Arabia, Oil and the Fulfilment of a Prophesy Part 1
The Arabian Peninsula was always open to conquest but never coveted by any empire until the rise of Islam in 7 A.D.
The Arabian Peninsula has been the most uninhabitable of lands throughout the ages, passed over by all invaders and adventurers alike who crossed its northern boundaries into the more luxuriant regions of East and Central Asia.
There are no known cases of invasions or incursions of any kind into the arid climate of Arabia. Deserted by non-Arabs except for the single pre-Islamic story of Abraha (and even that was to raze the Ka‘ba rather than to conquer the Peninsula).
Furthermore, numerous battles had been won and lost between the military superpowers of the Byzantine and Persian empires between 610—625 just north of the Peninsula. The Persians defeated the Byzantine on numerous fronts until they reached the holy capital of Jerusalem in 614. Then, the Byzantine pushed back and retook their territories under the commanding forces of Heraclius. Thousands of lives were lost in the taking and retaking of these lands and in the remaking of new borders.
The territories that were lost and gained during these bloody battles amounted to a fraction of the size of the Peninsula, but it never occurred to either empire to conquer the Peninsula with less casualties, minimal cost, and in less time. This was in spite of the fact that the Peninsula was open to conquest. It had no standing army, no central government, no fortifications, no economic or colonial power, and its only inhabitants, the Arabs, were too fragmented by intertribal wars to stand a chance against any type of mobilized enemy.
If you recall, Abdul Muttalib and the Quraysh withdrew to the mountains when Abraha stationed his army six miles east of Makka and said, “We will not fight him and will free up all that lies between him and the House. If Allah puts nothing in his way to stop him from reaching it, then, by Allah, we have no strength against him” (Seerah Ibn Hisham, 1/48).
It was the same when Alexander the Great crossed over the north. He also skirted the Peninsula entirely in 334 B.C. His map of the Helenian empire shows a border that spans lands to the east, west, and even north of the Peninsula, but the Peninsula itself is virginal like an empty outcropping of land surrounded by water.
This unwanted land was a paradise for the Bedouin. The inhospitable nature of the Peninsula, its dry climate, unchartered deserts, and lack of growth and vegetation, fortressed him against the hegemony of foreign influence and culture. The bedouin operated in this natural fortress with complete autonomy and practiced his faith, traditions, and ancestral, nomadic itinerancy in the same way without change or fluctuation for thousands of years. The values of the bedouin always remained the same and their principle mode of survival on the sheep and camel unchanged. One author writes,
“The nomad, as a type, is today what he was yesterday and what he will be tomorrow. His culture pattern has always been the same. Variation, progress, evolution are not among the laws he readily obeys. Immune to the invasion of exotic ideas and manners, he still lives, as his forbears did, in tents of goats’ or camels’ hair, “houses of hair”, and grazes his sheep and goats in the same fashion and on the same pastures. Sheep- and camel-raising, and to a lesser degree horse-breeding, hunting, and raiding, form his staple occupation and are to his mind the only occupations worthy of a man. Agriculture and all varieties of trade and craft are beneath his dignity. If and when he frees himself from his environment, he is no more a nomad. In the Fertile Crescent empires have come and gone, but in the barren wastes, the Bedouin has remained forever the same.”[1]
Indeed, even recent historical accounts of explorers like Burton in the mid-19th century, Burchardt in the early 19th century, William Palgrave in 1862-63, and Paul Harrison in the early 20th century paint the same narrative of a medieval society that was still herding sheep and camels and living in camels’ hair tents.[2]
Marc Lowey, an Aramco expat, in his blog has a page entitled Tales of the Bedouin in which his indigenous Arab colleagues share fascinating stories of their harsh, Bedu lives in the desert in the 1940-50’s.
Quriyan Mohammed Al-Hajri was one such son of a bedouin who was born in the eastern province of As Sarrar. Quriyan himself became a surveyor for Aramco and was known as the “human GPS,” a skill he had honed growing up deep in the desert.
He tells how once in 1969 he was sitting with his father and uncles and there was a flash of lightning in the sky.
