www.theatlantic.com Open in urlscan Pro
199.232.198.133  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

GET https://www.theatlantic.com/search/

<form class="Search_searchForm__GtMZS" action="https://www.theatlantic.com/search/" method="GET"><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 16 16" aria-hidden="true" class="Search_searchIcon__r1HQB">
    <path d="M15.85 15.15l-5.27-5.28a6 6 0 10-.71.71l5.28 5.27a.48.48 0 00.7 0 .48.48 0 000-.7zM1 6a5 5 0 115 5 5 5 0 01-5-5z"></path>
  </svg><label for="search-input" class="Search_visuallyHidden__kpWqH">Search The Atlantic</label><input type="search" id="search-input" name="q" placeholder="Search The Atlantic..." autocomplete="off" class="Search_searchInput__QFeYn"><input
    type="submit" value="Submit Search" tabindex="-1" class="Search_visuallyHidden__kpWqH"></form>

Text Content

WE VALUE YOUR PRIVACY

We and our partners store and/or access information on a device, such as cookies
and process personal data, such as unique identifiers and standard information
sent by a device for personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement,
and audience insights, as well as to develop and improve products.
With your permission we and our partners may use precise geolocation data and
identification through device scanning. You may click to consent to our and our
partners’ processing as described above. Alternatively you may click to refuse
to consent or access more detailed information and change your preferences
before consenting.
Please note that some processing of your personal data may not require your
consent, but you have a right to object to such processing. Your preferences
will apply to this website only. You can change your preferences at any time by
returning to this site or visit our privacy policy.
I Do Not AcceptMORE OPTIONSI Accept
Skip to content


SITE NAVIGATION

 * The Atlantic
 * PopularLatest
   
   
   SECTIONS
   
    * Politics
    * Ideas
    * Fiction
    * Technology
    * Science
    * Photo
    * Business
    * Culture
    * Planet
    * Global
    * Books
    * Podcasts
    * Health
    * Education
    * Projects
    * America In Person
    * Family
    * Events
    * Shadowland
    * Inheritance
    * Newsletters
   
   
   THE ATLANTIC CROSSWORD
   
   
   Play Crossword
   
   
   THE PRINT EDITION
   
   Latest IssuePast Issues
   
   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
   Give a Gift
 * Search The Atlantic
   
   
   QUICK LINKS
   
    * Dear Therapist
    * Crossword Puzzle
    * Manage Subscription

 * Popular
 * Latest


 * Sign In
 * Subscribe



Read The Atlantic’s continuing coverage of Russia’s war on Ukraine here.

Global


ABSOLUTE POWER

Asked about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Mohammed bin Salman said, “If that’s
the way we did things, Khashoggi would not even be among the top 1,000 people on
the list.”

By Graeme Wood
Photographs by Lynsey Addario

A woman walks past a poster showing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ( left)
with his father (right) and grandfather (top), at the old market in Taif, Saudi
Arabia. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)
March 3, 2022
Share

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, is 36 years old and has
led his country for almost five years. His father, the 86-year-old King Salman,
has rarely been seen in public since 2019, and even MBS—as he is universally
known—has faced the world only a few times since the pandemic began. Once, he
was ubiquitous, on a never-ending publicity tour to promote his plan to
modernize his father’s kingdom. But soon after the murder of the Washington Post
columnist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, MBS curtailed his travel. His last interview
with non-Saudi press was more than two years ago. The CIA concluded that he had
ordered Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia’s own prosecutors found that it had
been conducted by some of the crown prince’s closest aides. They are thought to
have dismembered Khashoggi and disintegrated his corpse.


EXPLORE THE APRIL 2022 ISSUE

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

View More

MBS had already developed a reputation for ruthlessness. In 2017, he rounded up
hundreds of members of his own family and other wealthy Saudis and imprisoned
them in Riyadh’s Ritz-Carlton hotel on informal charges of corruption. The
Khashoggi murder fixed a view of the crown prince as brutish, thin-skinned, and
psychopathic. Among those who share a dark appraisal of MBS is President Joe
Biden, who has so far refused to speak with him. Many in Washington and other
Western capitals hope his rise to the throne might still be averted.



But within the kingdom, MBS’s succession is understood as inevitable. “Ask any
Saudi, anyone at all, whether MBS will be king,” a senior Saudi diplomat told
me. “If there are people in Washington who think he will not be, then I cannot
help them. I am not a psychiatrist.”

His father’s eventual death will leave him as the absolute monarch of the
birthplace of Islam and the owner of the world’s largest accessible oil
reserves. He will also be the leader of one of America’s closest allies and the
source of many of its headaches.

I’ve been traveling to Saudi Arabia over the past three years, trying to
understand if the crown prince is a killer, a reformer, or both—and if both,
whether he can be one without the other.

Even MBS’s critics concede that he has roused the country from an economic and
social slumber. In 2016, he unveiled a plan, known as Vision 2030, to convert
Saudi Arabia from—allow me to be blunt—one of the world’s weirdest countries
into a place that could plausibly be called normal. It is now open to visitors
and investment, and lets its citizens partake in ordinary acts of recreation and
even certain vices. The crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts, and
invited notably raw hip-hop artists to perform. He has allowed women to drive
and to dress as freely as they can in dens of sin like Dubai and Bahrain. He has
curtailed the role of reactionary clergy and all but abolished the religious
police. He has explored relations with Israel.

He has also created a climate of fear unprecedented in Saudi history. Saudi
Arabia has never been a free country. But even the most oppressive of MBS’s
predecessors, his uncle King Faisal, never presided over an atmosphere like that
of the present day, when it is widely believed that you place yourself in danger
if you criticize the ruler or pay even a mild compliment to his enemies. MBS’s
critics—not regicidal zealots or al‑Qaeda sympathizers, just ordinary people
with independent thoughts about his reforms—have gone into exile. Some fear that
if he keeps getting his way, the modernized Saudi Arabia will oppress in ways
the old Saudi Arabia never imagined. Khalid al-Jabri, the exiled son of one of
MBS’s most prominent critics, warned me that worse was yet to come: “When he’s
King Mohammed, Crown Prince MBS is going to be remembered as an angel.”

For about two years, MBS hid from public view, as if hoping the Khashoggi murder
would be forgotten. It hasn’t been. But the crown prince still wants to convince
the world that he is saving his country, not holding it hostage—which is why he
met twice in recent months with me and the editor in chief of this magazine,
Jeffrey Goldberg.

In our meetings, the crown prince was charming, warm, informal, and intelligent.
But even at its most affable, absolute monarchy cannot escape weirdness. For our
first meeting, MBS summoned us to a remote palace by the Red Sea, his family’s
COVID bunker. The protocols were multilayered: a succession of PCR tests by
nurses from the Royal Clinics; a Gulfstream jet in the middle of the night from
Riyadh; a convoy from a deserted airstrip; a surrender of electronic devices; a
stopover at a mysterious guesthouse visible in satellite photos but unmarked on
Google Maps. He invited us to his palace at about 1:30 a.m., and we spoke for
nearly two hours.


RECOMMENDED READING


 * SLACKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!
   
   Ellen Cushing


 * THE PROBLEM WITH HR
   
   Caitlin Flanagan


 * DEAR THERAPIST: I LOOKED THROUGH MY DAUGHTER’S PHONE, AND I DIDN’T LIKE WHAT
   I SAW
   
   Lori Gottlieb

For the second meeting, in his palace in Riyadh, we were told to be ready by 10
a.m. It also began after midnight. The halls were astir. The crown prince had
just returned after nearly two years of remote work, and aides and ministers
padded red carpets seeking meetings, their first in months, with the boss.
Neglected packages and documents had piled up on the desks and tables in his
office, which was large but hardly opulent. The most obvious concession to high
taste was an old-fashioned telescope on a tripod, its altitude set shallow
enough that it appeared to be pointed not at the heavens but at Riyadh, the
sprawling and unsightly desert metropolis from which the Saud family has ruled
for most of the past three centuries.

