Salman Of Saudi Arabia Quotes

The kingdom’s population was growing, costs were rising, and the rest of the world was talking with more urgency about using less oil. What would happen when oil prices dropped? To ward off a catastrophe, Alwaleed argued, Saudi Arabia needed to diversify, invest in solar and nuclear energy, and start moving some of its oil wealth abroad so it would have diversified sources of income.

As a matter of fact, Islam does not negate critical inquiry. Muslim scholars who understand this viewpoint are supportive of stem cell research, genetic engineering and robotics within ethical bounds. Even traditional Muslim scholarship in early-twentieth century was not skeptical of evolution as a scientific explanation, which can be seen in the writings of Syed Qutb and Maulana Syed Abul-Ala Maududi. Several Muslim scientists conduct research in evolutionary biology and also teach it including Mohammed Alassiri of King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ehab Abouheif, Canada Research Chair at McGill University; Fatimah Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of North Carolina and Rana Dajani, Associate Professor at Hashemite University, Jordan.

The First Saudi State ceased to exist, but the surviving Al Saud learned two important strategic lessons: first, you must obtain modern military equipment and second, you can lose everything if you quarrel with the superpower of the day. King Salman, the current ruler, has not forgotten either of those lessons.

From that bitter defeat, the Al Saud learned another strategic lesson: above all else, do not use force against each other; keep family disputes peaceful and private; and unite quickly and firmly against anyone who violates this rule. Modern-era Kings Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, and Abdullah all respected this stabilizing principle. King Salman and his ambitious Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, have not.

In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011. The Quran is immutable, and all it does is tell believers to respond to blasphemy with dignity.

When Yemen’s Imam Ahmad bin Yahiya (1881–1962) died in his sleep, Republican military officers quickly sought to overthrow the ancient, religiously-based Hamid al-Din dynasty. The Republicans claimed that Saudi Arabia had unjustly seized the Jizan and Najran provinces from Yemen in 1934 and demanded their return. King Saud’s government rejected that claim and supported the Yemeni royalists with arms, money, and subsidies to cooperative tribes. Egypt’s President Nasser—who supported the socialist, Arab Nationalist Republicans—hoped to add Yemen to the United Arab Republic that he had created with Syria, and to use the country to overthrow the House of Saud.28 Today, King Salman fears that Iran has similar intentions in Yemen.

Religious conservatives had long boasted that when King Abdullah died, they would remove the liberal, religious-police chief that he had installed, restore the conservative ulama that he had fired, and shut down the co-educational university that he had founded. King Salman initially gave them much of what they wanted.

The entire world saw Mohammed bin Salman kneel and kiss the hand of his deposed cousin, promising to always seek his advice. Mohammed bin Naif shook his younger cousin’s hand and swore allegiance to him as the new crown prince. No new deputy crown prince was named then—or has been since. The following month an entirely new security agency, reporting directly to the king through the Royal Diwan and Mohammed bin Salman, was created. Known as the Presidency for State Security, it took over nearly all police and internal intelligence work

After November 4, 2017, only King Salman or MBS had direct control over any of the kingdom’s security forces.

Having been in government all his life, Salman was well aware of Saudi Arabia’s structural economic problems and administrative inefficiencies. He had watched Qatar and the United Arab Emirates develop more rapidly than Saudi Arabia. He saw talented, educated young Saudis moving to Dubai, New York, and London. Above all, he recognized that the long-running partnership of brothers managing the kingdom could not last much longer. Preserving the dynasty would require a powerful and determined king who could both engineer the transition to third-generation leadership and diversify the country’s economy. Intending to rule as a reforming autocrat, Salman was looking for ideas—and his younger son, Mohammed, seemed to have some.

The rise of Mohammed bin Salman was as remarkable as it was unexpected. In 2010 he was the unknown younger son of the governor of Riyadh; by 2019 he was arguably the single most prominent leader in the Arab world. In 2010 he had held no official position, spending his time trading stocks, developing real estate, and buying expensive cars—most notably, a multi-million-dollar fire-engine-red Bugatti.

