Tolerance Arabia: Vijay Prashad unravels the tangled role of Saudi Arabia in the region's volatile mix of neocolonialism, oil, and theocracy - A new Era

Just before 10 a.m. on the 11th of September, the clocks in the World Trade Center stopped. Tons of inflamed jet-fuel melted the steel girders of the mammoth towers and sent five thousand people to their death.

It was the handiwork of a handful of men, 19 all told, who, as we learn later, did not come from among the wretched of the earth, the hungry and desolate who have no options left in the world but to go out with a bang. Rather they came from among the educated middle class of Saudi society, with access to European technical education and with a reasonably bright future before them.

And yet the U.S. went to war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, even as no Afghan was directly involved in the terrorist act. Saudi Arabia, as a favorite son of its colonial fathers, is spared the wrath of the U.S.-led attacks.

The recipe in this geopolitical soup was written some time ago, with Saudi Arabia as one of the main ingredients. The ascension of the current Saudi monarchy shows how economic interests and racial paradigms of the West have combined with the domestic pursuit of right-wing theocracy to produce a volatile mix that cannot be undone easily.

A Fuel's Errand

Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, was a brigand before he was encouraged by the British to take leadership against the Ottoman Empire. Long before he became King (1932), the English monarch knighted him and bestowed upon him the Order of the Bath--the highest honor accorded to nonroyalty. In the 1920s, the English helped arm Ibn Saud as his Ikhwan ("brothers") took inspiration from the fanatical Wahhabism (a branch of Sunni Islam developed in the 18th Century by the Ibn Saud family's patron saint Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab) and executed not less than 400,000 people in a land of only 4 million to take hold of the Arabian peninsula.

Oil, the liquid gold, was only discovered in large quantities once Ibn Saud named the country after himself and took sole title to it. Afraid of a rebellion from below and eager for funds to lavish pleasure on his 7,000 member royal family, Ibn Saud signed treaties with U.S.-English oil firms and began a relationship that continues to this day--the Saudis act as rentiers of a reservoir that holds a quarter of the world's oil; they control production so that the price of oil does not rise to Europe-U.S.'s disadvantage; they use any means to thwart a challenge to their domination, this in order to protect the passage of oil. Even as people of color actually sit on the oil, the sovereignty of the masses is curtailed by the mendacious arrangement made by white supremacy and its dusky franchise, here the Ibn Saud family.

In January 1957, Ibn Saud, son of the original emit, traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with U.S. President Eisenhower and they produced-a declaration-known as the Eisenhower Doctrine (to protect Saudi Arabia as if it were part of the USA). Even as Eisenhower found Ibn Saud personally unfit for leadership, he accepted that this substandard leader was the stuff that allowed the oil to travel untrammeled by nationalists like Gamel Abdul Nasser of Egypt. Nasser had introduced the world to the doctrine of Pan-Arabism, as he called upon the Arabs to reject neocolonialism and take shelter in a radical socialist agenda that included the use of their resources toward the development of their lands. In 1956, Nasser nationalized the crucial Suez Canal (through which all ship traffic from Asia-Europe passed); in response, the English-French invaded the Suez. But Nasserism seemed to be on the rise, and the U.S. was terrified when the people of Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) received him as a hero in 1956. "Arab Oil For the Ar ab People," said Nasser, and he not only scared the U.S. government (who invaded Lebanon in 1958), but also local potentates (such as the heads of Iraq and Lebanon) who, in the words of the scholar Fouad Ajami "reign, but do not rule."

The CIA went into action, alongside Saudi intelligence. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood (ancestor of Osama Bin Laden's current collaborator, the Islamic Jihad) received CIA funds to undermine Nasser; in eastern Saudi Arabia, journalist Said Aburish claims, CIA agent James Russell Barracks confirmed the existence of "an extensive program" to fund small religious cells (these are the direct ancestors of Bin Laden's Advice and Reformation Committee or Hayat Annaseyha Wa'ahisla); finally, in Iraq, the Secretary General of the Ba'ath Parry noted that "we came to power on an American train" in 1963, both through direct finds (alongside Kuwaiti money) and through the use of CIA-run radio stations in Kuwait that broadcasted anti-communist messages from an Islamic fundamentalist standpoint into a secular and socialist Iraq (among these anti-communist Ba'ath leaders stood Saddam Hussein). Nasserism died due to the creation of a modern Islamic challenge as well as because of the renaissance of the Israeli military pos ition after its victory in the 1967 war.

