Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, John R. Bradley, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. pp208 Journalist John R. Bradley is an old-style British adventurer with a taste for living dangerously and an acute sense of where it is useful for a journalist to be. In the late 1990s, Bradley decamped from London to Cairo, learned Arabic, and set about building up contacts in the Arab press. Before long, he had recommended himself to the leading English-language Saudi newspaper, Arab News. Enlisted as the paper's managing editor, he was among the few Western journalists working in Saudi Arabia when mostly Saudi-born hijackers crashed into the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September 2001. In the aftermath of that cataclysmic event, Bradley was singularly well-placed to report on an Arab country that had suddenly become an object of universal fascination and alarm -- a place in the throes of dizzying upheaval, with East and West, tradition and modernity, apparently clashing in spectacular fashion. Keen to anatomise the country that had spawned a gang of epoch-making suicide bombers, he decided to write an in-depth study of the Saudi kingdom. With the recent death of King Fahd, Bradley's book, Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, could not be more timely. Brimming with hard-won information, it lifts the lid on a key Arab country, which, for all its exposure to globalised instant communications, remains in many ways a closed society ruled by a royal family, the Al-Saud, that has often tried to muzzle its critics. Bradley's outspokenness about Saudi Arabia's regime explains why his book -- which has been published to acclaim in the US -- has yet to appear in libel-conscious Britain. For the time being, readers outside America are obliged to procure a US copy of the book via the Internet. One of the virtues of Bradley's book is the deftness with which it sketches the tangled historical background of Saudi Arabia -- without which making sense of the threat posed by Saudi Arabia both to itself and to the world-at-large is all but impossible. Though the House of Saud owes its wealth and power to oil, it would never have been able to prevail at all but for the alliance that it forged with the austere brand of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. It is thanks to this sect that the Saudi royal family succeeded in imposing its will on a desert kingdom which has always been riven by tribal tensions and which, for all its air of antiquity, is in fact a modern construct. Whole sections of the Saudi kingdom, the Hijaz of the Red Sea and the oil-rich Eastern province with its Shia majority, submitted to a religious and political establishment with which they felt no natural affinity. The trouble is that in their exploitation of Wahhabist zealotry the Saudi royal family has increasingly found themselves wielding a double-edged sword. A divisive force within the Saudi kingdom itself, Wahhabism has at the same time become a source of Islamist militancy. The majority of the 11 September hijackers -- along with their fugitive mentor, Osama bin Laden himself -- were formed by the anti-Western religiosity bred by Saudi Wahhabism. Though no admirer of the Saudi royal family, Bradley shows that it is a complex entity, with notably thoughtful individuals among its members. He records a conversation with Princess Reem, for example, who belongs to the liberal-minded but marginalised Al-Faisal branch of the family. A cosmopolitan intellectual who is also an acclaimed photo-journalist (she specialises in capturing the "divine light"), Reem readily concedes that Saudi society is marked by serious ills -- corruption, vast inequalities, the failure of many Saudi men and women, cossetted by generous welfare provision, to embrace the work ethic. But she is also outraged by the monolithic presentation of her country prevalent in the West, the widespread tendency to regard Arabs as "dark and shifty" people who have yet to emerge from the Middle Ages. Insisting that "we are human beings who form part of the global society", she protests that it is hardly as if the West is without its own forms of social pathology, as has been exemplified by the deadly shooting sprees of American teenagers. Yet, since September 11 liberals like Reem have become increasingly intolerant of criticism from outsiders. The events of that day caused Saudi progressives to shift their focus from promoting open debate and domestic reform to defending the reputation of Saudi Arabia abroad. That there was a sudden and dramatic closing of ranks on the part of the Saudi elite Reem does not dispute, but she sees a parallel in the refusal of the American media to face squarely the root cause of the attacks: American foreign policy. What dismayed Bradley was that while ready to admit to him personally the Saudi origins of the principal 11 September hijackers, the otherwise candid princess had refused to admit anything of the kind when interviewed by the New York Times. Even the most enlightened members of the Saudi elite, he feels, are loath to acknowledge unpalatable home truths -- though to be fair, Princess Reem accepts that Saudis themselves bear at least some of the blame for the misunderstanding that dogs a kingdom that has specialised in shutting itself off from the rest of the world. Saudi Arabia Exposed is a portrait of a society where denial and self-delusion, not to mention moral and intellectual confusion, are endemic. The problem is at its most extreme among Saudi youth, and Saudi Arabia has a booming population of young people. Bradley reports encounters with muddled young Muslims who are at once beguiled and revolted by the West and whose lot is to suffer the boredom that hangs over Saudi Arabia like a "toxic cloud." Lacking anything approximating to Western youth culture, frustrated Saudi teenagers are apt to spend their time gazing at satellite television, surfing the web and contemplating a suffocating existence in a largely closed society, a place that has become dangerously dependent on foreign workers, where the rights of women remain heavily circumscribed and where poverty and unemployment go hand in hand with nepotism and repression. Small wonder if Wahhabi fanatics who demonise the West are finding recruits among Saudi Arabia's disaffected youth. What is an especial cause for alarm, according to Bradley, is the extent to which the Saudi education system is imbued with Wahhabist intolerance of Westerners and of non-Wahhabi Muslims. He recalls an evening he spent with a Saudi student who invited him to his home but who declined to introduce him to his brothers and sisters for fear that the next day they would tell their school friends that they had been associating with a Westerner. The friends would then inform their school teacher, which would spell big trouble, for the teacher would caution them never speak to "infidels" and would hold them up as a bad example. Despite affecting to find this appalling, Bradley's student friend kept speaking of the need to "kill all the infidels". Asked how he could engage in such talk with a guest whom he purported to regard as a friend, the student replied that Bradley "was different." However, Bradley's hope that the student might yet outgrow his anti-Western attitudes did not survive the discovery that the young man had explained to his friends, who were reviling him for mixing with an infidel, that talking to a Westerner enabled him to "get to know our enemy better." That there are great numbers of young Saudis with the same mindset can hardly be doubted. It is Bradley's belief that Saudi officials who assert that Saudi Arabia is purging itself of the scourge of terrorism are being either complacent or disingenuous. He is not alone in suspecting that the country's security services have been penetrated by Islamist activists who share Osama bin Laden's determination to overthrow the House of Saud, and he instances surreal shoot-outs between Saudi police and al-Qaida activists in which neither side seemed to be taking proper aim. Regarded by many of their own subjects as hypocritical, the Saudi royal family has long faced a potential crisis of legitimacy. The recent death of King Fahd may yet usher in a period of instability in the Saudi kingdom, with incalculable international consequences. Certain that the brutal interventionism favoured by George Bush and Tony Blair will achieve nothing in the Middle East, Bradley argues that the best hope for progress in the region resides not in massive military expenditure but in the capitalising of language schools, cultural projects and exchange programmes. Yet if his book tries to indicate how channels of communication might be improved, it also suggests the personal as well as the political difficulties of bridging the gap between the West and the Arab country which is the home of Islam's holiest shrines. For all his efforts to get to know the Saudi people, Bradley's acknowledgements include not a single Saudi name. By Neil Berry
