The new Saudi state, speeding onto the highway (at its own pace)

The series of purges, still unexpected and adjoined with questions and estimates on the course it will set the country on (and not without the almost customary parallell to the Night of the Long Knives) followed swifter than most experts had deemed themselves audacious to foresee, and have unquestionably served to reinforce the transition as much expected as already speeding, which will exchange the fragile balance existing since the death of old man Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1953 - the year of the death of Stalin, the Rosenbergs, Dylan Thomas, Sergey Prokofyev and Mary, Queen of the Empire in 1910-1936, mind you - for something yet more fragile but purposely stronger and more fitted to ever-changing but now pressing times. Its most distinguishing feature mirrors that undergone by the first Caliphate following the death of Ali ibn Abi Talib, or (to coin a phrase) its repeal and replace by a monarchy of Mu'awiyah's line and the Banu Umayyah - an elitist clan who in the Prophet's days had been at best sceptic, and zealous at most when battling or torturing the pious - and the transfer of rule by consensus by a brokering oligarchy and a careful balance of power for the supreme domination of one man's loins (ambiguously cheered by some heralding it as a step in a long march towards an open and equal society).

So far, the reforms undertaken by father-son in a too-open and yet closed collegial relationship have met with little resistance, and its swift boldness - from the death of Abdullah the power-broker to the ascension of the Sudairi as the epicenter of the inexorable and long-expected shift to a third generation, and then the straight line from, all in less than thirty full moons - show the paradoxic drive for cohesive survival among the ranks of undoubtedly jealous brothers, nephews and cousin, now cast out into the cold (a deadly realisation, but in its most literal sense and by the joint sensations of ostracism) but which are all hallmarked by a common realisation of fear. No bulwark of resistance is likely to emerge soon, or before Salman is dead or dying. After that, it will be a short timespan - in the terms defining the workings of this family and the economic system that upholds it - before the new order is established within.

Seven brothers, father superimposed. The irony of the tribalist, bedouin culture which spawned the might and progeny of Abdulaziz Ibn Saud is its necessary insistence of matrilineal bonds. The Sudairi Seven, defined by an ambitious and insistent mother contriving cooperation within a competitive family and the cohesive power of asabiyyah, Ibn Khaldun's definition for the arid-climate phenomenon of extended self-preservation through group solidarity, which among the Saudi clearly exists in a multitude. 

For a multitude of factors could bring about not only the overthrow of the Al Saud family, but the destruction of the Saudi state before its centenary in 2032. The Arab-Persian cold war with an Iran entering a center role on the Middle Eastern stage and with all the resources to keep such a place for the future - even as its own system is facing challenges just as serious, which can best be boiled down to the "population clock", and increasing political emancipation of a post-1979 generation not too keen on and impious against the conclusions laid out half a century ago by architect of its own system, and the "nuclear clock" heralding an inevitable confrontation with its neighbours, if not the established nuclear quinquevirate - the Saudi monarchy have embarked on a rivalry since nearly forty years, with calamitous fallout outside the frontiers of these competitors for the mantle of the prophet (the continuous hold and solidifying of Israeli rule over Jerusalem making the Saudi prospect of a Caliphate impossible, beyond its quasi-form of "Custodianship of the Two Holy Mosques") seems bound to clash in open conflict over the fate of the region. The dress rehearsal in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, now Lebanon and - not for much longer - Iraq have been ongoing since years, on all these fronts to the apparent benefit of the plague of Khomeinist Ja'afari Shi'ah expansionism, with its altering faces. With the most powerful armaments in the region per capita, Saudi Arabia have yet awe-striking powers to unleash (hence the denigrating use of "dress rehearsal" for what would better be termed in squeals as cries of bloody murder) but which may just as well turn against them in the event of an uprising. Just as matters started to look underway, or at least under control, and the dead spirit of consensus fitted for euthanasia and succession by a new and just as innovative order as the bedouin pan-tribalist kingdom, or the ulema-and-oil system once was.

