ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most common approach to the analysis of developments in Saudi Arabia is to describe them in terms of a struggle between the forces of traditionalism and those of modernism: the path which events have taken (especially since the discovery of oil) is seen as determined by the interaction of – and ultimately conflict between – these two contradictory tendencies. The most fundamental problem facing the contemporary state, therefore, is described as the likelihood of modern technology (with its associated social attitudes) undermining the traditional foundations of the state. Manfred Wenner, for example, describes Saudi Arabia as a ‘patriarchal desert state’ and characterises the pursuit of modernisation programmes by the traditional elite as ‘the contradiction of Saudi Arabia today’. 1 Robert Crane, similarly, sees the bedouin as providing the ‘cultural bedrock of Islamic values’ on which the Saudi state is based, and stresses the importance of government programmes which counter the threat that Western technology poses to the traditional foundations of the state. 2 The latter conception echoes one of the themes in the guidelines laid down for the Second Five-Year Plan of Saudi Arabia (1975–80), 3 and is also to be found in the writings of George Lenczowski, 4 Michael Hudson 5 and Stephen Duguid. 6
