The future — if Allah wills it

Abstract

After the street riots in Cairo in January 1976, the Egyptian writer Tawfiq al Hakim wrote that ‘a cataclysm in Egypt would cause those who sit on wells of gold to sit on wells of fire’. It may not necessarily follow, but the warning is still valid. For the more that Saudi Arabia attempts to secure regimes in the Arab world that fit in with her view of things, the greater the problem if the peoples of those countries are moved to rebel.