Mohammed bin Salman’s decisions have earned him legions of admirers worldwide – and even more enemies from across the political spectrum.

Do you remember that time when it was intellectually fashionable to pin the blame for the rise of violent extremism and spread of religious intolerance on the Wahhabi clerics of Saudi Arabia?

That trend greatly accelerated with the al-Qaeda assault on America of September 11, 2001 – when 15 out of the 19 attackers turned out to be Saudi nationals – and reached its peak with the emergence of Islamic State, or ISIS, in Iraq and Syria.

These days, however, from India to Indonesia and from Bosnia to Bangladesh, Muslim populations are at a significantly lower risk of exposure to the strict Saudi version of Sunni Islam, regarded by many as inimical to the syncretic Islam of these countries.

The reason is simple: The Saudi Arabia of 2018 bears little resemblance to the kingdom that was both an ideological begetter of the 9/11 attacks and a target of repeated al-Qaeda attacks starting from 2002.

On the face of it, the kingdom just keeps on doing the same old same old: it recently arrested two women’s rights activists, eliciting criticism from Canadian officials, which in turn has prompted Riyadh to retaliate by freezing new trade dealings and suspending diplomatic relations with Ottawa.

However, the consensus view of Middle East scholars is that after many decades, the promotion of Islam, the Wahhabi version of the faith to be precise, has ceased to be a crucial source of legitimacy for the House of Saud.

“We will not waste 30 years of our lives in dealing with extremist ideas. We will destroy them today,” the ambitious Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, better known by his initials MbS, said last year.

“We only want to go back to what we were: moderate Islam that is open to the world, open to all the religions.”

Admirers and detractors

Statements like these from the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia have won him legions of admirers worldwide.

But they have earned him even more enemies from across the political spectrum.

The critics of MbS differ widely on the necessity, substance and pace of social progress in Saudi Arabia, yet they all appear to agree on one thing: that the ongoing reforms are a thinly veiled power grab by the 32-year-old.

They are presumably conscious of the potentially salutary domestic and global effects of the changes being introduced in almost every sphere of Saudi life.

Still, every category of critics seems to have their own complaints about the policies and vision of MbS.

At one end are the conservative religious leaders and Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamist activists who live in Saudi Arabia and are largely silent since they are either in jail or have stopped willy-nilly airing their opinions publicly.

Despite the culture of self-censorship inside the kingdom, comments on Twitter and Facebook as well as opinion pieces point to a stark gap between the world-view of MbS and that of supporters of political Islam in the wider Middle East.

On the other end of the spectrum are critics who ventilate their complaints principally through the oped pages of anti-Saudi media outlets as well as American and British dailies.

Their argument essentially is that MbS has not earned their support because he doesn’t fit the conventional Western definition of a progressive liberal (eg Barack Obama, Justin Trudeau) and that his rapid accumulation of power has turned Saudi Arabia into an autocracy.

Ammunition for critics

For proof, the critics say, look no farther than the arrests in November 2017 of several Saudi royal family members, ministers and businessmen as part of a stated drive against corruption and self-enrichment by the Saudi elite.

Or the short-lived resignation, also in November, of the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, during a visit to Riyadh, apparently under pressure from his hosts.

Or the rumors of acquisition by MbS of a chateau in France, a yacht and a Leonardo da Vinci painting for hundreds of millions of dollars while imposing austerity measures at home.

Against this backdrop, the critics are adamant that the socio-religious and economic changes being introduced by MbS should not be mistaken for genuine reforms.

The reality, of course, is not so black and white.

“The generation gap between today’s Saudi and Emirati princes and the previous rulers cannot simply be measured in years or taste for paintings,” a Gulf-Asia relations researcher based in West Asia, who did not wish to be identified, told Sharnoff’s Global Views.

Pointing to the lifting in December of Saudi Arabia’s 35-year ban on cinemas, the curtailment of power of the religious police, and the sidelining of senior Muslim scholars who used to set official religious policy, the researcher said: “MbS is in a hurry not just to modernize Saudi society, but also to build popular support for a dynamic, confident and tolerant Islam. For better or worse, this means little sympathy for Islamists and other kinds of activists.”

Women driving drama

The mutual antipathy between the pro- and anti-MbS camps was vividly on display in the run-up to the lifting on June 24 of Saudi Arabia’s longstanding ban on women driving in the kingdom.

In September last year, on the same day the government announced that women would be allowed to drive, the royal court had issued a decree ordering women’s rights campaigners not to speak to the media.

