While the young rave in the desert, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is ushering in a new era of radical repression.
Just before midnight in the desert outside Riyadh, an aircraft engineer offers me a swig of vodka while his gay friend poses for pictures in leather leggings. A girl runs towards a dancing crowd in a black minidress; a man in denim shorts twirls a silver crucifix around his tongue. Flames shoot up in the sky from the main stage, where an American DJ is performing, merging with a swirl of geometric patterns projected by lasers. Below, thousands of men and women are dancing, the lights from their phones blinking under the stars. “This is Saudi Arabia!” a young doctor from Riyadh shouts, throwing his arms around his girlfriend. “I love my country. We are so happy with everything the crown prince has done.” He pauses. “OK, I’ve taken some Ecstasy,” he adds. “But it is actually amazing.”
He’s right. It is. We’re in a country where five years ago even elevator music was frowned upon for being un-Islamic. Now, after a radical series of reforms pushed by 37-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, men and women are dancing together at a festival called MDLBeast — not only approved but partly funded by the Saudi Arabian state.
Over the past half-decade the kingdom has undergone a social and economic transformation so dramatic it is without comparison. Changes to the law and relaxations of strict societal codes have allowed women to divorce in online courts against their husbands’ wishes; travel without permission from their male guardian; wear jeans and T-shirts; drive. Young Saudi men and women make lattes in Starbucks side by side, drive taxis, write code for tech companies. Alcohol and drugs are banned, but — like anywhere else in the world — there are ways of finding them, and it seems to be becoming easier.
This transformation, however, is only part of the truth. To look at Saudi Arabia today you have to hold two ideas simultaneously in your mind. One: there has been enormous social and economic change under MBS. Two: he has made the country more repressive than ever.
Last year the crown prince’s 87-year-old father, King Salman, appointed him as prime minister, formalising his existing power over the country. Under his de facto rule dissenting voices within the judiciary, the security services, the business community and the royal family itself have been silenced — arrested, hit with travel bans, forced to hand over large sums of cash to the state.
Freedom of speech, while always limited, is now non-existent. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund holds a significant stake in Twitter, which has about 14 million active users in the kingdom. But you can be arrested for sharing anything that in any way criticises the reforms, or even for tweeting about the arrests of others.
Around the time that the ban on women driving was lifted, female activists who had spent years campaigning for the change were arrested. Several of them were sexually harassed in prison, beaten and tortured with electric shocks. Some are still under house arrest.
In August, Salma al-Shehab, a 34-year-old Saudi PhD student who had been studying at Leeds University, returned home for the holidays, planning to bring her husband and two young sons back with her to the UK. Instead she was arrested, tried and sentenced to 34 years in prison for retweeting Saudi dissidents’ calls for the release of political prisoners while she was still in the UK to her 2,500 followers. Her case was not unusual. One by one, poor or rich, city dweller or villager, people are disappearing in Saudi Arabia — taken to detention centres or prisons. Sometimes their names are publicised, sometimes they vanish without a word.
Saad Ibrahim Almadi, a 72-year-old American citizen with Saudi origins, was arrested in 2021 when he arrived in the kingdom for what was supposed to be a two-week trip. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison for a number of charges including terrorism and trying to destabilise Saudi Arabia. His son said he was imprisoned for a number of tweets that criticised, among other things, demolition works in Mecca and the effectiveness of the Saudi-led coalition’s military presence in Yemen.
“It’s not a mistake, it’s a message,” said one Saudi activist of the draconian sentences. “It’s saying that even if you’re a real nobody, someone with just a few followers, you’re not safe.”
Once they are behind bars, many don’t receive a fair trial. Rights groups have documented the use of torture and sexual abuse by the authorities in Saudi prisons. Punishments can be bloody, public and demonstrative.
During the weeks before MDLBeast, 12 people who had been convicted of drug offences — mostly foreign nationals — were beheaded by sword, despite MBS vowing to curtail the practice. In March 2022 a record 81 people were beheaded on a single day for a wide range of crimes — described by Amnesty International as an “execution spree”. Last year 138 people were executed in total, more than twice as many as in 2021.
Four years after he was murdered at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul by agents of the Saudi state, the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s body is still missing.
The festivals, the parties, the loosened social restrictions all come at a price: complete obedience and devotion to MBS. Pledge loyalty to him and he will protect you. Wrong him, or even fail to be enthusiastic enough in your support of his transformational project, and you’re at risk.
It’s hard to keep focus on the two Saudi Arabias, your mind has to flick between them. But one cannot exist without the other. And MBS is betting that the public won’t mind, as long as they’re entertained.
