Editor's Note:

This SUSRIS IOI provides for your consideration Mark Weston's introduction to his book, "Prophets and Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present." We thank Mr. Weston for permission to share it here with you and for permission to provide the book's foreword by Amb. Wyche Fowler yesterday (link below).

"Prophets and Princes: Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present"
Mark Weston

Introduction

Saudi Arabia is both the economic and the spiritual center of the Middle East and a crucial ally of the West. It has a quarter of the world�s oil; the United States has just 2 percent. At present, if the United States were forced to rely on its own resources, it could run out of oil in less than five years.

Three families control more than 40 percent of the Earth�s oil reserves: the al-Saud of Saudi Arabia, the al-Sabah of Kuwait, and the al-Nahayan of Abu Dhabi. By far the most powerful of these families is the al-Saud, the rulers of Saudi Arabia, the world�s only country that is named after a family. Their desert kingdom is almost as large as the United States east of the Mississippi River.

Saudi Arabia is also the cradle of Islam, the monotheistic but misunderstood faith of almost a quarter of the world�s people. When one and a half billion people from Morocco to Indonesia kneel to pray, they pray face Mecca, Islam�s holiest city, in western Saudi Arabia. There are 25 percent more Muslims than Catholics in the world, three times as many Muslims as Protestants, and more than eighty Muslims for every Jew.

The Saudi kingdom is a paradox. It has been a breeding ground for al-Qaeda, but it has also been a friend of the United States for more than sixty years. After September 11, 2001, for example, when oil buyers were nervous, Saudi Arabia pumped millions of barrels of extra oil to keep the price down, and it did the same in March 2003, when the United States invaded Iraq. The kingdom has also been a force for moderation in the Arab world, periodically proposing a plan for peace between Israel and Palestine and denouncing Hezbollah as �irresponsible� when the militia�s guerrillas crossed into Israel and killed eight Israeli soldiers in July 2006.

A balanced view of Saudi Arabia is vital if Americans are to avoid more of the miscalculations that so often lead to violence in the Middle East. The kingdom�s duality needs to be acknowledged and explored, but many recent books about the country have been polemics. In fact, since 2001, it has been open season on Saudi Arabia in newspapers, magazines, and especially books with titles such as Hatred�s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism; Princes of Darkness: The Saudi Assault on the West; and The Two Faces Of Islam: The House of Saud from Tradition to Terror. Most of these attacks are one-sided and written by people who have never been to the country.

Saudi Arabia is easy to criticize. Women cannot drive, work with men, or travel without a man�s permission. The religious police, though less assertive than they used to be, still harass women if they see the slightest bit of hair, arm, or ankle but never arrest a Saudi man for abusing his Indonesian or Sri Lankan housemaid. In business, corrupt princes have taken �commissions� on large contracts and squandered the money on luxuries, even while 30 percent of the nation�s young men are unemployed. In schools, students spend almost a third of their time on Islamic studies and often graduate without the skills they need to compete with the nine million foreigners who live in the kingdom and do much of the country�s work.

Worst of all, until 9/11 the Saudis sent millions of dollars abroad to schools that taught Muslim extremism and to charities that turned out to be fronts for al-Qaeda. Even today, 10 to 20 percent of the members of al-Qaeda are Saudi, including its leader, Osama bin Laden. On September 11, 2001, as everyone knows, nineteen of bin Laden�s followers hijacked four U.S. passenger jets and slammed three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing almost three thousand people. Fifteen of these murderers were from Saudi Arabia, eleven from a single region.

Yet Saudi Arabia has also been a steadfast ally of the West since 1915, first of Britain and then of the United States. The kingdom has huge oil reserves, but is dependent on the United States for its security, and for decades it has kept its end of the energy-for-security bargain. The Saudis often pump much more oil than their own need for income requires to keep both the price of oil and the world�s economy stable. If the Saudis did not provide this cushion of extra oil, the world�s oil supplies would be much more prone to disruption, and markets would be a lot more jittery. Americans might easily be paying a dollar or two more for a gallon of gasoline than they already do.

