It’s summer in Saudi and that means one thing: Saudi ‘foreign policy’, such as it is, is on hold. The Saudi foreign ministry amounts to the minister, Saud al-Faisal and … well, that’s about it. Except that the king appointed this week his son Abdelaziz as Saud al-Faisal’s deputy, which suggests that the portfolio will eventually pass out of the hands of the Faisal branch of The Family to Abdullah’s. Both are seen as representing the more liberal wing of Al Saud and there’s no leading prince to represent the Faisal’s any more, since all are merely grandsons of the kingdom’s founder Ibn Saud. Despite his best efforts to charm the Westerners, Saud’s brother Turki continues to be haunted by suspicions that he cut a Family deal with Bin Laden when he was intelligence chief in the 1990s. [...]

Back to Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and London-based Palestinian writer Elias Nasrallah’s recent book with a startling rereading of what Munif was trying to say in a work that has come to be regarded as one of the greats of modern Arabic literature. I previously wrote about it here when I was first reading it. To recap: Nasrallah has committed the unholy of unholies by accosting received wisdom on the Munif cycle of novels about the founding of the Saudi oil state. In his view, Munif was not simply out to depict how oil sustained a corrupt system of government and created a corrupt society, he was knowingly presenting a distorted rendering of Saudi history in order to rouse Saudis to revolt against Al Saud under the banner of the Salafi Islamist movement, the only movement he saw as capable of undertaking the task. Nasrallah makes it clear that he finds Munif’s cycle to be a subversive work that has helped to legitimise and propagate jihadist ideology. This is of particular interest now since people across the region have taken to the streets this year to challenge their rulers. But finally, Nasrallah’s work does raise inevitable questions about whether there is a pro-Al Saud agenda lurking somewhere.  [...]

(Reuters) – Saudi Arabia has helped damp down democracy movements sweeping the Arab world but is waiting now to see how events play out in places like Syria and Yemen for fear of overplaying its hand.

After witnessing the sudden collapse of rulers in Egypt and Tunisia this year, the Al Saud family that monopolises power in Saudi Arabia orchestrated Gulf Arab moves to stop the unrest from spreading through the Gulf region. [...]

The Big Speech was rather a non-event from the perspective of most people in the region, I reckon. Obama and his administration were behind the curve when the uprisings broke out. The uprisings were troubling for them because 1. (like the Iranian Revolution in 1979) they didn’t see it coming 2. the uprisings were an entirely local affair, trumping the assumption for years that democracy would only come from outside via war (like Iraq) or US pressure (post-Iraq war Bush years until Hamas won Palestinian elections) 3. as such, the uprisings have been outside US control and have the potential produce outcomes that challenge US policy in the region. That policy is pretty straightforward in its general outlines: make the Arabs and Iran accept Israel and peace with Israel on Israeli terms, challenge Iran and other forces opposed to the terms of the Pax Americana, and ensure that oil fields in Iraq and the Gulf stay in friendly hands. [...]

What is striking about Osama Bin Laden’s extrajudicial execution - let’s be precise – is how insignificant the man’s movement had become in much of the region. The threat to Arab regimes has moved on from the violent revolt of al-Qa’ida to the peaceful civil disobedience of the Bouazizi uprisings. The call for democratic reform is far more troubling to Al Saud than the rather weak mobilizations of Al-Qa’ida. The group was a serious problem between 2003 and 2006. It staged spectacular attacks on several residential compounds, government buildings and even an Aramco oil refinery in the Eastern Province. Its “greatest hits” included beheading an American in 2004. But Al-Qa’ida increasingly became a has-been. The security forces crushed the group, which was reduced to desperate stunts orchestrated from its new base in Yemen, such as sending a believer to Jeddah in 2009 with a bomb concealed in his anus in a bid to assassinate the deputy interior minister Mohammed Bin Nayef. Crushing the group was easy for the government, which was genuinely frightened by the jihadist stream of thinking within the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. But combatting Al-Qa’ida on the ground and its ideas became a happy distraction for an antiquated monarchy engaged in a protracted succession struggle among its senior princes that has been unwilling and unable to engage in the kind of reforms the country needs. Indeed, the death of Bin Laden offers little political benefits for Al Saud. The only person who will reap rewards is the US president Barack Obama who has successfully hunted the head long demanded by the American public for the atrocity of 9/11. But for the Arab countries Osama Bin Laden passes away at the moment when his relevance dwindled to its lowest. It may have been Al-Qa’ida in the Maghreb that attacked tourists in Marrakesh last week, but it’s not Al-Qa’ida in the Maghreb that can mobilize people on the streets to press for changes in how the country is run.   [...]

