Customer Reviews

Saudi Arabia Exposed : Inside a Kingdom in Crisis, Updated Edition

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought this from amazon after I saw Bradley on Fox & Friends on Sunday 12 June. He was the most articulate speaker on Saudi Arabia I have seen on the networks. Crucially, he lived there for 2.5 years and speaks Arabic. He is also unusual in that his book combines very literary prose (he has edited and published critically acclaimed books on the great Anglo-American author Henry James) with political journalism and travel narrative. The result, Saudi Arabia Exposed, is far from the usual boring academic book you have to struggle through to get useful information. If you are a layperson who wants to know what makes the Saudis tick, what makes them seem to be our allies and our enemies at the same time, this is the book to buy.

This is according to most reports the best book on Saudi Arabia that has yet been written. It does not content itself with looking at the royal family, but attempts to take a look at the Saudi people in all their complexity. Surprisingly what Bradley finds is not the stereotypical picture had in the West of a wholly submissive and subservient people who are pleased to be ruled by the House of Saud. In fact what Bradley finds is a people eager for a degree of freedom and autonomy, one which is oppressed by the royal family 's corruption .
In an interview on FrontPage Com. in which he spoke about the book and the situation in Saudi Arabia Bradley said that what is needed now is a real effort to help democratic elements in Saudi Arabia come to the fore. He criticized the Bush Administration for caring only for oil supplies and short- term convenience, thus appeasing the Saudi ruling house, and not really being true to the Democratization of the Middle East program it itself has espoused.
As Bradley a veteran Arabic speaking journalist who traveled throughout the kingdom in his research on this book, sees it the Saudi people suffer from a regime corrupt as the former Soviet one, a regime in which privilege and power are held by one huge clan suppressing millions of people.
This work thus provides both a very detailed picture of the way people actually live in Saudi Arabia, and political prescriptions as to how to alleviate the situation of a disenfranchised and tyrannized majority.

This book by veteran Middle East journalist John R Bradley is worth the money for just the chapter on the Asir region and the ideological/regional/religious background of the Saudi hijackers on 9/11. Also excellent are the insights into the bizzare Bin Laden-Bush-Al-Saud entanglement, the hypocrisy and duplicity inside the state-controled media, and the exploration of how Saudi Arabia is an empire in the same way the Soviet Union was -- inhabited by people who are historically not Wahhabis and in fact remain (in the author's view) in many ways resistant to Wahhabism. Bradley doesn't appear to recognize the fact, but with its clear distinction between the tyrannical regime and the oppressed people, there is a strong message in theis book about how the Saudis might be natural allies of the West if it chose to overthrow the Al-Saud regime... Very highly recommended!

I bought this book after reading this review by the ever-reliable William Grimes in The New York Times, although it contains some errors uncharacteristic of his usually top-notch writing. For instance, he says Asir is in the southeast, whereas it is obvious once you start reading the book that it is in the southwest. But other than that it gives a good overview of what this fascinating book tries to achieve (at least judging on the first half of it, which is all I have so far read).

THE NEW YORK TIMES
August 17, 2005
A Glimpse of Forces Confronting Saudi Rule

By WILLIAM GRIMES
Western reporting on Saudi Arabia has been in attack mode ever since Sept. 11. Not since the Borgias has a ruling family received such bad press as the House of Saud, and the United States-Saudi connection is probably the one that Americans would most like to sever, if it could be done without raising gasoline prices.

In "Saudi Arabia Exposed," John R. Bradley, a British journalist who spent two and a half years as a newspaper editor and reporter in Saudi Arabia, will not make Americans feel any better about the Saudi royals, whom he calls "perhaps the most corrupt family the world has ever known." But he does provide a highly informed, temperate and understanding account of a country that, he maintains, is an enigma to other Arabs, and even to the Saudis themselves.

The book's accusatory tabloid title does not reflect its tone. "Inside Saudi Arabia" might have been better. Mr. Bradley, although based in Jedda, traveled far and wide throughout the country in an effort to map the regional tensions and cultural distinctions that make Saudi Arabia much more diverse and complicated than the smooth propaganda of its government would allow.

