Loosening of Saudi restrictions gains foothold
The taxi driver’s question was barely audible. Prodded to repeat it a few times, he mustered enough courage to raise his voice and ask if he could play music.
He sought permission because he was driving in Buraidah, the capital of Saudi Arabia’s conservative heartland, where music is widely frowned upon as un-islamic. That he dared to do so is a sign of the subtle liberalization taking root in Qassim province, a bastion of Islamic orthodoxy, years after the big cities of Riyadh and Jeddah embraced change.
To the strains of a Lebanese singer urging his lover to “Hug me tenderly,” the taxi glided past restaurants and shops with sleek, modern exteriors and Western names like Meaty Buns and XOXO. Inside one of the cafes, Haifa Abdullah celebrated the newfound freedoms — as she sat swathed head-to-toe in black, her eyes peeking out from a veil.
“We’re happy with this new openness and want more,” said Abdullah, a 21-year-old university student who sat in the cafe with two female friends. She laughed when asked about Buraidah’s reputation as an ultra-conservative city resistant to change.
“That was in the past. People’s mindset is changing,” she said. “They saw there were changes in Riyadh and Jeddah, that nothing happened to the girls, and they’re slowly coming around.”
Demographic statistics help to explain this quiet evolution in the kingdom’s most conservative region. Half of Qassim’s population of 1.4 million is under 30. Their parents grew up at a time when the country’s rigid doctrines were being enforced by the government, and their prime outlet to the outside world was satellite TV, which didn’t arrive in the kingdom until the 1990s.
But younger Saudis are a tech-savvy group who have been exposed to the rest of the world through the internet and travel, and want to be part of it.
Qassim gave Saudi Arabia one of its most extremist figures, Juhayman al-otaybi, who led the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamists seeking to shift the country to a more conservative course. The government responded by adopting a more austere interpretation of Wahhabi Islam that still prevails in Qassim, making the region an important testing ground for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s drive to loosen social restrictions and return the country to moderate Islam.
The prince pushed the envelope further last week by announcing that women will be allowed to travel abroad without permission from a male relative, a major step toward ending a controversial “guardianship” system that renders women legal dependents of men throughout their lives.
“The advancement of social reforms has shown that MBS’ risky strategy of quick change has more support than traditionally assumed,” said Ayham Kamel, head of Middle East and North Africa research at Eurasia Group, a consultancy. Bin Salman wants to succeed in places like Qassim to “ensure that his program is a national program that changes society at large rather than creating limited pockets of openness.”