LONDON, 21 October 2003 — On Wednesday, Oct. 15, the Middle East Center of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford, witnessed the inauguration of an annual series of lectures named in honor of King Abdul Aziz, who is known in the West as Ibn Saud. The event was attended by an enthusiastic gathering of Oxford Arabists; among the special guests was the Saudi ambassador to Britain, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, whose helicopter made a dramatic landing in the grounds of St. Anthony’s only minutes before the lecture began.
Before introducing the inaugural guest speaker, Professor Helmut Mejcher of the University of Hamburg, the director of the college’s Middle East Center, Eugene Rogan, sketched the background to the project, which will be dedicated to the study of Saudi Arabia and the Arabian Peninsula and go by the name of The King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud annual lecture. The lecture, he explained, celebrates a cooperation agreement between the Middle East Center and the King Abdul Aziz Foundation for Archives and Research in Riyadh, which was founded in 1972 with the aim of collecting and preserving historical material on the Kingdom. Thanks to the agreement — which in large measure owes its existence to the efforts of the chairman of the board of the foundation Prince Salman — St. Anthony’s Middle East Center now enjoys an endowment that will ensure that the center’s archives are professionally managed and available to scholars and students in perpetuity.
Eugene Rogan said St. Anthony’s Middle East Center will be cooperating with the King Abdul Aziz Foundation in developing the foundation’s collection of historic documents on Saudi Arabia, with particular reference to the papers of the great British Arabist Sir John Philby, which were a gift to the center from the Arabian American Oil Company. At the same time, the center will be donating 26 letters written by King Abdul Aziz, which are to be kept in the foundation bearing his name. The director emphasized the valuable role the cooperation agreement was expected to play in providing for exchanges of students and researchers and the organization of conferences. “We in the Middle East Center,” he said, “welcome this opportunity to strengthen our links with the scholars in Saudi Arabia and to gain access to the leading archival facility in the Kingdom.” He ended by voicing the hope that the agreement would “encourage a more profound knowledge in Britain and the West of the history and culture of Saudi Arabia through close cooperation with our Saudi academic colleagues.”
A leading Western authority on the history of Saudi Arabia, Professor Mejcher was an eminently suitable choice to launch the Middle East Center’s new lecture series. Taking as his theme “Germany and Saudi Arabia: Encounters in the 20th century,” he contrived to throw a great deal of light on a neglected subject. He began by outlining the embryonic diplomatic and commercial links forged between Germany and Saudi Arabia in the 1920s, a time when the economies of both countries were in a precarious state, before going on to examine the rather more “hazardous” German-Saudi encounter of the late 1930s. With a view to equipping his forces with modern European weaponry, King Abdul Aziz sought — having failed to obtain military hardware from Britain — to secure substantial armaments from Germany. But thanks, among other things, to the erratic, improvisatory nature of Hitler’s Middle East policy, the relationship between Saudi Arabia and Nazi Germany proved tentative and short-lived.
Anxious to challenge the power and prestige of the British Empire in the Arab world and increasingly mindful of the potential value to Germany of Saudi mineral resources, Hitler is said to have dispatched a private message to King Abdul Aziz, exhorting him to attack Britain and offering him the “crown of the king of all Arabs” as a reward for his services. This was of course the talk of a megalomaniac — a megalomaniac whose plans to subjugate the entire world, including the Middle East, would before long miscarry terminally. Still, as Professor Mejcher suggested, but for the reverses Germany’s forces suffered at Stalingrad and El Alamein, the consequences for the Arab world could have been far-reaching. The region perhaps only narrowly escaped the experience of European fascist dominance that was to be the lot of Libya.
Turning to the post-World War II era in the German-Saudi relationship, Professor Mejcher discussed the commercial ascendancy that Germany, or, to be precise, the newly formed state of West Germany, was on the verge of achieving in Saudi Arabia in the early 1950s. Comprising two major German firms, the “Governmental Engineering Company” or GOVENCO was poised to develop the entire modern infrastructure of Saudi Arabia. In the event, however, the project was stillborn — partly, it seems, because of interference by the newly dominant US, but not least on account of the inflammatory German-Israeli reparation agreement. What Professor Mejcher’s remarks made plain was that throughout much of the latter part of the 20th century, German-Saudi relations were clouded, if not poisoned, by the increasingly close commercial ties cultivated by Germany with Israel. He pointed out that the then Crown Prince Faisal, with his pronounced pro-Palestinian sympathies, was bound to feel personally insulted and betrayed when in the mid-1960s — after receiving assurances of the essentially moral aspect of German reparations to Israel — it emerged that Germany had been engaging in clandestine arms sales to the Jewish state. For the Saudis, such disingenuousness on the part of Germany could not but inspire distaste and distrust. Nursing lasting feelings of disappointment about German behavior, Prince Faisal himself was less than eager to resume German-Saudi diplomatic relations and treated the Saudi-German connection as of peripheral relevance to his country’s interests. According to Professor Mejcher, “hidden security and intelligence cooperation” between Germany and Israel was very likely the rock on which the encounter between the two countries foundered in the 1980s. But this scrupulous scholar insisted that complete certainty on the matter would not be possible until the relevant archives were opened for inspection.
A promising addition to other annual addresses which take place at St Anthony’s Middle East Center, the King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud lecture will surely to do much to promote Western understanding of Saudi Arabia and of the Saudi point of view.
