MBS
“There’s a big difference,” he said. “The first, he can create Apple. The second can become a successful employee. I had elements that were much more than what Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates had. If I work according to their methods, what will I create? All of this was in my head when I was young.”
King Abdullah, however, saw MBS as an upstart whose experience fell far short of his ambitions. He named Salman minister of defense, but barred MBS from joining his father in the ministry. The king later relented to Salman’s request and named MBS the head of the crown prince’s court and the director of his father’s office at the ministry, a cabinet-level position.
Much still remains unclear about how MBS spent his twenties, largely because he did so little that drew attention at the time and because so much effort would later go into retroactively polishing his reputation. But what is clear is everything MBS did not do before he burst onto the scene in 2015. He never ran a company that made a mark. He never acquired military experience. He never studied at a foreign university. He never mastered, or even become functional in, a foreign language. He never spent significant time in the United States, Europe, or elsewhere in the West.
That background would shape how he wielded power later on. His deep understanding of the kingdom and its society would enable him to successfully execute moves that few thought possible before he pulled them off. But his lack of experience with the West gave him weak instincts for how allies, particularly the United States, functioned and thought—a blind spot that would frequently lead him to miscalculate how they would view his riskier gambits.
The drastically different backgrounds of MBS and his older, more experienced half brothers poses the question of why his father chose MBS to follow in his footsteps. Salman has never publicly explained his choice, and as an absolute monarch, will never have to. So we are left with little more than informed speculation.
Salman may have shared the views of his own father, the kingdom’s founder, who had rejected the suggestion by an American businessman that he educate his sons abroad.
“In order to be a leader of men, a man has to receive an education in his own country, among his own people, and to grow up in surroundings steeped with the traditions and psychology of his countrymen,” King Abdulaziz said.
That jibed with the theories of two close associates of the Salman family who spoke to me on the condition that I not identify them.
One felt that the older brothers, with their foreign educations, British accents, and horse ranches, had lost touch with their father, who, in the end, was a Saudi traditionalist who liked the desert and eating meat with his hands. So did MBS, and his father appreciated it.
The other said that although MBS’s rough style grated on many of his relatives, it never bothered his father, who may have seen in the young prince a toughness he felt the kingdom needed going forward.
The associate summed up the thinking this way: “To deal with a Bedouin, I need a Bedouin.”
IN THE SPRING of 2014, Joseph Westphal arrived in Riyadh as President Obama’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Then 66, Westphal had led a career that moved back and forth between academia and government, working at a number of universities and serving for a spell as the acting secretary of the army. He was a tall, large, avuncular man whose back-slapping style annoyed more hard-driving members of the administration. But it worked well with the Saudis, who appreciated that he liked to chat before getting down to business.
As Westphal settled into his post, someone showed him an old video of Salman getting a tour of some public facility—a factory, or a water treatment plant—elsewhere in the Middle East. Salman was dressed like “a Wall Street banker,” Westphal recalled, and made sure that those giving the tour explained everything to his son, who jotted down copious notes on a small pad.
That was MBS, and Westphal was intrigued.
“There is something very special about this young guy,” he thought. “There was no question that he was the apple of his father’s eye.”
King Abdullah was busy and often ill, so Westphal frequently visited Salman and noticed MBS, usually standing to the side but never speaking. So Westphal requested a meeting with the young prince and got the impression that MBS was excited, because no one as prominent as a U.S. ambassador had ever asked to meet him before.
The two men hit it off, chatting about their families and backgrounds, and the ambassador became convinced that the young man was off to do big things.
“I did believe from the very beginning that this was a young, ambitious guy who was destined to be a leader,” Westphal recalled later. “And he had the platform.”
