Book Review: If Olaya Street Could Talk--Saudi Arabia: the Heartland of Oil and Islam, by John Paul Jones

(Published Aug. 28, 2007 in BC Magazine--Book Review: If Olaya Street Could Talk - Saudi Arabia: the Heartland of Oil and Islam by John Paul Jones )

At once personal memoir, travel narrative, and cultural and political commentary.

What do we really know about Saudi Arabia? What does the North American general public know about the Kingdom aside from what is absorbed through media references? And if our sources of information about the Arab and Muslim world in general, and Saudi Arabia in particular, are mass media sources--tabloids, newspapers, magazines, radio and television shows, and let's not forget Hollywood--what exactly is it that we learn? Do we learn anything of substance? Anything positive? Anything but propaganda and crude caricatures of the Other viewed through prevailing political and ideological prisms?

After decades of negative portrayals in the news media and villainous stereotypes in Hollywood movies, a growing number of scholars, filmmakers and writers are not only pointing out that there exists a long history of anti-Arab racism in American mass media, but also that such portrayals have and continue to contribute to the rise of Islamic extremism and terrorism. Among them are Jack Shaheen's Reel Bad Arabs, Steve Salaita's Terrifying Patriotism: How Anti-Arab Racism Justifies Empire and Threatens Democracy, and Tran Nguyen's We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories of Immigrant America After 9/11. Others, such as Chomsky and Roy, discuss the issue within the larger framework of Nation and Empire. But these are products of post-9/11 America, arising at a time, and in a climate, where they simply can no longer be ignored.

John Paul Jones, in the introduction to his book, If Olaya Street Could Talk: Saudi Arabia, the Heartland of Oil & Islam, states that, unlike the books and articles he had read about France, another country he had learned to appreciate, with Saudi Arabia "it is only the exceptional book or article that reflects my experience. The others seem a crude caricature, like wartime propaganda, and much of this was even before 9/11." It is his hope that this book will be a "step in changing American perceptions of Saudi Arabia in particular, and the Arabs in general, and further an examination of how and why those shifts in 'tribal thinking' occur" that give rise to conflicts and war. Writing about his experience in Saudi Arabia, though he'd never intended to do so, "eventually became an imperative. To contribute to ending the ideology of war without end should be a sufficient reason."

If Olaya Street Could Talk is at once personal memoir, travel narrative, and cultural and political commentary. It draws on his experience as an American expatriate living and working in Saudi Arabia for nearly a quarter century. Though the book is essentially about his experiences in Saudi Arabia, his participation, though not by choice, in the Vietnam war during his youth also comes up more than once, playing an important role not only in the plot, so to speak, in that it launched him into the career that would later lead him to work in Saudi Arabia, but also in his perspective of the changes he witnesses while in Riyadh, particularly the political/religious/ideological changes leading up to and accelerating after the events of 9/11. His Vietnam experience forms an important backdrop to the overall narrative, adding weight especially to observations made constituting cultural/political commentary.

When first reading about the book, I expected a book heavy on theory and commentary. And because of the current cultural and political climate with the 'war on terror' being waged not only on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, but increasingly also against the Other at home, the ideological 'war without end', I expected a dark and depressing read. Although there are moments, small sections here and there, that can arouse anger, outrage and sadness in the politically and culturally aware reader, but more so in those with personal experience, that is certainly not the tenor of the book as a whole.

The opening chapters explain not only how Jones got to Saudi Arabia, how he came to work at the King Faisal Specialty Hospital in Riyadh, but also provide some background to illuminate the title of the book. It is a line adapted from W. C. Handy's "Beale Street Blues." Beale Street is of course the street in Memphis credited as the birthplace of the Blues. Jones was there in April of 1993 listening to the Blues with an Arab, the one who had hired him to return with him to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia after studying St. Jude's operation, the hospital after which King Faisal Specialist Hospital was modeled. Jones quite deftly, using no more than a couple of paragraphs, creates a link between the cultural divide in America and the cultural divides in the Middle East. His Arab companion may not have been able to experience the full effect of the Blues because he did not know the history of the anguish that gave rise to it. Although not explored in much depth, he points out that the almost haphazard creation of new countries, new kingdoms, in the Arabian Peninsula, created deep cultural divides with consequences difficult for us to understand.

