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University Daily Kansan Monday. Dec. 10. 1962
Near East: Land of Contrasts
Two women. They live only five miles apart, but are separated by four hundred years.
One wears a Dior dress and shoes made in Cleveland. The other wears a thin, dirty rag and sandals woven from reeds and painted white.
One has her hair in the latest Italian style and wears a wristwatch set with diamonds. The other tells time by the sun and her hair hangs down her back, dirty and crusted with cow dung.
ONE CARRIES only a purse, which contains three tubes of lipstick, a nail file, a comb and a pack of Winstons. The other is bent over by the 100-pound bale of hay on her back and has never seen lipstick and has never heard of filter blend.
One lives in a third-story apartment with 100-year-old Tabriz rugs on the floor and a Philips record player on the end table. The other lives in a filthy mud hut with goats and roaches for company.
- * *
This is the Near East, a land of violent contrasts. It is a land of futility and hope and desolation and abundance.
It is a land long-known by man, a land where three continents met and traded spices and silks
The hot nomadic sun and a lonely Arab girl . . . anywhere in the Near East.
on the road from China to Qum to the Italian trade cities.
IT IS A LAND of bitter struggle and conquest and glorious empires rising from arid wastes. It is the land of the Persian and the Mede, the Assyrian and the Babylonian, the lords of Mesopotamia and the pharaohs of Egypt.
It is a land where men were taming flooding rivers and studying the stars and using medicine and mathematics when Europe was living in caves and fighting with stone clubs.
And, it is a land which today tries desperately to pull itself from the backwater where it was thrown when the pharaohs died and the Turks invaded.
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The Near East still carries the faint scars of greatness. Beside a modern city, the crumbling remains of a 6,000-year-old empire city stick slightly from the earth. The columns of Persepolis and the Valley of the Kings attest to modern eyes that once man lived in magnificence there.
That greatness is gone today, forgotten with the rest of men and animals and dwellings that once ruled the world.
Today, decay abounds. Illiteracy is high, birth rates are high, there is disease and unrest. Too many live as their fathers and great-great grand-fathers did, and too few read or write or eat meat more than once or twice a week.
CONTRAST is everywhere. In one field, a farmer whips his plowbeast on and his wooden plow stirs up whirls of dust where water is a sometimes thing. In another field, irrigation ditches suckle the black, rich furrows dug by a farmer and his John Deere tractor.
The urbanite has contempt for his countryman in the outlying province, and the man in the province fears strangers, is hostile to change and loathes the city slicker.
Yet, this strange land is a land of promise, a land of hope . . . and part of that hope is oil.
A sandy waste provides no food, but beneath that waste lies hope and security and the ability for the Near East to pull itself away from its desolation and despair.
Oil can build schools and train teachers and build cities and spray insect-ridden villages and supply armies.
OIL CAN SUPPORT a regime and it can topple it down. Oil can make the world beat a track to the Near East's door. Oil can make the Near East a land of plenty, where poverty is a myth and disease exists only in the nightmares of old men.
And there is oil in the Near East. Oil by the billions of barrels and by the thousands of tankers and by the miles and miles and miles of pipeline.
There is oil there, desperately needed by Western Europe and the United States and the Soviet bloc. There is oil there to make automobiles run and machines rumble and make tiny gears in a high altitude missile run silently and smoothly.
But oil is not the complete answer to the ills of the Near East. Without men to use it, to guide it into channels which enable it to spray the village or construct the dam or staff the school, it is useless.
WITH OIL, there must come many men with understanding, with administrative skills—selfless men who realize that without guidance, oil serves no purpose and could just as well remain below the sands.
Such men come slowly to the Near East, but they are increasing in number and are forming a solid foundation for advance in the Near East.
- * *
It will be no overnight thing, this renaissance of the Near East. There are many walls in the way of a Nasser or a Ben Bella or a Kassem or a Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlevi. But, slowly, one by one, these walls are tumbling.
Sometimes, they fall slowly. There are millions of people who must be forced—bodily, unwillingly—into the 20th century and taught to forget the ways of their fathers. Villagers rebel at those who come to teach their young the ways of the new Near East. They are slow to accept DDT and birth control and electricity and things not enclosed within the walls of the village. The wealthy resist efforts to cut up their lands, the army resents regimentation.
BUT SOMETIMES, these walls fall fast. Cities rise, white in the broiling sun, to a million population or more. Ten thousand taxicabs fight through broad, well-laid streets. The illiteracy rate declines, and four out of five children attend school. Fine hospitals spring from the disease and squalor of the slums. Dams are built, airports installed, streets paved.
And always the contrast. There are riots and bloodshed and beatings and assassinations and corruptions. There are mullahs and cantors and nuns side by side in the streets. There are wild jazz parties and the strange tinny notes of Arabic music and Beethoven symphonies hanging everywhere. There are cretin beggars in alleyways and brilliant scientists in laboratories. There is bustle and calm and five times a day the melodic note of a mullah calling the faithful to prayer. There is peace and war, heaven and hell . . . all together, all at once, contributing to a sense of abortive unease and violent change.
