Professor Madawi Al Rasheed

Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792) and the Beginnings of Unitarian Empire in Arabia
by George Rentz. London Arabian Publishing, 2005 Pp.xlii+275, bibliography, index.  xxxxx(cloth), ISBN 09544792 2 X

Since the 11 September the Saudi regime launched a serious public relations campaign to rescue its reputation in the West and that of its religious establishment. While print and visual media remain the most important platform for this campaign in the West, Saudi sponsored academic conferences and annual lectures in English proved to be equally important as these quasi-academic activities influence a different audience. 

David Commins The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia London: I.B. Tauris 2006, pp. 276, ISBN 1 845 11 080, Hardback £39.50
Tim Niblock Saudi Arabia Power, Legitimacy and Survival London: Routledge 2006, pp. 206, ISBN 10 0-415 30310 9, Paperback £19.99

Anthony Cordesman and Nawaf Obaid National Security in Saudi Arabia Threats, Responses, and Challenges Centre for Strategic and International Studies and Westport: Praeger Security International 2005, pp. 426, ISBN 0-275 98811 2 Hardback

Dependence on Saudi oil and strategic location in the heart of a volatile Arab region made this country the centre of academic interest in the second half of the twentieth century. Since 9/11 and the terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia itself, the country received further focused attention. Researchers flooded to Saudi Arabia to investigate its history, society, religion and security challenges.

1744-2003, Paris: La Decouverte.

It is a well known fact that Arabian studies have been dominated by Anglo-Saxon scholarship, reflecting the historical, colonial and economic contexts of power relations in which academic discourse takes place. Throughout the twentieth century, English language publications dominated the sphere of knowledge and theorising about not only Saudi Arabia but the Arabian Peninsula in general. With the exception of two or three classical monographs and few traveller’s and colonial accounts, for example the monographs of Charles Huber and Robert Montagne, there has been little French academic engagement with Arabia up to the second World War. 

Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf: Power Politics in Transition.
London, I.B. Tauris 2003. Bibliography, index, pp. 181. Hardback.

The starting point for this book is the decision of Britain to withdraw from the Gulf in 1968 and the actual withdrawal in 1971. The central thesis states that no other superpower was ready to replace Britain in the Gulf at the time. The USA was occupied in Vietnam while the Soviet Union was still maintaining a cautious foreign policy. The author is strongly convinced that when British power was in decline, other superpowers never established unquestionable dominance or control over the region. Against this vacuum, politics in the Gulf went ‘local’, leaving Iran, the strongest and most ambitious and capable regional force to determine and reorder the political landscape. Therefore, the book argues that after British withdrawal, the new Gulf order was achieved by emphasising local concerns, thus giving regional powers (Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf states) supremacy over external forces in shaping the politics of the area.

by Daryl Champion . London: Hurst and Company.  2003. Pp.xxii+392glossary, index, bibliography. £ 45 (cloth) , £16.95 (paper), ISBN 1-85065-647-9 casebound, 1-85065-668-1 paperback. 

The intimate connection between Saudi Arabia and oil not only influenced historical development in this country but also left its fingerprints on Western scholarly work in the humanities and social science disciplines. More than any other country in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia polarised the academic community and created a rift between those who justify its alleged ‘exceptionalism’ and those who condemn its archaic and odd social, political, religious and cultural traditions. In this polarised scholarly atmosphere sound interpretation tends to be the first casualty.  With a number of exceptions, indigenous research in general has not so far produced nuanced interpretations either.

Saudi Arabia is an ‘Islamised authoritarianism’. The system rests on propagating religious interpretations of the Quran and the tradition of the Prophet, which seek to anchor authoritarianism in the sacred tradition.