If Olaya Street Could Talk is an easy read. The writing is simple and straightforward. The fact that so much of the book reads like the personal memoir of an American expat living abroad, interspersed with frequent travel narratives, tales of road trips, camping, exploration, and scuba diving, makes it a much lighter read than a book solely focused on the Middle East crises or the conditions leading up to and contributing to them. It is these parts that make the heavy parts, the enraging and depressing parts, easier to handle. Many of the more academic books on culture, politics and war, and specifically on the aforementioned crises, can result in emotional overload and are consequently difficult to read straight through.

Though certainly not a history book, Jones manages to get some of the basics of Saudi history into the narrative. Of course the snippets of history he shares contribute to the larger narrative. He tells, mainly to provide some historical background not only to the particular incident of the seizure and occupation of the Grand Mosque in Makkah (Mecca), but also to the gradual rise of Wahabi extremism in Saudi Arabia, how the House of Saud had formed a loose alliance in the 1800s with Abdul Wahab. Abdul Aziz, in the early 1900s, once again made use of the latest incarnation of the Wahabites, the Ikhwan, the Brotherhood, in order to unify much of the Arabian Peninsula and establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The same region of the Kingdom from which the leader of the Mosque occupation hailed, produced several of the people who participated in the 9/11 attacks.

Both the descriptions of daily life at the hospital and around town, and the descriptions of trips to numerous places, combined with the maps in the appendix, provide the reader with a sense of basic familiarity with the country. Too bad the author didn't include a lot more pictures in the book. To see some photographs of the various places described in the book, both around town and in the desert, go to the Taza Press website. There you are able to see photographs relevant to various chapters of the book.

Jones and his family, unlike many of the other expats working at the hospital, did not take advantage of the many buffers the Hospital provided to remain isolated and insulated from the larger society--"the hospital was a mini-city, and like the US Army before, assumed the function of caring for many of the social needs of its employees and their families," providing completely furnished and equipped housing, its own power plant, water treatment plant, security and fire departments, subsidized food and recreation facilities, post office and telephone exchange, as well as transportation and travel departments. He and his family, along with a few other expats, got out, explored the country, especially the desert. They met various Saudis, in the city and on the road.

Getting out and getting involved in various activities around the country, including forming warm and not-so-warm relationships with various Saudis, has allowed Jones more insight into the social and cultural mechanism of change, including the impact of Western, particularly American, attitudes towards the Saudi people, their culture and religion. He observes how the hospital, during the early years when it was entirely administered by Americans, rendered the Saudis in whose country they lived and operated, largely invisible. In the very heart of one of the most socially conservative countries, he writes, the Saudis "were at the very periphery of our existence. The very poor Saudis drove the hospital buses and the local taxis. More affluent Saudis were shopkeepers... A small group of Saudis worked at the hospital in administration posts but were kept at the extreme edges of power... like so much cardamom sprinkled in the coffee, an exotic presence sufficient to suggest that one was not actually in a hospital in Peoria."

Jones also makes regular use of quotes by famous Western writers to introduce his chapters, people such as T.E.Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), Wilfrid Thesiger, and Gertrude Bell, using them as points of reference and distinction, historical markers of sorts, laying bare past prejudices. He notes, after a Lawrence quote, what 'a profound unease' the modern reader should experience from some of their writing, especially their "casual assessment of the racial characteristics of another people." He is looking through very different eyes, of course, but in examining how others before him viewed and treated this particular Other, we get a bit more perspective on the inevitable rise of opposition and hatred. "All these observers," he writes, "with their impressions of Arabia, sliced and diced."

