Answer: Bloody Hands

The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the Saudi monarchy. Since 1937 is not a long time for an hereditary monarch, but I bet being installed as a despot was not an option. It seems to be a case, like the ancient German kings, of the aristocracy choosing a first among equals – which would suggest that the aristocracy is still really the governing class except to the extent co-opted by the monarchy.

I mentioned the Hashemite dynasty (post of April 20) not because I thought it was one of the better examples of revolution in the Arab world, but really only to make a contrast with that of the Saudis.

This family has not hesitated to draw one another’s blood, or usurp one another’s powers, in its relatively short time as a royal dynasty. The Saudi princes, and their British allies, also liquidated the Ikhwan (the camel-riding army that brought them into power) when it became necessary to the consolidation of that power – Hitler stole a page from their book on the Night of the Long Knives. Next it seems the emirs of those families who weren’t liquidated were suffered to have their sisters and daughters marry into the now royal family. The resulting monarchy, which incidentally claims descent from an 18^th century dynasty in the Hejaz without – at least in my opinion – gaining any prestige thereby, appears to be absolute, as no other political institutions have been permitted to exist, but really it governs like an aristocracy, a formulation rendered only somewhat less dangerous to the monarch by the circumstance that all the nobility are also of his family.

The Arab world displays a truly fascinating variety of despotisms!

Fact is, the middle classes have on frequent historical occasion proven to be surer supports of a monarch’s throne than the nobility. We’d like it to be the case that Saudi Arabia is stable, which for good or ill entails that the throne be secure. To all appearances this is the case: an accommodation has been reached with conservative Islam regarding religious “liberty,” demands for political and civil liberty are voiced, if at all, inaudibly. The monarchy can afford to buy as much economic “justice” as it deems necessary, and still keep the eighth part of the nation’s wealth and income for itself.

What’s happened to the voices, not of discontent, but of the people who by rights ought to be discontented? Clearly the observation that a modern economy requires professionals to run it applies in spades to the Saudi oil economy and the proliferation of sophisticated financial arrangements that spring from it. So there are petit bourgeois professional classes that ought to have, and express, petit bourgeois interests.

But they don’t. I think there might be two explanations, or rather, two sides of the same explanation: first, they’re co-opted in cash – petty cash to the monarchy; second, they’re bosses, or their bosses’ bosses, are princes of the blood. That is, this whole class of potential revolutionaries is directly under the eyes of the state. The middle class thus disappears into the aristocracy as its creatures and dependants, making bourgeois revolution – even bourgeois class consciousness – impossible.

This phenomenon is not unique in the Arab world to Saudi Arabia, and will bear further investigation, and discussion in another post.