“Vikings is no. 1 from all the Saudi men 😂”. Leila chuckled as we browsed top hits on Netflix. For only 30 Riyals (8 USD) a month, Saudis can tune into stories about uncovered pagans. A global feast of delights are now on offer - from Western films to women’s football.
I wonder to what extent these surprising Saudi cultural developments are downstream of geopolitical alignments.
The Saudis are strongly aligned with the US, which is the Power that is associated with and promotes liberal globalism. Countries seeking to maintain and deepen that relationship seek to adopt the hegemon's ideology. It is therefore no surprise that Taiwan hosts East Asia's biggest gay pride parades, since they double as a kind of ward against China. Obviously can't (yet) be that bold in Saudi Arabia but I suspect at root it's the same phenomenon.
The contrast with regimes that have defined themselves in opposition to the US is startling, with Iran having become more brutal about morality policing its women (so the gap between the regime and young urbanites keeps growing ever wider, and in turn requiring them to become more and more repressive), and Russian state-backed homophobia and transphobia assuming runaway characteristics after 2022.
Yes, parallel examples would be some Ukrainian politicians promoting gay rights, and some Poles actively embracing EU ideals of liberalism and secularism.
author seems out of touch westerner that just discovered the country for the first time. the idea that Hollywood movies are new is laughable, it was common to find video stores selling movies going back to the 70s and 80s. One could even remember state TV showing a weekly American movie like Rambo when there was only one government TV station before satellites. The gulf states have always been a major market for global entertainment like music, movies, and video games produced by western or Japanese or Korean companies, possibly as big as multiple Latin American countries combined.
if anyone is interested, search google images for "Saudi Arabia book" and you see book covers of camels, oil fields, kings, sand, and women in veils with big black eyes. If you read one you read them all, they are usually written by flyover journalists who show up and visit a few malls and talk to people and get a few quotes. The author seems to do the same thing.
What is funny is there is a very old documentary from the 1960s, and the same talking points about a government that is engaging in modernization and top down reform. you would think this is from last year if it wasn't black and white. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsoTKIgw0c4
I got extremely offended that Vikings being popular is somehow intriguing to outsiders. Imagine if I shook hands with a American and with a straight face said "I was expecting to meet a fat cowboy"
what the author also doesn't get about social science research is once something becomes legible the state will take action to control it. For example when social media was a niche thing, discourse was much freer, now post arab spring the state has effectively controlled public discourse by full time users who are paid to be engaged online as well as giving orders to people to not post something outside of state control, for example someone posted about a bad hospital service he had and got a call and was ordered to delete his viral post that became the discussion of the day.
I read on the authors twitter account she is interested in visiting Saudi Arabia. So I can tell you what's going to happen, the government will take her for a tour showing her all the women with jobs and who are happy to work, and meet many middle class families who like the new entertainment venues. Then the government also has a shock tour program where western visitors get to meet the most crazy salafis and let them speak their mind about social issues and let them say offensive things to a westerner. This has been a common tactic the government has been using to build their narrative, which is we are a open minded and enlightened elite who are struggling with a backward and reactionary population that isn't capable of self government and it is better for us to cull them. Although maybe her visit won't have the common shock tour given that almost anyone willing to say anything crazy has already been imprisoned.
Gender relations in Saudi Arabia is definitely worth researching, but so far everything I have read is regurgitated talking points from your standard feminist academic which is unfortunate. In fact I would say the opposite, if someone is writing about Saudi Arabia, and mentions women or oil, it should mean the author actually doesn't have anything interesting to say.
I think the author will become more sympathetic to the authoritarian government tactics once she visit. For us who live here, we are missing out on the most fun parts democracy, which is to debate if women have the right to show her toes in public. For example the west currently is engaging in a democratic debate about transgenders, once the debate is settled we will be forced to adopt the outcome by naval navel gazing intellectuals.
> If I were a Crown Prince trillionaire with a penchant for secularisation, I’d bet my petrodollars on the power of storytelling. Invest in captivating narratives that make greater freedoms not just permissible, but glamorous and exciting.
I doubt this strategy is going to work in the long run. As they say, "Freedom is not a gift, it's something you take for yourself,"
You'll probably see a repeat of what happened in Egypt happen in KSA. When the oil money runs out by 2040, the clerics will blame economic stagnation on secularisation and create a hardcore backlash. The real question is whether other Muslim countries in Asia are going to follow KSA in their religious revival since their countries will be better off in a post oil world.
That won't happen, because the rise in Islamist extremism in the late 20th century was not organic at all. Instead, it was the deliberate product of billions of Saudi petrodollars being poured into extremist madrassas and organizations across the Islamic world, which itself was the result of 3 events which all happened in 1979: the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of the Grand Mosque. For good reason, 1979 is called the annus horribilis of the Middle East. This is very similar to how communist and socialist parties across the world collapsed after the USSR did. They either disappeared or rebranded themselves as milquetoast center-left social democrats. That's because they only existed due to Soviet patronage.
Given that Saudi Arabia has stopped its support for such groups and is now funding the opposite, while Iran is becoming weaker and less popular by the day (the Mahsa Amini protests are the perfect example), the return of Islamism as a viable ideology is impossible now.
Assuming that the leaders in autocratic states see the same data that outsiders can see, might they start to restrict access to that data if the data supports a narrative different from the official party line? I know that the Communist Party of China stopped publishing the urban youth unemployment rate once it got too high, and I suspect that other autocracies would also try to limit access to information on topics they considered sensitive.
I wonder to what extent these surprising Saudi cultural developments are downstream of geopolitical alignments.
