Page 272 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blest’ 269

governments are normally so fearful of jeopardizing the lucrative contracts
they or Western industrial and commercial companies have won from the
Saudi government that they will offer only token objections to the mistreat­
ment of their own nationals. For the Saudis there is undoubtedly a double
satisfaction to be gained from the infliction of humiliating punishments upon
Westerners; for not only are they an expression of the power and independence
of Saudi Arabia but they also demonstrate, as they are intended to demon­
strate, contempt for Christianity and the pre-eminence of Islam. The most
unfortunate victims of the merciless quality of the Saudi judicial system,
however, are not Westerners but those wretched Yemeni labourers who
happen to fall foul of the Saudi authorities.
The prescriptions of the Hanbali rite are not applied with the same rigour to
all aspects of Saudi life or to every class of society. The Koranic injunction
against usury, for instance, has been circumvented, notably in the case of Saudi

banks, by the redesignation of interest as bank charges or disbursements. This
happy expedient, duly enshrined in a fatwa, or legal ruling, from the Wahhabi
muftis, has proved even more felicitous of late, following a fiat from the Saudi
government compelling all foreign banks operating in the country to accept a
controlling Saudi shareholding. No legal restraints hinder the avid solicitation
by the Saudi commercial community, government officials and influence
pedlars alike of substantial bribes from foreign businessmen in return for
introductions, permits and contracts. So vast is the scale on which this organ­
ized corruption is practised that its beneficiaries are said to have accumulated
greater financial reserves (most of them held outside the country) than the
Saudi government itself. A similar judicious indulgence regulates the applica­
tion of the sterner ordinances of thesharia to the Al Saud and their intimates, to
the more prominent tribal and merchant families, and, more recently, to the
emergent educated and semi-educated classes.
The degree of immunity enjoyed by the last is the result of a conscious effort
on the part of the Al Saud to broaden the support for their rule — from that
traditionally provided by their own extensive ranks, by the religious estab­
lishment and by the shaikhs of the major tribes — by conciliating the new
technocrats and their numerous acolytes. These have been won over to the
maintenance of the status quo chiefly by the allocation to them of highly paid
posts in the bureaucracy, and by allowing them a certain latitude to indulge the
tastes that prosperity and Western influences have led them to cultivate. So far
as is known, these new allies of the regime are content with their lot. Though

they may lack some of the diversions available to their counterparts in the less
puritanical societies of the minor oil states of the Gulf, they show no conspicu­
ous tendency to compensate for the deprivation by taking an active interest in
politics - other than to engage in the usual rhetoric about Islam, Arabism,
imperialism and Zionism which is the standard fare of contemporary Arab
political discourse. Even here, however, they have to exercise caution in