‘Crosswinds’ Review: Middle East Balancing Act An exploration of the Saudi temper that has both the interpretative heft of scholarship and the anecdotal brilliance of literary travelogue. By Martin Peretz
Search for recent news articles about Saudi Arabia and the first name certain to appear is that of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist and inside player of Saudi power politics who was exiled from the kingdom, became an outspoken critic of the House of Saud, and in October 2018 met his gruesome end in an ambush inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul—an attack about which Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman denies any foreknowledge. The Khashoggi incident was met by world-wide revulsion; it’s been a blow to Saudi Arabia’s reputation that, in comparison to those of the kingdom’s neighbors, is warranted but not deserved. Every day, for example, more evidence surfaces of the top-down human-rights abuses in Iran and the unending human wreckage caused by the Syrian genocide. Still, Khashoggi’s fate has become a more potent symbol than either of these, emblematic of an increasingly hardline, conservative regime that the American foreign-policy establishment, and much of the American public, dislikes and distrusts.
Actions don’t exist outside of contexts. Insisting on a less myopic look at Saudi Arabia doesn’t mean excusing Khashoggi’s murder, but it does mean contextualizing it, bringing to it an analytical commitment to complexity too often attenuated in our times. This is the indirect achievement of “Crosswinds,” a posthumous book by Fouad Ajami that makes sense of the Saudi kingdom on its own terms—terms dense and tense with possibilities.
The Lebanon-born Ajami, who died in 2014 at age 68, was director of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and America’s most prominent pragmatic idealist about the possibilities of liberalization in the Middle East. “Crosswinds,” completed in 2010 and drawing on 30 years of anecdote and analysis, attempts to gauge those possibilities in Saudi Arabia, not as an apologia for the kingdom but as a corrective to facile critiques.
In this work, more penetrating than argumentative and more deepening than sweeping, Ajami shows that behind its deliberately opaque exterior, modern Saudi Arabia has been defined by the calibration of tensions between competing forces: deep conservatism and yearnings for modernity; the ferocity of radicalism and the dependability of oil revenues; pressures from America to move left and from Iran to move right. The role of the monarchy in negotiating these crosswinds implicitly repudiates the brutal despotic repressions of regional neighbors like Iran and Syria: the Saudis may be authoritarians but they are also pragmatists.
Pragmatists their neighbors most certainly are not: One of Ajami’s revelatory explanations is of the negative role played by the radicalism of the Iranian Revolution in shaping Saudi Arabia. Writes Ajami: “There was no kingship in Islam, [Ayatollah] Khomeini asserted, and this Islam in the Peninsula was only ‘American Islam,’ an instrument of the Great Satan.” In response, to maintain its religious identity, Saudi leadership gave conservative preachers, the religious establishment, and their enforcers (the religious police the mutawwa) more and more rope. Ajami uses observations gathered firsthand to emphasize the acuteness of this shift.
He focuses particularly on the revolution’s impact on Saudi women, who in the mid-1970s were permitted education for the first time, only to see liberalization recede soon after. Indeed, Ajami’s most sustained critique in these pages is of repressive gender norms, and he allows a chorus of articulate, well-educated women to speak for themselves about restrictions that limit their lives. In one particularly telling line, a Saudi woman laments the loss of a world that placed “less emphasis on religion” and allowed one to cultivate “a genuine desire for the modern world, a curiosity about the movies of Egypt and about the literary output of Beirut, about the pop culture of America.” Crucially, Ajami probes the political consequences of these restrictions: “Young men denied normal access to the company, and to the world, of women are damaged”; they “desire and despise women at the same time,” which results in both “sexual repression and compensatory militant zeal.”
Also in “Crosswinds” Ajami brings his intricate knowledge of American geopolitics to tracing the convergence of this militant zeal with America’s Middle Eastern ventures in the years after the Iranian Revolution. In Ajami’s telling, the first Gulf War put Saudi leadership further on the defensive against reactive Islam—spotlighting its dependence on America for security despite what was seen as the defiling presence of U.S. troops on Saudi soil. Osama bin Laden—with the tacit applause of the Saudi elite, some of whom funded terrorism while maintaining close ties with the royal family and the state security apparatus—nurtured that insult all the way to 9/11. The book unwinds this evolution with a deft combination of exposition and earthy example: It has the interpretive heft of a scholarly work and the sharp observation of a literary writer’s travelogue.
This approach pays dividends, even when it comes to predicting a future Ajami could not see—the book unearths the Saudi government’s unease at the beginning of President Obama’s pivot to Iran in 2009 and 2010. Indeed, it was Mr. Obama’s turn toward Iran that eventually concentrated and hardened the Saudi mind: perceiving a real threat, the Saudis began to detach from America and look to their own defense and alliances, balancing less and asserting more. Today, under the extremely assertive, sometimes reckless crown prince, the presence of the mutawwa and the influence of the religious establishment is much diminished. But, even as the prince has lifted a ban on women driving, he has cracked down on women human-rights campaigners and demoted pragmatic reformers like the former foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir.
Ajami cannot tell us about these developments, but his socially astute, politically savvy book leaves us with a more nuanced view of the kingdom’s evolution and of its causes, some of which can be traced to our doorstep. Whether Mohammed bin Salman deserves derision, support, or something in between, Saudi Arabia did not reach its current impasse by accident: 40 years of relentless Iranian aggression and intermittent American naivete helped drive the kingdom there.
Mr. Peretz was editor in chief of the New Republic from 1974 until 2011.
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