The first 400 students and 74 faculty members began studies in September, even as construction crews labored to ready the multibillion-dollar campus. In time, the university will be a small town of 20,000, cloistered behind three layers of security, in isolated luxury on the banks of the Red Sea. There will be a yacht club, a golf course, a movie theater (there are no theaters allowed in the kingdom), a town center with fast food and shops  and there will be no rules against men and women working, studying and socializing together. On campus, women do not have to cover up and wear the baggy black gown, called an abaya, mandatory everywhere else in Saudi Arabia.

Because of this, the university is in a rush, hoping to establish itself as a source of pride  and perhaps revenue  before conservative forces beyond its walls try to rein it in.

Not long after the lavish opening ceremony with thousands of guests and dozens of heads of state, a member of the Saudi Council of Senior Scholars, an official body appointed by the king, criticized the university. Most of the uproar focused on his condemnation of “mingling,” which he called “a great depravity.” But the critic, Sheik Saad al-Shathry, also called for the creation of a religious committee to ensure that the curriculum was consistent with Islam.

King Abdullah promptly, and with great effect, fired Sheik Shathry from the council. But at the university, some staff members and students said they were wondering how long they had before the king decided, for political expediency, that he must bow to the nation’s powerful religious forces.

Image Thuwal’s university operates with its own set of social rules.

And what happens when the king is gone? He is 85, and it appears that the next in line is not Crown Prince Sultan, who has been out of the country for months after cancer treatment, but the interior minister, Prince Naif, whose political base has been the nation’s conservative religious community.