The core of Mohammed bin Salman’s vision was political, not social or economic.

Mohammed bin Salman intended to speak to young Saudis with a voice that was modern and pious, but not democratic.

Within four years of ascending to the throne, King Salman has thus dramatically changed Saudi Arabia’s political structure. The old system—in which various senior princes ran independent, uncoordinated ministries and where senior technocrats were allied to one senior prince or another—has been dismantled. The king has appointed dozens of new judges and replaced every minister and military service chief, some more than once. Across the Saudi government, all senior technocrats now owe their position not to a variety of princely patrons but solely to the patronage of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

King Salman appears to have engineered a peaceful handover of power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons. Third-generation princes now serve not only as crown prince but in nearly all provincial governor, deputy governor, and royal cabinet positions. Like the young team of brothers that King Faisal assembled in the 1960s, the grandsons of King Abdulaziz installed by King Salman and MBS expect to govern Saudi Arabia into the foreseeable future.

Saudi Arabia now suffers from what investors call “key man risk.” Too much is riding on one person. Should Mohammed bin Salman leave the scene for whatever reason, all bets would be off with regard to Saudi stability. There is no obvious replacement. No deputy crown prince has been named,

Because he was the governor of Riyadh, where most Al Saud princes lived, King Fahd had assigned him the role of “referee” in family disputes and disciplinarian for wayward princes. Sometimes referred to as the “Prince of Princes,” Salman maintained a private jail for princes and was well aware of which family members abused their royal status.

His stern demeanor notwithstanding, Salman was a popular governor and effective politician who regularly paid condolence calls upon the death of prominent citizens or attended the weddings of their children.

Since the abdication of King Saud in 1964, the sons of King Abdulaziz have transferred political power four times without violence or public protest: to Khalid in 1975, Fahd in 1982, Abdullah in 2005, and Salman in 2015. This is a much better record than many of the Arab World’s so-called republics. In a region where violent coups and revolutions have been more common than orderly political transitions, the Al Saud’s consistent ability to transfer power swiftly and peacefully has contributed to their legitimacy

By 2015, the transition to third-generation princes was imminent and managing that process would be King Salman’s most important challenge. When King Abdulaziz died in 1953, it had taken a decade of periodic crises to resolve the manner in which the second generation of princes would govern. The system that they eventually created of thirty-four brothers sharing power, served the kingdom well for many years. The king was always first among equals with final authority and some kings were clearly more dominant than others, but all had sought to maintain family unity.

On the day of King Abdullah’s death, King Salman appeared to resolve this difficult issue by appointing his nephew, the 55-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Naif or MBN to be the deputy crown prince and third in line of succession. This move to a third-generation prince was an historic event, which effectively ended the political hopes of Abdulaziz’s few remaining sons. Many in Riyadh believed that by making the transition to third-generation leadership while a second-generation king was still on the throne to supervise the process, King Salman had taken the most important step of his reign on his first day in office.

during the first few weeks of his reign, King Salman made very few changes as he sought to embrace and reassure all stakeholders in the Al Saud’s coalition.

The genuine sorrow over King Abdullah’s passing was accompanied by relief at the smooth succession that followed. Crown Prince Salman immediately became the new king and promoted his half-brother, Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin, to be the new crown prince.

King Abdullah presided over a royal family increasingly concerned that the powerful Sudairi brothers—particularly Sultan, Naif, and Salman—would engineer a takeover of the Saudi government.

Had King Abdullah overseen the effective use of the Allegiance Council, the evolution of succession in Saudi Arabia might have been very different. As it was, when the Council approved Mohammed bin Naif as crown prince in 2015 and Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince in 2017, it was regarded as little more than a rubber stamp for the king’s decision. As stated in the Basic Law of Governance, succession remained very much the prerogative of the king.

