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The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power

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AbuKhalil is a political science professor who writes the Angry Arab News Service. This book chronicles the history of Saudi Arabia and its ruling ideology, Wahabbi Islam, then continues as a stinging critique of the present day regime and the complete lack of human rights in the kingdom. He shows the complete moral bankruptcy of the kingdom, and its close relationship with the United States, who has consistently supported the House of Saud in its treatment of their own population, and as a proxy to further American interests in the Islamic world, often to the long term detriment to American interests. The stranglehold the royal family, especially the sons of the states founder, has on the country is essential to understanding the political dynamics within the country, and this is a focal point of AbuKhalil's critique. It is fascinating how inter-family politics plays such a powerful role in the county's political life. His only mistake seems to be that he believes the new King Abdullah (who was Crown Prince when the book was written), would not become king, since he is not a son of the first wife, unlike the so-called Sudayri Seven, the now deceased King Fahd and his six full brothers. However, these brothers still are the main power elites in the country, and they are getting really old. What happens when they're gone will truly be momentous for both Saudi Arabia and the world. A must read for those wanting a greater understanding of this very important country and close ally of the US, right now fighting what is close to be coming a civil war.

This book is probably the best introduction to Saudi Arabia I have read yet. Over a hundred years of history including the founding of the Saudi state is condensed into a scholarly, yet easy-to-read and always entertaining work. The House of Saud's alliance with the Wahhabist sect (the House of Shaykh) has allowed the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to exist today. Saudi Arabia is one of the most enigmatic and oppressive nations in the world today. This book is the perfect introduction for anyone interested in Saudi Arabia or the Middle East in general.

This book is a brilliant and concise analysis of the Kingdom. As one who has consulted to the Royal Family (King Fahd was investor in a major wheat and dairy project for which my firm served as Strategists--based in the World Trade Center, how ironic now--not only did the Min of Ag and Water have to lie about the CEO being a woman but for years the joint venture itself (Irish and Saudi) often denied and minimized our Pan-Gulf Strategy success, our financial structuring (one of largest IPOs in 20 yrs), my very existence. This book reveals--and I have read 30 texts including historical analyses that get lost in the minutia of tribal rivalry--how flawed the very thinking of the powerful Saud family is: except for Khalid the SAud Family is not religious, not very Islamic (gambling, London cruising/procuring of prostitutes, etc), and certainly never subsribers to Wahhabi fundamentalism themselves--has co-opted the religious powers for money such that the mullas export the fundatmentalist furry rather than focus on the family itself.
AbuKhalil's book is among the very best I had read on Saudi.

Other than the small form factor of the book this book has a multitude of information about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I personally agree strongly with the conclusions of the book and I'm convinced they are based in the strong reality that the Saudi economy is based solely on oil revenues.

I have lived in the kingdom for more than a year and fully comprehend the authors views and conclusions about what is transpiring there.

As Stephen Schwartz has said before, AbuKhalil, a representative of the American academic Left and a Lebanese-born academic who teaches at California State University/Stanislaus, attempts in this small volume to explain to his ideological constituency such matters as the history of Wahhabism, the relationship of the Saudi state to Al-Qaeda, the current crisis of the Saudi kingdom, and the resulting challenges to regional and global peace and order.

This commission could not have been a plum assignment. The oppression, corruption, and extremism of the Saudi monarchy are by now so notorious that to make the case that the United States and neoconservatives are prone to unjust interfering with the Riyadh rulers requires a real talent. It means detailing grotesque inhumanities but blaming them all on the United States and Israel, as well as on colonial rulers past and the fantastical specter of "Orientalism."

AbuKhalil does not disappoint. He derides Western authors (this one included), who have exposed the bloody past of Wahhabi Islam, as "Orientalists" (a flattering description, in my view). He recapitulates the Wahhabi historical time line but adds nothing to what is already known, except for occasional flings into the typical Western academic idiom, aimed at softening or explaining away Wahhabi extremism. Thus, the main Wahhabi-Saudi theologian in the second half of the twentieth century, Ibn Baz, "may not have been as principled in his hostility to Jews and Christians as his earlier edicts may have led us to believe." To identify the anti-Jewish and anti-Christian bigotry of Ibn Baz with a "principled" position might seem sycophantic but it fits the prevailing ethos on American campuses.

The author presents himself as the revealer of authentic Saudi reality, but his portrait of the country differs from that described by the most acute critics of the kingdom only in its ideological vocabulary. After enumerating the usual atrocities and undeniable instabilities, AbuKhalil has no solution to offer aside from condemning, yes, Washington neoconservatives for provoking "fanatical and radical forces" in Iraq, and thereby threatening the Saudi state.

The litany is tediously familiar: America was wrong to enable Saudi tyranny, just as it is wrong to try to end it. The Battle for Saudi Arabia is not of use to those hoping to learn about Saudi Arabia. Its only value is to provide insight into current leftist intellectual gymnastics.

This very small book is a quick, quite superficial overview of the Saudi royals -- material better covered in Murawiec's 'Princes of Darkness' and in Schwartz's 'Two faces of Islam' among other options. It is, for example, surprisingly generic and non-specific when alleging human rights violations,corruption, etc.

In addition, it is not particularly well written, or perhaps not well-edited -- occasionally one can get away with starting a sentence 'And...' but not constantly. Reads like a college term paper more than a professional work, at times.

I also have to say - having read more than a dozen books on aspects of the Middle East, I am still waiting for one author of Arab heritage to be anything other than virulently, belligerently anti-Israel. Jewish and Israeli authors seem to bend over backwards to give at least some small nod to the Arab, Muslim, or Palestinian point of view, even if they then try to discredit it. The shrill polemics of even educated, 'Westernized' Arabs inevitably casts doubt on their other observations. Although it is a very small note in this book, it was there in the usual strident neon.