MBS

“My name is Dana.”

“How old are you?”

“I am nine.”

“When is your birthday?”

She switched to Arabic.

“We don’t have that in Saudi Arabia,” she said. “That’s an infidel holiday.”

Alarmed, her father asked her where she had learned that, and she retrieved a government textbook and flipped to a lesson listing “forbidden holidays”: Christmas and Thanksgiving. Her teacher had added birthdays to the lesson.

Another time, I was having coffee with a conservative friend and his two young sons when the call to prayer sounded. My friend excused himself to pray, and his sons looked at me wide-eyed, wondering why I did not follow.

“Are you an infidel?” one asked.

DESPITE THESE OVERWHELMINGLY visible signs, Mohammed bin Salman consistently argued that Wahhabism didn’t exist.

“No one can define Wahhabism,” he said. “There is no Wahhabism. We don’t believe we have Wahhabism.”

He was not the only one. The hardest part of discussing Wahhabism with Saudis was their tendency to deny its existence, for a range of reasons. Even the most devout Saudis did not identify themselves as Wahhabis and argued that Muhammed ibn Abdul-Wahhab had not established a new creed, but merely restored Islam to its roots. Others noted that Wahhabism was often used as a blanket slur against a range of practices or beliefs that the person wielding the term didn’t like.

But Saudi and foreign academics and Muslims from other societies found the word useful to describe the ultraconservative interpretation of Islam born in Saudi Arabia and propagated by its government at home and abroad. Under that definition, it would have been hard to find a truer Wahhabi than Hisham al-Sheikh, a direct descendant of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab, the cleric who had started it all hundreds of years before.

“There is no such thing as Wahhabism,” al-Sheikh told me the first time we met. “There is only true Islam.”

Since Ibn Abdul-Wahhab’s death, his movement had mushroomed into a massive religious establishment inside the Saudi state. It included a legal system that applied Sharia law; a network of universities that cranked out graduates in religious studies; a council of clerics that advised the king; tens of thousands of mosque imams who delivered the government’s message from the pulpit; and, of course, the Commission, to police public behavior. In addition, a complex web of organizations worked to spread the faith abroad, from Texas to Tajikistan.

Al-Sheikh’s life had been defined by the religious establishment. His uncle was the Grand Mufti, the kingdom’s top religious official. He had memorized the Quran at a young age and studied with prominent scholars before completing a PhD in Sharia law, writing a thesis on how technology changed its application. Now he wore a number of hats, all of them religious. He advised the minister of Islamic affairs; wrote studies for the clerics who advised the king; served on the Sharia board of the MedGulf insurance company; and trained judges to serve in the kingdom’s courts. On Fridays, he preached at a mosque near his mother’s house and welcomed visitors who came to see his uncle.

When I met al-Sheikh, he was a portly man of 42, with a long beard and no mustache, in imitation of the Prophet Muhammad, and in the middle of a shining career. We met in the music-free lobby of a Riyadh hotel, where we sat on purple couches, ate dates, drank coffee, and chatted, with al-Sheikh glancing from time to time at his iPhone.

“I am an open-minded person,” he told me.

It was clear he hoped I would become a Muslim.

He had traveled extensively abroad and loved the United States. He had been to Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, and California and visited a synagogue, a black church, and an Amish community, whose adherence to strict religious rules he admired. The hardest part had been during Ramadan, when he struggled to find a restaurant open late that did not have a bar.

“All I had was IHOP,” he said.

He told me that Islam did not forbid doing business or being friends with Christians and Jews. He frowned when I asked about Shiites, but said it was wrong to declare takfir, or infidelity, on entire groups. Each person would be judged individually.

The issue of birthdays was complicated. He didn’t oppose their celebration, but his wife did, so their four children did not attend birthday parties thrown by less strict Saudis. Instead, he showed me a video on his phone of the family’s own celebration. They gathered around a cake bearing the face of his 15-year-old son, who had memorized the Quran, a major milestone. They lit sparklers and cheered, but did not sing.

