MBS

COURTING OBAMA

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA came into the White House in 2009 hoping to turn a new page in the United States’ relationship with the Muslim world. He understood, and talked about, how the United States’ focus on terrorism had led it to neglect other problems in the Middle East and spoke about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a way that suggested sympathy for the Arab point of view. His first television interview was with a Saudi-owned network; he delivered a high-profile address to the Islamic world from a university in Cairo; and he spoke directly to Muslims in his inaugural address.

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect,” he said. “To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West, know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.”

Despite the rhetoric, the Saudis were ambivalent about Obama, and their view got worse over time. During my early visits to the kingdom, I heard growing frustration with how Obama had handled the Arab Spring, how he had failed to support the uprising in Syria, and how Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies needed to pursue greater independence from the United States. That attitude became more entrenched after the announcement of the Iran deal, which left Saudi Arabia feeling that its protector was engaged in a dangerous dalliance with a wily foe.

In September 2015, King Salman and MBS came to the United States for a visit deeply colored by those differences. During a meeting in the Oval Office, Obama pressed the king on human rights, suggesting that increasing the margins for expression and granting more freedoms to women were necessary for the kingdom to develop. The king grew animated, pushing back and arguing that Obama did not understand Saudi society.

A smaller meeting was also held, with just the king, MBS, Obama, and Susan Rice, the national security adviser. As soon as they were alone, the king turned the floor over to MBS, who laid out grand plans for the future of the kingdom, which included opening up society and diversifying the economy away from oil. Obama and Rice listened, but refrained from giving the full-throated American endorsement their Saudi guests seemed to be hoping for. That plan would later be released publicly as Saudi Vision 2030, the centerpiece of MBS’s ambitions. But at the time, Obama and Rice felt that the goals were laudable even if the plan itself seemed shallow.

“He knew how to say the right talking points about reforming the kingdom, but he didn’t seem to know what was underneath them,” Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser, recalled later. “He had all the right buzz words, but if you tried to probe them like they did, he didn’t seem to know what they meant.”

During the same visit, Secretary of State John Kerry hosted MBS for dinner at his mansion in Georgetown. The evening began with a chat in the ground floor sitting room. At one point, MBS eyed the piano. Kerry asked if he played, and MBS sat down and performed a well-practiced classical piece, surprising everyone in the room. Given Wahhabism’s animosity toward music, MBS’s hosts had not expected that he played. The group then moved downstairs to a dining room overlooking the back lawn. During a discussion of Middle East politics, MBS surprised his host again by suggesting that he could determine who ruled where in the Arab world.

“If I want Sisi out, he’ll be out,” he said, referring to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt.

None of the Americans present knew how serious he was, but when the official report on the dinner made its way around the White House, many were taken aback by the prince’s cockiness.

At the time, a range of officials and opinion-makers in and outside the United States had noticed MBS’s growing power, and their early assessments of him varied widely. In late 2015, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman spent an evening with MBS and wrote the first in what would be a procession of breathless columns by foreign commentators lauding him as a much-needed change agent.

MBS, Friedman wrote, “wore me out” with talk of proposed innovations few expected in Saudi Arabia. The prince planned to improve government performance through an online dashboard that would track Key Performance Indicators, or KPIs, for each ministry. The kingdom was too dependent on oil, so MBS would reduce subsidies for wealthy Saudis and institute a value added tax and “sin taxes” on cigarettes and sugary drinks. The government would privatize key sectors and charge fees for undeveloped lands, meaning, MBS argued, that even if oil fell to $30 a barrel, the state would still have enough cash.

Political reform played no role in the prince’s plans, Friedman noted, but MBS said that the connection between the royal family and the people was enough.

“A government that is not a part of the society and not representing them, it is impossible that it will remain,” MBS said. “People misunderstand our monarchy. It is not like Europe. It is a tribal form of monarchy, with many tribes and subtribes and regions connecting to the top.”

Those relationships guided governance, he said. “The king cannot just wake up and decide to do something.”

