Stereotyping the Kingdom

IF the pen, as it is generally assumed, is mightier than the sword, then Saudi Arabs have every reason to be concerned about the spate of books penned about their country by American writers.
Since the oil embargo in 1973, and most decidedly since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2011, literally hundreds of books have been released, by both political analysts and academics, purporting to edify readers on the history, culture and politics of the Kingdom. Given the significant role the country plays in the region, indeed the world at large, you would imagine that these authors would’ve been careful to lend depth and authority to their research, and equally careful not to let their preconceived prejudices insinuate themselves into their writing. That, sadly, is not the case.
The most recent tome, published ten months ago but released in paperback quite recently, attests to that wretched fact. Titled “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines and Future,” it is written by Karen House, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former executive editor at the Wall Street Journal. Plugging the book, the publisher tells us that the author has been visiting the country for thirty years and thus “has an unprecedented knowledge of life inside this shrouded Kingdom”.
If there is anything shrouded here it is House’s analysis, which is infantile and, yes, outright racist, as she dredges up every tired stereotype Americans harbor about Saudis. Consider this improbably banal description of the land House has visited repeatedly over the last three decades, where she attempts to wax poetic but ends up waxing pathetic. “For millenia,” she writes, “Saudis struggled to survive in a vast desert under searing sun and shearing winds that quickly devour man’s energy, as he searches for a wadi of shade trees and water which are few and far between, living on only a few dates and camel’s milk. These conditions bred a people suspicious of each other and especially of strangers, a culture largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty.”
My, my, and this is a professional writer who has won the Pulitzer Prize, the most prestigious accolade in the journalistic enterprise.
Where did she get the notion that Saudis, whose tradition of hospitality and openness to strangers are legion, could be so mean-spirited to each other? And where did she get the equally bizarre notion that the Kingdom’s culture, so rich in its poetic effusions that go back centuries, is “largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty”? Clearly, it all came from one place: her racist phantasies.
And, yes, in another egregious generalization, not to mention a show of wanton psychologizing, she gets into the collective psyche of Saudi Arabs and discovers that they all “feel trapped”. The sad part of it all is that House is verbalizing the thoughts of a great many — though clearly not all — Americans, for most of whom the Kingdom remains more like another world than another country. That is not only unfortunate but also inexplicable.
It’s been exactly 80 years since the United States and the Kingdom established diplomatic relations, and sixty eight since that historic encounter between King Abdul Aziz and President Roosevelt onboard the cruiser USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake of the Suez Canal (where the American chief executive pledged not to do anything hostile to Arabs, especially Arab interests in Palestine, only to die a week later, with his pledges dying along with him).
That’s long enough, surely, for both area specialists and political analysts to get a responsible grip on what they write about, to free themselves, as it were, of their bigotry and racialist myths about the Kingdom. Saudi Arabia is not just a major regional player, but also the economic and spiritual center of the Middle East, and the cradle of Islam, a faith that, though embraced by a quarter of the world’s population, remains in the US both misunderstood and often maligned.
It is ironic that Saudis, who allegedly come from a “culture largely devoid of art or enjoyment of beauty,” appear to understand America a devil lot more than Americans understand Saudi Arabia. Since the early 1960’s, tens of thousands of Saudi students have graduated from US colleges. In fact, as of 2012, Saudis have formed the fourth largest group of international students studying in the US. You wonder then, given how dumb Saudis are, if there was something wrong with their curricula there.
Karen House’s book is not alone in demonizing the Kingdom. There are countless others like it, in bookstores and libraries, and on lists for suggested or required reading for students majoring in Middle Eastern Studies on campuses across the US. My favorite is Robert Lacey’s “Inside the Kingdom” (2009) — and Lacey is not a lightweight among his peers —which begins, on its first page, with the puerile observation: “In theory Saudi Arabia should not exist — its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers … trusting in God rather than man, and running their oil rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief.” I say my “favorite” because the book is pedestrian beyond belief, so bad that it is good, embodying, as it does, the best in what we call camp.
And no, ignorance is not bliss. It is what sent Americans to Vietnam and Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, and elsewhere around the world to fight wars in countries whose culture and history they knew little about because their intellectual and scholarly elite opted to cling to facile racial stereotypes in diffusing ideas.