Many strict Wahhabis forbid music, but al-Sheikh kept an open mind, relatively. He allowed for background music in restaurants, but opposed music that put listeners in a state similar to drunkenness, making them jump around and bang their heads.

“We have something better,” he told me. “You can listen to the Quran.”

Since much of what shocks outsiders about Saudi Arabia is its treatment of women, I wanted to talk to a conservative Saudi woman, which was a challenge because most would refuse to meet an unrelated man—let alone an infidel foreign correspondent. So I had a female Saudi journalist I worked with contact al-Sheikh’s wife, Meshael.

She agreed to meet me, so I asked her husband for permission.

“She is very busy,” he said, changing the subject.

So Meshael and my colleague met at a women’s coffee shop, where they could uncover their faces and hair and talk freely.

Meshael and al-Sheikh were cousins and their marriage had been arranged when he was 21 and she was 16. They met once for less than an hour before they were married, and he had been allowed a glimpse at her face before making his final decision to wed.

“It was hard for me to look at him or to check him out, as I was so shy,” she said.

He had accepted her condition that she be allowed to continue her studies, and she was now completing a doctorate in education while raising their four children. She disputed the idea that Saudi women lacked rights.

“They believe we are oppressed because we don’t drive, but that is incorrect,” she said. Driving would be a hassle in Riyadh’s traffic anyway. “Here women are respected and honored in many ways you don’t find in the West.”

She, too, was a descendant of Ibn Abdul-Wahhab and said proudly that one of her ancestors had founded the religious police.

“Praise God that we have the Commission to protect our country!”

THE PRIMACY OF Islam in Saudi life had fed the growth of a huge religious sector that extended beyond the state’s official clerics. Public life was filled with celebrity sheikhs: old sheikhs, young sheikhs, sheikhs who used to be extremists and now preached tolerance, sheikhs whom women found sexy, and a black sheikh who had compared himself to Barack Obama. They competed for followers on social media in the kingdom’s hyper-wired society, and a number of them, including the blind, elderly Grand Mufti, had their own television shows.

This embrace of technology ran counter to the history of Wahhabi clerics rejecting nearly every innovation as a threat to Islam. Throughout Saudi history, the clerics had sought to ban the telegraph, the radio, the camera, cinema, soccer, girls’ education, and television, whose introduction in the 1960s caused outrage.

In areas where it was not entirely clear what was halal or haram—permitted or forbidden—Saudis turned to clerics for fatwas, or religious opinions. Some fatwas had made international news, such as when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran called for the killing of the author Salman Rushdie, but most had to do with personal religious practice. Others revealed the lengths clerics went to when applying ancient scriptures to modern life.

Take the cleric who appeared to call for the death of Mickey Mouse and then backtracked. Or the cleric who had to clarify that he had not, in fact, forbidden all-you-can-eat buffets. That same sheikh was asked whether it was OK to take a photo with a cat. The cat was not the problem, the cleric said. The photo was.

“Photography is not permitted unless necessary,” he said. “Not with cats, not with dogs, not with wolves, not with anything.”

The private fatwa sector sometimes got unruly, so the government tried to impose consistency with official fatwa institutions. But their fatwas provoked laughter, too, like the one that deemed spending money on Pokémon products “cooperation in sin and transgression.” Others contradicted government policy. The state, since King Abdullah, had been trying to push more women into the workforce, an effort further advanced by MBS. But the state fatwa organization warned against the “danger of women joining men in their workplace,” calling it “the reason behind the destruction of societies.”

While digging around on the organization’s website, I was shocked to find a fatwa in English from the previous Grand Mufti that called for infidels to be killed or taken as slaves until they became Muslims.

“Whoever refuses to follow the straight path deserves to be killed or enslaved in order to establish justice, maintain security and peace and safeguard lives, honor and property,” it read. “Slavery in Islam is like a purifying machine or sauna in which those who are captured enter to wash off their dirt and then they come out clean, pure, and safe, from another door.”

