Singularly Gifted

On October 19, 2018, less than three weeks after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, when the whole world was pointing its finger at the Saudi prince, Sheikh Abdulrahman al-Sudais, imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca and the kingdom’s highest religious authority, delivered his Friday sermon from a written script previously approved by the Saudi security apparatus.

Friday sermons from the podium where the Prophet Muhammad is supposed to have given his final sermon are broadcast live on cable networks and social media sites, to be watched with reverence by millions of Muslims all over the world. As Khaled Abou el-Fadl, a leading authority on Islamic culture and law, points out, “these sermons carry a great deal of moral and religious authority.”

In his sermon, Imam Sudais referenced a famous hadith (saying or “tradition”) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, accord­ing to which once in every century god sends a great renovator or interpreter (mujtahid) to reclaim or reinvigorate the faith in order to address the unique challenges of the era: “The path of reform and modernization in this blessed land . . . through the care and attention from its young, ambitious, divinely inspired reformer crown prince, continues to blaze forward, guided by his vision of innovation and insightful modernism, despite all the failed pressures and threats.”

Invoking the debate that followed the Khashoggi murder, Imam Sudais warned Muslims against believing “ill-intended media rumors and innuendos” that sought to cast doubt on the great Muslim leader. The conspiracies against the crown prince, he said, were aimed at destroying Islam and the Muslims, warning that “all threats against his modernizing reforms are bound not only to fail, but will threaten international security, peace, and stability.”

In praising the prince, Imam Sudais used the word muhaddath, “uniquely and singularly gifted,” an honorific the prophet is supposed to have attached to Umar ibn al-Khattab, his esteemed companion who became the second caliph of Islam. One can see this as an implicit challenge to the claims of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the so-called caliph of ISIS, who proclaimed himself caliph — or “deputy” of the prophet — in July 2014.

The significance of the imam’s sermon in the holiest shrine of Islam cannot be underestimated. Abou el-Fadl points out the worldwide response to the sermon was far from complimentary: the reaction of scholars on social media was mainly “disdain and outrage,” while Arabic-language comedies and talk shows on YouTube reacted with mockery and contempt.

A negative response, however, could paradoxically serve the prince’s aim of underpinning his image with religious authority. Authoritarian leaders know that one way to garner support is to generate opposition by creating the sense that the society they lead faces threats that are both internal and external.

The Saudis tend to elide the threat they perceive from Shia Iran with the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization of Sunni reformers that occupies a broad spectrum of political stances, from full if grudging acceptance of democratic pluralism (as held by the Brotherhood-linked Ennahda party in Tunisia) to the militant jihadism of Sayyid Qutb and his followers. As MBS stated in a television interview with CBS in March 2018, he regards Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as an existential threat to his country who

wants to create his own project in the Middle East, much like Hitler. Many countries in Europe did not see how dangerous Hitler was until what happened, happened. I don’t want to see the same events happening in the Middle East.

Worst of the Worst

Viewed through any kind of lens — social, cultural, or economic — the Saudi kingdom is one of the world’s most repressive polities. On the rankings devised by Freedom House, a US-funded NGO, America’s leading ally in the Arab world occupies the bottom percentile (5.8 percent) in terms of political rights and civil liberties, belonging with Syria, North Korea, Somalia, and the Central African Republic in the category designated “the worst of the worst.”

In 2016, the kingdom executed 146 people, including a mass execution of forty-seven men on January 2. Forty-three of these were reported to have been associated with al-Qaeda attacks in the 2000s, but four were members of the country’s Shia minority, including the prominent cleric Nimr al-Nimr, an outspoken critic of the regime, certainly, but no terrorist.

In April 2018, there were reported to be at least thirty-eight Shia men awaiting execution. On March 12, 2022, there was the execution of eighty-one men, the largest mass execution for decades with the total of 196 executed that year representing a substantial increase, despite promises to curtail death penalty use, according to Human Rights Watch.

The following year was almost as harsh, with one single month (August) averaging a rate of four executions per week. Some of the death penalties have been meted out for drug offenses, despite repeated promises to limit executions where the death penalty is not mandated under sharia law. Some appear overtly political. According to Amnesty International, in July 2023 the Specialized Criminal Court sentenced Mohammed al-Ghamdi to death “solely for tweets” criticizing the authorities.

The 2016 protests in Sheikh al-Nimr’s hometown of Awamiya led to a siege by the Saudi authorities, with tensions flaring over plans to demolish the historic district, which the government claimed was being used by armed insurgents. At least a dozen people are said to have been killed in the protests, and many young men went into hiding to avoid checkpoints at all the town’s exits.

