Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
I have to remember to take it all with a grain of salt, since this dude is basing his writing on a couple of journalists and a short trip to Saudi.
Highlights
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Khalid came to the throne in 1975 during one of the most tumultuous times of an overwhelmingly tumultuous century in the Arab world. On the left, secular nationalists were rejecting religious orthodoxy, flirting with the Soviet Union, embracing aggressive modernization, and discarding sluggish regimes. In Egypt, Nasser overthrew the monarchy and proclaimed a new pan-Arab state, and he was soon followed by revolutionary Baathist regimes in Syria and Iraq. On the right, a religious revival was pushing for even more reactionary doctrines than Wahhabism. The Iranian monarchy fell to Shia extremists, Yemen split in a civil war, and throughout the Middle East, nationalists and religious factions clashed for control over states. Saudi Arabia was caught in the middle. It culturally leaned toward the religious right, but its leadership tended toward a pro-Western secular pragmatism, much to the chagrin of Arab states who urged the Sauds to spend more of their boundless wealth on trying to destroy Israel. With neither side placated, the Saud dynasty was facing revolutionary pressure on both fronts, and there were serious concerns that the Sauds would be overthrown or Saudi Arabia would break up. Shias funded by Iran tried launching a separatist movement in the eastern provinces while Baathist-backed revolutionaries infiltrated the Saudi government bureaucracy.
✏️ It paints a very complex picture of what the Middle East looked like, and all the relations that were in place, fighting or allying for power. One has to wonder the half a dozen other realities that could’ve materialized if any one decision was made differently. 🔗 View Highlight
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Khalid recognized that the Iranian-backed Shia separatists and the revolutionary secularists would always oppose the Saudi state, but the Sunni extremists could be reasoned with. They considered the Sauds to be decadent, too soft on Israel, and too friendly with the West, but they largely shared an ideological vision of a conservative, Wahhabi, or Wahhabi-adjacent form of Islam.
✏️ Of all the choices to make, to decide that we should placate the extremists and bend towards them is a Faustian one indeed. 🔗 View Highlight
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Hence King Khalid led a social/religious/political reactionary revolution within Saudi Arabia to align with the Sunni extremists. Up until about four years ago, Saudi society was still gender segregated and enforced a largely literalist interpretation of Sharia, hence the array of bizarre and antiquated laws – gender segregation in public, requiring women to cover their faces, outlawing of non-Muslim religious buildings (there are a few Shia mosques), restrictions on foreign media, etc. Saudi Arabia was always conservative, but most of these draconian laws were only put into place in the 1980s. The Saud dynasty purposefully induced a reactionary legal regime and pulled Saudi Arabia further away from liberalism.
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The charitable take on making an already oppressive regime even more oppressive is that the Sauds were trying to bend Saudi Arabia to the extremists so the country would not break.
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Saudi Arabia was certainly made a worse country for its citizens, but that was the price to pay for averting civil war.
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So what do the Saudi people do? Unless they work in oil… not much. In the pre-reform era (five years ago), Saudi citizens basically lived a life of cushy socialism with free or heavily subsidized housing, free electricity, heavily subsidized water, heavily subsidized petrol ($60 billion per year in 2015, about 10% of GDP), free healthcare, free education (often paid to get educations, even abroad), extraordinarily generous unemployment benefits, and random cash gifts bestowed by the monarch. They paid no taxes outside a handful of tariffs, and if they wanted jobs, they would be given them by the government, but… they generally didn’t want jobs. Outside of the oil sector, a staggering 90% of Saudi Arabia’s workers were immigrants, covering both low wage menial labor and high-skilled technical or administrative work. In total, almost 40% of Saudi Arabia’s population was immigrant in 2020.
✏️ I do have to think about this very carefully. At face value, as this guy is seeing it, we had a form of socialism. We had subsidized benefits with utilities and gas; free healthcare and education; cash gifts; no taxes; and lots of jobs or job security. Also, no one worked in low wage or service industry; we fully gave that to immigrants. But we were also religiously constrained. No creative thought, no outlets, a core aspect of Wahhabism was that innovation was evil. And at the end of the day, it was still authoritarian rule.. all these things given to us were at the whim of the leader, and not the basis of some collective power. If any of those things were to be taken away (and they were), it wasn’t in our hands to protest that. So yeah, not really socialism except in a a very shallow view of it. It was an authoritarian government placating its citiz-, its subjects, all to maintain power and control in one of the most tumultuous and chaotic regions of the planet during the past century. Oil money gave them the ability to placate us physically, and religion gave them the ability to numb us spiritually. That’s what differentiates them from the other failed and chaotic ups and downs of neighboring countries. 🔗 View Highlight
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The price to pay for all this is inefficiency, government waste, and rampant corruption, but the benefits are a relatively well-designed national patronage system which has kept the Saudi people loyal for nearly a century.
✏️ Again, sure this is technically wealth redistribution, but not in any socialist or equitable way. The powers the be keep 95%, and the remainder can be showered inefficiently and with massive corruption to the rich elite, and the last dregs of that is trickled down to the loyal masses. 🔗 View Highlight