bruh...just watch this before you commentOh im sorry I thought the question at hand was the methods autocrats use to hang on to power....not specific personality types or ideology
And that was my point ...Thank you for agreeing with me
Sure buddy...The info is laid out like i said they're going broke,their civil service is bloated, The population growth is too high,too unproductive,too reliant on foreign labor ,foreign expertise and too heavily reliant on state subsidies
You based this opinion on what??
Who chooses and funds the clerics....The religious leaders are not independent they still need to eat and allah aint dropping food
Official Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Collapse Thread...They're absolutely FU&KED!!!
- Thread starter ☑︎#VoteDemocrat
- Start date
You know thats a entertainment movie...right? Not even a documentary...and what there is relevant to what i said?
ZoeGod
I’m from Brooklyn a place where stars are born.
http://blogs.ft.com/nick-butler/2016/10/10/the-saudis-strategic-failure/
So even if the Saudis cut production the US shale gas industry will increase production as well as the Iranian,Libyans and Nigerians. They are fukked.
Way less than that. We produce about 75% of the oil we consume.
damn....
In Saudi Arabia: Can It Really Change?
October 13, 2016 Issue
Nicolas Pelham
The Other Saudis: Shiism, Dissent and Sectarianism
by Toby Matthiesen
Cambridge University Press, 277 pp., $29.99 (paper)
Joyriding in Riyadh: Oil, Urbanism, and Road Revolt
by Pascal Menoret
Cambridge University Press, 250 pp., $34.99 (paper)
Saudi Arabia: A Kingdom in Peril
by Paul Aarts and Carolien Roelants
London: Hurst, 176 pp., £14.99 (paper)
Force and Fanaticism: Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and Beyond
by Simon Ross Valentine
London: Hurst, 362 pp., £25.00
Fayez Nureldine/AFP/Getty ImagesSaudi Defense Minister and Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, right, with Omani Defense Minister Badr bin Saud al-Busaidi and US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter at the US–Gulf Cooperation Council summit in Riyadh, April 2016
Until the Wahhabi conquest of the Arabian peninsula at the turn of the last century, the mixture of sects there was as diverse as it was anywhere in the old pluralist Middle East. In its towns there lived, among others, Sufi mystics from the Sunni branch of Islam, members of the Zaidi sect, which is linked with the Shia branch of Islam, Twelver Shia traders, and seasonal Jewish farmhands from Yemen.
From the eighteenth century onward, successive waves of warriors from the Wahhabi revivalist movement, formed from Sunni tribesmen in the hinterland, have struggled to enforce a puritanical uniformity on the cosmopolitan coast. Toby Matthiesen recounts in The Other Saudis that, a few years after taking the eastern shores of the peninsula from the reeling Ottomans in 1913, Wahhabi clerics issued a fatwa obliging local Shias to convert to “true Islam.” In Hijaz, the western region that includes Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah, militant Wahhabi clerics and their followers ransacked the treasuries of the holy places in Mecca, lopped the dome off the House of the Prophet in Medina, and razed myriad shrines.
But their success was only partial. In 1930, when the Wahhabi Brethren began raiding Iraq and Jordan and upsetting the region’s British overlords, Abdulaziz al-Saud, the modern state’s founder, reined them in, slaughtering the zealots by the hundred.
Afterward, the peninsula regained much of its old tempo. Shia clerics applied their versions of Islamic law in the east. Jeddah’s newspapers continued to publish listings of Western as well as Islamic New Year’s Eve celebrations, cinema screenings, and concerts. Then, in 1979, apparently inspired by the Iranian overthrow of the Shah and the establishment of an Islamic republic earlier that year, Islamic militants stormed Mecca’s Grand Mosque, the holiest place in Islam, and declared a new order under a leader who proclaimed himself the Mahdi—the redeemer—and sought to replace the Saudi monarchy. Wahhabi forces loyal to the monarchy counterattacked, saved the al-Sauds, and retook the mosque. But a crucial deal was made: loyalist clerics approved the removal of the militants by force; but in return demanded that Saudi royals cede them power to strictly control personal behavior. The last cinemas and concert halls shut down. Women were obliged to shroud themselves in black.
Thirty-five years later, foreign descriptions of Saudi Arabia remain for the most part remarkably bleak. The writers of all four books under review examine the domination of the al-Saud dynasty with the fascination with which a zoologist might regard a black widow snaring its prey. Pascal Menoret describes young men whose only escape from Riyadh’s Islamist social strictures is the homoerotically charged practice of joyriding down the city’s grim highways. Matthiesen describes the often difficult lives of two million Shias in eastern Saudi Arabia—many of them employees of oil companies—whose right to practice their form of Islam contracts and expands according to royal whim. Paul Aarts and Carolien Roelants describe the suppression of Saudi women, who still need a man to study, work, travel, or open bank accounts. Simon Ross Valentine is appalled and fascinated by the power of Wahhabi clerics; he stays behind after a clumsy public decapitation to watch a mosque steward hose down the blood. Yet through all of these recent books comes a nagging question: If Saudi Arabia really is the wellspring of ISIS and if it imposes, as it often does, an orthodox conformity, how, a century after its creation, does the kingdom these authors describe remain, as they also make clear, such a heterogeneous and nuanced place?
Each of the authors acknowledges the gap between the totalitarian ideal and the looser reality. “Wherever I lived in [the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia],” writes Valentine in a chapter entitled “Serpents in Paradise,” “I was not only offered drugs and alcohol, but also ‘woman, for good time.’” Aarts is surprised by a portrait gallery violating sharia injunctions against figurative art. There are plenty of censors, but the Internet and satellite TV, he found, have made them obsolete. Menoret records how the joyriders have turned the uniform urban grids into an escape route from state planners and authoritarian governors as they speed down the streets.
Most striking of all is Matthiesen’s meticulous portrayal of contemporary Shiism. He describes how the Shia residents of the Eastern Province are treated as second-class citizens; but he makes it clear that they are also able to stage Shia ritual processions through the streets, and how their ayatollahs maintain networks of close relations with one another and with their Iranian counterparts that “allow for a certain independence from the state.” Some have opened hawzat, or theological colleges, including one for women. Such open displays of Shia religiosity and autonomy make many a Wahhabi cleric writhe. But they survive nevertheless.
Mike King
In January, I went with my editor in chief from The Economist to Saudi Arabia to meet Mohammed bin Salman, a young, previously little-publicized royal, known to his courtiers as MbS. Upon his aging father Salman’s coronation in January 2015, he rose to become deputy crown prince, minister of defense, and de facto ruler. We met with him at an inauspicious time. He had marked the New Year by executing forty-seven people—including forty-three Sunni jihadists and four Shias—the kingdom’s largest group of executions since the crackdown that followed the retaking of Mecca’s Grand Mosque in 1979. Throughout the meeting, the young prince watched reports of the executions on a large television screen—seeming to confirm the caricature of himself on social media as a teenager who played at brutal statecraft as if it were a video game. Iranian protesters had stormed the Saudi embassy in Tehran, and in response MbS promptly severed relations with Iran. “We try as hard as we can not to escalate anything further,” he told us at dinner, while his acerbic foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir, portrayed his masters as valiantly defending against the Persian Empire’s march west.
