RIYADH,
Saudi Arabia — I never thought I’d live long enough to write this
sentence: The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the
Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia. Yes, you read that right. Though I
came here at the start of Saudi winter, I found the country going
through its own Arab Spring, Saudi style.
Unlike
the other Arab Springs — all of which emerged bottom up and failed
miserably, except in Tunisia — this one is led from the top down by the
country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it
succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the
tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its
success — but only a fool would not root for it.
To
better understand it I flew to Riyadh to interview the crown prince,
known as “M.B.S.,” who had not spoken about the extraordinary events
here of early November, when his government arrested scores of Saudi
princes and businessmen on charges of corruption and threw them into a
makeshift gilded jail — the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton — until they agreed to
surrender their ill-gotten gains. You don’t see that every day.
We
met at night at his family’s ornate adobe-walled palace in Ouja, north
of Riyadh. M.B.S. spoke in English, while his brother, Prince Khalid,
the new Saudi ambassador to the U.S., and several senior ministers
shared different lamb dishes and spiced the conversation. After nearly
four hours together, I surrendered at 1:15 a.m. to M.B.S.’s youth,
pointing out that I was exactly twice his age. It’s been a long, long
time, though, since any Arab leader wore me out with a fire hose of new
ideas about transforming his country.
We
started with the obvious question: What’s happening at the Ritz? And
was this his power play to eliminate his family and private sector
rivals before his ailing father, King Salman, turns the keys of the
kingdom over to him?
It’s
“ludicrous,” he said, to suggest that this anticorruption campaign was a
power grab. He pointed out that many prominent members of the Ritz
crowd had already publicly pledged allegiance to him and his reforms,
and that “a majority of the royal family” is already behind him. This is
what happened, he said: “Our country has suffered a lot from corruption
from the 1980s until today. The calculation of our experts is that
roughly 10 percent of all government spending was siphoned off by
corruption each year, from the top levels to the bottom. Over the years
the government launched more than one ‘war on corruption’ and they all
failed. Why? Because they all started from the bottom up.”
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So
when his father, who has never been tainted by corruption charges
during his nearly five decades as governor of Riyadh, ascended to the
throne in 2015 (at a time of falling oil prices), he vowed to put a stop
to it all, M.B.S. said:
“My
father saw that there is no way we can stay in the G-20 and grow with
this level of corruption. In early 2015, one of his first orders to his
team was to collect all the information about corruption — at the top.
This team worked for two years until they collected the most accurate
information, and then they came up with about 200 names.”
When
all the data was ready, the public prosecutor, Saud al-Mojib, took
action, M.B.S. said, explaining that each suspected billionaire or
prince was arrested and given two choices: “We show them all the files
that we have and as soon as they see those about 95 percent agree to a
settlement,” which means signing over cash or shares of their business
to the Saudi state treasury.
“About
1 percent,” he added, “are able to prove they are clean and their case
is dropped right there. About 4 percent say they are not corrupt and
with their lawyers want to go to court. Under Saudi law, the public
prosecutor is independent. We cannot interfere with his job — the king
can dismiss him, but he is driving the process … We have experts making
sure no businesses are bankrupted in the process” — to avoid causing
unemployment.
“How much money are they recovering?” I asked.
The public prosecutor says it could eventually “be around $100 billion in settlements,” said M.B.S.
There
is no way, he added, to root out all corruption from top to the bottom,
“So you have to send a signal, and the signal going forward now is,
‘You will not escape.’ And we are already seeing the impact,” like
people writing on social media, “I called my middle man and he doesn’t
answer.” Saudi business people who paid bribes to get services done by
bureaucrats are not being prosecuted, explained M.B.S. “It’s those who
shook the money out of the government” — by overcharging and getting
kickbacks.
The
stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public
feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system
and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future
Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will
really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process
ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at
aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it
will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign
investors in ways the country can’t afford.