King Abdulaziz respected, consulted, and depended on all of the Al Saud, but his first strategic choice regarding succession was that power would transfer to his sons rather than his brothers or cousins. From the outset, he intended to marginalize all but his direct descendants, much as King Salman appears to be doing today.

Then Abdulaziz did something revolutionary. He dismissed the leaders of two major Ikhwan tribes. He announced that Abdulaziz Daweesh would replace Faisal Daweesh as chief of the Mutair, and Ibn Ruba’yan would replace Sultan ibn Bijad as paramount sheikh of the Utaibah.20 This was unprecedented. Abdulaziz was the imam of the Wahhabis, just as King Salman is today. As such he was the community’s supreme political and spiritual leader, but no existing tradition allowed him to depose tribal chiefs. It was not at all clear that Abdulaziz could enforce such changes, but it was very clear that he intended to limit tribal independence and create a strong central government.

Worried about claims that the Al Saud were not Islamic enough, Kings Khalid, Fahd, and, for the most part, Abdullah, did more waiting than reforming as Saudi Arabia’s cultural norms slid increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. King Salman, on the other hand, did not wait. He recognized that times had changed, and with them the demographics, opinions, and aspirations of most Saudis. By 2015, most Saudis were under thirty years of age, and very few thought the Earth was flat. Most thought that women should be allowed to drive. Traditional cultural values, which had provided a valuable stabilizing force during the social upheaval of oil booms, were becoming a liability for an economy that needed to improve its productivity and labor force participation rates.

Salman was the sixth brother of the Sudairi Seven and the last survivor of the team that King Faisal had installed in the early 1960s. He was generally regarded as one of King Abdulaziz’s most intelligent and experienced sons.

There were no princes in the RDA bureaucracy. Salman regularly warned employees that anyone caught embezzling would spend the rest of their life in prison,

Salman’s longstanding emphasis on effective administration, opposition to corruption, and unforgiving disciplinary style were all well known when he became king. These traits have characterized his reign ever since. However, coming to the throne at the age of 78, Salman was not the young man who had first taken charge of Riyadh. His general health, stamina, and concentration for extended periods were legitimate concerns.

Early in 2017, the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Saleh Al al-Sheikh, hosted a dinner at his home in Riyadh for the Committee of Senior Scholars, during which Mohammed bin Salman outlined his plans for economic and social reform. The prince told the religious scholars that economic development was crucial to the kingdom’s future but could not advance without social liberalization. He assured them that Islam and their role as its guardians would always be respected in Saudi Arabia but insisted that some things would have to change and that their support was both needed and expected.

Like King Faisal, but unlike Mustapha Kemal Ataturk in Turkey or Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, Mohammed bin Salman would also make an effort to preserve the dignity, influence, and incomes of the clerics.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been very careful to show respect for the tribes, their sheikhs, and tribal culture.

Some called it the Saudi Spring. Others saw the start of the Fourth Saudi State, or “Salman Arabia.” It left some celebrating and others distraught. All agreed that it was part of a revolution that King Salman had initiated when he ascended the throne in January 2015.

Salman bin Abdulaziz had not expected to inherit these problems. He was only a few years younger than his two full brothers, Sultan and Naif. Both of them had been named crown prince and both had died younger than Salman would be when he ascended the throne. Although fate made Salman an unexpected king, he was not unprepared. He had been governor of Riyadh Province for forty-eight years. Intelligent, pragmatic, hardworking, well organized, and disciplined, he was also strict, demanding, and humorless. He made firm decisions and would become known locally as the “King of Decisiveness.

Although King Abdullah allowed limited press liberalization, his successor, King Salman, has reversed that trend. Charmed by rock concerts, women driving, and new movie theaters, some have overlooked the fact that under King Salman freedom of speech and freedom of the press has declined.

Under King Salman, the technocrats’ representative body has lost influence. Major reforms have bypassed it. The Majlis al-Shura did not vote on Vision 2030, the Saudi Aramco initial public offering, or the imposition of a value-added tax.