Soon after, a starkly different assessment emerged from Germany’s foreign intelligence service. In a one-and-a-half-page memo sent to German news organizations, the BND warned that a new, assertive Saudi Arabia could destabilize the Middle East.

“The cautious diplomatic stance of the older leading members of the royal family is being replaced by an impulsive policy of intervention,” the report said. This had led Saudi Arabia to pursue an increasingly confrontational stance toward Iran through proxy wars in Syria and Yemen.

“Saudi Arabia wants to prove that it is ready to take unprecedented military, financial, and political risks in order not to fall into a disadvantageous position in the region,” it said, adding that MBS risked doing too much too fast.

“The concentration of economic and foreign policy power on Mohammed bin Salman contains the latent danger that, in an attempt to establish himself in the royal succession while his father is still alive, he could overreach with expensive measures or reforms that would unsettle other members of the royal family and the population.”

ON THE SECOND day of 2016, the world woke to the news that forty-seven men had been executed in Saudi Arabia, the kingdom’s largest mass execution in thirty-six years. Most of the men who were killed that day were Sunni Muslims who had been convicted of links to Al Qaeda attacks in the kingdom. But a number were members of the kingdom’s Shiite minority, and one was famous. Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was a thin preacher with a salt-and-pepper beard who wore a large white turban and had a reputation for diatribes against the royal family.

An estimated 10 percent of Saudi citizens were Shiites. They lived mostly in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, where they faced consistent discrimination. While most kept their criticisms of the government to themselves, some participated in protests against the state, which during the Arab Spring grew more ardent and sometimes violent.

Al-Nimr hailed from the village of Awamiya, which had a history of opposition to the monarchy. After more than a decade abroad for religious studies in Iran and Syria, he had returned to his village and taken up at a local mosque, where he delivered fiery calls for Shiite rights. His reach was small at first, and many in his community avoided him, fearing trouble. In a diplomatic cable, an American diplomat said locals dismissed the sheikh as “a secondary player in local politics.”

But his star rose with the Arab Spring in 2011. Inspired by protesters elsewhere, Shiites in Saudi Arabia and the nearby island nation of Bahrain joined the movement, clashing with security forces. Young Shiites who felt their elders’ quiet efforts to win concessions had failed coalesced around al-Nimr, who overflowed with anger. He argued that Shiites deserved a fair share of the country’s oil wealth and suggested that they secede from the kingdom. In one sermon, he called on the downtrodden to rise up against “oppressors.”

“In any place he rules—Bahrain, here, in Yemen, in Egypt, or in any place—the unjust ruler is hated,” he said. “Whoever defends the oppressor is his partner with him in oppression, and whoever is with the oppressed shares with him his reward from God.”

He enraged the Saudi leadership by attacking the royal family, comparing its members to villains in Shiite history and branding them “tyrants” who should be toppled.

“A crown prince dies, put a new crown prince! What are we, a farm? Poultry for them?” he shouted in one sermon. “We don’t accept the Al Saud as rulers. We don’t accept them and we want to remove them.”

The Saudi authorities arrested al-Nimr in 2012, shooting him in the leg during a raid. Pictures of the cleric wrapped in a bloody cloth fueled further protests. A Saudi court sentenced him to death for charges that included breaking allegiance to the ruler, inciting sectarian strife, supporting riots, and the destruction of property. The United States, the European Union, and the United Nations all expressed concern about the trial’s fairness.

His arrest and trial elevated al-Nimr from a small-town firebrand to a lightning rod in the growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran. To Saudi Arabia, al-Nimr was a dangerous rabble-rouser who personified the kingdom’s fears of Shiite insurrection and Iranian meddling Iran and its allies saw the cleric as an invaluable domestic foe to the Saudi ruling family, and they amplified his message, making him a regional figure.

