Inside the Kingdom - Softcover

Lacey, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0091931258 ISBN 13: 9780091931254

Verlag: Hutchinson, 2009

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Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox: it sits atop some of the richest oil deposits in the world, and yet the country's roiling disaffection produced sixteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. It is a modern state, driven by contemporary technology, and yet its powerful religious establishment would have its customs and practices rolled back to match those of the Prophet Muhammed over a thousand years ago. In a world where events in the Middle East continue to have geopolitical consequences far beyond the region's boundaries, an understanding of this complex nation is essential.

With Inside the Kingdom, British journalist and bestselling author Robert Lacey has given us one of the most penetrating and insightful looks at Saudi Arabia ever produced. More than twenty years after he first moved to the country to write about the Saudis at the end of the oil boom, Lacey has returned to find out how the consequences of the boom produced a society at war with itself.

Filled with stories told by a broad range of Saudis, from high princes and ambassadors to men and women on the street, Inside the Kingdom is in many ways the story of the Saudis in their own words. It is a story of oil money that opened the door to Western ways, and produced a conservative backlash with effects that are still being felt today. It is a story of kings and princes who worried more about keeping power than the dangerous consequences of empowering radical clerics. It is a story of men who challenged orthodoxy and risked prison or death in the name of furthering open society, and of women who defied laws saying they should not write, drive, or play sports. And, at its heart, it is a story of a people attempting to reconcile the religious separatism of the past and the rapidly changing world with which they are increasingly intertwined. Their success - or failure - will have powerful reverberations in their own country, and across the globe.

Contraportada:

"Robert Lacey explains one of the world's most complicated governments and societies with sweeping, beautiful writing, intellectual brilliance and unparalleled insight. Inside the Kingdom is the most penetrating and substantial book on the Saudi state and society since September 11. Once again Lacey has proved that no outsider understands Saudi Arabia better than himself. This is a thoughtful masterpiece about a country that lies at the heart of the Muslim world."

-Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent into Chaos

"Robert Lacey has returned to the Kingdom to provide an insightful and intimate portrait of a country - and a family - chained to tradition and challenged by the remorseless march of modernity. Lacey provides many startling and often delicious details that make this history fresh, surprising, and essential."

-- Lawrence Wright, Pulitzer-winning author of 'The Looming Tower"

Saudi Arabia is a country defined by paradox - the world's largest producer of oil which also produced fifteen of the nineteen hijackers of 9/11. While its fabulously wealthy princes and businessmen raise futuristic cities in the desert, its fundamentalist clerics despise western modernity and seek to roll back the kingdom's values fourteen hundred years to the time of the Prophet Mohammed. To fully understand our interdependent 21st century world, we have to understand Saudi Arabia.

Best-selling author Robert Lacey has known the Kingdom for thirty years. He first went to live there in 1979 to research the inside story of the oil boom, producing his epic and revelatory book The Kingdom which was banned by the Saudi government. After 9/11 he returned, to discover the dramatic components of a story stranger than fiction:
* The bloody seizure of Mecca's Grand Mosque, Islam's Holy of Holies, by a group of fanatics under the wing of the Saudi religious establishment itself
* How Osama Bin Laden and his Arab fighters in Afghanistan were fostered by both the US and Saudi governments, to inspire a whole generation of Muslim youth with the ideal of the jihadi - the Islamic holy warrior
* The proof to refute the conspiracy theorists: how Al-Qaeda was waiting to celebrate before the planes hit the Towers on 9/11
* The tragedy of the "Qateef Girl" - raped by six men, then sentenced to be lashed for her own "immoral" behaviour
* How Saudi Arabia seeks to re-educate its graduates from the Guantanamo prison camp - with a job, a car, and a wife

Lacey is a born storyteller and he recounts these dramatic and controversial incidents in the voices of the Saudis themselves, painting a picture of a society that is slowly learning how not to be at war with itself. Saudi Arabia is notorious for its role in the greatest tragedy of modern times. Now it is struggling to realign itself around the concepts that it once scorned: religious tolerance, human rights, political accountablity - though not yet democracy - and, most challenging of all, equal rights for women. If the Kingdom can succeed in its latest and greatest battle, the consequences will be profound for its own society, for the troubled Middle East, for the countries that struggle with these crucial issues all over the globe - and, not least, for America.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: Hutchinson
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0091931258
• ISBN 13: 9780091931254
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 432