King Salman very deliberately replaced age and experience as the criteria for the throne with ambition, determination, and a capacity for hard work.

the king very deliberately engineered the unconventional, complicated, and controversial rise of the young and relatively inexperienced Mohammed bin Salman because, to paraphrase The New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, If you think there are another dozen princes in Riyadh with the steel, cunning, and ruthlessness as Mohammed bin Salman, you are wrong.

King Salman systematically dismantled the institutional power bases that other senior princes had enjoyed for decades as ministers of defense, the interior, the National Guard, municipal affairs, and foreign affairs.

King Salman knew very well that his father had been in his mid-twenties when he captured Riyadh. Age and experience were not the qualities that had led to this success. What King Abdulaziz had, and what King Salman was looking for, was fire in the belly. Brought up in humiliating exile, King Abdulaziz had been fiercely determined to restore his family’s honor. He had combined exceptional ambition with a ruthless will to power. Such vigor and resolve would be needed again in order to manage a generational leadership transition and drive forward much needed, but contentious, economic and social reforms.

Another factor in Al Saud cohesiveness has been the fact that aged kings never stayed in power too long. In fairly rapid succession they handed over power to another brother from a different branch of the family. It paid to wait your turn rather than rock the boat. That incentive to cooperate is no longer present as Mohammed bin Salman could easily be king for the next fifty years.

In business, only a third of family firms make the transition to a second generation; less than ten percent survive into the third generation. The important, North African, political thinker Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) predicted a similar cycle of rise and decline for all Arab dynasties. In his influential book the Muqaddimah or Introduction, with which King Salman is almost certainly familiar, Ibn Khaldun described how Arab dynasties usually last for three generations or 120 years—whichever came first.

To understand why Mohammed kidnapped the leader of Lebanon, it’s necessary to go back a half century, to 1964. That’s when a young Lebanese accountant named Rafic Hariri decided he couldn’t make enough money at home to support his young family. So he moved to Saudi Arabia, where burgeoning oil wealth was funding roads, hospitals, and hotels, and all sorts of companies were springing up to build them. Saudi Arabia in the 1960s had lots of oil and money but not much to show for it on the ground. The kingdom’s population was smaller than that of London. The royal family was intent on using the kingdom’s oil income to build new infrastructure across the country, but few domestic companies could handle big construction projects. And there were few universities to produce graduates who could run such companies.

Things changed radically between the early 1990s and 2019. The spread of fracking turned the United States into the world’s biggest oil producer by 2013. The American economy wasn’t dependent on Saudi oil anymore. Now it could pump its own. Then Barack Obama made the nuclear deal with Iran, alienating Saudi leaders. Mohammed had high hopes that Donald Trump, with his visit to the kingdom early in his presidency, would renew the kind of relationship Saudi Arabia had under previous presidents. But as Trump showed Mohammed in that embarrassing White House visit, when the president displayed a poster board showing arms sales to the kingdom, this new White House was purely transactional. The decades-long US-Saudi alliance didn’t mean much to Trump and his deputies, and many of the old officials who kept that alliance going for both sides, men like Mohammed bin Nayef and former CIA director John Brennan, had been sent off to retirement, or worse.

Mohammed bin Salman’s plan should probably have been called Vision 2050. That would have represented a more realistic, if a less-motivating, time frame for transforming the Saudi economy from one based almost entirely on oil-funded transfer payments into one based partially on productive enterprise. Even by 2050, the existing plan will not turn Saudi Arabia into South Korea.

And on the other side of the world, there was Mohammed bin Salman—the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, who was embittered at Bezos for the Washington Post’s coverage of the murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, and who some cybersecurity experts would come to believe had hacked Bezos’s cell phone.