In the struggle to into modernity and to best define it, with past and present already crumbling, Salman's agnatic ascendance may have placed a firm lock on the march towards progress, however defined. Hereditary monarchy, while rightly defined by Thomas Paine as equally absurd as a hereditary doctor or hereditary mathematician (though he equally gets the point about both the values of monarchy and hereditary qualities, a doctor or mathematician in Paine's day being far more likely to be the son of a doctor or mathematician than any other profession) sports a brand of continuity in which a state without a nation increasingly finds itself wanting, and which may be its own alternative to a democratic revolution; which will be as likely to keep the Saudi family as regalia as the August 1792 uprising did the Bourbons, or its own fully-fledged, capacious, and undoubtedly cruel Wahhabi Salafist paraphrase of the Jomhuri-ye-Eslami. Barring near-certain foreign intervention, the last may actually come to pass. The first, the promise of the Jasmin spring, is sure not to, even in the context of the most beneficial American intervention or continued Western treatment with many stripes, both hard-green economic, rainbow cultural-relativist or (brazenly) anti-Jihadist hopes.

The now departed, already so concerned. Meritocracy looms in the background while the one and future king has smugly claimed his seat in the halls of power.

For what might be established within may well be weltered from without. The Islamic Republic, deadly foe as much as alternative to the Saudi system for nearly four decades has for that same period, after accomplishing its own Shah Mat in an alleged revolution - in a move which must have stirred something in the ulema south of the strait and (certainly) kindled some of their hopes enough to reevaluate the existing model - strategically extended its influence with a chessplayer's mood for patience and quiet indulgence in opponents' mistakes. Meanwhile Saudi Arabia, or Salman's Arabia, has spent the period - verily enough to make empires rise or fall or both - squandering resources over an endless set of causes that have maintained retardation and caused upheaval at home and abroad, and whose legacy which must rightly be given the same association with international Jihadi terrorism as that of the president with its two irreplaceable and broken victims.

The process of reform of an allegedly ossified and hermit kingdom - by some alleged progressives termed "revolution" - now underway will thus be the foundation by which the future of the country will stand or fall. The social and economic reforms delayed, as the inevitable question of succession, until the very last hour are already underway, with a number of high-rising, groundbreaking and unrealistic (but given the desperation equally possible) investment projects designed to burn oil to move ahead to a more refined model of sustainment - a return to bedouin ways being apparently impossible after a mere 80 years, thus yet again confirming Ibn Khaldun's thesis - and emancipate, at a pace designed to put Slomobius to shame, the Saudi woman within the framework of the domination simultaneously strengthened, and even fit to turn lambasting critics into all but admirers of this prospect (but so did the old and very dynamic order of Singapore, not entirely successfully but disgustingly so, by the most shallow but almost admirable appropriation of identity politics).

Laying their hands on the globe. But some are already retracting. The new Pharaoh appears prescient, donning his constant calm. The First Lady seems unmoved by the juxtaposition of the family and industry so credited with changing the face of Manhattan with the ones held to blame for scarring it. The President, above all, dons the visage of the gambling table as he, careful as never before, fondles the palantír. As the wizard said, one never knows who is watching... or listening.

The most dramatic bow may yet be announced, and may (as predicted by Caspian) involve the separation of the two titles held since the 1980s, wherein Salman will retain the title of Khadim while King Muhammad, the first Al Saud of that name and title to reign, will rule as political incarnation of Ibn Saud's legacy. For this reason, the abandonment of the ecclesiastic title would be considerably more dramatic than its adoption, which was a mere formality stolen from the Ottoman Sultans and, supposedly, a Kurd known as Saladin. In the Saudi system, for all its deep-founded hypocrisy and ill-aged instinct of bargaining with the times, separation would mean the historic establishment of a new order: a socially contracted Leviathan rather than theocratic incarnation of both the secular and ecclesiastical.

The fallout of this symbolism, especially if it will mean a break with the alliance of the Wahhabi ulema and the Saudi bloodline, older than the United States, cannot be overestimated. The social and economic reforms, drastic and altering what remains of Saudi religious orthodoxy whatever their contents and aspirations, will put equal pressure to the uneasy bonds between pragmatists and traditionalists within the ruling elite. Once they break, a society bound together by such consensus and welded only by stark brutality and oil wealth, may have to rely entirely on the latter to survive. Which, in all likelihood, it cannot. Fiscal and economic reform, including phasing out the oil industry - while singing a hymn of salvation for the rest of the world - is both corrosive and absolutely vital. The platinum key out of a suffocating vault, resting immersed in a vat of acid.

