Page 261 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

2$8 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

in general. Naturally, little prominence was accorded in ARAMCO’s pub­
licity to the fanatical nature of Wahhabism, or to its dark and bloody
excesses. To imbue its message with more widespread appeal, ARAMCO
also propounded the notion that some kind of natural affinity existed between
Americans and Saudi Arabs, an affinity which transcended the mutuality of
economic interests represented by the harnessing of American technical
expertise and commercial dynamism to Saudi Arabia’s natural resources.
The Saudi Arab, it appears, was also a great lover of liberty, one of nature’s
democrats, so that it was hardly surprising that he should feel a sense of
kinship with Americans, and Americans with him. The irony implicit in this
inventive attempt to create the fiction of a community of outlook and a
spontaneous camaraderie between the citizens of the world’s most advanced
democracy and the subjects of one of its most unenlightened despotisms

never seemed to dawn upon the industrious fabulists of Dhahran.
Over the years, beginning in the mid-t930s, ARAMCO had developed a
close relationship with Harry St John Bridger Philby, the British Arabophile,
explorer, entrepreneur, Wahhabi convert, historian and confidant of Ibn
Saud. The two parties had many things in common, not the least being an
abiding admiration for the house of Saud and an equally abiding hostility to
Great Britain, which in Philby’s case ran bone-deep. He used his influence
with Ibn Saud before, during and after the Second World War to try to injure
Britain’s interests in Arabia and the Middle East, sailing on occasion fairly
close to the wind of treason, although he never carried his hatred of his own
country to the savage lengths that his son Kim was to go. Whatever his
achievements as an explorer, and these were of an undeniably high order,
Philby was a man of highly unpleasant character - mercenary, arrogant,
irascible and untrustworthy. Though he had been an agnostic, perhaps even an
atheist, since his schooldays, and was in old age to profess materialist beliefs,

he became a Muslim so as to improve his standing with Ibn Saud and to further
his own private objects. He was an admirer of Hitler, yet also a vociferous
pacifist - although his pacifism did not embrace Ibn Saud’s conquests or inhibit
him from trafficking in arms himself. In later life he became an avowed if
muddled communist, given to uncritical commendation of the beneficent
influence exercised by the Soviet Union in the world, while reviling Britain for
all the wrongs she had supposedly done the Arabs since the First World War.
That ARAMCO should have seen fit to cultivate the intimate acquaintance of
such a man places its own corporate character in an interesting light.
Since the publication of his first book, The Heart of Arabia, in 1922 Philby
had constituted himself the court historian of the Al Saud, as well as the
dynasty’s principal apologist in the English-speaking world. His preoccu­
pations and those of ARAMCO therefore meshed with one another very
conveniently. From Philby ARAMCO initially learned a great deal about
Arabia, past and present, while Philby in turn was able to profit in later years