Saudi Arabia Transformation: What Are Bin Salman’s Goals of Westernizing the Saudi Society?

The Saudi authorities' announcement to ease prayer restrictions in the holy mosques in Makkah and Medina from October 17, 2021, to eliminate social distancing for the first time in more than a year, was a pleasant surprise to Muslims.

The mitigation came at the basis of the reduction of COVID-19 infections by 150 percent and the vaccination by three doses, but the Saudis say the real reason for the decision is making way for greater participation in the "Riyadh Season" and its loud concerts, which the Kingdom is widely preparing for.

They stressed that the biggest goal is to activate the 2021 Riyadh Season after the 2020 events were cancelled due to COVID-19, and to restore the "boys and girls mixing and dancing" that took place in its first year 2019.

 

Harassment and Chaos

What angered the Saudis was that these loud singing celebrations coincided with the killing of 18 Saudi officers and soldiers in Jazan in the south of the Kingdom in a bombardment by the Houthi group from Yemen, and the failure of the festival organizers to take into account the feelings and sorrows of the families of the dead.

On social media, activists criticized the authorities’ focus on celebrations and entertainment parties while the families of six officers and 12 soldiers are sobbing for the loss of their children.

The matter did not stop there, but the festival witnessed more decadent manifestations than it was in 2019, with the increased mixing, dancing, and harassment of females, amid popular anger over the moral corruption that is increasing in the Kingdom, and the last of which was allowing the bikini on the beaches of Jeddah.

Activists circulated a video on Twitter of women being harassed, which sparked widespread anger due to the lack of oversight and security.

They published pictures of dancers and singers at the festival and asked about the message that the festival organizers wanted to convey to their people and the world.

Public Security in Saudi Arabia admitted the spread of harassment in the Riyadh Season 2021, saying that it would deal with the perpetrators, yet they showed pictures of detainees they said were disgracing the royal and officials!

It is strange that the Public Security spokesman warned those who took those clips revealing the harassment that they are harming "the lives of others by misusing the mobile phone for filming," and threatened them with "fine and imprisonment."

It was remarkable that the head of the Entertainment Authority, Turki al-Sheikh, was keen, with the launch of the new entertainment season on October 20, 2021, to confirm that the festival is supported by "our leadership…so that every Saudi achieves their ambitions and dreams."

The segments of the October 2021 Season, like 2019, included dance parties by Western singers, rodeo competitions, free wrestling for men and women from the famous American championship.

The five-month festival will witness up to 7,500 artistic, lyrical, entertainment, sports, dazzling performances and American-style wrestling, according to the organizers.

Over the course of 150 days, about 70 concerts will be shown by foreign singers surrounded by girls in immodest clothes, including rapper Pitbull, who accompanies a group of girls dancing semi-naked, as shown on his Instagram account.

The festival will also witness an American women's freestyle wrestling championship in which famous female wrestlers participate, and it is the third time such an event has been held in the Kingdom since 2019.

Saudis say that this wrestling is making millions of dollars from the people's money.

In return for the joy of officials and young people at the festival, many Saudis and Arabs criticized the ceremony and its organizers, considering it a waste of money and a departure from religion and customs.

They criticized Turki al-Sheikh, accusing him of misunderstanding the "entertainment" that Saudis need, and that "entertainment should not be to provoke God's wrath."

Saudi opponents say that what MBS is doing is an attempt to generalize the experience of the Aramco complex, which is more like an American city on the territory of the Kingdom, but where mixing, revealing clothes, alcohol, Christmas, and other activities are widespread.

 

Degeneracy Precursors

Before the start of the Riyadh Season festival, activists warned that the absence of the commission for “Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice," and what previous festivals witnessed in terms of youthful indiscretion and moral disorder in the streets of the Kingdom, foreshadows the expansion of moral corruption.

Prior to the opening of the 2021 Riyadh Season, three phenomena were revealed that indicate the collapse of Islamic values ​​in the Kingdom, according to activists.

The first: the mass harassment of girls on the Saudi National Day, September 23, 2021, which the authorities acknowledged and announced the arrest of some young men, accusing Turki al-Sheikh of being the reason behind it.

The second: The French news agency revealed, on October 15, 2021, the spread of women appearing in bikini swimsuits on the beaches of Jeddah with their friends.

Spending a “pleasant time” in noisy dancing evenings for women and men to the sound of Western music there, smoking shisha in public places, and not requiring a marriage or kinship relationship between those who enter the resorts.

For 300 Saudi riyals ($80), the agency said, singles can enter Pure Beach near Jeddah, where beachgoers swim freely, women wear bikinis, and some smoke shisha on the beach.

It indicated that what the pioneers only complain about is the lack of alcohol, as it is like the United States, as they say, but the only thing missing is wine cocktails, due to the ban on alcohol in Saudi Arabia so far.

The bikini permit crisis was previously raised on August 2, 2017, when Saudi Arabia announced the launch of a huge tourism project, converting 50 islands and a number of sites on the Red Sea into tourist resorts, subject to rules separate from the rest of the country.