The father said, “It’s raining near Thaj.”
He goes on to say, “Since no one else saw what he saw, and because Thaj was about 100 kilometers away, we found it difficult to believe that my father had seen something so far away. But the eyes of the Bedouin are very sharp. Bedouins eat the meat of the camel, they drink the milk of the camel, and they walk long distances in the desert without shoes. This is why they are healthy and sharp-eyed. This is why Bedouins can see far away.”[3] The father turned out to be right.
There was a trade-off the bedouin made with the desert. The desert would preserve his culture, offer the unbridled freedom to graze his beloved sheep and camels, provide sovereignty so that he lives under none but the authority of Allah, and be fearless of any interference to his pastoral tendencies. In return, he must endure hunger, walk the parched sand without shoes or slippers, and don his body with bare skin against the unforgiving sun, i.e. compromise those bare necessities that are the regular economy of man.
One author writes,
“The life of the bedouin was full of privations. In the rare snowy winters, young camels perished, female camels stopped giving milk and the livestock starved. A dry summer, too, spelled hardship and danger. Even the scarce reserves of dates and grain came to an end and poor bedouin ate wild tubers and fruit; many of them died of malnutrition. Their summer pastures usually lie close to cemeteries.”[4]
The bedouin complied with these wishes and lived this nomadic and meager existence in cheerful poise. For as long as his herds of camel and sheep were his to roam from pasture to pasture, and his fealty to tribe and clan was robust, he would endure anything to body and soul in order to remain in the sandy borders, and he would be saved from the greatest threat of assimilation.
He would bow to no one and answer only to himself. His sense of individualism and equality was beyond anything a westerner could imagine.
Paul Harrison notes, “A man with a lean, sinewy, piano-wire physique, a keen, active mind, and an incomparably free and untrammeled spirit, he is at once the most incorrigible individualist and the greatest internationalist in the world. Under a burden of poverty and hard living conditions such as are endured by perhaps no other people in the world, he stand unbent and upright, cheerfully contemptuous of all the luxuries and comforts of more favored races…his love of liberty and his stubborn belief in the essential equality of all men are at once a rebuke and a model for the rest of the world.”[5]
Funny enough, but even in this bare subsistence, the Arabs suffered from a superiority complex. They earnestly believed that their way of life was superior to everyone outside the borders of the desert expanse.
As Peter Mansfield noted, “But while some of the Arabs adopted a sedentary way of life, the nomadic tribes, who held a strong military advantage over the settlements, remained convinced of the superiority of their own style of living. Moreover, most of the settled peoples showed that they accepted this belief by adopting nomadic values; some of them abandoned their settlements for the freedom of the desert.”[6]
We find this to be true even in the seerah of the Prophet (peace be upon him). A group of women had come down from the villages to take the newborns of Quraysh to nurse and raise them, Haleema Sa‘diyya (ra) taking the Prophet (peace be upon him) back with her to Banu Sa‘d.
The Seerah-biographers explain that that the Quraysh and other sedentary tribes saw the nomadic code as the quintessence of the Arab way of life. They felt that sedentary lifestyle had modernized them, their frequent trade expeditions to cosmopolitan cities to the north and south, and their intermingling with Byzantine and Persia even if only for business purposes had diminished them in their true ‘Arabness.’ Whatever changes they felt was always measured against the roaming nomads of the desert. This is why sending children off to the desert in the care of these nomads was necessary.
It was due to this superiority complex of the nomads and the inferiority complex of their sedentary brothers that the Arabs remained defiant of the modernizing world around them. As the world integrated itself to a new industrial age, the Arabs were still mired in the traditions of the past.
Then the process of modernization kicked off in the 19th century with inventions that ushered in a new dawn. The steam engine, locomotive, telephone, telegraph, the internal combustion engine, rifle, ironclad ships, medicine, and electricity/light bulb all fundamentally changed our modes of thinking, transportation, occupations, our economies, and improved our ways of life. Democratic and secular institutions were formed, the industrial revolution and the age of science came introducing a new paradigm to the way the world thought and worked. While these colossal shifts reconstructed the world stage, the bedouin Arab remained frozen in primitivism. One would enter the Arabian Peninsula feeling like they had teleported into the 7th century or even earlier. It was a microcosm of the medieval era still enduring through the 20th century. Islam had indeed brought changes in the norms, mores, and worldview of the Arab, but it did not change the geography that defined the ethos of the Arab.
