Page 216 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers’ Apprentices 213

itself generates wealth by the production of goods. The frenzy is the frenzy of

consumption, not of creation, the indiscriminate acquisition of the products of
more advanced economies in the form of goods, skills and ideas, few of which
are being put to use to lay the foundations of genuine economic progress.
To exorcize the demons of doubt and confusion that their hectic expenditure
of oil revenues has brought in its train, the governments of these states have

resorted to the hocus-pocus of statistics. They have, to give credibility to their
claims to rule over polities worthy of international recognition as independent
states, put out inflated figures for the size of their populations; and then,
alarmed by the proportion of resident foreigners that these reveal, they have
subsequently doctored the figures to show a higher percentage of native-born
inhabitants than actually exists. To fend off the envious or the censorious

among their fellow Arab governments (and those of the Afro-Asian world at
large), they have made a great brouhaha about the sums they have donated
as charity to needy lands or worthy causes; only to hurriedly amend their
exaggerated estimates as they found the ragtag and bobtail of Asia and Africa
beating a path to their doors, begging bowls outstretched. Ostentation and

secretiveness, which reside uneasily together in the breast of the peninsular
Arab, have combined to invest the statistical information issuing from the Gulf
governments with a strong element of mendacity. Few if any of the figures
quoted in this present chapter for populations, incomes or expenditures in the
Gulf states can be regarded as reliable, since they are taken in the main from the
pronouncements of the governments of these states or their fuglemen in the
Western press. Finding refuge or solace in statistics, falsified or otherwise, is

not, however, a weakness to which the Gulf Arabs alone are prone. As the
well-known French Orientalist, Jacques Berque, has pointed out, it has been a
common response among Arab governments throughout the Middle East to
the unsettling effects produced by Western influences. ‘Statistics’, according
to Berque, ‘are the orison of the contemporary world . . . [The] passion for

enumeration ... gives the Arabs an intoxicating sense of modernity.’ Hence
the industrious compilation of all manner of figures (whether accurate or not)
on population, trade, expenditure, transport, education and so forth. ‘The
Arab countries expect these figures [writes Berque] to supply direction and
compensation, as well as expression, for the outburst of feeling, the expansive
surge of heart and speech that is now agitating them.’ Statistics, in other words,
a ford the Arabs both emotional and intellectual satisfaction. Or, as Berque

puts it, We can trace a tendency to the old casuistic cult of abstractions in this
passion for numbers, in so far as it is justified neither by the requirements of its
su ject matter nor the reliability of its information.’*
The constant invocation of statistics, however, has not served to lessen the
ears, discontents and uncertainties which oppress one section or another of the

populations of the Gulf states. Rulers and their families and close retainers fear
The Arabs: Their History and Future, London, 1965, pp. 77-9.