The Times described the project as the brainchild of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, saying that the Kingdom is preparing to open a beach resort that will allow women to sunbathe while wearing a bikini, along with the men.

The British newspaper considered this a sign that the country is slowly opening up, with influential figures such as the crown prince encouraging "gradual change."

In this context, CNN revealed on October 19, 2021, that Saudi Arabia plans to transform an oil platform into an "amusement park" to become a resort within the Red Sea, with the aim of attracting foreign tourists with "extreme openness" activities similar to Dubai.

The third of these degeneracy precursors to the Riyadh festival. On October 18, 2021, AFP also revealed that the Saudi Book Fair introduced taboo subjects as one of the results of the openness of the crown prince.

It indicated that the exhibition featured books on "forbidden topics" such as sexual relations, atheism, homosexuality, witchcraft, and secularism, as part of the liberation campaign led by bin Salman in the Kingdom.

Within the escalating decay, Saudis complained about the fact that an advertisement for “sex massage” services appeared publicly in Saudi Arabia, describing them as public prostitution advertisements.

The most prominent question among the deniers of this decadence and corruption that has spread in the Kingdom is: Where are the Saudi scholars? Does bin Salman want to dissolve in order to satisfy the West and bypass human rights violations and the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi?

They said that in order to achieve this, bin Salman dissolved the Commission for “the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” and sought to get rid of the reformed Sheikhs, as well as some members of the Council of Senior Scholars close to the regime who criticize the secularization of the Kingdom.

In September 2017, following Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz’s appointment of his son, Mohammed bin Salman, as crown prince in June 2017, authorities under his control launched a series of arrests targeting critics of openness.

Among them, prominent clerics, intellectuals, academics and human rights activists, while dozens of others fled abroad for being targeted.

 

Strip the Identity

In the midst of the recent changes in the Kingdom, the religious police have lost much of their influence and their authority has been greatly diminished after they roamed the roads and commercial centers and forced residents to close their businesses during prayer times.

Activists, through their participation in several hashtags in Arabic, most notably the “bikini,” “Riyad Season,” unanimously agreed that what the Kingdom is witnessing is "alienation" from its societal norms and rules and a moral and religious dissolution.

They pointed out that the Westernization and corruption of Saudi society is the only way for bin Salman to stay in power and maintain Western support for him, so he put scholars and reformers in prisons to avoid any resistance to his scheme.

Saudi activists monitored many indicators of Transparency International, about tyranny and corruption in the Kingdom.

A Saudi academic, who preferred not to be named, told Al-Estiklal that the goal of this official insistence on decadent openness in festivals and other things is to "strife the Islamic identity and exclude Islamic values,” and to please the West.

He stressed that "there is a policy followed from the highest pyramid in power to corrupt society and separate it from its Islamic identity," and that they use the shock method, and say, "We will destroy them immediately," while meaning the Islamic awakening and religion.

He explained that although the authority was the one who spread the Wahhabi-Salafi ideology and strictly followed its creed, it is now bearing the more moderate Islamic awakening its mistakes and exploiting this to strip the whole society of its Islamic identity, not to return it to its moderation.

On March 22, 2018, bin Salman surprised the world by blaming the "allies of the Kingdom," that is, the West, responsible for spreading Wahhabi ideology in Saudi Arabia and the region, in order to confront the Soviet Union's penetration in the region during the Cold War period.

He told the Washington Post that, "Successive Saudi governments lost their way in spreading the extremist Wahhabi ideology, and the situation has come to restore things to the right place."

The Saudi academic further stresses that "this corruption and stripping of identity is intended by many things, including revenge against the phenomenon of religiosity, and normalization with the Zionist enemy [Israel].”

In order to eliminate the Islamic identity, and strike the Islamic values ​​represented by this awakening, they seek to spread the so-called entertainment and openness.

Therefore, they create the atmosphere through corruption and the slogans of citizenship and “Saudi Arabia first” to strip society of its Islamic identity through a strange and incomprehensible acceleration in this openness based on the stripping of identity and exclusion, according to the academic.

Within this trend comes the reception of a Saudi rabbi (during October), Saudis going to occupied Jerusalem, the spread of bikini beaches, the Riyadh Season festival, and others.

The academic continued, "The authority attaches all its failures and problems to the Islamic awakening in order to get rid of it, to justify for themselves a coup against it and get rid of it and cancel everything related to it to the point of preventing even the call-to-prayer loudspeakers," according to him.

He continued: "They portray the matter as if the state and its institutions were all hijacked from the Islamic awakening or the [Muslim] Brotherhood, and it is responsible for the stagnation and mistakes, even though these matters are borne by the traditional government Salafist movement that was ruling the country."

Another Saudi dissident who fled abroad indicates that among the plans of the crown prince, the candidate to ascend the Kingdom's throne soon, is to seek to "secular" Saudi Arabia and separate the religious position (the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques) from the secular position (the King).

He adds to Al-Estiklal that among these steps is the process of freezing the activities of the Commission for “the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice,” and the establishment of the "Entertainment" Commission and the other steps that follow, turning the country into a metamorphosis in the manner of the American city of Las Vegas, according to his estimation.