SLOWLY AND SURELY, no matter what the cost in lives, or blood or oil pipe, the Near East rises.
Now, it is buried in the sands that mark its boundaries, half-today, half-yesterday. But you can be sure that one of these days, not so long from now, the Near East will once again take a rightful place in the affairs of man.
En'sha'allah, it shall come to pass.
—Zeke Wigglesworth
Daily Kansan Focus
The Daily Kansan today focuses on the Near East; Land of Contrasts. A Daily Kansan editor discusses the Near East's struggle to "once again take a rightful place in the affairs of man," and articles appear on three major Near East nations: Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the United Arab Republic.
Oil Brings Wealth To Arab Monarch
Bv Elaine Blavlock
In his palace at the capital city of Riyadh, King Saud of Saudi Arabia lives in fantastic splendor that would put the tales of the "Arabian Nights" to shame.
His huge palace at the capital city (most luxurious of the royal abodes scattered about the country) is completely air-conditioned against the hot Arabian climate. His numerous limousines also are equipped with air conditioning. The four wives allowed him by Moslem religion and a bevy of ex-wives share his lavish, fairy-tale existence.
KING SAUD is believed to have some 60 sons. Each of them receives an allowance of $10,000 a month—which they frequently find will not cover their plush tastes.
These sons—plus other relatives—are believed to make up a group of some 2,000 princes of the Saud family supported by the government. One prince—now exiled in Egypt—estimates that this royal family has spent two-thirds of Saudi Arabia's total oil income for the past 15 years, or around $2 billion.
At the same time, two-thirds of the people of this mostly barren land are Bedouins or nomads. They roam the desert with their camels, sheep, donkeys and goats, searching for whatever grazing land they can find.
LIFE FOR THEM is lived much as it was in the days of the Old Testament, in a country which is gradually acquiring paved highways, jet aircraft, contemporary architecture, electricity, education, hospitals and Western ways.
The kingdom of Saudi Arabia was created by the late King Ibn Saud, father of the present ruler. He welded together four-fifths of the Arabian peninsula—uniting a territory that had been fragmented and disunited from earliest times except for a brief period under Mohammed and his successors.
For years this nation was a poor, almost unknown area of the earth, noted mainly for its deserts and tribal clashes. For hundreds of years nearly all the people had made their living through pastoral and agricultural pursuits or trade. Some money came in from the thousands of pilgrims who made the annual pilgrimage to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
THAT WAS THE picture in 1931, when a party financed by an American philanthropist set out to try to find artesian wells to ease the ever-present water shortage.
Beneath those dry, desert sands was discovered one of the free world's richest sources of petroleum. This oil has been exploited by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), now owned by four U.S. oil companies.
Thus, a government which had known only poverty became fabulously wealthy. The government didn't know quite how to handle its sudden good fortune. In fact, a few years ago it had to be rescued from the brink of bankruptcy through some elementary fiscal reforms.
WITH THE DEATH of his father in 1853, King Saud took over supreme authority in this absolute monarchy. Little authority is delegated to anyone else, even Saud's own Council of Ministers.
But the King cannot stop his subjects from traveling. As they come in contact with the outside world, they become more and more dissatisfied with their government. They are beginning to want more political freedom and greater guarantees of civil rights.
Sensing the unrest, Saud has slowly responded. His reforms may not seem too impressive to the outsider, but any change is significant in Saudi Arabia.
SAUD'S BEST RECORD is in the field of education. The population of this country may range from 3 million to 10 million: no one knows because there has never been a census. Of this number, about 150,000 now are students. About 100 new schools are being built each year. Poor families are being paid about $20 a month for each child in school.
Despite strong opposition from the mullahs (religious leaders), the government has even established eight schools for girls. (Once only boys were educated in Saudi Arabia.)
SAUD IS plagued, too, with troubles from the outside. A political feud rages between Saud and Egyptian President Gamal Abdul Nasser.
Saud sees Nasser as a Marxist firebrand whose form of "Arab socialism" defies the Koran. Nasser in turn, proclaims Saud to be a feudal overlord who keeps his people in bondage. Each morning Radio Cairo sends out prayers for the quick demise of the "antisocial, reactionary, squandering, lecherous, oligarch Saud, his family and supporters."
Nasser also has welcomed four exiled half-brothers of Saud. They are leading a "Liberation Front" in Cairo which is working to overthrow King Saud.
THE EXILED princes believe that the revolution, when it comes, will be against the entire royal family. This would mean that even though Prince Talal has renounced his royal title he probably could not lead the revolt.
To add to Saud's woes, the revolutionaries who have overthrown the friendly monarchy in Yemen now pose a threat to the South.
WHATEVER HAPPENS in Saudi Arabia in the near future will be of great importance to the United States and to the world. Saudi Arabia not only commands tremendous oil reserves, but its location is a strategic one. It lies between Africa and mainland Asia, it is close to the Suez Canal, and it has frontiers on both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf.
This Cinderella nation has come a long way in the past 30 years. The world will watch to see what path it will follow in the years to come.
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