Saudi Arabia and Iran: Riyadh Season vs. Mahsa Amini

Saudi Arabia and Iran are two regional powers in the Arab East or, in the Frankish expression, in the Middle East. The means of power for both components are fundamentally different. Saudi Arabia is the heart of the Sunni world, the home of the Two Holy Mosques and it is one of the largest oil exporters in the world. As for Iran, it is distinguished by its nationalist political influence, which has a religious aspect, and its ability to contain the largest Arab capitals, from Baghdad, through Beirut, Sana’a and Damascus, which turned it into a pivotal player in the Arab East.

Today, the Iranian regime is facing a strong popular uprising after the killing of the young Iranian woman of Kurdish origin, Mahsa Amini, at the hands of the religious police, which caused “human rights shops” in the West to defend Iranian women. This event complicated matters for the religious authorities in Tehran after the wave of arrests, the number of deaths on both sides, and the regime’s fear of the situation spiralling out of control. On the other hand, entertainment seasons begin in Riyadh, the capital of the Sunnis, which the ruler saw as an appropriate way to absorb the anger of the youth and prevent the formation of waves demanding rights and freedoms and rejecting tyranny.

Iran and the beginning of the end

The position of the Western media towards the eastern events is an important compass for understanding and evaluating the nature of the movement, as the Western

media outlets are supporting the Iranian protest movement, pretending, as usual, to support women’s and human rights. On the other hand, it is silent about the same repressive situation that prevails in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab dictatorships, and it rarely denounces it in the context of settling circumstantial diplomatic scores that keep evaporating quickly.

The Western media’s support for Iran’s protests achieves many gains for the West. On one hand, it strengthens its position as a defender of women’s rights and human rights, and reinforces the West’s image as an oasis of democracy and freedom in contrast to the savage, barbaric East. Then the West deludes the masses by claiming there is enmity between it and Iran, which is apparent in the nuclear file, which has been ongoing for almost half a century of negotiations, threats and auctions at the time when the Iraqi Tammuz reactor was bombed without warning, and in a matter of hours. Thirdly, the Western attack provides the Iranian regime with a powerful pretext to suppress the protests, betray the protesters, and portray them as Western agents hostile towards Islam, religion and the Islamic Revolution.

Everyone, beginning with the West itself, knows that it was never an “Islamic revolution”, but was a Persian revolution in Shia disguise that was specifically designed to get rid of the Shah’s regime and to destroy Islamic cities, or more precisely, Sunni cities in the Levant, the Gulf and Yemen in particular, and to prevent Islamic unity that might threaten the emerging settlement occupation in Palestine.

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It is true that the Iranian nuclear project has reached a point of no return. Instead, we see Iran arming the Russian army in full view of the great powers in the West, which does not lift a finger. This makes it likely that the world powers may seek to weaken the Iranian player from within without eliminating it through striking at its fragile legitimacy in the street, and then anticipating any sudden change that may occur at any time. Maintaining the backward medieval Iranian regime in this way makes it in dire need of international legitimacy, secretly or publicly, because the regime and its militias perform dangerous tasks for the global system, the most important of which may be threatening Sunni cities, destroying Arab capitals and creating a deep ideological conflict between Sunnis and Shias.

However, the mullahs’ regime did not realise that the global changes that the world has known and which have moved at an alarming speed through the digital explosion have created demands that no regime today can completely disregard because they will explode in its face one day. The religious police that are active in Iran have become a tool of an old era that can only cause an increase in the level of social tension and an explosive situation, as is happening today with the incident of Mahsa Amini. This will force the regime there to make deep and careful changes capable of absorbing the changes taking place without compromising the ideological capital that is the lifeline of the regime at home and abroad.

Saudi Arabia and escaping forward

In Saudi Arabia, the regime pre-empted social demands by abolishing the religious police or the group for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, and placed a large number of scholars and sheikhs in prisons, especially those who denounced the Land of the Two Holy Mosques heading towards Westernisation under the guise of entertainment. The entertainment seasons do not stop, and the country spends huge sums of money under new and shiny pretexts such as openness, liberation, modernity and other false slogans.

This openness does not include civil rights systems, nor the right to expression, freedom of information, publishing, thought, and political activity, as it is still one of the major sins that leads those who commit them to disappear behind the sun. So the regime chose to neglect and concede a number of ideological constants, such as women’s freedom of dress, mixing, and other things that are considered in the West, for example, as part of basic individual rights, such as women driving a car. This rapid openness is, in fact, a way to prevent an explosion similar to the Iranian explosion today, meaning that the youth, who are the driving force of society, will find these entertainment seasons as a an outlet for religious, social, moral and familial repression that may explode from time to time. Although this Saudi path will irk a large part of the conservative current and the religious social classes, it will give the regime an important dose of oxygen at the international level.

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The Saudi regime and the Iranian regime are not looking for political legitimacy at home, which is the strongest and greatest legitimacy. The mullahs’ regime oppresses the Iranians and deludes the people into believing it has made divine victories through the massacres it supervises in Yemen, Iraq and Syria, and by destabilising the security of its neighbours and infiltrating their political systems. On the other hand, Iran managed to create social and ideological classes that are ideologically loyal to it, taking advantage of the foolishness of the Sunni Arab regimes, led by Saudi Arabia, which fights all its Sunni surroundings and the religious or political movements that express it.

The Riyadh Seasons will not succeed in preventing people from demanding their basic rights, foremost of which is the right to free expression and political participation, while the repression of Iranian demonstrators will not succeed in stopping the masses’ demands to put an end to the farce of the repressive and backward rule of the mullahs. They are nothing but palliative doses that may last for years, a decade, or even two decades, but they will explode one day to overthrow the regime, no matter how solid it is, unless the matter is preceded by real reforms that place freedom, dignity and the right to expression at the top of the list of individual and collective civil rights.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.