One of the protestors, Yussuf al-Mushaikhass (aged forty-two), was executed in July 2017 along with three other men after being found guilty by the Specialized Criminal Court for offenses including “firing at a police station in Awamiyya twice, resulting in the injury of a policeman,” “armed rebellion against the ruler,” and “participating in riots.” His family only found out that he had been executed afterward, when they saw a government statement read on TV. According to Amnesty International, the court’s decision was largely based on “confessions” obtained under torture.

Electronic Repression

Initially, in the aftermath of the Arab Spring when Saudi youth, like others, were enlivened by prospects for change, the Twitter­sphere may have served as a refuge for free expression, a trend that was rapidly eroded as X/Twitter trolls employed by the government hit back at any suggestions of disloyalty.

Control­ling social media — even partially — has obvious advantages for the regime. Saudi Arabia has the highest number of active X/Twitter users in the Arab world: 2.4 million, or more than double the number in Egypt, a country whose population is three times as large. The mastermind behind the trolling operation is thought to have been MBS’s infamous fixer Saud al-Qahtani, who was sacked from his jobs and “disappeared” from public visibility after his role in the Khashoggi murder was exposed but appears to have been restored to grace.

In August 2017, al-Qahtani launched a “blacklist,” asking the X/Twitter community to tag the names of people who did not support the block­ade of Qatar. The trolling system al-Qahtani headed, as chairman of the board of directors of the Saudi Federation for Cyber Security and Program­ming, engaged academics and specialists working for think tanks close to the Emirati and Saudi leadership. MBS was boosted as a visionary and a thoroughly modern figure: talking points focused on how he was the same age as the majority of Saudi citizens, was tech-savvy, had an entrepreneurial mindset, and so forth.

Opinion manufactured and “shared” on X/Twitter and other plat­forms may be the least obnoxious of the electronic tools the regime uses to sustain its control over society in the age of “fake news.” A more menacing type of control involves the use of malware against opponents.

Two months after Khashoggi’s murder, in December 2018, a friend of Khashoggi’s, Omar Abd al-Aziz, a Saudi exile living in Canada, filed a lawsuit against NSO, an Israeli software company registered in Cyprus. An investigation published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab had revealed that Abd al-Aziz’s and Khashoggi’s phones had been hacked using the NSO’s malware known as Pegasus, which is only sold to gov­ernments. “The hacking of my phone played a major role in what happened to Jamal, I am really sorry to say,” Abd al-Aziz told CNN. “The guilt is killing me.”

Pegasus hacks a smartphone by sending it a fake message, such as notice of a package delivery or urgent news about a family member. If the recipient clicks on the link, the system installs sophisticated malware on the device that can go undetected and send informa­tion back to those doing the spying. Abd al-Aziz shared with CNN more than four hundred messages he had exchanged with Khashoggi.

Many concerned their plan to create a digital activism project called “cyber bees,” aimed at documenting Saudi human rights abuses in short films that could be easily shared online. The messages were explicitly critical of MBS. In November 2018, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the NSO group had offered the Saudi government an advanced version of the software, Pegasus 3, “an espionage tool so sophisticated that it does not depend on the victim clicking on a link before the phone is breached.”

According to the paper, representatives of the group met with Abdullah al-Malihi, a close associate of Prince Turki al-Faisal, former head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence services, and Nasser al-Qahtani, a top Saudi businessman close to the crown prince, in June 2017 in Vienna. After a number of subsequent meetings between al-Malihi and al-Qahtani and “officials of Israeli companies in which other Israelis were present . . . an agreement was made to sell the Pegasus 3 to the Saudis for $55 million.”

The Safe

When public political discourse is banned or controlled by the state, nonverbal communication can still flourish, especially if it conveys ambiguities. In June 2019, visitors to the Basel art fair in Switzerland were invited to enter “The Safe,” an installation by Saudi artist Abdulnasser Gharem.

“The Safe” is a room-sized white box beneath a pale yellow awning. The interior walls — with only one person permitted to enter for one minute at a time — recall the padded cells of a prison or mental institution. One side is dominated by the Saudi flag displaying the sword and kalima (the Muslim credo that there is only one god and Muhammad is his prophet).

At the end of the room, set on a steel table, there are some two dozen rubber stamps that visitors are invited to impress on the padded wall. The stamps display messages in Arabic and English, such as “the difference between the terrorist and the martyr is the media coverage.”

But it’s the steel table that grabs the attention. With its trolley wheels, sink, and curving tap, it is the type of table to be found in any city morgue. It can easily be read as an implicit reference to the butchery suffered by Khashoggi, authorized by the ruler of the kingdom whose religious banner dominates the space above.

Gharem, whose work commands six-figure sums in the international market, is a former lieutenant colonel in the Saudi army. In interviews, he always stresses that his work is “not about taking sides.” In the dysfunctional realm of MBS’s kingdom, “The Safe” is a fitting symbol of cruelty and repression. But the fact that the artist continues to reside and work in the kingdom signals a significant message of hope.