At the outset of both conversations, MBS said he was saddened that the pandemic
precluded giving us hugs. He apologized that we all had to wear masks. (Each
meeting was attended by multiple, mainly silent princes wearing identical white
robes and masks, leaving us unsure, to this day, who exactly was present.) The
crown prince left his tunic unbuttoned at the collar, in a casual style now
favored by young Saudi men, and he gave relaxed, nonpsychopathic answers to
questions about his personal habits. He tries to limit his Twitter use. He eats
breakfast every day with his kids. For fun, he watches TV, avoiding shows, like
House of Cards, that remind him of work. Instead, he said without apparent
irony, he prefers to watch series that help him escape the reality of his job,
such as Game of Thrones.

Before the meetings, I asked one of MBS’s advisers if there were any questions I
could ask his boss that he himself could not. “None,” he answered, without
pausing—“and that is what makes him different from every crown prince who has
come before him.” I was told he derives energy from being challenged.

MBS said it was “obvious” he had not ordered the killing of Khashoggi. “It hurt
me a lot,” he said. “It hurt me and it hurt Saudi Arabia, from a feelings
perspective.”

During our Riyadh encounter, Jeff asked MBS if he was capable of handling
criticism. “Thank you very much for this question,” the prince said. “If I
couldn’t, I would not be sitting with you today listening to that question.”

“I’d be in the Ritz-Carlton,” Jeff suggested.

“Well,” he said, “at least it’s a five-star hotel.”

Difficult questions caused the crown prince to move about jumpily, his voice
vibrating at a higher frequency. Every minute or two he performed a complex
motor tic: a quick backward tilt of the head, followed by a gulp, like a pelican
downing a fish. He complained that he had endured injustice, and he evinced a
level of victimhood and grandiosity unusual even by the standards of Middle
Eastern rulers.

When we asked if he had ordered the killing of Khashoggi, he said it was
“obvious” that he had not. “It hurt me a lot,” he said. “It hurt me and it hurt
Saudi Arabia, from a feelings perspective.”

“From a feelings perspective?”

“I understand the anger, especially among journalists. I respect their feelings.
But we also have feelings here, pain here.”

The crown prince has told two people close to him that “the Khashoggi incident
was the worst thing ever to happen to me, because it could have ruined all of my
plans” to reform the country.

In our Riyadh interview, the crown prince said that his own rights had been
violated in the Khashoggi affair. “I feel that human-rights law wasn’t applied
to me,” he said. “Article XI of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states
that any person is innocent until proven guilty.” Saudi Arabia had punished
those responsible for the murder, he said—yet comparable atrocities, such as
bombings of wedding parties in Afghanistan and the torture of prisoners in
Guantánamo Bay, have gone unpunished.

The CIA concluded that Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of the Washington
Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Saudi Arabia’s own prosecutors found that it had
been conducted by some of the crown prince’s closest aides. (Moises Saman /
Magnum)

The crown prince defended himself in part by asserting that Khashoggi was not
important enough to kill. “I never read a Khashoggi article in my life,” he
said. To our astonishment, he added that if he were to send a kill squad, he’d
choose a more valuable target, and more competent assassins. “If that’s the way
we did things”—murdering authors of critical op-eds—“Khashoggi would not even be
among the top 1,000 people on the list. If you’re going to go for another
operation like that, for another person, it’s got to be professional and it’s
got to be one of the top 1,000.” Apparently, he had a hypothetical hit list,
ready to go. Nevertheless, he maintained that the Khashoggi killing was a “huge
mistake.”

“Hopefully,” he said, no more hit squads would be found. “I’m trying to do my
best.”

If his best is not good enough for Joe Biden, MBS said, then the consequences of
running a moralistic foreign policy would be the president’s to discover. “We
have a long, historical relationship with America,” he said. “Our aim is to keep
it and strengthen it.” Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have called for
“accountability” for Khashoggi’s murder, as well as the humanitarian disaster in
Yemen, due to war between Saudi Arabia and Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. The
Americans also refuse to treat him as Biden’s counterpart—Biden’s peer is the
king, they insist—even though the crown prince rules the country with his
father’s blessing. This stings. MBS has lines open to the Chinese. “Where is the
potential in the world today?” he said. “It’s in Saudi Arabia. And if you want
to miss it, I believe other people in the East are going to be super happy.”

We asked whether Biden misunderstands something about him. “Simply, I do not
care,” he replied. Alienating the Saudi monarchy, he suggested, would harm
Biden’s position. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America.” He
gave a shrug. “Go for it.”

Also risible to the crown prince was the notion that his citizens fear speaking
out against him. We need dissent, he said, “if it’s objective writing, without
any ideological agenda.” In practice, I noted, dissent seemed to be nonexistent.
In September 2017, MBS ordered a boycott of Qatar, citing the country’s support
for the Iranian government, the Muslim Brotherhood, al‑Qaeda, and other Islamist
organizations in the region. His tiny neighbor suddenly transformed from
official friend into official villain, and those expressing a kind word toward
it disappeared into prison.

These sentiments, apparently, did not count as objective or nonideological.
Qatar, MBS said, was comparable to Nazi Germany. “What do you think [would have
happened] if someone was praising and trying to push for Hitler in World War
II?” he asked. “How would America take that?” Of course Saudis would react
strongly to Nazi sympathizers in their midst. Three years later, however, the
countries reconciled, and the Saudi government tweeted out a photo of MBS and
Hitler—that is, Qatari Emir Tamim Al Thani—wearing board shorts and smiling at
MBS’s Red Sea palace. “Sheikh Tamim’s an amazing person,” MBS said. The fight
between them had been no big deal, “a fight between brothers.” The relationship
is now “better than ever in history.” The dissenters remain in prison, however,
and I do not mean the Ritz-Carlton.

As for the actual Ritz-Carlton prisoners: They had it coming, the crown prince
said. Overnight he’d rounded up hundreds of the most prominent Saudis, delivered
them to Riyadh’s most lavish hotel, and refused to let them go until they
confessed and paid up. I said that sounded like he was eliminating rivals. MBS
looked incredulous. “How can you eliminate people who don’t have any power to
begin with?” If they had power, he would not have been able to force them into
the Ritz.

Does Joe Biden misunderstand something about him? “Simply, I do not care,” MBS
replied. “It’s up to him to think about the interests of America.” He gave a
shrug. “Go for it.”

The Ritz operation, MBS said, was a blitzkrieg against corruption, and wildly
successful and popular because it started at the top and did not stop there.
“Some people thought Saudi Arabia was, you know, just trying to get the big
whales,” MBS said. They assumed that after the government extracted settlements
from the likes of Alwaleed bin Talal, the kingdom’s richest man, corruption at
lower levels would resume. MBS noted, proudly, that even the minnows had been
hooked. By 2019, everyone “understood that even if you steal $100, you’re going
to pay for it.” In just a few months, he claims to have recovered $100 billion
directly, and says that he will recover much more indirectly, as dividends of
deterrence.

MBS acknowledged that to outsiders the Ritz operation may have looked thuggish.
But to him it was an elegant, and by the way nonviolent, solution to the problem
of vampires feasting on the kingdom’s annual budget. (An adviser to MBS told me
that one alternative his aides had suggested was executing a few prominent
corrupt officials.) During the months that the Ritz served as a prison, the
kingdom’s financial regulator was essentially made king pro tempore, to devote
the full power of the government to bleeding the vampires dry. But the Ritz
guests had not, MBS said, been placed under arrest. That would imply that they
had entered the court system and faced charges. Instead, he said, they had been
invited to “negotiate”—and to his pleasure, 95 percent did so. “That was a
strong signal,” he said. I’m sure it was.



The Saudi throne does not, like the British throne once did, just pass to the
next male heir. The king chooses his successor, and ever since the founding king
of the modern Saudi state, Abdulaziz, chose his son Saud as crown prince in
1933, each king has chosen another son of Abdulaziz. (He had 36 sons—with
multiple wives and concubines—who survived to adulthood.) All were old enough to
remember the camels-and-tents days, before extreme wealth, and they ruled
conservatively, as if to lock in their gains. Even the shrewdest and most
ambitious kings accomplished little. Abdullah, who took power in 2005, began as
a reformer, but much of the momentum of the first half of his reign was lost as
he doddered in the second, and the royal treasury was looted. (One notorious
alleged thief in the Ritz, a major figure in the Royal Court, was said to have
stolen tens of billions of dollars during His Majesty’s decline.)

