wsj.com
A Social Revolution in Saudi Arabia
Yaroslav Trofimov
9-11 minutes
The mosh pit was packed on a recent night in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. As the Jamaican rapper Sean Paul performed, young men and women raised their iPhones, swayed along and mouthed the lyrics: “I’m in love with your body…and now my bed sheets smell like you.”
A young Saudi man, wearing a white T-shirt with the kingdom’s green flag wrapped scarflike around his neck, high-fived a female European tourist who danced nearby without the loose, body-covering abaya traditionally worn by women in the kingdom: “Welcome, welcome, this is the new Saudi Arabia!”
Even as the House of Saud intensifies its political repression, it is also accelerating the pace of social liberalization, opening up many aspects of daily life in the puritanical Saudi kingdom—the birthplace of Islam and home to the faith’s two holiest shrines.
Just two years ago, there were no pop concerts, let alone events where women with their hair uncovered could mix and dance with men. No Saudi women could drive or work at restaurants, hotel reception desks or airport immigration booths. Until Saudi Arabia started issuing quick online visas last month, there were no Western tourists either.
“It’s amazing to live through this. I have never thought it would reach this far this fast,” said Hoda Abdulrahman al-Helaissi, a member of Saudi Arabia’s appointed legislature.
This new Saudi Arabia also has a dark side, of course. The murder of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year—on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, according to the CIA—has focused the world’s attention on the prince’s drive to root out dissent, tarnishing his image as a domestic reformer.
Some foreign performers, such as Nicki Minaj, have since pulled out of concerts in the kingdom, citing its troubling human-rights record. Some potential Western investors have been spooked too.
“ ‘A truly reforming Saudi Arabia would not subject its leading activists to harassment, detention and mistreatment.’ ”
While Prince Mohammed pushed through the historic decision to allow Saudi women to drive last year, his government has also jailed women’s rights activists who had campaigned for that very measure. “A truly reforming Saudi Arabia would not subject its leading activists to harassment, detention and mistreatment,” said Michael Page, deputy Middle East director of Human Rights Watch, at the release of a report on abuses by Saudi Arabia earlier this month.
The U.S. Justice Department has recently brought charges against three individuals for illegally using Twitter’s data to spy on Prince Mohammed’s critics. Many of those critics, including once influential Islamic scholars, are behind bars, some on death row—which is one reason that there has been so little visible conservative backlash to the country’s social transformation.
“The critical voices are all in prison, and those who are not in prison have gone very silent because of fear,” said Madawi al-Rasheed, a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. “The fact that you don’t see any public debate or criticism doesn’t mean it’s not there.” In the first attack against the new entertainment venues, a knife-wielding Yemeni man burst onto the stage and lightly injured three performers in Riyadh this month.
Saudi Arabia’s future course is critical for the Middle East and the wider Islamic world, where many have long looked to the oil-rich kingdom for guidance. Success could reduce the appeal of Islamist extremists, promoting societies that are more tolerant socially, if not necessarily politically. Failure could prompt the type of toxic backlash that followed the collapse of the shah of Iran’s reform efforts in the 1970s.
Saudi Arabia’s trajectory depends in great part on the fate of Prince Mohammed’s ambitious plans to reform its oil-dependent economy, bring women into the workforce and drive growth by creating entertainment and tourism industries. It also depends on how well the kingdom of some 33 million people survives escalating security threats, especially those posed by Iran and its proxies in Yemen and elsewhere.
“It was smart of Mohammed bin Salman to play the entertainment card to win the support of the new generation. But political Islam is not dead in Arabia, it is hibernating,” said Stéphane Lacroix of Paris’s Sciences Po university. “When the social and economic situation becomes more difficult, we could well see that discourse of contestation resurface.”
A Social Revolution in Saudi Arabia
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A Social Revolution in Saudi Arabia
Rapper Sean Paul performs earlier this month in Riyadh. VIDEO: Yaroslav Trofimov/The Wall Street Journal
Until recently, when Saudis wished to escape the mind-numbing boredom of their own country, they had no choice but to travel abroad. “If you wanted to hear a Saudi singer at a concert, you had to go to Bahrain or Dubai or Egypt or elsewhere. It was absurd. Now we see a reverse trend: People are coming here,” said Faisal Saed Bafarat, CEO of the new General Entertainment Authority, a government agency.
The authority’s most ambitious project so far, the two-month Riyadh Season festival, brought music and theater performances, fashion shows, pop-up restaurants, sports events, amusement parks, a circus, a game park and even the kingdom’s first outdoor cinema. The government expected to have five million visitors for the festival, Mr. Bafarat said—and topped that within three weeks of its Oct. 11 opening.
“Most of our events are sold out,” he said. “This is showing to the private sector that the return on investment in entertainment is guaranteed.”
Change and Challenge in Saudi Arabia
Many Saudi liberals say that change is long overdue and that today’s developments prove that the Saudi people aren’t as ultraconservative as conventional wisdom held them to be. “The society was ready 40 years ago. We were saying all these years: The community is ready, go ahead. But the government didn’t listen to us,” said Faris bin Hizam, who recently returned to Riyadh from Dubai to run the government’s TV news channel, al-Ekhbariya. “And see now: The people who initially refused the changes now enjoy the changes.”
One sign of a new mind-set may be the way that Saudis view American troops in the kingdom. After Iraq’s 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait, the deployment of more than 500,000 U.S. troops to defend the kingdom from Saddam Hussein proved hugely controversial. Islamist preachers railed against American boots defiling the Arabian Peninsula’s holy soil, and al Qaeda harnessed the anger to recruit for its world-wide terrorist network.
In September, after a missile and drone attack, reportedly by Iranian proxies, on the kingdom’s main oil-processing facility, President Donald Trump sent 3,000 U.S. troops to Saudi Arabia—the first such deployment since the U.S. military contingent left in 2003. This time, the American presence has provoked little visible reaction. “It’s a different Saudi Arabia,” a senior Saudi official said. “All that talk of ‘expelling the infidel,’ it has lost its currency.”
In a country where 70% of the population is under 30 and where access to social-media platforms such as YouTube, Twitter or Instagram is unfettered, that was to be expected, said Mohammed Al-Sulaimi, chairman of Rasanah, a think tank that advises the Saudi government. Islamists were mainstream in the 1990s and early 2000s, he noted, but “now, the loudest voices, the mainstream, are exactly the opposite: those who want to open up, to communicate and reform the country.”
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
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