RIYADH: In his book “A Saudi Tale: Readings and Encounters in Search for Consciousness,” Iyad Ameen Madani, a Saudi journalist and former minister, is less concerned with recounting the milestones of his life than exploring how his consciousness was shaped and seeking the meaning of his Saudi, Arab and Islamic belonging in a world torn between identities, ideas and centers of power.

It is an intellectual biography that uses personal experience as an entry point for interrogating social, political and cultural transformations, and individual memory as a means of understanding the questions of a Saudi generation that lived through major changes in its country and the world.

The book, first published in English as “A Saudi Tale: Readings and Encounters in Search for Consciousness” and translated into Arabic by Dr. Waleed Bleyhesh Al-Amri, represents an extension of its author’s career spanning journalism and public service.

He served as editor-in-chief of Saudi Gazette, director-general of the Okaz Foundation, then as a member of the Shoura Council, and as minister of Hajj and of culture and information, culminating in his role as secretary-general of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.

These positions, however, do not form the book’s focus but rather the backdrop that enabled its author to test his ideas about society, the state and the world.

From biography to the question of consciousness

Madani begins with the concept of consciousness, which he does not reduce to knowledge or intellectual positions, but sees as a comprehensive formation that defines a person’s relationship with himself and his surroundings.

In his introduction, he says: “It is said that consciousness is not merely opinions, information or a system of values, but a comprehensive state, an integrated formation that shapes our perception of reality and grants us a holistic vision of the world.” He then says: “These pages are essentially a dialogue with the self, about what it means to be Saudi, and also Arab and Muslim.”

From this starting point, he poses the question that governs his project: “Can these identities be reconciled with the givens of modernity? What is modernity, really? Can there be multiple modernities? Indeed, has modernity itself become an outdated concept?”

The author does not claim to possess final answers, but describes his work as “a reflective journey through an intellectual biography, tracing the sources and courses of consciousness.”

The book is divided into five sections, beginning with Components and Frameworks, in which he addresses the formation of consciousness, his journalistic experience and the emergence of the new world order. The second section, An Ideal Societal System, discusses issues of the general will, the individual and social relations.

He then moves to The Global South, in the Footsteps of Authenticity, to questions of liberation, discrimination and identity, before examining in Close Horizons the Islamic worldview, the Arab predicament and the Saudi narrative, culminating in the section The Outcome.

Madinah: A Debate on Modernity

Among the book’s most telling passages is the author’s recollection of the atmosphere of Madinah in his youth, when intellectual and political discussions flourished among school students during the 1960s and early 1970s. He notes that such debates were neither frowned upon nor rare, but were “part of everyday intellectual activity.”

Here he recalls names such as Mohammed Hassan Awwad, Abdullah Al-Qasemi, Ahmed Al-Sibai, Hamza Shehata and Abdullah Abduljabbar as figures of that intellectual ferment. He pauses on Awwad’s book “Khawatir Musarraha” (“Outspoken Reflections”), which he sees as having helped break the stagnation and open the way for modernity. He also reflected on the intellectual transformations of Abdullah Al-Qasemi, who moved from defending tradition to critiquing inherited norms and calling for liberation from the authority of history and rigid doctrines.

The young people’s interests did not stop at Arab thought. Existentialism was present through Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir, alongside Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Miller and Emily Bronte, as were the causes of nationalism, liberation from colonialism and scientific socialism, and the ideas of Mohammed Iqbal, Ali Shariati, Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani, Mohammed Abdo and Malek Bennabi.

The author evokes a scene from cultural life in Madinah, when Umm Kulthum’s voice reached gatherings of young people under the palm trees via Egyptian radio, in a scene where music intertwined with reading and discussion.

Madani does not exaggerate the maturity of that experience, acknowledging that the discussions were not always profound, but came within “persistent attempts to create an inner sense of understanding the self, and at the same time of belonging to a wider world in which ideas and identities intersect and questions intertwine.”

This testimony offers a glimpse into the history of Saudi culture, revealing that questions of freedom, modernity and identity were present among young people decades ago.

What it means to be Saudi

Saudi identity occupies a central place in the book. Madani rejects reducing Saudis to their Arab or Islamic identity alone, calling for an understanding of the specificity of their historical and cultural experience, “not as Saudis being merely Muslims or Arabs, but as Saudis with their own unique identity and particular experience.”

He notes that Saudis were not subjected to Western colonialism, yet were not isolated from its cultural and intellectual influences. He therefore does not believe that confronting stereotypes is achieved through rejection, but through acquiring knowledge and the tools of research and development, and the ability to produce an independent vision of progress.

He says: “Saudi identity is not a mere shell bearing foreign values, as Saudis have never been subjected to colonialism or the enslavement of the white man. Yet one cannot deny the existence of a struggle, a struggle with a West that is considered superior.

“This superiority stems not only from military dominance, but from its possession of the tools of knowledge, technology and expertise, and from its ability, through research and development and cross-border mass media, to impose a normative conception of success and to have its cultural patterns adopted.”

He poses a question: “If Saudis do not understand the meaning of their ‘Saudiness,’ how can they define their sense of belonging? And how can they formulate their perception of a unique civil national identity?” Here the book shifts from critiquing how others view Saudis to interrogating the way Saudis understand themselves, and the extent of their ability to formulate their national narrative.

Identity and dominant narratives

The search for identity extends to the Islamic and Arab affiliations. In regard to the former, the author distinguishes between Islam as a faith and civilizational experience, and the use of religion to justify domination and violence.

He discusses the phenomenon of “Islamophobia,” which reduced Islam to extremism and overlooked its intellectual and civilizational contributions. As for his Arab identity, he evokes the impact of colonialism and Western narratives of Arab history, and discusses the Zionist narrative of Palestinian history as one manifestation of the struggle over memory and identity.

Madani places these questions within a broader critique of the Western narrative that bundles liberalism, democracy, capitalism and individualism into a single model of progress, asking about the ability of societies outside the West to produce their own vision without either closing themselves off or falling into dependency.

The outcome: Revisiting assumptions

In the book’s conclusion, Madani returns to the question from which he began: How is consciousness formed? And what is the individual’s relationship to society and the world?

He affirms that human rights are not a Western cultural privilege, saying: “It was a fundamental conviction that never left me that the principle of every human being possessing basic rights is not the monopoly of Western culture.”

He also rejects isolation as a means of protecting identity, affirming that the Kingdom “cannot close its doors and be content with itself, or isolate itself from the outside world.”

The conclusion of his experience seems closer to a call for an identity conscious of itself, one that does not abandon its roots nor make them an obstacle to progress. An identity that accepts dialogue and revisits assumptions, and grants the individual the right to participate in shaping his future.

The significance of “A Saudi Tale” lies in the fact that it does not present identity as a complete answer, but rather as a question that calls for revision. It also offers a testimony of a Saudi generation that lived through major transformations and tried to understand its place within them.

From this angle, the book is not merely the story of one man, but a reading of the formation of Saudi consciousness, and of the relationship between national specificity and human belonging, between memory and modernity, and between the ideas a person inherits and what he chooses to become.

This article was first published in Asharq Al-Awsat.