Abdelbari Atwan, the editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, says the Egyptian Prime Minister Essam Sharaf was looking for investments not direct aid handouts during his Gulf tour last week. But while he was received in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, the door was slammed in his face when it came to the UAE: “He was told politely that officials were busy with prior engagements, which in diplomatic and undiplomatic parlance means a veiled rejection”.  (Of course, I liked this reference:اندرو هاموند، مراسل وكالة أنباء ‘رويترز’ في منطقة الخليج أماط اللثام عن الموقف الخليجي من ثورة مصر في تقرير إخباري بثته وكالته يوم أمس الأول ونقل فيه شعور أحد مساعدي الشيخ محمد بن زايد ولي عهد أبوظبي، والرجل الأقوى فيها بخيبة الأمل لسقوط نظام الرئيس حسني مبارك، وقوله، أي المسؤول الاماراتي نفسه ‘كيف يفعلون هذا به.. كان الأب الروحي للشرق الأوسط.. كان رجلا حكيما قاد المنطقة دوما.. نعم الشعب يريد الديمقراطية ولكن ليس بهذه الطريقة.. هذا أمر مهين’.) Yup, anger over Egypt’s attempt to have an independent foreign policy is visceral and the Gulf countries have proven incapable of preventing the prosecution of Mubarak, his family and the gang of hangers-on who steadily ruined Egypt over three sad decades. Atwan thinks that, one, Sharaf didn’t go “begging” and, two, he didn’t appear to get anything anyway. Since the old/new colonial powers often come looking to cash in chips for services rendered – remember the investments British PM Gordon Brown got out of Qatar in 2008 - Atwan asks فلماذا لا يفعل رئيس وزراء مصر، الشقيقة الكبرى، الشيء نفسه؟ – Why shouldn’t Egypt do the same? The Gulf countries are not so united on Iran and other issues as the image they present through the GCC suggests. Qatar and Oman maintain their own independent ties with Iran. Mubarak made Egypt-Gulf relations a one-way street but even if the Gulf has the resources, now the fact is it’s Saudi Arabia et al. who are worried about Egypt, not the other way round. Saudi Arabia’s cordon sanitaire in Arab media is, for a start, under threat now that Egypt has broken the shackles of Mubarak rule. And even if Al-Jazeera/Qatar is helping Saudi Arabia circle the wagons by ignoring the repression in Bahrain, it doesn’t share the distaste for the new Egypt that it would like to think its gung-ho coverage helped create.
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(Reuters) – At a recent conference in Abu Dhabi, a confidant of the emirate’s crown prince vented his frustration over the downfall of a major ally who Gulf Arab rulers once thought was as entrenched in power as they are.

“How could someone do this to him? He was the spiritual father of the Middle East. He was a wise man who always led the region,” the aide told Reuters. “We didn’t want to see him out this way. Yes, people want democracy but not in this manner. It’s humiliating!” [...]

