A return to Saudi Arabia

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — I landed in the searing heat of the House of Saud on Tuesday, the longest day of the year. The day when the Arab Spring turns to summer.

They say that the Middle East is a tent with two poles — Egypt and Saudi Arabia. In the sweeping momentum of democratic movements across the Arab world, one of those poles has fallen and now the question we are examining here is whether the second pole might be wobbling?

If the world’s first digital revolution ended the 30-year reign of Hosni Mubarak why is it that the monarchy of Saudi Arabia seems to be standing strong and steady?

These are hard, good questions to be asking here. And no American news organization has a better correspondent to help its audience get some answers than GlobalPost. Our woman in Riyadh, Caryle Murphy, is a Pulitzer-winning former foreign correspondent for The Washington Post. She’s lived here and reported for GlobalPost since our launch two and a half years ago. Her colleagues say she now holds the title as the longest reigning American foreign correspondent to stay in Riyadh.

With its shimmering glass towers, its impenetrable palaces and its vast subterranean fields of oil, there are only a handful of countries in the world more opaque than Saudi Arabia. And I am here reporting with Murphy on a Knight-Luce Foundation grant for reporting on religion. We are meeting with clerics and analysts and just plain folks from across the Saudi spectrum to try to get to the bottom of the hard questions that are facing Saudi Arabia today. 

The last time I was here for any extended period of time was 10 years ago in the immediate aftermath of September 11th and it is interesting to return and see what has changed here, and what hasn’t … . I’ll keep you posted on the journey.