Page 253 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

250 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

dozens of hospitals are to be built, to a total of 11,400 beds; the number of

medical clinics is to be doubled to over 452; and the ratio of doctors is to be
increased to one to every 357 inhabitants, double the figure for Great Britain.
How much of this has been achieved is uncertain. Few Saudi Arabian doctors
have as yet been trained, and nearly all of them have been absorbed into the
bureaucracy. Most of the doctors in the country, perhaps some 2,500 in
number, are foreigners, and the highest proportion of these arc Egyptians. The
King Faisal Memorial Hospital lately built at Riyad, the costliest and most
lavishly furnished hospital of its size in the world, is operated by foreigners and
serves only a privileged segment of Saudi Arabian society. How many less
opulent hospitals and clinics have been built, and what improvements there
have been in medical care for the mass of the population, remains a mystery.
Saudi Arabia not only refuses to open its doors very widely to Western
newspaper correspondents, but it keeps them firmly shut against independent
scholars and travellers - against all, in fact, who do not come to trade or sell
their skills. What little news seeps out of the country concerns events in Riyad
or Jiddah, Dhahran or Dammam. Nothing is heard of life in Buraida or
Anaiza, Shaqra or Russ or elsewhere in the Qasim; nothing of Hail and Jabal
Shammar, of Jabrin and the Dahana; nothing of A.sir in the south or the Wadi
Sirhan in the north; little even of Mecca and Madina. It is as if a shroud of
silence lies over the greater part of the country. Only at the edges, on the Gulf
coast and at Jiddah, is there to be heard a slight sound - the faint and fitful
chatter of typewriters as visiting journalists dutifully transcribe what the
spokesmen of the Saudi government have seen fit to tell them.
The ambivalence manifest in the Saudi regime’s attitude to secular educa­
tion is shared by the recipients of this education. Like other Arabs and
Muslims - indeed, like most Asiatic peoples, whatever their religion - the
Saudi Arab is convinced of the superiority of his own culture over that of the
West and of the industrial world in general. He believes that he can acquire and

use whatever the West has to offer in the way of material goods and technologi­
cal methods, and at the same time reject the culture which produced them. It
is, quite literally, incomprehensible to him that the products and skills of the
West are inseparable, in their genesis and development, from the West’s
empirical and scientific traditions; from its historical experience, its modes of
thought, its ethical values; from the Graeco-Roman and Christian-Judaic
origins of its civilization; from its philosophical principles and systems, Socra­
tic, Cartesian, Kantian or Hegelian - from everything, in fact, that has gone to
shape the Western mind and the way in which it regards the universe and man’s
place in it. The result is that in Saudi Arabia today, in a society which before
the second half of this century had been acquainted with only the most
rudimentary mechanical aids to labour, the educated and semi-educated mem­
bers of the population take it for granted that the most advanced technology in
the history of mankind is at their disposal for the mere asking - to serve their