Even after Islamic conquest exposed the Arab to progressive civilizations and the downfall of the reigning dynasties and superpowers of the time upturned the economic plight of Arabia, the Arabs were preset to the harsh nomadic life in the desert and their most prized possessions— the sheep and camels.
Ali al-Naimi was a bedouin who was later appointed the first Saudi president of Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabian American Oil Company).
In his autobiography, he writes, “The world I was born into in 1935 had remained all but unchanged for hundreds of years. The family’s efforts provided enough to eat, but little more. The rhythm of seasonal migration were set by nature, by the endless search for water and grass for our camels, sheep and goats. It was a way of life largely untouched by the modern world. To say we didn’t understand modern finance and technology would be an understatement; most of those in this tribal culture had no knowledge that such things existed at all. I could just as easily have been born in the 1830’s, the 1730’s or possibly even the 1630’s and had a very similar barefooted boyhood to the one I experienced in the Saudi Arabia of my youth.”[7]
But then the traditional Bedouin society that had ruled the desert life of the Arabian Peninsula for thousands of years was to forever change. Oil was discovered in 1938 in the eastern province of Arabia, which funded the centralized state founded by Ibn Saud in the early 1900’s.
It established a combined identity for the Arabs as a nation, replacing the intertribal system that cast tribes in a permanent tug of war against each other.
Though, the centralization of the Peninsula itself was not powerful enough to exact radical transformation in a traditional hermetic society.
The oil revenue changed all that.
The concessionary policies and reforms funded by petrodollars and introduced by the new centralized state lured the Peninsular nation to restructure itself to the mold of the modern world.
Alexel Vassiliev notes, “The collision between the traditional socio-political institutions, which had developed from within Saudi society itself, and the modernizing trends from outside did not upset the state’s socio-political balance in the first decade. There were two main reasons for this: the impact of modernization, which came from far more developed states of the Middle East, was still weak; and second, the traditional structures were still dominant. The situation underwent a radical change only in the late 1940’s, when the sudden vast inflow of oil revenues undermined the earlier society in Saudi Arabia.”[8]
The phenomena was so spectacular and unexpected that one historian, Arthur Young was forced to say,
“It was in the decades between the two world wars that Saudi Arabia began to change from a land of nomads, oases, and a few walled towns to one of the world's key countries. The major causes of change were the unification of most of Arabia by Abd al-Aziz, commonly known as Ibn Saud, and the discovery of the world's richest oil fields. During less than half a century [of] these events, with the efforts of Saudi's leaders and people, have had a spectacular effect . . . in a way without precedent in history.”[9]
This modernization process, which concentrated itself on urbanizing the Arab peoples, led to the slow dissolution of the nomadic life.
