Living Behind Walls: Inside the Desert Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

• Author: McGibbon, Ian
• Position: Book review

LIVING BEHIND WALLS

Inside the Desert Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Author: Bruce M. Petty

Published by: Security Studies Press, Lincoln, Neb., 2008, 233pp, US$27.95.

Of all the Arabic nations, Saudi Arabia is perhaps the most important to Westerners--and the least understood. On the surface a source of stability in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia is rent by deep fissures, nowhere more clearly revealed than by the participation of fifteen Saudis in the 9/11 attacks on the United States. But Westerners seeking to understand what makes Saudi Arabia tick face no easy task. They quickly come face to face with the fact that Saudi Arabia is a closed society 'defined by walls'. It is, according to a diplomat who served there, 'very dry, isolated, insular, and xenophobic'. Suspicious of outsiders and intolerant, Saudis have to contend with harsh restrictions on their human rights, especially women, and strict monitoring of their behaviour by the notorious religious police

Despite its oil riches, Saudi Arabia faces many growing economic problems. A growing number of poor is a worrying development. So, too, is the degree to which Westerners prop up the economy--90 per cent of private and 70 per cent of government jobs are performed by foreign workers. These expats, even Muslims from other Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, find 'a life of austerity, where they were treated as creatures somehow dangerous and hostile to the host country'.

One of those to endure this existence was American Bruce Petty, who worked in a Saudi Arabian hospital in 1983. He left vowing never to return, but nearly twenty years later, married with children and...