By Karen Elliott House
ISBN-10: 0307272168
ISBN-13: 9780307272164
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter who has spent the final thirty years writing approximately Saudi Arabia—as diplomatic correspondent, overseas editor, after which writer of The Wall road Journal—an very important and well timed publication that explores all aspects of existence during this shrouded nation: its tribal earlier, its complex current, its precarious future.
via remark, anecdote, broad interviews, and research Karen Elliot residence navigates the maze within which Saudi electorate locate themselves trapped and divulges the mysterious state that's the world’s greatest exporter of oil, serious to international balance, and a resource of Islamic terrorists.
In her probing and sharp-eyed portrait, we see Saudi Arabia, one of many final absolute monarchies on the earth, thought of to be the ultimate bulwark opposed to revolution within the area, as threatened through a number of fissures and forces, its levers of energy managed by means of a handful of aged Al Saud princes with a regular age of seventy seven years and a longer kin of a few 7,000 princes. but not less than 60 percentage of the more and more restive inhabitants they rule is lower than the age of 20.
the writer writes that oil-rich Saudi Arabia has develop into a rundown welfare kingdom. the general public will pay no taxes; will get unfastened schooling and well-being care; and gets backed water, electrical energy, and effort (a gallon of fuel is more affordable within the country than a bottle of water), with its petrodollars procuring much less and no more loyalty. apartment makes transparent that the royal family members additionally makes use of Islam’s requirement of obedience to Allah—and via extension to earthly rulers—to perpetuate Al Saud rule.
at the back of the Saudi facade of order and obedience, today’s Saudi adolescence, pissed off via social conformity, are achieving out to each other and to a much wider global past their cloistered nation. a few 50 percentage of Saudi adolescence is on the web; 5.1 million Saudis are on Facebook.
to put in writing this ebook, the writer interviewed many of the key individuals of the very deepest royal family members. She writes approximately King Abdullah’s modest efforts to chill a few of the kingdom’s such a lot oppressive social regulations; ladies at the moment are allowed to procure picture identification playing cards, eventually giving them an id self reliant from their male guardians, and are newly in a position to check in their very own companies yet are nonetheless forbidden to force and are barred from such a lot jobs.
With awesome entry to Saudis—from key spiritual leaders and dissident imams to girls at college and impoverished widows, from govt officers and political dissidents to younger profitable Saudis and people who selected the trail of terrorism—House argues that the majority Saudis don't want democracy yet search switch however; they need a central authority that offers simple companies with out subjecting electorate to the indignity of begging princes for handouts; a central authority much less corrupt and extra obvious in the way it spends countless numbers of billions of annual oil profit; a state governed through legislations, no longer royal whim.
In House’s evaluate of Saudi Arabia’s destiny, she compares the rustic this day to the Soviet Union sooner than Mikhail Gorbachev arrived with reform guidelines that proved too little too past due after a long time of stagnation below one elderly and infirm Soviet chief after one other. She discusses what the following iteration of royal princes may convey and the alternatives the dominion faces: endured fiscal and social stultification with growing to be danger of instability, or a gap of society to person initiative and company with the danger that this, too, undermines the Al Saud carry on power.
A riveting book—informed, authoritative, illuminating—about a rustic that may good be at the breaking point, and an in-depth exam of what all this portends for Saudi Arabia’s destiny, and for our own.