MBS is far and beyond the most disruptive royal we've seen in the kingdom in a very long time, and it's worth noting that he's still very young, and a millennial, who grew up addicted to Facebook, playing American video games, and obsessively trading stocks. His extreme style underlies everything from his unprecedented steps to crack down on the Wahhabi clerical establishment's influence inside the kingdom, to the chilling and extreme pursuit of Jamal Khashoggi abroad, to such splashy development projects as NEOM.
The Wahhabi clerics are generally interested in Wahhabi dawa, or call to their strain of Islam (the source of my book's title), which is expressed both in domestic laws governing Saudi citizens' daily lives and in foreign proselytization. The Wahhabi clerics' influence inside the kingdom has decidedly contracted under MBS, who has single-handedly made rulings curbing the religious police's powers and jailed many opposition clerics.
Joe Biden has gotten us back to "normal" in the Middle East quagmire by bombing Syria -- more specifically Iranian-backed militias. Do you see a specific project at work here? A coming war with Iran? How does it relate, if at all, to dawa plans you describe in The Call ?
I think it's too soon to forecast what President Biden's overarching foreign policy is, but his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, was the most overtly skeptical of the US-Saudi relationship of any president in recent decades -- he once called them our 'so-called allies' and, in one speech in Indonesia (where he spent a few years of his childhood), called out what he perceived as the deleterious effect of Saudi proselytization on the country's religious traditions.
President Biden came to power after historic levels of popular skepticism of the US-Saudi relationship, which had been slowly building for years and then really boiled over with the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. So he potentially has more room to negotiate the terms of our relationship while he's in office than any previous president. He'll certainly be a chillier partner than President Trump, who decided to make Saudi his first foreign trip as president, signed enormous arms deals with them, and so on. Regarding the Saudi proselytization of Wahhabism that was the theme of my book, several other elected officials have explicitly called attention to the phenomenon in recent years, including Sens. Bernie Sanders and Chris Murphy, which felt like a major turning point in the public discourse about the kingdom.
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