The Saudi Royal Family Directory is the comprehensive source for biographic and geneological information on the Saudi Arabian Royal family. The database includes over 5,000 records of Saudi Royal family members. You can search the database and view the family tree for free. For online biographic reports, check out the subscription page.

The Qur'anic Vision of Muhammad bin Salman: Conviction or Politics?

window dressing?

MbS has neutered the ability of the religious police to impose strict rules on women's clothing, or enforce bans on alcohol, music, prayer-time shop closures and the mixing of men and women. The Kingdom has also ended a long-standing prohibition on cinemas, and a decades-old ban on women driving cars. Now, public entertainment flourishes, and with the ban on gender-mixing eased, women are no longer forced to live a separate existence, hidden behind partitions in restaurants and needing permission from a male relative to perform even the most mundane of tasks.

Behind the rapid change is the belief that a fundamental shift needs to take place; for too long, MbS believes, Islam has been under the sway of those who fail to recognize the rightful primacy of the Qur'an. Instead, generations of scholars have relied on interpretations of the 'hadith', the corpus of the sayings or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad. Hadith are revered by Muslims as a major source of religious law and moral guidance, used by influential jurists to support their teachings and edicts on all aspects of life. The problem, however, is their provenance - many are of disputed origin, and an entire field of study exists to sort them into various categories to help establish their validity. Significantly, the king has now ordered the establishment of an authority to scrutinize uses of the hadith. This new body, based in Madinah and overseen by a council of senior Islamic scholars, is a manifestation of the push by the crown prince to realign the place of hadith within the context of the faith as practiced in the Kingdom, in accordance with his conviction that weak or dubious hadith have had undue influence on Islamic thought.

MbS spoke at length during a 2022 interview with the magazine, The Atlantic, on his efforts to document the most authentic traditions (hadith), to protect them from misuse by extremists and terrorists. "There are tens of thousands of Hadith. And, you know, the massive majority, are not proven and are being used by many people as the way to justify doing what they are doing". Extremist groups like al-Qa'eda and ISIS, he said, were "using hadith which are very weak, not proven to be true hadith, to propagate their ideology." This view grounds his belief that the Kingdom's repressive social structures are the product of an over-reliance on hadith, used to justify what has no actual basis in Islam.

Ending the use of hadith for making laws would be a sea change; the goal is that a complete overhaul of the system will eventually lead to an entirely codified law. Indeed, MbS has been upfront about his desire to veer away from hadith and turn to the Qur'an, often signaling reforms by making this connection explicit. For several years now, religious programs on various Saudi television channels have been citing injunctions in the Qur'an specifically, whereas only those hadith are quoted that corroborate the Qur'an's message. For example, MbS quoted a passage from hadith saying that the Prophet used to race with his wives and that women had a role in public life during that time.

MbS studied (Islamic) law at university, but the influence on his religious and political outlook appears to have come from his association with advisors close to Ahle Qur'an, a group of scholars holding that the Qur'an alone is the source of divine law, and that the literature of hadith can be redundant. This emphasis on following the Qur'an rather than hadith underlies the Kingdom's religious makeover; at the same time, MbS ensures that change can only come from the top, on his terms. The prisons are filled with scholars and clerics who have dared to criticize the regime, and citizen dissent, even in the form of social media, is not tolerated. So far he has been insulated by the tacit support of his father, the king; will MbS, once he takes the throne himself, be able to continue with his reforms, avoiding a clerical backlash?

Previous