Saudi Arabia after King Abdullah

The Saudi Arabian royal family has to resolve the contradictions at the heart of their state . 

The House of Saud is one of the biggest and most successful family businesses in the world and, as in any business, much depends on the CEO. King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz was a skilful manager of his awkward country after he took over as effective regent in 1995, when King Fahd was disabled by a stroke.

He was adept at steering the contentious princely clan at the top of the Saudi system, many of whose members have less access to privilege and power than the stereotypes suggest. He was good, if slow, at accommodating the growing class of educated commoners whose allegiance, and satisfaction, are vital if Saudi Arabia is to become a modern industrial economy. He was successful in defeating a major internal Islamist threat in the shape of al-Qaida. He also took action, belatedly and still far from completely, on the export of Wahhabi extremism and the funding of Islamist movements abroad by Saudi individuals and groups, the worst aspect of the dangerous double life long led by the Saudi state. He moved just a little, but still perceptibly, on political matters, widening consultation slightly and introducing elections to municipal councils. He was, in other words, not a bad man, and his reign illustrates the argument that parts of the princely elite are more liberal, in a very broad sense of that word, than much of the rest of Saudi society and than its religious establishment.

The proof of this good management came with the Arab spring, when many saw Saudi Arabia as ripe for the kind of change that at that time seemed to presage a new democratic future for many countries in the region. But the country weathered the storm with surprising ease, indeed emerging to become an arbiter in the internal conflicts that followed in the nations where regime change had taken place. The wisdom of that foreign policy, whether in Syria, Egypt, or Libya, is very debatable, but it is nevertheless the expression of a relatively strong state.

Yet at the end of Abdullah’s reign Saudi Arabia is still a country where terrible and deplorable things happen. It is a country where a young man can be sentenced to repeated floggings because he put forward moderately worded arguments on freedom of thought. It is a country where women cannot drive a car, a country without a single non-Muslimplace of worship, even though many who work there are Christians orHindus, and a country where corruption, grand and petty, remains a serious problem. It is, finally, still a country a long way from dealing with the contradictions that will undoubtedly undermine its ambitions if they are not at least partly resolved. Saudi Arabia cannot be the economic powerhouse it wants to be without enfranchising its educated professionals, on the way to fuller political participation for all. It cannot flourish, given its demographics, without meeting the aspirations of its youth and without allowing the half of the population that is female the right to work, among other rights, if they wish to do so. And it cannot be a state open to the world, which its large expatriate community at home and the large number of its students and businessmen abroad dictate it should be, if it continues to act as if everything foreign is in some way toxic.

The new ruler, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, is thought to be in bad health. Both he and his crown prince, Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, are old. Although age has never been a disqualification in this long-lived family, the name that may turn out to matter more is that of Deputy Crown Prince Muhammad bin Nayef. Young by Saudi standards, he is a nephew of Abdullah and the first of the grandsons and great-nephews of Ibn Saud to have an opportunity to rule.

Whatever the exact dynastic sequence turns out to be, the Saudi royal family has work to do. Their nation was founded on two enormous pieces of luck. The first was that the British chose to look the other way as Ibn Saud rounded out his kingdom in the 1920s. The second was oil, swiftly parlayed into an alliance with the United States that has endured ever since. But the oil revenues are no longer enough to sustain a state that has historically contained its problems by throwing money at them. Saudi Arabia needs to move down the new path that King Abdullah very tentatively explored both more swiftly and more surely than in the past. –The Guardian

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