Word is Egypt’s post-uprising prime minister will be in Riyadh next week meeting King Abdullah. One would like to be a fly on the wall at that one. It’s not been a good year for the Gulf dynasties. The regional discourse was merrily All About Iran until a Tunisian fruit-seller called Mohamed Al-BouAzizi set himself alight in December 2010 and the era of revolutions was upon us. Al Saud watched in horror as the Obama administration, grudgingly and in stages, endorsed the protest movement against Mubarak’s rule and then decided to ride the wave by echoing the street’s demand for Mubarak to go, in the desperate hope – but the best it could do at the time – of being able to regain the initiative and work with the military junta on making sure the post-Mubarak era was as pro-American as possible. The uprising spread to Yemen, where Ali Abdullah Saleh is fighting back, and to Bahrain, where Saudi forces were sent in after Al Khalifa faffed around and even considered giving this dialogue and democracy drivel a chance. It’s pretty clear Iran will feature on the Saudi agenda. Saudi-owned and influenced media has put the word out that Egypt is going too far in its shift towards What The People Want. Egypt sees itself more in the mould of Turkey when it comes to foreign policy – a country whose weight will derive from the fact that its policies on Israel and the Palestinians have some kind of connection with public opinion. [...]

I had the good fortune to receive a copy of a rare and arresting critique of Abdelrahman Munif’s classic Cities of Salt novels. It is by Elias Nasrallah, a London-based Palestinian writer, and just came out in Arabic last year under the title السعودية والتأريخ البديل: قراءة نقدية لخماسية عبد الرحمن منيف  (Saudi Arabia and the Fiction of Alternative History: A Critical Reading of Abdelrahman Munif’s Five-part Cycle). Munif’s cycle of five novels quickly came to be considered literary milestone for its pioneering, exhaustive and very direct depiction of the creation of the 20th century Arab petrodollar state. It was very clearly the history of Saudi Arabia with the names simply changed to maintain the fiction – Abdelaziz bin Saud is Khureibet, King Saud is Khaz’al, Faisal is Fanar, the kingdom is named the Hudeibi Sultanate, etc.. Critics of Arab nationalist, leftist and Islamist persuasion loved it for exposing the enigmatic and rather outrageous political entity that Saudi Arabia is and which all ideological trends in the Arab world love to hate. But Nasrallah is the first to hold up to real scrutiny Munif’s version of the famous rags-to-riches story of a nation ruled by a monopolistic dynasty and a school of fanatical Sunni religious scholars, protected and cradled by British imperialism before the baton was passed on to the Americans once the black stuff was found in monstrous quantities under the desert sand (of the Shi’ite zones in the east, no less). Since Munif is relating the history of Saudi Arabia, where does his story veer from the facts as known, where does he use literary licence and what purpose might it be intended to serve? [...]

The Washington Institute for Near East Policy wants to tell us that  ”U.S.-Saudi relations are in crisis” (http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/templateC06.php?CID=1612). We’ve heard this one many times before and quite frankly who’s buying it. The “conflict” over the U.S. administration’s rhetorical commitment to democracy and freedom to choose your ruler in the Middle East is miniscule in the larger scheme of agreement on shared interests. There was also “conflict” over the issue in 2003-4 when the Bush administration - oh so deluded - was pressing Arab governments on democratic reforms in the wake of its Iraq invasion. Saudi Arabia got votes for men to elect men to half the seats of ineffective municipal councils, which produced a victory for Islamist candidates that Riyadh held up to Western governments as an example of what happens if you let the natives out of the cage. In any case, this time round Obama’s government dragged its feel on backing the uprisings in both Tunisia and Egypt. It was the perservance of ordinary people facing the vicious security apparatus of arrogant rulers smug in the knowledge of Western support that eventually forced the U.S. government’s hand. And Bahrain? The Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey D. Feltman was in Manama the week that Saudi Arabia forced Al Khalifa to quit kidding around with this pro-democracy lark and give these Shia riffraff what they deserve. “Washington is upset about the king’s alleged offer to bail out Egypt if Hosni Mubarak had decided to cling to power,” WINEP tells us. More like a lovers’ tiff, nothing more.
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