But
one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over
three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this
anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with
the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their
country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal
framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was:
“Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets
and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”
But
guess what? This anticorruption drive is only the second-most unusual
and important initiative launched by M.B.S. The first is to bring Saudi
Islam back to its more open and modern orientation — whence it diverted
in 1979. That is, back to what M.B.S. described to a recent global
investment conference here as a “moderate, balanced Islam that is open
to the world and to all religions and all traditions and peoples.”
I
know that year well. I started my career as a reporter in the Middle
East in Beirut in 1979, and so much of the region that I have covered
since was shaped by the three big events of that year: the takeover of
the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Saudi puritanical extremists — who
denounced the Saudi ruling family as corrupt, impious sellouts to
Western values; the Iranian Islamic revolution; and the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan.
These
three events together freaked out the Saudi ruling family at the time,
and prompted it to try to shore up its legitimacy by allowing its
Wahhabi clerics to impose a much more austere Islam on the society and
by launching a worldwide competition with Iran’s ayatollahs over who
could export more fundamentalist Islam. It didn’t help that the U.S.
tried to leverage this trend by using Islamist fighters against Russia
in Afghanistan. In all, it pushed Islam globally way to the right and
helped nurture 9/11.
A
lawyer by training, who rose up in his family’s education-social
welfare foundation, M.B.S. is on a mission to bring Saudi Islam back to
the center. He has not only curbed the authority of the once feared
Saudi religious police to berate a woman for not covering every inch of
her skin, he has also let women drive. And unlike any Saudi leader
before him, he has taken the hard-liners on ideologically. As one
U.S.-educated 28-year-old Saudi woman told me: M.B.S. “uses a different
language. He says, ‘We are going to destroy extremism.’ He’s not
sugar-coating. That is reassuring to me that the change is real.”
Indeed,
M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam —
we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins — and our biggest tools are the
Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At
the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical
theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for
Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was
a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you
mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”
Then
one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures
and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s — women without heads
covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as
concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but
not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.
If
this virus of an antipluralistic, misogynistic Islam that came out of
Saudi Arabia in 1979 can be reversed by Saudi Arabia, it would drive
moderation across the Muslim world and surely be welcomed here where 65
percent of the population is under 30.
One
middle-age Saudi banker said to me: “My generation was held hostage by
1979. I know now that my kids will not be hostages.” Added a 28-year-old
Saudi woman social entrepreneur: “Ten years ago when we talked about
music in Riyadh it meant buying a CD — now it is about the concert next
month and what ticket are you buying and which of your friends will go
with you.”
Saudi
Arabia would have a very long way to go before it approached anything
like Western standards for free speech and women’s rights. But as
someone who has been coming here for almost 30 years, it blew my mind to
learn that you can hear Western classical music concerts in Riyadh now,
that country singer Toby Keith held a men-only concert here in
September, where he even sang with a Saudi, and that Lebanese soprano
Hiba Tawaji will be among the first woman singers to perform a
women-only concert here on Dec. 6. And M.B.S told me, it was just
decided that women will be able to go to stadiums and attend soccer
games. The Saudi clerics have completely acquiesced.
The
Saudi education minister chimed in that among a broad set of education
reforms, he’s redoing and digitizing all textbooks, sending 1,700 Saudi
teachers each year to world-class schools in places like Finland to
upgrade their skills, announcing that for the first time Saudi girls
will have physical education classes in public schools and this year
adding an hour to the Saudi school day for kids to explore their
passions in science and social issues, under a teacher’s supervision,
with their own projects.
So many of these reforms were so long overdue it’s ridiculous. Better late than never, though.
On
foreign policy, M.B.S. would not discuss the strange goings on with
Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon coming to Saudi Arabia and
announcing his resignation, seemingly under Saudi pressure, and now
returning to Beirut and rescinding that resignation. He simply insisted
that the bottom line of the whole affair is that Hariri, a Sunni Muslim,
is not going to continue providing political cover for a Lebanese
government that is essentially controlled by the Lebanese Shiite
Hezbollah militia, which is essentially controlled by Tehran.
