Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists, and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia

by Robert Lacey

Book Overview

"It's all here-Islam, the family tree, a sea of oil and money to match, palace intrigue...This is high drama and an epic tale."
-Tom Brokaw

Though Saudi Arabia sits on one of the richest oil deposits in the world, it also produced fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. In this immensely important book, journalist Robert Lacey draws on years of access to every circle of Saudi society giving readers the fullest portrait...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0143118277
• ISBN13: 9780143118275
• Release Date: October 2010
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Good analysis, to be read as a novel, with several anecdotes

I enjoyed this book. Very easy to be read, also by non English mother tongue readers. I was looking a book which could give an insight on current Saudi life and politics and it gave it. For the issues that I have already known, I found them correctly described. An important book for people who want to know more about last years Saudi Arabia. Congratulations to Mr.Lacey.

Exposing what would prefer to remain hidden

Saudi Arabia is a kingdom that lives in two unique worlds. As a global center of both the Islamic faith and oil it has to deal with the ancient and the modern and is torn by the two. Robert Lacey does a wonderful job of offering a narrative that describes how the worlds events during the past 60 years have shaped, and been shaped. Lacey gives us the standard history tour which one might expect, but he also goes behind the scenes and offers just the right amount of opinion with history. The book is very good at explaining how Saudi Arabia was a fairly modern kingdom until a terrorist attack made it one that espoused the very ideals the terrorists espoused. This lead almost directly to the creation of the 9/11 factor and Osama Bin Laden. But only after the terrorists came home did Saudi Arabia start to act in anything approaching a reformist mindset. Lacey does a great job of showing how any reform was slow and met with tremendous opposition and even now minor steps require major battles. All in all a very good read!

My Kind of Book: Timely, Smart, Informative, Relevant and cuts to the chase (as well as to the bone)

This sweeping political tour de horizon, across modern Middle Eastern History, by a seasoned historian and author, with Saudi Arabia as its centerpiece and focal point, is timely, smart, informative, and cuts to the chase (as well as to the bone). Its main themes and stories are already well known: the internecine struggles within the royal family, as well as within Islam; how oil money has corrupted both the U.S., the Arab world and the Saudi Nation; and how the Arabs and Israelis continue to play each other off for greater influence over the U.S. economy and U.S. national security: They both have learned to "game" the shameless and endless corruption of U.S. politicians. What this book brings to the party is that it goes directly to the heart of these matters without the normal detours of fluff and insincere disclaimers, or the niceties required to protect reputations that the wider set of facts revealed here suggest do not deserve such protection. It is this sense of an expose, coupled with a keen sense of urgency, as well as a precise sense of what is important to history, that makes for uncommonly good, if not, altogether exciting reading. Thus it goes without saying that this book has a strong and refreshing irreverent tone to it. But this tone is not just irreverence for irreverence sake. It is a case of old wine being updated and poured into new bottles: old facts merged with a few fresh and newly revealed ones, all grafted onto the old stories. Together they provide a new basis for fresh thinking, fresh historical analysis, and fresh, more novel, interpretations and results. To wit: a surprisingly interesting but subtly revised history of the religious strife within both the Saudi royal family and the larger Muslim family; new revelations about how American politicians were brought to heel in the F-15 AWACs procurement episode (of which I was involved in); how the Arabs coalesced against the Saudis when Saddam invaded Kuwait, requiring the royal family to do the unthinkable: ask the U.S. for help; and how the royal family itself hoisted on its own petard, laid the groundwork and paid for the emergence of al Qaeda, as well as others Muslim radicals and internal enemies. Thus it is the series of vignettes based on new facts and the new interpretations of them that provide the excitement for the book and gives rise to new twists that leave a few tattered reputations flailing in its wake. The main story line of course is built up on the development of the Saudi Arabian Empire, a fluke of history if ever there was one. It is a case of turning a series of running skirmishes across the desert, among sword-wielding camel and sheepherding tribes, into world-class manipulators. The winner of the last set of skirmishes (the Aziz brothers in 1925) conquered the land of sand by brute force and imposed its will as well as its dessert morality upon the surviving tribes. But with the discovery of oil (voila!) changed everything including the way t

The long-awaited sequel...

