By Mai Yamani.

Brookings Institution Press; 176 pages; $19.95.

RIIA-Chatham House; £14.95

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THERE are worse fates than being born a Saudi. So long as you obey the tiresome rules (exceedingly tiresome if you happen to be female), you can be reasonably assured of food, education, health care and comfort. But young Saudis peer into the future with more trepidation than their elders. Change has come so rapidly. Their grandparents remember austere nomadic days, when the family or tribe meant all. Their parents, happy beneficiaries of a state with no bottom to its purse, have been programmed to expect life to get ever better. But the young (and more than half the population is under 20) sense that the munificence is ending. Old certainties have begun to crumble.

Mai Yamani, a fairly rare bird herself as a respected female Saudi academic, has produced an even rarer study, tapping a source that most westerners know nothing whatsoever about. A social anthropologist, she interviewed young people of 15 to 30, many of them from the new middle classes but including members of the royal family (Saudi Arabia's ruling class is based on its 6,000 royal princes), and Islamic radicals and others. She asked how these young men and women saw themselves amid economic uncertainty, and amid exposure, through travel and television, to the culture of other worlds.

Their answers, as incoherent as one would expect, show their unease. Predictably, most of them, rich or poor, male or female, want more space and fewer social constraints. They speak out against the corruption and double-standards of their rulers and the wasta (influence and contacts) system for getting work. But many agree that wasta was the way that they had got, or were getting, their own jobs in a shrinking market for the managerial and professional posts that Saudis insist on, menial and skilled work still being left to expatriates.

Less predictably, they do not much like what they see outside Saudi Arabia either. Those who have studied abroad still want to return when qualified. They do not call for less religion in society, though many want a more liberal interpretation of Islam. Nor would they dispense with tradition. Caught between the two worlds of tradition and modernity, they are fearful, most of them tending to look back, rather than forward. Many are dissatisfied but very few are rebellious.

Ms Yamani's short study reaches few firm conclusions. But she skilfully unveils a layer of the mystery that clouds Saudi Arabia, a country like none other.