Salman, the current king and at 86 one of the youngest of Abdulaziz’s brood, saw
the perils of unchecked gerontocracy and anointed a successor from the next
generation. His choice of Mohammed was not obvious. King Salman’s sons include
Faisal, 51, who has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford; and
Sultan, 65, a former Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who in 1985 spent a week on the
space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist. Either of these competent and
educated men, citizens of the world, might have been a natural successor. But
Salman had an inkling that the next king would need a certain grit and fluency
with power that cannot be acquired in a seminar or a flight simulator. The new
generation, born into luxury, tended to be soft, and the next king would need to
be a modern version of a desert warlord like his grandfather.

Women pray at sunset at the Boulevard, an entertainment district in Riyadh.
(Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)

Outside the immediate family, Salman considered his nephew Mohammad bin Nayef,
who is known as MBN, appointing him crown prince in 2015, when he was 55. As a
spymaster and security official in the 2000s, MBN had led the country’s domestic
war against al‑Qaeda, and in the process had become well connected with
counterparts in Washington and London. In 2009, MBN was injured when an al‑Qaeda
bomber packed his underpants with explosives and approached him at an event.

Foreign governments considered MBN a safe pick: old enough but not too old, a
proven fighter, respected overseas. But for Salman he was merely a throne-warmer
for his son. (MBS had held no high office prior to his father’s coronation and
needed a couple of years as defense minister to burnish his CV.) In 2017, Salman
fired MBN. When you fire a prince, you fire all those who staked their fortunes
on his rise; among the opponents of MBS are foreign governments who had planned
for the reign of King MBN, and Saudis whose wealth and influence flowed from
him. MBN’s chief adviser, Saad al-Jabri, fled to Canada. He alleges that MBS
sent a team there to kill him. MBS’s government alleges that al-Jabri stole a
massive fortune and is bankrolling efforts to defame the crown prince. (Both
parties deny the claims.) “MBN survived al-Qaeda,” al-Jabri’s son Khalid told
me. “But he couldn’t survive his own cousin.”

Others have suggested Salman’s younger brother Ahmed, a well-liked former deputy
interior minister, as a throne-worthy alternative to MBS. Ahmed reportedly
opposed MBS’s appointment as crown prince. In 2020, he was arrested on suspicion
of treason.



Having consolidated power, MBS focused on Vision 2030. He is exasperated by the
rest of the world’s failure to acknowledge how well it has gone. “Saudi Arabia
is a G20 country,” he said. “You can see our position five years ago: It was
almost 20. Today, we are almost 17.” He noted strong non-oil GDP growth, and
reeled off statistics about foreign direct investment, Saudi overseas
investment, and the share of world trade that passes through Saudi waters. The
economic success, the concerts, the social reform—these are all done deals, he
said. “If we were having this interview in 2016, you would say I’m making
assumptions,” he said. “But we did it. You can see it now with your eyes.”

He was not lying. Between my first visit to Saudi Arabia, in 2019, and this
conversation two years later, I had gone to the movies in Riyadh and sat next to
a Saudi woman I had never met. She wore jeans and canvas sneakers, and she
bounced her bare ankle while we watched Zombieland: Double Tap. When I first
visited, I ate at restaurants that had cinder-block walls dividing single men on
one side from women and families on the other. These were sledgehammered down—a
little Berlin 1989 in every restaurant—and now men and women can eat together
without eliciting so much as a sideways glance from fellow diners.

Read: A brief drive in Saudi Arabia changed my life

Many of the crown prince’s most persistent critics approve of these changes, and
wish only that they had come sooner. (Khashoggi was such a critic. When I met
him in London for brunch, shortly before his death, I asked him to list MBS’s
failings. He said “90 percent” of the reforms were prudent and overdue.) The
most famous Saudi women’s-rights activist, Loujain al-Hathloul, campaigned for
women’s right to drive, and against the Saudi “guardianship law,” which
prevented women from traveling or going out in public without a male relative.
Al‑Hathloul was thrown in prison on terrorism charges in 2018—after MBS and his
father had announced the imminent end of both policies. In prison, her family
says, she was electrocuted, beaten, and—this was just a few months before
Khashoggi’s murder—threatened with being chopped up and thrown in a sewer, never
to be found. (The Saudi government has previously denied allegations of
torturing prisoners.)

Left: Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is greeted by Qatar's Emir Sheikh
Tamim Al Thani in Doha, Qatar, in 2021. Center: The Saudi activist Loujain
al-Hathloul in 2021. Right: MBS and his father, King Salman, in 2017. (Saudi
Press Agency / Reuters; Ahmed Yosri / Reuters; Saudi Press Agency / AP)

Al-Hathloul and other activists had demanded rights, and the ruler had granted
them. Their error was in thinking those rights were theirs to take, rather than
coming from the monarch, who deserved credit for having bestowed them.
Al-Hathloul was released in February 2021, but her family says she is forbidden
from traveling abroad or speaking publicly.

Another dissident, Salman al-Awda, is a preacher with a massive following. His
original crime, too, was to utter publicly a thought that would later be shared
by the crown prince himself. When MBS began squabbling with his counterpart in
Qatar, al‑Awda tweeted, “May God harmonize between their hearts, for the good of
their people.” He was imprisoned, and actual harmony between the two leaders has
not freed him. His son Abdullah, now in the United States, claims that his
father, who is 65, is being held in solitary confinement and has been tortured.

The crown prince, one of his admirers told me, “put the Wahhabis in a cage, then
he reached in with gardening shears and he cut their balls off.”

Saudi authorities say al-Awda is a terrorist and a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which is supported by Qatar and intent on overthrowing the monarchy
and replacing it with a theocracy. (The Muslim Brotherhood plays a bogeyman role
in the Saudi imagination similar to the role of Communists in America during the
Red Scare. Also like Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood really has worked
covertly to undermine state rule, just not to the extent imagined.) Al-Awda’s
defenders say he is being punished for daring to speak with a moral voice
independent of the monarchy’s. He faces death by beheading.

Would MBS consider pardoning those who’d spoken out in favor of women driving
and normalization with Qatar—both now the policy of the country? “That’s not my
power. That’s His Majesty’s power,” MBS said. But, he added, “no king has ever
used” the pardon power, and his father does not intend to be the first.

The issue, he said, is not a lack of mercy. It is a problem of balance. Yes,
there are liberals and kumbaya types who have run afoul of state security—and
perhaps some could be candidates for a royal pardon. But some of the others in
his jails are bad hombres indeed, and pardons cannot be meted out selectively.
“You have, let’s say, extreme left and extreme right,” he said. “If you give
forgiveness in one area, you have to give it to some very bad people. And that
will take everything backward in Saudi Arabia.”

Left: Saudi women attend a live music performance in Riyadh in January. The
crown prince has legalized cinemas and concerts and permitted women to dress as
freely as they can in places like Dubai and Bahrain. Bottom: A tenth-grade
girls’ basketball team in Jeddah. Until recently, a man would have been
forbidden to coach a girls’ team. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)

On one side are liberals, tugging on the sympathies of Westerners; on the other,
Islamists who are also opposed to the monarchy. Letting this latter group out
would not just mean the end of rock concerts and coed dining. They would not
stop until they brought down the House of Saud, seized the country’s estimated
268 billion barrels of oil and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and
established a terrorist state. In private conversations with others, MBS has
likened Saudi Arabia before the Saud family’s conquest in the 18th century to
the anarchic wasteland of the Mad Max films. His family unified the peninsula
and slowly developed a system of law and order. Without them, it would be Mad
Max all over again—or Afghanistan.

Still, the crown prince’s argument—that if he extended forgiveness to good
people who deserved it, he would have to extend it equally to bad people who did
not—struck me as bizarre. Why would one require the other? Then I realized that
MBS was not saying that the failure of his plan to remake the kingdom might lead
to catastrophe. He was saying that he’d guarantee it would. Many secular Arab
leaders before him have made the same dark implication: Support everything I do,
or I will let slip the dogs of jihad. This was not an argument. It was a threat.



Ali Shihabi, a Saudi financier and pro-MBS commentator, told me that the changes
in Saudi Arabia could be compared to those in revolutionary France. An old order
had been overturned, a priestly class crushed; a new order was struggling to be
born.

