Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman pledged a “moderate, open” Saudi Arabia on October 24, breaking with ultra-conservative religious figures in favour of an image catering to foreign investors and Saudi youth at the occasion of the launch of an independent $500 billion megacity — with “separate regulation” — along the Red Sea coastline.
“We want to live a normal life. A life in which our religion translates to tolerance, to our traditions of kindness,” he told international investors gathered at an economic forum in Riyadh.
“Seventy per cent of the Saudi population is under 30, and honestly we will not spend the next 30 years of our lives dealing with destructive ideas. We will destroy them today and at once,” the crown prince said.
Prince Mohammed, known by his initials MBS, said he would see to it that his country moved past 1979, a reference to the rise of conservative thought in the years following the assassination of King Faisal in 1975.
The early 1970s had ushered major change into the oil-rich kingdom, including the introduction of television and schools for girls. But that came to a halt as the Al-Sheikh family, which controls religious and social regulation in the kingdom, and the ruling Al-Saud family slowly reinforced the conservative policies Riyadh is known for.
Prince Mohammed’s statement is the most direct attack by a Saudi official on the Gulf country’s influential conservative religious circles.
“We are returning to what we were before — a country of moderate Islam that is open to all religions, traditions and people around the globe,” he said.
While the Saudi government continues to draw criticism from international human rights groups, the crown prince has pushed ahead with reforms since his sudden appointment on June 21.
But the young prince is widely regarded as being the force behind King Salman’s decision last month to lift a decades-long ban prohibiting women from driving.
Prince Mohammed’s comments came hours after the opening of the Future Investment Initiative, a three-day economic conference that drew some 2,500 dignitaries, including 2,000 foreign investors, to Riyadh.
Earlier on October 24, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund — controlled by MBS — announced the launch of an independent economic zone along the kingdom’s north-western coastline. At the Future Investment Initiative, Prince bin Salman announced the creation of Neom, a new $500bn (£381m) independent economic zone to be built on the border with Jordan and Egypt. The project, dubbed NEOM, will operate under regulations separate from those that govern the rest of Saudi Arabia.
Alcohol, cinemas and theatres are still banned in the kingdom and mingling between unrelated men and women remains frowned upon. However Saudi Arabia – an absolute monarchy – has clipped the wings of the once-feared religious police, who no longer have powers to arrest and are seen to be falling in line with the new regime.
Prince Mohammed had repeatedly insisted that without establishing a new social contract between citizen and state, economic rehabilitation would fail.
In the next 10 years, at least five million Saudis are likely to enter the country’s workforce, posing a huge problem for officials who currently do not have jobs to offer them or tangible plans to generate employment.
The country’s enormous sovereign wealth fund is intended to be a key backer of the independent zone. It currently has $230bn under management. The sale of 5% of the world’s largest company, Aramco, is expected to raise several hundred billion dollars more.
Al ash-Sheikh Family
The Al ash-Sheikh is Saudi Arabia's leading religious family. They are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century founder of the Wahhabi sect of Islam which is today dominant in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia, the family is second in prestige only to the Saudi royal family, the Al Saud, with whom they formed a power-sharing arrangement nearly 300 years ago. The arrangement, which persists to this day, is based on the Al Saud maintaining the Al ash-Sheikh's authority in religious matters and the Al ash-Sheikh supporting the Al Saud's political authority.
Although the Al ash-Sheikh's domination of the religious establishment has diminished in recent decades, they still hold most of the important religious posts in Saudi Arabia, and are closely linked to the Al Saud by a high degree of intermarriage.
Two prominent members of this family are Saleh bin Abdul-Aziz Al ash-Sheikh, current Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs since 1996 and Abdul-Aziz ibn Abdullah Al ash-Sheikh, current Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia
Saudi Mufti, Abdul Aziz Al Ash-Sheikh’s statement considering Iranians not Muslims was not unprecedented to what Muslims know concerning the Takfiri ideology upon which the Saudi kingdom was based. Takfirism wasn’t but the kingdom’s weapon in the battles to push up its political system. It recalls to demonize the rival, and ignores the same thoughts based on its interests.
The descendent of the Al ash-Sheikh family, which goes back to the master of Takfirism in the Arabian Peninsula “Mohammad Abdul Wahhab” (the ancestor), couldn’t but defend the “worst catastrophe in the history of Hajj”, according to France Presse, by claiming the Iranians are non-Muslims.