Q6 / page 113 / part (D)

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
Abdulazizwas 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
torepeated 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-Muslim place 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.