Page 438 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The ‘Sting, 435

Eastern regimes with which they are treating and of the corrupting effects
which Arab and Persian oil money is having in Western society. This being so,
their indifference to what is happening - one might almost say their encour­
agement of it - is presumably occasioned by fear and greed: fear of offending
the Arabs and Persians lest they reduce oil supplies or raise oil prices; greed for
the expenditure and investment of their oil revenues in the ailing economies of

the West. How else is one to account for the obsequious contortions perf ormed
by British, French or American politicians and officials to ingratiate them­
selves with the rulers of the Gulf states and, until his fall, the shah? How else to
interpret the insensibility of the British and French governments to the feel­
ings of the citizens of London and Paris as they watch the more select parts of

their cities being turned into Middle-Eastern caravanserais, bazaars and bag­
nios? Or are forced to witness assassinations and gun-battles in their streets
between warring Arab factions, whose presence in their capitals, along with the
arms and money with which they are amply furnished, has largely been made
possible by the excessive oil revenues paid to the Arab oil states?
The lure of Arab and Persian oil money has also exerted its attraction outside

Western financial and political circles. Its influence is discernible in publishing
and journalism, in the professions, in the universities and learned societies,
most of it unnoticed and unrealized by the Western public at large. Through­
out the past decade, as we have seen, newspapers like The Times, the Financial
Times and Le Monde have shown themselves increasingly ready to cater to the

desire of Saudi Arabia and the petty states of the Gulf for self-esteem and
self-advertisement by publishing a seemingly endless stream of supplements
about the vigour, wisdom and capacity of the governments of these countries,
the charm and talents of their peoples, the giant strides they are making
towards the millennium, and the gratifyingly large sums of money they are
spending in the process upon Western goods and services. The content of the

articles which appear in these supplements, hemmed in by acres of advertising,
is, as indicated in an earlier chapter, best passed over in silence. A reminder of
what it is like, however, may not be out of place here.
A special supplement on King Abdul Aziz University, Jiddah, put out by the
Times Higher Educational Supplement in October, 1977, had this to say about

the aims of this new seat of learning. ‘The main campus of King Abdul Aziz
University one day . . . will house one of the most prestigious centres of
learning in the Middle East - and, it is hoped, the world. Named after the
charismatic monarch who earlier this century welded the ancient warring
tribes of Arabia into today’s modern nation state, ... its expansion is really
taking off.’ Airborne himself on a flight of rhetoric, The Times's correspondent

goes on to enthuse over ‘the Master Plan’ to spend £3,000 million on buildings
and equipment, the recruitment of a distinguished academic staff (‘in large
num ers from Europe and North America: salaries are high and this is
re ected in the quality of applicants’) and the high standards of scholarship