ARRIVALS
I KNEW NOTHING ABOUT these royal machinations when I made my first visit to Saudi Arabia in 2013. I had recently been hired as a Middle East correspondent for The New York Times after living and working in the region for seven years. I spoke and read Arabic, lived in Lebanon, and had reported in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and elsewhere, giving me a broad understanding of the region’s dynamics. But Saudi Arabia was a black hole, its murky politics dominated by men in identical white robes with seemingly interchangeable names, its society opaque, reduced in most writing to generalities about the birthplace of Islam and outrage over the treatment of women.
I had grown used to hearing Arabs blame Saudi Arabia for all manner of ills, from the rise of particular political parties or trends, to funding or inspiring terrorist groups like the Islamic State and Al Qaeda, to the spread of social conservatism. But the mechanics of Saudi influence seemed invisible, as if the kingdom’s power emanated across the Middle East at some subsonic frequency that affected everything but remained inaudible to the naked ear.
For the next five years, my assignment was to figure the place out. During dozens of visits to the kingdom and trips to many of its provinces, I met and got to know hundreds of Saudis from different parts of society: clerics who thought the kingdom was the best place on earth; young people who longed to escape; princes and princesses who were oblivious to their privilege; women who wanted to drive; women who could not care less about driving; and others who were proud to be Saudi even if they wished the place would lighten up a bit.
Over that time, I wrote hundreds of articles exploring Saudi politics, foreign policy, culture, and religion. I saw remote historic sites. I watched horse races at the king’s track. I met the Grand Mufti, the top religious authority, who told me to become a Muslim. And I made friends with a range of Saudis who helped me understand how they saw their homeland and where they wanted it to go. But it was my early visits to the kingdom that showed me the old Saudi Arabia, giving me benchmarks I could use after MBS showed up and tried to change everything.
In 2013, I checked in to an old-fashioned hotel downtown that had large, framed pictures of the king, the crown prince, and the founding king, Abdulaziz, in the lobby. All the employees were men, from India, Pakistan, and other Arab countries. The only Saudis in sight were men in white robes who were always reading newspapers in the lobby. Why were they there? Were they secret police, keeping an eye on who was meeting whom? Or did they just like the ambience? I never knew.
My room looked as if the wallpaper had been hung in the 1970s and the carpet laid before that. There was a speaker next to my bed that I could turn on to get the call to prayer piped in five times a day. Not that I needed it. There were so many mosques around that I could hear the call clearly, even with the window closed. On Friday afternoon, the city shut down for communal prayers and the sermons were so loud that I could follow them word for word inside my room.
I didn’t know anyone, so I reported to a functionary at the Ministry of Culture and Information who dealt with foreign press. I began to tell him about the articles I hoped to report, but he cut me off, saying that I should have sent him a fax with my “program” a month in advance. Since I had not, he could not help.
“I am very sorry,” he said, not sounding very sorry at all.
He served me tea in a plastic cup.
“Enjoy your time in Saudi Arabia.”
I had a list of phone numbers I had inherited from colleagues who had covered the kingdom before, so I got to work, cold-calling Saudis to ask for meetings. Most were surprisingly welcoming, offering to meet me at my hotel or sending their drivers to bring me to their homes or offices. There was nothing secretive about it, and the newspaper guys in the lobby never seemed to care. At that time, Saudis had no reason to worry about speaking to a foreign journalist.
The kingdom was clearly wealthy, and many of the Saudis I met seemed to have a lot of money without doing a lot of work. But it was also shabbier than I expected, with perpetual roadwork snarling highways and poor lighting as soon as one left the main drag. At the time, the kingdom was at the end of a ten-year bender, during which oil prices had remained high, piping cash into the government, which trickled down to everyone else. Had there been no oil, there would have been almost no economic activity whatsoever.
Non-Saudis did most visible jobs. Foreigners made up about one-third of the kingdom’s population, and they did the economy’s heavy lifting. Checking in to a hotel, one was likely to meet an Egyptian or an Indian. Take a taxi and the driver was often Afghan. Construction sites were packed with Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. The professional class was full of Arabs, with engineers, managers, accountants, and doctors from Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Lebanon. A smaller number of Westerners worked in banks, large firms, the oil industry, or as advisers to wealthy royals.
