The Saudi Arabia you encounter today wants these fires to be put out as soon as possible. In the meantime, it acts as if they don’t exist. As news from Syria and Gaza dominated global headlines, the conversation here focused on other matters. An ultramodern driverless metro, the world’s longest subway system, opened last week. Jennifer Lopez, in a plunging sequined body suit, headlined a fashion show/concert “ode to the female figure” put on in Riyadh by the Lebanese designer Elie Saab. Later this week, Hollywood’s glitterati are coming in for the Red Sea Film Festival. On Wednesday, Saudi Arabia won the right to host the 2034 soccer World Cup.
This, in a couple of nutshells, is today’s Saudi Arabia, as transformed with a firm hand by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
“Like China on steroids,” one diplomat quips.
“There is this sense that they don’t want anything to screw up the good things that are happening in their own country,” adds another.
Riyadh is disorienting. The conversations you have, the public interactions, images that come at you are so … normal. As if you were in Singapore, Seoul or Stockholm. Until you remember where you are: a film festival in a place where a decade ago cinemas were closed and public executions on Riyadh’s “Chop Chop Square” passed for mass entertainment. Forget about J.Lo. Saudi women, fashionably dressed, hair covered, slightly exposed or freely flowing, greet you at a hotel reception desk or sit next to you at a coffee shop or drive — that wasn’t possible in the fundamentalist version of Saudi Arabia.
“It could be seen as a provocation,” says Elie Saab Jr., the designer’s son and CEO of the fashion company, referring to last month’s fashion show. “But Saudi Arabia is on a mission. They want to change, and we are happy to contribute to that vision.”
“What has changed in this country? Everything,” says Mohammed Alyahya, the U.S.-educated senior adviser to the Saudi foreign minister, echoing what every ambassador and businessperson I meet here tells me. “We all thought it might take two to three generations. It was sudden and it worked. We have a leader in this country who is drawing on the energy of the ‘youth bulge’ to remake it.”
it seems, only the 2 beggars blighting the indian subcontinent will remain the true citadels of islam in the near future: the histrionic beggar and the disenfranchised "noblesse" beggarThere is no other game in town than Washington. China helped broker the Saudi normalization deal with Iran and is looking to expand its influence. But it can’t come close to the hard and soft power that the U.S. has in the Middle East.
The other Gulf countries are effectively well-run city states. Saudi Arabia carries real bulk — and faces real challenges. MBS has to navigate his family and tribal politics and worry about resistance to his modernization plans. Saudi demographics are an advantage and a danger. The oil riches, vulnerable to swinging prices — at the moment on the way down — have to provide all these young people opportunities. Geography matters, of course, too. Iran, Yemen and the Levant are all nearby. Egypt, which had a brief fling with freedom in 2011, is big, poor, repressed and ripe for another explosion.
