The state visit of the King of Saudi Arabia to Britain came at a time of growing internal and external crisis for the desert kingdom, and was surely intended to bolster international confidence in the Riyadh regime. All the indications are that King Abdullah really does want to extricate his country from its benighted state. Yet political modernisation has been so slow as to be almost invisible. King Abdullah may be an absolute monarch, but there are limits to what he can do — and he is badly isolated within the kingdom.
The work facing the reformers was neatly summed up in a cartoon in the Saudi daily Al Watan (the Nation) on 7 October. It showed a garage — ‘Reforms and Repairs’ — in which a broken-down, leaking car was labelled ‘judiciary system’, and an upside-down vehicle was marked ‘schools’. A week before, the same paper carried the dismaying news that an extremist Saudi website had posted 18 flight-simulation videos for training on Boeing 747s. The message is obvious: the spirit of 9/11 lives on in the kingdom.
Against such a background, vague claims by King Abdullah that Saudi authorities have arrested terrorist financiers count for little. As for the king’s allegation that UK authorities ignored Saudi warnings about the 7 July 2005 London Tube bombings, however, one wishes it were just bluff, but it is possible to believe the king. The Blair government was clearly hesitant to act preventatively against the rise of extremism among the Muslim communities.
For several years now the Saudis have quite rightly protested to the UK over the granting of sanctuary to Saad al-Faqih, who heads the so-called Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia (MIRA). Al-Faqih is considered by Saudi reformers to be an advocate of a regime that would be more radical in its Wahhabism than the present one.
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