After 9/11, it took the Saudi people more than a year to fully appreciate the fact the homegrown terrorism had become a major problem. Since 2002, however, the Saudis have killed more than 150 terrorists and captured more than 1,000 others, shared valuable information with the FBI and the CIA, stopped all Saudi charities from sending any money abroad, fired or retired 1,300 extremist clerics and forbidden them to preach at their mosques, and begun the lengthy process of replacing millions of schoolbooks in the one subject, �Monotheism� in which the textbooks contained numerous hostile references to Christians and Jews.

Despite these efforts, two-thirds of Americans have an unfavorable view of Saudi Arabia, according to one Gallup poll. Misunderstanding, of course, is a two-way street. In Riyadh, an old man waiting in line at a bank asked me, �Why are you in Iraq? Why do you help Israel? You are a great people. You make planes. You make cars. Then I watch television and see what you are doing nearby, and I don�t understand it.� (I just nodded, having learned within days of my arrival that is was futile to try and change Saudi minds about Israel.)

In the United States, harm is done by grossly misleading magazine articles such as �The World�s 10 Worst Dictators,� a piece David Wallechinsky updates each year for Parade. In 2006, he put Saudi Arabia�s King Abdullah seventh on his list, although, as this book makes clear, Abdullah has been an excellent monarch, and a Saudi king is not a dictator. The king is subject to Muslim law, receives many petitions, and seldom makes a decision without the support of his brothers, the senior clergy, and experts with PhDs.

Thomas Lippman, a former Middle East bureau chief for the Washington Post and the author of Inside the Mirage, an excellent book on America�s relationship with Saudi Arabia, correctly called Parade�s inclusion of King Abdullah on its list of the world�s worst dictators �ridiculous� and asked, � What planet do these people dwell on?�

Yet in a sign of how deeply suspicious many Americans are toward the kingdom, Parade ignored Lippman�s criticism and moved King Abdullah up to fourth place in 2008, ahead of Zimbabwe�s Robert Mugabe, a brutal tyrant who has killed his opponents and has robbed his people of a generation of economic progress. (Parade�s three worst dictators were the leaders of North Korea, Sudan, and Burma.)

Saudi Arabia�s unfair ranking comes from the fact that the kingdom justifiably gets a zero in religious freedom. Non-Muslims are forbidden to build houses of worship in Saudi Arabia and can hold services only inside their homes. This is because when Muhammad was dying, he said, � Let there not be two religions in Arabia.� Today, the Saudis say, building a church in Saudi Arabia, the home of Islam, is as unthinkable as building a synagogue would be in Vatican City.

Like an F on a report card, the kingdom�s zero in religious freedom pulls down what is otherwise a fairly decent human rights record. Even Amnesty International, one of the kingdom�s harshest critics, concedes that no one has ever disappeared in Saudi Arabia, as so many have in Iraq, and it estimates that the number of political prisoners in Saudi Arabia, a nation of twenty-seven million people, is fewer than two hundred. While the Saudis are not free to demonstrate against their government, their right to petition the royal family is absolute because the Quran commands rulers to seek advice. As a result, clerics and professors routinely sign petitions, with impunity, that ask the king to give up his power and form a constitutional monarchy.

In the last decade, the Saudi people have begun to speak freely, but, out of residual caution, most of the Saudis I met still asked me not to use their names in this book. I never heard anyone make fun of the king or crack a joke about the senior princes, but people did not hesitate to call some uneducated, although most Saudis see them as conscientious administrators who consult many experts before making a decision.

King Abdullah has worked especially hard to integrate his country into the world economy. Recently, Saudi Arabia has signed thirty-eight trade agreements and enacted forty-two commercial laws so that in 2005, it could be the 149th nation to join the World Trade Organization and exchange goods and services more freely and cheaply with the other 148 countries.

