Abdelrahman Munif, R.I.P.
Michael Young | January 31, 2004, 8:43am
The Saudi author Abdelrahman Munif has died at the age of 70 in Damascus. Why should that matter? First, because his five-book Cities of Salt saga (published as a trilogy in English by Vintage International), particularly the first volume, was an unsparing account of the formation of a Gulf petro-monarchy—in effect Saudi Arabia—written in the days when, at least from an American perspective, the corruption and cruelty inherent to such systems were largely ignored.
Second, because Munif, who was as unsparing in his criticism of American involvement in transforming Gulf backwaters where oil had been discovered, long ago anticipated the destructive cultural rift that would ensue between the U.S. and conservative forces in the Gulf kingdoms.
The Al-Ahram Weekly obit linked typically misses the point: Munif’s “legacy will live on as something over and above literature—the struggle of a truly pan- Arab citizen to attain historical lucidity and to retrieve the right to self expression.”
That is a reference to the fact that the Saudi authorities deprived Munif of his nationality. But what Al-Ahram missed was that the experiences of this allegedly pan-Arab citizen did more than anything to reaffirm what a terrible idea pan-Arabism was, since its success would have merely added more layers of stifling patriarchal rule. Indeed, that Munif should have turned to communism and died in Syria was a testament to what abysmal alternatives secular Arab opposition figures are often left with.
Andrew | February 1, 2004, 2:17am | #
JB
Wasn't it about theft to begin with? Wasn't Saudi Arabia a concotion of Whitehall, supporting the claims of the Saudi founder against the rather more plausible claims of the Jordanian Husseins? (And all to secure a "sweet-heart" deal for largely Anglo-American oil interests?)
And like every piece of Real-Politik, this has back-fired in a spectacular way-- there is no "realism" in cynicism...it is a kind of "something-for-nothing" wishful thinking that believes you can substitute political/military action for producing and trading.
The worst thing about Saudi Arabia is not that the Brits placed the oil in the hands of some thieving desert bandits-- it is that the Brits put the holy cities in the hands of some PARANOID desert bandits, and turbo-charged their bogus "state" with an ocean of oil revenues.
There will be no such thing as a Moderate Islam until Mecca and Medina are returned to the Jordanian Kingdom, with a center of gravity in a larger population than the Peninsula as a whole, a real economy based in the Levant, and a largely tolerant (almost secular) society containing a significant Christian minority.
Instead, the holy sites are the captive of a wahhabi principality, which is most a ghost-town (with a servant class that out-numbers the indigines), %99 Muslim, and totally dependent on the manic-depressive world energy market...not a recipe for peace.
So what we get was last Friday's haj sermon in Mecca, spewing hatred and martyrdom even as new bombings rock Riyadh-- and this was considered a good year!
Then and now, doing the right thing is doing the smart thing.
