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Stage Management: Spectacles, Sidelining And Dissent

room for dissent?

The crackdown on clerics can be seen as part of the crown prince's broader vision, in which the role of religion, until now a core element of the Kingdom's founding mythos, cedes place to the primacy of the royal family - MbS, as heir and de facto ruler, aims to replace the country's religious identity with a new nationalism and reverence for the Kingdom's founders. Intolerance for clerical dissent is correlated with the dismantling of the "mutawa'a" and loosening of the moral code; the free mixing of genders at concerts is a visible manifestation of the more relaxed social environment. Despite the "progressive" moves, however, change can only come from the top, with even perceived criticism met with ferocity.

Saudi courts have lately issued several extreme prison sentences over cyber activism and the use of social media as a means of criticizing the government. In August, for example, courts sentenced a schoolgirl to 18 years in jail and a travel ban. Manal al-Gafiri, who was only 17 at the time of her arrest, was posting tweets in support of political prisoners. Nurah al-Qahtani, a mother of five, was sentenced to 45 years in prison over tweets from two anonymous accounts. Sa'd al-Madi, a dual Saudi-American citizen, was sentenced to 16 years over his online activity. And last year, Leeds University doctoral candidate Salma al-Shihab was handed a 34-year sentence over her tweets.

More alarmingly, a court levelled the death penalty against Muhammad al-Ghamdi, a retired teacher, for comments made on Twitter and YouTube. al-Ghamdi, brother of the prominent Saudi critic, was convicted in July over his activity on the social media platforms, which only had 10 followers in total. His tweets focused on unemployment, inflation, and government mismanagement. He was picked up by a special forces team reporting directly to the Royal Court and taken to the notorious al-Ha'ir Prison.

al-Ghamdi, and others, were detained in accordance with two articles of the Combatting Terrorism and Financing of Terrorism Act, passed in 2017 shortly after MbS became crown prince. The law has been criticized for its broad definition of terrorism, defining any act which disturbs public order as terrorism. Similarly, members of "the Bees", an online initiative started by slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi and dissident Umar Abd al-Aziz to combat pro-government misinformation and messaging, were sentenced under the same counterterrorism law.

The crown prince has argued that the extreme sentences are the result of "bad laws" that he cannot change. In a recent FOX television interview, he said that "the judiciary system has to follow the laws and I cannot tell the judge [to] do that and ignore the law because that's against the rule of law. But do we have bad laws? Yes. Are we changing that? Yes." However, the crackdown coincides with the introduction of new judicial bodies that have, since his ascent to power, overseen the crackdown on his critics. Two new bodies - the Presidency of State Security and the Public Prosecution Office - were established by royal decrees in 2017, when at the same time much of the power and responsibility for state security was shifted from the Ministry of Interior (that his uncle Nayif had run) directly to the Royal Court. Furthermore, judges appointed to the Specialized Criminal Court, which sentenced al-Ghamdi, are selected by the Supreme Judicial Council, the majority of whose members are appointed by the king, Salman.

In spite of his protestations, the crackdown that has shut down hundreds of critics of government policies in waves of arrests and prosecutions is a direct consequence of the rise to power of MbS. The overhaul of the Kingdom's powerful security apparatus has enabled the repression of those who speak out, while others look on in astonishment as foreign performers take to the stage in spectacles designed to enhance the royals' image.

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