Mohammed bin Salman’s treatment of domestic affairs seemed as headstrong as his treatment of foreign ones. Apparently in return for sanctioning the youngster’s accumulation of power, the clerical establishment secured the dismissal of the country’s first female minister, appointed in laxer times by Abdullah, the late king. Religious police resumed their raids on private premises. A young female accountant told us how they had detained a male colleague sharing her office, in violation of their codes. A spring festival in the south was shut down after prepubescent girls joined in a folkloric dance. McDonald’s revamped its fast-food franchises, and renovated signs segregating their counters and seating areas by sex.
At literary salons, writers recounted stories of people jailed for blaspheming. Some were fed watermelon to fill their bladders, they said, and then had their penises tied. In November 2015 Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet raised in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for voicing religious doubts. “I am Hell’s experiment on the Planet Earth,” he had written in his offending volume of poems. (After much international protest and a worldwide reading of his poems, a panel of judges upheld the verdict of apostasy but commuted the sentence to eight years in prison and eight hundred lashes.) “For the first time in my life, I’m truly afraid,” a news editor told me. The dearth of names in this review is testimony to how nervous even prominent figures have become.
Having proven his conservative and repressive capabilities, MbS tacked leftward. Earlier this year, after the executions, he stripped the special unit of the morality police of its powers to arrest people and locked up popular preachers who dared challenge this change. Among them was Abdul-Aziz al-Tarifi, a prominent televangelist, who sneered, “There are some rulers who think that renouncing their religion to satisfy infidels will put an end to the pressures on them.” News of his arrest soon after was tweeted 22,000 times.
Similarly dismissive of tradition, Mohammed bin Salman pointedly gave his first on-record interview to my editor in chief, an unveiled Western woman who rejected the black abaya our minders wanted her to wear. He received her in the living room of his out-of-town rest house in a renovated desert fortress. The daggers of old battles hung from the wattle-and-stucco walls above them. IPads lay strewn on the coffee table in front of them. He expressed views in favor of reform. Curing the kingdom’s oil “addiction” would require diversifying its economy, he said, which in turn might require modernizing its rigid hierarchies. Women should have a more productive part in the kingdom’s economy. Migrants should have the rights of residents. (“All nationalities?” an alarmed interviewer on Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned Arabic-language channel, asked him later. “Without a doubt,” replied MbS without a twitch.)
A relaxation of the social code would have economic advantages. To discourage his citizens from frittering away their earnings on trips to Dubai or Beirut (both capitals where women can drive and people freely drink), the Saudi kingdom, he said, should construct its own tourist resorts, to keep the money at home. As part of his $5 billion plan to develop the country’s entertainment sector, he told us, he would build theme parks and resorts on the kingdom’s untouched islands in the turquoise Red Sea. Saudi pop stars—“the best in the Arab world”—who performed in the kingdom in his father’s youth might soon be allowed back to perform—perhaps before the year’s end. Footage from Mecca during his grandfather’s reign showed women riding on camels, beating drums, and selling wares in the marketplace. They might yet do so again.
MbS’s new education minister, an academic whose book Wahhabi censors had banned for criticizing clerical control over curricula, spoke of breaking the preachers’ stranglehold by opening branches of American universities in the kingdom. An Information Ministry official showed me architects’ drawings for a Royal Arts Complex that he said would wean the kingdom off “ISIS values.” Saudi Arabia had closed its last public cinema in the 1970s, but the new complex would have both a movie theater and an opera house. One day, the official said, it might stage La Bohème. “We want to break the social resistance that prevents women driving, provide an alternative to the conservatives, and work gradually to eliminate extremism,” he told me. Another official added that MbS’s recent acquisition of a $3.5 billion stake in Uber, the cell phone app for ordering taxis, would give women greater freedom of movement.
An adviser to Mohammed bin Salman compared the young prince to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who turned his sleepy creek of Dubai into a libertine metropolis. But for all his talk of theme parks, the only one near completion is Diriya, the reconstructed town outside Riyadh where his forefathers and the founder of the Wahhabis, Ibn Abdel Wahhab, sealed their pact in 1744. In the 1980s, Saudia Arabia’s King Fahd built an opera house that never opened because of religious objections and remains a gleaming white elephant on the outskirts of Riyadh. Advisers who had anticipated an announcement that women would be allowed to drive sounded glum when MbS dismissed the idea.
There are private beaches where local women can wear bikinis, but the kingdom seems unprepared for mass domestic tourism on a scale that proliferates elsewhere in the Middle East. Such a development, a Jeddah hotelier told me, would happen “only over the graves of the religious establishment.” As MbS attempts to placate both camps, he risks satisfying none.
Each year, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city, hosts a festival recalling pre-Wahhabi times. Under the seemingly innocuous slogan Kunna Kidda, “That’s How We Were,” charitable associations funded by local businessmen evoked memories of a more pluralist past. From the glistening white square where the regime stages its executions, I joined the crowds floating through the arched gates into the Old City. In blown-up sepia photographs lining the port city’s historic alleys, religious buildings flattened when the al-Sauds and their conquering puritans descended from the desert highlands in 1925 rose again. Beneath lattice balconies, families stopped to marvel at Sufi lodges and the domed shrine of Eve, the first woman—toppled by zealots who frown on saint-worship. Inside a glass case running the length of a house, mannequins flaunted the colorful capes women wore before the Wahhabi sheikhs mandated that they wear black. Recalling a time when Jeddah was Arabia’s diplomatic capital, spotlights illuminated the whitewashed buildings that were once the American and British consulates, as well as the residence of the Ottoman caliph, the steps of which were so shallow that a camel could plod to the fifth floor.
Excited girls, outnumbering the men in their segregated stands, cheer comedians on an open-air festival stage. Between acts, a DJ spins discs, defying the ban on music. “Suck me,” screech its English hip-hop lyrics. After the show, the more adventurous of both sexes then mingle onstage, taking group selfies. “The festival is our answer to the desert tribes who disparage our cosmopolitan port city ways,” one of the organizers tells me.
His remarks underlined just how much resistance Wahhabis face in a peninsula relandscaped as their own. Mecca’s ancient hill has been laid low and its old town leveled to make way for sixteen towering apartment hotels, and shrines to the Prophet’s descendents, historically venerated by Sunnis and Shia alike, have been bulldozed. “The crime has been committed,” says a Jeddah art curator and conservationist, who on his office wall has a painting of a group of bland hotels looming over the Kaaba—the inner sanctum of Mecca’s Grand Mosque—and shrouding its black sanctity in shadow. “Our task is to salvage what remains.”
But unlike the Islamic State, which in two years of depredation has purged its territory of Muslim and non-Muslim nonconformists, Wahhabis have failed to suppress the peninsula’s many cultures and sects, despite a century of rule. Zaidis, in their wan-colored adobe houses beneath the shadow of Yemen’s mountains, and the Nakhawila, Medina’s indigenous Shias, continue to visit the graveyards where the shrines of the Prophet’s family once stood. On Thursday nights, their Sufi neighbors recite their zikr, or mystical incantations—deemed profanities by the Wahhabis—to the beat of the daf, or traditional drum. In Medina, erudite advocates of conservation, drawn primarily from the shurafa, the pre-Wahhabi nobility of Hijaz, successfully lobbied the authorities not to let the Wahhabis demolish the Prophet Muhammad’s house as part of their expansion.