McJihad

The rise and rule of the Saud clan is a showcase of neocolonialism in the region. In 1965, the ex-President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, wrote a book that was fated to be a classic, but has since been forgotten, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Nkrumah recognized that the period of colonial racism was over, the time when European rulers captured lands and peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America to make them work for the profit of Northwestern Europe and the United States. With the freedom of the erstwhile colonies, the corporations and corporate states had to find a new means to dominate the world. Formerly colonized people had the right to rule over themselves politically, but economic sovereignty over them was still to be dictated by Europe. "Neocolonialism," Nkrumah wrote, "is fast entrenching itself within the body of Africa today through the consortia and monopoly combinations that are the carpetbaggers of the African revolt against colonialism and the urge for continental unity."

Nkrumah's remark about the body is not accidental. Race, that fierce social category of the modern world, writes all kinds of stories on the body, makes the body hold meanings that it cannot possibly have. White supremacy, nurtured by imperialism, defines delimited groups of people in certain racist cultural ways, so that the African is seen as undisciplined and therefore in need of the lash, while the Arab is seen as unethical and therefore in need of monarchical rule. If Europe and the U.S. held that bourgeois democracy was the hallmark of modernity, they simultaneously held that those whom they deemed to be (either racially or culturally) inferior should have other ways to rule themselves.

European and U.S. support for the ruthless emirates in the Gulf, of which Saudi Arabia is the leader, must be seen as part of the multi-racist foreign policy of Europe-U.S. in neocolonial times. The U.S.-Europe will offer military and economic aid to prop up unscrupulous kings (for the Arabs and the Persians) and ruthless dictators (for the Africans). U.S. support of the Shah of Iran, of the Emirs of the Gulf States and of Jordan, of Mobuto in the Congo and of other such figures illustrates the racist practice of neocolonialism.

Islam as Cover

Ibn Saud's embrace of fanatical Wahhabism in the early part of the 20th century has not only served to defeat Nasserism, but has helped fortify the racist framework of Christian-based imperialism. Islam is about faith, indeed, but in our contemporary world it is also about race. The stereotypes about Islam feed our belief that there are those who live in feudal times, and our government must he given the freedom to deal with them as if it ruled as medieval lords. Jihad, the rage of the dispossessed Muslims in lands possessed of oil, is fueled against McWorld, the globalization of the world's people in the service of a ravenous capitalism. But McWorld is not so far from Jihad, because it is the desires of McWorld that partly create the conditions for Jihad--the greed of the transnational oil companies to dominate the oil fields, the fear of the emirs to hold onto power over those oil fields, and our own implication as massive consumers of that cheap oil. Power (here, oil) really does come from the barrel of a gun.

King Faisal, in 1962, convened an International Islamic Conference in Mecca where the Saudis unveiled their World Muslim League (Rabita al-Alam al-Islami). The Muslim Brotherhood told the gathering, "Those who distort Islam's call under the guise of nationalism are the most bitter enemies of the Arabs, whose glories are entwined with the glories of Islam." The Brotherhood invoked the idea of shu'ubi (anti-Arab) to cast aspersions specifically at Nasserism (or Pan-Arabism) and Communism (Egypt and Iraq, at this time, had vibrant communist parties, with the Iraqi party by far the strongest in the region). The combination of anti-communism and pro-Islam developed by the Saudis and their Islamicist allies appealed greatly to the United States government, so much that the head of the Brotherhood, Sayed Kuttub wryly called it "American made Islam." The road was open to the most virulent forms of Sunni Islam to take precedence over all that is beautiful in both heterodox Islam and in the democratic urges of the Arab people.

Eyes Wide Shut

The United States gives the Saudis carte blanche, the white card, to do what it wants in the lands of the Gulf. According to Amnesty International's 2001 Report on Saudi Arabia, "Serious human rights violations continue. Suspected political or religious activists suffer arbitrary arrests, detention, and punishment under secretive criminal justice procedures which deny the most basic rights, such as the right to be defended by a lawyer. One person had his eye surgically removed as judicial punishment." State control of almost every aspect of women's lives is pervasive; women cannot walk alone even in their own neighborhood without fear of being stopped by the religious police and suspected of being moral offenders.

The United States can wash its hands of the heinousness of the Ibn Saud regime by invoking the prime directive: cultural relativism. Do not get involved in the "internal" matters of other cultures. However, the presence of U.S. troops in the peninsula protects a regime that is unpopular within its own cultural zone, so that it is hard to say that the U.S.'s "cultural relativism" is not another, more sophisticated way to conduct a racist foreign policy. This "racism from a distance" that does not countenance a democratic regime in Saudi Arabia allows the U.S. to continue its addiction to cheap oil.

The colonial fathers' addiction to oil, and the sons' to theocracy won't end anytime soon.

Vijay Prashad teaches at Trinity College and is the author of Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting and The Karma of Brown Folk.

Vijay Prashad, "Tolerance of Arabia." Vijay teaches at Trinity College and is the author of Everybody was Kung Fu Fighting and The Karma of Brown Folk.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Color Lines Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group