Passing Fahd

How should we mourn a dictator? Or, for that matter, should we even mourn them at all? I think not. But with the passing of King Fahd, Saudi Arabia's "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques," these sorts of questions arise.

The Washington Post took the interesting step (considering the authorship and tone of past dictators' obituaries) of farming out the king's obituary to its former reporter, Thomas W. Lippman, a scholar at the formerly Saudi financed Middle East Institute. Lippman may (or, more likely, may not) be responsible for the obit's headline: A Leader Who Fostered Progress Even as He Held to Insular Traditions. But the title seems apt, given Lippman's apparently conflicted fondness for the dictator, instilled by birthright, who led the country as king from 1982 until an incapacitating stroke forced him to cede power in 1995.

Though Lippman acknowledges the king's critics, citing amongst other things Fahd's preference for "public beheadings [as] the preferred instrument of authority, and... for greatly increasing the authority of the country's conservative religious establishment in the 1980s," he apparently shares at least some admiration for the king as a beacon of plodding, incremental progress. Else, why report it? Fahd, writes Lippman, was seen by many as a man of "undoubted abilities," "a forward-looking modernizer," a man who held "his country together and preserve[d] his family's rule in an era of immense pressures," "a relative moderate on Israel, a proponent of stable oil prices and a usually reliable strategic and economic partner of the United States," and a man who, by allowing U.S. troops into the kingdom showed "courage in breaking out of Saudi Arabia's xenophobic tradition and making a crucial decision in defense of the kingdom's strategic interests."

I'm not the first to question Lippman's take on the House of Saud. Last year the National Review noted the "air of nostalgia [that] hangs about" Lippman's well-received Inside the Mirage: America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, "as if Saudi Arabia could still be considered that weirdly charming country with which we have always had warm relations, disturbed only by the occasional dispute over whether or not women should be permitted to wear miniskirts." TNR concluded that "[i]f you want to know about the Saudi role in the great international crisis that is the war on terrorism, you'll have to turn elsewhere."

Speaking of elsewhere, the BBC has compiled excerpts from various obituaries of Fahd. Opinions range from calling this a "moment of sadness" (London's al-Hayat), lauding his resistance to Israel (Syria's al-Thawrah and others), citing his "record of achievements" (Egypt's al-Ahram), lobbing more criticism in a few words than Lippman could muster in several hundred (Turkey's Sabah), and expected condemnation (Israel's Jerusalem Post).

On a personal note, and in a strange twist while researching this post, I've just learned through the Post's obituaries section that my undergraduate advisor and professor, former American University sociologist Samih Farsoun, died in June 2005. I last was in touch with him in February, when he wrote me from Kuwait. He was a fantastic advisor (he let me carry out an independent study on DC's hardcore-music scene), one of the best professors I've ever had (I chose my major because he was department chair, and must have taken at least a half-dozen classes with him), a mentor and a friend. He was fun to debate, and he was the only professor I had as an undergrad who invited his students over to his house for beers. He also had an unparalleled sense of humor and passionately hated King Fahd, referring to the king more than once as "Fat Fahd." Farsoun, unlike Fahd, will be missed.