Some even detect a growing acceptance of other religions and a reexamination of the Wahhabi doctrine—cited by a senior royal—that non-Muslim worship should not be allowed in the entire peninsula. (“If Saudi Arabia had lands in Africa, we would undoubtedly have opened a church there,” he said.) The kingdom includes perhaps the largest and fastest-growing Christian community in the Middle East. Despite the formal ban on non-Muslims in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, non-Muslim domestic servants and drivers live and work in the shadow of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Though Christians are forbidden from worshiping publicly, congregations at weekly prayer meetings on foreign compounds can be several hundred strong. “A generation ago we pretended Christmas didn’t exist,” says a Saudi businessman who has two live-in Christian servants from the Philippines. “Now we give them Christmas presents, and host Winter Festival receptions for our Christian employees.”
At literary salons, writers recounted stories of people jailed for blaspheming. Some were fed watermelon to fill their bladders, they said, and then had their penises tied. In November 2015 Ashraf Fayadh, a Palestinian poet raised in Saudi Arabia, was sentenced to death for voicing religious doubts. “I am Hell’s experiment on the Planet Earth,” he had written in his offending volume of poems. (After much international protest and a worldwide reading of his poems, a panel of judges upheld the verdict of apostasy but commuted the sentence to eight years in prison and eight hundred lashes.) “For the first time in my life, I’m truly afraid,” a news editor told me. The dearth of names in this review is testimony to how nervous even prominent figures have become.
Having proven his conservative and repressive capabilities, MbS tacked leftward. Earlier this year, after the executions, he stripped the special unit of the morality police of its powers to arrest people and locked up popular preachers who dared challenge this change. Among them was Abdul-Aziz al-Tarifi, a prominent televangelist, who sneered, “There are some rulers who think that renouncing their religion to satisfy infidels will put an end to the pressures on them.” News of his arrest soon after was tweeted 22,000 times.
Similarly dismissive of tradition, Mohammed bin Salman pointedly gave his first on-record interview to my editor in chief, an unveiled Western woman who rejected the black abaya our minders wanted her to wear. He received her in the living room of his out-of-town rest house in a renovated desert fortress. The daggers of old battles hung from the wattle-and-stucco walls above them. IPads lay strewn on the coffee table in front of them. He expressed views in favor of reform. Curing the kingdom’s oil “addiction” would require diversifying its economy, he said, which in turn might require modernizing its rigid hierarchies. Women should have a more productive part in the kingdom’s economy. Migrants should have the rights of residents. (“All nationalities?” an alarmed interviewer on Al-Arabiya, a Saudi-owned Arabic-language channel, asked him later. “Without a doubt,” replied MbS without a twitch.)
A relaxation of the social code would have economic advantages. To discourage his citizens from frittering away their earnings on trips to Dubai or Beirut (both capitals where women can drive and people freely drink), the Saudi kingdom, he said, should construct its own tourist resorts, to keep the money at home. As part of his $5 billion plan to develop the country’s entertainment sector, he told us, he would build theme parks and resorts on the kingdom’s untouched islands in the turquoise Red Sea. Saudi pop stars—“the best in the Arab world”—who performed in the kingdom in his father’s youth might soon be allowed back to perform—perhaps before the year’s end. Footage from Mecca during his grandfather’s reign showed women riding on camels, beating drums, and selling wares in the marketplace. They might yet do so again.
MbS’s new education minister, an academic whose book Wahhabi censors had banned for criticizing clerical control over curricula, spoke of breaking the preachers’ stranglehold by opening branches of American universities in the kingdom. An Information Ministry official showed me architects’ drawings for a Royal Arts Complex that he said would wean the kingdom off “ISIS values.” Saudi Arabia had closed its last public cinema in the 1970s, but the new complex would have both a movie theater and an opera house. One day, the official said, it might stage La Bohème. “We want to break the social resistance that prevents women driving, provide an alternative to the conservatives, and work gradually to eliminate extremism,” he told me. Another official added that MbS’s recent acquisition of a $3.5 billion stake in Uber, the cell phone app for ordering taxis, would give women greater freedom of movement.
An adviser to Mohammed bin Salman compared the young prince to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who turned his sleepy creek of Dubai into a libertine metropolis. But for all his talk of theme parks, the only one near completion is Diriya, the reconstructed town outside Riyadh where his forefathers and the founder of the Wahhabis, Ibn Abdel Wahhab, sealed their pact in 1744. In the 1980s, Saudia Arabia’s King Fahd built an opera house that never opened because of religious objections and remains a gleaming white elephant on the outskirts of Riyadh. Advisers who had anticipated an announcement that women would be allowed to drive sounded glum when MbS dismissed the idea.
There are private beaches where local women can wear bikinis, but the kingdom seems unprepared for mass domestic tourism on a scale that proliferates elsewhere in the Middle East. Such a development, a Jeddah hotelier told me, would happen “only over the graves of the religious establishment.” As MbS attempts to placate both camps, he risks satisfying none.
Each year, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city, hosts a festival recalling pre-Wahhabi times. Under the seemingly innocuous slogan Kunna Kidda, “That’s How We Were,” charitable associations funded by local businessmen evoked memories of a more pluralist past. From the glistening white square where the regime stages its executions, I joined the crowds floating through the arched gates into the Old City. In blown-up sepia photographs lining the port city’s historic alleys, religious buildings flattened when the al-Sauds and their conquering puritans descended from the desert highlands in 1925 rose again. Beneath lattice balconies, families stopped to marvel at Sufi lodges and the domed shrine of Eve, the first woman—toppled by zealots who frown on saint-worship. Inside a glass case running the length of a house, mannequins flaunted the colorful capes women wore before the Wahhabi sheikhs mandated that they wear black. Recalling a time when Jeddah was Arabia’s diplomatic capital, spotlights illuminated the whitewashed buildings that were once the American and British consulates, as well as the residence of the Ottoman caliph, the steps of which were so shallow that a camel could plod to the fifth floor.
Excited girls, outnumbering the men in their segregated stands, cheer comedians on an open-air festival stage. Between acts, a DJ spins discs, defying the ban on music. “Suck me,” screech its English hip-hop lyrics. After the show, the more adventurous of both sexes then mingle onstage, taking group selfies. “The festival is our answer to the desert tribes who disparage our cosmopolitan port city ways,” one of the organizers tells me.
His remarks underlined just how much resistance Wahhabis face in a peninsula relandscaped as their own. Mecca’s ancient hill has been laid low and its old town leveled to make way for sixteen towering apartment hotels, and shrines to the Prophet’s descendents, historically venerated by Sunnis and Shia alike, have been bulldozed. “The crime has been committed,” says a Jeddah art curator and conservationist, who on his office wall has a painting of a group of bland hotels looming over the Kaaba—the inner sanctum of Mecca’s Grand Mosque—and shrouding its black sanctity in shadow. “Our task is to salvage what remains.”
But unlike the Islamic State, which in two years of depredation has purged its territory of Muslim and non-Muslim nonconformists, Wahhabis have failed to suppress the peninsula’s many cultures and sects, despite a century of rule. Zaidis, in their wan-colored adobe houses beneath the shadow of Yemen’s mountains, and the Nakhawila, Medina’s indigenous Shias, continue to visit the graveyards where the shrines of the Prophet’s family once stood. On Thursday nights, their Sufi neighbors recite their zikr, or mystical incantations—deemed profanities by the Wahhabis—to the beat of the daf, or traditional drum. In Medina, erudite advocates of conservation, drawn primarily from the shurafa, the pre-Wahhabi nobility of Hijaz, successfully lobbied the authorities not to let the Wahhabis demolish the Prophet Muhammad’s house as part of their expansion.
