David Rundell > Quotes

“Early in 2017, the Minister of Islamic Affairs, Saleh Al al-Sheikh, hosted a dinner at his home in Riyadh for the Committee of Senior Scholars, during which Mohammed bin Salman outlined his plans for economic and social reform. The prince told the religious scholars that economic development was crucial to the kingdom’s future but could not advance without social liberalization. He assured them that Islam and their role as its guardians would always be respected in Saudi Arabia but insisted that some things would have to change and that their support was both needed and expected.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The entire world saw Mohammed bin Salman kneel and kiss the hand of his deposed cousin, promising to always seek his advice. Mohammed bin Naif shook his younger cousin’s hand and swore allegiance to him as the new crown prince. No new deputy crown prince was named then—or has been since. The following month an entirely new security agency, reporting directly to the king through the Royal Diwan and Mohammed bin Salman, was created. Known as the Presidency for State Security, it took over nearly all police and internal intelligence work”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Another factor in Al Saud cohesiveness has been the fact that aged kings never stayed in power too long. In fairly rapid succession they handed over power to another brother from a different branch of the family. It paid to wait your turn rather than rock the boat. That incentive to cooperate is no longer present as Mohammed bin Salman could easily be king for the next fifty years.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“When King Abdulaziz died in 1953, there were no universities in Saudi Arabia.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The SCCC wasted no time making its presence felt. Within hours of its creation, General al-Howairini efficiently conducted a wide-scale series of detentions unprecedented in Saudi history. Those taken to Riyadh’s five-star Ritz Carlton Hotel included eleven princes, four serving ministers, dozens of former ministers, deputy ministers, and prominent businessmen.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Having been in government all his life, Salman was well aware of Saudi Arabia’s structural economic problems and administrative inefficiencies. He had watched Qatar and the United Arab Emirates develop more rapidly than Saudi Arabia. He saw talented, educated young Saudis moving to Dubai, New York, and London. Above all, he recognized that the long-running partnership of brothers managing the kingdom could not last much longer. Preserving the dynasty would require a powerful and determined king who could both engineer the transition to third-generation leadership and diversify the country’s economy. Intending to rule as a reforming autocrat, Salman was looking for ideas—and his younger son, Mohammed, seemed to have some.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The scholars back the government not just to keep their jobs and salaries but also because the Saudi government gives them independence to promote conservative Islamic social values that maintain their influence in society.48 Ultimately, the senior ulama support the Al Saud because they see themselves not as leaders of an opposition but as respected and influential members of the establishment.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Within four years of ascending to the throne, King Salman has thus dramatically changed Saudi Arabia’s political structure. The old system—in which various senior princes ran independent, uncoordinated ministries and where senior technocrats were allied to one senior prince or another—has been dismantled. The king has appointed dozens of new judges and replaced every minister and military service chief, some more than once. Across the Saudi government, all senior technocrats now owe their position not to a variety of princely patrons but solely to the patronage of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“having won one a huge gamble when he had very little to lose, Abdulaziz became more conservative. Caution, careful calculation, and reconciliation with defeated opponents now became his signature tactics. After taking Riyadh, he always wanted the odds to be on his side—and, during the decades of near-constant campaigning and over fifty battles that it took him to create modern Saudi Arabia, they usually were.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Mordechai Abir noted, “[u]nlike the Shah’s Iran where only a small, self-indulgent upper middle class monopolized the country’s oil wealth, the Saudi regime prudently channeled it, however unevenly, to all Saudis.”14 These policies secured the allegiance of the country’s business community. They also created an economy that, although nominally based on market principles, was badly distorted, more distributive than productive, and could seldom compete globally in anything other than hydrocarbon-based products.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“When all the collateral branches of the family are added together, the Al Saud number well over 100,000. Far from being a small, isolated group like the Shah of Iran’s family, they comprise at least one half of one percent of the entire Saudi population and a much larger portion of the nation’s political, social, and economic elites.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Between 1975 and 1980, Saudi Arabia spent as much on building desalinization plants as it did on education.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The aftershocks of the Mecca siege within Saudi society were profound. Coinciding as it did with Iran’s Islamic Revolution, widespread rioting among the Saudi Shia, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the seizure of the Great Mosque by Sunni religious extremists severely unsettled the House of Saud. Their response was a dramatic shift towards a more conservative Islamic society as they energetically sought to keep their bargain with the ulama and prevent another Juhayman”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Vast oil reserves have created an unconventional economy that is more distributive than productive, and provides the population with a living standard totally divorced from their actual productivity. Unlike many Muslim countries, there is no talk in Saudi Arabia of reintroducing Islamic law because it never disappeared. All of this makes Saudi Arabia different, not only from the West but also from other Arab countries.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“On the day of King Abdullah’s death, King Salman appeared to resolve this difficult issue by appointing his nephew, the 55-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Naif or MBN to be the deputy crown prince and third in line of succession. This move to a third-generation prince was an historic event, which effectively ended the political hopes of Abdulaziz’s few remaining sons. Many in Riyadh believed that by making the transition to third-generation leadership while a second-generation king was still on the throne to supervise the process, King Salman had taken the most important step of his reign on his first day in office.