Page 220 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Sorcerers' Apprentices 2iy

ikhwan had been proscribed in Egypt during Nasser’s presidency. From Saudi
Arabia a number of them later drifted, with Saudi blessing, to the Gulf
shaikhdoms, where they were accorded an uneasy welcome by most of the
rulers. Recently their influence and activities have increased considerably,
under the pressure of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the example of Muslim
obduracy set by the late Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz. They have also been helped by
the fact that the doctrines they preach are calculated to appeal to the fears and
prejudices of the recipients, especially in the general atmosphere of suspicion
which hangs over the Gulf.
To the local governments this arousal of Muslim feeling is a mixed blessing:
on the one hand it compels them to tolerate a certain degree of interference in
the administration of their shaikhdoms by Muslim vigilantes; on the other
hand, it is useful to them in countering the propaganda of Marxist groups like
the PFLO by branding them irreligionists and even atheists. The charge has
been applied with particular force to the National Front in South Yemen,
which is regarded as being virtually beyond the pale of Islam. Yet for all the
anathematizing of Arab revolutionary movements by Muslim conservatives, it
is extremely doubtful whether these movements are au fond anti-Islamic or
irreligious. Marxist dogma sits very lightly and uncomfortably upon the few
semi-educated peninsular Arabs who have ostensibly adopted it. Their
thoughts and their lives are still shaped by Islam, they themselves are still
fundamentally Muslim. Nor could it be otherwise, since, as we have had
occasion to observe already, Islam is the only real source of moral and intellec­
tual guidance available to the Arabs of the peninsula. The present evidence of
Islamic revivalism, therefore, may be a more significant indication of the drift
of events in the Gulf than sporadic troublemaking by self-styled Marxist
revolutionaries.
Most of the Gulfs inhabitants obtain their view of the world around them
from radio, television and the cinema. What they hear and see through these
media is almost exclusively Arab and Muslim in content as well as context, and
what is not Arab or Muslim in origin is transformed and presented to them in
Arab or Muslim terms. Thus it appears to them - and increasingly so since the
oil embargo of 1973 - that the political map of the world is constructed upon an
Arab projection, that the Arab lands are at the very centre of the globe, and that
the affairs of the Arabs are of supreme moment to mankind. The self-esteem
that this impression engenders in them has been inflated even further in the
past few years by the regular arrival on their doorsteps of the world’s states­
men, financiers and industrialists, come to pay them court; by the attention
and flattery they receive when they travel abroad; and by the appearance in
their midst of thousands upon thousands of ‘white coolies’, sent to serve their
every need and indulge their every whim. Before the 1960s the Arabs of the
Trucial Coast had encountered few Europeans, and these were mainly British
political, military or naval officers, oil company men, bankers and the rep­