Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is reforming his country at lightning speed – turning society upside down in the process. Nothing is heard from the once all-powerful conservative forces in Saudi Arabia. What became of them?
A country is changing. In 2018, all women in the Saudi coastal city of Yidda wore black clothes with a headscarf.
When night falls, Riyadh comes alive. SUVs then pile up on the streets of the Saudi capital and the cafés glow in the dark. Men and women sit together casually behind the windows. Instead of wearing a hijab, some women wear their hair down – unimaginable in the kingdom of Al Saud just a few years ago. Not everyone likes the change.
A lot is to be welcomed, says a taxi driver on the drive from King Khalid Airport to the city. “I think it’s good that Saudi Arabia is opening up and people are now coming here and seeing what a beautiful country we have. But there must be limits,” says the man, who wears a fine moustache, a headscarf and the white thaub, the traditional garment of Saudi men.
When asked where the limits are, the man says: “Look at how some women dress now. Especially the foreigners. That goes against any morality. We are still the motherland of Islam.”
The old rules no longer apply
For decades, Saudi Arabia, where the Prophet Mohammed founded Islam 1,400 years ago, was considered one of the most conservative countries in the world. Gender segregation prevailed, music and cinemas were banned, women had hardly any rights, and hatred of people of other faiths was taught in schools.
The kings of the House of Saud had ceded jurisdiction in their empire to radical Wahhabi clerics. To men like Abdelaziz bin Baz, who maintained that the earth was flat long after the Americans had gone to the moon.
Now all that is a thing of the past. Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince and son of the current ruler King Salman, opened up the country at lightning speed and threw large parts of the old rules and laws on the scrap heap of history.
At first glance, it seems as if the Saudis really breathed a sigh of relief. Young people in particular are enjoying the new freedom. Women can now drive cars undisturbed, there are pop concerts and beaches. In Riyadh and Jidda there are also clandestine raves where alcohol is drunk and drugs are used.
Resistance to the crown prince’s frenzied reforms has hardly materialised. “We all thought the conservatives wouldn’t put up with that,” says a Saudi woman who runs a fitness club for women with a friend and even offers pole dancing courses. “But nothing happened.”
Uncertain look back: women are now allowed to drive cars. But the conservatives have not disappeared in Saudi Arabia.
There is a climate of fear
Indeed, the conservatives who held the desert kingdom in check for so long seem to have disappeared. The clergy, who for decades were an important pillar of public order, are either in prison or nodding to the innovations – like Mohammed al-Issa, the head of the Muslim World League, who even visited Auschwitz last year.
And from ordinary citizens one hears little more criticism than the carefully worded warning that change should not go too far or too fast.
This is also due to the way in which the reforms are being carried out, says a Saudi journalist who asked not to be named. “There is a climate of fear. The crown prince fought the internal opposition with all his might. No one opposes his course.”
However, this is not without risk. Because Saudi Arabia is not only opening up socially, but also economically. The economy, which is still dependent on oil exports, is to be diversified and the Saudi rentier state is to be converted into a dynamic economy whose citizens work and pay taxes.
Mohammed bin Salman, the young crown prince, wants to reform his country – and therefore had many conservative clergymen imprisoned.
The mind has not disappeared
But it is unclear how long the now numerous Saudi Uber drivers and saleswomen will be happy about their new jobs. Complaints are already being heard about rising prices and the cost of living. What if at some point the economic situation for the country’s middle and lower classes becomes more difficult?
By then at the latest, the conservatives could emerge from obscurity, the journalist believes. Because her ideas have not disappeared. After all, the clergy had been indoctrinating the population with it for decades.
The Saudis not only exported their radical reading of Islam all over the world, they also support Islamist groups abroad and until 2015 provided the largest proportion of foreign fighters with the IS. At the beginning of the millennium, there was also an armed uprising in their own country – when Saudi Qaeda fighters covered the kingdom with a bloody terror campaign.
A stronghold of the insurgents at the time was Buraida, around four hours’ drive north-west of Riyadh. The commercial city with around 660,000 inhabitants is considered the center of the conservatives. The drive there is on a dead-straight highway, through endless deserts. This is the heartland of Saudi Arabia.
In the midday heat, Buraida seems deserted. It’s almost 50 degrees and the sun is beating down mercilessly on the streets. Here, too, modernity has found its way. So now there are burger restaurants and mixed cafes in the city. Even a cinema has opened in a shopping mall. She has been there herself, says a black-veiled saleswoman from the mall through her face veil: “I’ve seen ‘Batman’. A great movie.”
Buraida is famous for its dates. The city is also considered a stronghold of conservatives in Saudi Arabia.
“We chose power”
A few years ago that would have been unthinkable. Because Buraida is considered the founding place of the Sahwa, a movement close to the Muslim Brotherhood, which agitated against the Saudi state in the 1980s and 1990s. For the leaders of the revival movement, like the strict preacher Salman al-Auda, even the ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia of the time was too lax.
Al-Auda is now in prison, and there is hardly any criticism of the changes in Buraida either. Of course he welcomes the crown prince’s reforms, says Abdul Aziz al-Twergi, one of the local sheikhs who runs a large date farm near the city.
He holds court in a comfortably chilled pavilion. Friends keep coming to visit, drinking coffee with cardamom and chatting about business and the latest gossip. One of the sheikh’s sons sits at a suitable distance and jumps up when the cups are empty to refill coffee. There are no women.
Finally, when asked, al-Twergi says there are two ways to change a society: “You either have the time or the power. We chose power in Saudi Arabia.” It is important that there are always two forces involved in the change process: “Those who drive it forward. But also those who ensure that the traditions are preserved.”
The two forces in Buraida still seem to complement each other well. The money that is still plentiful in the petrostate of Saudi Arabia also contributes to this. The king recently made an airplane available to the city’s business people to present their products in Europe and Central Asia. “In the end,” says the sheikh, “we are traders. And from that point of view, change is also an opportunity.”