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Abdulaziz and the Bedu lost the argument. Cox insisted on a line and drew it much further south than the new Sultan of the Nejd had hoped. However, as he was still receiving a substantial British subsidy of £60,000 a year, the Sultan was in no position to argue.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The Third Saudi State has been from its inception, an urban enterprise aimed at settling nomads, protecting settled populations, and promoting trade. Under King Abdulaziz, the political and religious unification of Saudi Arabia was closely associated with, and facilitated by, its economic integration.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“A great deal of original research, much of it conducted by Western-trained Saudi sociologists, went into finding out who joined al-Qaeda and what motivated them. The results, gathered from scores of interviews, made interesting reading. These Saudi terrorists were, for the most part, urban high-school graduates in their twenties from lower middle-class backgrounds. Most were unmarried and had jobs with steady, but modest, incomes. Most had been to Afghanistan or had relatives who had been on jihad abroad. They were motivated not by oppression at home but largely by events outside of Saudi Arabia, and what the sociologists called “humiliation rage.” Fueled by religious zeal, this boiled down to a three-part agenda: defend foreign Muslims who were being abused by non-Muslims; get the foreigners and their non-Islamic values out of Saudi Arabia; and overthrow the Al Saud, who were clearly aligned with the non-Muslim foreigners.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state whose legitimacy depended on the upholding of sharia law. In theory, the law and the scholars who interpreted it placed a check on the sultan’s executive authority. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 marked the end of the political system that had governed the Arab world for over a thousand years. First colonial governments and then newly independent, republican Arab regimes sought to replace Islamic institutions with foreign concepts such as elected legislatures, written legal codes, and secular court systems. Nearly everywhere in the Arab world, the ulama were marginalized. They became minor officials with no real political authority. Everywhere, that is, except Saudi Arabia—where there never was a colonial government or secular Arab Nationalist regime, and where the classical Islamic constitutional order in which executive power was counterbalanced by the scholars is to this day preserved in a still-recognizable fashion.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Mubarak of Kuwait sheltered the Al Saud because, like them, he had no time for the Al Rasheed of Ha’il,”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“It is worth remembering that in March 2015, Mohammed bin Salman was not the king of Saudi Arabia nor the crown prince or even the deputy crown prince. He was the newly appointed minister of defense. The experienced Saud al-Faisal, though ill, was still foreign minister. The popular view that 30-year-old Mohammed bin Salman recklessly took his country to war and that ten sovereign states, including Britain and the United States, blithely followed him, is a misreading of history. King Salman made the decision in order to stop the “Hezbollahization” of Yemen. Major Western powers supported the Saudis in order to prevent the expansion of Iranian influence into the Red Sea, especially in the strategically important Bab al-Mandeb strait, and to maintain Saudi support for then-ongoing nuclear negotiations with Iran.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“the British authorities in Iraq were becoming increasingly alarmed by these raids and Abdulaziz’s refusal, or inability, to control them. They built fortified border posts and sent out armed patrols. In 1927, the Royal Air Force began bombing the Ikhwan in Saudi territory. From the air it was often difficult to distinguish the Ikhwan from peaceful tribes, and many innocent people were killed.11 These operations were in many ways the 1920s equivalent of twenty-first century drone strikes, and unsurprisingly proved an embarrassment to Abdulaziz. Not only were the British putting his house in order for him but also, like Afghan leaders a century later, he faced angry protests when his people were killed by foreign bombs in their own homes.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“There were no princes in the RDA bureaucracy. Salman regularly warned employees that anyone caught embezzling would spend the rest of their life in prison,”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“investment rather than develop it. As a result of high land prices, most Saudis cannot afford their own home. After the 2011 Arab Spring unrest in neighboring countries, King Abdullah sought to address this longstanding social problem.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“The First Saudi State ceased to exist, but the surviving Al Saud learned two important strategic lessons: first, you must obtain modern military equipment and second, you can lose everything if you quarrel with the superpower of the day. King Salman, the current ruler, has not forgotten either of those lessons.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“In 1980, Jeddah was the largest city in Saudi Arabia; by 1990, Jeddah and Riyadh were roughly the same size. In 2020, Riyadh, with over seven million people, is the most populous city in the Arabian Peninsula, and distinctly larger”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“Only when they controlled all the levers of power and faced little effective resistance, did the king and his son strike out at corruption.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“As we have seen, succession—not fighting corruption—was the new king’s first order of business. Salman’s concentration of power was well planned, gradual, relentless, and successful.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“By 1960, Saudi pilots and Saudi princes were defecting to Cairo. Saudi Arabia was surrounded by secular, republican regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—all eager to see the monarchy’s downfall.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads

“MBS believed that recent Saudi kings had ceded too much authority to the ulama, technocrats, and tribes. He intended to reassert centralized control. He also intended to maintain Saudi predominance in the Arabian Peninsula and increase Saudi influence in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Implicitly, this meant competing with Iran while exploring co-existence and cooperation with Israel.”
― David Rundell, Vision or Mirage: Saudi Arabia at the Crossroads