Some even detect a growing acceptance of other religions and a reexamination of the Wahhabi doctrine—cited by a senior royal—that non-Muslim worship should not be allowed in the entire peninsula. (“If Saudi Arabia had lands in Africa, we would undoubtedly have opened a church there,” he said.) The kingdom includes perhaps the largest and fastest-growing Christian community in the Middle East. Despite the formal ban on non-Muslims in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, non-Muslim domestic servants and drivers live and work in the shadow of Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Though Christians are forbidden from worshiping publicly, congregations at weekly prayer meetings on foreign compounds can be several hundred strong. “A generation ago we pretended Christmas didn’t exist,” says a Saudi businessman who has two live-in Christian servants from the Philippines. “Now we give them Christmas presents, and host Winter Festival receptions for our Christian employees.”
Magnum PhotosStudents at Effat Women’s University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, 2009; photograph by Olivia Arthur from her 2012 book, Jeddah Diary
At one of Riyadh’s universities, a minor Saudi prince who studied Hebrew in Boston teaches Jewish studies. And with their non-Arabic signs and street food, whole stretches of southern Riyadh feel more Bengali, Keralite, and Afghan than similar parts of London. That Saudi Arabia tries to conceal such diversity from the outside world underscores its deference to its clerical establishment, but for a journalist raised on books like those listed here the kingdom’s tentative foray into multiculturalism can be jarring.
One morning I went to Riyadh’s modernist off-white Criminal Court. I had been told that anyone hoping for a fair hearing should grow an unkempt beard, showing piety. In Courtroom 39, a clean-shaven taxi driver and father of six from the poor southeastern part of the capital was pleading for mercy from a young, bearded judge in white Wahhabi garb who was sentencing him to eighty lashes for drinking whisky. “But the police said that you would let me off with a warning if I confessed,” the taxi driver protested. “No man can tamper with the punishment God has prescribed [in the Koran],” the judge said, in a tone that suggested he wished he could. Glancing at the conspicuous foreigner in his courtroom, he placed a Koran under his armpit and reenacted a mercifully limp-wristed whipping. “The police can only use their lower arm,” he said, interrupting proceedings to tell me that patriarchal tradition, not the Koran, was to blame for excesses and that he favored letting women drive.
In his dilapidated house on the eastern outskirts of Riyadh, I talked with Hassan Farhan al-Maliki, now an active protester but formerly a well-paid bureaucrat whose needs were all met by the state. As a clerk in the Education Ministry, he told me he had distributed cassettes of Bin Baz, the chief mufti who preached that the world was flat. But a trip to Afghanistan and the predominance of Saudis involved in the suicide attacks of September 11, 2001, he says, induced a change of heart. Dar al-Razi, a publishing house in Amman, Jordan, published his book, Preacher Not Prophet, a refutation of the “corrupting” tenets of Wahhabism’s founder, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. He was dismissed from the ministry and sent, twice, to prison. Unrepentant, he emerged to denounce the kingdom’s application of God’s law that he told me “was hard on the people and soft on the rulers.”
The elite, al-Maliki argued, bypassed sharia in their beach clubs and mansions equipped with cinemas and bars, but the poor had no such retreats. “The clerics serve the regime by banning protests and freedom of expression, and exonerating all its corrupt acts,” he said as we had tea. The Prophet himself, he said, lived peacefully among kuffar, or nonbelievers, in Mecca. Why couldn’t their self-proclaimed successors?
Al-Maliki is unusual in his determination to withstand the regime’s pressures and temptations, but he is not alone. When I visited the small town of Awamiya, near Dammam, the Eastern Province capital and large oil center, I found that it had been taken over by Shia insurgents. Activists had used a bulldozer to dig up and block the one-lane road leading into the town. Snipers were said to lurk in the date palms, waiting for security vehicles. Locals celebrated their intifada, which, they said, had chased out Saudi forces and fortified the town against their return. The nearest checkpoint when I visited was unmanned, and Saudi policemen inspected papers several kilometers away, standing behind large cement barricades. People in the town proudly told me that they had rejected government offers of help in guarding against ISIS militants, who over the past year had blown up seven Shia mosques in the kingdom. Instead, on Fridays, local volunteers patrolled mosques in the town and neighboring villages, guarding against outside attack.
The execution in January of this year of the Shia preacher Nimr al-Nimr, Awamiya’s leading cleric, had revived the protest movement that Shias in the Eastern Province had launched in 2011 as part of the Arab Spring. “After the killing of Nimr, we see ISIS and the security forces as one and the same,” one of his relatives told me. Graffiti pronouncing “Death to the al-Sauds” could be seen throughout the town, including on the cemetery walls, and inside them female relatives tended to the shrines of eighteen local men whom, they said, Saudi forces had shot dead while suppressing unrest. Lampposts were draped in mournful black ribbon, and Nimr’s image hung over the town on posters, billboards, and stencils imprinted on walls. Two armored cars were parked in front of the sole police garrison, their gun turrets pointing into town. The approach road was strewn with barbed wire, rocks, and burned tires. Not a Saudi policeman was to be seen.
Nimr’s brother, Mohammed, guided me around the town, introducing local grocers, peddlers hawking banned Shia liturgies, and women grieving for sons and brothers buried in the cemetery. Almost everyone I spoke to had a close relative in one of the regime’s jails. Mohammed’s son, Ali, had been detained, aged seventeen, for participating in protests and was now on death row. The family had a history of protest dating back four generations, Mohammed explained, after Saudi Arabia conquered the Eastern Province in 1913. A century later, Nimr al-Nimr had revived his grandfather’s cry of resistance, appealing to young Shias to rise against systemic state discrimination.
Though Shias make up over 10 percent of Saudi Arabia’s population, their Saudi rulers had yet to appoint a single Shia minister after a century of rule. Shia community leaders across the Eastern Province told me that the authorities had staffed Shia schools with Wahhabi teachers who taught that Shias were apostates, and they pocketed the oil revenues while leaving Awamiya and Shia villages near the oil wells sunk in poverty. For over a decade, Nimr al-Nimr had championed the cause of equality. If the Saudis opposed it, he warned, Shias might opt for separation. In the heady days of 2011, he roused Shias onto the street. Alone in Saudi Arabia, the Shias of the Eastern Province joined the Arab Spring protests. Five years later, Nimr was beheaded. Outraged by his execution, the town of Awamiya simmered with anticipation of self-rule.
And yet Nimr’s brother, Mohammed, is no revolutionary. He runs a plumbing business selling toilets, drives a Lexus SUV, and relaxes on weekends in his palm groves on the outskirts of town. In better times, he participated in officially sanctioned interfaith meetings with Wahhabi clerics. Even after his brother was executed and his son sentenced to death, Mohammed insists that the rift with the al-Sauds is redeemable. “We tell the government to deal with Sunnis and Shias politically, but they only respond with security.” He told me that if Mohammed bin Salman had only diverted a fraction of the billions spent fighting Shias in Yemen and Syria and maintaining the standoff with Iran to development in Shia towns in the kingdom and around its borders, Shias across the region, including in Awamiya, would be kissing his hands.