As news of the cleric’s execution spread, protesters chanting “Death to Al Saud” threw firebombs at the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, smashed windows and furniture, tossed papers from the roof, and set the building alight. Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran and gave the Iranian ambassador and the country’s other diplomats forty-eight hours to get out. Iran followed suit. Saudi Arabia and Iran had long been at odds, but the episode marked a sharp escalation in the regional Cold War that would fuel regional tensions for years to come.

A FEW DAYS after the executions, MBS sat down with journalists from The Economist magazine for his first full-length interview, giving the world the most detailed description yet of his ambitions for the future of the kingdom. He defended the executions, including that of al-Nimr, saying they were the result of a legal process the rulers could not intervene in. But the interview focused on his economic vision, which had developed since he pitched it to Obama the year before. The kingdom was overhauling its economy, he said, privatizing health care and education to take pressure off the government budget; developing a domestic military industry; turning undeveloped state land into a valuable asset; and increasing religious tourism to Mecca and Medina. The plans were hugely ambitious, and the prince threw around sums in the tens of billions of dollars as if they were casual investments.

What generated the most buzz, however, was his surprise announcement that Saudi Arabia would sell shares of Saudi Aramco, the state-run oil monopoly and the world’s most valuable company.

“I believe it is in the interest of the Saudi market, and it is in the interest of Aramco, and it is for the interest of more transparency, and to counter corruption, if any, that may be circling around Aramco,” he said.

It was an eye-popping statement. For anyone familiar with the oil industry, it was clear that the proposed transaction would be massive. No outsider knew exactly how much Aramco was worth, as it had never had a formal valuation and the kingdom’s oil reserves had never been audited. But the Saudis estimated its value at between $2 and $3 trillion and said they would sell shares of up to 5 percent of the company, earning more than $100 billion. If those numbers worked out, it would be the largest initial public offering in history.

Others zoomed in on two words MBS used to describe the plan: transparency and corruption. The first was significant because Aramco’s finances had always been opaque, especially when it came to the share of its profits that went to the royal family. Exposing those details would reveal one of the kingdom’s most closely guarded secrets. The second drew notice because in a kingdom rife with mismanagement and corruption, Aramco had always been seen as the cleanest, best-run institution. Did the prince have reason to suspect foul play?

The proposed IPO lit up energy and financial markets whose analysts and dealers would spend the next few years scrambling to get information on the kingdom’s plans and angling for a piece of the action.

MBS summed up his interview with a description of the Saudi Arabia he dreamed of, for himself and for the kingdom’s other young people. It was a place that would not be dependent on oil and would have a growing economy, transparent laws, a strong position in the world, popular participation in decision-making, and would participate in “facing the obstacles and the challenges that face the world.”

“My dream as a young man in Saudi Arabia, and the dreams of men in Saudi Arabia, are so many, and I try to compete with them and their dreams, and they compete with mine, to create a better Saudi Arabia,” he said.

It was heady, grandiose talk, the likes of which the kingdom had never heard before. But what to make of it? He was still only number three in the kingdom’s power structure, and the barriers to everything he wanted to accomplish were numerous—and deeply embedded in his own society.

NO SUCH THING AS WAHHABISM

DURING MY EARLY visits to Saudi Arabia, I became friends with a Saudi businessman who had returned to the kingdom to live after studying in the United States. He was a charming blend of cultures, a fan of dirty jokes and hamburgers who hailed from a prominent family and fasted during Ramadan. We would go out to dinner and discuss current events. I got the feeling that being with an American reminded him of his old life, and I appreciated his insights into Saudi society.

One day, he was angry when he picked me up. I asked what was the matter, and he delivered a tapestry of insults at the religious police, the force officially known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.

“The Commission,” as Saudis called it, was deeply woven into the kingdom’s history as part of the alliance between the royal family and the clerics. It owed its existence to the Quranic injunction to build a religious society by encouraging good behavior and stopping bad. The Commission had come to exert great influence in Saudi society, a force of stern, bearded men (it did not employ women) with offices and patrol cars who reported to the king and roamed public places imposing what they saw as proper Islamic conduct. It bothered them little that their rules were much more strict than those practiced in nearly all other Islamic societies.

