SAUDI TRANSFORMATION

 

Dancing is in, dissent is out as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince transforms his country

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Dancing is in, dissent is out as Saudi Arabia’s crown prince transforms his country

Singers performing on stage at a crowded music festival

Singers perform at a Soundstorm music festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.(Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

BY NABIH BULOSSTAFF WRITER 

DEC. 25, 2022 2 AM PT

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JEDDAH, Saudi Arabia — Standing in a maelstrom of swirling smoke and spotlights, Nouf Sufyani, the 29-year-old Saudi DJ better known as Cosmicat, sang along to Fatboy Slim’s “Right Here, Right Now.” She looped a snippet of the melody, letting the tension build before grabbing the mic and shouting to the cheering, dancing crowd: “Right here, right now — we’re Jeddah!”

It was the second night of Balad Beast, a two-day rave held earlier this month in Saudi Arabia’s second-largest city. The event was part of Soundstorm, a series of state-backed music festivals that began in 2019 and has since brought dozens of international artists to the country, including Bruno Mars and top-flight DJ Solomun.

Fawaz Utaibi, a 26-year-old English-language teacher, was excited to cut loose in Jeddah’s Balad, or Old Town, where an animated image of a giant cat’s head was projected onto the coral-stone buildings, nodding to the beat. Five years ago, “there was nothing to do here — the only reason you’d come was to buy traditional goods. Now you can celebrate,” he said.

Concertgoers at a music festival hold up cellphones and wear glow in the dark glasses.

Concertgoers at the Soundstorm music festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Dec. 9. (Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

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“Look around you. It sounds crazy: We’re partying in Saudi.”

Balad Beast is of a piece with Vision 2030, the all-out transformation of Saudi Arabia that the country’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, launched soon after he became heir to the throne in 2017. Its aims include diversifying Saudi Arabia’s oil-dependent economy and revamping its long-held image from a puritanically religious kingdom inaccessible to outsiders into a regional entertainment mecca.

The campaign’s main target is the two-thirds of the Saudi populace who are under the age of 35. The crown prince — himself only 37 — wants his peers to live, work and play at home rather than leave for jobs abroad or spend billions of dollars every year seeking out fun in places such as Dubai or Manama, the capital of Bahrain.

A man in robes passes a line of flags and waves.

Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, wants to diversify his country’s economy, including by turning it into an entertainment hub.(Kay Nietfeld / DPA)

The swiftness of the changes in Saudi Arabia has residents long used to its sleepy social life blinking in shock, like Dorothy stepping out of her sepia-toned Kansas house into Technicolor Oz. December’s calendar alone featured Balad Beast, the Red Sea International Film Festival, the Dakar Rally, the Riyadh Season — a monster lineup of concerts and sporting events — and the Boulevard Riyadh, a sort of world fair in the Saudi capital with pavilions showcasing foreign countries, including the U.S., which was represented by a chunk of interstate highway asphalt, a Magnolia Bakery and a police cruiser.

Supporters of the crown prince, who was recently named prime minister, praise him as the only leader with the chutzpah and authority to push through such a profound makeover of Saudi society. Here at Jeddah’s Balad Beast, in a scene unthinkable only a few years ago, Utaibi stood sipping a mocktail alongside a female friend who wore no hijab; other revelers sported jeans, shorts, crop tops, even mesh shirts. Electronic music blasted from billboard-sized speakers as a female performer belted out tunes onstage. Men and women danced together.

“Unless you grew up here, you wouldn’t understand the magnitude of what we’re doing,” said Ahmad Ammary, 44, the DJ and music producer who developed Soundstorm.

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Men dancing with glow sticks at a nighttime music festival.

Men dance with glow sticks at an outdoor rave in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.(Tasneem Alsultan / For The Times)

But critics say the strides in social liberalization have been accompanied by the cementing of a politically illiberal climate with a single person in charge: the crown prince. They liken his rule to the more centralized Arab dictatorships in Egypt and Syria, in a break with the more consultative system the kingdom used to employ.

They also accuse the crown prince of using extreme measures to neutralize anyone opposed to or even insufficiently enthusiastic about his policies, such as Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed by a Saudi hit team at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in October 2018. The U.S. has concluded that the crown prince ordered the brutal slaying, which he denies.

Last summer, two Saudi women were sentenced to 34 and 45 years in prison essentially for expressing dissent on social media, according to human rights organizations, which noted that the sentences were the longest ever handed to activists. Saudi officials said the cases go beyond social media activity but did not elaborate.

The political atmosphere is such that, in interviews, people willing to criticize government policies — saying that tourism revenue could never supplant oil proceeds, or that spending on flashy entertainment projects ignores more pressing infrastructure problems — refused to do so on the record. On Twitter, the social network of choice in Saudi Arabia, previously critical accounts have been suspended or deleted or now stick to safe topics.https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-12-25/saudi-social-transformation-entertainment-political-crackdown