Inside the Kingdom

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Authors: Robert Lacey

Tags: #History, #Modern, #20th Century, #World, #Political Science, #General

BOOK: Inside the Kingdom
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Table of Contents
 
 
 
 
ALSO BY ROBERT LACEY
Robert, Earl of Essex
Henry VIII
The Queens of the North Atlantic
Sir Walter Ralegh
Majesty
The Kingdom
Princess
Aristocrats
Ford
God Bless Her!
Little Man
Grace
Sotheby’s
The Year 1000
The Queen Mother’s Century
Monarch: The Life and Reign of Queen Elizabeth II
Great Tales from English History: Cheddar Man to the Peasants’ Revolt
Great Tales from English History: Chaucer to the Glorious Revolution
Great Tales from English History: The Battle of the Boyne to DNA
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
 
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
 
First published in 2009 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
 
 
Copyright © Robert Lacey, 2009
All rights reserved
 
Photograph credits appear on page 403.
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Lacey, Robert.
Inside the Kingdom : kings, clerics, modernists, terrorists, and the struggle for Saudi Arabia / Robert Lacey.
p. cm.
Sequel to: The Kingdom. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, c1981.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14073-4
1. Saudi Arabia—History—1932- 2. Saudi Arabia—Politics and government—1982- 3. Saudi Arabia—Social
conditions. 4. Saudi Arabia—Description and travel. 5. Lacey, Robert—Travel—Saudi Arabia. I. Lacey, Robert. The
Kingdom. II. Title.
DS244.63.L33 2009
953.805’3—dc22 2009008367
 
 
 
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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To Faiza, Fawzia, Ghada, Hala, Hatoon, Maha, Najat,
and all the mothers of Saudi Arabia
And to the memory of my own mother,
Vida Lacey (1913 -2008)
PREFACE
Welcome to the Kingdom
I
n theory Saudi Arabia should not exist—its survival defies the laws of logic and history. Look at its princely rulers, dressed in funny clothes, trusting in God rather than man, and running their oil-rich country on principles that most of the world has abandoned with relief. Shops are closed for prayer five times a day, executions take place in the street—and let us not even get started on the status of women. Saudi Arabia is one of the planet’s enduring—and, for some, quite offensive—enigmas: which is why, three decades ago, I went to live there for a bit.
It was 1979. I had just published
Majesty,
my biography of Elizabeth II, which recounted the paradoxical flourishing of an ancient monarchy in an increasingly populist world. Now I was in search of more paradox, and it was not hard to find in Riyadh. After many a morning sipping glasses of sweet tea in the office of the chief of protocol, I finally secured an audience with King Khaled, the shy and fragile old monarch who had become the Kingdom’s stopgap ruler following the assassination of his half brother Faisal in 1975. (The five Saudi monarchs who have ruled the Kingdom since 1953 have all been half brothers, with more than a dozen brothers and half brothers, not to mention their sons, still waiting in the wings—see the family tree on page xxiv.)
In the weeks of tea sipping I had given much thought to the important question of what I might
give
the king. What could I offer to the man who had—or could have—just about anything? I had decided on photographs. Before coming to the Kingdom, I had read the papers of the earliest British travelers to Arabia, intrepid servants of His Majesty’s imperial government who had trekked across the desert sands in the early decades of the twentieth century in their solar helmets and khaki puttees. A surprising number had loaded their camels with the heavy wood-and-brass cameras of the time, complete with fragile glass plates and portable darkrooms so they could develop and print their negatives in their tents.
I made up an album of these images, which were then comparatively unknown, wrote out long captions and had them translated into classical Arabic, and bore my gift into the royal presence. It was
majlis
day—
majlis
meaning “the place of sitting”—and the bedouin had come out of the desert to sit with their king. Inside the manicured palace grounds were dusty Toyota pickup trucks parked higgledy-piggledy on the marble among the burnished Rolls-Royces and BMWs of princes and ministers. The trucks did not have sheep or goats in the back at that moment, but from their smell it was clear they had recently contained some woolly passengers.

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