By then, 91 percent of the Saudis had satellite television, with access to more than 150 Arabic-language channels. Saudis today get their news from many sources and have also begun to see how women live in less gender-segregated societies. Nearly every Saudi agrees that women, who outnumber men almost three-to-two at Saudi Universities, will have more rights soon. But even educated young women seem content to move cautiously, because the goal, many say, is not to free themselves from men, but with men.

Although Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally making genuine social progress, many Americans, from right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch to left-wing film director Michael Moore, want the House of Saud to fall. They ignore the fact that unlike Iran, where the people are more progressive than their rulers, in Saudi Arabia the royal family is more progressive than its people. Day after day, I asked almost every Saudi I met the same question: If three political parties competed in elections tomorrow-one representing the royal family, a second representing conservative clerics, and the third representing Western-educated reformers-how would the Saudi people vote? The answer was always about the same: 50 to 55 percent for the royal family, 35 to 45 percent for the Islamist clerics, and just 5 to 10 percent for the Western-oriented reformers.

The alternative to Saudi Arabia�s royal family today is not some Arabic-speaking version of the Swedish parliament, but a militantly Islamist regime, which, even if it were democratically elected, would almost certainly be far more troublesome and anti-Western than the royal family is. (In Kuwait, Muslim fundamentalists won 34 percent of the seats in the parliament in 2006, and the Saudis are more devout than the people of Kuwait.)

The Saudi princes �are the only ones in the position to stop the extremists from controlling our lives,� a blogger, Saudi Jeans, wrote to me, � and liberals need them to implement that reforms they are looking for.� Even Patrick Buchanan, the ultraconservative U.S. columnist, has rightly asked, �Can anyone believe that should the 7,000 princes go to the wall, 7,000 liberal democrats will replace them?�

The harshest critics of Saudi Arabia are ill-informed. They ignore the country�s long traditions, pro-Western history, and undeniable recent progress and treat the whole kingdom as if it were a rogue state where everyone supports terrorism. The truth is that the overwhelming majority of Saudi people, including all but one of the Saudis I talked with, hate terrorism, and the police have been able to raid dozens of terrorist hideouts because of tips, as one officer said, from �disgusted neighbors.� A 2005 poll of ten thousand Saudis found that only 4.7 percent of them wanted Osama bin Laden to have political power. Ninety-two percent thought it was a �bad idea.�

Critics of Saudi Arabia face a dilemma. If the majority of Saudis are Islamic militants, then we are lucky the house of Saud is in power because the alternative would be an anti-American theocracy that has billions of petrodollars to spend opposing U.S. interests. But if most Saudis are against extremism and most princes and police officers want to help us fight terrorism, then it is foolish and counterproductive to demonize their country just because their culture is so different from our own.

It is easy to disparage the Saudis. It is harder to try to see them as they see themselves: as champions of monotheism and modesty, under a monarchy that is subject to Islamic law. Saudis know that their royal house has many corrupt princes, but the al-Saud family also has a 260-year tradition of ruling the country, a 60-year alliance with the United States, and a current king, Abdullah, who is widely considered to be accessible, prudent, and broad-minded.

As for Saudi women, few of the ones I talked with would trade places with their American sisters and give up the protection of their extended families. To women in Saudi Arabia, the possibility of raising children as a single mother without any money from brothers, uncles, and cousins seems as demeaning as having to wear a full veil and not being able to drive seem to us.

Appearances are deceiving in Saudi Arabia. �Outside, everything is dusty,� said an American nurse who has lived in Riyadh for years. �The only colors are beige, brown, tan, and cream. But inside, everything is air-conditioned, well-furnished, and beautiful.� Similarly, �Western journalists covering our kingdom only show extremists and the royal family,� a petrochemical salesman complained, �but everyone I know just wants to make money, raise a good family, and live a peaceful live. We are more like Americans than different.�

Riyadh is dusty because it is surrounded on every side by hundreds of miles of desert, so if there is the slightest breeze, the blue sky turns half-brown, particles of sand brush against one�s cheeks, and contact lenses become hard to wear. The cities and towns of Saudi Arabia are oases in an unrelentingly harsh desert, where vast seas of off-white sand reflect so much sunlight that without dark glasses, it is difficult to see until about five in the afternoon. There is not even much scrub in Saudi Arabia. Compared to the almost lifeless Arabian Desert, the American Southwest is a garden. In fact, much of the kingdom looks more like Mars than the Mojave. It is amazing that anyone ever settled Arabia�s interior, and it is not surprising that until the twentieth century, fewer than a dozen Europeans had ever been to Riyadh.