The House of Saud and the religious establishment, fired by the puritanical form of Islam known as Wahhabism , hold sway in the central region, al-Najd; elsewhere rifts and tensions abound. Mr. Bradley's heart is in the Hijaz, and the lingering cosmopolitanism of Jeddah, whose great merchant families tend to take a much more worldly view of politics and religion, including (with one notable exception) the bin Ladens. When the Saudi religious police objected to the use of a plus sign instead of an ampersand in a company's name because it resembled a Christian cross, a writer for the region's main newspaper, Al-Medina, suggested that perhaps the symbol should be replaced with a "tasteful Islamic crescent" in the country's math books.

In the 1920's and 1930's, Ibn Saud created a unified state from the disparate tribes of present-day Saudi Arabia by force, imposing a brand of Islam that, in many areas of the country, is regarded as alien. In Asir, on the border with Yemen in southeastern Saudi Arabia, Wahabbism has been accepted only reluctantly. Mr. Bradley sees women driving pick-up trucks, and in the remote hills he encounters a strange sect known as the flower men, who wear garlands of flowers and herbs and douse themselves in perfume.

In the southwest, Shiites, who constitute a majority, chafe under religious oppression and an official policy intended to convert them to Wahabbism. One official put the matter starkly: "We don't eat their food, we don't intermarry with them, we should not pray for their dead or allow them to be buried in our cemeteries." In April 2000, armed Shiites in Najran rose up against Saudi security forces, and their co-religionists in the Eastern Province, site of huge oil reserves, are also restive.

Saudi Arabia's young people make up another worrying constituency. Mr. Bradley strolls the malls and sits in secluded bedrooms with many disaffected Saudis. Those who travel to the West seem to bring back little more than a degree and a pile of consumer goods. Those who do not travel sit and fester. Waited on hand and foot, they watch satellite television or, using illegal computer cards to bypass the censors, log on to X-rated chat rooms on the Internet. Parents, Mr. Bradley writes, have delegated traditional responsibilities to a despised class of mostly Asian drivers, servants and nannies. As never before, young Saudis have been left to their own devices and easily fall prey to jihadist recruiters.

It comes as a shock to find that Saudi Arabia has something like a gay scene and a nascent feminist movement. In severely repressing all forms of interaction between men and women, the country leaves a large social space open to men, who are free to pursue relations with one another. "I don't feel oppressed at all," one gay man tells the author. "We have more freedom here than straight couples. After all, they can't kiss in public like we can, or stroll down the street holding one another's hands."

Half inch by half inch, the government has been opening the professions to women, who can now obtain commercial licenses and who now account for more than half of the kingdom's university graduates. Since liberal arguments have failed to move the clerical establishment, a new wave of Saudi women have turned to Islam, and Muhammad's earliest teachings, to develop legal ideas that are, so to speak, more fundamental than Wahabbi fundamentalism.

Mr. Bradley tends to leap at the merest glimmer of light. His liberals and reformers, however attractive, hold very weak cards, and the regime has shown itself extraordinarily resistant to change. But modern communications, and the government's grudging baby steps toward democratic reform, he argues, may be the first cracks that, spreading inexorably, could bring down the House of Saud.

Saudis and their tribal leaders have been changed by the oil money that bought their loyalty in the 1970's. Expectations have risen, as well as disillusionment that so few benefited from oil revenues. The war in Iraq, Mr. Bradley argues, "will come back to haunt the Al-Saud." Already, home-grown terrorists have adopted the insurgent tactics being used in Iraq, and battle-hardened Saudi volunteers will eventually return home. Prince Turki bin Khalid, a member of the ruling family, recently bought two apartments in the Time-Warner Center on Columbus Circle in Manhattan for a reported $8.1 million. One is for friends; the other he plans to keep empty. Mr. Bradley has a strong suspicion that he may need it.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

I liked this book a lot, but didn't like the ending which is why I'm giving it four stars instead of five. The author gives four different scenarios of what will happen in Saudi Arabia. It's very well done, and he obviously knows the Kingdom better than most outside observers, but he totally rejects outside interference of the military kind like what happened in Iraq and follows the likes of Tom Freidman (though he doesn't name him) in arguing that the cash spent on bombs would be better spent on cultural centers etc. I take his point about trying to change hearts and minds in a quietly suberversive way, but that will take generations. In the meantime, the Wahhabis, as John R Bradley admits, are a far more powerful force, and they have real control over the minds of the youth. Bradley writes fantastically well, and this is a humane book that challenges all the misconceptions people in the West usually have about Saudi Arabia. I can iamgine it will become the standard book on the subject, at least from the point of view of someone who has been there. But I wanted a more forceful ending...