I was struck by the kingdom’s conservatism and how Wahhabism shaped every aspect of life. In public, nearly all women wore baggy black gowns called “abayas” that hid their forms, turning them into billowing black figures, indistinguishable but for the high heels or tennis shoes poking out below. Nearly all covered their hair, and most covered their faces, leaving only thin slits for their eyes. Mixing between unrelated men and women was forbidden, and to prevent it, restaurants were divided into sections for “families,” where related men and women could sit together, and for “singles,” who were all men. I would learn that many Saudis mixed in private, and men and women could usually meet in hotel lobbies with little problem. Others did not want to mix and saw gender segregation as part of their culture. In some conservative circles, men went their whole lives without seeing the faces of women other than their immediate relatives—even their brothers’ wives.
Shops and restaurants shut their doors when the call to prayer sounded, even if their proprietors hung out in the back and killed time on their phones instead of going to the mosque. They had little choice but to shut their doors, to avoid the wrath of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, the so-called “religious police.” Its stern, bearded fellows patrolled public areas to harass women whose clothes were deemed not concealing enough and to seek out those drinking, doing drugs, or engaging in unsanctioned ikhtilat, or “mixing,” with the opposite sex. Local news sites reported when they stormed a basement where Indian Christians were holding a covert church service (the kingdom banned the practice of any religion other than Islam), or when they broke up a birthday party where young Saudi men engaged in “inappropriate dancing” (birthday celebrations were considered un-Islamic).
That meant there was not much to do. In fact, it was excruciatingly boring. No movies. No music. Few parks. I felt cooped up in my room, and so walked to the mall for a change of scenery, but was not allowed in because it was “family time” and I was a single male. So I sat outside and watched young Saudi guys try to glom on to visiting families to sneak inside, where they might see some girls. I tried to work in coffee shops, but got kicked out when prayer time came. Once, I took a seat outside and a policeman tried to hustle me off to the mosque.
Since there were so few public places for young men to hang out, they pooled their money to rent simple salons where they could gather to talk, drink tea, and watch television. Before I got there, the more daring would steal cars and engage in a unique kind of Saudi drifting called “tafheet” that birthed its own subversive subculture. Like rave organizers, the drifters organized pop-up events where drivers entertained crowds with risky car tricks. Filling out the scene, poets praised their favorite drivers, who competed to expand their entourages. It was dangerous and illegal, but exhilarating, like drag racing during the James Dean era, and it gave the city’s underclass, who had benefited little from the kingdom’s wealth, a way to push back. But by the time I got to Riyadh, the government had plastered the city with surveillance cameras so the police could shut down the drifters before they got going.
Young women had even fewer options, so they mostly met up in homes or went out to eat. There was lots of fast food, and lots of eating. But if the ladies’ drivers were occupied and no male relatives could drop them off, they stayed home.
A few days after I arrived, there was a driving protest, although the organizers insisted that it was not a protest, because the government hated protests. Small groups of women had been challenging the driving ban now and then for decades, and a group of activists had chosen October 26, 2013, for their next campaign. The idea was simple: Women who had legal foreign licenses would drive and post videos of themselves online to show that it was not a big deal.
But news of the non-protest got out and conservative forces mobilized to remind the kingdom of the perils of women behind the wheel. One religious scholar on TV blasted the activists as “a great danger” whose goals were “suspicious and threaten the homeland.” The clerics had banned women from driving, he said, “because of the political, religious, social, and economic problems it entails” which could “open the door to evil.” Another cleric led a delegation of more than a hundred men from around the kingdom to warn King Abdullah about “the conspiracy of women driving.”