As late as 1950, Riyadh and every other Saudi city except Jeddah were just clusters of mud-walled homes, with no restaurants, parks, electricity, or running water. Saudi Arabia did not have a high school until the 1930s or a girls� school until the 1950s. Today, in many Saudi families, although the grandmothers and the great-grandparents are illiterate, the grandfathers attended only elementary school, and the parents have just a high school education, the sons and the daughters are attending universities. It is easy for an American to think that Saudi Arabia is backward, but the Saudis themselves feel as if they are rocketing into the future.

My curiosity about Islam began in 1990, when I was writing my first book, The Land and People Of Pakistan, a few years after I had made some Pakistani friends at the London School of Economics. Two things struck me about the Muslims: their numbers and their fervor. While churches in the United States may fill up once or twice a week, mosques in Pakistan (and in Saudi Arabia) fill up five times a day.

In Islamabad, Pakistan�s capital, there was a wonderful store called Mr. Books that sold biographical pamphlets about the early Muslims for ten rupees, about fifty cents. The booklets told the stories of not only Muhammad, but also his immediate successors, favorite wives, smartest daughter, son-in-law, and two grandsons, among others. Historically, these men and women are as important to Muslims as Jesus, Mary, Joseph, Peter, and Paul are to Christians.

I realized that the prophets, the saints, the rulers, and the martyrs whom the Muslims learn about in childhood are alien to us. Yet if we in the West are to understand the thinking of our allies and the motives of our adversaries, it is important that more of us begin to know some of these dramatic Muslim stories. Greedily, I bought twenty of the pamphlets. � Someday,� I promised myself, � I will write about them.�

Eleven years later, after the attacks of 9/11, that time had come. I wrote the first four chapters of this book in 2002, trying to combine the liveliness of the Pakistani pamphlets with the rigor of the more scholarly books on Muslim history that I found in university libraries.

Americans are typically more concerned with the present than with the past, and many busy people may have the time to read only my book�s final chapters on Saudi Arabia today. But almost every Saudi would agree that if you have time to read just one chapter in this book, you will learn much more about Saudi Arabia by reading the first chapter on Muhammad than you will by reading the last chapter on relations with Iran and the future of the royal succession.

When I lived in Saudi Arabia and had already decided to write a much longer book, I sometimes showed the Saudis my table of contents so they could see what I was writing. They were always pleased that this book begins with the chapters on Muhammad and his successors. Once when I interviewed Prince Abdullah bin Faisal bin Turki, the former director of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (roughly the equivalent of the secretary of commerce), he had originally agreed to see me for fifteen minutes. After taking a long look at my table of contents, he changed his mind and talked to me for an hour and a half.

The Middle East dominates the news almost every day, yet only 7 percent of Americans claim to have any knowledge of Islam�s core beliefs. Few Americans realize that Muslims revere Genesis, Exodus, Psalms, and even parts of the Gospel as holy scripture and honor Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as prophets of God. It is news to most Americans that Muslims believe in the virgin birth, miracles, and the resurrection of Jesus (for there is no miracle, Muslims say, that Allah cannot perform). Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God. To them, the Trinity is a deviation from monotheism.

Few Americans know that Muhammad was a reformer who loved the company of women and greatly improved their lives. The Quran, the scripture he recited, prohibits the killing of girls at birth and commands that a woman inherit half of what a man inherits, a revolutionary idea anywhere in the world until the nineteenth century. It was also Muhammad�s personal opinion that a woman should be educated and have a major say in choosing her husband. Indeed, his first wife was a businesswoman who proposed to him.

