[MUSIC] This week we'd like to look at Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. And as you can probably imagine there is something very peculiar about this place. This, probably the most startling observation that external observers make is the discrepancy between a very traditional society clinging to old ways of arranging social affairs and at the same time itÂ’s super modern, super new. It is a very, very large degree of conspicuous consumption of cities that are extremely modern looking. So this tension and this discrepancy between the very old and the very new in one place, is one of the characteristics in the region that we will try to explore this week. The region is, at the same time, it's the heartland of Islam, both geographically and spiritually. Geographically is obvious when you look at the map, but spiritually also, because it's the centre of the two key, the most holy sites of Islam. And also the region from which, you know, the prophet started his propagation of this new religion, something that we discussed in the first week. Here you see the Kaba, the central focus of the annual pilgrimage that Muslims have to undertake and in a sense the very geographical centre of Islam. And this was an old image and here you see the, the current shrine that has been bulit around it. To, you know, to accommodate the annual pilgrimage, which is now a very, very large affair, and something which is a tremendous source of pride and legitimacy for the Saudi government that is in charge of these two holy shrines. As reflected in the one of the official titles of the Saudi king, who calls himself the custodian of the two holy shrines. The dualism that I just referred to, this tension between the old social relations and the modern way of life is reflected in the, the characteristic of all of these societies in the Arabian Peninsula, with the possible exception of Yemen and slightly less Oman, because they are slightly less rich than the others. But all of them are very avid importers of Western consumer goods, Western weaponry, here you see a cityscape in, in Dubai, you know, the Annual Camel Race, and in the back the skyscrapers that have been built up, and here you see a Saudi F-15 fighter plane. And these two things, the conspicuous consumption and the importation of Western weaponry and western protection, these are two of the things that characterize the tension that exists in this region. And it raises the obvious question and you might've probably already thought about this, how does it work out in practice to have a society that claims to be very traditional, that does not want its social norms or organizational structures changed that does not adopt the dominant pattern that exists in the world. Yet, at the same time, tries to live in a modern environment, here you see a, an Arab family a Khaliji given the dress of the ladies. In some Western tourist spots, so they are living in the modern world, but they don't want to be part of the modern world, and the question is whether this works out without tension, and I leave that to your imagination and to your exploration in this week as we jointly look at this region. To see whether this is a process that works out well, or whether there remain tensions that remain unresolved. Perhaps the most startling and most commented upon feature of these societies is the role of women in public life, you have, on the one hand a very modern, Western-looking society, as you see here. A city that is full of high skyscrapers, and all the modern conveniences of modern life, yet you have very stark restrictions on the on the lives of women. Perhaps best symbolized in the prohibition of driving that most women are subjected all women are subjected in most of these societies in the Arabian Peninsula. And at this point, it might be useful to point out the difference between truly genuinely religious prescription and cultural patterns that exist and the role of custom in the development of Islamic law. Something that we have referred to in the first week so, the Arabian tribal society has a particular role, and a particular expectation of what constitutes proper female behaviour. And that as we already mentioned, is very different from the role women are perceived, And the functions they serve in society in many of the other Islamic societies. So here we need to distinguish between cultural patterns and truly religious dogmas and one of the things that's also important to pay attention to is that, the exclusion of women from public life, also means exclusion of women from economic life, and that's something you actually have to be able to afford in the first place. If you look at very poor Muslim societies like even in, in very restrictive environments like Afghanistan, it's simply not possible to exclude women, to that degree from public and economic life. The gulf states; however, due to the oil wealth that they exist, are actually able to do that, they are able to dispense with the productive capacity of half of their populations. And that's what they do, but it's something that is not readily transposable to many other societies, that I'll leave to, to your imagination and to ponder a bit. But at the same time I'd like you to draw your attention to one of the features, that is probably the outcome of the very aggressive Islamization program that many of the Gulf States, particularly Saudi Arabia, have engaged in the last decades. Which we now see the growing appeal of the Khaliji, the Gulf way of dress, the gulf way of the particular customary practices with respect to women that is now growing among many other Muslim societies and something we will, you can observe for yourself. For example in the patterns of dress of immigrant Muslim women in Western societies, most of whom are not originating from the Gulf because these societies are rich, they don't export populations. But you see sometimes now, you know, people who