The news from Saudi Arabia is deeply dismaying. Government authorities have arrested seven women and three men—all of them well-known advocates for women’s rights—and are holding them in secret locations without access to counsel. The 10 were arrested on May 15 in Riyadh on charges of—according to one Saudi newspaper—“using human rights as a pretext to violate the country’s systems.”
Friends of individual rights had hoped for better from the Saudi Arabia of Mohammed bin Salman. The new crown prince—MbS, as he’s known—has held his position for slightly less than a year, but all indications are that it’s he who holds the power of the monarchy rather than his aged father, King Salman bin Abdulaziz.
MbS has openly championed women’s rights—not a Western doctrine of sexual equality but a recognition of women as rights-bearing subjects. He has spoken against the kingdom’s “guardianship laws,” laws forbidding women from traveling without male accompaniment. The custom “doesn’t go back to the time of the Prophet Muhammad,” he said in a recent interview. “In the 1960s women didn’t travel with male guardians. But it happens now, and we want to move on it and figure out a way to treat this that doesn’t harm families and doesn’t harm the culture.” Saudi women are now permitted to attend soccer matches. On June 24 the kingdom is (or at least was) scheduled to rescind the law forbidding women from driving automobiles.
And yet several of the women arrested and detained are famous in Saudi Arabia precisely for speaking out against the guardianship laws. The arrests were carried out, moreover, by the country’s internal security agency, which reports to the crown prince.
Western commentators and NGOs have been quick to condemn MbS and suggest that his moves toward openness and reform must be empty gestures. It’s right to hold up Saudi Arabia’s leadership to criticism and to temper hope with realism, but it was always naïve to expect a premodern kingdom to ape Western cultural mores of the 21st century in the space of one year. Backlashes were inevitable, and the crown prince is burdened with a very likely impossible task—that of weaning Saudi Arabia from its reliance on oil revenue, modernizing its economy, reforming its religious and cultural dictates, cutting off payments to extremists around the globe, countering Iranian expansionism, and somehow avoiding assassination. Even so, the arrests of innocents for manifestly political reasons is an outrage and an injustice. We hope they’ll be freed unharmed at the earliest possible time.
On that last score, rumors that MbS has been injured or assassinated—he hasn’t been seen in public for several weeks—are swirling around the globe’s social media. We’ve inquired but have heard nothing reliable. Until we know more, our hopes are with the crown prince and his stated intentions for Saudi Arabia, and our prayers are with the men and women unjustly arrested.