In 2018, when I was last in the country, the transformation was beginning and the first concerts were taking place — with restrictions. One night I went to see the Egyptian crooner Tamer Hosny. The concert was gender segregated and the tickets specified “No dancing or swaying”. Every time someone clapped too enthusiastically, a woman in a white headscarf and burgundy abaya would come to tell them off.
That was a fleeting stage in the metamorphosis of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom was founded in 1932 by King Abdulaziz al-Saud after the fall of the Ottoman empire, extending the al-Saud clan’s power from their desert heartlands around Riyadh to the trading port of Jeddah as well as the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. As the al-Saud family consolidated their power, the traditions of their tribe — far more conservative than many others in the kingdom — became the norm. Women and men lived in strict gender segregation and women often covered their faces as well as their hair.
Then, as now, the al-Saud family were the custodians of the two holiest sites in Islam, and they believed their conduct had to be more conservative than other countries. Their critics considered them medieval fanatics. The kingdom’s judicial system was and remains based on the Quran and the sunnah, the traditions of the Prophet Mohammad. There are no national elections. Traditionally, while the king was the ruler, Saudi Arabia was in practice governed through a slow system of consensus rule where the clerical establishment, other royals, tribal heads and leading tradesmen all influenced decisions.
Yet the country wasn’t trapped in amber. Over the decades things did change. In the early 1970s some Saudis — particularly those living in more cosmopolitan cities such as Jeddah — could go to the cinema or listen to music in cafés. Women could wear tunics and long dresses rather than cloaks, and some even left their hair uncovered.
Then, on the night of November 20, 1979, Islamist militants stormed the Grand Mosque in Mecca, declaring their leader as the saviour of the Muslim world and attempting to overthrow the al-Saud family, whom they accused of bringing western impurities into the country.
It took two weeks and the lives of hundreds of hostages before the Saudis, backed by French special forces, regained control of the holiest site in Islam. The attack was an unimaginable wound on the kingdom — akin to terrorists storming the Vatican. In response the king, desperate to retain control over the country, launched a series of decrees that cemented an ultra-conservative version of Islam as the norm. Women everywhere covered themselves from head to toe in black. The cinemas closed. Billions of pounds were poured into promoting religious fundamentalism at home and abroad.
This was the Saudi Arabia that Mohammed bin Salman wanted to change. In 2015 his father, King Salman, came to the throne and made him defence minister.
By 2017 MBS had risen above the ranks of well-placed uncles, brothers and cousins to become crown prince. That’s when he began changing Saudi society with all the slow, consensus-based subtlety of a nuclear bomb. He defanged the hated religious police, who used to shout at women in the street to cover up and harass couples while they were shopping. He opened cinemas. He said women were equal to men and that the abaya wasn’t required under Islamic law. More than anything, perhaps, he made life in Saudi Arabia a lot less boring.
In just a few years MBS — with the help of legions of expensive foreign consultants and a devoted coterie of advisers — has transformed the kingdom from one of the most closed-off societies in the world into something a Saudi citizen time-travelling from 2016 would struggle to recognise.
The crown prince’s supporters have tried to legitimise his programme of change by arguing that the hardline restrictions he is dismantling were an aberration, imposed after the siege of the Grand Mosque, and that the natural order of Saudi Arabian culture has been restored.
Some of the reforms sped up changes that had begun under King Abdullah, his father’s predecessor, who died in 2015. When MBS came to power, women had begun to work in shops and there had been a significant crackdown on extremism. But the young prince’s changes are more extreme than anyone had expected.
MBS is directing the country’s transformation into an ultra-nationalist state with a moderate Islamic outlook, a modern economy and a cult of personality formed around himself and his father.
His Vision 2030 for the kingdom includes everything from the construction of a space-age, mirror-sided, road-free, 160km-long supercity — the Neom project’s The Line, which remains part-built, its beaches of glow-in-the-dark sand and artificial moon still on the drawing board — to increasing household savings among Saudi citizens by promoting financial literacy. The Neom project is investing millions in a British plan to capture solar power in space and beam it to Earth via high-frequency radio waves.
Billions have been ploughed into sport. Boxing world title fights, Formula One races, tennis, football and golf tournaments (and the launch of a professional golf tour to rival America’s PGA) have all been staged in a country that had held virtually nothing before 2018. Last year Saudi Arabia won its bid to hold the 2029 Asian Winter Games in a mountainous desert area where it will form ski slopes using artificially produced snow.
All this is to boost productivity and stimulate the economy as it diversifies away from oil, and to attract foreign investment and wield soft power in the world — but it also comes out of a genuine desire to modernise Saudi society. Not everyone in the kingdom is wealthy: the GDP per capita is about $38,000 (Qatar’s is about $105,000). Though most Saudis are of course better off than the migrant workers who toil in their cities with few rights, many in this country of nearly 40 million people struggle to make ends meet, to find work, to pay rent. An energised private sector would provide opportunities for them.