I was having coffee with al-Sheikh once and he answered his cellphone, listened intently, and issued a fatwa on the spot. He got such calls all the time, he complained. This query was a simple one: At what point did a pilgrim headed to Mecca have to don the white cloths of ritual purity? Jeddah, he said. But others baffled him, and he declined to rule if he was not sure. Once, a woman had asked whether she could wear fake eyelashes. He told her he didn’t know, but later decided it was fine, on one condition: “That there is no cheating.”

A woman could put them on before a man proposed and got his first peek at her face—marital false advertising.

“And then after they get married, they’re gone!” he said. “That is not permitted.”

One Friday, he invited me to visit his uncle, Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Sheikh.

We entered a vast reception hall near the mufti’s house in Riyadh, where a dozen bearded students sat on padded benches along the walls. The mufti presided in the center in a raised armchair, his feet clad in brown socks and perched on a cushion. The students read religious texts, and the mufti provided commentary. The younger al-Sheikh told me his uncle was 75 and had not been able to see since age 14, when a German doctor had tried to save his eyesight and instead left him blind.

My turn came to ask a question, and I asked one that was on the minds of many Westerners: How did he respond to critics who compared Wahhabism to the ideology of the Islamic State?

“That is all lies and slander. Daesh is an aggressive, tyrannous group that has no relation,” he said, using an Arabic acronym for the group.

After a pause, he told me, “You must become a Muslim.”

My family were Christians, I said.

“The religion you follow has no source,” he said. I needed to accept the Prophet Muhammad’s revelation.

“Your religion is not a religion,” he said. “In the end, you must face God.”

MY REPORTING ALSO led me to the home of a man whose relationship with the religious establishment was more conflicted. Ahmed Qassim al-Ghamdi had spent most of his life working for the Commission, helping to protect the kingdom from secularism, Westernization, and general religious laxity. Some of his tasks had resembled police work: catching drug dealers and bootleggers in a country that banned alcohol. But most of it focused on upholding the kingdom’s strict social rules on dress and ikhtilat, the hated gender mixing that opened the door to fornication, adultery, broken homes, orphans, and all-around societal collapse.

I met al-Ghamdi in a sitting room in his Jeddah apartment that had been decorated to look like a Bedouin tent, with burgundy fabric on the walls, gold tassels hanging from the roof, and carpets on the floor, on which al-Ghamdi prayed periodically. He was 51 and sported the same signs of a devout Saudi man as al-Sheikh—the long beard and bare upper lip. For much of his life, the beliefs of both men would have lined up, too, but al-Ghamdi had gone through a religious reckoning that had caused him to question his old life and the religious establishment that had defined it.

Little in his background foretold his future as a religious reformer. He had worked at the customs office in the port of Jeddah during university but quit after a cleric told him that Islam forbade collecting duties. After graduation, he studied religion in his spare time and handled international accounts for a government office, a job that required travel to non-Muslim countries. At the time, the clerics recommended avoiding infidel lands, so he quit.

He next got a job teaching economics at a technical school, but became so annoyed that the curriculum did not include Islamic finance that he quit that, too. When he landed a job with the Commission in Jeddah, he thought, finally, a vocation that matched his religious convictions.

In different positions there and in Mecca, he helped catch prostitutes and sorcerers, who could be beheaded. But over time he grew uneasy with the force’s methods, feeling that his colleagues’ zeal made them overreact, breaking into homes to hunt for contraband or humiliating suspects.

“Let’s say someone drank alcohol,” he said. “That does not represent an attack on the religion, but they exaggerated in how they treated people.”

He got a position reviewing cases and tried to report abuses. One case involved a middle-aged bachelor who received two young women in his home on weekends. The man did not pray at the mosque, so his neighbors suspected the worst. They called the Commission, which raided his house and caught the man red-handed—visiting with his own adult daughters.

“People were humiliated in inhuman ways, and that humiliation could cause hatred of religion,” al-Ghamdi said.

