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‘Araby the Blest’ 271

deni state in the Hijaz.) Hundreds of people were arrested, though few were
brought to trial before the first half of 1973, by which time several of the
ringleaders had been tortured to death in prison, while others reputedly had
been disposed of by being tossed out of aircraft high over the Rub ai-Khali with
the macabre valedictory injunction to walk home. Report has it that 135
officers and men in the army and air force were sentenced to death, and 305 to
life imprisonment. Another 752 officers, soldiers and civilians received sen­
tences ranging from ten to fifteen years’ imprisonment. Others again were
released, with or without a trial, including, so it is said, the dean of the
technical college at Dhahran.
Apart from the occasional defection of a Saudi air force pilot with his
aircraft, there was little evidence of political unrest in the Saudi armed forces in
the next few years. It may be that the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, though Saudi
Arabia played only a minute military part in it, had a sobering influence for a
time. However, in the summer of 1977 reports began filtering through to the
outside world of the unmasking of another conspiracy, apparently centred
upon the military base and airfield at Tabuq. It was said to involve air force
officers and men at Tabuq and Dhahran, and army units at Taif, near Mecca.
Trouble was also reported to have occurred at the military base and airfield at
Hail. What substance there may be in these reports, and in others alleging
Libyan and Iraqi involvement in the conspiracy and its suppression with the
aid of Egyptian and Jordanian military intelligence, as well as Jordanian
troops, it is impossible to say. On the face of it, and in the light of recent
history, the Saudi armed forces would appear to be the natural spearhead of an
uprising in Saudi Arabia. Yet the incidence of military coups in other Arab
countries is not necessarily an infallible guide to the likely course of future
events in Arabia. There is, moreover, a counterbalance to the regular armed
forces in the National Guard, the para-military organization of armed tribes­
men who number, according to different reports, 25-30,000 men, or about
half the strength of the regular army and air force combined. This ‘white army’

(so called from the white turbans its members affect, after the style of the old
ikhwan) is drawn from the townsmen and Bedouin of Najd. Its members also
call themselves mujahidun, and the force still has something of the spirit of a
religious brotherhood about it. It is commanded by Abdullah ibn Abdul Aziz,
the second deputy prime minister, and its loyalty to the ruling house is said to
be intense. A mark of its reputed reliability is that it, and not the regular army,
has been entrusted with the protection of the oilfields in Hasa province.
If there is any restlessness in the Saudi armed forces, it could just as well
proceed from suspicion about the manipulation of the Saudi defence budget for
non-military purposes as from the ambitions of any potential Nassers within
the officer corps. Early in 1978 the defence estimates for 1977-8 were revised
upwards from 26,690 million riyals ($7,53° million) to 32,000 million riyals
(about $9,050 million). Why this revision was considered necessary was never