Saudi King Salman Quotes

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.

Oil jumps as Saudi king's death feeds market uncertainty Abdullah died early on Friday and his brother Salman became king, the royal court in the world's top oil exporter and birthplace of Islam said in a statement carried by state television.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Saudi Oger’s Saad Hariri, a dual citizen who also happened to be the prime minister of Lebanon, was struggling to keep the cash flowing too. The Oger business was poorly managed, so it had little cushion for a slowdown in payments. Saad desperately tried to win Mohammed bin Salman’s approval, building an extension to King Salman’s expansive seaside palace in Tangier for Mohammed. And when Mohammed suggested he’d like a more direct passageway in the Royal Court to access the foyer of his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef’s section, Saad himself stayed up through the night with workers to cut through marble and concrete to get the job done. Mohammed thanked him but clearly felt no exchange had taken place. Saad hadn’t won any goodwill.