The Saudis are strongly aligned with the US, which is the Power that is associated with and promotes liberal globalism. Countries seeking to maintain and deepen that relationship seek to adopt the hegemon's ideology. It is therefore no surprise that Taiwan hosts East Asia's biggest gay pride parades, since they double as a kind of ward against China. Obviously can't (yet) be that bold in Saudi Arabia but I suspect at root it's the same phenomenon.
The contrast with regimes that have defined themselves in opposition to the US is startling, with Iran having become more brutal about morality policing its women (so the gap between the regime and young urbanites keeps growing ever wider, and in turn requiring them to become more and more repressive), and Russian state-backed homophobia and transphobia assuming runaway characteristics after 2022.
Yes, parallel examples would be some Ukrainian politicians promoting gay rights, and some Poles actively embracing EU ideals of liberalism and secularism.
This isn't something that is being caused by the US. This is an entirely internal Saudi development.
author seems out of touch westerner that just discovered the country for the first time. the idea that Hollywood movies are new is laughable, it was common to find video stores selling movies going back to the 70s and 80s. One could even remember state TV showing a weekly American movie like Rambo when there was only one government TV station before satellites. The gulf states have always been a major market for global entertainment like music, movies, and video games produced by western or Japanese or Korean companies, possibly as big as multiple Latin American countries combined.
if anyone is interested, search google images for "Saudi Arabia book" and you see book covers of camels, oil fields, kings, sand, and women in veils with big black eyes. If you read one you read them all, they are usually written by flyover journalists who show up and visit a few malls and talk to people and get a few quotes. The author seems to do the same thing.
What is funny is there is a very old documentary from the 1960s, and the same talking points about a government that is engaging in modernization and top down reform. you would think this is from last year if it wasn't black and white. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsoTKIgw0c4
I got extremely offended that Vikings being popular is somehow intriguing to outsiders. Imagine if I shook hands with a American and with a straight face said "I was expecting to meet a fat cowboy"
what the author also doesn't get about social science research is once something becomes legible the state will take action to control it. For example when social media was a niche thing, discourse was much freer, now post arab spring the state has effectively controlled public discourse by full time users who are paid to be engaged online as well as giving orders to people to not post something outside of state control, for example someone posted about a bad hospital service he had and got a call and was ordered to delete his viral post that became the discussion of the day.
I read on the authors twitter account she is interested in visiting Saudi Arabia. So I can tell you what's going to happen, the government will take her for a tour showing her all the women with jobs and who are happy to work, and meet many middle class families who like the new entertainment venues. Then the government also has a shock tour program where western visitors get to meet the most crazy salafis and let them speak their mind about social issues and let them say offensive things to a westerner. This has been a common tactic the government has been using to build their narrative, which is we are a open minded and enlightened elite who are struggling with a backward and reactionary population that isn't capable of self government and it is better for us to cull them. Although maybe her visit won't have the common shock tour given that almost anyone willing to say anything crazy has already been imprisoned.
Gender relations in Saudi Arabia is definitely worth researching, but so far everything I have read is regurgitated talking points from your standard feminist academic which is unfortunate. In fact I would say the opposite, if someone is writing about Saudi Arabia, and mentions women or oil, it should mean the author actually doesn't have anything interesting to say.
I think the author will become more sympathetic to the authoritarian government tactics once she visit. For us who live here, we are missing out on the most fun parts democracy, which is to debate if women have the right to show her toes in public. For example the west currently is engaging in a democratic debate about transgenders, once the debate is settled we will be forced to adopt the outcome by naval navel gazing intellectuals.
Here is one critical voice of this "Westernisation" as he called it - Sami Hamdi https://open.spotify.com/episode/11WpttAvu8U30ZAkIJTmJB?si=8bc7kd7CTCS0dwvcxZUUmg
> If I were a Crown Prince trillionaire with a penchant for secularisation, I’d bet my petrodollars on the power of storytelling. Invest in captivating narratives that make greater freedoms not just permissible, but glamorous and exciting.
I doubt this strategy is going to work in the long run. As they say, "Freedom is not a gift, it's something you take for yourself,"
You'll probably see a repeat of what happened in Egypt happen in KSA. When the oil money runs out by 2040, the clerics will blame economic stagnation on secularisation and create a hardcore backlash. The real question is whether other Muslim countries in Asia are going to follow KSA in their religious revival since their countries will be better off in a post oil world.
That won't happen, because the rise in Islamist extremism in the late 20th century was not organic at all. Instead, it was the deliberate product of billions of Saudi petrodollars being poured into extremist madrassas and organizations across the Islamic world, which itself was the result of 3 events which all happened in 1979: the Islamic revolution in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the seizure of the Grand Mosque. For good reason, 1979 is called the annus horribilis of the Middle East. This is very similar to how communist and socialist parties across the world collapsed after the USSR did. They either disappeared or rebranded themselves as milquetoast center-left social democrats. That's because they only existed due to Soviet patronage.
Given that Saudi Arabia has stopped its support for such groups and is now funding the opposite, while Iran is becoming weaker and less popular by the day (the Mahsa Amini protests are the perfect example), the return of Islamism as a viable ideology is impossible now.
I don't disagree with your analysis (sorry for the double negative) but we'll see.
Assuming that the leaders in autocratic states see the same data that outsiders can see, might they start to restrict access to that data if the data supports a narrative different from the official party line? I know that the Communist Party of China stopped publishing the urban youth unemployment rate once it got too high, and I suspect that other autocracies would also try to limit access to information on topics they considered sensitive.