Though many grumble that the changes are happening too fast, among the young people I spoke to MBS is overwhelmingly popular. He changed their lives from being insular, with little to enjoy outside the home and immediate community — particularly for women — to something on a par with other countries in the region. The most visible change is in the way women dress: though most wear the abaya — a long cloak — and a headscarf, and some cover their faces with a niqab, others walk around the malls of Riyadh in jeans and T-shirts.
These social developments are all well and good if you have a liberal family, but if you come from a conservative background, your male guardian — father, brother, husband — still has a lot of control over your life. The pressures on women come from their families and communities as well as the state. There isn’t a law that states women have to wear the niqab, but many do because they don’t want to bring shame or embarrassment onto their families.
While recent reforms to the legal system have greatly bolstered women’s rights to divorce, activists say that a lack of official transparency leaves it unclear how widely and fairly they are being implemented. “[Now there are] easier and quicker routes to end marriages for women who no longer wish to stay with their husbands — but only if she can support herself and faces no objections from her family,” says Hala Aldosari, a Saudi scholar and activist.
While divorce can lead to discrimination for Saudi women, it is generally becoming more accepted. Abortion rights have long been more permissive than in some western countries: terminations are permitted in a range of circumstances, including when the mother’s physical or mental health is at risk.
Two women I spoke to had managed to get divorced against the wishes of their husbands in about ten minutes on an online call with a judge — faster than they might have done in the UK — and couldn’t believe their luck. “When they sent me the paper I didn’t understand,” said one, who had tried to end her marriage years earlier without success. “I thought, there has to be another hearing or something. But it was just done. Something I’d been desperate for, for so many years, and it just happened.”
Perhaps the most extreme example of the changes, the one that most clearly and publicly smashes down the Saudi social code, is the MDLBeast festival. It began in 2019, when the concept was so alien that even some of its organisers — Saudi and foreign alike — believed it wouldn’t go ahead right up to the last moment. Since then influencers and celebrities from around the world have been invited to share this glitzy vision of a fun, forward-looking nation — effectively a PR exercise in the style of the United Arab Emirates.
As I walked around the MDLBeast site on a Friday night this winter, the music thumping, girls in flower crowns screaming while Swedish House Mafia played, I was struck by the fact I could have been anywhere in the world, if it wasn’t for the occasional abaya and thobe, or the fact that people kept shouting “Welcome in Saudi Arabia!” at me.
There’s no suggestion MDLBeast was aware of any drug or alcohol use, and all visitors were searched on the way in. Huge signs warned that anyone found guilty of harassment (a big problem in previous years) would be given huge fines and prison sentences. Still, most women I spoke to said they’d been harassed. One, Shahad, 22, said women and gay people had been bothered and at times groped by groups of men. “They’re a bunch of arseholes,” she hissed. “I don’t feel safe here.”
“They’re not used to seeing women, LGBT people, walking around and think they can take advantage,” said her gay male friend Bader, also 22. It is illegal to be homosexual in Saudi Arabia, and those convicted can be lashed and sentenced to years in prison. None of the gay people I spoke to had come out to their families. In certain cafés and spaces in big cities such as Riyadh, and at the festival, though, there is a visible and burgeoning LGBT community.
Aside from the harassment and bigotry, there was a kind of innocence about some of the men at the festival. I asked two teenagers wearing thobes, their faces partly hidden by headscarves, what was the craziest thing they’d seen. “Everything here is crazy,” said one, a little shell-shocked. He leant in so he couldn’t be overheard. “I’ve seen a boy and a girl kissing,” he whispered, reddening, and ran into the tent.
On a bench by an oasis-themed area filled with palm trees, Fatemeh, 25, and her brother Ahmed, 27, were taking a break from dancing. Ahmed was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, with a white bandana tied around his head. Fatemeh wore a black abaya, a thick green headscarf and a mask.
“Oh, I’m not conservative,” she said, laughing, when I asked about her clothes. “I’m just wearing them so that no one recognises me.” Winking conspiratorially, she pulled out a phone and showed me a video she had taken of herself minutes earlier, by the Underground stage. Her long chestnut hair hung loose over her T-shirt and she was dancing, laughing, having a glorious time. But outside, where there were so many young men with phones, she didn’t feel it was safe to show her face. If anyone photographed her and published it online, someone in her tribe might see it — and it could get back to her parents, ruining her reputation and theirs. “If my family knew I was here they’d kill me,” she said. “Not actually kill me, but they’d be so angry.”
