Volume 51, Number 16 · October 21, 2004
Unloved in Arabia
By Max Rodenbeck
House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties
by Craig Unger
Scribner, 356 pp., $26.00
Saudi Arabia and the Politics of Dissent
by Mamoun Fandy
Palgrave, 288 pp., $26.95
Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism
by Dore Gold
Regnery, 331 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia
by Thomas Lippman
Westview, 354 pp., $27.50
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude
by Robert Baer
Three Rivers, 272 pp., $13.95 (paper)
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Understanding Saudi Arabia
by Colin Wells
Alpha, 356 pp., $18.95 (paper)
Can Saudi Arabia Reform Itself?
a report by the International Crisis Group
July 14, 2004, 35 pp.
Late in the year 1818, the people of Constantinople witnessed the execution of a bandit chief who had been captured in the arid badlands of Arabia. Tried and convicted by the Ottoman Empire's highest sharia court for heresy as well as brigandage, the rebel was dragged to the gate of the sultan's palace. The decapitation itself was swift, but his severed head was then placed in a giant mortar and ceremoniously pounded into pulp; his body spiked on a tall pole and displayed, a sunken dagger pinning the sentence of irtidad—excommunication—to his bloodied chest for all to see.
Review, 4809 words
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