Robert Lacey, Inside the Kingdom: Kings, Clerics, Modernists, Terrorists and the Struggle for Saudi Arabia (Viking, 2009).

Saudi Arabia, its image in need of polishing in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, has opened itself up to foreign scrutiny of its notoriously poor human rights record. Members of Congress now make regularly scheduled stops in the kingdom; in February 2008, the Saudis welcomed a second two-week fact-finding mission of the UN special rapporteur on violence against women. The scrutiny tends to be tightly managed: A visit to the government’s Human Rights Commission or the National Society for Human Rights, an NGO, is de rigueur.

Enmity for the Shi‘a in Saudi Arabia, never entirely absent, has become increasingly strident in 2006 and early 2007. The empowerment of the Iraqi Shi‘a and the bloody escalation of Sunni-Shi‘i violence in Iraq have intensified sectarian animosity around the Middle East, but in Saudi Arabia the hostility runs particularly deep. Recent anti-Shi‘i rhetoric recalls the 1980s, the most vituperative period of sectarian rancor, when the country’s leaders vilified Shi‘ism as part of a domestic and regional political program to counter the revolutionary message of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.