Introduction

Within the psyche of Western European thought, the word 'Arab' in general and the name 'Saudi Arabia' in particular has, in the past, connoted multiple meanings. On the one hand, there are the mythologies of Lawrence of Arabia's and Wilfred Thesiger's 'noble savage' version of the Bedouin, but on the other, and intentionally less flattering, notions of tribalism, anti-progress and a duplicitous nature have been expounded. At a level of scholarship and intellect, Edward Said (1978) has successfully demolished these views in his work on Orientalism as colonialist-inspired instrument of cultural repression. Ranna Kabbani (1994) has also worked towards confuting the cultural mythologies through her analysis of Orientalist images. Said's work has been described eloquently by Salman Rushdie (Said, 1995; this essay first published 1986) as an analysis of 'the affiliation of knowledge with power' and how the carefully manufactured social construct of 'the Arab' was used to provide the 'justification for the supremacist ideology of imperialism' in yet another example of binary divide, not so much Lévi-Strauss' 'raw and cooked' but more as a form of van der Ploeg's (1993: 210) scientific knowledge vs. 'art de la localité' (wherein Western power is bounded by 'proper' or rational knowledge and that of the East is perceived as folkloric and superstitious). The history of Saudi Arabia is intertwined with British colonialism, the US' blind allegiance to Israel and the geopolitics of oil (and increasingly, water). It is the US-Israeli axis of course that has enabled new forms of Orientalism to arise – witness Western, especially CNN, media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict of April 2002 and the virtual non-coverage of the obscene wall being built (at the time of writing the present chapter, July / August 2003) by the Israelis partly on the Palestinian homelands.