The end of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

The most important thing happening in the world that is different this week from last week from what I can tell is that the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going “full Ishmael” on us. By this I mean the reference in the Hebrew Bible to Abraham’s firstborn son, Ishmael, and the legendary ancestor of the Arabs: “And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him….”

What’s going on now? As you know there seems to be an internal purge going on, and a centralization of power around the Crown Prince. This, after the rollback of the power of the religious establishment.

Externally the quagmire in Yemen continues, and the Saudi state is now becoming more belligerent toward both Iran and Lebanon.

Most of you probably know the general issues about why the Saudi state is attempting to change and reform. Though petroleum will remain important for plastics and jet fuel, it is quite possible that the proportion used for gasoline will decline with the rise of electric cars. Additionally, there seem more supply-side possibilities with fracking technologies.

But perhaps the biggest factors are demographic. Over ten years ago Peter Turchin wrote a paper, Scientific Prediction in Historical Sociology: Ibn Khaldun meets Al Saud. It’s pretty useful in understanding what’s going on right now. The big issue which Turchin talks about more generally and is relevant to Saudi Arabia is elite overproduction. The Royal House is highly fecund. And all the scions demand unsustainable leisured lives….

America with the evil empire

Before Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi Arabia my eyes were already preparing to start rolling. If there is one thing that brings Americans of all political stripes together, it is contempt for our alliance with Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the American ruling class reaffirms and reiterates our alliance with the passing of every administration like clockwork.

The Saudi alliance useful. It is financially lucrative for the small minority of Americans who are part of the international elite. It helps sustain some intellectuals and think tanks in Washington D.C. And in the bigger game of geopolitics the Saudis have been aligned thoroughly with the United States since after World War II.

But no one is under any great illusions about what the Saudi regime is. When Trump says “For decades, Iran has fueled the fires of sectarian conflict and terror” we have to laugh at the audacity of the lie. Starting in the late 1970s Iran did try to assert leadership of international Islam…but to do so it had to dampen sectarian consciousness, because 90% of the world’s Muslims are Sunni. Iran does support other Shia movements (though in general other Twelver Shias; the alliance with ghulat sects is opportunistic, as is that of the almost-Sunni-Zaydis of Yemen), and has had a very close relationship with Hezbollah for generations. But it has engage in this with a relatively soft touch with pretenses, because the Shia are outnumbered.

In contrast, Saudi Arabia does not need to pretend. The Saudi government and populace has been fomenting and exporting sectarian hatred for generations. Sectarian hatred even predates oil as an export of the peninsula. In 1802 the Wahhabis under the Saudis sacked Karbala. The Shia of eastern Saudi Arabia live under what is perhaps best analogized to Jim Crow for Americans.

After 9/11 many average Americans asked “why do they hate us?” This is a big question with many answers.

Here is one. For various reasons our government is allied  with a neo-medieval monarchy. Most Americans are not too aware of foreign policy, international affairs, and geography. But if you are a well informed citizen of Iran, you know exactly what Saudi Arabia is.

Many Muslims who are Sunni also know what Saudi Arabia is. Many Sunnis rue the day that oil enriched the monarchies of the Arabian peninsula, because they believe that it transformed the nature of modern Islam. This is overdone; the Wahhabis of the 18th century in Arabia can be paired up with the Deobandis of 18th century India, or the revivalism of the Sokoto caliphate in the 19th century in the Sahel. But on the margin and in quantitative degrees it is hard to deny that oil wealth has helped shape the ideological topography of modern day Sunni Islam.

The robust American alliance with one of the most extreme regimes in the world makes a farce of our rhetoric of freedom and democracy. But Americans being who we are, we continue to engage in that rhetoric despite the reality that we quickly compromise when the national interest demands it. The strength of the American-Saudi alliance from administration to administration suggests there is far more than what we see above the surface. The rumors that some Muslims spread that the House of Saud has some of the biggest wine cellars in the world illustrates the reality that that regime is very willing to violate the spirit and letter of the laws which it promotes in public.

But the alliance is always a black mark in our American self-perception that we’re a moral superpower. Most Americans don’t realize it, but in the Muslim world it something that people take note of.

America’s great Saudi foreign policy sin

The future past

Periodically on my Twitter feed there is mention of the new series, The Handmaid’s Tale. The New York Times has a typical positive review. The author attempts to assert its contemporary relevance, ending with ‘the new “Handmaid’s Tale” enters the culture as its own kind of Offred-like resistance, pushing back against a reality that somehow got ahead of the show’s own imagination.’

This is not the 1980s. Or the early 2000s. The President of the United States is a nominal Christian at best. Maggie Haberman, who covers Trump for The New York States had this to say about his relationship to Mike Pence:

…When Trump and Pence were first getting to know each other, the one thing that Trump had relayed to people, according to several advisers I spoke to at the time, was that he was a little uncomfortable with how frequently Pence prayed. And Pence is fairly devout about his praying. Trump is not a serious churchgoer and in an anomaly for a presidential candidate, very rarely went to church services when he was running….

We live in an age of massive secularization, even on the conservative Right. Ergo, the rise of a post-religious Right predicated on ethnic identity, whether implicitly or explicitly. Though Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are going to rollback a few of the victories of the cultural Left, there is no likelihood of turning back the clock on the biggest win of the last generation for that camp, gay marriage.

Also, don’t watch the series, read the book. Books are usually better. While I’m recommending reading, while Atwood’s work gets a lot of attention (it’s already been made into a film back in 1990), I want to suggest Pamela Sargent’s The Shore of Women for those curious about a different take on broadly similar themes. Flipping the framework of The Handmaid’s Tale on its head Sargent depicts a far future gynocracy, as opposed to a near future patriarchy. Additionally, The Shore of Women  has echoes of the bizarre 1970s film Zardoz.

I’ve always felt the Sargent is an underrated writer (also see Ruler of the Sky, a novelization of the life of Genghis Khan). Her output is not high volume, but it is high quality.

But this post is not about The Handmaid’s Tale, and the specter of an anti-feminist dystopia. Rather, it will be on the reality of an anti-feminist dystopia which exists in our world, which also happens to be religiously totalitarian and oligarchic. I am talking about the great ally of the United States of America in the Middle East, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

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