By Shamsudeen Sani
Authors: Bradley Hope and Justin Scheck
Date of Publication 2020 Pages 338
In the past couple of days, our timelines have been inundated by tirades demonizing the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) for championing some recent reforms around the inclusion of women into football in Saudi Arabia. This decision obviously didn’t sink in well with our homegrown opinion holders who feel the Saudi government should have done otherwise. But what baffles me was the stark indication of how those opinion holders need to read a bit more about this personality called MBS. That’s what this book tries to address.
Unfortunately, it’s been some couple of months since I read the book, so forgive my inability to recall everything that lies in there.
It is a fairly wordy book broken into 20 chapters that lay out the cascade of milestones that detail the monumental rise of this mysterious figure to power. In a lucid manner, in the earlier chapters, the book fleshes out the peculiar background that MBS had with being way different from many other royals. That is on many fronts ranging from educational background, penchant for reforms to ostentatious royal lifestyle, and his romance with sheer vanity.
It is mindboggling how MBS craftily had his way using all the arsenal at his disposal in a bid to acquire more power not minding what comes his way. And not unexpectedly, how the Western world is evidently complicit in all his excesses because money is involved. Who would ever have thought MBS could have his way with Twitter Inc to be complacent in helping unmask his critics? Nigerian government could have done same without blocking it for us, we the law-abiding citizens. Lol.
Of course, MBS wouldn’t have been able to do all these without the carefully orchestrated plan to handle his own internal pushback from other royal family members. He tamed that monster by masterminding the dramatic arrest and subsequent detention of powerful and wealthy royal Saudi figures at a 5-star Riyadh hotel. This drama lasted for months.
It is amazing how this book exposes MBS’s rise to power ridden with corruption and abnormalities. For example, the deployment of Israeli spy technology to go after his Twitter detractors.
And before you ask. Yes, there was a whole chapter on Jamal Kashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered and dismembered in Turkey. And going by what has been said in the book about MBS, Kashoggi was more than just a critic of the Saudi government.
This book coming from 2 investigative journalists, seems to be all over the place with stories about MBS’s wrong doings and the authors were squarely out to unravel all the possible dirt about their subject. It is therefore a very good starting place for knowing more about this guy eliciting wildly varying global emotions!
I wasn’t really impressed by the writing style of the book.For example, chapter 3 will go about detailing the lavish party by MBS in Maldives but derails tangentially to talk about other unrelated events. This flaw can be seen throughout the book. You are left at the mercy of the most coordinated part of your brain to figure out the storylines and make sense of what they want to relay to their readers.
It is difficult to verify most of the content of this book considering how the authors put together the information there from diverse sources in a very tricky and mostly risky manner. That’s why it doesn’t even have footnotes.
Otherwise, this is a great book to start reading about this growing influential, global political figure that will shape the future of not only the Middle East but also discussions across the Arab and the Islamic world.
Conclusively, as ideal as this book is, it should be read alongside other materials to enable one draw cogent conclusions. One should draw from materials written regarding Salafi ideology, Saudi government and Najd movement otherwise known as the Wahhabi.
