The Saudi Enigma: A History [Paperback]

Pascal Ménoret (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1842776053 | ISBN-13: 978-1842776056 | Publication Date: July 14, 2005

Despite speculation about Saudi interests and loyalties that have been directed at the country since 9/11, Arabia remains the key US ally in the Arab Middle East. Ménoret debunks the facile notions about Saudi society, and focuses our attention on present political and economic realities that cannot be reduced to essentialist "tribalist" ideas. Ménoret illustrates the emerging autonomous--and Islamic--manifestations of Saudi national identity, fiercely reformist rather than medieval, complex and varied rather than merely a justification or support for the rule of the al-Saud royal family. Underlying this account is a sophisticated economic history of the Saudi state, from the eighteenth century to the present day, which details all the alliances and manoeuvres that have brought the country and its rulers to their current precarious position.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This carefully researched, analytical study of Saudi Arabia during the past century provides a much-needed examination of the country that provides Americans with much of its oil." --J.W. Walt, Choice

About the Author

Pascal Ménoret worked as a French civil servant with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and was attache to the French Embassy in Riyadh, beginning a few days after September 11, 2001.

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Zed Books (July 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1842776053
• ISBN-13: 978-1842776056
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #405,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #82 in Books > History > Middle East > Saudi Arabia

More About the Author

Pascal Menoret (born 1976 in Marseille) is a social anthropologist with a focus on the Arabian Peninsula. He is Assistant Professor of Arab Crossroads Studies at New York University Abu Dhabi. Menoret received his MA from the Institut des Langues et Cultures Orientales in Paris (2004) and his PhD from the Sorbonne-University of Paris-1 (2008). His dissertation was entitled "Racailles et Devots: La Politisation de la Jeunesse Saoudienne, 1965-2007". Before joining NYUAD, he was a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton's Institute for the Transregional Study of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia (2008-2010), and a Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2010-2011).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Counter to "Conventional Wisdom", March 1, 2006

By 

J. Burgess "jfb1138" (Sarasota, FL) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Saudi Enigma: A History (Paperback)

For anyone interested in Saudi Arabia from the inside, this is a good place to start. Pascal Menoret arrived in Saudi Arabia shortly before 9/11. A member of the French Embassy staff, he was assigned as a teacher of French language courses. This book results from his conversations with his students and families--as well as research. His interlocuters represent a wide cross section of Saudi society, not just the elite and "westernized".

His book shows the complexity of Saudi Arabian society as well as many seemingly paradoxical aspects of it. For instance, he sees (correctly, in my view) fundamentalist Islamism as a "counter culture," challenging the status quo. He identifies (again, correctly) the "women's liberation movement" in Saudi Arabia to be very much a home-grown matter, rejecting the terms of argument and labels projected on Saudi women by women in the West.

I think the book an important contribution to understanding Saudi Arabia. It's marred--to me--by a European point of view regarding the US. It barely misses an opportunity to slam US activities in and policies toward the region in a quasi-Marxist manner, i.e., "all bad."

The book is a bit annoying to read in that it's laced with deconstructionist cant and post-modern sensibilities, but that just makes it a bit harder to read, though no less interesting.

Do take a look at it. It goes a long way to disabuse the concept of Saudi Arabia as a state promoting terror, filled with slathering "Wahhabis" intent on a restoration of the 14th C.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An enigma like any other..., September 11, 2009

By 

John P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Saudi Enigma: A History (Paperback)

Pascal Ménoret is one of only a handful of academic "experts" on Saudi Arabia who has actually lived in the country for more than a few months. In the first chapter he raises a fundamental question that his book attempts to address: "Why are the frameworks used in the West for analysis of the Kingdom so remote from its social, economic and political reality?" Ménoret commences his book by quoting Egyptian writer Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid who set his novel in Tabuk, in the Arabian northwest, and says that the writer "...perceives minute differences and imperceptible nuances. Gradations and variations are everywhere..." and it is in the same spirit that Ménoret, eschewing "black and white, absolute good vs. absolute evil," attempts to address the actual social and political forces that have formed the modern country that is Saudi Arabia.

The author provides a fresh perspective on the Kingdom, making a number of relevant and at times novel points about the forces that created and govern the country. For example, he says that the "Saudis do not call themselves Wahhabbis"; rather they consider the term somewhat blasphemous, preferring "salafiyun." He stresses the point that the founding alliance of the Kingdom was between the Hijaz merchants and the Sauds. I think this is an overstatement, since he would never have reached those merchants if it was not for his Ikhwan warriors. He also asserts, and it is jarring for an American reader, that "Saudi Islamism should be seen not as an upsurge of obscurantism but as a revolt of reason." How can this possibly be? The author makes a reasonable case, as it were, to support this, mainly by saying that those who opposed the pell-mell "modernization" in the `80's, and the rejection of traditional values, did so by using the idiom of their religion, much like an American might have to frame arguments in terms of "market forces" when the underlying issues do not relate directly to either, but essentially involve values that we hold most dear. Another fascinating concept that he observed, unlike the "one week in country" journalists, is what he called the "eroticization" of the veil - a delightful section on page 179. The author developed an understanding of what is involved with Islamic feminism. The author's French, and by extension, European perspective is valuable for the American reader. Numerous references are cited, for example, quoting Montesquieu that "the natural effect of commerce is to spread peace." He also says that the Nedj is the Prussia of Arabia! The lack of an American perspective does produce deficiencies in analysis however, for example on p 140 where he discusses the defects of Saudi agricultural policies, particularly vis-à-vis water, and does not make a similar point about the madness of American agricultural policies, particularly in the West.