New Riyadh
Rubble of old Riyadh
David Long writes, “How long the traditional patterns of Saudi society will remain entrenched is an open question. Saudi society, which was at a preindustrial level just a few decades ago, is rushing into modernity at an unbelievable pace. The impact of development on the society is everywhere present. Urbanization is bringing people to the cities, where they are cut off from the support systems of tradition society. Modern communication and transportation have brought the world to the doorstep of what had long been one of the most remote and isolated countries on earth.[10]
In another article, William Polk observes,
“In 1950, the country had almost no roads so that travel to many regions amounted to expeditions; today superhighways crisscross the country. Then its few telephones were virtually inoperative even across town in the capital; today, one can dial direct from even the most remote sites to any other "modern" center in the world more easily than in most of Europe and much of America. Then, there was virtually no public entertainment and little education other than rudimentary religious schools; today, television reaches into every house and virtually every family has dozens, many have thousands, of video tapes from Japan, Europe and America, while free education up to and including the universities of Europe and America is the citizen's right. In 1950 even minor ailments required treatment abroad, but today huge medical complexes tower over all the cities. In the avalanche of the new, much of the old has simply vanished. The desert today is truly deserted as the Bedouin have sought the cities' bright lights. Walled villages have been submerged beneath concrete, glass and asphalt. It is easier, of course, to document the passing of the old than to discern the pattern of the new. The Saudis have had little time for or interest in nostalgia; for them the past often means pain, privation and weakness.”[11]
The move from nomadic to urbanite is irreversible because few will contemplate returning from an air-conditioned villa to a camel-haired tent in the blazing heat of the desert. Today, 83% of the population is in the most populous cities of Riyadh, Jeddah, followed by Makka, and then Madina Munawwara, an unprecedented change in the history of the Peninsula that is referred to as “The New Arab Social Order” by at least one leading sociologist.12 The oil boom created massive internal migrations to the cities, converted villages into towns, while founding many new towns with a sizable population in previously rural areas. As stated in the U.N. website for urban development, “While growth in the largest cities has been very significant, it is not confined to them only: smaller cities outside Riyadh and other major urban concentrations have also witnessed similar growth. The number of cities in Saudi Arabia increased from 58 in 1936 to 258 in 2004 and lately to 285 in 2015, distributed over 13 regions and 118 governorates.13 The pace of urbanization has accelerated over the past 20 years and is expected to reach up to 93 % by 2030, which has boosted the demand for massive construction projects to meet the needs of a burgeoning urban population.
A typical example of this is the mega-expansion of the Haram in Makka and the Clock Tower overlooking the Masjid Haram itself. The only significant difference is that the construction projects in the Holy City are designed to meet the needs of the global population, while the cosmopolitan Jeddah and Riyadh are expanding upward and outward due to mostly domestic population. As stated in the Middle East Journal, “Petrodollars enabled the authorities to undertake prestigious building projects, attract the best architects and use the most expensive building materials.”[12]
The change was rapid and rather disastrous for an ancient and insular society that had been hardened and sheltered by the desert against inflictions on their ancestral ways.
The saying “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen” best encapsulates the perishing of the conservative, traditional society that was impervious to any change over the centuries, but was now undergoing rapid and radical ones by a natural windfall within two decades.
As one historian notes, “Nonetheless, by seeking to look behind the stereotypes, one can glimpse the Saudis as they really are—a deeply religious, traditionally conservative, proud people who have been forced to make the transition from the preindustrial to the modern age in less than two generations.”[13]
Oil Glut
The glut of oil wealth modernized the Peninsula, yet it also corrupted its internal code that identified Arab as an altogether different breed in the human race. The rugged, hardworking, unmaterialistic Arab who was once the paragon of endurance, forbearance, and hospitality, was now more drawn to leisure and extravagance.
As it often is with inherited wealth that is come by without risk and labor, oil wealth created an attitude of entitlement. The inheritors exhibited all the vanity and pompousness that juxtaposed against the rusticness of the pre-oil era reflected the massive impact of oil wealth on the Peninsula.
This did not go unnoticed by those who had lived through the pre and post oil era like Milad Hanna an Egyptian sociologist, “who remembers the years before World War II, when Egyptians would take up a collection for the ‘poor people of Mecca [in Saudi Arabia]’ and send beautifully embroidered cloth for the holiest shrines on the Arabian peninsula. "It was the other way around then," he says, ‘We were the rich country, and looked up to.’”[1]
The Vainest Buildings
An example of this internal “petro-decay” is the idea of what one architect calls the “vainest” buildings. The “vainest” buildings are the type of buildings that rise into the sky with added features like spires and unrentable space at the top that increase the height but serve no practical function except to wow and please the eye. UAE, one of the states in the Arabian Peninsula tops the list.
According to The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH), “Unusable space at the top of the UAE's 19 tallest buildings was an average 19 percent of their total height, a measure it called the "vanity height.”
The Jeddah Tower will rise 1 km high (3281 feet), the tallest building in the world after completion in 2023, at an estimated cost of 1.2 billion dollars.
It goes on to say, “The building with the largest vanity height is the 2,716 feet Burj Khalifa in Dubai, of which 29 percent or 800 feet is unusable - which would rank on its own as the 11th tallest building in Europe.”[2] But why?
