Ibn Saud

Author : Daniël Meulen
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 348 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Download or read book The Wells of Ibn Saʻud written by Daniël Meulen and published by . This book was released on 1957 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic rise to power of the Sa'udi family in Central Arabia and the emergence of the country from early Moslem ways into the modern materialism of the West are vividly described in this book by a Dutch official stationed in South Arabia from 1926 to 1931 and from 1941 to 1945. This is much more than a personal memoir. Through the account of his long service in Sa'udi Arabia, the author gives the reader a unique perspective on this feudal land. The personal glimpses of Arab life, the author's acquaintance with Ibn Sa'ud and St. John Philby, and his affection for the pilgrim town of Jedda, are the more interesting because he is Dutch and thus in a position to compare impartially the impact upon Arabia of the British and the Americans. He knew the spiritual wells that inspired Ibn Sa'ud in the austere Wahhabi faith and he witnessed the mastery of the material wells, wells of oil, that came into conflict with the faith and broke it. He saw also wells of precious water - to the Arab "The Blessing of Allah" - produced by American technology, and often poured out to waste in the desert. The reader first glimpses Jedda through the author's eye as he arrives there in 1926. He discusses the history of the ancient town and its significance as the port of entrance to the spiritual and geographical center of Islam. Then he explores the influence of Wahhabism upon the Sa'udi dynasty and the political developments of the Arabian peninsula, particularly Ibn Sa'ud's becoming the ruler of the new Arab nation. Contacts with the outside world are taken up : first, the complicated British-Arab relationship with its political overtones; then its gradual replacement by the technical and commercial interests of the Americans. The religious and political conflicts involved in the meeting between East and West are explored, as are the questions of Palestine and the Arab League and the effects on the economy of the growing oil industry and the new agriculture based on irrigation. In 1952 the author returned to Arabia to visit the old King Ibn Sa'ud and his family. While awaiting the Crown Prince in the garden of his new home, the an-Nasriyya Palace, he had an experience which typified the vast changes that had taken place during his long service as Dutch Minister to Sa'udi Arabic. As the hour for sunset prayer drew near, he writes, "hundreds of coloured electric light bulbs burst into light...the minaret suddenly rose up floodlit out of the dark... from the top of the minaret a modern loudspeaker started to rend the air with a metallic roar that Allah was the most great." Summing up this last visit, the author says: "The reality was that in the garden of an-Nasriyya we had witnessed not a return to an Arabian Night of Harun ar-Rashid but a demonstration that what should have been the last bulwark of Wahhabism was in full retreat from advancing materialism." The story of Ibn Sa'ud, whose story this book relates, is superficially, or materially, a success story. But spiritually, as Mr. van der Meulen views it, it has its bitter aspect, as the King began to realize before he died.