I remember sitting by the poolside in some five-star hotel in Bahrain in early 1982 and reading this book while I was waiting for my Saudi Arabian entry visa. Several drinks and several laps in the pool and a few hundred pages into the book later I came to the part where it said that it was banned in the Kingdom.
Left behind in the hotel's wastepaper basket in Bahrain in 1982, many years later in Australia I bought another copy of this classic about a country full of mystery and contradictions. Robert Lacey wrote his book in 1981, just months before I arrived there, which makes it a perfect aide-memoire of my own life in the world's largest sand-box.
The Kingdom not only banned this and many other books but several hundreds, perhaps thousands, of consumer goods such as Ford cars, Xerox machines, Alka Seltzer, and - much to an Aussie friend's dismay who had a lifelong addiction to it and spent many years in Saudi - Coca-Cola, because those companies had investments in Israel (before leaving Jeddah on a business trip, I once suggested to book my return trip via Tel Aviv which would've automatically cancelled my Saudi visa).
During my years in Jeddah plans were discussed to tow kilometre-long icebergs, covered with insulating blankets, from the South Pole to the Red Sea as a source of fresh water, and yet video-taped imports of the Muppet Show were confiscated on the grounds that its heroine is a pig.
And while corporal punishment is banned in schools, public beheadings are carried out regularly which neatly brings me to the movie "Death of a Princess" which I described here. There's a rumour that Princess Misha'il had a stand-in - or should that be a 'kneel-in'? - and that she's slowly growing old in a windowless room of the royal palace in Riyadh like some latter-day female version of the "Man in the Iron Mask".
Will we ever find out? "Insha Allah." If God wills so.
