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Some See Hope for Changing Islam, Saudi Arabia and the World
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — A few weeks ago, a prominent media consultant and her two daughters were shopping at the Kingdom Center mall here. Her daughters, both in their early 20s, had their heads covered on this shopping trip. Hers was not.
At the approach of members of the Saudi religious police, she reached for her head scarf. She did not, however, put it on. Enough already, she thought.
“Cover your head!” the agents ordered her. “No.” “Well,” they muttered, “may God protect you.”
The bearded enforcers limped away. They used to descend on stores that sell the shapeless black gowns called abayas imposed on Saudi women, scoop up those with any adornment and burn them. No longer: These once-feared upholders of a puritanical Islamic order are now defanged.
On June 24, Saudi women started driving, consigning, at last, a conspicuous symbol of such oppression to the scrapheap. These are heady days in the Saudi Arabia of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as M.B. S., who became heir to the throne in a virtual palace coup a year ago, ousting his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef. He’s a hardcharging 32-year- old disrupter.
President Donald J. Trump of the Unit- ed States has embraced the prince as his lost Middle Eastern son, a young man who hates Iran, hates political Islam and loves money. It’s a risky bet that a brash upstart can end the Saudi bargain with the devil that contributed to jihadist terrorism around the world. To some degree, the level of violence and instability in the
Arab world will depend on the Saudi experiment.
The prince’s apparent aim is to upend just about everything, except the absolute rule exercised since 1932 by the House of Saud, with the help of oil and American power. He wants to liberalize, at least economically and socially, and so demonstrate that Islam, in the nation of its holiest cities, Mecca and Medina, is not a harsh, unbendable rule book based on ancient scripture but is rather compatible with modernity and tolerance.
Perhaps his most radical proposition is the empowerment of women because the genuine liberation — and that’s still in doubt — of half the Saudi population would transform the country and send a clear message of a modernized Islam.
During a week in the capital, Riyadh, and the Red Sea port of Jeddah, I found a nation where ultrachic malls are full of stores that close five times a day for prayer and modern restaurants still enmeshed in the minutiae of segregating men from women. There’s a heavy dose of glitzy Houston and a repressive hint of Pyongyang. People marveled when the country’s first movie theaters opened this year.
The prince’s makeover could, in theory, change more than Saudi Arabia. Five times a day many of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims turn toward the country in prayer. “When people look at Saudi Arabia, see Mecca and Medina, they want to emulate it,” the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said. “When they see openness and moderation and tolerance and innovation, that’s what they want to be.”
In other words, change Islam in its Saudi nucleus and you change the world.
But as the arrests in May of several female activists suggested, the prince faces a delicate balancing act.
Reactionary forces abound, not least within the sprawling royal family, some of whom Prince Mohammed locked up in Riyadh’s Ritz- Carlton hotel in November, with no due process.
Prince Mohammed has said he wants to return Saudi Arabia to “normality,” a favorite term in the king- dom these days, as contrasted with what are called “30 lost years,” the time of the aberrations that helped produce Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.
Yet Prince Mohammed also propagates the kind of fear that makes a woman prepared to defy the religious police afraid to give her name. Allow women to drive, but don’t allow the brave women who pushed for this to claim credit. Embrace the internet, but not to the point of allowing it to be used to criticize the royal family. Permit Victoria’s Secret, but desexualize the mannequins and make sure the lingerie is in muted shades of pastel.
But cynicism is too facile. “I get annoyed with the West telling us the changes are cosmetic,” Hoda Abdulrahman al-Helaissi, one of the first female members of the Shura Council, an advisory body to the king, told me. “We are changing at the rate of a high- speed train, not of a rocket. Young people, and 70 percent of the population is under 30, don’t want to live as we lived. The prince understood we have to pull the tooth from the mouth!”
Things are happening. A new Jeddah airport opened in May. The Riyadh subway will begin operation next year. Saudi Aramco, the staterun oil giant, is to be partly privatized. Ground has just been broken near Riyadh on a vast, multibillion- dollar “entertainment city” that will include a Six Flags theme park.
Stadiums are being retrofitted to accommodate women. A new bankruptcy law was adopted. “Saudization” is the buzzword denoting the drive to tackle 34 percent youth unemployment by training Saudis to replace foreigners, of whom there are some 12.6 million in a total population of 33.4 million.