They included preventing unauthorized ikhtilat, or “mixing,” between unrelated women and men; enforcing a ban on music; making sure that merchants closed shops during prayer times; herding people to the mosque when the call to prayer sounded; castigating men who wore their hair long; and ensuring that women dressed modestly in public, which meant shrouding their forms and covering their hair. If they covered their faces, too, that was a plus. If not, the men of the Commission would trail them, sometimes wielding batons, commanding, “Cover up! Cover up!” and insulting the women’s honor.

The Commission were the on-the-ground enforcers of Wahhabism, and Saudis had no choice but to heed their injunctions or pay the price, as my friend had learned.

The day before, he told me, his wife had been returning to her car from the grocery store with her hair covered but her face showing, and carrying their baby. A man from the Commission spotted her and told her to cover her face, insulting her. She locked herself in her car, snapped a photo of the man, and sent it to her husband to let him know she was being harassed.

He rushed to the supermarket in a rage but couldn’t find his wife’s car. He spotted the Commission’s vehicle and worried she had been arrested, so he ran to open the back. The officers shoved him away, he shoved back, and he remembered seeing one of the men “flying toward the Starbucks.” He realized his wife was not in the car and went home.

Shortly after, the police called. Cases had been filed against him and his wife for assaulting an officer from the Commission and for distributing his photo. My friend had to report to the police station, which he feared would mean jail time. So he spent the next few weeks working his connections to get the cases dropped, a process he finalized by paying a hefty fine (he called it a bribe) to the Commission. The experience left him so bitter that he considered giving up on Saudi Arabia and returning to the United States.

“They are germs,” he told me. “Filthy criminals.”

BY 2016, THE rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria had led to new international scrutiny of Wahhabism, and my editor sent me to Saudi Arabia to explore how it was lived in the modern day.

I had always been struck by the kingdom’s unique mix of urbanism and desert tradition, with a determined adherence to a strict interpretation of thousand-year-old scriptures. Tremendous wealth, gleaming skyscrapers, and motorways packed with SUVs existed within an all-encompassing religious regime, in which questions about how to interact with other faiths, handle money, and treat animals were answered with stories about the Prophet Muhammad or quotes from the Quran.

Religion permeated daily life. Images of men and women were blurred on billboards and department store mannequins lacked heads because Wahhabism rejected depictions of the human form. Insurance companies employed boards of clerics to ensure their compliance with Sharia law. Textbooks spelled out how girls should cover their bodies (completely), how boys should cut their hair (short), and how often a person should trim his or her pubic hair (often).

There was no public trace of any other religion, because the men of the Commission actively suppressed other faiths. Jews working in the kingdom kept it to themselves. Christians didn’t wear crosses. There were no churches, and not even a Church’s Chicken (they called it “Texas Chicken”). Saudi officials denied that this showed intolerance, arguing that the kingdom was a unique place for Muslims, with its own rules, as the Vatican was for Christians. (It did not seem relevant to them that women in headscarves or men in turbans could visit St. Peter’s Basilica without issue.)

As in any country, personal religious practices varied, but even those who followed the state’s official creed were alarmed by the tendency among Westerners to equate it with extremism and insisted that they supported “moderate Islam.” That was a slippery term. In Saudi Arabia, it meant beheading criminals, jailing “apostates,” and barring women from traveling abroad without the permission of a male “guardian.”

Gay rights? Not so much.

The kingdom had championed foreign jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s (in cooperation with the CIA), but that idea had gone out of style by the time I arrived, and government clerics focused their teaching on another tenet of Wahhabism: obedience to the ruler. I heard little disparaging talk about Christians and Jews, but the clerics persistently attacked Shiites, for ideological reasons and as part of the rivalry with Iran.

The only Saudis who ever called me an infidel were children.

A Saudi journalist once introduced me to his 9-year-old daughter, whom he had enrolled in a private school so she could learn English.

“What is your name?” I asked.