Popular sentiment mattered less when Saudi Arabia could distribute payments from its oil revenues with abandon to relieve its citizens’ frustrations. But in an age of low oil prices and bloated budget deficits, the Saudis might have to broaden their popular base if they are to persuade their people to foot the bill. As long as Saudis pay no income tax, they have no right to representation, Mohammed bin Salman insists. But if he is to realize what he says are his two policy objectives—transforming the kingdom from a single-resource state into a productive economy and securing regional support to stymie Iran’s advance west—MbS will need to reach out beyond the Wahhabi core of the hinterland to the country’s many diverse sects on its productive edges.
Few Shias, Sufis, or secular Saudis want the kingdom to collapse, least of all to ISISzealots. MbS’s vision of a new social contract suggests that he understands the benefits of a more inclusive society, even if he stops short of fully engaging his kingdom’s multiple parts. There is still a chance that future books about the kingdom might not be so dark, but MbS will need more than words if he is to convince his heterogeneous population that the Saudis are rulers for all their people, not just themselves and the Wahhabis.
—September 14, 2016
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/w...ince-shatters-decades-of-royal-tradition.html
Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition
By MARK MAZZETTI and OCT. 15, 2016
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, has a hand in nearly all elements of Saudi policy. Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
He has slashed the state budget, frozen government contracts and reduced the pay of civil employees, all part of drastic austerity measures as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is buffeted by low oil prices.
But last year, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, saw a yacht he couldn’t resist.
While vacationing in the south of France, Prince bin Salman spotted a 440-foot yacht floating off the coast. He dispatched an aide to buy the ship, the Serene, which was owned by Yuri Shefler, a Russian vodka tyc00n. The deal was done within hours, at a price of approximately 500 million euros (roughly $550 million today), according to an associate of Mr. Shefler and a Saudi close to the royal family. The Russian moved off the yacht the same day.
It is the paradox of the brash, 31-year-old Prince bin Salman: a man who is trying to overturn tradition, reinvent the economy and consolidate power — while holding tight to his royal privilege. In less than two years, he has emerged as the most dynamic royal in the Arab world’s wealthiest nation, setting up a potential rivalry for the throne.
He has a hand in nearly all elements of Saudi policy — from a war in Yemen that has cost the kingdom billions of dollars and led to international criticism over civilian deaths, to a push domestically to restrain Saudi Arabia’s free-spending habits and to break its “addiction” to oil. He has begun to loosen social restrictions that grate on young people.
The rise of Prince bin Salman has shattered decades of tradition in the royal family, where respect for seniority and power-sharing among branches are time-honored traditions. Never before in Saudi history has so much power been wielded by the deputy crown prince, who is second in line to the throne. That centralization of authority has angered many of his relatives.
His seemingly boundless ambitions have led many Saudis and foreign officials to suspect that his ultimate goal is not just to transform the kingdom, but also to shove aside the current crown prince, his 57-year-old cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, to become the next king. Such a move could further upset his relatives and — if successful — give the country what it has never seen: a young king who could rule the kingdom for many decades.
Crown Prince bin Nayef, the interior minister and longtime counterterrorism czar, has deep ties to Washington and the support of many of the older royals. Deciphering the dynamics of the family can be like trying to navigate a hall of mirrors, but many Saudi and American officials say Prince bin Salman has made moves aimed at reaching into Prince bin Nayef’s portfolios and weakening him.
This has left officials in Washington hedging their bets by building relationships with both men, unsure who will end up on top. The White House got an early sign of the ascent of the young prince in late 2015, when — breaking protocol — Prince bin Salman delivered a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy during a meeting between his father, King Salman, and President Obama.
Many young Saudis admire him as an energetic representative of their generation who has addressed some of the country’s problems with uncommon bluntness. The kingdom’s news media have built his image as a hardworking, businesslike leader less concerned than his predecessors with the trappings of royalty.
Others see him as a power-hungry upstart who is risking instability by changing too much, too fast.
Months of interviews with Saudi and American officials, members of the royal family and their associates, and diplomats focused on Saudi affairs reveal a portrait of a prince in a hurry to prove that he can transform Saudi Arabia. Prince bin Salman declined multiple interview requests for this article.
But the question many raise — and cannot yet answer — is whether the energetic leader will succeed in charting a new path for the kingdom, or whether his impulsiveness and inexperience will destabilize the Arab world’s largest economy at a time of turbulence in the Middle East.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia. Many Saudis and foreign officials believe Prince bin Salman’s goal is to become the next king. Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Tension at the Top
Early this year, Crown Prince bin Nayef left the kingdom for his family’s villa in Algeria, a sprawling compound an hour’s drive north of Algiers. Although he has long taken annual hunting vacations there, many who know him said that this year was different. He stayed away for weeks, largely incommunicado and often refusing to respond to messages from Saudi officials and close associates in Washington. Even John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, whom he has known for decades, had difficulty reaching him.
The crown prince has diabetes, and suffers from the lingering effects of an assassination attempt in 2009 by a jihadist who detonated a bomb he had hidden in his rectum.
But his lengthy absence at a time of low oil prices, turmoil in the Middle East and a foundering Saudi-led war in Yemen led several American officials to conclude that the crown prince was fleeing frictions with his younger cousin and that the prince was worried his chance to ascend the throne was in jeopardy.
Since King Salman ascended to the throne in January 2015, new powers had been flowing to his son, some of them undermining the authority of the crown prince. King Salman collapsed the crown prince’s court into his own, giving Prince bin Salman control over access to the king. Prince bin Salman also hastily announced the formation of a military alliance of Islamic countries to fight terrorism. Counterterrorism had long been the domain of Prince bin Nayef, but the new plan gave no role to him or his powerful Interior Ministry.
The exact personal relationship between the two men is unclear, fueling discussion in Saudi Arabia and in foreign capitals about who is ascendant. Obscuring the picture are the stark differences in the men’s public profiles. Prince bin Nayef has largely stayed in the shadows, although he did visit New York last month to address the United Nations General Assembly before heading to Turkey for a state visit.
His younger cousin, meanwhile, has worked to remain in the spotlight, touring world capitals, speaking with foreign journalists, being photographed with the Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg and presenting himself as a face of a new Saudi Arabia.
“There is no topic that is more important than succession matters, especially now,” said Joseph A. Kechichian, a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, who has extensive contacts in the Saudi royal family. “This matters for monarchy, for the regional allies and for the kingdom’s international partners.”
Among the most concrete initiatives so far of Prince bin Salman, who serves as minister of defense, is the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which since it was begun last year has failed to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital. The war has driven much of Yemen toward famine and killed thousands of civilians while costing the Saudi government tens of billions of dollars.
Saudi troops along the country’s border with Yemen. The war in Yemen has cost the kingdom billions and led to international criticism. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images
The prosecution of the war by a prince with no military experience has exacerbated tensions between him and his older cousins, according to American officials and members of the royal family. Three of Saudi Arabia’s main security services are run by princes. Although all agreed that the kingdom had to respond when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital and forced the government into exile, Prince bin Salman took the lead, launching the war in March 2015 without full coordination across the security services.
The head of the National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, had not been informed and was out of the country when the first strikes were carried out, according to a senior National Guard officer.
The National Guard is now holding much of the Yemeni border.
American officials, too, were put off when, just as the Yemen campaign was escalating, Prince bin Salman took a vacation in the Maldives, the island archipelago off the coast of India. Several American officials said Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter had trouble reaching him for days during one part of the trip.