As the big day approached, hackers defaced the women’s website, filling it with insults and posting a video by an Israeli-American activist calling on women to drive and sarcastically accusing “Zionists” of using the issue to weaken the kingdom. The government warned that it forbade all that “disturbs the social peace, opens the door to discord, and responds to the fantasies of those with sick dreams among the biased ones, the intruders, and the predators.” The security forces would respond “with all force and determination,” it said, to punish anyone who sought “to split and divide society.” Security officials called the activists to tell them to stay home.
But on the day of, some still drove. The organizers said they received videos from dozens of women, but it was hard to know how many there were, and in any case, it was minuscule in a country with 22 million citizens. I got the feeling that day that there were more foreign journalists looking for women drivers than there were drivers to be found.
But the videos were charming. One showed a young woman grinning as she sped through Riyadh, giggling as her father filmed her from the passenger seat.
“This is Loujain Al-Hathloul who just arrived in Riyadh and is on her way home. She is driving and happy,” he said. “God willing, after ten years we will laugh at this image.”
I spoke to a number of the participants. One was a 60-year-old photographer and psychoanalyst named Madeha Alajroush, who told me the women’s request for an audience with King Abdullah had been turned down. That annoyed her, since it seemed like clerics got to see the king whenever they wanted. All she wanted was to drive herself to a café.
“We are looking for a normal way of life, for me to get into my car and do something as small as get myself a cappuccino or something as grand as taking my child to the emergency room,” she told me.
On the morning of, her driver took her to a Costa Coffee, where she was to meet a friend to drive with. But two men were following them, so they aborted the mission, sought refuge in a mall, and bought a yellow toy car, which they presented to the men as a gift. The men stormed off.
The hubbub surrounding the issue bugged her.
“This is not a revolution,” she told me.
I also spoke with a linguistics professor at a Riyadh university, Eman Al Nafjan, who wrote a blog about Saudi women. She didn’t have a license, so she filmed other women as they drove. But she did own a car, a beige Ford, and she explained her transportation setup.
“There is a little room outside my house, and in that little room is a little Bangladeshi guy,” she said. “He drives me around.”
I laughed, and she laughed, too.
“That’s Saudi for you,” she said.
In the coming years those three women and their quest to drive would collide with MBS’s rise in unexpected ways.
By the end of the day, no women had been jailed, society had not collapsed, and the biggest news ended up being a music video posted on YouTube by a group of Saudi artists. To the tune of Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry,” they sang an a cappella version that urged “no woman, no drive.”
“I remember when you used to sit, in the family car, but backseat …”
They mocked a cleric who argued that driving damaged women’s reproductive organs.
“Ova-ovaries are safe and well, so you can make lots and lots of babies.”
It was funny and went viral, its criticism so clever that it didn’t enflame tempers or get anyone arrested.
“Heeeeeeey, little sister, don’t touch that wheel! No woman, no drive!”
That was one of many incidents during my early visits that made it clear that the kingdom was bursting with young people who were branched in to the outside world through entertainment and social media and who saw the kingdom in drastically different ways than their elders.
I kept meeting young Saudis who challenged my assumptions of what it meant to be “liberal” or “conservative.” One religious man I got to know sported a long beard and no mustache, the signs of a salafi, a hyper-conservative who imitated the practices of the Prophet Muhammad and his companions from centuries before. I once caught him reading Hillary Clinton’s autobiography.
“You don’t even believe women should be in politics, right?” I asked.
True, he said, but irrelevant.
“She’s an important figure and I want to know how she thinks,” he said.
The next time I saw him, he was reading The Da Vinci Code.
I asked what he thought.
Its history was bogus, he said, but he didn’t care. “Great story!”
I made friends with a judge whose day job was applying Sharia law. We met to discuss an article I was reporting, but when we paused for tea, he leaned in and asked, “Do you watch Breaking Bad?”
As I got to know him, he confided that for vacation, he liked to take his wife and daughter to California, where they would rent a car and drive around Hollywood. He had effectively been drafted into the judiciary after university and was trying to get out, which was not easy. I wondered what life he would have chosen had he been able to.
