John R. Bradley on Saudi Arabia

From an inteview with the author of Saudi Arabia Exposed:

Q. What are the key themes and central messages of your book? What is your underlying thesis?

My thesis is that Saudi Arabia is an empire, and to understand what Saudi Arabia is you have to go back to the 1920s and early 1930s, the formative years just before the kingdom was established in 1932. What you find is the country that would become Saudi Arabia was then made up of very distinct regions: the Hijaz in the West, which was liberal and diverse; the Eastern Province, which is majority Shiite; the Asir region, where the people worshipped the local ruler as a saint; and the northern regions like Al Jouf, where the locals had historic tribal ties to Iraq and Syria.

All these regions were conquered by the Al Saud dynasty and the Wahabi zealots they employed as foot soldiers. Al Saud hegemony was imposed, often with the sword. There were no fewer than 26 major rebellions. Hundreds of thousands were slaughtered. What I discovered when I travelled to these regions was that resistance to Wahabism especially has remained very strong — that Hijazis have a pluralistic and liberal tradition which they are very much aware of, that Asiris have not accepted the Al-Saud-Wahabi hegemony; and that in fact there are still men and boys who still wear flowers in their hair in the mountains down there: hardly Wahabi behaviour.

The Eastern Province is still majority Shiite, and they are persecuted. In the north there has been a minor rebellion in Al Jouf, which represents tribal and other groups trying to take advantage of a perhaps fatally weakened Saudi regime in the wake of 9/11 and the ensuing domestic violence to reassert territorial claims.

I see the Saudi people as not wanting to overthrow the Al Saud regime, but very much aware of their diverse history, which is denied them in the name of an alien ideology. They want to reclaim that history, just as people who lived under the Soviet Empire — in Poland, East Germany, or even Russia itself — were waiting for the moment to cast off the ideology that oppressed them: Communism.