The priestly class in particular interested me. The brand of conservative Islam
practiced in Saudi Arabia—called Wahhabism, after the sect’s 18th-century
founder, Muhammad ibn Abd al‑Wahhab—once wielded great power and enjoys at least
some popular support. I asked Shihabi if MBS really had diminished the Wahhabis’
role. “Diminished their role?” Shihabi asked me. “He put the Wahhabis in a cage,
then he reached in with gardening shears”—here he made the universal snip snip
gesture with his fingers—“and he cut their balls off.”

My flight into Riyadh was packed with foreigners attending Stan Lee’s Super Con.
Ahead of me in the passport line I saw Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk.

In France, revolution worked out just as badly for the House of Bourbon as it
did for the clergy. (Diderot famously wrote that the entrails of the priests
would be woven into ropes to strangle kings.) The House of Saud wanted the
anticlerical revolution while conveniently omitting the antiroyalist one. I
wanted to see how that alliance between monarch and sansculottes was working.

Vision 2030 made modernization easier to observe now than it would have been
just a few years ago. Until October 2019, tourist visas to Saudi Arabia did not
exist. Then the Saudis realized that to attract crowds to the concerts they had
legalized, they’d need to let in visitors. Overnight, a visa to Saudi Arabia
went from one of the hardest in the world to get to one of the easiest. In
minutes I had one valid for a whole year. My flight into Riyadh was packed with
foreigners attending Stan Lee’s Super Con. Ahead of me in the passport line I
saw Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk, on his way to an autograph signing.

The new system arrived so fast that the first visitors were like an invasive
species, an unnatural fit in the rigid social order of the kingdom. For years,
almost every non-Saudi in the country had needed a document called an iqama. It
was a sort of license to exist: Your iqama identified your Saudi patron, the
local national whom you were visiting or working for, and who controlled your
fate. Every Saudi patron had his own patron, too—sometimes a tribal leader,
sometimes a regional one. Even those bigwigs paid obeisance to someone and,
eventually, by the transitive property of Saudi deference, to the king himself.
Saudi Arabia, MBS explained, “is not one monarchy. You have beneath it more than
1,000 monarchies—town monarchies, tribal monarchies, semitribal monarchies.” The
iqama guaranteed that every sentient creature fit into this scheme of Saudi
society.

MBS batted away my suggestion that this system is antiquated and might be
replaced with a constitutional monarchy—one where citizens have freestanding
rights not granted by a monarch or a demi-monarch. “No,” he said. “Saudi Arabia
is based on pure monarchy,” and he, as crown prince, would preserve the system.
To remove himself from it would amount to a betrayal of all the monarchies and
Saudis beneath him. “I can’t stage a coup d’état against 14 million citizens.”

But he has already forced that system to adapt. Nearly every day someone asked
for my iqama, and I had to explain that I had none. They reacted as if I’d told
them that I had no name. Renting a car, buying a train ticket, checking into a
hotel—all of these interactions left some poor clerk baffled. But in the new
Saudi Arabia I was free to wander, to listen, to overhear.

Left: Men talk over coffee in Riyadh. Right: Young women at a Formula E racing
event. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)

In Riyadh I found, effortlessly, young people thrilled by the reforms. Like the
other major Saudi cities, Dammam and Jeddah, Riyadh has specialty coffee shops
in abundance—little outposts of air-conditioning and caffeine, in an environment
otherwise characterized by heat and boredom. Many of the Saudis I met professed
a deep love for America. “I spent seven years at Cal State Northridge,” one told
me, before rattling off a list of cities he had visited. He was one of several
hundred thousand Saudi students who’d attended U.S. universities on government
scholarships in the 2000s. “I studied finance,” he said. “But I never graduated.
I had a wonderful time.” He listed his American friends, who had names like Mike
and Emilio. “I drank and did too much meth, and my grades weren’t good.”

“Is it possible to do just the right amount of meth?” I asked.

“When I came back, I stopped.” He looked out the window of the coffee shop at
the parched cityscape. “This country is the best rehab center on the planet.”

Now he was studying again, at a Saudi university, and planning to open his own
business. He had already attended concerts, and he said his fondest wish was to
listen to music in the open air and smoke a joint—just one, he promised. He
asked if I thought that would happen. I said I did not think that was explicitly
part of Vision 2030, but he’d probably get his wish. Later, with him in mind, I
asked the crown prince whether alcohol would soon be sold in the kingdom. It was
the only policy question that he refused to answer.

In another café, in the northern city of Ha’il, a man pointed to a mural,
freshly painted, of the Lebanese singer Fairouz, her hair flowing beautifully
over her shoulders. Next to her were her lyrics (in Arabic): “Bring me the flute
and sing, for song is the secret to eternity.”

“One year ago,” he said, “that would not be possible.” By “that,” he meant
pretty much everything: a woman’s hair; a celebration of song; a celebration of
a song about singing; and, on top of all this, the music playing in the café as
we spoke. Before the rise of MBS, every component of this scene would have
violated long-standing canons of Saudi morality enforcement. The religious
police, known in Arabic as the hay’a or mutawwi’in, would have busted the joint.
They used to show up in ankle-length white thobes, their beards curly and
unkempt. They yelled at people for dressing immodestly, or thwacked at them with
sticks to goad them to the mosque for one of the five daily prayers. For the
flagrancy of the Fairouz sins, the café’s managers would have been detained,
questioned, and punished. “Screw those guys,” the man said, in a succinct
expression of the most common sentiment I heard about the religious police.

Encounters with the hay’a have provided many an appalling story for foreign
visitors. When Maureen Dowd of The New York Times went to Riyadh in 2002, the
hay’a spotted her in a shopping mall and objected to being able to see the
outline of her body. Her host, the future foreign minister Adel al-Jubeir,
pleaded with them, but they were unimpressed by his status as a prominent
diplomat, and she fled to her hotel room. “I fretted that I was in one of those
movies where an American makes one mistake in a repressive country and ends up
rotting in a dungeon,” Dowd wrote.

“Saudi Arabia is based on pure monarchy,” MBS said. To remove himself from that
system would amount to a betrayal of all the Saudis beneath him. “I can’t stage
a coup d’état against 14 million citizens.”

I told one of MBS’s advisers that the religious police had been an international
PR problem. “May I be impolite?” he asked me. “I don’t give a fuck about the
foreigners. They terrorized us.” He likened the religious police to J. Edgar
Hoover’s FBI, operating with unchecked authority. (The religious police’s
official Arabic name dates back hundreds of years, but still sounds Orwellian in
English: the Committee for the Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue.)
Anyone who wished to drag down a professional or political rival could
scrutinize him for sins, then call the religious police to set up a sting. Or
the hay’a could flex its authority on its own, either for political
reasons—toppling a prince they disliked—or for recreation.

“The religious police were the losers in school,” Ali Shihabi told me. “Then
they got these jobs and were empowered to go and stop the cute girls, break into
the parties no one wanted them at, and shut them down. It attracted a very nasty
group of people.” The Saudi diplomat told me that he did not miss them, and that
Saudi Arabia had needed someone with the crown prince’s mettle to get rid of
them. “When someone hits you because he does not like what you are wearing,” he
said, “that is not just a form of harassment. It is abuse.”

Left: Golf at the Boulevard in Riyadh. Right: A couple, newly engaged, dine at a
restaurant in Jeddah in January. In the recent past, many restaurants had
cinder-block walls dividing single men on one side from women and families on
the other. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)

MBS ordered the religious police to stand down, and one of the enduring
mysteries of contemporary Saudi Arabia is what these thwackers do, now that they
are invisible on the streets. Fuad al-Amri, who runs the hay’a in Mecca
province, confessed to me that since the reforms, one of his main activities has
been vetting his own employees, to ensure that they aren’t fanatics loyal to the
Muslim Brotherhood.



MBS’s grandfather King Abdulaziz founded the modern Saudi state with the support
of the clergy. But he also cracked down on them, hard, when they outlived their
usefulness. MBS has recounted a famous anecdote about his grandfather. In 1921,
Abdulaziz attended the funeral of the most senior religious scholar in the
kingdom. The king told the assembled clerics that they were dear to his heart—in
the Arabic idiom, “on my iqal,” the black cord that holds a Najd headdress in
place. But then he warned them: “I can always shake my iqal,” he said, “and you
will fall.”