Over the course of almost 25 years, Jones witnesses remarkable changes in Saudi Arabia. He witnesses the profound and rapid transformation of Riyadh, at the time a small frontier town with only a couple of traffic lights, into a bustling, modern city. He witnesses the hybridization and modernization, in many cases for the worse, of the Bedouin. Most of the Bedouin, over the course of about 20 years, abandoned their nomadic lifestyles in favor of a sedentary lifestyle, and as with indigenous populations in various parts of the world, ended up with various problems, including an epidemic of diabetes.

A much more subtle transformation witnessed and described in the book, both timely and vital to understand in these troubled times, is on the cultural/religious front. Over time, not only are the changes in the hospital administration great, but the presence of the mutawaa, the religious police, becomes ever more pronounced and intrusive. He describes the subtle but noticeable changes from "the gentler days of the mid-80s" when men and women freely cohabited in the housing units surrounding the hospital, and when professional chamber music concerts held at the International Hotel "were open to the public where men and women, Saudi and non-Saudi, would sit together and enjoy," to a time, approaching and entering the new millennium, when the mutawaa roamed the streets, policing public morality, and when open hostility and violence towards Westerners emerged.

While describing the changes, Jones provides a number of examples of underlying aspects of Western, but particularly American, attitudes and behavior that have fomented the hatred of America and the West among those now labeled terrorist. There's the negative portrayal of the Arab in a children's book (Children of the World) in an Atlanta school library, leading Jones to think to himself, "this is what the Arabs are complaining about." There's the fact that, in 21 months of living in Atlanta and reading the Wall Street Journal daily to find and "save any article that was not totally negative, that had just one sentence which hinted at something positive in the country," there was not even one. And there were those Americans in Saudi Arabia, perhaps numerically no more than 10%, who carried with them "that insufferable, smug attitude that measures another person, or another country, by the degree to which they conform to American norms."

Perhaps more potent and pernicious than the above examples are those to be found in the media. Jones describes one particularly disturbing encounter with a well-known New York Times journalist, Thomas Friedman, the author of From Beirut to Jerusalem. Though technically not misquoting him, after an interview during the journalist's first visit to Saudi Arabia, Friedman had chosen to quote "only the part of our conversation which reconfirms preconceived notions," thereby completely distorting his statement. He quotes only the part about the author seeing "Saudi doctors and nurses around him celebrating on 9/11," but not the "overall statement about the number who had offered their condolences, the positive reaction of the Saudi hospital administration, and the number of Saudis who were far more concerned about Osama bin Laden changing their lives than the Americans' lives."

Another New York Times columnist sent to Riyadh, Maureen Dowd, instead of focusing on "understanding how Saudi professional women work, what their personal aspirations are, not to mention the aspirations and workings of the vast number of Saudi stay-at-home middle class mothers," and how these "contrast with the aspirations of American women," chose to contrast the negligees sold in prominent Riyadh lingerie stores with the completely covered women who shopped there.

Though Jones does not spend much time discussing politics or war in If Olaya Street Could Talk, nor the events of 9/11, he does hint at an interesting parallel between Saudi and American populations. After a close personal encounter with the mutawaa, a brief discussion takes place between him and the boss. "He voiced that he knew all Westerners hated the mutawaa," leaving Jones to think to himself, "also, about 80% of the Saudi population." What comes to mind immediately is how much the current American administration, with Bush at its head, claims to represent the will of the American people, to do what's best for the American people. Perhaps the percentage of Americans that, by the government's standards and rhetoric, could be labeled anti-American because they do not necessarily approve of the actions taken by the administration, ostensibly on their behalf, reaches a similar percentile.

If Olaya Street Could Talk is not only an interesting personal narrative of the author's life as an expat in Saudi Arabia, punctuated by fascinating travel tales, it is also an important book for our times. It has many positive things to say about the Kingdom. At times saddening and enraging, but much of the time fascinating and engaging, this book is highly recommended.

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Further Reading:

A Virtual Tour of Saudi Arabia
Taza Press