Saudi Arabia is regarded as one of the most conservative Sunni Muslim countries— a society with strong tribal roots, under the strict control of a monarchy that is argued to view cultural change as a threat to its survival. The country is routinely and harshly criticized in the Western media for alleged denial of basic human freedoms, especially those of women: the legal protection of the institution of male guardianship, the ban on women driving, obligatory female covering, and mandatory gender segregation in public spaces are but a few examples of contentious issues earning notoriety for the regime; its implementations of ḥudūd (corporal punishments) similarly generates loud protests from human-rights groups. With Saudi state remaining firm in its commitment to Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb—the highly conservative eighteenth-century religious reformer from central Arabia, who promulgated an almost militant conception of takfīr that led mainstream Sunni scholars of the time (including his own brother) to declare him a heretic—Saudi Arabia's social milieu is seen not just by the West, but increasingly even by modern-educated, young Muslims, as highly restrictive and out of sync with contemporary realities. Equally vocally expressed are concerns that Wahhabi theology is inspiring global jihad, spearheaded by groups such as al-Qaida and ISIS.

Such conceptions of Saudi Arabia warrant its reputation as the ultimate exception to the processes of secularization of modern Muslim subjectivities mapped for the other contexts under study in this book. Scholarship on Saudi Arabia has thus focused heavily on explaining the persistence of orthodoxy, rather than mapping change. Western scholars often attempt to explain the survival of the House of Saud through the rentier state model: the Saudi royal family, it is argued, successfully buys public allegiance through the provision of large-scale public subsidies, made possible by its surplus oil wealth. This chapter will show how the most interesting question to ask about Saudi society today, however, is not about the persistence of conservative values but about the forces of rapid social change: the aspirations and sensibilities of the younger generation of Saudis are just as much influenced by the global consumer and entertainment culture that increasingly prevails in the rest of the Muslim world and elsewhere.