The prolonged war has also heightened tensions between Prince bin Salman and Prince bin Nayef, who won the respect of Saudis and American officials for dismantling Al Qaeda in the kingdom nearly a decade ago and now sees it taking advantage of chaos in Yemen, according to several American officials and analysts.
“If Mohammed bin Nayef wanted to be seen as a big supporter of this war, he’s had a year and a half to do it,” said Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East analyst at the C.I.A. and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Near the start of the war, Prince bin Salman was a forceful public advocate for the campaign and was often photographed visiting troops and meeting with military leaders. But as the campaign has stalemated, such appearances have grown rare.
The war underlines the plans of Prince bin Salman for a brawny foreign policy for the kingdom, one less reliant on Western powers like the United States for its security. He has criticized the thawing of America’s relations with Iran and comments by Mr. Obama during an interview this year that Saudi Arabia must “share the neighborhood” with Iran.
This is part of what analysts say is Prince bin Salman’s attempt to foster a sense of Saudi national identity that has not existed since the kingdom’s founding in 1932.
“There has been a surge of Saudi nationalism since the campaign in Yemen began, with the sense that Saudi Arabia is taking independent collective action,” said Andrew Bowen, a Saudi expert at the Wilson Center in Washington.
Still, Mr. Bowen said support among younger Saudis could diminish the longer the conflict dragged on. Diplomats say the death toll for Saudi troops is higher than the government has publicly acknowledged, and a recent deadly airstrike on a funeral in the Yemeni capital has renewed calls by human rights groups and some American lawmakers to block or delay weapons sales to the kingdom.
People who have met Prince bin Salman said he insisted that Saudi Arabia must be more assertive in shaping events in the Middle East and confronting Iran’s influence in the region — whether in Yemen, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon.
Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress in Washington, who met the prince this year in Riyadh, said his agenda was clear.
“His main message is that Saudi Arabia is a force to be reckoned with,” Mr. Katulis said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/w...ince-shatters-decades-of-royal-tradition.html
Rise of Saudi Prince Shatters Decades of Royal Tradition
By MARK MAZZETTI and OCT. 15, 2016
Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, has a hand in nearly all elements of Saudi policy. Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
He has slashed the state budget, frozen government contracts and reduced the pay of civil employees, all part of drastic austerity measures as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is buffeted by low oil prices.
But last year, Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy crown prince, saw a yacht he couldn’t resist.
While vacationing in the south of France, Prince bin Salman spotted a 440-foot yacht floating off the coast. He dispatched an aide to buy the ship, the Serene, which was owned by Yuri Shefler, a Russian vodka tyc00n. The deal was done within hours, at a price of approximately 500 million euros (roughly $550 million today), according to an associate of Mr. Shefler and a Saudi close to the royal family. The Russian moved off the yacht the same day.
It is the paradox of the brash, 31-year-old Prince bin Salman: a man who is trying to overturn tradition, reinvent the economy and consolidate power — while holding tight to his royal privilege. In less than two years, he has emerged as the most dynamic royal in the Arab world’s wealthiest nation, setting up a potential rivalry for the throne.
He has a hand in nearly all elements of Saudi policy — from a war in Yemen that has cost the kingdom billions of dollars and led to international criticism over civilian deaths, to a push domestically to restrain Saudi Arabia’s free-spending habits and to break its “addiction” to oil. He has begun to loosen social restrictions that grate on young people.
The rise of Prince bin Salman has shattered decades of tradition in the royal family, where respect for seniority and power-sharing among branches are time-honored traditions. Never before in Saudi history has so much power been wielded by the deputy crown prince, who is second in line to the throne. That centralization of authority has angered many of his relatives.
His seemingly boundless ambitions have led many Saudis and foreign officials to suspect that his ultimate goal is not just to transform the kingdom, but also to shove aside the current crown prince, his 57-year-old cousin, Mohammed bin Nayef, to become the next king. Such a move could further upset his relatives and — if successful — give the country what it has never seen: a young king who could rule the kingdom for many decades.
Crown Prince bin Nayef, the interior minister and longtime counterterrorism czar, has deep ties to Washington and the support of many of the older royals. Deciphering the dynamics of the family can be like trying to navigate a hall of mirrors, but many Saudi and American officials say Prince bin Salman has made moves aimed at reaching into Prince bin Nayef’s portfolios and weakening him.
This has left officials in Washington hedging their bets by building relationships with both men, unsure who will end up on top. The White House got an early sign of the ascent of the young prince in late 2015, when — breaking protocol — Prince bin Salman delivered a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy during a meeting between his father, King Salman, and President Obama.
Many young Saudis admire him as an energetic representative of their generation who has addressed some of the country’s problems with uncommon bluntness. The kingdom’s news media have built his image as a hardworking, businesslike leader less concerned than his predecessors with the trappings of royalty.
Others see him as a power-hungry upstart who is risking instability by changing too much, too fast.
Months of interviews with Saudi and American officials, members of the royal family and their associates, and diplomats focused on Saudi affairs reveal a portrait of a prince in a hurry to prove that he can transform Saudi Arabia. Prince bin Salman declined multiple interview requests for this article.
But the question many raise — and cannot yet answer — is whether the energetic leader will succeed in charting a new path for the kingdom, or whether his impulsiveness and inexperience will destabilize the Arab world’s largest economy at a time of turbulence in the Middle East.
Prince Mohammed bin Salman, left, and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef of Saudi Arabia. Many Saudis and foreign officials believe Prince bin Salman’s goal is to become the next king. Fayez Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Tension at the Top
Early this year, Crown Prince bin Nayef left the kingdom for his family’s villa in Algeria, a sprawling compound an hour’s drive north of Algiers. Although he has long taken annual hunting vacations there, many who know him said that this year was different. He stayed away for weeks, largely incommunicado and often refusing to respond to messages from Saudi officials and close associates in Washington. Even John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, whom he has known for decades, had difficulty reaching him.
The crown prince has diabetes, and suffers from the lingering effects of an assassination attempt in 2009 by a jihadist who detonated a bomb he had hidden in his rectum.
But his lengthy absence at a time of low oil prices, turmoil in the Middle East and a foundering Saudi-led war in Yemen led several American officials to conclude that the crown prince was fleeing frictions with his younger cousin and that the prince was worried his chance to ascend the throne was in jeopardy.
Since King Salman ascended to the throne in January 2015, new powers had been flowing to his son, some of them undermining the authority of the crown prince. King Salman collapsed the crown prince’s court into his own, giving Prince bin Salman control over access to the king. Prince bin Salman also hastily announced the formation of a military alliance of Islamic countries to fight terrorism. Counterterrorism had long been the domain of Prince bin Nayef, but the new plan gave no role to him or his powerful Interior Ministry.
The exact personal relationship between the two men is unclear, fueling discussion in Saudi Arabia and in foreign capitals about who is ascendant. Obscuring the picture are the stark differences in the men’s public profiles. Prince bin Nayef has largely stayed in the shadows, although he did visit New York last month to address the United Nations General Assembly before heading to Turkey for a state visit.
His younger cousin, meanwhile, has worked to remain in the spotlight, touring world capitals, speaking with foreign journalists, being photographed with the Facebook chairman Mark Zuckerberg and presenting himself as a face of a new Saudi Arabia.