For the past 50 years, Abdulaziz’s successors have taken a softer line with the
Wahhabis. The Saudi clerical class’s power grew, and their imprimatur mattered.
In 1964, they sealed the fate of the inept King Saud when his brothers Faisal
and Mohammed sought and received religious approval for ousting him. To oppose
the religious conservatives was risky. Peter Theroux, a former National Security
Council director who worked on the Saudi portfolio during the 2000s, recalls
being aghast at the vicious sermons still being preached by government-paid
imams years after September 11. Theroux told me he confronted a senior Saudi
official about the sermons. “You know,” the official apologized, “the big beards
are kind of our constituency.” The rulers of Saudi Arabia put almost no limits
on the speech or behavior of conservative clerics, and in return those clerics
exempted the rulers from criticism. “That was the drug deal that the Saudi state
was based upon for many years,” Theroux told me. “Until Mohammed bin Salman.”

Who could resist cheering on MBS as he renegotiated this relationship? One of
MBS’s most persistent critics in Washington, Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat
from Connecticut, told me the concerts and Comic-Cons in Riyadh have not yet
translated into defunding Wahhabi intolerance overseas. “When I’m traveling the
world, I still hear story after story of Gulf money and Saudi money fueling very
conservative, intolerant Wahhabist mosques,” he said. A hallmark of traditional
Wahhabism is hatred for non-Wahhabi Muslims, whom the Wahhabis view as even
worse than unbelievers for perverting the faith. With little modification,
Wahhabi teachings can lead to Osama bin Laden–style jihadism. Murphy said he
thinks that isn’t over. “The money that flows from Saudi Arabia into
conservative Islam isn’t as transparent as it was 10 years ago—much of it has
been driven underground—but it still exists.”

Yet after spending hours in MBS’s company, and in the company of his allies and
enemies, I was convinced that neutering the clergy was not just symbolic. He was
fighting them avidly, and personally. “The kings have historically stayed away
from religion,” Bernard Haykel, a scholar of Islamic law at Princeton and an
acquaintance of MBS’s, told me. Outsourcing theology and religious law to the
big beards was both an expedient and a necessity, because no ruler had any
training in religious law, or indeed a beard of any significant size.

By contrast, MBS has a law degree from King Saud University and flaunts his
knowledge and dominance over the clerics. “He’s probably the only leader in the
Arab world who knows anything about Islamic epistemology and jurisprudence,”
Haykel told me.

“In Islamic law, the head of the Islamic establishment is wali al-amr, the
ruler,” MBS explained. He was right: As the ruler, he is in charge of
implementing Islam. Typically, Saudi rulers have sought opinions from clerics,
occasionally leaning on them to justify a policy the king has selected in
advance. MBS does not subcontract his religion out at all.

He explained that Islamic law is based on two textual sources: the Quran and the
Sunna, or the example of the Prophet Muhammad, gathered in many tens of
thousands of fragments from the Prophet’s life and sayings. Certain rules—not
many—come from the unambiguous legislative content of the Quran, he said, and he
cannot do anything about them even if he wants to. But those sayings of the
Prophet (called Hadith), he explained, do not all have equal value as sources of
law, and he said he is bound by only a very small number whose reliability,
1,400 years later, is unimpeachable. Every other source of Islamic law, he said,
is open to interpretation—and he is therefore entitled to interpret them as he
sees fit.

The effect of this maneuver is to chuck about 95 percent of Islamic law into the
sandpit of Saudi history and leave MBS free to do whatever he wants. “He’s
short-circuiting the tradition,” Haykel said. “But he’s doing it in an Islamic
way. He’s saying that there are very few things that are fixed beyond dispute in
Islam. That leaves him to determine what is in the interest of the Muslim
community. If that means opening movie theaters, allowing tourists, or women on
the beaches on the Red Sea, then so be it.”

MBS rebuked me when I called this attitude “moderate Islam,” though his own
government champions the concept on its websites. “That term would make
terrorists and extremists happy.” It suggests that “we in Saudi Arabia and other
Muslim countries are changing Islam into something new, which is not true,” he
said. “We are going back to the core, back to pure Islam” as practiced by
Muhammad and his four successors. “These teachings of the Prophet and the four
caliphs—they were amazing. They were perfect.”

Even the Islamic law that he is bound to implement will be implemented
sparingly. MBS told me a story, reported in Hadith, about a woman who commits
fornication, confesses her crime to the Prophet, and begs to be executed. The
Prophet repeatedly tells her to go away—implying, the crown prince said, that
the Prophet preferred to give sinners every chance at lenience. (MBS did not
relate the end of the tale: The woman returns with indisputable evidence of her
sin—a bastard son—and the Prophet acquiesces. She is buried to her chest and
stoned to death.)

Instead of hunting for sin and punishing it as a matter of course, MBS has
curtailed the investigative function of the religious police, and encourages
sinners to keep their transgressions between themselves and God. “We should not
try to seek out people and prove charges against them,” he said. “You have to do
it the way that the Prophet taught us how to do it.” The law will be enforced
only against those so flagrant that they are practically demanding to take their
lumps.

He also stressed that none of these laws applies to non-Muslims in the kingdom.
“If you are a foreign person who’s living or traveling in Saudi Arabia, you have
all the right to do whatever you want, based on your beliefs,” he said. “That’s
what happened in the Prophet’s time.”

It is hard to exaggerate how drastically this sidelining of Islamic law will
change Saudi Arabia. Before MBS, influential clerics issued fatwas exhibiting
what might charitably be called a pre-industrial view of the world. They
declared that the sun orbited the Earth. They forbade women from riding bikes
(“the devil’s horses”) and from watching TV without veiling, just in case the
presenters could see them through the screen. Salih al-Fawzan, the most senior
cleric in the kingdom today, once issued a chillingly anti-American fatwa
forbidding all-you-can-eat buffets, because paying for a meal without knowing
what you’ll be eating is akin to gambling.

Some of the clerics may have given in because they were convinced by the crown
prince’s legal interpretations. Others appear to have succumbed to good
old-fashioned intimidation. Formerly conservative clerics will look you in the
eye and without hesitation or scruple speak in Stepfordlike coordination with
the government’s program. The minister of Islamic affairs and guidance, normally
an unsmiling type, now cheerily defended the opening of cinemas and mass layoffs
of Wahhabi imams. I liked him immediately. His name, Abdullatif Al Asheikh,
indicates that he is descended from a long line of stern moralists going back to
Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab himself. I told him I had seen the Zombieland sequel
in his country, and if Woody Harrelson reprised his role in Zombieland 3, I
would return to Riyadh so we could go to a theater and watch it together. “Why
not?” he replied.

Mohammad al-Arefe, a preacher known for his good looks and conservative views,
mysteriously began promoting Vision 2030 after a meeting with MBS in 2016.
Previously, he had preached that Mada’in Saleh, a spectacular pre-Islamic
archaeological site in northwest Saudi Arabia, was forbidden to Muslim tourists.
God had struck down the civilization that once lived there, and the place was
forever to remain a reminder of his wrath. The conventional view held that
Muslims should follow the Prophet’s warning to stay away from Mada’in Saleh, but
if they absolutely must pass through, they should cast their gaze downward and
maintain a fearful demeanor toward the Almighty. Then, in 2019, al-Arefe
appeared in what seemed, to me, like some sort of hostage video, filmed by the
Saudi tourism authority, lecturing about the site’s history and inviting all to
enjoy it. If he was displaying a fearful demeanor, it was not toward the
Almighty.



In the smaller cities it isn’t clear how quickly modernization is catching on. I
visited Buraydah, the capital of Qassim, the most conservative part of the
country. In two days, every woman I saw wore a black, flowing abaya. I attended
the opening of a new shopping mall and showed up early to watch the crowds
arrive. The sexes separated themselves without discussion: women in the front,
all in black, near the stage where children recited poems and sang; men, in
white thobes, in the back of the audience and on the sides. The process was
unconscious and organic, but to an outsider remarkable, as if salt and pepper
were shaken out onto a plate, and the grains slowly and perfectly segregated
themselves. Cultural practices decades or centuries old do not yield suddenly.

Taif, a city an hour outside Mecca, was once the summer residence of the king
and his family. The Prophet is thought to have visited there, and many Muslims
supplement their pilgrimages to Mecca with side trips to other sites from the
Prophet’s life. The Wahhabis have, historically, treated these visits as
un-Islamic and reprehensible. Whenever pilgrimage sites have fallen into Wahhabi
hands, they have methodically and remorselessly destroyed them by leveling
monuments, grave markers, and other structures sacred to Muslims in other
traditions.

