Yes, (Saudi) Minister! A Life in Administration by Ghazi Algosaibi

This is my book from Saudi Arabia for the Read The World challenge. I was looking for Saudi novels, and found Algosaibi because, as well as being a government minister and then ambassador, he wrote poetry and novels; one of which, An Apartment Called Freedom, was translated into English. What intrigued me enough to buy this memoir is that some of his books were banned in Saudi Arabia, including An Apartment Called Freedom — which was published while he was the Saudi ambassador to the UK and Ireland, a post he continued in for another 8 years.

That’s a weird situation, right? I guess it’s not necessarily actively hypocritical to keep serving a government which has banned one of your books, but there is certainly a tension there. So, that was intriguing, as I say.

And I just thought it might be interesting to read an insiders’ view of what is after all a very unusual country: one of the last full-blown monarchies, a virtual theocracy, a regional superpower, a brutally oppressive state given unswerving support by the US, the home of the holiest places in one of the world’s great religions, a sparsely populated desert state that became wealthy very quickly by an accident of geology.

Unfortunately, this book was written with his civil servant/diplomat hat on, and it is a very civil, very diplomatic memoir which confines itself strictly to his professional life and fastidiously avoids anything too controversial. Many of the aspects of Saudi society that seem intriguing to an outsider are completely ignored: the treatment of women, for example. And he doesn’t even mention the banning of his own books. I suspect the bans were more symbolic than real for the kind of elite circles he moved in: any of his chums who wanted to read them could just pick up a copy when they were out of the country. But even that symbolism is interesting, and it would have been interesting to read what he had to say about it.

Still, it was about as readable and interesting as one could hope for from the professional memoir of a technocrat. It’s written in a lively manner with plenty of (suitably tame) anecdotes, and although it comes across as slightly self-serving, I can believe he was a genuinely effective administrator: hard-working and pragmatic, keen to be well-informed, careful to keep in contact with the end users of whichever project he was running, whether railways or electrification or the health service.

Not everything I hoped for, then, but quite interesting.

» ‘Suspension Bridge, Wadi Laban, Riyadh’ is © KhanSaqib and used under a CC by-nc-sa licence.