I agree with the first reviewer: Who needs another hatchet job on Saudi Arabia when we already have Baer, Gold, Aburish et al, none of whom have ever been to Saudi Arabia? They're useful in their own way, but there's no substitute for an Arabic-speaking journalist who has spent years inside the place.

I've never been to Saudi Arabia, either, but it's always in the news, and when king Fahd dies it will be all over the news 24/7. So I thought I'd read this with the hope that I could better understand what's going on there.

It didn't disappoint. In fact, when I'd finished it I couldn't believe it covered such a broad canvas -- from slums to royalty, from cities to the outer regions. There's a trip to Asir, where most of the hijackers came from, and where the author encounters "flower men" in the mountains. And a really fascinating trip to the northern frontier province of al-Jouf where there is a low-level rebellion taking place against the Al-Sudairy branch of the ruling family. He links all of this to a recurring theme of loyalty bought and loyalty earned: how because the loyalty the Al-Saud have from their subjects is "bought" it can never be relied on, and they will turn away from their princely masters as soon as the time is right...

SAUDI ARABIA EXPOSED is written so beautifully and unpretentiously that you just keep turning the pages, mesmerised by a cinema-like series of stark images...

John R. Bradley doesn't say it in exactly these terms, but his argument seems to be: everyone who says the Al-Saud are the buffer between the West and the extremists have got it wrong. It is the Al-Saud who USE the extemists to oppress the Saudi people, who historically are not Wahhabis and mostly hate the royal family. So the Al-Saud are the extremists, and opposing them will empower the anti-Wahhabi forces.

Sound revolutionary? Well, this book may leave you with a lot of sympathy for the Saudi masses, who Bradley says want to throw off the Wahhabi ideology in the same way those in Eastern Europe wanted to throw off Communism.

By avoiding the usual cliches about the kingdom being a "kernal of evil" and all the rest of it, Bradley -- by encountering the reality first-hand over a number of years -- has been fantastically subversive: this is the book the Al-Saud will not want you to read because it demystifies the kingdom and shows that there is near-universal resistance to their rule by people who also oppose the rigidity of Wahhabism.

If it is read as widely as it should be, SAUDI ARABIA EXPOSED will change the way people in the West think about the kingdom.

A truly remarkable, groundbreaking book...

I came across this useful review when looking for more information on this book:

Library Journal
Bradley worked in Saudi Arabia for two and a half years as a reporter for Arab News. His visa and residency permit, plus fluency in Arabic, allowed him to travel more freely in the kingdom than is common for Westerners and to get candid opinions from citizens at many levels of society. Here he depicts a country in which allegiance to the central authority is in strong conflict with other, more traditional allegiances, such as to tribe or region. Differences among groups within Islam are especially sharp in this country, and recent oil wealth and development imposed from the top down have created additional divisions. Bored, unemployed youth are exposed to Western cultural influences via satellite television and the web but are told in the mosque that this influence is decadent and corrupt. The crisis of the title, then, is the need to navigate the shoals of conflicting demands; the solution will need to come from within. Carmen bin Laden's recent Inside the Kingdom dealt with life for the upper classes; this covers lower classes and immigrant labor as well. Recommended as popular background reading on a country much in the news.-Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., New York Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

The reviewer who wrote that this is a "disappointing must-read" sounds like a Brit-hater from the US (which is odd since Bradley writes almost all his articles in the US, and this US edition of Saudi Arabia Exposed is the only one available as far as I can work out).

In any case, the other reviewer gets this book completely wrong. Maybe he is planning to write a book of his own, and is jealous because John R. Bradley got there first? He sounds like he is promoting his own ideas, which it turn sound like those put forward by apologists for the Saudi regime (former Western diplomats on the pay roll etc).

Of course, as with any book, it is possible to find a list of what it does not deal with. The question is: does it deal successfully with the topics it does highlight?

In The Nation, veteran New Yorker writer Milton Viorst -- who has covered the Middle East for three decades, including Saudi Arabia -- says that Bradley "uses a graceful journalist's pen to write with scholarly authority" and "shows a sensitivity rare for a Westerner, reaching directly to the society's core."

I couldn't have put it better myself.

