‘And never the twain shall meet’? The Western other in the Saudi novel and the contrastive construction of Saudi identity Elad Giladi 5 University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Q1 ABSTRACT This article examines the issue of the ‘other’ in the Saudi novel from the 1980s to 2000 against the background of the social changes taking place in Saudi Arabia. It is based on the reading of some 10 thirty Saudi novels and offers a critical analysis of selected novels, based on the assumption that fictional-literary texts can serve as a valuable source for the understanding of various social processes. My main contention is that at the beginning of the period, the discourse towards the Western ‘other’ was very dichotomous and 15 stereotypical, but over time changes in discourse could be identi- fied that indicate developments in the perception of the ‘self’ versus the ‘other’ that reflected a dynamic dialogue between Saudi society and Western society. Later novels presented a more complex and genuine picture of East-West relations, and even served as 20 a platform for internal criticism. Introduction Historical, social, economic, religious, and political factors led to the strengthening of conservative trends in Saudi Arabia in the 1980s. However, various events and processes that took place in the 1990s led to a certain loosening of zealous and 25 rigid approaches and created different groups that introduced new concepts and contents of defiance towards the government into the Saudi discourse. The great changes that the Saudi Kingdom and society underwent during this period encour- aged the writing of novels that dealt honestly with charged social issues, and those, in turn, helped to create an open and daring cultural discourse. In recent years, 30 mainly in the wake of 9/11, many prominent studies have focused on Saudi Arabia. However, most of them have not paid sufficient attention to socio-cultural aspects and have not made use of Saudi novels. 1 CONTACT Elad Giladi elad.giladi@mail.huji.ac.il University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel Q2 1 Noteworthy exceptions are Madawi al-Rasheed’s A Most Masculine State: Gender, Politics, and Religion in Saudi Arabia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), that includes two chapters on novels by Saudi women of the 1990s and 2000s, accompanied by interviews with the authors, and works by Zahia Smail Salhi. See: Zahia Smail Salhi and Abdullah Alfauzan, ‘Withstanding the Winds of Change? Literary Representations of the Guld War and its Impacts on Saudi Society,’ Arab Studies Quarterly 39, no. 4 (2017): 973–995; Zahia Smail Salhi and Ibrahim A. I. Alfraih, ‘Blurring the Boundaries of History and Fiction: Re-imagining the Past and Re-defining the Present through the Lens of Saudi Women Novelists,’ in Necessary Travel: New Area Studies and Canada in Comparative Perspective, eds. Susan Hodgett and Patrick James (Maryland: Lexington Books, 2018) 99–113. BRITISH JOURNAL OF MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2022.2041400 © 2022 British Society for Middle Eastern Studies