If my late colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi could see Saudi Arabia today, five years after his murder by agents of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, what would he find?
What would Jamal Khashoggi think of Saudi Arabia today?
Khashoggi would probably scoff at MBS’s promises that such a murder will never happen again. The kingdom has created national-security committees that, in theory, would prevent such a brazen attack. But those promises, by themselves, are no more binding than “the paper they’re written on,” in the words of John Brennan, a former CIA director and Riyadh station chief.
“The repressive nature of the MBS regime is as persistent and strong as ever,” Brennan told me in an interview. “People are still arrested if they defy the crown prince.”
But Khashoggi would observe other things in the kingdom that would astonish and please him. Above all, he would be struck by the empowerment of women — a bright light that shines, paradoxically, in a country ruled in deep shadow.
Returning to the kingdom, Khashoggi would witness changes he had hoped for, while he was alive, but doubted would happen. Women not only can drive, a freedom they were granted in 2018, a few months before his murder, but they are now largely free of the tutelage of men. They can mix freely with men at concerts and sporting events. Many are unveiled. Saudi women today are ambassadors, business executives, even astronauts.
Khashoggi would be astonished at the mass rock concerts MBS has sponsored outside Riyadh. Videos capture riotous scenes of men and women dancing together. Last year’s version of the annual Soundstorm concert series drew more than 600,000 people. Khashoggi was raised in a kingdom where authorities feared that any large public gathering might turn into a protest — and having fun in public was seen as subversive.
Khashoggi would probably be amazed, too, that Saudi Arabia stands at the edge of normalizing relations with Israel and signing a defense pact with the United States. He would caution, I suspect, that these moves could be political tactics for MBS, rather than a fundamental realignment.
My sense of how Khashoggi would react is grounded in a relationship with him that began about 20 years ago. We met often as he traveled with Saudi Prince Turki bin Faisal, the former Saudi chief of intelligence and later ambassador to Washington and London, whom he advised. We watched the Arab Spring unfold in 2011, and I saw his passion for reform. I rejoiced when he joined The Post as a contributor in 2017, and watched him struggle as a journalist with the twin realities that MBS was a change agent and a brutal tyrant. What allowed MBS to make so many reforms in the kingdom? Ali Shihabi, one of MBS’s informal advisers, told me bluntly: “MBS had to neuter the religious establishment. How? Coercion. He put many people in jail.”
Brennan is a fierce critic of MBS, but he also credits the changes he has brought. “All these reforms — Jamal would say are good and worthy,” Brennan told me. “MBS, for all his flaws, has been able to accelerate the modernization of the kingdom and is making it less Islam-centered. He has been able to kneecap the opposition to these moves.”
This is the awful paradox of MBS, as Khashoggi well knew. He is a modernizing autocrat, a bit like Saddam Hussein was in Iraq. To break through his country’s rigid, enfeebling status quo and its religious establishment, he mobilized a police state. The same man who sponsored music festivals in the desert sent a capture-or-kill team to Istanbul to get Khashoggi — armed with a bonesaw to cut his corpse into pieces if he resisted.
At times, MBS has seemed to communicate that he understands the murder of this dissident journalist was wrong, even though he still won’t take personal responsibility for the operation the CIA says he authorized. “It was a mistake. It was painful,” he told Fox News anchor Bret Baier this month. The crown prince told Baier that he is “ashamed” of the kingdom’s death sentences for critics, but he blamed the problem on Saudi courts: “Do we have bad laws? Yes. We are changing that.”
Khashoggi would disdain a man who cannot rule without savagery. The groundwork for change, after all, was laid by the previous monarch, his uncle King Abdullah, who quietly ignored protests from the religious establishment to grant women educational opportunities at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and other institutions. MBS didn’t invent reform.
Khashoggi worried from the first about the mess of contradictions he saw in MBS. He was hopeful after King Salman took power in 2015 that his son would be a modernizer. But by 2017, when MBS toppled the sitting crown prince, Khashoggi texted an American friend: “This kid is dangerous.”
Rereading Khashoggi’s columns reminds us that he hoped for the best from MBS but feared the worst. During his last year, he admonished the crown prince to learn from Detroit about rebuilding the economy and from South Korea how to fight corruption without jailing hundreds of suspects. He let himself imagine that MBS could be like the young king of Wakanda in “Black Panther.”
But he wrote, too, in a September 2017 column: “When I speak of the fear, intimidation, arrests and public shaming of intellectuals and religious leaders who dare to speak their minds, and then I tell you that I’m from Saudi Arabia, are you surprised?” Khashoggi saw the cruel twist: MBS encouraged change but punished those who advocated it.
Take the simple matter of women playing sports. For some reason, this always terrified the kingdom’s religious leadership, and the royal palace for years accommodated their repression. Shihabi remembers moving his family from Saudi Arabia to Dubai in 1996 after the kingdom banned most women’s sports because he wanted his daughter to be able to play soccer.
MBS reformed this backward, misogynistic system. There’s even a Saudi women’s professional soccer league now. But here’s the strange part: Activists for women’s athletics have suffered, as have the advocates of women driving. Manahel al-Otaibi, a 29-year-old Saudi fitness instructor, was charged with “defaming the kingdom” after making online posts that advocated liberal dress codes for women and LGBTQ+ rights, according to the Associated Press.
What would anger Khashoggi most, I think, is MBS’s gratuitous cruelty. A case in point is his imprisonment, for more than three years now, of Sarah and Omar Aljabri, whose crime is that they are the children of Saad Aljabri, a former counterintelligence chief (and close partner of the CIA) who bizarrely is at the top of MBS’s enemies list.
Ponder this: Sarah Aljabri celebrated her 20th birthday by attending one of MBS’s concerts in the desert, a gathering in Al-Ula where the French composer Jean-Michel Jarre was playing, according to her brother Khalid. A few days later, she and her brother disappeared. When a visiting foreign official recently asked about the Aljabris, Khalid Aljabri relayed, the visitor was told by a senior Saudi official: “This case is managed by the crown prince, and everyone is afraid to talk to him about it.”
Khashoggi didn’t pose any real threat to the kingdom as he made his way toward the consulate in Istanbul five years ago. But on this anniversary of his murder, his martyrdom for free _expression_ still haunts the ruler who sent the “tiger team” that dismembered his body. If Khashoggi returned, he would surely write a column saying: Keep pushing for a free and truly modern Saudi Arabia.
Opinion by David Ignatius