If it doesn’t serve any meaningful function and the cost is over a billion petrodollars, what purpose does it have to justify such a profligate amount?
The Ego Element
Steve Watts, the chairman of CTBUH surmises that the reason may be nothing more than ego.
He says, “There can also be an ego element with these things with developers wanting to go higher than each other.”[3]
So, while the numbers of building projects in the Peninsular cities (including Qatar, Dubai, etc.) rose with the increasing demands of urbanization, many of the tallest buildings were built in spite of it by oil wealth.
The competition has been on between several of the peninsular countries to build the highest skyscraper to pierce the clouds. The cost of each project, like the Jeddah Tower and the Dubai Creek Tower, is over a billion dollars each, both of which were slated for completion in 2020 until the Coronavirus pandemic struck. Jason Gabel, communications manager for CTBUH, notes that many countries have planned for building skyscrapers but “The competitive situation we now see between Saudi Arabia and the UAE is very unique.”[4]
Competition betweeen K.S.A and U.A.E
Both countries are tapping into petro coffers to finance these mega-towers though quantitively speaking, UAE has already outdone the desert giant in numbers. As one article puts it, “Home to more than 65 high-rises over 656 feet (200m) tall and counting, Dubai has become synonymous with futuristic skyscrapers, and has been a pioneer of this in the Middle East.” It is not merely a matter of coincidence that both countries are putting up the tallest buildings at the same time. The competition is cutthroat as the headlines suggest:
One headline:
SAUDI ARABIA VS DUBAI: THE 2020 RACE FOR THE WORLD’S TALLEST TOWER
CNN:
DUBAI AND SAUDI ARABIA TOWERS IN TIME WAR TO BE WORLD’S TALLEST
And Yahoo:
WATCH OUT, DUBAI: SAUDI ARABIA IS BUILDING WORLD’S TALLEST TOWER
[1]Hitti, P. (1970). History of the Arabs, (pp. 23-24)
[2] Roots of the ethnic slur that Arabs are camel jockeys is based in true fact. Saudi Arabia has even laid out Camel Jockey regulations such as the Royal Decree M/964.
[3] Lowey, M. (2020, January 22). Tales of the Bedouin - Part I. https://www.aramcoexpats.com/articles/tales-of-the-bedouin-part-i/
[4] R. Montagne. La Civilisation, (p. 45)
[5] Harrison, Paul. (1924). The Arab at Home. (p. 330)
[6] Mansfield, Peter. (1976). The Arabs, (p. 14)
[7] Al-Naimi, Ali (2016), Out of the Desert; My Journey From Nomadic Bedouin to the Heart of Global Oil, (p. 9)
[8] Vassiliev, Alexel. (2000). The History of Saudi Arabia, (p. 242)
[9] Young, Arthur N. (1983), Saudi Arabia, (p.1)
[10] Ibid, (p. 24)
[11] Polk, W. (1982, January 31). Saudi Arabia: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1982/01/31/saudi-arabiafrom-bedouins-to-oil-barons/bef09597-7dd2-481c-9a85-1041320e0a63/
[12] https://www.osti.gov/biblio/6744917-new-arab-social-order-study-social-impact-oil-wealth
[13] Saudi Arabia - Urban Issues: UN-Habitat. https://unhabitat.org/saudi-arabia-urban-issues
[14] (Peterson, S. (1999, August 05). Arab power ebbs and flows with oil prices. https://www.csmonitor.com/1999/0805/p7s1.html)
[15] Bill, T. (2013, September 05). UAE has the world's 'vainest' skyscrapers: Report. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uae-towers-idUSBRE9840IF20130905)
[16] Trinh, B. (2013, September 09). Oh Burj Khalifa, You're So Vain. https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/09/09/burj-khalifa-vainest-building_n_3894341.html
[17] CNN. (2019, March 04). Dubai and Saudi Arabia towers in time war to be world's tallest. https://egyptindependent.com/dubai-and-saudi-arabia-towers-in-time-war-to-be-worlds-tallest/