But in a move that took the Middle East by surprise, Saudi officials on May 15 began detaining female activists, some of whom had been campaigning for women’s rights and abolishing the guardian system and to get the ban on women driving lifted since 1990.

The arrests prompted a wave of outrage from international human-rights groups and activists, who interpreted them as part of an effort by MbS to control the message.

This view was echoed by Mona Eltahawy, who put it this way in her New York Times column: “Saudi Arabia’s highest authorities apparently want to make it clear that it was not the courageous advocacy of those feminists that led to this moment … but rather the grace of a crown prince engaged in ferocious revisionism.”

And writing in the Middle East Eye, Madawi al-Rasheed, a British academic of Saudi origin, wondered if “the vague but loaded language the Saudi press utilized to justify the arrests – including references to ‘treason’ – reflects a desire to mobilize Saudis against an imaginary foreign enemy.”

Yet, for all the hue and cry, on the appointed day women in Saudi Arabia were granted the right to drive as promised. And four of the detained female activists have been temporarily released.

Any ordinary day

Except for the banner headlines in newspapers, slick videos on social media platforms and special sections in news websites, Saudi Arabia’s momentous day passed off just like any ordinary day.

Since then, according to a Wall Street Journal report, “tens of thousands of Saudi women have signed up for lessons at the few women-only driving schools, creating long waiting lists. More schools are expected to open soon.”

A study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, the professional-services network, estimates that by 2020 about three million women are expected to be in the driver’s seat in the kingdom.

If this is how history happens, with an unremarkable day (in this case, June 24) made remarkable by a landmark event, then Saudi authorities should next consider declaring a formal end to the flow of petrodollars into the web of Islamic charities and cultural bodies that have been viewed as fronts for Salafi proselytizing worldwide since 1967.

That was the year Saudi appeals for Islamic unity began to find a receptive audience around the world, mainly because Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War and capture of East Jerusalem, the site of Islam’s third holiest shrine, came as a rude awakening for global Muslim consciousness.

Sensing an opening against Nasser’s secular Arab nationalism, King Faisal, who in 1962 established the Muslim World League, switched to the language of religious slogans and in 1969 founded the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which today comprises 57 member states.

Years later, diplomatic cables from Riyadh released by WikiLeaks in 2015 confirmed the extent of Saudi financing of mosques, Islamic centers and preachers spread across Europe, Africa and Asia, which acted as a tool of its global soft-power strategy.

In New Delhi, 140 Muslim preachers were listed as on the Saudi consulate’s payroll, according to the cables, cited in a 2016 New York Times report, “How Kosovo was turned into fertile ground for ISIS.”

Possibility of backlash

That was then.

In 2015, in his first year as king, MbS’s father Salman bin Abdulaziz abolished 12 public bodies including the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, which was in charge of religious diplomacy.

Since then, the coordination among ministries – foreign, interior and Islamic affairs – and government departments – the intelligence service and the office of the king – that undergirded Saudi missionary activity abroad has presumably been scaled back drastically, if not ended.

While there is perhaps no easy way to undo the decades-long impact of Saudi Salafi proselytizing on the societies and political culture of, say, Afghanistan and Pakistan, the hope is that, from now on, economically weak Islamic countries will be spared its allegedly insidious influence.

In theory, at least, MbS could moderate the Wahhabi religious dogmas further by launching a scheme to retrain the religious establishment and send out a new generation of clerics to emphasize Muslim communities’ local sense of identity and the diversity of Islamic practices.

In reality, though, every Saudi king or heir apparent probably knows instinctively how far to push their luck. Indeed, a conservative blowback along the lines of the events of 1979 and the early 1990s cannot be totally ruled out.

Writing in The Caravan, an online periodical of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Cole Bunzel, who studies Sunni jihadism, said the fear of such a backlash may have led to the round-up of the female activists in the weeks before women were officially permitted to drive in Saudi Arabia.

“The arrests are an attempt to maintain the balance between social progressives and conservatives – between Westernisers and guardians of virtue,” he wrote, adding presciently that “more such efforts may well be in the offing.”

As if on cue, Saudi Arabia arrested the two women’s rights activists at the center of the diplomatic feud with Canada, barely weeks after reportedly detaining an Islamic scholar – seen as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood – and three of his sons for publishing a book critical of the royal family.

To sum up, MbS is arguably the most daring modernizer the Arabian Peninsula has seen in living memory. But he is not immune from the political risks that such a role entails.

And no matter which labels best defines him, he is neither a Western liberal nor a reckless reformer.

Like it or lump it, that’s the reality.

Arnab Neil Sengupta is an independent journalist and Middle East affairs commentator. Read other stories by Arnab.