Black Gold And Black Veils

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States and other Western democracies have had good reason to learn more about the close relationship between the Saudi royal family and the kingdom's Salafist Muslim sect, the Wahhabis. As Karen Elliott House chronicles in “On Saudi Arabia,” the relationship shapes today's Saudi state and society in many disturbing ways. Ms. House tells us that the goal of her book is “to peel back the bindings of tradition and religion that wrap the Saudi mummy.” In this she succeeds brilliantly.

To help us understand the modern era, Ms. House, a former foreign-affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal and its former publisher, concentrates on two crises that occurred in 1979. The first was the seizure of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist terrorists and the Saudis' need to turn to infidel troops (French) to reclaim their holiest site. The episode stunned the royal family, highlighting its vulnerability to Muslim fanatics. Soon the royal family faced another crisis—one that bedevils Saudi Arabia to this day: the coming to power of a theocratic totalitarian regime in Shiite Iran. With Iran seeking to expand its influence, the royal family decided to give the country's Sunni fundamentalists virtually free rein. The result has been, as Ms. House chronicles throughout “On Saudi Arabia,” a transformation of Saudi society—with religious authorities governing ever larger areas of civic life.

Like Ms. House, I first visited Saudi Arabia just before 1979. I saw a country that seemed in many ways to have a culture somewhat similar to Jordan's. It was Islamic, of course, but there were dinner parties with government officials and their wives (in Western dresses), jazz on the stereo, wine with dinner, and Western newspapers on the coffee table. Today such an evening in the kingdom with a visiting Westerner would be unimaginable. The resurgence of Wahhabism prevents any such violations of fundamentalist Islam's strictures.

Saudi theocratic totalitarianism begins within the family. Ms. House offers vivid descriptions of the oppression and frustration faced by Saudi women. The Wahhabis' view is that, after kindergarten, the two sexes should never meet except in the home. Such limits have a devastating effect on the freedom of Saudi women to work or even to take a walk in their own neighborhoods.

In 2002, in an incident of startling cruelty, the Saudi religious police prevented more than a dozen girls from fleeing their flaming school building in Mecca, thus condemning them to burn to death because, while trying to escape the fire, their abayas and veils didn't fully cover them. The outrage that followed this incident led to certain reforms, but they have been insufficient to help most women get a better education or a job.

It is true that, in 2012, Saudi women were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time, and a few can now sell lingerie in department stores. But they are still denied the freedom to drive a car, a restriction that has led some brave Saudi women, Ms. House tells us, to stage “drive-ins” or test authority “by getting behind the wheel of a car and posting videos of their defiance on YouTube.” These are small protests, she concedes, but they are telling: Clashes over the role of women in Saudi society serve as “a proxy war between modernizers and conservatives over what sort of Saudi Arabia both sexes will inhabit and over the role and relevance of the omnipresent religious establishment in Saudi society.”

On the geopolitical front, Saudi Arabia cooperates to a substantial degree with the United States on its counterterrorism efforts, but the royal family hasn't challenged the Wahhabi management of the country's schools. It is the schools, Ms. House reminds us, that provide the doctrinal and emotional underpinnings for its young men—often unemployed and impressionable—to turn to jihad.

On the brighter side, Ms. House takes us to two promising venues where one can see a glimmering of what Saudi Arabian institutions might become if we are all very lucky: the campus of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (in the town of Thuwal) and the constructed suburban city, often called “Little America,” that serves as the headquarters of Saudi Aramco, the national oil company. Each place can be seen, Ms. House says, as an “innovative and international island in the largely stagnant Saudi sea.” Saudi men and women work together, attend classes together, and learn to use advanced technology.

We can always hope, but the chances of reform at the moment seem limited. In June, Crown Prince Naif died, and his replacement at the top of the royal family's governing structure was taken by his brother, Prince Salman, an ultraconservative supporter of the Wahhabis. In the new interior minister, Prince Ahmed, and the new intelligence chief, Prince Bandar, there is little that is hopeful either. The Center for Democracy and Human Rights in Saudi Arabia states that neither man “has shown any interest in human rights or political change in Saudi Arabia.”

Ms. House observes that, for decades, the rulers of Saudi Arabia have used their oil revenues to swell the public sector, hand out government largess and keep Saudi citizens dependent on the royal family. “Control trumps economic competitiveness,” she notes. Is such an arrangement sustainable? The low price and ever wider availability of natural gas—the result of the hydro-fracturing of gas shale—could transform the world's energy sector, especially if cars are modified to drive on liquid fuels derived from natural gas. In such a scenario, the stultified, oppressive country that Ms. House portrays so well may find itself enduring a painful and chaotic transformation beyond the control of even its most stern leaders.

Mr. Woolsey, a former director of Central Intelligence, is a venture partner with Lux Capital and chairman of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and of the Opportunities Development Group.