For decades, the real face of Saudi Arabia has been shrouded in opaque. First, by the country's remoteness, then by its myriad of restrictions on personal freedoms to both its citizens and foreigners, and lastly by the royal family, who has invested millions of dollars in a public relations campaign aimed at obscuring unflattering information altogether, or in constructing a disjointed hagiography.

For many who have lived in the Middle East, or closely followed events there, genuine insight and hard information about what life is like in the Kingdom has come only from placing a string of anecdotes by visitors.

In "Saudi Arabia Exposed," John R. Bradley has written, perhaps, the best current book on the Kingdom, revealing an unflattering portrait of a dysfunctional society coming apart at the seams. He does from a peculiar vantage point, as an editor of the English language "Arab News," where he lived and worked INSIDE the Kingdom for three years.

An Oxford-educated, Arabic-speaker, Bradley was able to come into direct contact with a society that few Westerners no much about.

Bradley does so with a journalists writing style, giving a primer to readers about the creation of the Kingdom, the state ideology of Wahhabism, and how its impacts are felt inside the kingdom by its subjects. He does so effectively, often graphically, painting a picture with vivid colors and textures.

The Saudis have spent millions of dollars paying authors to write laudatory books that have little meaning, other than to somehow sanitize the image of the kingdom and the royal family. Bradley's book, however, is a powerful and believable antidote to the Saudi's pr campaign. This is one of a handful of books that THE ROYAL FAMILY DOES NOT WANT YOU TO READ!!!

If you want to learn how the average Saudi lives, the lives of foreigners, and how crime, drug abuse and high-level government corruption all play out in everyday life, then Bradley's book is a must-read.

And, for that reason alone, Bradley's work should be on the reading list of anyone interested about the current affairs of the Middle East and an uncertain future for the region, upon which Saudi Arabia's fate will play a significant role.

As an old Middle East hand, I can say that "Saudi Arabia Exposed" is one of the four best books I've read on the region in the past 10 years.

(PRWEB) September 12, 2005 -- A controversial new book by widely published Middle East correspondent John R. Bradley, "Saudi Arabia Exposed: Inside a Kingdom in Crisis," is being hailed by critics as "the best book on the country in decades," according to a prominent Knight Ridder columnist.

Bill Tammeus also personally recommends the title in his latest syndicated column.

"Saudi Arabia Exposed" has already been praised by The New York Times as "highly insightful," by Newsweek as "remarkable," and by the Los Angeles Times as contributing "significantly to the debate" because of Mr. Bradley's "unique vantage."

Library Journal wrote in its review of "Saudi Arabia Exposed" that the book is "recommended as popular background reading on a country much in the news."

And Booklist added: "For readers interested in the social forces at work in the country, including terrorism, Bradley provides perceptive access to current trends."

The book was withdrawn from UK publication by the publisher at the last minute, according to the Newsweek review, which cited the UK's harsh libel laws as the reason. Newsweek also reported that the title was "anxiously received" by Saudi officials because it comes at such a "key moment" in the kingdom's short history.

According to the publisher, Palgrave Macmillan, "Saudi Arabia Exposed" is already in its 4th printing.

Extraordinary Insights

Mr. Bradley, an Oxford-educated, 35-year-old British author and journalist, who is about to embark on the second leg of a major author tour in the United States, was the only permanently-based, fully accredited Arabic-speaking Western journalist in Saudi Arabia for 2.5 years, from three months before 9/11.

A former editor of the Jeddah-based Arab News, he was uniquely able to travel throughout all of the kingdom's regions -- crucially without a government minder.

From the heart of urban centers to Saudi Arabia's most remote mountainous terrain, from the royalty to the destitute who inhabit the kingdom's slums, Mr. Bradley introduces readers to fascinating people and places and unveils the workings of this mysterious society.

He provides intimate details of underlying regional, religious, and tribal rivalries, and highlights the tensions generated by social change.

Also revealed is the restlessness of Saudi youth torn between the security of tradition and the appeal of the West, and the predicament of Saudi women seeking opportunities but facing constraints.

In the latest issue of The Nation, long-time New Yorker writer Milton Viorst writes that in "Saudi Arabia Exposed" Mr. Bradley "uses a graceful journalist's pen to write with scholarly authority" and "shows a sensitivity rare for a Westerner, reaching directly to the society's core."