Regrettably the book often adopts stilted academic prose, which may, in part, be the fault of the translator. For example: "irenic political history" and "essentially involves a recovery of the heuristic power of Islamic concepts beneath the coating of accumulated tradition and political intervention." Whew! And by far, the most overworked word in the book is "endogenous." The style is a shame, because Ménoret has some valuable insights that need to reach a general reader.

I did find several statements that I would consider errors, and it is ironic in a book that so many times uses "endogenous." Part of the problem seems to be that neither standard English language account on the creation of the Kingdom, Lacey's or Holden and Johns' are listed in the Bibliography. Furthermore Trofimov's excellent "The Siege of Mecca" was published two years after this work, so he could not cite his research. But the author repeatedly asserts the contribution of outside forces at key junctions in Saudi history when others do not. For example: "In 1902 Abdelaziz bin Abd al-Rahman Al Saud retook Riyadh with the help of the same British who..." (p 78) What help? As Nestor Sander says in his biography of the king, "Ibn Saud," when the treaty was signed in 1915 between Britain and Ibn Saud it was the result of 12 years efforts on his part to attract the attention of Britain. At the Battle of Sibila, when Abdul Aziz defeated Ikhwan forces, the author says: "The last Ikhwan were finally overcome in December 1929, when they were pushed south by British machine guns and encircled by British forces and the troops of Abdelaziz." (p 90) What British forces? No one else has ever mentioned them. Concerning the siege of Mecca in 1979, the author says: "The action was eventually terminated only with the help of a French rapid deployment force (the GIGN)..." (p110) Is this the three men who stayed in a hotel room in Taif that Trofimov describes? "The Saudi state cracked down on jihadist circles with the help of the American FBI." (Yes, I saw the movie `The Kingdom' too, and it was only a movie, and a bad one at that.) I also had problems with some other assertions, for example: "In 2003, at the end of twenty years of economic decline..." (p144) What decline? "...for defense against the imperialism of Bedouin tribes..."(p 158) Surely a poor translation. "...polygamy became a common practice in the course of economic growth and social modernization." (p 162) Surely not "common." Ménerot routinely quotes economic and demographic statistics without the slightest caveat. As with such easily manipulated numbers as the US unemployment rate, some healthy skepticism is in order when dealing with official numbers in the Kingdom, including, certainly, the number of books published!

Overall though, the good far outweighs the bad, and the author's outlook and experience in the Kingdom are valuable for the American, and other Western readers. In his conclusion, he reinforces one of his points about the futility, and counter-productivity, of Western efforts to force the Kingdom to "reform." The Saudis know they have numerous problems in their society, like virtually all countries, and they will formulate their own solutions, ones that will be, dare I say it, "endogenous"?

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Much Non-sense Abounds Herein, October 1, 2007

By 

Jazz It Up Baby - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Saudi Enigma: A History (Paperback)

As Patrick Clawson says, Saudi Arabia need not be an enigma. French scholar Menoret demonstrates the wide array of information available about Saudi society--from detailed statistics to frank press accounts--on sensitive subjects as well as on the mundane. The picture emerging from his account is in many ways similar to that of other middle-income developing countries. As in most such societies, many are left out of modernization: 55 percent of young Saudis do not complete middle school, showing that the problem with Saudi education is not only its content but its limited reach. Despite this, government schooling has created a mass-educated middle class: by 1996, as many book titles (3,700) were published each year in Saudi Arabia as in the rest of the Arab world combined, other than Egypt and Lebanon. A similar mixed picture characterizes all aspects of Saudi society. Modernization has even reached into homes: the average number of children borne to a women dropped from 8.26 in 1980 to 4.37 in 2000 and appears to be continuing downwards. Yet massively inappropriate government policies--expenditures on all the wrong things, perverse regulations, inappropriate education, feeding of unrealistic expectations, open doors for immigrants--has created a job crisis so severe that only 19 percent of working-age Saudis hold jobs; even among men, the rate is only 32 percent.

If Saudi Arabia remains poorly understood, much of the explanation is that scholars such as Menoret devote their energies to denying the obvious. In the midst of the rich information he provides, Menoret offers such analytical nonsense as, "the evolution of Saudi society owes very little to Islam." Indeed, his main theme is that it is an "essentialist" error to understand Saudi society as being shaped by radical Islam, Bedouin tribalism, and oil wealth--precisely the three forces that have most shaped Saudi Arabia. Even more nonsensically, Menoret blames Islamist terrorism by Saudis not on Salafi Islam but on "the worst features of the West: a crude will to power, corrupt arrangements, police violence and media lies"--as though such features were not amply present in Arabia long before the West arrived in the region. Menoret's mixture of detailed knowledge and stubborn denial of reality should warn off those who think listening to experts would result in improved U.S. policies.