Mordechai Abir - Saudi Arabia in the Oil Era (RLE Saudi Arabia)

Volume 5

Regime and Elites; Conflict and Collaboration

MORDECHAI ABIR

First published in 1988

This edition first published in 2015

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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1988 Mordechai Abir

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-138-82515-4 (Set)

ISBN: 978-1-138-84633-3 (Volume 5)

Publishers Note

The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original copies may be apparent.

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The publisher has made every effort to trace copyright holders and would welcome correspondence from those they have been unable to trace.

MORDECHAI ABIR

CROOM HELM

London and Sydney

1988 Mordechai Abir

Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House,

Burrell Row, Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT

Croom Helm Australia, 44-50 Waterloo Road,

North Ryde, 2113, New South Wales

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Abir, Mordechai

Saudi Arabia in the oil era: regime and

elites: conflict and collaboration.

1. Saudi Arabia Social conditions

I. Tide

953.805 HN663.A8

ISBN 0-7099-5129-9

Filmset by May hew Typesetting, Bristol, England

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Billing & Sons Limited, Worcester.

In Memory of Anat,
the Victim of her Fathers Academic Career

When I began a survey of source material for this book in the early 1980s, I was somewhat surprised by the paucity of sources relating to socio-political dynamics in modern Saudi Arabia both in European languages and Arabic. Thus, William Rughs article Emergence of a New Middle Class in Saudi Arabia (1973), for instance, remains a classic to this day. In the field of social anthropology I found only a handful of serious studies of the Saudi population produced by western and Arab scholars (Katakura, Lancaster, Cole, Shamekh, and Hamzahs outdated work). Other sources in Arabic largely dealt with the kingdoms geography and tribal division, past history to the twentieth century, the reign of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, and the rise of the Wahhabi movement and its impact on the Arabian Peninsula. The contribution of Saudi scholars of good standing to the subject was minimal, as the Saudi modern elites were beginning to emerge in the middle of the century and only lately have they begun to publish worthwhile scholarly studies of their society and government studies inhibited, unfortunately, by the character of the regime and its strict censorship laws.

It was not only that Saudi Arabia was a sparsely populated desert periphery of the Arab world, but travelling in the kingdom until the 1960s or early 1970s was technically difficult and the authorities, as well as the xenophobic Wahhabi-Saudis, were suspicious of foreigners (Hijaz is the exception) travelling in their country or researching its population. Indeed, with very few exceptions, foreigners were not permitted to conduct fieldwork in the rural areas (Lancasters and Coles experience) and until the 1970s were not supposed even to travel in the kingdom other than between its main towns and in the Eastern Province, where Aramco began to operate on a large scale after World War II (and became a major source of information on Saudi Arabia as well as of oil). The provincial governors (amirs) are,