Some influential Americans display an astonishing ignorance about Islam. In 2003, Lieutenant General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence, said that the Muslims he fought in Somalia worship �an idol.� Similarly, Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, told NBC News in 2002 that, �the God of Islam is.. a different God,� and Islam, �is a very evil and wicked religion.� Jerry Vines, a former president of the Southern Baptists, told a Baptist convention in 2001 that, �Allah is not Jehovah.� In fact, Allah and Jehovah are one and the same. Al-lah is simply Arabic for �the God,� and Islam began as and continues to be a movement against idol worship.

Fox News commentator Bill O�Riley compared the University of North Carolina�s assignment of a book about the Quran to incoming freshmen in 2002 to a requirement that the read Hitler�s Mein Kampf and asked why Americans should study �our enemy�s religion.� O�Riley�s question has two answers. First, American�s enemy is terrorism, not Islam, Second, the growth of terrorism has shown that it is not possible to fully understand the twenty-first century without knowing something about the seventh century, the period when Muhammad began the spread of Islam.

Millions of Muslims, including many Saudis, see the seventh century, when Islam grew so rapidly, as a golden age when saints ruled the world, a utopia that they want to restore. In the �smoking gun� videotape that U.S. soldiers found in Afghanistan in 2001, Osama bin Laden and his black-turbaned Saudi dinner companion discuss their destruction of the World Trade Center, then talk about reviving the spirit of early Islam.

Why are Muslims so fervent about their religion? Muhammad and his followers introduced a way of life that was more just and equitable than anything the Arabs had known before, and this spurred them to spread their faith from Spain to India. Muslim civilization became the most advanced in the world until the time of the European Renaissance. In the 1030s, for example, one Arab scientist, ibn al-Haytham, closely observed the twilight and correctly determined that the air peters out (and space begins) about sixty miles up. It would be almost nine hundred years before Western scientists discovered the ionosphere and reached a similar conclusion.

The many English words that come from Arabic are a constant reminder that for centuries, Europeans borrowed from the Muslims -- not the other way around. Words derived from Arabic include coffee, sugar, soda, candy, alcohol, magazine, orange, lemon, lime, rice, spinach, cotton, sofa, mattress, admiral, average, canal, cannon, jacket, jar, sheriff, traffic, and zero. Muslims led the world in astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and even home furnishings for more than four hundred years, until a combination of reactionary clerics and Mongol invasions drained Islamic civilization of its dynamism in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

By the time I had finished writing about early Islam, I had also become interested in Wahhabism, the strict Saudi form of Islam that began in the 1740s as a movement against superstition, magic, and idolatry. After 9/11, because most of the hijackers were Saudi, some writers began to call Wahhabism a totalitarian ideology, comparing it to Nazism and communism, and said it was America�s next great enemy. But as chapter 5 makes clear, Wahhabism was simply a puritanical religious revival, rather like Calvinism in our own past.

Arabia had regressed and become a superstitious backwater when Wahhabism began. People prayed at tombs and sacred palm trees instead of in mosques, and they pursued astrology and ancestor worship instead of monotheism. The Saudis themselves call this time a �period of ignorance.� Then, in 1744, ibn Abdul Wahhab, a fiery preacher and strict monotheist, joined forces with Muhammad ibn Saud a few miles outside what is now the city of Riyadh. Together, they formed a military and spiritual alliance that conquered and briefly ruled most of the Arabian peninsula. The kingdom fell but briefly reappeared in the twentieth century as modern-day Saudi Arabia, and the Saudi-Wahhabi alliance, after 260 years, is still one of the key pillars of the royal family�s legitimacy.

Today, the most pressing question in Saudi Arabia is whether the kingdom can control its population growth, find work for its unemployed, and create an economy based on manufacturing and services before its oil runs out by the end of the century. If it is left alone, Saudi Arabia will have a bright future. It earns huge oil revenues, has a business-friendly government, and is making slow, but steady social progress. Turmoil in the Middle East, however, could easily spill into the kingdom, particularly if a �clash of civilizations� developed between the West and the Muslim world.

