Historian Robert Lacey’s account of post-70s Saudi Arabia offers a glimpse into a secretive kingdom Following on from his bestselling The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa’ud, published 30 years ago, royal biographer and historian Robert Lacey now relates the dramatic everything that came after: the growth of terrorism, the souring of the US-Saudi relationship and the kingdom’s agonising engagement with the modern world. The society that leaps from these pages is repressive to an almost unimaginable degree. Daily life is a cocktail of cane-wielding religious police, a restless and angry youth, volleys of death threats for dogma-defying teachers, and the continuing intolerance of women drivers – a shibboleth of western fascination for this secretive kingdom, and a misleading one: Bedouin women have long driven around the desert, but the breach of this convention (it’s not a law) by urban women still leads to arrest and ostracism. Lacey also offers a brilliant glimpse into the delicate machinery of government, and the constant tension between ‘ ulema (religious establishment) and monarchy. In contrast to the office-holding ayatollahs in Iran, where the clergy seized power in 1979, the Saudi ‘ ulema has always shown a “reflexive loyalty” to monarchy. But their persistent demands for piety in the 70s and 80s would hopelessly skew the balance of power. The turning point was the hijacking of the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979, a violent protest at the country’s perceived ungodliness, which struck at Islam’s holiest sanctuary.
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