“There is no topic that is more important than succession matters, especially now,” said Joseph A. Kechichian, a senior fellow at the King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh, who has extensive contacts in the Saudi royal family. “This matters for monarchy, for the regional allies and for the kingdom’s international partners.”
Among the most concrete initiatives so far of Prince bin Salman, who serves as minister of defense, is the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which since it was begun last year has failed to dislodge the Shiite Houthi rebels and their allies from the Yemeni capital. The war has driven much of Yemen toward famine and killed thousands of civilians while costing the Saudi government tens of billions of dollars.
Saudi troops along the country’s border with Yemen. The war in Yemen has cost the kingdom billions and led to international criticism. Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images
The prosecution of the war by a prince with no military experience has exacerbated tensions between him and his older cousins, according to American officials and members of the royal family. Three of Saudi Arabia’s main security services are run by princes. Although all agreed that the kingdom had to respond when the Houthis seized the Yemeni capital and forced the government into exile, Prince bin Salman took the lead, launching the war in March 2015 without full coordination across the security services.
The head of the National Guard, Prince Mutaib bin Abdullah, had not been informed and was out of the country when the first strikes were carried out, according to a senior National Guard officer.
The National Guard is now holding much of the Yemeni border.
American officials, too, were put off when, just as the Yemen campaign was escalating, Prince bin Salman took a vacation in the Maldives, the island archipelago off the coast of India. Several American officials said Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter had trouble reaching him for days during one part of the trip.
The prolonged war has also heightened tensions between Prince bin Salman and Prince bin Nayef, who won the respect of Saudis and American officials for dismantling Al Qaeda in the kingdom nearly a decade ago and now sees it taking advantage of chaos in Yemen, according to several American officials and analysts.
“If Mohammed bin Nayef wanted to be seen as a big supporter of this war, he’s had a year and a half to do it,” said Bruce Riedel, a former Middle East analyst at the C.I.A. and a fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Near the start of the war, Prince bin Salman was a forceful public advocate for the campaign and was often photographed visiting troops and meeting with military leaders. But as the campaign has stalemated, such appearances have grown rare.
The war underlines the plans of Prince bin Salman for a brawny foreign policy for the kingdom, one less reliant on Western powers like the United States for its security. He has criticized the thawing of America’s relations with Iran and comments by Mr. Obama during an interview this year that Saudi Arabia must “share the neighborhood” with Iran.
This is part of what analysts say is Prince bin Salman’s attempt to foster a sense of Saudi national identity that has not existed since the kingdom’s founding in 1932.
“There has been a surge of Saudi nationalism since the campaign in Yemen began, with the sense that Saudi Arabia is taking independent collective action,” said Andrew Bowen, a Saudi expert at the Wilson Center in Washington.
Still, Mr. Bowen said support among younger Saudis could diminish the longer the conflict dragged on. Diplomats say the death toll for Saudi troops is higher than the government has publicly acknowledged, and a recent deadly airstrike on a funeral in the Yemeni capital has renewed calls by human rights groups and some American lawmakers to block or delay weapons sales to the kingdom.
People who have met Prince bin Salman said he insisted that Saudi Arabia must be more assertive in shaping events in the Middle East and confronting Iran’s influence in the region — whether in Yemen, Syria, Iraq or Lebanon.
Brian Katulis, a Middle East expert at the Center for American Progress in Washington, who met the prince this year in Riyadh, said his agenda was clear.
“His main message is that Saudi Arabia is a force to be reckoned with,” Mr. Katulis said.
Prince bin Salman at a news conference in April for Vision 2030, his plan to transform Saudi life by diversifying its economy away from oil, increasing Saudi employment and improving education, health and other government services. Fayex Nureldine/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A Swift Ascent
Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s few remaining absolute monarchies, which means that Prince bin Salman was given all of his powers by a vote of one: his own father.
The prince’s rise began in early 2015, after King Abdullah died of lung cancer and King Salman ascended to the throne. In a series of royal decrees, the new king restructured the government and shook up the order of succession in the royal family in ways that invested tremendous power in his son.
He was named defense minister and head of a powerful new council to oversee the Saudi economy as well as put in charge of the governing body of Saudi Aramco, the state oil company and the primary engine of the Saudi economy.
More important, the king decreed a new order of succession, overturning the wishes of King Abdullah and replacing his designated crown prince, Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, with Prince bin Nayef.
While all previous Saudi kings and crown princes had been sons of the kingdom’s founder, Prince bin Nayef was the first of the founder’s grandsons to be put in line. Many hailed the move because of the prince’s success at fighting Al Qaeda and because he has only daughters, leading many to hope he would choose a successor based on merit rather than paternity.
The bigger surprise was that the king named Prince bin Salman deputy crown prince. He was 29 years old at the time and virtually unknown to the kingdom’s closest allies.
This effectively scrapped the political aspirations of his older relatives, many of whom had decades of experience in public life and in key sectors like defense and oil policy. Some are still angry — although only in private, out of deference to the 80-year-old king.
Since then, Prince bin Salman has moved quickly to build his public profile and market himself to other nations as the point man for the kingdom.
Domestically, his focus has been on an ambitious plan for the future of the kingdom, called Vision 2030. The plan, released in April, seeks to transform Saudi life by diversifying its economy away from oil, increasing Saudi employment and improving education, health and other government services. A National Transformation Plan, laying out targets for improving government ministries, came shortly after.
Read in one way, the documents are an ambitious blueprint to change the Saudi way of life. Read in another, they are a scathing indictment of how poorly the kingdom has been run by Prince bin Salman’s elders.
Official government development plans going back decades have called for reducing the dependence on oil and increasing Saudi employment — to little effect. And in calling for transparency and accountability, the plan acknowledges that both have been in short supply. Diplomats and economists say much about the Saudi economy remains opaque, including the cost of generous perks and stipends for members of the royal family.
The need for change is greater now, with global oil prices less than half of what they were in 2014 and hundreds of thousands of young Saudis entering the job market yearly. Prince bin Salman has called for a new era of fiscal responsibility, and over the last year, fuel, water and electricity prices have gone up while the take-home pay of some public sector employees has been cut — squeezing the budgets of average Saudis. He has also said the government will sell shares of Saudi Aramco, believed to be the world’s most valuable company.
Many Saudis say his age and ambition are benefits at a time when old ways of thinking must be changed.
“He is speaking in the language of the youth,” said Hoda al-Helaissi, a member of the kingdom’s advisory Shura Council, which is appointed by the king. “The country for too long has been looking through the lenses of the older generation, and we need to look at who is going to carry the torch to the next generation.”
Some of his initiatives have appeared ham-handed. In December, he held his first news conference to announce the formation of a military alliance of Islamic countries to fight terrorism. But a number of countries that he said were involved soon responded that they knew nothing about it or were still waiting for information before deciding whether to join.
Others have been popular. After Prince bin Salman called for more entertainment options for families and young people, who often flee the country on their vacations, the cabinet passed regulations restricting the powers of the religious police. An Entertainment Authority he established has planned its first activities, which include comedy shows, pro wrestling events and monster truck rallies.
The Serene, a 440-foot yacht Prince Mohammed bin Salman spotted while vacationing last year. He dispatched an aide to buy it; the deal was done within hours, at a price of about 500 million euros (roughly $550 million today). Phil Walter/Getty Images
The prince has kept his distance from the Council of Senior Scholars, the mostly elderly clerics who set official religious policy and often release religious opinions that young Saudis mock as being out of touch with modern life.
