Excerpt from 'Blood and Oil': New book on Crown Prince bin Salman's rise
The following excerpt from Blood and Oil: Mohammed bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power is republished with permission from Hachette Books. The book, by award-winning Wall Street Journal reporters Justin Scheck and Bradley Hope, shows how a rift in the world’s most powerful ruling family, Saudi Arabian royalty, produced Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a charismatic leader with a ruthless streak. Listen and subscribe to the Religion Unplugged podcast for a conversation between Justin Scheck and executive editor Paul Glader.
Islamic leader Salman al-Ouda didn’t know what to make of the young prince sitting across from him in his living room in October 2012. He didn’t even know why Mohammed bin Salman, whom Ouda knew as a princeling of uncertain influence in the Royal Court, had invited himself over in the first place. Ouda would have politely turned the meeting down, but he had already rebuffed Mohammed once, about a year earlier, at a wedding. It wasn’t good practice to ignore the son of the crown prince.
So there was Mohammed, sipping coffee on the couch and talking about world history, while Ouda, one of the Muslim world’s most popular imams with more than thirteen million Twitter followers, sat listening. Mohammed shared his ideas about Islam, Arab leaders, and how a ruler should run a country. They struck Ouda as the shallow learnings of a recent graduate who hadn’t spent much time inside the library or outside the kingdom. Then Mohammed said something that got the cleric’s attention.
“My role model,” he declared, “is Machiavelli.”
Ouda remained silent. Mohammed’s attempt to earn respect with his knowledge, rather than his birthright, impressed the cleric. But the substance of the message was troubling. This prince was quoting The Prince; it augured tumultuous times for the kingdom and later for Ouda himself.
By that time Mohammed, whose wide girth and hot temper and the scruffy beard running down his throat had earned him the nickname “Stray Bear” from his enemies, had been gaining a reputation up and down the royal family for having a sharp edge. In one oft-recounted story, always told with a new variation, he sent a bullet to a land official who had declined to give him title to a plot he demanded—gaining him another nickname, Abu Rasasa, or “Father of the Bullet.”
Even in his official work, Mohammed established a reputation for pushing around powerful relatives. Showing up with buses full of Filipino workers, he told his own aunt, one of the wives of the late King Fahd, that she was being evicted from a palace needed for new purposes. The power would be disconnected by midnight, he told her. This was especially bracing in Saudi culture, where age and rank are held in the highest regard.
During late-night banter, well-to-do Saudis like to point to Mohammed’s tribal heritage on his mother’s side, suggesting that his character traits traced back to his Bedouin blood. His mother, Fahdah, hails from the Ajman tribe in the northeast of Saudi Arabia. Its most famous member is Rakan bin Hithlain, a revered fighter during the Ottoman era. On the other side, Ibn Saud, Mohammed’s grandfather, was the consummate desert warrior: six foot, four inches tall; lusty; strategic; and bold. Mohammed was the convergence of those two lines. It was folklore, but it would be important later in creating a mythical backstory for young Saudis looking to champion a reformer prince speaking directly to their demographic.
Within the Al Saud family, Mohammed became known as am- bitious and self-assured—and protected by his powerful father, Prince Salman.
Salman al-Ouda had a feeling he’d one day run afoul of Mohammed bin Salman. Ever since the prince came to the preacher’s house years before and professed his admiration of Machiavelli, it seemed likely that if Mohammed ever gained power, he wouldn’t countenance the type of influence Ouda had in the Arab world. He had thirteen million Twitter followers and a well-documented unwillingness to hew to the royal family’s messaging.
For more than two years after his father reached the throne, Mohammed had built up his image as a reformer. Now that he was crown prince, he had much more power to actually govern as a reformer. So it surprised many, if not Ouda himself, when the preacher was rounded up with a group of other reform-minded clerics in September 2017 and thrown into solitary confinement.
The government issued a barely coherent explanation for the crackdown, saying the religious leaders were working “for the benefit of foreign parties against the security of the kingdom and its interests, methodology, capabilities, and social peace in order to stir up sedition and prejudice national unity.”
