Comic books and concerts... Saudi Arabia tiptoes forward

The legendary Arab singer Rashed al-majed performed three encores at the end of his concert last week in the Saudi capital. It was the least he could do for his fans, said Arabnews.com (Jeddah). They had, after all, “waited about three decades for such a show”. Since the early 1990s, concerts have effectively been banned in conservative Riyadh, and are held only rarely elsewhere in the country. Cinemas and theatres, seen as sources of distraction and depravity, have likewise been forbidden. But change is in the air thanks to the launch last year of “Vision 2030”, a reform plan led by Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s 31-year-old deputy crown prince. The aim of the blueprint is to prepare Saudi Arabia for the “post-oil” era by, among other things, cultivating homegrown entertainment and tourism, and by boosting the percentage of women in the workforce from 22% to 30%.

Signs of change are everywhere, said Michael Jabri-pickett on Arabianbusiness.com (Dubai). Last month alone, Saudi Arabia hosted a global convention for comic book fans; the country’s largest mall operator revealed that it had allocated space for cinemas in all ten of its new malls under development; and the Saudi Stock Exchange, the largest in the Arab world, appointed Sarah al-suhaimi as its first female chairperson. The reforming agenda is in part an attempt to modernise a country in which 60% of the population is under the age of 30, said Fahad Nazer in The Arab Weekly (London). But there’s also a compelling economic case for it. The dearth of local entertainment options mean that Saudis looking for fun have long headed to the likes of Bahrain or Dubai to spend their money. “It is estimated that Saudis spent $670m abroad over a recent nine-day school holiday.”

Saudi Arabia has also made a few tentative steps to liberalise its politics, said Ian Bremmer in Time (New York). Last year, for instance, the feared religious police had their powers of arrest curbed. But it still has a long way to go. Saudi women are still banned from driving, and the Vision 2030 plan could yet be derailed by the religious hardliners who underwrite the royal family’s precarious political legitimacy. Many in the West assume that younger Saudis must be clamouring for liberal reforms, and many no doubt are. But it’s hard to judge the true state of public opinion. The fact that “conservative clerics have far more social media followers than do the king, well-known athletes, or the few political activists in this closed society”, should give us pause for thought.