are originating from Pakistan or the Indian subcontinent who are now dressing like the Khaliji women in elsewhere. And that is a direct outcome of the growing propagation of the particular practices that have sprang up in the Arabian Peninsula and are now gaining a greater foothold due to the ability of these states to propagate them due their oil wealth. And this obviously increases the tensions that we already have among immigrants, Muslim societies and their Western hosts, something that we will return to in the next to last week of this course when we talk about Muslim minorities. Here you have an image shown from the Munich, Bavaria, I believe. The key characteristic of all of the societies that we look at this week on the Arabian Peninsula is the, what I would call, the patrimonial welfare state and the, funded by the rentier income from oil and gas. And, this patrimonial arrangement, we will explore Further in a special video later this week. But what is characteristic now is the perpetuation of premodern ways of social organization that paid an inordinate amount of importance on descend and lineage. And that are based on traditional ordering system that evolves around patrimonial duties of care and loyalty on the other hand. So we have a patron-client relationship that is very much unchanged from pre-modern times. and, what we see here is a peculiar iteration of what some social scientists have called the Arab social contract, so the ruling house, the person in charge of the state can dispose of the state and the income of the state in a quasi-personal manner. So there is an expectation that its the state and its income and its resources are the personal property of the ruler, but in exchange, he will take care of his subjects, of their economic and social needs. And then in return, they owe him a duty of obedience and there is no expectation of participation or political involvement in the affairs of the state. But the state will take care of them, so we see here a particular form of an oil-driven welfare state that is far more comprehensive in the, the types and the degree of services that the state is supposed to provide for its subjects than any other welfare state that you might know. And, it's important to understand now that the basis for this traditional social arrangement is not peculiar to the Arab or Muslim society, we see, as you can see in this picture from the European Middle Ages. Patron client relationships and, and these mutual relationships of duty and care is something we see in many other cultures perhaps in all cultures the, what normally leads to the disintegration of these pre-modern Patron clients relationships is that the economic base from which the. The ruler normally receives the resources that he needs to dispense to his, to those who follow his clients, disintegrates and therefore he's no longer able to keep his part of the bargain. So, his clients then are released from their duty of obedience, we see here a picture from Akira Kurosawa's film Ronin, which shows marauding Samurais that we've discussed the Samurais in the first week of this course. There we have exactly this problem that the old social order in which, the Shogun would take care of his Samurais is now disintegrating. He is no longer able to provide for them economically, so they are no longer following him obediently and this economic change that leads to the disintegration of patron-clients relationships, that is now not taking place in the Arabian peninsula, something that we would normally expect. And the reason it does not take place is the discovery of oil, and basically free income, provided by foreign oil companies that explore this oil, sell it, and pay a fraction of the profits to the local leaders which they then in turn use to provide patronage to their followers. And here it's important to understand the nature of these economies as rentier economies and here I would like to draw your attention to the fact that this characteristic of these economies as rentier economies, i.e. Are economies that rely to a very large extent, normally more, it's defined as more than, let's say, 40% of the income is from one source, and there is no local input required for that income. this is the key characteristic that defines these economies and therefore their societies and the way that they arrange their social affairs. And you already will guess that this is an arrangement that has absolutely nothing to do with religion. It's a point that is [Homa Katouzian] and his political economy of modern Iran stresses very much. He says the rentier characteristic of these oil-exploring economies is the key characteristic that defines social arrangements and the way the state is built up, and it's something that is completely divorced from the religious nature of these societies. So here we see perhaps the most important social factor that is not linked at all to religion. So, if you remember the danger of essentialism that I referred to in the first week. Of ascribing to individuals and groups characteristics based on one facet their being, in our case the fact of them being Muslims, is misleading, because here, perhaps, the characteristic of their economies is far more important than the nature of their religious beliefs. If you recall the, the four response patterns that we outlined in the first week of this course, the four patterns, the four ways that society can respond to the challenge of modernity, they were emulation of. The dominant Western ways, Islamic reform, traditionalism, based on the idea that no change is needed, or fundamentalism. And as you can easily imagine now, we are dealing here with societies that have explicitly followed the traditionalist conservative model, they say there is no change needed and both in social terms and in governmental terms. We are dealing here with states that explicitly claim to be able to perpetuate habits and modes of organization