(2 of 10)
The U.S. Government's scrupulous hands-off attitude does not imply a lack of concern. At Dhahran, the U.S. has built and maintained a major airfield, whose 10,000-ft. runways could land long-range bombers in case of war. Around the shores of the Persian Gulf lie three-quarters of the world's oil reserves, one-sixth of those reserves in Saudi Arabia alone.
Oil and geography have thrust Arabia back onto the stage of history from which it had vanished for over a thousand years. Then the Sons of the Prophet swarmed out of the desert to destroy the infidel and conquer an empire for Allah —an empire bigger than Rome's, which vanished and left as relics the tongue of Arabic and the faith of Islam that five times daily calls 300 million Moslems to bow down toward Mecca in concentric windrows that stretch from Morocco on the West to Indonesia on the East. After the Arab tide receded, Arabia drowsed for centuries in its black tents, unnoticed and unnoticing as history passed it by—the bleak and secret land of Islam's holy places forbidden to all but the faithful. In all Arabia there was not a single factory, a hard-topped road, a telephone.
Then, in 1938, Aramco (invited in by Saud's father because "Americans get oil out of the ground, and they -stay out of politics") tapped the black gold beneath the deserts. Delayed by the war, production began in quantity in 1945. Overnight refineries spraddled the shore of the Persian Gulf, pipelines crawled past ancient caravan trails to the Mediterranean. As money poured in on the kingdom whose national treasury used to be carried in a camel's saddlebags, princes born to the saddle splashed in shaded swimming pools and traders of pearls and spices became sellers of Chevrolets.
The Wahabis. Neither training nor heritage has equipped 55-year-old King Saud for the test history has set him—"to bring Arabia's medieval society into workable relationship to the 20th century, which is flooding in on it. His father Ibn Saud was a desert warrior, whose domains were oases deep in Arabia's barren heartland. The Saudis were fanatic disciples of Mohammed Wahab, Islam's 18th century Martin Luther, who cried that Islam had fallen on evil ways. Ibn Saud became the scourging sword of Wahabism, a zealot whose savagery in the name of Allah struck terror throughout the length and breadth of Arabia's inner desert. The aristocratic Hashemites, who ruled in the holy land of the west coast and sent their sons to Harrow for education and Paris for experience, laughed at the Saudis as narrow and ignorant yokels. Faced with a choice in World War I, the British backed the Hashemites. But in 1924, Ibn Saud and his Wahabis stormed down from the remote desert and swept the soft-living Hashemites into the sea. Like avenging angels, they drove the prostitutes from the holy cities of Medina and Mecca, smashed the tombs not hallowed by the Koran. Wahabi vigilantes roved the streets, wrecking shops that failed to close at prayer time, beating those caught smoking, ruling the land in an austere discipline that Arabia had not known in centuries.