According to analysts, 666 Fifth Avenue had about a 30 percent vacancy rate and only generated about half of its annual mortgage. It was rumored that the largest tenant was planning to move out. A Canadian company named Brookfield Property Partners took a ninety-nine-year lease on 666 Fifth Avenue. Brookfield paid the rent for the entire century-long lease, upfront, which amounted to about $1.1 billion—removing Kushner’s biggest financial headache (a $1.4 billion mortgage on the office portion of the tower due in February 2019). Brookfield got its financing for this deal from a $750 million mortgage from ING Group, a Dutch multinational and financial services corporation, and a $300 million mezzanine loan from Apollo Global Management.9 However, the Qatar Investment Authority, the government-run agency that made decisions about the nations’ financial investments, bought a $1.8 billion stake in Brookfield Property Partners. As the second largest shareholder, they had a lot to say about what should be purchased; in this instance, they apparently used Brookfield to bail out 666 Fifth Ave. This investment was a godsend to Kushner, who was now out of debt just as Qatar was suddenly no longer blockaded by Mohammad bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, crown prince of Saudi Arabia (known colloquially as MBS), and his allies.

In all 6,236 verses of the Quran, there is not a single verse calling on Muslims to silence blasphemers by force. Not in 1989, when Khomeini called on believers to kill Salman Rushdie, not in 1992, when the Egyptian intellectual Farag Foda was shot in Egypt, and still not in 2011.

Unlike the Arab Spring uprisings, Riyadh’s anti-corruption campaign was implemented by the highest levels of government in order to preserve, not overthrow, a government. Furthermore, it was not, as is often heard, a power-grab by an ambitious young prince. By November 2017, Mohammed bin Salman and his father had already neutralized any serious opposition.

This distinctive balance of fear and favor has now shifted. Under King Salman, Saudi Arabia has become more autocratic. Civil liberties, which were never prominent, have become even more restricted. The sophisticated electronic surveillance systems developed to monitor violent terrorists have been used to detect nonviolent political dissent. Saudis who once spoke freely have become hesitant to criticize their government.

No Saudi king ever came to power facing greater regional instability than Salman bin Abdulaziz. In January 2015, the very existence of Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, and Yemen was in question. The Islamic State, or ISIS, had become the first terrorist organization with its own capital city and oil production. Iran was supporting the Houthi insurgents in Yemen, who had just taken the capital, Sanaa, and were on the verge of capturing the entire country. Not since the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century had the Arab world seen such widespread chaos—and all of it threatened Saudi security.

Saudi Arabia established a robust alliance with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). These two neighbors created a very powerful bloc, producing between them nearly half the Arab world’s GDP and 40 percent of OPEC’s oil. Their crown princes, Mohammed bin Salman and Mohammed bin Zayed, were close personally and professionally. Although their interests were not completely aligned, from 2015 onward the two neighbors fought together against the Iranian-supported Houthis in Yemen. In June 2018, their de-facto alliance was given a formal structure through a new Saudi–Emirati Coordination Council. Led by the two crown princes, the new body issued a “Strategy for Resolve” listing forty-four joint economic and military projects that the two nations planned to carry out over the following five years.

It is worth remembering that in March 2015, Mohammed bin Salman was not the king of Saudi Arabia nor the crown prince or even the deputy crown prince. He was the newly appointed minister of defense. The experienced Saud al-Faisal, though ill, was still foreign minister. The popular view that 30-year-old Mohammed bin Salman recklessly took his country to war and that ten sovereign states, including Britain and the United States, blithely followed him, is a misreading of history. King Salman made the decision in order to stop the “Hezbollahization” of Yemen. Major Western powers supported the Saudis in order to prevent the expansion of Iranian influence into the Red Sea, especially in the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb strait, and to maintain Saudi support for then-ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran.