One morning I took a long walk to a mosque where the Prophet is said to have
prayed. On arrival I found a building in disrepair, fenced off by rusty wire,
with parts of it reduced to rubble. A sign at this site, posted by the Ministry
of Islamic Affairs, noted in Arabic, Urdu, Indonesian, and English that the
historical evidence for the Prophet’s visit was uncertain. It suggested,
further, that “to feel an adoring reverence or regard toward these places is a
kind of heresy and fabrication in religion,” an innovation not sanctioned by God
that “leads to polytheism.”

Later, I met Mohammad al-Issa, formerly the minister of justice under King
Abdullah and now, as secretary-general of the Muslim World League, an
all-purpose interfaith emissary for his country. In the past, Saudi clerics
inveighed against infidels of all types. Now al-Issa spends his time meeting
Buddhists, Christians, and Jews, and trying to stay ahead of the occasional
surfacing of comments he made in less conciliatory times. I asked him about the
site, and whether Saudi Arabia’s new tolerance—which he emphasizes so
energetically overseas, with non-Muslims—would apply domestically. He assured me
that it already did. “If in the past there were some mistakes, now there is
correction,” al‑Issa said. “Everyone has the right to visit the historic places,
and there is a lot of care given to them.”

“But the signs are still up,” I said.

“Maybe they are there to remind people to be respectful,” he suggested. “You see
signs like that at sites all over the world: ‘Don’t touch or take the stones.’ ”

But these signs are not meant to preserve the ruins. They are there to remind
you that you are wicked for visiting at all.

A mosque in Taif where the Prophet Muhammad is said to have prayed. A sign
posted by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs notes that the historical evidence for
the Prophet’s visit is uncertain, and warns that “to feel an adoring reverence
or regard toward these places is a kind of heresy.” (Lynsey Addario for The
Atlantic)

The day after my trip to the mosque, I stopped by a Starbucks in Taif. It was
early afternoon. When I pulled the door handle, it clunked—the shop was closed
for prayer, just as it would have been if the religious police had been
enforcing prayer times.

As I waited outside alone, a small police truck pulled up behind me. The police
officer salaamed me, and I responded in Arabic. Only after a short interrogation
(“What are you doing here? Why are you here?”) did he discover that I was
American—not, as I think he suspected, Filipino—and apologize awkwardly and
leave. It took me a minute to realize what had happened: The religious police
have stood down, and the ordinary police have stood up in their place. The
conservatism in society has not gone away. In some places, it has just undergone
a costume change.



These lingering manifestations of intolerance illustrate what MBS’s critics say
is his ultimate error: Even a crown prince can’t change a culture by fiat.

Belated realization of this error might be behind the grandest and most
improbable of his projects. If existing cities resist your orders, just build a
new one programmed to do your bidding from the start. In October 2017, MBS
decreed a city in a mostly uninhabited area on the Gulf of Aqaba, adjacent to
Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, the southwestern edge of Jordan, and the Israeli resort
town Eilat. The city is called Neom, from a violent collision between the Greek
word neos (“new”) and the Arabic mustaqbal (“future”).

At present, little exists but an encampment for the employees of the Neom
project, a small area of tract housing. Regular buses take them to shop in the
nearest city, Tabuk, which is itself a city only by the standards of the vacant,
rock-strewn desert nearby. (If you recall the early scenes of Lawrence of
Arabia, when a lonely camel-borne Peter O’Toole sings “The Man Who Broke the
Bank at Monte Carlo” to the echoes of a sandstone canyon, then you know the
spot.) The ambitions for this settlement are vast. Neom’s administrators say
they expect it to attract billions of dollars in investment and millions of
residents, both Saudi and foreign, within 10 to 20 years. Dubai grew at a
similar pace in the 1990s and 2000s. MBS said Neom is “not a copy of anything
elsewhere,” not a xerox of Dubai. But it has more in common with the great
globalized mainstream than with anything in the history of a country that, until
recently, was remarkably successful at walling off its traditional culture from
the blandishments of modernity.

For a few hours, the Neom team showed me around and made grandiose promises
about the future. Neom would lure its investors, I gathered, by creating the
ideal regulatory environment, stitched together from best practices elsewhere.
The city would profit from central planning. When New York or Delhi want to
grow, they choke on their own traffic and decrepit infrastructure. Neom has no
inherited infrastructure at all. The centerpiece of the project will be “The
Line”—a 106-mile-long, very skinny urban strip connected by a single bullet
train that will travel from end to end in 20 minutes. (No train capable of this
speed currently exists.) The Line is intended to be walkable—the train will run
underground—and a short hike perpendicular to its main axis will take you into
pristine desert. Water will be desalinated; energy, renewable.

So far, Neom is less a city than an urbanist cargo cult. The practicalities can
come later, or not at all. (The projected cost is in the hundreds of billions of
dollars, a huge sum even for Saudi Arabia.) But many good ideas look crazy at
first. What struck me was that Neom’s vision is really an anti-vision. It is the
opposite of the old Saudi Arabia. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent
today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an
entrepreneur’s nightmare. Riyadh has almost no public transportation. No matter
where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. No
one in Neom mentioned religion at all. Even Neom’s location is suggestive. It is
far from where Saudis actually live. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty
corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel.

Seen this way, Neom is MBS’s declaration of intellectual and cultural bankruptcy
on behalf of his country. Few nations have as many carried costs as Saudi
Arabia, and Neom zeroes them out and starts afresh with a plan unburdened by the
past. To any parts of the kingdom that cling to their old ways, it promises that
the future is everything they are not. And the future will wait only so long.



During the 1990s and 2000s, Saudi Arabia was a net exporter of vision, but it
was a jihadist vision. The standard narrative, now accepted by the Saudi state
itself, is that the kingdom was seduced by conservative Islam, and eventually
the jihadists it sent overseas (most famously Osama bin Laden) redirected their
efforts toward the Saudi monarchy and its allies. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on
9/11 were Saudi citizens.

“A series of things happened that made the Saudis realize they couldn’t keep
playing the game they had been playing,” Philip Zelikow, a State Department
official under George W. Bush and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission,
told me. The years of violence that followed 9/11 shocked the Saudis into
realizing that they had a reckoning coming, though only after jihadists began
attacking in the kingdom itself did the government move to crush them. What the
Saudis did not have was a plan to redirect the jihadists’ energy. “They needed
to have some story of what kind of country they were going to be when they grew
up,” Zelikow said. Jihadism would not be that story. But there was no immediate
alternative, either for society or for the individuals attracted to jihadism.
Saudi Arabia was left to do what most other countries, including the United
States, have done, which is to imprison terrorists until they grow too old to
fight.

Left: The aftermath of an al-Qaeda bombing in Riyadh in 2003. Only after
jihadists began attacking in the kingdom did the government move to crush them.
Right: Saudi Special Security Forces at the Counterterrorism Training School in
Riyadh in 2013. (Lynsey Addario)

Last year, Saudi officials informed me that the crown prince had a new plan to
deprogram jihadists. One morning they sent a convoy of state-security SUVs to my
hotel, and with lights flashing, we left behind the glassy skyscrapers of the
capital and continued along one of the straight, hypnotic roads radiating from
Riyadh to nowhere. An hour later, we turned off at an area called al-Ha’ir and
went through a security checkpoint.

Ha’ir is a state-security prison, run by the Saudi secret police, which means
that its prisoners are not car thieves and check forgers but offenders against
the state. They include jihadists from al-Qaeda and the Islamic State—I met at
least a dozen of each—as well as softer Islamists, like Salman al-Awda, the
cleric.

We drove past the checkpoint and through the gates, into a windswept compound
coated in a film of light-brown dust, like tiramisu. We were met by the director
of state-security prisons, Muhammad bin Salman al-Sarrah, and what appeared to
be a television crew of at least half a dozen men, each bearing a microphone or
a camera. I worried about what would happen next. Newsworthy events inside the
walls of terrorist prisons tend not to be good. Lurking in the background were
several bearded men in identical gray business suits.

During the 1990s and 2000s, Saudi Arabia was a net exporter of vision, but it
was a jihadist vision. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were Saudi citizens.

