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By Brian Whitaker | ( Al-Bab.com) | – –

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on a mission to shake up Saudi Arabia, the most change-resistant of Arab countries. Though still only 32 and not actually king, he appears to have been given unlimited power and is determined to make use of it.

Last week alone, he announced a $500 billion plan to create a hi-tech utopia in the desert, declared his intention to convert Saudi Arabia to “moderate” Islam, and granted Saudi citizenship to Sophia, a Chinese-made robot with lipstick and well-developed breasts.

There’s a touch of Kim Jong Un about Prince Mohammed’s fads and fantasies but in the prince’s case they are of a sort that tends to be viewed favourably in the west – especially by consultancy firms slavering over the fees they hope to collect.

His willingness to take big decisions is beyond dispute but what some admire as boldness, others regard as impulsiveness; where some see self-confidence, others suspect recklessness. His ability to assess risks and see decisions through is still unproven, and the early signs are not good.

It was Mohammed bin Salman, in cahoots with the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, who two years ago launched the ongoing military intervention in Yemen and, more recently, picked an intractable quarrel with neighbouring Qatar. Neither of those is going well (to put it mildly) and the princes appear to have waded into both of them without much thought about exit strategies.

No less perilously, in announcing his ambition to reform Saudi Arabia’s religion, the heir to the throne has stepped where his forebears feared to tread. He has signalled his willingness to confront the most reactionary religious elements – elements that have hitherto been a mainstay of the Saudi monarchy.

As far as the religious nettle is concerned, previous Saudi rulers had reason to be nervous. They were mindful of King Faisal whose modernisation plans ended abruptly with his assassination in 1975. Among other things, King Faisal had enraged the religious ultras by permitting Saudis to watch television.

The late King Abdullah, who survived into his nineties, also recognised the need for reform – he appointed women to the Consultative Council and encouraged female employment – but was extremely cautious about how far to push it. He continued to hold back from more contentious changes, such as allowing women to drive and ending the discriminatory male “guardianship” system.

At King Abdullah’s snail-like pace reform on the scale that Saudi Arabia needs would have taken centuries – which explains why the young prince is in such a hurry. While many will welcome this in principle, the question is how it can be achieved without a catastrophic backlash from those who view the plans as horrifyingly radical.

So far, though, it looks to be succeeding. Last month’s announcement that women will shortly be allowed to drive was accomplished without obvious signs of mass opposition. But this doesn’t necessarily mean the conservatives have accepted defeat. Their relative silence could be partly explained by the crackdown on dissenting voices – liberal as well as conservative – instituted by Mohammed bin Salman since becoming crown prince.

A Saudi utopia

Last week the Saudi capital hosted an investment conference with the extraordinarily ambitious Neom project as its centrepiece. The plan is for a $500 billion “independent economic zone” covering more than 26,000 square kilometres in the northwest of the kingdom, adjacent to the Jordanian border and facing Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba.

“Neom” is a made-up name combining the prefix “neo” with the first letter of mustaqbal (the Arabic word for “future”) – and the outline plans are certainly futuristic. They talk of a place with passenger-carrying drones, new ways of growing and processing food, free high-speed wifi, continuous online education, e-governance, carbon-neutral buildings, wind power and solar energy, and a healthy environment that encourages walking and cycling.

Some might wonder if Neom is necessary – couldn’t these things simply be introduced in existing cities? But that’s not really the point. Arab leaders are fond of mega-projects and Neom is intended as a statement about the new Saudi Arabia and its future king.

Needless to say, an article in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday was sceptical. It pointed out that the history of mega-projects in Arab countries has been less than spectacular and noted that the far more modest $10 billion King Abdullah Financial District in Riyadh – designed to attract foreign firms – is still mostly empty almost a decade after work on it began.

The hope, presumably, is that if Neom goes according to plan it will have some kind of trickle-across effect, gradually shifting the rest of the kingdom in a more modern and progressive direction. The risk, though, is that it will be perceived as an enclave of privilege, fuelling resentment among ordinary citizens who feel ignored and bypassed on the road to utopia. Neom isn’t being presented as a job-creation project for Saudis and the expectation is that it will be populated mainly by foreigners and robots (with robots in the majority, according to some reports).

This is where sexy Sophia, the mechanical woman on wheels, comes in. Her attendance at the investment conference and the news that she had been given Saudi citizenship was meant as a “symbolic gesture”, according to Al Arabiya, but it invited mockery on social media. People noted that Sophia was not draped in black from head to foot as Saudi women are supposed to be, and was also mingling freely with the opposite sex. Others commented on how easily she had obtained Saudi nationality when millions of foreign workers in the kingdom have precarious residence permits under the iniquitous kafala system which ties them to specific employers.

Social ‘innovation’

Robots aside, the most intriguing part of the Neom plan is that it’s envisaged as being “independent of the kingdom’s existing governmental framework”. At the very least, this implies creating an array of new laws applicable only inside Neom – financial laws to attract foreign investors, construction laws to meet the environmental requirements plus, presumably, new air-traffic laws for the passenger-carrying drones.

But the plan goes further and talks of Neom as a place for “societal innovation” – which appears to be code for a sharia-free zone where, in order to attract foreigners, gender segregation, female dress codes and other rules based on wahhabi doctrine won’t apply. How the religious ultras will react to this remains to be seen.

Reading in English about the plans for Neom it’s easy to underestimate their theological consequences. The talk of social “innovation”, for instance, may sound innocuous enough (in western culture its connotations are broadly positive) but its Arabic equivalent, bid’ah – sometimes translated as “heresy” – rings immediate alarm bells for religious conservatives. There’s a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad that “every innovation is a misguidance and every misguidance goes to hellfire”. Although distinctions can be made in Islam between “bad” and “good” bid’ah, it is on the grounds of preventing bid’ah that Saudi scholars over the years have opposed all manner of new-fangled things, from wristwatches in the 1940s to camera-phones in the 2000s.

Forward into the past

In contrast to the forward-looking vision of Neom, when the prince talks of religious reform it’s not as innovation but as a return to the past. He told the investment conference