In 2005, al-Ghamdi was promoted to be the head of the Commission for the Mecca region, a big job overseeing scores of stations in a large, diverse area. He worked hard, but worried privately that the force’s emphasis was off. He returned to the scriptures and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and found a gap between what they contained and what the Commission was imposing. There had been plenty of mixing among the first generation of Muslims, for example, and no one had sought to stamp it out, not least the prophet himself.

Al-Ghamdi came to believe that much of what Saudis practiced as religion was actually Arabian cultural practices that had become mixed up with their faith. It was a startling conclusion, and dangerous for a man of his station. So he kept quiet, at least for a time.

IN 2007, SAUDI Arabia broke ground on a new pet project for the monarch, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, which was supposed to grow into a world-class university on the Red Sea with the help of a royal endowment of more than $10 billion. To ensure international standards, King Abdullah insulated KAUST, as it was known, from clerical interference. Female students would dress as they wished, and classes would be co-ed.

KAUST followed the precedent of Saudi Aramco, the oil company, where the clerics had also been forbidden to tread, highlighting a great Saudi contradiction: As much as the royals preached Islamic values, when they wanted to earn money or innovate, they did not solicit the clerics’ advice. They locked them out.

Most clerics stayed mum on the plan, out of deference to the king, but one member of the top clerical body warned on a call-in show about the dangers of co-education. There would be sexual harassment. Men and women would cavort, distracting them from their studies. Husbands would grow jealous of their wives. There could be rapes.

“Mixing has many corrupting factors, and its evil is great,” declared Sheikh Saad al-Shathri, suggesting that the king would stop it if he knew.

But the mixing at KAUST had been the king’s idea, and he promptly fired the cleric.

The ordeal frustrated al-Ghamdi. He felt that the clerics were not supporting an initiative that was good for Saudi Arabia. So after praying about it, he put his thoughts in two articles about religious practices that were published in Okaz newspaper in 2009.

They were the first volleys in a prolonged battle between al-Ghamdi and the religious establishment. He followed with other articles, and faced off on TV with noted clerics who countered him with their own evidence from the Islamic scriptures. His colleagues at the Commission shunned him, so he requested—and swiftly received—early retirement.

Once off the force, he cast doubt on other practices, arguing that it was not necessary to close shops during prayer times, force people to go to the mosque, oblige women to cover their faces, or bar them from driving. Women during the time of the prophet had ridden camels, which he argued was more provocative than driving SUVs. At one point, a woman asked him if she could not only show her face, but wear makeup. He replied, Why not? To prove that he meant it, he went on a popular talk show with his wife, Jawahir, her face bare and adorned with a dusting of makeup.

His arguments went off like a bomb inside the religious establishment, shaking the foundations of the social order that gave the clerics their power. Condemnation rained down from the senior ranks. Some attacked al-Ghamdi’s credentials, saying he was not really a sheikh. That was a dubious accusation because there was no standard qualification for sheikh-hood. Others questioned his résumé, arguing, correctly, that he had no degree in religion and pointing out, also correctly, that his doctorate was from Ambassador University Corporation, a diploma mill.

“There is no doubt that this man is bad,” a member of the kingdom’s top clerical council said. “It is necessary for the state to assign someone to summon and torture him.”

The Grand Mufti, who years later would beseech me to become a Muslim, addressed the issue on his call-in show, saying that the kingdom’s television channels should ban content that “corrupts the religion and the morals and values of society.”

The clerical attacks were loud, but the social blowback hurt more. Angry callers yelled at al-Ghamdi through his cellphone. He got death threats on Twitter. His tribe disowned him as “troubled and confused.” A mosque where he preached asked him to stop coming. Vandals scrawled insulting graffiti on the wall of his house. A group of men showed up at his door, demanding to “mix” with his womenfolk. His sons—he has nine children—called the police.

Al-Ghamdi had not broken any laws and faced no legal charges, but the attacks shook his family. The relatives of his eldest son’s fiancée called off the couple’s wedding, not wanting to associate their family with his. His sister’s husband left her after she stood by her brother. A boy at school taunted his 15-year-old son, Ammar, saying, “How did your mom go on TV? That’s not right. You have no manners.”