that they have inherited from premodern times. So you will now wonder, whether what I've told you in the first week is actually accurate, because if you remember, I was referring to the challenge of modernity, the competitive international systems, something that Kenneth Waltz in his book Theory of International Politics refers to, that is now imposing a socializing effect on all the units in the system. So as Professor Waltz had pointed out, he says, in a competitive system innovations that any one unit introduces must be adopted by all the other units, otherwise they face annihilation and they cannot survive in that competitive system so, Professor Waltz had predicted that, in this structure, the units would become alike. They would socialize to look like each other, and we have now just discussed that the societies and the states on the Arabian Peninsula are explicitly rejecting change. They do not want to become like the Western nations that are more dominant than they are. So, which one is it going to be? Is there a change that is, well, the pressure for change that is inevitable? Or are they able to isolate themselves? So we're dealing here with society that explicitly reject the need for change, but what Waltz and any other realist or materialist would predict is that position is not open to a society in a competitive system. If you don't adopt a competitive economy able to procure the weaponry you needed, if you don't set up a defence force sufficient to protect you, you will not be able to survive in a competitive system that's what Waltz would predict and what realists would have accepted. And this is what the, the Arabian Peninsula seems to contradict, so we're dealing here with a paradox. That they, they apparently seem to be able to survive in a competitive system, in a hostile environment, without adapting to these pressures. And how do we account for this paradox? And there are two reasons, one is the relative geographical isolation of these societies, ever since the 15th Century they were basically left alone by external forces because there was not much interest by external forces in these areas, because they are relatively poor. Relatively remote and communications were difficult, so their societies could continue unperturbed by external events. That is perhaps the main reason why the societies have not undergone the, the transformations that we have discussed with respect to Turkey or Egypt or some of the other places. So, they remain relatively unchanged well into the 20th Century, but what allows them now in the 20th Century to continue with their traditional patterns is, on the one hand, the discovery of oil but more importantly the protection by external forces that is now given to them. If you look at the map of the Ottoman possessions at the region, the Ottomans left the interior of the Arabian peninsula relatively to its own devices. They were not interested in that, as I said, this is the lack of interest in the region, but what you see then, in the context of the growing British colonial possession and global empire. The region assumes a certain degree of importance but not an overwhelming importance would then leads to the establishment of British protectorates in this, you know, particularly around the coast. So they are now protected by an overarching external hegemony, and therefore, can continue with the ways of traditional ways of life without having to worry about defence. And, this pattern now continues in the 20th Century with the discovery of oil. And now what Waltz would predict is that if you have small societies, small states that are not able to defend themselves very well but have lots of wealth, that one of their neighbors would come and gobble them up. And this is exactly what we see in the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, here's an image from the burning oil fields that the the Iraqis set ablaze when they left Kuwait, again. But the Kuwait incidence also very graphically illustrates, exactly the arrangement that explains that paradox. Kuwait did not have to adopt modern ways because it could rely on the United States and its allies to defend it, to protect as then happened in the operation Desert Storm when Kuwait was liberated by foreign forces. Here we see the, the Saudi Commander- in- Chief who was normally put in charge of the Arab forces that led the, or that participated in the liberation and behind him is General Schwarzkopf, whom you see here. And here, it's important to note that despite the, the appearance and the rhetorical posturing of, in this case, the Saudi Commander- in- Chief as being on equal footing with the American general. There is absolutely no doubt that the Saudi contribution to this liberation was absolutely marginal, it was only there for political effect. This is an army that is unable to do very much of anything, despite the very advanced weaponry that it possesses and that's one of the things that we will discover in the context of this week and we have already discussed last week in the context of Egypt. It is not enough to simply purchase weaponry, you also have to operate them, and in order to do this, you need to have to state machinery, and the educational machinery, and the training facilities, etc.. That go hand in hand and that they are necessary to operate these aspects of modern life. That's exactly what Kenneth waltz refers to when he's speaks about the socialization tendency of an international system. The Saudis have not done this, so what they have de facto done, they've relied exclusively on the Americans to ensure their defence. And, we will now look in the, in the next video, we will look at Ottoman and Colonial history as this particular arrangement has developed, how these, these states have sprung up, how they have been able to divorce themselves from the pressures of an international competitive system, and I look forward to seeing you back then. MUSIC