She was still caught between the old Saudi and the new, making constant awkward compromises to fit her family’s demands with the vast array of new opportunities created by the state.
Other women have carved out a place for themselves in this new world. On the Underground stage Nouf Sufyani, a 30-year-old DJ known as Cosmicat, had just finished her set. Sufyani, like the smattering of other Saudi DJs her age, began working at underground parties before the changes came, playing at raves in rented beachside chalets or private homes, risking arrest and fines. When concerts finally were allowed, there was a ready-made roster of Saudi talent to play alongside western performers.
“When I first started playing gigs publicly I was a bit scared — I never knew what the response would be because no one did this and I had no one to look up to,” she said. “But I was super-surprised that it was positive, which drove me to pursue this even further.”
All of which is great for Sufyani and other young Saudis who chafe against conservative society. But many in Saudi Arabia, the older generations in particular, have been left baffled. The restrictive beliefs they were raised with, struggled against, embraced and were told were the only truth have been nullified in just a few years. After living cloistered lives governed by strict edicts, they are effectively being told they did it for no good reason. “Where does that leave us?” asked one Saudi who grew up in a conservative family. “Was it all a lie? Did we waste all that time for nothing? Were all these rules never real? They’ve changed everything and we’re supposed to agree?”
Twenty-five kilometres from MDLBeast, by a road sign pointing to the Charitable Society for the Memorisation of the Holy Quran, another festival was taking place in the Riyadh suburb of Diriyah. This one had nothing approaching house music and the only dancing was done by men, solemnly twirling ceremonial swords to a drumbeat as a singer chanted lines of poetry. Families wandered around buying syrup-drenched sweets or sat down for coffee poured from the long spout of a dallah. On the fairground rides women in long black niqabs screamed with laughter, struggling to hold down their skirts as the carts whirled. Ten years ago this would have been at the limits of acceptability.
Maha, 52, a mother of six, had come to the festival with her family. Like many of the other people there, she had heard of MDLBeast and did not like it one bit. “MDLBeast does not represent us,” she said. “It is not the majority who go there, only the minority. It is dangerous there. It is a strong change — too strong.”
Her 34-year-old son, she said, had asked to go but she’d banned him. “There are drugs there,” she said. “It is not good for the people.” Her friend Aljawhara, 52, had a different view. “My sons go there and I don’t refuse them, but I have some limits,” she said. “I said to my son it’s not forbidden to talk to women, and if I didn’t let him he’d do it anyway. It is no problem for them to go and get coffee together if it’s respectful … but there need to be some limits.”
For both Maha and Aljawhara, some of the changes that had come to Saudi Arabia were positive and necessary. While they didn’t drive cars themselves, they thought it was good that other women did. And Maha liked the fact that men and women could work together in offices. The issue was the pace and scope of the changes.
The Saudi embassy in London told The Sunday Times: “Thanks to the package of reforms introduced by the crown prince as part of Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia is enjoying significant improvements to its economy. Changes on such a scale are never easy, but they have been met with an overwhelmingly positive reception, and they are having a demonstrably beneficial impact on the economy of our nation, and the opportunities available to all of our people.”
In a café in Jeddah on a winter night I met a prominent Saudi dissident. He was concerned about his safety and asked me not to use his name, even in this city, historically seen as more liberal than Riyadh.
“As we sit here, in about a square mile around us five doctors, three of them medical doctors, have been taken away within the past six months,” he said. Some, he added, had been arrested for old tweets — perhaps for criticising the reforms. He was looking for a friend, a mother of seven, who disappeared a year and a half ago. No one knows, or at least will tell him, where she is and why she was taken. He has no idea either. The kingdom, he said, is more repressive than it has ever been.
It is not enough, today, not to criticise the crown prince — you have to laud his changes and his rule publicly, preferably on social media. Anything less is considered suspect, even subversive. In this man’s view the Saudi public have bought into MBS’s project because they are afraid and not thinking critically. “All this progress is a façade as long as there’s no accountability,” he said. “Expression, dialogue, respect for law and order — this is progress. Not dancing and making everything in English … Forget the MDLBeast, it’s all cosmetic.”
For him, the social changes in the kingdom are window-dressing, nothing more than a way of cosying up to the West while cracking down on any opposition.
I think that both things can be true: the social and economic changes are dramatically improving the lives of many people, but they come at a price that MBS is betting most Saudis will accept. Bread and circuses, as the Roman satirist Juvenal wrote, in exchange for obedience and political inertia. The social contract is there, the pact is signed, and anyone who deviates from it faces the wrath of the prince.
Written by: Louise Callaghan
© The Times of London