Fouad Ajami - Crosswinds

Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia

Since 2014, we have all missed the combination of historical context and elegant prose with which Fouad Ajami helped us understand the complexities of the Middle East. Now we receive the gift of this previously unpublished encore that shows readers the way to think about the region and develop policies that clear a path toward a better future for its long-suffering peoples while advancing American interests.

H. R. M C M ASTER , Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World

Crosswinds is a unique combination of research, reportage, and commentary leavened with deep cultural insights of Saudi society. Like a good wine, Fouads wise writing has aged beautifully over the past decade.

K AREN E LLIOTT H OUSE , senior fellow, Belfer Center, Harvard University, and author of On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Linesand Future

About a decade ago, the late Fouad Ajami wrote the prescient anatomy of Saudi Arabia, now published for the first time. With his characteristic wit and sense of irony and paradox, Ajami offers a personal tour of a high-tech nation that relegates women to the Middle Ages, and a staunch ally of the United States that supplied the vast majority of the 9/11 terrorists. Superbly written, impeccably researched, and enlivened by Ajamis own wide travels in the Middle East and his encyclopedic knowledge of Arab history and literature, Crosswinds will become a mini-classic about one of the strangest societies in the world.

V ICTOR D AVIS H ANSON , Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University

With his graceful prose and nuanced insights, Fouad Ajami provides a magisterial account of the dramatic encounter between religious faith and state power in Saudi Arabia. From the early alliance between monarchy and Wahhabism, through the challenges of Islamist violence, to the cultural changes in the twenty-first centuryespecially the changing status of womenCrosswinds traces a narrative that testifies to the authors rich understanding of politics and intellectual history in the Kingdom and the wider Arab world as well.

R USSELL A. B ERMAN , Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities, Stanford University, and senior fellow, Hoover Institution

The Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledges the following individuals and foundations for their significant support of the

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

Herbert and Jane Dwight

Donald and Joan Beall

Beall Family Foundation

S. D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation

The Lynde & Harry Bradley Foundation

Nancy Doyle, MD

With its eminent scholars and world-renowned library and archives, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the human condition by advancing ideas that promote economic opportunity and prosperity, while securing and safeguarding peace for America and all mankind. The views expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of the Hoover Institution.

hoover.org

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 593

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University,

Stanford, California 94305-6003

Copyright 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher and copyright holders.

For permission to reuse material from Crosswinds: The Way of Saudi Arabia, ISBN 978-0-8179-1174-4, please access copyright.com or contact the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC), 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400. CCC is a not-for-profit organization that provides licenses and registration for a variety of uses.

First printing 2020

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Crosswinds : the way of Saudi Arabia / Fouad Ajami

p. cm. (Hoover Institution Press publication ; no. 593)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8179-1174-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8179-1176-8 (epub) ISBN 978-0-8179-1177-5 (mobi) ISBN 978-0-8179-1178-2 (pdf)

1. Saudi ArabiaPolitics and government19822. Political cultureSaudi ArabiaHistory20th century. 3. Political cultureSaudi ArabiaHistory21st century. 4. Saudi ArabiaForeign relations1982

I. Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. II. Title.

DS244.63.A37 2020

953.8053dc22

2010030942

For Megan Ring,

a partner and friend who made so much possible with heart and humor and intellect

F rom his philosophers study in a Baltic seaport, Immanuel Kant took on the intellectual problem of promoting peace in the world. This was the kind of thing Enlightenment thinkers did; Kants project would emerge as a structure for the modern international state system.

Kants logic chain began with the extreme places of the world. Arabia, as Fouad Ajamis masterwork Crosswinds never lets us forget, is the extrme de la extrme: in climate, topography, faith, and fanaticism. Ever since the swift, stunning rise of Islam, most intensively through the Victorian nineteenth and war-riven twentieth centuries, orientalist scholars and aesthetes, adventurous travelers in disguise on the hajj, sojourners, diplomats, journalists, and spies tried to grasp this phenomenon. Some were alarmed by what they found, others intrigued, many captivated by heart-beguiling Araby. In our time, as the stakes grew ever higher, a cadre of policy and security analysts urgently joined the search for clues to the riddle of the sands.

At last we have Fouad Ajami, a uniquely gifted figure in this cavalcade, a thinker and a writer of astounding insight and depth: Muslim, scholar, political philosopher, category-defying public intellectual, Americanjust the one Kant must have hoped would arrive to carry his logic chain forward.

Put most simply, Kant concluded that the cause of peace would most pragmatically be advanced through an international association of states with republican governance and the willingness to refrain from bringing their religious beliefs to the negotiating table of world affairs and to foster an open trading system that would benefit, and benefit from, those extreme regions of the world. Thus we see the immense significance of todays Saudi Arabia, whose statehood has been indispensable but profoundly troubled, whose religious faith has been internationally hyperactive, and whose world trade has been dominated by the curse of oil.

Ajami makes good use of his predecessors, the Victorian travelers Palgrave and Hogarth, but not until the final page does he mention Doughty, the best of them all.

Travels in Arabia Deserta, published in 1888 by Charles Montagu Doughty, gained a reputation as a monumental achievement of English prose. In it Doughty created an elevated, archaic style to convey the elaborately wild yet elegant culture of honor and blood of the Arab tribes. The book was, as its student T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote, the first and indispensable work upon the Arabs. Lawrence summed it up: The Arabs have no half-tones in their register of vision. They show no longing for great industry; their largest manufacture [is] of creeds. Their thoughts live easiest among extremes, the only refuge and rhythm of their being is in God. He is the commonest of their thoughts. The Arabs Doughty dwelt among were unselfconscious in their premodern authenticity, as yet undeparted from what twentieth-century philosophers would call their being.