Saudi Arabia: Islam and Oil

Crude oil is perhaps more easily found than water in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is home to nearly a quarter of the world's proven petroleum reserves (Klare 55). Naturally, this has caught the rapacious eye of the United States, which has, especially since the establishment in 1980 of the Carter Doctrine, increasingly defined the security of its extra-national oil supplies as a matter of vital national interest even during times of peace (33). At the end of World War II, envisioning the future need for oil, President Franklin D. Roosevelt met with Saudi King Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud and offered the country and regime American protection, with a "vital but unspoken quid pro quo: in return for protecting the royal family against its enemies, American companies [would] be allowed unrivaled access to Saudi oil fields" (75).

Saudi Arabia may be rich in oil, but it is richer still in fundamentalist Islamic sentiment. If one accepts the postmodern concept of delocalized topical boundaries between states, then in economic terms Saudi Arabia clearly lies on what Samuel P. Huntington has aptly called the "bloody borders" (55) of Islam, occupying a key commercial juncture between the Arab world and the United States. The Saudi regime has long "engaged in a deadly dance with religious extremism" (Zakaria 276), burying its failures in strong support for a highly conservative form of Islam (271) which views "the modern world and non-Muslims with great suspicion" (272), creating an external other to bolster internal unity.

Such efforts to mask the involvement of Americans in Saudi Arabia are doomed to eventual failure because of the unique nature of the Saudi territory, comprising some of the most symbolically important desert in world...

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...both internal and external enemies. Even the optimistic Al-Farsy acknowledges, on the subject of 'Arab Terrorism', that &aquot;it is largely the Arab countries which are threatened by acts of terrorism perpetrated by Arabs" (317). With the exception of Egypt, perhaps no Arab country has done more to alienate and disappoint its hardline Muslim citizens. While Al-Farsy asserts that only an end to the distortion of Islam in the West can bring a workable compromise (321), it seems, in light of the very internal violence that he sites, that only a systematic rethinking of Saudi domestic rule will bring real stability to the country. The government, he asserts, represents its people well ­ but it must do better, and do so visibly vis-á-vis its large share of fundamentalist Moslems, or it will remain on the brink of religiously motivated destruction from within and without.