Absolute monarchies in these post-modern times are an irritating incongruity. And if those monarchies come in the image of brash young princes unable or unwilling to respect people or acknowledge their own fallibility, it is the civilized world beyond their frontiers which feels the pressure, and of course the inevitable embarrassment.
And that precisely, is the image we have today of Saudi Arabia, a kingdom warped in time and cheerfully reluctant to step out of the Middle Ages.
Its oil keeps it alive and hubristic. Its friends in powerful places, and Washington is one such place, give it a niche in the global scheme of things for reasons of what are misleadingly labeled as geo-politics.
Time has been moving ahead and the world has gone by, but Saudi Arabia remains an incongruous affair. It is a kingdom named after a family. It presides over a country in the name of Islam when Islam was and is a legitimate rebellion against feudalism in all its forms. Nothing in Islam sanctions rule by kings and emperors.
The head of the Saud dynasty, in the person of the king, is the custodian of Islam’s holy places. That again is an incongruity. In a world where places of religious worship remain timeless in their sanctity and in their remembrance of God, the Saudis have thrown such ideas to the winds in their drive for tourism around the holy Kaaba.
All around this sacred symbol of Islam are superstructures -- hotels, offices, shopping malls and what have you. The monarchy has been busy re-branding the Islamic faith in its own opinionated fashion. Material prosperity in conjunction with choking Wahhabism has grown, and continues to grow, as a menace for the world. The Saudi king and his endless clan of royals do not care.
And yet, finally, they are beginning to feel the heat naturally consequent upon their decades-long arrogance. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, so thought the power-driven young man named Muhammad bin Salman, would be as routine as the beheading carried out in the kingdom after Friday prayers every week.
The callow young prince, a mere 32, apparently convinced himself that if he could confine his own relatives within the resplendent suites of the Ritz Carlton as a way of preventing them from challenging his consolidation of power, if he could misbehave with Canada and get away with it, pouncing on a respected journalist from his own country and doing away with him would be a mere fall of an autumn leaf.
No one would notice.
Everyone has noticed. The medievalism which has for generations underlined the Saudi monarchy has now acquired a fresh new form of barbarity through the murder of a good, courageous intellectual within the precincts of a diplomatic mission, its own.
Fifteen men flew darkly into Istanbul, lay in wait for Khashoggi, and swooped on him as he entered the place. Horror went to work, with one of the men dismembering the journalist’s corpse. The kingdom denied its culpability in the crime. The crown prince feigned ignorance. The consul general in Istanbul stealthily fled. All of them knew, and know, what they did to Khashoggi. But the bare-faced lies went on.
The kingdom is today a portent of danger to the rest of the world. It not only picks off dissidents it needs to eliminate or put away in desert dungeons; it also picks fights with self-respecting countries around it. It would love to see the destruction of Iran.
Qatar is a bright instance of Saudi malicious intent to strangulate a society. Fighter jets take off from bases in Islam’s holy land to rain down bombs on helpless Muslims in Yemen. The monarchy looks away from the blood which flows on the ground. It remains indifferent to the sudden death which comes to men, women and children in that hapless land.
The crown prince commits the outrage of abducting the prime minister of Lebanon and thinks nothing of the inviolability of international law. He is the law. He commands the military; he upends diplomacy in his haughty belief that nothing will touch him and the land his ancestors commandeered long ago and claimed it for themselves.
He sends his younger sibling, untutored in foreign affairs, to Washington as ambassador. He has little patience with women clamouring for change and locks them up. Dissidence, of the sort Khashoggi epitomized, is a sin and must be squashed underfoot.
Arabia, a land rich in tradition since time immemorial, cringes in the grip of the Saud clan.
The sheer insensitivity to life beyond the palace, the absolute disdain for civilization the monarchy demonstrates day after day is a blot on these present times.
The American politician Lindsey Graham speaks for many around the world: Mohammed bin Salman has got to go.
And how much longer before the sacred land of Islam, before the landscape that is the legacy of the Prophet of Islam, sees the back of a monarchy which is, yes, an incongruity in our times?
Syed Badrul Ahsan is a journalist.