The mantra in King Abdullah’s Saudi Arabia, repeated ad nauseam by government officials and Saudi academics, was “evolution, not revolution.” The kingdom was politically stable, as far as anyone knew, and the old king was a reformer, in his way. He had lifted regulations to allow women to enter the workforce; appointed a group of women to the Shura Council, a royal advisory body; and vowed to let women vote and run in municipal elections. Most Saudis welcomed those changes but were keenly aware of the chaos that the Arab Spring uprisings had unleashed in neighboring countries. That made them happy to take it slow and leave governance to the royals, as long as they kept paying the bills.
But building quietly was a looming challenge to the monarchy. As the younger sons of the founding king grew old and died, it was not clear who would take over once they were gone. The throne would eventually have to pass to the next generation, but how? The third generation contained thousands of princes, so who would choose from among them?
In 2009, a well-known Saudi journalist who had spent decades with kings and princes and had a good feel for royal dynamics laid out the issue to an American diplomat.
The kingdom was “a country in transition,” the journalist said, facing tough questions about its future. Within ten years, he predicted, Saudi Arabia would have a young ruler from the “new generation.” The problem was, “No one knows who this will be.”
The journalist’s name was Jamal Khashoggi.
He was right.
CORONATION
ON JANUARY 23, 2015, King Abdullah succumbed to a long bout with lung cancer and died in the National Guard Hospital in Riyadh. One of his sons emerged from the emergency room to inform relatives and courtiers that the king had passed, and many broke into tears. As word spread through the kingdom, princes from other branches of the family passed by to pay their condolences. Among them was Salman, who arrived with Mohammed bin Salman. At some point, the young prince took the seal used on Royal Court documents from the powerful man who had run it under King Abdullah, an early sign of who would be in charge going forward. The royal guards who had brought Abdullah to the hospital left with Salman. Abdullah was laid to rest in a simple grave and Salman became Saudi Arabia’s new king. He was 79, one of the last surviving sons of King Abdulaziz, and the last of his generation to rule the kingdom.
Despite the jubilation in Saudi Arabia at the ascension of a new monarch, with celebratory programs flooding the television stations and green fireworks bursting over Riyadh, it was a troubling time for the kingdom. The popular uprisings known as the Arab Spring had shaken the regional order the Saudis were used to by toppling autocrats in Tunisia, Yemen, Libya, and Egypt. Their departure had left behind a murky picture of who would wield power where and how they would relate to the kingdom.
A new, Saudi-backed dictator had taken charge in Egypt, but the Arab world’s most populous country faced an economic crisis. Libya was in chaos, with two competing forces seeking to impose their rule on a shell-shocked country. Scrappy rebels known as the Houthis had seized control of northwestern Yemen, including the capital, Sanaa, and territory along the Saudi border. Farther afield, a brutal civil war raged in Syria, where Saudi support had failed to help rebels oust a Saudi foe, President Bashar al-Assad.
In the meantime, the jihadists of the Islamic State had rampaged through eastern Syria and western Iraq, seizing territory the size of Britain, using phenomenal violence to terrify enemies, and declaring the creation of a caliphate, or an Islamic government they hoped would unite the world’s Muslims. In reality, most of the world’s Muslims, including the Saudi leadership, abhorred the jihadists, but their rise posed challenges for the kingdom. It drew unflattering attention to Saudi Arabia’s own intolerant interpretation of Islam, which also shunned “infidels” and practiced public beheading. There were significant differences: Wahhabism did not call for the establishment of the caliphate, encouraged obedience to rulers, and did not oppose interactions with the West. But the similarities on most religious matters were so great that the jihadists used Saudi textbooks in their schools. Nevertheless, the jihadists blasted the royal family as hypocrites and sellouts while recruiting thousands of Saudis to their ranks, some of whom launched deadly attacks inside the kingdom.