Can you see that? The little jig I'm dancing? I can't make the trip, you see, but in my mind it's on the fucker's grave. It's a fun little jig.

Ace, that article isn't....well, it's not complete. I'm not defending or dissing Fahd, it's just that it misses the point. In the late 60s, Nasser was kicking the Islamic Brotherhood dissidents out of Egypt, and the then king, Faisal, was pretty much forced by virtue of Saudi Arabia's standing as the center of Islam to accept these radical Islamist exiles. By and large these radicals all went into teaching and in 10 years, Saudi Arabia reaped the results with an increasingly radical population. When Bad Day at Black Rock happened, Fahd did the same thing Faisal did 10 years before--he folded, and did whatever they wanted.

Few if any of the Sauds are devout Muslims. But in over 60 years, none of them have figured out how to handle the Islamists. They all just assumed--as America and the West did as well--that once modernization came around, the populace would become more secular. That hasn't happened and *that* is the problem. If the Sauds didn't placate the Islamists, they'd have trouble with their own people. Their own people don't despise the Sauds because they are repressive and Islamist. They despise the Sauds because they are pro-American and don't give the people more rights that they would promptly use to turn Saudi Arabia into an even more anti-Western country.

As for Fahd modernizing things, I think it's more accurate to say that he spent heavily on the infrastructure. Faisal was much more liberal on women's rights and secular government than Fahd was--primarily because Fahd had much more trouble with Islamists. Genders are heavily segregated now, and I've been told that Western women have to wear burqas in public. Women wore jeans or at most a long skirt when I lived there and there was no segregation.

The article is also wrong about Fahd's influence on education, because while he was the first minister of education, it was Faisal and his wife who started public education.

But at least it got Fahd's father's name right. The New York Times couldn't manage that much.