the government of neighboring Iran. And he effectively buttresses his arguments with insightful anecdotes and telling vignettes.

The events in this book have been chronicled elsewhere--it doesn't contain startling revelations or previously undisclosed diplomatic secrets. But it does help you understand the forces that have created the current mess in the Middle East, many of which were unleashed unwittingly by the participants. And I personally will take it as a sign of hope for the region (albeit a small sign) if the Kingdom, this time around, does not choose to ban Mr. Lacey's book.

The long-awaited sequel...
... to "The Kingdom," which ends at the beginning of the `80's. At the beginning of his previous work, Lacey relates how a Georgetown educated member of the House of Saud told him that he had lived in the Kingdom for 30 years, and if he tried to explain the country, and how it worked, the best he could do is get a B+ on the paper, and therefore, Lacey, as an outsider, could only hope to earn a C. I disagreed, and in my review, said that Lacey deserved at least a B+, if not an A-. For this work, which covers the last 30 years, he deserves a solid A.

Lacey starts with "Angry Face," Juhayman, and his followers, including the expected "Mahdi," who seized the mosque in Mecca (Makkah) in 1979. (This event is also covered well by Trofimov, in "The Siege of Mecca."). The author selected a wonderfully appropriate epigraph for this section, from Dostoevsky: "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him." Lacey did a commendable job in explaining the grievances of those being overwhelmed by the "future shock" that was roiling the Kingdom as a result of the influx of money and foreigners (and their ideas) following the sharp increase in oil prices after 1973. This event, plus the revolt of the Shia, in the eastern town of Qateef, in the same year, had the net effect of nudging Saudi Arabia to a much more conservative governmental social policy, yes, in effect, co-opting a portion of Juhayman's agenda... and the women disappeared from the TV, and the "Opera House" remained closed for many a year! Lacey also covers the Saudi-American alliance of the `80's, ironical in retrospect, openly supported "jihad," certainly when it was fighting the "godless" Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And now both countries suffer from the "blowback," in CIA parlance. Part Two deals with the second decade of the 30 year period, the `90's. The author again commences with an all too appropriate epigraph, this time from Edward Gibbon: "So intimate is the connection between the throne and the alter that the banner of church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people." The seminal event in this decade was Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and his expulsion, lead by an American coalition. The net effect on the Kingdom, who saw American female soldiers driving, which was emulated by their Saudi counterparts, was to again nudge the Kingdom into a more conservative mode. Still, despite the various "fetishes" developed by the religious police, say, against red roses on Valentine's day, the country continues to be overwhelmed by Western (and world) influences, and sadly, the upholders of tradition saw nothing wrong in the influx of fast food restaurants, which led to an "epidemic" of diabetes. Paralleling events in the Kingdom, Lacey devotes space to events in not so far off Afghanistan, where the "students," (the Taliban) were seizing power, and welcomed Bin Laden from the Sudan. The last third of the book starts with "15 flying Saudis," the events of 9/11, and the aftermath, and the Kingdom's own "9/11", which occurred on May 12, 2003, when three upscale compounds were attacked by suicide bombers in Riyadh. Clearly Lacey empathizes with the modernizing goals of now King Abdullah, who had been de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since King Fahd's stroke in '95, but only obtained the full title after his death in 2005. He closes his epilogue poignantly, with the King praying longer one evening after seeing the progress at KAUST, the university that bears his name, slower than he had hoped.

There is a small "cottage industry" which publishes books, and promotes articles that depict the Kingdom as "mysterious," that wants to "rip the veil" off Saudi society, that "exposes" the Kingdom, that produces sheer fantasies of life in the Kingdom. Lacey might have foregone a few book sales by not following this gamut, but for those who want to understand the country (and even ponder how we in the West perceive the country), this book is an essential read. The author has an extraordinary range of contacts in the Kingdom, and has woven the stories of real Saudis into his story, such as the "jihadis," Mansour Al-Nogaidan and Khaled Al-Hubayshi. Overall, through the sheer number of Saudis who were willing to speak "on the record," you had a sense that they trusted Lacey to tell the story in a balanced way, which I think he has. Tis a shame that it will be one more book on the Kingdom that will be banned by their Ministry of Information.

I loved the way Lacey utilized Saudi parables, as Saudis themselves do, to make a point, with my favorite being "The Donkey from Yemen." Lacey should also be commended for correctly translated the meaning of "Tash ma Tash," the Saudi sit-com, unlike the authors of a couple other books on the Kingdom.

Quibbles? Well, I have a few, and they only underscore the difficulty for a foreigner to get it "all right," but often they can, even better than a Saudi, due to the perspective, and "lack of baggage," including tribal ones. Per Lippman, in "Inside the Mirage," it is unlikely American women were in Al Kharj before 1950, not 1944, as Lacey indicates (p 9). There would have been no "hilal" moon (or any other), on Muharram 01, 1400 (p 22). I'd love to know how the M113 armored personnel carrier was a "success" story of the Vietnam War (p 32). Al-Nakba (the disaster) is usually associated with the Palestinian expulsion of 1948, not the defeat of `67 (p 56). Steve Coll, in his "The Bin Ladens," says that there are two versions of how Osama's father, Mohammed, lost his eye, but both occurred in Ethiopia and neither involved soccer; Lacey says that it happened in the Sudan, as a result of a soccer game (p 58). Concerning the formation of "Al Qaeda", the BBC documentary "The Power of Nightmares, directed by Adam Curtis, gives a much more plausible explanation its origins - it was invented by Americans, (!!) for the trials of the 1993 bombers of the WTC, legally, so that RICO laws could be utilized, which involve "conspiracy" and an organization. Later, Bin Laden co-opted the term! It is extremely unlikely that Bin Laden had (has) a "database" of names of all the muhahideen and their contact details, save in his brain (p 148). "Only" three compounds in Riyadh were attacked on May 12, 2003 - the Oasis compound was not (p 244). And Lacey entitles a chapter on the women of Saudi Arabia the "girls" of Saudi - and not a single "girl" was in the chapter (p 274).

Overall, though, a thoroughly researched, and balanced book, written to illuminate Western and in particular, American readers on Saudi Arabia, (Lacey, a British writer even explains that Sandhurst is the "West Point of England.") and should be read in conjunction with Lacey's earlier work, "The Kingdom." Though I'm sure Lacey would demur that "it is beyond the scope of this course," should not all Americans ponder the progress made after each countries "9/11" concerning the issues he only discusses about the Kingdom, be it educational policies, human rights, detention facilities, employment of youth and counteracting those who advocate endless conflict with "the other." An essential 5-star read.

Exposing what would prefer to remain hidden
Saudi Arabia is a kingdom that lives in two unique worlds. As a global center of both the Islamic faith and oil it has to deal with the ancient and the modern and is torn by the two. Robert Lacey does a wonderful job of offering a narrative that describes how the worlds events during the past 60 years have shaped, and been shaped. Lacey gives us the standard history tour which one might expect, but he also goes behind the scenes and offers just the right amount of opinion with history.

The book is very good at explaining how Saudi Arabia was a fairly modern kingdom until a terrorist attack made it one that espoused the very ideals the terrorists espoused. This lead almost directly to the creation of the 9/11 factor and Osama Bin Laden. But only after the terrorists came home did Saudi Arabia start to act in anything approaching a reformist mindset. Lacey does a great job of showing how any reform was slow and met with tremendous opposition and even now minor steps require major battles. All in all a very good read!