Will it succeed? Unlike the lock held by the Persian-Arab oligopoly on the oil market innovation (unlikely to be rivalled by a remerging Bolivarian Venezuela, the actor most well placed to profit from it) innovations merrily recited, and now tested, as the way of the future; technology, IT and financial services, tourism are frail to other sorts of competition, and will mean higher standards regarding the conditions of an already-dying third Saudi state. While changing social patterns will predictably be accepted as a reverse carrot, spurring calls for further incitement, lack of civil rights, a constitution and an even rubber-stamp elected legislature will further the clash between crucial reform and outside expectations, as will continued involvement by Salman's Arabia in regional wars.

This is a lever which the King may incline to be pulled against the Iranians, and whoever is to emerge as the next Rahbar from among the cool-minded turbans already self-empowered and long-since plotting across the strait. But each and every bomb dropped in cause of a waiting democide against an Arab neighbour, every riyal spent in prolonging the Syrian cause - the Iraqi one being sordidly lost, to the detriment of anyone remotely professing the Sunni dogma within its borders and his grandson - will hurt the cause of modernisation and force Muhammad to set a course between waging the old King Fahd agenda for regional geopolitical domination, reinvented on a new and concerning morass with a burgeoned arsenal including Swedish arms, or that of his eastern neighbours and make his country a middle ground between or juxtaposition of a mystical Lawrentine Arabia, the technocratic-metropolitan tyranny of Lee's and son's burgeoning city-state, and a futuristic counterpart of antebellum Beirut - and eventual scenery for the next Star Wars trilogy. As of present both these spices have been cast into the mortar of "reform", now to be molded and formed in a new dish at the cook's discretion, and the pestle swifter spun and brought down harder by the day. The growing prospects of reconciliation with Turkish interests against the Greater Shaytan, as well as increasing Indian, Chinese and African capital made available will likewise provide much-needed support on both these paths, but only with certain promises made and kept, certain standards affirmed, certain legal requisites securely established.

Dusk steals upon Riyadh... for a day, or a century about to close. As Ibn Wahhab might have asked while standing at this spot and beheld the desert; What could possibly replace it? If this sight would have been a fright to the first scions of Saud and Wahhab, I can imagine far worse.

What highway this process, eventually inexorable, will put the country on, whether it will lead out of the desert, and how well the Islamic Republic will be able to take advantage to press the present conflict within the frontiers of the kingdom (rather than the self-confidently stated opposite) and burning at its doorstep before its own clock runs close to midnight is a question of time. As for now - as before - Muhammad stands against looming and impossible odds but he has the initiative, the lever that is a country of his own, the will to act. Nonwithstanding, and in the same breath it must be said, countless have been given the lever. Few have equalled the strength of the messenger and, considerably more crucial, his Rāshidūn, and few the follies (Byzantine, one might even say, if not so sassy) of Constantinople and Ctesiphon. Measured in success, the exploits of Erdoğan may be more admired than accursed, but the Iranian geopolitical strategy seems as grandiose in its perfection as a well-played round, not least by the other players, of the old game.

To counter this, the captain - sole at the rudder, now or shortly - of the fourth Saudi state will need more than a less dogmatic and greener banner of pure audacity. While his grandfather's blood, the last to act so strongly may be in him (and even his best uncle's, perhaps) this is a different time, and this a calf untested against the trials which have vested him, rather than by which he have been entitled. Paine's observation of absurdity echoes the somber observation of the first regal Muslim family, of the society and structures which were encapsulated by the faith rather than overthrown by it, by its echo regarding a hereditary prophethood. The first Madinah and the sonless, cobbled construct which followed could succeed because it was - in the fully un-ironic sense - aristocratic in a part of the world where, as the daughterly heirs of the prophet found, only the best prevailed. Where the creed proposed, and taken until the very edges of the kingdom, by the Zaydi-Houthi rebellion would have taken the first Muslim state remains unexplored, but upon such a noxious premise - to me and to old man of the desert Al Wahhab - rests the future of if not the entirety of Sunnidom the present tenant-occupant of its primeval landmarks, its moral and spiritual bedrock already challenged, and as of yet, this quasi-Caliphal authority of which nothing has been conceived to rival it that could conceivably could be born and actually live. Not yet, that we know. All that is known is that the old must finally die, and this order has - like its nominal steward - lasted too long to craft the new. In other words, the great game is on.

Comfortable at the center stage, no questions asked. But how much the prince that was promised can take in from the world he wants to mimic, if not surpass, will be judged before he comes into his throne, and the fall will be his if he fails to deliver. For the sake of those deemed fit to be his subjects, if not for his own, one is sordidly forced to recall then-President Obama's words of well-wishes and genuine hopes for the success of his impending successor.