Whether the Saudi people choose to be moderate or militant in the future depends on whether they believe globalization can enrich their lives without endangering their faith. Do they feel that Islam is secure in the face of the Western world�s many influences? Whatever the Saudis decide, their influence on the rest of the Muslim world will be enormous, both because of their immense oil wealth and because of their moral authority as the guardian of Islam�s two holiest cities, Mecca and Medina.

Most of my friends read more fiction than nonfiction, and the art of reading the two genres is quite different. A novel is a work of art that needs to be taken whole. A nonfiction book is a buffet; the reader has only to read what interests him or her. To make it easy for readers to jump and skip, I have divided each chapter into many subchapters. Some are obviously more interesting than others. The boyhood of Osama bin Laden, for example, is a more interesting topic for most people than are monthly fluctuations in the price of oil, and women�s issues are generally more interesting than budget cutbacks and petrochemical plants are. Although a book on Saudi Arabia would not be complete without detailed discussions of the price of oil, no one ever said that you have to read every page of a nonfiction book.

When I was a sophomore in college, I was struck by the second paragraph of Niccolo Machiavelli�s introduction to The Discourses:

At nineteen, I pitied Machiavelli. One of the great political thinkers of all time had to humble himself before his patrons. Now I read the same paragraph with envy. Machiavelli did not have to claim to have written �the one indispensable book on the subject� as so many authors do to sell their wares today. He simply hoped that he had done some useful work, as I do with this book.

No one can spend six years on a project without being deeply aware of its deficiencies. The ideal author for this book would have gone to college pursuing a double major in Arabic literature and petroleum engineering, worked in the Saudi kingdom for twenty years, come to know many Saudi families extremely well, and then, with a novelist�s eye, woven the history of the kingdom back and forth between the sweep of national events and daily lives of his friends. If we are lucky, perhaps someone this talented is writing such a book now.

In the meantime, there is room for a new and sympathetic survey of Saudi Arabia that highlights its reforms since 2001 instead of only its shortcomings. Unlike other works about the kingdom, the purpose of this book is not to criticize the Saudis, although often I do, but to try to understand them. In a region as explosive, exasperating, and hostile to the United States as the Middle East, America�s sixty-year friendship with Saudi Arabia is worth preserving.

Printed with permission of Mr. Weston.

[Links and graphics added by SUSRIS as background material.]

About Mark Weston

Mark Weston has recently returned from Saudi Arabia, where he was a Visiting Scholar at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. He has completed a history of the kingdom, Prophets and Princes � Saudi Arabia from Muhammad to the Present, which John Wiley & Sons published in July 2008. Wyche Fowler, former U.S. Senator from Georgia and Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, wrote the foreword.

Weston�s interest in the Muslim world began in 1990, when he lived in Lahore while researching his first book, The Land and People of Pakistan (HarperCollins 1992) a work recommended by the National Council for Social Studies.

The Los Angeles Times called Weston�s second work, Giants of Japan: The Lives of Japan�s Greatest Men and Women (Kodansha 1999) �a superb new book.� Foreign Affairs called it �vivid, an excellent introduction to Japanese history.� Walter Mondale wrote the foreword, and the book went into paperback in 2002 and again in 2005. 

Weston grew up in Armonk, New York and graduated from Brown University with a B.A. in history. He spent a year at the London School of Economics, then earned a law degree from the University of Texas. He has been a lawyer for ABC Television and a journalist for ABC News, and has written articles for The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. His one-character play, �Meet George Orwell,� has been performed at Trinity College, Oxford and the John Kennedy Presidential Library Theatre in Boston, among other venues. 

In 1991 Weston won enough money on TV's Jeopardy! to start a company that makes geographical jigsaw puzzles for children. He sold his firm to a larger puzzle company three years later, then lived with a Japanese family in Tokyo while researching his second book. He has also written a children�s book, Honda: The Boy Who Dreamed of Cars, that Lee & Low Books will publish in October 2008.

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