The arrests weren’t limited to clerics. Other critics, including some guilty of seemingly minor differences of opinion with the crown prince, were also rounded up. Police arrested Essam al-Zamil, a well-known economist who often opined publicly on government policies, and threw him in prison. He had questioned Mohammed’s predicted valuation for the Aramco IPO. Others who tweeted skepticism of Mohammed’s ideas were summoned into the office of Saud al-Qahtani and threatened with prison. None of those arrested men admitted to any crime, and the legal processes underway against them aren’t, for the most part, open to Western journalists.
The crackdown demonstrated the limits of Mohammed’s reforms. Social strictures, like rules limiting women’s behavior and dress and prohibitions on concerts and movie theaters, would be loosened. Mohammed explained it with an oft-told narrative that began in 1979, when militant Islamists laid siege to Mecca’s Grand Mosque. Until that point, Mohammed said, Saudi Arabia was a liberalizing country. But after the attack, which the government quashed with artillery and French military help, the royal family sought peace by appeasing the most conservative religious elements in the kingdom, cracking down on things like entertainment and women’s education. Mohammed promised to lift those harsh rules, claiming they weren’t inherent to Saudi culture or even Saudi-style Islam.
Mohammed relied heavily on a Saudi religious thinker and former justice minister, Mohammed al-Issa, for theological support. The sheikh had risen up under King Abdullah, gaining attention by making strident but measured statements against Wahhabist orthodoxy. It was his ideas about the role of the 1979 events in pushing Saudi Arabia into deep conservatism that Mohammed learned and began repeating in private and public forums.
The change was welcome for many inside and outside the kingdom. But missing from Mohammed’s promises of reform was any mention of civil or political freedom. While he talked about music and movie theaters and women in the workforce, free speech was never brought up. Criticizing the monarchy— or even publicly questioning Mohammed’s policies—could be a crime. Royal Court officials would label critics as traitors, accusing them of taking money from hostile foreign regimes.
This was by design. Mohammed felt there was no room for public dissent as he moved ahead with big economic and social changes all at once. Rather, he wanted to show his subjects that they had a simple choice: Get on board and enjoy the music and restaurants where men and women could mix in normal fashion, like in Dubai or Bahrain, or keep complaining and get thrown in jail. Mastering the message on social media by disseminating positive news and using spies, spyware, money, and threats to stem the flow of negative sentiment would be a years-long priority for Mohammed and his deputies.
“This is unlike anything Saudis have experienced before,” Saudi commentator Jamal Khashoggi told the Wall Street Journal at the time. He had moved to the United States shortly before, worrying that he could no longer speak with any semblance of independence at home. “It was becoming so suffocating back at home,” he told the paper, “that I was beginning to fear for myself.”
Khashoggi had spent time as a spokesman for the Saudi embassies in Washington, DC, and London in the years after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when he parroted the state line to scores of influential journalists and did his part to keep his homeland from becoming a pariah state in a world aghast at the barbarity of Islamic extremism. Over the years, he developed relationships throughout the royal family and was especially close to Prince Turki bin Faisal, the once-powerful intelligence chief who remains a public face of the kingdom. Their ties went so deep that many Saudis speculated Khashoggi was a semipermanent intelligence operative working for Turki. But in truth he was mostly a writer, delighting in the power of ideas and words and the profile he developed in the Muslim world as a public intellectual.
In that role, Khashoggi would sometimes stray from the Royal Court, pushing the envelope on sensitive topics. During the Arab Spring, which terrified Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, he started attending regional conferences about governance in the Middle East, talking openly with people the Al Saud saw as enemies. At a conference in Istanbul after the Saudi-supported ouster of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood–linked president, Mohamed Morsi, Khashoggi met a Turkish politician named Yasin Aktay. A close friend of Salman al-Ouda, who helped the now imprisoned cleric to get his books published in Turkish, Aktay was also an advisor to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. During the Arab Spring, King Abdullah saw Erdoğan as dangerously sympathetic to the Brotherhood. At the conference, Aktay and Khashoggi discussed their mutual hopes for a more democratic Middle East. At the same time, Khashoggi was insistent that the Al Saud should continue to play an important role in Saudi Arabia and across the region. He wanted a more democratic future but wasn’t pushing for an end to Al Saud leadership.
Mohammed didn’t appreciate that nuance. His view was binary: Khashoggi could be a friend or an enemy.