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WEALTH, OPPORTUNITY, AND REPENTANCE
Habeebie Saif,
The Arab world you were born into and have been brought up in is very different from what it was
like fifty years ago. You recognize some of this when you meet older relatives who are unable to read
or write, and who speak in an older, more distant dialect of Arabic. My father’s generation—those
born in the 1930s and 1940s—were born into a dry world with little food and water. There was no
news to be had, and events like the Second World War were distant and marginal events in the life of
the community. My uncle told me of how rice was hard to come by and that most of the time they lived
off fish and dates. And even then, the bigger boys would be better fed, as they could grab more fish
from the large communal tray on which their food was presented. The population of the Arabian
Peninsula was small. In Abu Dhabi, where I spent my childhood, the population was a few thousand
and there were no roads until the late 1950s. Then oil was discovered. It was initially discovered in
Saudi Arabia in 1902, but it took years to begin production. Oil was discovered in the rest of the
countries in the region in the 1930s and 1940s.
It was in 1973 that oil begin to have a tremendous impact regionally and globally. This was the
year when the oil-producing countries of the Arab world declared an embargo on oil supplies to the
West. This meant that we stopped selling oil to countries like the United States, Canada, Japan, the
UK, and the Netherlands. As a result the price of oil shot up. It skyrocketed, and thus the income of
the oil-producing states rose drastically.
This huge increase in income allowed the oil-producing states to begin to invest in their local
economies. Governments could afford to spend on roads, schools, hospitals, ports, and housing for
all. This huge expenditure required people and companies to provide all kinds of services. As the
economy grew, those who were lucky or well prepared made fortunes.
How does this affect the world you live in today? Oil wealth allows governments and wealthy
individuals to back the interpretations they feel attached to. People in the Arabian Peninsula began to
move from the traditional tribal scramble for survival to thinking about what they could and should do
with the bounties of Allah. This is why we see so many wealthy families donating vast sums to build
mosques and dig water wells for impoverished Muslim communities around the Islamic world.
Islamic interpretations coming out of the Arabian Peninsula—otherwise known as the Gulf Arab