The murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in 2018 tore the mask off Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman’s regime. The author of The Son King, Madawi Al-Rasheed, knew Khashoggi and is, as he was, a Saudi exile critical of her country’s status quo. Now living in London as a Fellow of the British Academy, Al-Rasheed has written a scathing critique of a nation that bears the name of its rulers, the Saud family, who have governed much of the Arabian Peninsula since the 1920s.
The family has ruled their desert land through a set of contradictions, juggling oil-wealth with an austere brand of Islam and balancing claims to Muslim leadership with vital ties to the West. Saudi Arabia promoted and bankrolled the Islamist fundamentalism that gave rise to 911 as well as terrorism on its own soil. The dogs they unleashed returned to bite the master’s hand. And yet the Saud family has ridden with great success on the backs of many tigers, rewarding and threatening their subjects, guaranteeing economic security while stifling freedom and jailing (or executing) dissenters.
Enter Muhammad bin Salman, the young pretender whose ascent as head of government in 2015 “ushered in a new wave of optimism and wishful thinking that Saudi Arabia would finally become a modern, tolerant and open society.” It was, Al-Rasheed writes, a fantasy promoted by the gullible Western media, who praised the prince for opening movie theaters, inviting foreign investment and granting women the right to drive while overlooking everything else. The media’s chorus of praise was echoed in academia, where many Middle East studies centers are funded by the Saudis.
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The prince, dubbed MBS by the cognoscenti, proved to be a master of manipulating the global media, including social media by inviting “influencers” into the kingdom who posted glowing reviews. To The Guardian and the New York Times, he posed as a modernizer and news reports initially brushed aside the inconvenient fact that MBS “excluded the basic, and fundamental, tenet of modernity: freedom to think, to debate all aspects of life.” Rather than a digital platform for free expression and sharing, the internet became the prince’s dark web of spies and trolls.
While MBS’ intervention in Yemen’s bloody civil war was relegated to the back pages, with Khashoggi’s killing, the media (abetted by an unlikely ally, Turkish strongman Recep Erdogan) belatedly took the prince to task. Although he had previously been a pro-Saudi propagandist, Khashoggi had become a critic of the regime as a Washington Post correspondent and the murder of a journalist is a crime no reporter can countenance. Khashoggi’s murder was a serious mistake, but despite Al-Rasheed’s hopes for the Saudi kingdom’s “young and restless,” MBS’ grip hasn’t loosened.
Al-Rasheed’s writing is repetitious (where were her editors?) but her message is clear: MBS is a master of image, opposing any shift toward popular government by distracting his subjects with pop culture. Anyone who gets out of line is likely to disappear.
