In 1981, two books on Saudi Arabia were published within days of each other: The House of Saud by David Holden and Richard Johns and The Kingdom by Robert Lacey.
If the first had the faint air of the Financial Times and the second the hothouse scent of Town & Country, they nevertheless advanced our knowledge of Saudi Arabia and its ruling house by a distance. At a time when the very institution of monarchy in the Middle East seemed doomed by the fall of the Shah of Iran, neither book was ready to write off the Al Saud (‘the clan of Saud’).
If both books are now dated, it is for the same two reasons. There was next to nothing in either about Saudi women, immured away from Western eyes by jealous families and Wahhabi custom, and not nearly enough about religion. As Lacey says here with admirable candour: ‘I did not begin to guess, when I brought my family to live in Jeddah three decades ago, at the world-shaking climax to which the contradictions and hypocrises around me would lead.’
Holden and Johns are dead. Lacey, very much alive, more than makes up the deficiences of 1981. Saudi women crowd these pages, demanding to be heard, to drive automobiles, to travel without the say-so of a male guardian, and for their husbands to be a bit nicer. There is a chapter on Sapphic love among neglected wives, which should be a warning to the wise. (Homosexual relations among unmarried Saudi men are, presumably, vieux jeu.).
Gone is the privilege of meeting Prince This and Sheikh That in their gracious palaces. In its place is a profound understanding of monarchical government at a period of great strain. Lacey’s chief principle, to which he remains true through a succession of short, bright chapters, is that 9/11 was a ‘manoeuvre in an essentially Saudi quarrel — played out with American victims.’ In other words, the alliance of puritanical religion and tribal power which created the Saudi state in the 18th century and revived it under Abdul Aziz bin Saud in the early 20th, is always at high tension and may snap with consequences for the whole world.
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