The night of the 27th of Ramadan of each year coincides with the anniversary of the pledge of allegiance to His Highness, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. On the 26th of Ramadan 1438, His Highness Prince Muhammad bin Salman assumed the mandate of the Covenant, so more than five years have passed since this event.. It is true that it is five years in the life of time, but it is The age of history, renaissance, and development is equivalent to dozens of years. Rather, I am not exaggerating if I say that it is equivalent to hundreds of years in the age of states, and I will mention two important examples that indicate the magnitude of this truly amazing transformation.
The first: The prince's position on the bureaucracy, which is the monster of the modern state. The prince stood firm against the bureaucratic monster, besieging it at every turn and every corner until he suffocated it.. The bureaucrats only felt that they had become – overnight – out of time. The most important example of this is the enactment of laws and regulations that pump the water of life into the veins of the state. Laws and regulations were coming out successively, to the extent that legal specialists are living in a race against time to keep the law in place in the face of this massive legislative revolution. I still remember the talk of that legal friend d. Nayef Al-Mazyad, who is a distinguished professor of commercial law, once used to say to me: We, the law professors in the Kingdom, have become in a terrible challenge in front of this great legal renaissance that most optimists did not expect. One day that prince put him out of time!
The second example is the Emir’s position on extremism and terrorism, which is the greatest threat to states in the modern era. In short, the Emir’s strategy in dealing with extremism was based on three pillars:
The first: in accurately diagnosing the source of the defect. Previously, treatments were only aimed at holding those who light the match accountable, but today they have gone further than this.
And the second pillar: erasing the separating area between the state and the organization..because in the past there was a very dangerous space in which those who did not believe in the state lived, so they would say we are not against the state and we are not with it, and this area provided them with sufficient security, because it relied on what You think it is a popular incubator.. So the Emir came with all courage and erased this region, and now these people have no choice but to define their position: either they will side with their state and be one of its men, or they will side with these organizations, and in this case they must confront the Sharia and the law.
The third pillar: the abolition of guardianship over people, for there is no guardianship over people except the guardianship of the state, in addition to the guardianship of the purified Sharia, which is the constitution of this country and the substance of its existence. However, the point is to emphasize that this idea of forming tribal, social, or religious guardianships has ended and no longer exists. An ignorant scholar could have succeeded – through an unfair fatwa – in kidnapping your son from your hands and sending him to the holocaust of war in Syria, Iraq, or elsewhere without you objecting a word. You only have to receive (congratulations) on the news of (his martyrdom).
All this day has ended, praise be to God, and talking about it has become a thing of the past.
I am not in the position to enumerate the harvest of this blessed pledge, but what I have listed here came as a result of interest and specialization, which is also a small part, and I believe that specialists in economics and politics will have more and greater harvests.
May God protect the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques and His Royal Highness the Crown Prince, and bless their lives in their legacy.
Khalid bin Abdulaziz Aba Al-Khail