Instead, he has sought the favor of younger clerics who boast millions of followers on social media. After the release of Vision 2030, Prince bin Salman held a reception for Saudi journalists and academics that included a number of younger, tech-savvy clerics who have gone forth to praise the plan.
Prince bin Salman’s prominence today was difficult to predict during his early years, spent largely below the radar of Western officials who keep track of young Saudi royals who might one day rule the kingdom.
Several of King Salman’s other sons, who studied overseas to perfect foreign languages and earn advanced degrees, built impressive résumés. One became the first Arab astronaut, another a deputy oil minister, yet another the governor of Medina Province.
Prince bin Salman stayed in Saudi Arabia and does not speak fluent English, although he appears to understand it. After a private school education, he studied law at King Saud University in Riyadh, reportedly graduating fourth in his class. Another prince of the same generation said he had gotten to know him during high school, when one of their uncles hosted regular dinners for the younger princes at his palace. He recalled Prince bin Salman being one of the crowd, saying he liked to play bridge and admired Margaret Thatcher.
King Salman is said to see himself in his favorite son, the latest in the lineage of a family that has ruled most of the Arabian Peninsula for eight decades.
In 2007, when the United States ambassador dropped in on King Salman, then a prince and the governor of Riyadh Province, to say farewell at the end of his posting, the governor asked for help circumventing America’s stringent visa procedures. His wife could not get a visa to see her doctor, and although his other children were willing to submit to the visa hurdles, “his son, Prince Mohammed, refused to go to the U.S. Embassy to be fingerprinted ‘like some criminal,’” according to a State Department cable at the time.
Prince bin Salman graduated from the university that year and continued to work for his father, who was named defense minister in 2011, while dabbling in real estate and business.
Many members of the royal family remain wary of the young prince’s projects and ultimate ambitions. Some mock him as the “Prince of the Vision” and complain about his army of well-paid foreign consultants and image-makers.
Other are annoyed by the media cell he created inside the royal court to promote his initiatives, both foreign and domestic. Called the Center for Studies and Media Affairs, the group has focused on promoting a positive story about the Yemen war in Washington and has hired numerous Washington lobbying and public affairs firms to assist in the effort.
Inside the kingdom, the government has largely succeeded in keeping criticism — and even open discussion — of the prince and his projects out of the public sphere. His family holds sway over the parent company of many Saudi newspapers, which have breathlessly covered his initiatives, and prominent Saudi editors and journalists who have accompanied him on foreign trips have been given up to $100,000 in cash, according to two people who have traveled with the prince’s delegation.
Meanwhile, Saudi journalists deemed too critical have been quietly silenced through phone calls informing them that they are barred from publishing, and sometimes from traveling abroad.
In June, a Saudi journalist, Sultan al-Saad al-Qahtani, published an article in Arabic on his website, The Riyadh Post, in which he addressed the lack of discussion about Prince bin Salman’s rise.
“You can buy tens of newspapers and hundreds of journalists, but you can’t buy the history that will be written about you,” he wrote.
He said that the prince’s popularity among Saudis was based on a “sweeping desire for great change” and that they loved him based on the hope that he would “turn their dreams into reality.”
In that lay the risk, Mr. Qahtani wrote: “If you fail, this love withers quickly, as if it never existed, and is replaced by a deep feeling of frustration and hatred.”
The site was blocked the next day, Mr. Qahtani said, for the third time in 13 months. (It is now back up, at a new address.)
President Obama welcoming Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, center, and Prince bin Salman to the White House in May 2015. Officials in Washington have been hedging their bets by building relationships with both men, unsure who will end up on top. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The Future
As sweeping and long-term as Prince bin Salman’s initiatives are, they may hang by the tenuous thread of his link to his father, who has memory lapses, according to foreign officials who have met with him. Even the prince’s supporters acknowledge that they are not sure he will retain his current roles after his father dies.
In the meantime, he is racing against time to establish his reputation and cement his place in the kingdom’s power structure.
His fast ascent, and his well-publicized foreign trips to Washington, Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere in Asia, have led senior Obama administration officials to consider the prospect that he could step over Prince bin Nayef and become Saudi Arabia’s next king.
This has led to a balancing act for American officials who want to build a relationship with him while not being used as leverage in any rivalry with Prince bin Nayef. Obama administration officials say relations with Prince bin Salman have generally improved, but only after a rocky start when he would routinely lecture senior Americans — even the president.
In November, during a Group of 20 summit meeting at a luxury resort on the Turkish coast, Prince bin Salman gave what American officials described as a lengthy speech about what he saw as the failure of American foreign policy in the Middle East — from the Obama administration’s restraint in Syria to its efforts to improve relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia’s bitter enemy.
Personal relationships have long been the bedrock of American-Saudi relations, yet the Obama administration has struggled to find someone to develop a rapport with the prince. The job has largely fallen to Secretary of State John Kerry, who has hosted the prince several times at his home in Georgetown. In June, the two men shared an iftar dinner, breaking the Ramadan fast. In September 2015, dinner at Mr. Kerry’s house ended with Prince bin Salman playing Beethoven on the piano for the secretary of state and the other guests.
In May, the prince invited Mr. Kerry for a meeting on the Serene, the luxury yacht he bought from the Russian billionaire.
His desire to reimagine the Saudi state is reflected in his admiration — some even call it envy — for the kingdom’s more modern and progressive neighbor in the Persian Gulf, the United Arab Emirates.
He has influential supporters in this effort, particularly the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who for more than a year has been promoting Prince bin Salman in the Middle East and in Washington.
Crown Prince bin Zayed, the United Arab Emirates’ de facto ruler, is a favorite among Obama administration officials, who view him as a reliable ally and a respected voice in the Sunni world. But he also has a history of personal antipathy toward Prince bin Nayef, adding a particular urgency to his support for the chief rival of the Saudi crown prince.
In April of last year, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, Susan E. Rice, led a small delegation of top White House officials to visit Prince bin Zayed at his home in McLean, Va. During the meeting, according to several officials who attended, the prince urged the Americans to develop a relationship with Prince bin Salman.
But all questions about Prince bin Salman’s future are likely to depend on how long his father lives, according to diplomats who track Saudi Arabia.
If he died soon, Prince bin Nayef would become king and could dismiss his younger cousin as a gesture to his fellow royals. In fact, it was King Salman who set the precedent for such moves by dismissing the crown prince named by his predecessor.
“If the king’s health starts to deteriorate, Mohammed bin Salman is very likely to try to get Mohammed bin Nayef out of the picture,” said Mr. Riedel, the former C.I.A. analyst.
But the longer King Salman reigns, foreign officials said, the longer the young prince has to consolidate his power — or to convince Prince bin Nayef that he is worth keeping around if Prince bin Nayef becomes king.
Most Saudi watchers do not expect any struggles within the family to spill into the open, as all the royals understand how much they have to lose from such fissures becoming public or destabilizing their grip on the kingdom.
“I am persuaded as someone who focuses on this topic that the ruling family of Saudi Arabia above all else puts the interest of the family first and foremost,” said Mr. Kechichian, the analyst who knows many royals.
“Not a single member of the family will do anything to hurt the family.”
Correction: October 15, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated an achievement of one of King Salman’s sons. The son was the first Arab astronaut, not the only one.