Saudi Arabia Exposed strongly particularizes cultural trends within Saudi Arabia and ties them to larger analyses about the country. Bradley’s major focus lies with the people of Saudi Arabia. He often centers on stories of the poor, disenfranchised people, but includes the middle-class and the wealthy. Though he occasionally finds himself emotionally invested with some of the people he describes, he remains mostly indifferent and his arguments are solid.
Far from everyone in Saudi Arabia living in oil-fueled splendor, imported laborers face nasty and brutish working and living conditions. The slums serve as breeding grounds for terrorism. With few acceptable methods of airing grievances and publicly debating political issues, Bradley posits that the worst-off in the country will keep turning to terrorism.
Bradley particularizes the psychological forces that affect Saudis and the foreign laborers that work for them, including the forces that encourage hatred of both the West and the Al-Saud princes. He devotes several pages to the foreign laborers in the country and the “flower men” of the southern province. Bradley illustrates the squalid living conditions of the first group, and the forms of oppression both groups experience. He also obliterates the idea of the population being homogeneous, as he describes oppressed people along their provincial, religious, and tribal origins, and the varying degrees to which they submit to the Al-Saud clan.
One of Bradley’s harsher criticisms concerns the Al-Saud’s resistance to introducing reforms. The lack of reform has hindered the populace’s ability to cope with the rapidity of their modernization. Because the Al-Sauds did not create a “civil society,” the tensions between various ethnic, religious, and regional groups will only increase as the price of oil–the source of the wealth that quells the populace–fluctuates, and the population grows larger without forums for airing ideas and forming consensus (44).
He discusses the effects that segregation of the sexes has on the people in more detail than is present in other books, including how youth find ways of exchanging numbers despite purdah. Bradley includes the sobering reality that many women, often unable to marry for love or divorce of their own choice, become depressed from living in unhealthy, occasionally abusive, marriages. One person Bradley interviewed mentions that the hospital workers tell these women to “take up a hobby so they don’t think about their situation too much” (174).
Bradley covers censorship of the press, which he argues comes from both above (the Ministry of Information, editors) and below (journalists, photographers). The media environment is what Bradley describes as a “cultural wasteland” that does not inform or enrich Saudi’s lives (198). The newspapers in the country are mostly mouthpieces for the government, and Saudis do not read them or trust them. This is especially true as wealthier Saudis can get satellite television to tell them about the world. Media in the Kingdom is essentially gagged, and those few glimmers of hope that Bradley profiles are often alone in the woods, or are co-opted to positions of some influence by the government and forced to follow the government’s official policies for fear of their safety.
The book’s criticism becomes harsher in the latter portion of the book, but serves more to point out the weaknesses of the country, rather than a wholesale condemnation of the people. His conclusion is brief, and offers an ambivalent hope that the country will come out of the conflict of terrorism and a delegitimized government. On the whole, Saudi Arabia exposed, while reiterating many facets of the country found in other books, offers very compelling individual stories that breathes life into the ethnic, religious, and political tensions that the Saudi leadership cannot paper over with money.