Al-Sarrah, it turned out, was a real jihadism nerd, and over tea we reminisced
about various luminaries in the history of Saudi terror. After this small talk,
he invited me to join him in an auditorium that could have been a lecture hall
on a small college campus. Shutters clicked as the cameramen followed.

In the auditorium, the men in suits took the stage. Their leader, a man named
Abdullah al-Qahtani, explained that he and most of the others in the room were
prisoners, and that they had a PowerPoint presentation they wished to show me
about the enterprise they were running in the prison. The camera crew was made
up of prisoners too, and they were documenting my visit for imprisoned members
of jihadist sects.

What followed was the most surreal slide deck I have ever seen: a corporate org
chart and plans for a set of businesses run from within the prison by jihadists
and other enemies of the state. Al-Qahtani spoke in Arabic, translated by an
excitable counterpart nearby.

The org chart showed CEO al-Qahtani at the top, with direct reports from seven
offices beneath him, among them financial, business development, and “programs’
affairs.” Under the last of these was another sub-office, “social
responsibility.”

Al-Qahtani explained that 89 percent of the prison population had taken part in
the program so far. In a way, it was like any other prison-industry program; in
the United States, prisoners staff call centers, raise tilapia, or just push
brooms in the prison corridor for a dollar an hour. But the Ha’ir group, doing
business as a company called, simply, Power, was aggressively corporate and
entrepreneurial.

Al-Qahtani and the interpreter took me to a small garden, where prisoners
cultivated peppers under plastic sheeting and raised bees and harvested their
honey to sell at the prison shop, in little jars with the Power logo. They
operated a laundromat and presented me with a price list. The prison will clean
your clothes for free, they said, but staff and inmates alike could bring
clothes here for special services, such as tailoring, for a fee. I could see
shirts, freshly laundered and pressed, with prisoner numbers inked into the
collars. Each number started with the year of entry on the Islamic calendar. I
saw one that started in 1431, about 12 years ago.

Almost all the men wore thick beards, and many had a zabiba (literally
“raisin”), the discolored, wrinkly spot one gets from pressing the head to the
ground in prayer. Some of their products were artisanal and religious-themed.
They led me into a tiny room, a factory for the production of perfumes for sale
outside the prison, and to another room where they made prayer beads from olive
pits.

“Here, smell this,” a former member of al-Qaeda commanded me, sticking under my
nose a paper strip blotted with a chemical I could not identify. I think the
scent was lavender. Another prisoner, at the Power-run prison canteen, offered
me free frozen yogurt. As I walked around the prison, the yogurt began to melt,
and my interpreter held it so I could take notes.

Strangest of all, I found, was Power’s corporate nerve center—a warren of drab,
cubicle-filled offices. The employees wore uniforms: suits for the C-suite
executives and blue Power-branded polo shirts for the mid-levels puttering on
their computers. They had a conference room with a whiteboard (at the top, “In
the name of God, the most gracious, most merciful” was written in Arabic, and
partially erased; the rest was the remains of a sales brainstorming session), a
reception desk, and portraits of the king and the crown prince overseeing it
all.

Nothing is stranger than normalcy where one least expects it. These
jihadists—people who recently would have sacrificed their life to take mine—had
apparently been converted into office drones. Fifteen years ago, Saudi Arabia
tried to deprogram them by sending them to debate clerics loyal to the
government, who told the prisoners that they had misinterpreted Islam and needed
to repent. But if this scene was to be believed, it turned out that terrorists
didn’t need a learned debate about the will of God. They needed their spirits
broken by corporate drudgery. They needed Dunder Mifflin.

My hyperactive interpreter, who had been gesticulating and yapping throughout
the tour, was no ordinary jihadist. He was an American-born Saudi member of
al-Qaeda named Yaser Esam Hamdi. Hamdi, now 41, emerged from a pile of rubble in
northern Afghanistan in December 2001. His dear friend, pulled from the same
rubble, was John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban. Hamdi spent
months in Guantánamo Bay before being transferred to the U.S.; he was released
after his father, a prominent Saudi petrochemical executive, helped take Hamdi’s
case to the Supreme Court, and won (Hamdi v. Rumsfeld ). Hamdi was sent back to
Saudi Arabia on the condition that he renounce his U.S. citizenship (he was born
in Louisiana and left as a small child), but the Saudis decided he needed more
time in prison and locked him up for eight years in a facility in Dammam, and
for another seven in Ha’ir. He is due for release this year.

Hamdi guided me like a kid showing his parents around his sleepaway camp. He
explained that Power is part of a larger entity at the prison, known as the
“Management of Time” (Idarat al-Waqt)—a comprehensive but amorphous program
meant to beguile the inmates out of bad ideas and replace them with good ones.
It involves corporate training, but also gathering the inmates together for song
and music, for poetry readings, for the publishing of newspapers (I snagged a
copy of the Management of Time News), and for the production of TV shows. I
watched a room full of men sing a song they had written, “O My Country!,” and
show videos in which they extolled the government and the crown prince. Al-Qaeda
and ISIS forbid most music and revile the monarchy. Like so many other Saudis,
these men seemed to have swapped their religious fanaticism for nationalist
fanaticism. One wondered what they really believed.

Al-Sarrah followed close behind us, and I shot him a look when I heard the name
of the program. One of the most famous jihadist texts, a playbook for ISIS, is
“The Management of Savagery” (Idarat al-Tawahhush). It is a deranged manual for
destroying the world and replacing it with a new one. That was what this program
was doing in reverse: replacing the jihadists’ savage appetite for an imagined
future with an appetite for the real, the now, and the ordinary.

A bookish man who had been with Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora looked me steadily
in the eye, like he was trying to convince me and not himself. “Vision 2030 is
real,” he said.

I told Hamdi that I had corresponded with his friend Lindh, who served 17 years
in federal prison in the United States before his release in 2019. Our
correspondence had led me to believe that he was just as radical as ever, and
that his stay in prison—spent in solitary study of Islamic texts—had confirmed
his violent streak and converted him from an al-Qaeda supporter to an ISIS
supporter.

Graeme Wood: I wrote to John Walker Lindh. He wrote back.

“Really?” Hamdi asked, before venturing a guess as to why. “The United States
doesn’t know how to deal with Muslims. When I was in Afghanistan, I had extreme
thinking.” Going to a Saudi prison helped. “The difference is that in jail
[here] we have a program. You want to explode the thinking we have in our brain.
For 17 years he was alone.” The Saudis filled Hamdi’s time. They managed it. “We
didn’t have time to read the Islamic books … We didn’t have time to do anything
but work to improve ourselves.” He was a specialist in Power’s media department,
and could now produce videos of passable quality.

“I didn’t know what a montage was,” he said. “I didn’t know what a design was.”
We were driving to another part of the prison with al-Sarrah in the front seat
and Hamdi and me in the back. “Now I am professional!” he said. “I am a complete
montage expert!” He pointed at al-Sarrah, who smiled but did not speak or even
look back. “All thanks to this man! The government opened this for us! Now I am
in a car! Talking to you! Normally! Peacefully! No kind of problems!” Upon
release, he said, he might work for his father’s company, or even (this was his
dream) go into film and television production. I wondered what it might be like
to have a co-worker like Hamdi, with, shall we say, an unconventional work
history, and a penchant for extremism and Osama bin Laden that he swore up and
down had been thoroughly replaced with a love for film and video production and
the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. I was pretty sure Hamdi would be a better
colleague than John Walker Lindh.


Top left: A camel market about an hour outside Riyadh, in January. Top right: A
sign on the highway from Jeddah to Taif marking the turnoff for Mecca. Bottom:
Women in Asir province. Outside Saudi Arabia’s major cities, it isn’t clear how
quickly modernization is catching on. (Lynsey Addario for The Atlantic)

At the prison I asked many inmates how they could trade jihadism for these
worldly things, which surely amounted to frippery compared with the chance to
die in the path of God. They laughed, nervously, as if to ask what I was trying
to do—get them to leave the prison and kill again? They were mostly still young,
and they yearned for freedom. That they no longer wanted something thrilling and
extraordinary was exactly the point. It is possible to have too much vision, or
the wrong kind—some of them had gone to Syria, barely survived, and had had
enough vision, thank you very much. “We don’t want anything but a normal life,”
one told me. “I would be happy just to go outside, to walk on the Boulevard in
Riyadh, to go to McDonald’s.”

