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‘Araby the Blest* 247

away. With the gas-gathering project in jeopardy, the whole ambitious scheme
for the industrialization of Yanbu and Jubail fell under a cloud.
What these retrenchments signify at one level is that the Saudi government
has been forced to acknowledge the inescapable fact that the cost of construct­
ing anything in Saudi Arabia is three or four times what it would be in Europe
or North America, a consideration which of itself (without introducing the
question of future operating costs) throws doubt upon the ability of any Saudi
Arabian industrial enterprise to compete on economic terms with similar
enterprises abroad. The acknowledgement, however, has not been made with
good grace, nor have the Saudis been weaned from their attachment to tech­
nological ventures on a grand and impressive scale. Instead, the realization of
the financial risks inherent in such ventures, especially those of uneconomic
competition with similar enterprises in the industrial world and, in the case of
the petro-chemical industry, of saturating the market, has led the Saudi
government to try to minimize or spread the risks by putting pressure upon oil
companies and large foreign industrial firms operating in Saudi Arabia to
participate in these ventures. As a means of securing their compliance, the
Saudis have shadowed forth the threat of a possible interruption of oil supplies
at some time.
Saudi Arabia’s targets for the provision of educational and medical services
under the second five-year plan are as ambitious as those for the country’s

industrial development. According to the Saudi government’s own figures,
there were in 1970 some 370,000 pupils in primary schools, another 40-50,000
in secondary schools, and a few thousand more in the universities at Riyad and
Madina and the technical colleges at Dhahran and Jiddah, which were soon to
be elevated to the status of universities. By the time of the expiration of the first
five-year plan in 1975 (again according to the Saudi government) the number of
pupils in primary schools had risen to 615,900 (214,600 of them girls), in
secondary schools to 150,200 (45,800 of them girls), and in higher education to
11,900. Under the second five-year plan this total of 778,000 pupils is to be
almost doubled by 1980 - to 1,030,900 (including 353,400 girls) in primary
schools, 305,700 (including 103,900 girls) in secondary schools, and 31,200 in
higher education. If an interim report put out by the Saudi government in
January 7978 is to be believed, remarkable progress has already been achieved
in the implementation of the educational plan, to wit, 928,000 students in
primary and secondary schools, 23,000 in the country’s six universities (two at
Riyad and one each at Madina, Jiddah, Dhahran and Dammam), and another
20,000 at educational institutions abroad - all this from a population of perhaps
three and a half million souls.
The Saudi government is not alone in being impressed by its own
accomphshments. A special supplement on Saudi Arabia put out by the
International Herald Tribune in February 1978 carried an ecstatic description of
the marvels being performed by the University of Petroleum and Minerals at