The progressive empowerment of women is also an economic necessity. Saudization of the work force is also feminization.
Tamader al- Rammah, the vice minister of labor and the most senior woman in the government, said she’d just been in a small town in the north, where she found young women, some with their faces covered, some not, doing all the sales jobs in a mall. “Not long ago it would have been men,” she said. “We’re breaking the stereotypes.”
With the crown prince, gradualism is gone. It’s all “Vision 2030,” his slogan, and K. P. I. s ( key performance indicators) on a forced march to a less oil- dependent country of mass tourism, empowered women, renewable energy, theme parks and the rest.
Can the crown prince pull off the rebranding?
“M. B. S. does not pretend to be a liberal, and he has the full coercive power of the state behind him,” Ali Shihabi, a Saudi author, told me. “Still, he has to balance things. Even if conservatives are not a majority, they can be a very disruptive minority.
For now there’s silence. It’s partly fear. Prince Mohammed throws opponents in jail — and it’s not always the Ritz. Many pro- democracy activists were rounded up in September.
At a restaurant, I met with a man in his 30s, a former journalist who’s taken himself off Twitter and decided to go abroad for a few years to sit out what he sees as an unpredictable, troubling moment. What sort of transformation, he asked me, includes no political change and shuts the door on more freedom? Saudi society, he mused, never challenges the government — as a public, press or parliament. Nor, it seems, will it any time soon.
Mohammed al-Tuwaijri, the economy minister, told me: “I can confirm we had 30 wasted years” as a result of “corruption” and being “hijacked by ideologies, by wrong ideas, jihadists and extremists. And lots of people were sitting in the middle saying: ‘I don’t know. My life is O. K. Why should I bother?’ Now we are saying there’s more to life than this, please join us.”
I went down to Jeddah. On the corniche, dotted with beaches, flanked by a new bike path, high-rise condos are going up beside luxury hotels. But on a pier with shaded areas formless black shapes — that is to say, women — glided with their faces veiled, one lifting the black flap over her mouth to insert an ice cream cone.
I looked for somewhere to get a cold drink. The Starbucks was closed for prayer. I waited in the blistering heat. When it reopened, I chatted with Mohammed Jalal, the Egyptian manager. He has been in Saudi Arabia a dozen years.
From his vantage point, Prince Mohammed’s transformation push looks like a stop-go process. Women sometimes sit next to men at the outdoor tables — inside, they are confined to the second floor — and nobody had complained. On the other hand, “We had Western music playing, customers grumbled, and Starbucks shot it down.”
At the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, I asked Saud Bin Saleh Al-Sarhan, the secretary general, and Abdullah bin Khalid Al-Saud, the director of research, how far the Saudi makeover could go. They suggested that where there is disagreement between Islamic scholars change would occur, but where there is unanimity it would not.
Women would go uncovered; store closings for prayer and restaurant gender segregation would end; the crippling system of “guardianship” that allows men to control the lives of Saudi women would unravel; Medina might be accessible to non-Mus- lim tourists, Mecca probably not.
However, alcohol, same-sex marriage and going public about homosexuality would never be allowed.
I visited the Riyadh driving school for women. It has a waiting list of 70,000. Here, some 3,000 registered students go through 30 hours of training, for about $ 600, about six times the cost of the course for men.
Shereen Abdulhassan, the founder of a Riyadh hiking team, told me that some years ago she’d given up hope. “I’m still not happy at the price discrimination,” she said. “But I love M. B.”S. for trusting society more.” Thousands of Saudi women have already signed up to be drivers for a ride-hailing company, Careem.
Hatoon Ajwad al-Fassi, a former associate professor of women’s history at King Saud University, has long campaigned for women’s right to drive. Four hours after the driving announcement in September, she received a call from an official telling her not to exult on social media. The government, she said, did not want it to be seen as a victory for public advocacy.
Her analysis of her country struck me as about right. The crown prince is genuine. He’s put his finger on what is keeping Saudi Arabia back. But there remain lots of red lines, constant censorship. Changes have occurred but have not been framed in law, which makes them vulnerable.
And so? “I am hopeful,” Fassi told me. “Hopeful that 10 years from now we will have a public sphere that is more humane and safe for women, freed of the guardianship’s abuses, and that will be good for the Saudi economy.”
A leader bringing genuine change but also propagating fear.