“I went to Syria because I was offered to take part in a dream, the dream of a
caliphate,” said another. Ali al-Faqasi al-Ghamdi, a bookish man who had been
with bin Laden at Tora Bora, told me he now recognized such dreams as
counterfeit. What, he asked, is the point of a big, exciting dream when it is a
false one? A small ambition that can actually be fulfilled is preferable to a
big one that cannot. He looked me steadily in the eye, like he was trying to
convince me and not himself. “Vision 2030 is real.”



America must now decide whether that vision is worth encouraging. Twenty years
ago, if you had told me that in 2022 the future king of Saudi Arabia would be
pursuing a relationship with Israel; treating women as full members of society;
punishing corruption, even in his own family; stanching the flow of jihadists;
diversifying and liberalizing his economy and society; and encouraging the world
to see his country and his country to see the world—Wahhabism be damned—I would
have told you that your time machine was malfunctioning and you had visited 2052
at the earliest. Now that MBS is in power, all of these things are happening.
But the effect is not as pleasing as I had hoped.

In 1804, another modernizing autocrat, Napoleon Bonaparte, arrested Louis
Antoine, the duke of Enghien, on suspicion of sedition. The duke was young and
foolish, and no great threat to Napoleon. But the future emperor executed him.
Around Europe, monarchs were shocked: If this was how Napoleon treated a
harmless naif like the duke, what could they expect from him as his power grew,
and his domestic opposition dissolved in fear? The execution of Enghien alerted
the most perceptive among them that Napoleon could not be managed or appeased.
It took a decade of carnage to figure out how to stop him.

Enghien’s schemes wouldn’t have stopped Napoleon, and Khashoggi’s columns
wouldn’t have stopped MBS. But his murder was a warning about the personality of
the man who will be running Saudi Arabia for the next half century, and it is
reasonable to worry about that man even when most of what he does is good and
long overdue.

For now, MBS’s main request to the outside world, and especially the United
States, is the usual request of misbehaving autocrats—namely, to stay out of his
internal affairs. “We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,” he said.
“The same goes the other way.” Saudi affairs are for Saudis. “You don’t have the
right to interfere in our interior issues.”

But he acknowledges that the fates of the two countries remain linked. In
Washington, many see MBS’s rise as abetted, perhaps even made inevitable, by
American support. “There was a moment in time where the international community
could have made it clear that the Khashoggi murder was the straw that broke the
camel’s back, and that we weren’t willing to deal with MBS,” Senator Murphy told
me. The Trump administration’s support, when MBS was at his most vulnerable,
saved him. “If MBS ultimately becomes king,” Murphy said, “he owes no one bigger
than Jared Kushner,” Trump’s personal envoy to the crown prince. (“You Americans
think there is something strange about a ruler who sends his unqualified
son-in-law to conduct international relations,” one Saudi analyst told me. “For
us this is completely normal.”)

Some still hope that MBS will not accede to the throne. “Only one of the last
five crown princes has eventually become king,” Khalid al-Jabri noted to me,
optimistically. But everything I see suggests that his ascent is certain, and
that the search for alternatives is forlorn. Two of those four also-ran crown
princes were sidelined or replaced by MBS himself. The other two died of old
age.

The United States needs its partners in isolating Iran, and MBS is a stalwart
there. And even domestically, he remains in some ways the right man for the job.
He is at least, as Philip Zelikow reminded me, not a ruler in denial. “We wanted
Saudi leadership who would face their problems, and embark on an ambitious and
incredibly challenging generational struggle to remake Saudi society for the
modern world,” he told me. Now we have such a leader, and he is presenting a
binary choice: support me, or prepare for the jihadist deluge.

“We don’t have the right to lecture you in America,” MBS said. “The same goes
the other way.”

MBS is correct when he suggests that the Biden administration’s posture toward
him is basically recriminatory. Stop bombing civilians in Yemen. Stop jailing
and dismembering dissidents. The U.S. might, on the margins, be able to persuade
MBS to use a softer touch—but only by first persuading him that he will be
rewarded for his good behavior. And no persuasion will be possible at all
without acknowledging that the game of thrones has concluded and he has won.

Many of the exiles I spoke with said their best hope now is that the crown
prince will mellow, and that elder Saudi wise men will keep him from destroying
the country with rash decisions, like the fight with Qatar, or the murder of
Khashoggi. MBS does have a sense that being capricious and impulsive can be
costly. “If we run the country randomly,” he told me, “then the whole economy is
going to collapse.” Others had tried that strategy: “That’s the Qaddafi way.”

King Salman has instituted measures ostensibly intended to force his son to
govern more inclusively after Salman’s death. He changed the law of succession
to prevent the next king from naming his own children, or indeed anyone from his
own branch of the family, as his crown prince. I asked MBS if he understood that
to be the rule, and he said yes. I asked if he had anyone in mind for the job.
“This is one of the forbidden subjects,” he said. “You will be the last to
know.”



When he is king, however, the rules will belong to him, and to ask him to abide
by them against his wishes will be about as easy as negotiating from your suite
at the Ritz-Carlton.

A crown prince with a subtler mind and a gentler soul might have implemented
MBS’s reforms without resorting to his brutal methods. But it is pointless to
consider policy in a state of childlike fantasy, as if it were possible to
conjure some new Saudi monarch by closing your eyes and wishing him into
existence. Open your eyes, and MBS will still be there. If he is not, then the
man ruling in his place will not be an Arab Dalai Lama. He will be, at best, a
member of the unsustainable Saudi old guard, and at worst one of the big beards
of jihadism, now richer than Croesus and ready to fight. As MBS told me, to
justify the Ritz operation, “It’s sometimes a decision between bad and worse.”

Since reality has handed us MBS, the question for America is how to influence
him. This question is practical rather than moral: If your moralism drives him
into a partnership with China, what good will it have been? A fundamental
principle of Chinese foreign relations is butting out of other countries’
internal affairs and expecting the same from them. Certainly Beijing will not
reprimand him for his treatment of dissidents.

In effect, both the Saudis and the Americans are now in the Ritz-Carlton, forced
to bargain with a jailer who promises us prosperity if we submit to his demands,
and Mad Max if we do not. The predicament is familiar, because it is the same
barrel over which every secular Arab autocrat has positioned America since the
1950s. Egypt, Iraq, and Syria all traded semitribal societies for modern ones,
and they all became squalid dictatorships that justified themselves as bulwarks
against chaos.

Twenty years ago, Syria watchers praised Bashar al-Assad for his modernizing
tendencies—his openness to Western influence as well as his Western tastes. He
liked Phil Collins; how evil could he be? By now most everyone outside Damascus,
Tehran, and Moscow recognizes him as Saddam Hussein’s only rival in the dubious
competition for most evil Arab leader.

MBS has completed about three-quarters of the transition from tribal king with
theocratic characteristics to plain old secular-nationalist autocrat. The rest
of that transition need not be as ruthless as the beginning, but MBS shows no
sign of letting up. The United States can, and should, make the case that Saudi
Arabia’s security and development will demand different tools going forward. It
might even suggest what those tools should be. But it probably cannot make MBS
use them.

A more pragmatic approach is to make sure that the reforms he has instituted
stick, and that the changes in Saudi culture become irreversible. The opening of
the country and the forcible sidelining of a crooked royal class—these are hard
changes to undo, and they bind even the absolute monarch who decreed them.
Granting women driver’s licenses was ultimately a smooth process. Taking them
back would disrupt millions of lives and sow protest across the kingdom.
American influence can acknowledge and encourage such changes.

Sometimes this is how absolute power relaxes its grip: slowly, without anyone
noticing. In England, the transition from absolute monarchy to a fully
constitutional one took 200 years, not all of them superintended by the most
stable kings. MBS is still young and hoarding power, and everyone who has
predicted that he would ease up on dissent has so far been proved optimistic.
But 50 years is a long reign. The madness of King Mohammed could give way to
something else: a slow and graceful renunciation of power—or, as with Assad, an
ever more violent exercise of it.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline “Absolute
Power.”





Already a subscriber?Sign in


THANK YOU FOR READING THE ATLANTIC.

GET UNLIMITED ACCESS TO THE ATLANTIC.

Subscribe Now