He
insisted that the Saudi-backed war in Yemen, which has been a
humanitarian nightmare, was tilting in the direction of the pro-Saudi
legitimate government there, which, he said is now in control of 85
percent of the country, but given the fact that pro-Iranian Houthi
rebels, who hold the rest, launched a missile at Riyadh airport,
anything less than 100 percent is still problematic.
His
general view seemed to be that with the backing of the Trump
administration — he praised President Trump as “the right person at the
right time” — the Saudis and their Arab allies were slowly building a
coalition to stand up to Iran. I am skeptical. The dysfunction and
rivalries within the Sunni Arab world generally have prevented forming a
unified front up to now, which is why Iran indirectly controls four
Arab capitals today — Damascus, Sana, Baghdad and Beirut. That Iranian
over-reach is one reason M.B.S. was scathing about Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran’s
“supreme leader is the new Hitler of the Middle East,” said M.B.S. “But
we learned from Europe that appeasement doesn’t work. We don’t want the
new Hitler in Iran to repeat what happened in Europe in the Middle
East.” What matters most, though, is what Saudi Arabia does at home to
build its strength and economy.
But
can M.B.S. and his team see this through? Again, I make no predictions.
He has his flaws that he will have to control, insiders here tell me.
They include relying on a very tight circle of advisers who don’t always
challenge him sufficiently, and a tendency to start too many things
that don’t get finished. There’s a whole list. But guess what? Perfect
is not on the menu here. Someone had to do this job — wrench Saudi
Arabia into the 21st century — and M.B.S. stepped up. I, for one, am
rooting for him to succeed in his reform efforts.
And
so are a lot of young Saudis. There was something a 30-year-old Saudi
woman social entrepreneur said to me that stuck in my ear. “We are
privileged to be the generation that has seen the before and the after.”
The previous generation of Saudi women, she explained, could never
imagine a day when a woman could drive and the coming generation will
never be able to imagine a day when a woman couldn’t.
“But
I will always remember not being able to drive,” she told me. And the
fact that starting in June that will never again be so “gives me so much
hope. It proves to me that anything is possible — that this is a time
of opportunity. We have seen things change and we are young enough to
make the transition.”
This
reform push is giving the youth here a new pride in their country,
almost a new identity, which many of them clearly relish. Being a Saudi
student in post-9/11 America, young Saudis confess, is to always feel
you are being looked at as a potential terrorist or someone who comes
from a country locked in the Stone Age.
Now
they have a young leader who is driving religious and economic reform,
who talks the language of high tech, and whose biggest sin may be that
he wants to go too fast. Most ministers are now in their 40s — and not
60s. And with the suffocating hand of a puritanical Islam being lifted,
it’s giving them a chance to think afresh about their country and their
identity as Saudis.
“We
need to restore our culture to what it was before the [Islamic] radical
culture took over,” a Saudi woman friend who works with an N.G.O. said
to me. ”`We have 13 regions in this country, and they each have a
different cuisine. But nobody knows that. Did you know that? But I never
saw one Saudi dish go global. It is time for us to embrace who we are
and who we were.”
Alas,
who Saudi Arabia is also includes a large cohort of older, more rural,
more traditional Saudis, and pulling them into the 21st century will be a
challenge. But that’s in part why every senior bureaucrat is working
crazy hours now. They know M.B.S. can call them on the phone at any of
those hours to find out if something he wanted done is getting done. I
told him his work habits reminded me of a line in the play “Hamilton,”
when the chorus asks: Why does he always work like “he’s running out of
time.”
“Because,”
said M.B.S., ``I fear that the day I die I am going to die without
accomplishing what I have in my mind. Life is too short and a lot of
things can happen, and I am really keen to see it with my own eyes — and
that is why I am in a hurry.”
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