... to The Kingdom: Arabia and the House of Sa'Ud which ends at the beginning of the `80's. At the beginning of his previous work, Lacey relates how a Georgetown educated member of the House of Saud told him that he had lived in the Kingdom for 30 years, and if he tried to explain the country, and how it worked, the best he could do is get a B+ on the paper, and therefore, Lacey, as an outsider, could only hope to earn a C. I disagreed, and in my review, said that Lacey deserved at least a B+, if not an A-. For this work, which covers the last 30 years, he deserves a solid A. Lacey starts with "Angry Face," Juhayman, and his followers, including the expected "Mahdi," who seized the mosque in Mecca (Makkah) in 1979. (This event is also covered well by Trofimov, in The Siege of Mecca: The 1979 Uprising at Islam's Holiest Shrine). The author selected a wonderfully appropriate epigraph for this section, from Dostoevsky: "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer. Nothing is more difficult than to understand him." Lacey did a commendable job in explaining the grievances of those being overwhelmed by the "future shock" that was roiling the Kingdom as a result of the influx of money and foreigners (and their ideas) following the sharp increase in oil prices after 1973. This event, plus the revolt of the Shia, in the eastern town of Qateef, in the same year, had the net effect of nudging Saudi Arabia to a much more conservative governmental social policy, yes, in effect, co-opting a portion of Juhayman's agenda... and the women disappeared from the TV, and the "Opera House" remained closed for many a year! Lacey also covers the Saudi-American alliance of the `80's, ironical in retrospect, openly supported "jihad," certainly when it was fighting the "godless" Soviet Union in Afghanistan. And now both countries suffer from the "blowback," in CIA parlance. Part Two deals with the second decade of the 30 year period, the `90's. The author again commences with an all too appropriate epigraph, this time from Edward Gibbon: "So intimate is the connection between the throne and the alter that the banner of church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people." The seminal event in this decade was Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, and his expulsion, lead by an American coalition. The net effect on the Kingdom, who saw American female soldiers driving, which was emulated by their Saudi counterparts, was to again nudge the Kingdom into a more conservative mode. Still, despite the various "fetishes" developed by the religious police, say, against red roses on Valentine's day, the country continues to be overwhelmed by Western (and world) influences, and sadly, the upholders of tradition saw nothing wrong in the influx of fast food restaurants, which led to an "epidemic" of diabetes. Paralleling events in the Kingdom, Lacey devotes space to events in not so far off Afghanistan, where the "students," (the Taliban) were seizing power, and welcomed Bin Laden

Exposing the Man Behind the Curtain

Saudi Arabia is the proverbial "man behind the curtain," the guy who exerts power, wields influence, and manipulates events but seeks to remain largely anonymous. Trouble is, Robert Lacey keeps pulling back the curtain to reveal the secrets and mysteries of this most peculiar kingdom. Thirty years ago Mr. Lacey published a history of Saudi Arabia called "The Kingdom," a book, by the way, that the House of Saud elected to ban. Mr. Lacey's new tome basically picks up where the last one left off. Mr. Lacey's prose is enjoyable and his book is well structured, describing and explaining events in a logical and chronological sequence with digressions and thematic developments where appropriate. And after reading his book, I have gained a renewed appreciation for the Law of Unintended Consequences. We learn that the Arab oil embargo, which was precipitated by U.S. support for Israel during the 1973 war, resulted in unprecedented prosperity in Saudi Arabia which, in turn, caused a backlash among Islamic conservatives, which fostered the growth of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood where Osama Bin Laden found a home, who then went to Afghanistan to fight the Soviets, and so on and so on. Mr. Lacey also does a fine job of chronicling the evolution of the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia and the Royal Family's genuine fear of the Shia extremists that control the government of neighboring Iran. And he effectively buttresses his arguments with insightful anecdotes and telling vignettes. The events in this book have been chronicled elsewhere--it doesn't contain startling revelations or previously undisclosed diplomatic secrets. But it does help you understand the forces that have created the current mess in the Middle East, many of which were unleashed unwittingly by the participants. And I personally will take it as a sign of hope for the region (albeit a small sign) if the Kingdom, this time around, does not choose to ban Mr. Lacey's book.