In some ways, the Saudi response to Iran has followed its long-established security policies; spend billions of dollars on advanced weapons and turn to traditional partners for support. In 2019, Riyadh made the first payments on an estimated $15 billion contract for Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) air defense system. That summer, Saudi Arabia reopened the Prince Sultan Air Base for the deployment of US aircraft, air defense missile batteries, and several thousand soldiers and airmen. Yet in other ways the Saudi response under King Salman and Mohammed bin Salman has been unconventional and may become even more so. Launching an independent air campaign in Yemen or investing seriously in a domestic defense industry were new approaches. Most worryingly, as the former head of Israel’s National Security Council Yaakov Amidor warned—a nuclear armed Iran would not only surround Israel with a “ring of fire,” it would very likely drive Turkey and Saudi Arabia to seek their own nuclear weapons.

As we have seen, succession—not fighting corruption—was the new king’s first order of business. Salman’s concentration of power was well planned, gradual, relentless, and successful.

he created an independent Supreme Committee for Combating Corruption (the SCCC) chaired by Mohammed bin Salman.

King Salman went on television stating, “The law will be upheld and applied firmly to all those entrusted with public funds(.…). This is part of the reform agenda against abuses that have hindered our development for decades.

King Salman was more decisive. The overwhelming majority of the 100 billion dollars in assets obtained from the Ritz Carton detainees was not in cash or equities, but in raw land. Well over 50 percent of the undeveloped urban real estate in Riyadh and Jeddah was returned to government ownership. Along with a new mortgage law that finally found a way to deal with sharia opposition to foreclosures, this new stock of available building sites has begun to resolve the Saudi housing shortage.

During his tenure as king, from 2005 to 2015, Abdullah did promote women’s education with the royal scholarship program that offered full scholarships to women, as well as men, to travel abroad for university degrees. However, he did not end the prohibition against women driving or relax many other restrictions on women. Only two and a half years after King Abdullah’s death, his brother, King Salman, assisted by his 32-year-old son, Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, decreed that Saudi women would be permitted to obtain driver’s licenses starting in June 2018. Other restrictions that hindered women from accessing government services without a guardian’s permission were also relaxed a few months earlier.

The United Arab Emirates reportedly had its contract with NSO cancelled in 2021 when it became clear that Dubai’s ruler had used it to hack his ex-wife’s phone and those of her associates. The New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard, Beirut chief for the paper, had his phone compromised while reporting on Saudi Arabia and its leader Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a man who has invested huge amounts of money in commercial spyware.45 Palestinian human rights activists and diplomats in Palestine have also been targeted by Pegasus, including officials who were preparing complaints against Israel to the International Criminal Court. NSO technology was used by the Israeli police to covertly gather information from Israelis’ smartphones. Pegasus had become a key asset for Israel’s domestic and international activities.46 Saudi Arabia is perhaps the crown jewel of NSO’s exploits, one of the Arab world’s most powerful nations and a close ally of the US with no formal relations with the Jewish state. It is a repressive, Sunni Muslim ethnostate that imprisons and tortures dissidents and actively discriminates against its Shia minority.47 Unlike previous generations of Saudi leaders, bin Salman thought that the Israel/Palestine conflict was “an annoying irritant—a problem to be overcome rather than a conflict to be fairly resolved,” according to Rob Malley, a senior White House official in the Obama and Biden administrations.48

The fact that NSO sold Pegasus in 2017 to the Saudis barely registered any outrage until the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in December 2018. Israel has a long covert history of relations with Saudi Arabia, providing intelligence about threats to its royal family from as early as the 1970s.49 Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who became the country’s spy chief, spent decades meeting Israeli and Jewish leaders as well as Mossad chiefs.50 NSO was immediately blamed for being an accessory to the Khashoggi killing, giving the accused ring leader bin Salman and his team the ability to track Khashoggi’s movements before his death. NSO denied any responsibility but nonetheless reportedly briefly canceled its contract with the Kingdom. NSO’s denials of any complicity in the murder were bogus, with evidence emerging that his wife, fiancé, and associates had their phones compromised by Pegasus both before his death and in the days after, including by the United Arab Emirates, a close ally of Saudi Arabia that often tracks dissidents for its friend. Today, both Khashoggi’s wife and fiancé, Hanan Elatr and Hatice Cengiz, live in fear for their lives.51