Gulf Growth:  Enriching the Rich or Creating Terrorists

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The rise in oil prices is doing wonderful things for a lot of countries, but we may be seeing missed opportunities to introduce justice by perfecting the system of money and banking in order to enrich everyone instead of letting a little wealth trickle down to the propertyless.  As the founder of the American Revolutionary Party, Dr. Norman Kurland says, “own or be owned.” 

  According to today’s Washington Post, half the adult population of Saudi Arabia has bought into a new $25 billion dollar city being created there.  The author of this piece, Afshin Molawi, writes: “The kingdom is no stranger to massive infrastructure projects, but there’s an interesting twist here: The government won’t be financing this one; that task will be up to wealthy Saudi investors, public share offerings, and a high-flying Dubai-based property company.  The company, Emaar Properties, the most widely traded stock in the United Arab Emirates, also happens to be the richest real estate development firm in the world, with a market capitalization near $25 billion.  It’s also one of the most ambitious.  On August 1, as war raged, the company bought a major British real estate firm.  The next day it announced an expansion into Algeria.  It’s building nearly 100 shopping malls in India, and retail and residential properties from Casablanca to Cairo to Karachi.  Oh, and it’s also constructing what will be the tallest tower in the world, known as the Burj Dubai. ... Bahrain-based Gulf Finance House, a leading Islamic finance bank with global investments, announced an 87 percent increase in second-quarter net profit. The billionaire Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who owns nearly 10 percent of Citigroup, publicly criticized management, sending tremors through the company.  And the Middle East construction boom—mostly centered in the oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf—has surpassed the $1 trillion mark.”

  This new city in Saudi Arabia is a marvelous development, and building the tallest building in the world is impressive, but what percentage will the Shi’a own?  Half the population of Saudi Arabia is poor and I have seen real slums.  Does this touted broadened investment serve in practice as a democratic cover-up to maintain the existing institutional bias toward concentration of capital and therefore to perpetuate the wealth gap? 

  The real test would be a study to determine what percentage of the new city will be owned by the Shi’a.  When I was the Principal Economic and Budget Advisor to the Finance Minister of Bahrain in 1976-77, I was amazed that by deliberate design the 75% of the population that is Shi’a received no benefit from the booming economy.  Although the present emir, Shaykh Hamad, then Defense Minister and now Malik (King) Hamad, tried to include the Shi’a in the new five year plan that I was developing, in fact he was overruled and the Shi’a were deliberately kept isolated in slums and villages without any modern amenities. 

  The Minister of Development and Industry, Yusuf Shirawi, to whom I dedicated my 242-page hardback book, Planning the Future of Saudi Arabia: A Model for Achieving National Priorities, Praeger, Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, CBS Inc., 1977, married a Shia, but the Sunnis blamed the severe mental retardation of his son on miscegenation.  This was considered to be a warning that if one mixed races the result would be not merely a racial bastard but a monster.  This was in addition to the fact that most young Sunnis from my experience at the University of King Sa’ud in 1987 believe that Shi’a are monsters anyway because they have no souls.

  I considered this “soft policy” deliberately to impoverish the Shi’a to be a crime against humanity.  The Shia were not all killed in a pogrom, any more than are the Muslim and Christian Arabs in Occupied Palestine, but my assistant, who was the brilliant son of the Minister of Interior, told me that some day either all the Shi’a or all the Sunnis would die.  He kept an arsenal in the trunk of his car because he said that he was going to take out as many of the Shi’a as possible in case he was on the losing side.

  Perhaps we need a study to explore how the oil boom might make possible real change as a means to counter the terrorist mentality.  Otherwise we may merely be multiplying more of the same.  The “Real ‘New Middle East,’” although a good title for an article in the Post, doesn’t look new to me, nor will it to those whose demonic hatred turns them into terrorists, but it may look rosy and shiny to the Carlyle Group and President Bush.

  Spreading ownership of new development and real estate assets among all the people of Saudi Arabia could best be accomplished through interest-free capital credit from Saudi commercial banks monetized by the Saudi central bank.  Since money and credit are “social tools” created by human beings, not by God, a just society would make such wealth-enhancing credit accessible to every member of society as a fundamental human right, as provided by haqq al mal, which is just as important as devolving political power to the individuals in society as called for in the universal Islamic jurisprudential principle of haqq al hurriya. 

  Oil and land rentals could be handled by a Saudi Natural Resources Bank where every man, woman, and child would be entitled to a free, non-transferable lifetime share in the God-created resources of nature through a de-nationalized Saudi oil company, thus entitling every citizen to a personal share in annual oil revenues.  If the leaders of the Saudi royal family would promote such a simple initiative, their rule would become a model of good governance in accordance with the human rights spelled out in the maqasid al shari’ah of classical Islam.  They would be universally respected, admired, and loved, and terrorists would be immediately marginalized as totally superfluous.