Following the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Ian Black picks five books that get inside the secretive kingdom
Understanding Saudi Arabia has never been easy: leaks, rumours and official denials surrounding the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi are a grim reminder of a notoriously opaque system. Historian Madawi al-Rasheed (herself the scion of a powerful dynasty that lost out to the Al-Saud in the formative years of the 1920s) provides a focused and up-to-date political and social guide as the editor of Salman’s Legacy: The Dilemmas of a New Era in Saudi Arabia. The promotion of the king’s ambitious son, Mohammed (MBS), to crown prince in June 2017 proves that “the survival and mystique of the monarchy are closely linked to its unpredictability,” she writes, noting the taboo on public discussion of royal struggles and intrigues.
For the background to the heavily spun narrative of modernisation under the thirtysomething MBS, a highly readable account is provided by Robert Lacey’s Inside the Kingdom (2009). Lacey wrote an earlier book describing the transformation of a pastoral and nomadic society – when traditional Bedouin raids were what Sir John Glubb called “a cross between Arthurian chivalry and county cricket” – into one when the soaring price of oil was producing unimaginable wealth. Lacey revisited it in the long shadow of 9/11, Osama bin Laden and the souring of the special relationship with what political scientist Robert Vitalis dubbed “America’s Kingdom”.
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