The recent arrests of at least 11 prominent women’s rights activists in Saudi Arabia should finally dispel popular illusions that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, known as MBS, is a progressive force.

For months, commentators in North America and Europe have been fawning over MBS as the shining light of Muslim “reform.” Political leaders and pundits have showered the Saudi prince with hosannas for allowing women to drive and attend sports events, and swooned over his pledge to “return” Saudi Arabia to “moderate Islam” (while also salivating at the prospect of signing lucrative oil and military deals with the kingdom).

These plaudits display a remarkable wilful blindness to the ruthlessly autocratic nature of Mohammad Bin Salman’s role — which has long been evident, even before the current assault on activists campaigning for the very same freedoms he claims to champion.

Since last September, dozens of dissenters pressing for progressive reform have been rounded up and arrested by the regime — targeting “the last vestiges of freedom of expression” in the country, in the words of Amnesty International.

In November, the state expanded its already draconian national security framework to criminalize criticism of the king or crown prince as a terrorism offence.

Saudi’s rate of executions — already among the highest in the world — has doubled since Bin Salman’s ascent to power, according to international human rights organization Reprieve.

“Since Prince Mohammed Bin Salman became crown prince on 21 June [2017], the human rights situation in the country has deteriorated markedly,” Amnesty International reports.

MBS has also been responsible for the severe deterioration of human rights in Yemen, where (in his capacity as Saudi’s defence minister in 2015) he was the architect of what the UN has called “the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time.”

Thousands of defenceless civilians have been killed by the Saudi-led bombing campaign, which has hit schools, weddings, funerals, and hospitals, and millions more have been subjected to famine and cholera by Saudi’s suffocating blockade. Canada has provided hundreds of millions of dollars in military equipment to the coalition of countries currently pulverizing Yemen: four times more than it has given to Yemen itself in humanitarian aid.

MBS says he wants to restore “moderate Islam,” but continues to exercise extreme state violence in violation of the Islamic legal tradition — which imposes strict prohibitions on targeting civilians in war, and severe restrictions on the use of capital punishment.

As London School of Economics professor Madawi al-Rasheed observes, “the prince’s moderate Islam is a new specific project … that ironically justifies, sanctions, and praises the most radical government practices.”

The Saudi crown prince is, in reality, a pauper on human rights. His valorization continues a long tradition of acclaiming brutal Muslim autocrats friendly to Western interests as salvific reformers of Islam.

Egyptian leader General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for example, was hailed by American media as “Islam’s improbable reformer” — even after his regime massacred more than 900 Egyptian civilian protesters in a single day, and imprisoned and tortured thousands more.

The 18th-century founder of Saudi Wahhabism — the very strain of Islam now denounced as the source of “extremism” — was similarly celebrated as the “Martin Luther of Islam” by British and French colonial powers, even though Wahhabi interpretations were widely rejected by Muslim scholars at the time.

“We [the West] count on dictators who will reform, alter, mutilate, mutate, or reconstruct an Islam that is more consistent with our interests,” writes UCLA Distinguished Professor of Law Khaled Abou El Fadl. “These dictators are relied upon to shove the Islam we want down their citizens’ throats, and to silence dissenting voices.”

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The support for tyrants like Mohammed Bin Salman relies on several myths long debunked as racist Orientalist fallacies: that the problems in Muslim countries are attributable to faulty interpretations of Islam — as opposed to oppressive political, military, and economic forces that Western governments have been complicit in creating; and that despotic leaders are necessary to reformulate Islam and bring Muslims into modernity.

The enduring popularity of these canards not only produces flawed analyses, but is an insult to the activists throughout the Middle East bravely struggling against authoritarian regimes for justice, freedom, and human dignity.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst.

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