So Ammar punched him.

BY THE TIME I met al-Ghamdi in 2016, the hubbub had mostly died down, although he kept a low profile because strangers still insulted him when he appeared in public. He was publishing columns in foreign newspapers, but was otherwise jobless—a cleric whose positions had rendered him unemployable in the Islamic kingdom.

It was a bad year for the Commission. A video of its officers confronting a girl in a mall parking lot had gone viral. It showed her being thrown to the ground and yelping as her abaya flew up, exposing her torso. For many Saudis, “the Nakheel Mall girl” personified the Commission’s overreach. Then the Commission arrested a popular talk show host who had criticized religious figures, and photos of him appeared online in handcuffs with bottles of liquor. It appeared that the photos had been staged and leaked by the Commission in an attempted character assassination. The outrage grew.

Those incidents highlighted the irony of al-Ghamdi’s ordeal: Many Saudis, including important royals and even some clerics, agreed with him that the kingdom’s strictures had gone too far. One of them was MBS, who recognized that clerical control was a major barrier to his development plans. So in April 2016, a surprise royal decree stripped the religious police of their powers. Henceforth, they could not arrest, question, or pursue subjects except in cooperation with the actual police. And they were advised to be “gentle and kind” in their interactions with citizens.

When the news broke, I contacted a number of Saudi friends for their thoughts, but no one knew what to make of it. Was it for real? It seemed too good to be true, and the Commission too powerful to merely fade away. But over time we realized that, yes, it was real. With a single royal decree, MBS had defanged the clerics, clearing the way for vast changes they most certainly would have opposed.

GRAND VISIONS

THE CONSULTANTS CAME in droves, wearing well-cut suits with power ties, flying in first-class from Dubai, Beirut, or London, and checking in to the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton or the Four Seasons. They put in long days extracting information about the Saudi government and economy and refining it into detailed reports and flashy PowerPoint presentations. When the time came to present their findings, they showed up at the Royal Court and waited in its ornate, high-ceilinged sitting rooms, where they inevitably found crowds of consultants from competing firms ahead of them in line. As they waited, servers brought endless cups of tea or saffron-flavored Saudi coffee. Often, they were given nighttime appointments, told to come at 10 P.M. and made to wait until 2 A.M. before being dismissed and told to return the next day. For many, it was a frustrating, grueling routine, but the money was great and there was no alternative if you wanted to pitch your services to the highest-spending customer in the Middle East: Mohammed bin Salman.

As MBS formulated his plans to remake the kingdom, he realized not only that he had to defang the clerics who would oppose change, but that he needed experts to figure out what had to be done and how. So he turned to management consultants, opening the taps of Saudi cash so crowds of highly educated foreigners could advise him on everything from diversifying the economy to streamlining military procurement to reformatting school curricula.

In many ways, it was a match made in heaven. Saudi Arabia lacked human capital in many domains that MBS wanted to reform, and he himself had little relevant experience for much of what he wanted to do. So why not bring in graduates of Oxford and Harvard who had worked on similar issues in other countries to help him out? They could synthesize past experiences, the thinking went, and give more unvarnished advice than the prince could expect from fellow Saudis.

MBS came along at a time of uncertainty for the consulting industry in the Middle East. Many firms had lost business in Egypt, Libya, and Yemen when their governments were toppled and economies roiled during the Arab Spring. So they had shifted toward the wealthy Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf, which were stable, with small domestic professional classes and lots of money to spend. MBS turbocharged that shift, because of the size of Saudi Arabia’s economy and the faith the young prince had in what foreign experts had to offer.

He commissioned the biggest companies, McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group, and Strategy&, as well as smaller boutique firms, to handle public relations and implement projects. Some firms kept permanent offices near the Royal Court, so they could be summoned quickly and sometimes turn around projects in twenty-four hours, much faster than they normally worked. MBS would pit them against one another, giving the same project to competing firms and making them present in front of the others, a live battleground of ideas.