Its ‘megaprojects’ win attention. But its people drive Saudi change.
Our reporter went to Saudi Arabia to find an economy story. The one he landed was far more revealing: a portrait of social transformation led by a generation yearning for more.
Thoughts about Saudi Arabia today might go a number of ways: to its heavy influence on global energy. To human rights. To ambitious projects like a massive “linear city” or a ski resort in the desert kingdom’s north.
Monitor reporter Taylor Luck, based in Amman, Jordan, went into Saudi Arabia recently to look at top-down changes, many aimed at preparing for a post-oil economy. What did those look like on the ground?
As he spoke with his editor, Taylor realized that he was witnessing something deeper than an economic shift. It was about people and their expectations of their country.
“Suddenly our story went from something about ‘how is this major producer of oil suddenly building a new economy at a time oil prices are going through the roof’ to something about how society is fundamentally changing,” Taylor tells the Monitor’s Samantha Laine Perfas. “Once we just hit on the word ‘transformation,’ all of a sudden all these experiences that I had, which I scribbled down … but never thought I would include … these experiences were the story. And it fundamentally changed what we wrote.”
Taylor recalls two sisters he met, young Saudi women snapping selfies at a small airport in a historically conservative kingdom. “It’s not about the dollars and the cents and the new gleaming skyscrapers,” says Taylor. “[Those sisters] became the story.”
Episode transcript
Samantha Laine Perfas: Welcome to Rethinking the News. I’m your host, Samantha Laine Perfas.
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In today’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Taylor Luck, the Monitor’s Middle East correspondent. Taylor started his journalism career at The Jordan Times, and as he put it in a previous interview, went “from the Midwest to the Middle East with an open heart and open mind,” and he hasn’t looked back. He’s traveled across the region, reporting on everything from long-lasting conflict to cultural revivals to a story on daisies and daggers (seriously, go read it). Recently, he reported on how Saudi Arabia is preparing for a post-oil future. He shares how he approached that story, as well as a little fun fact about himself. Here’s our conversation.
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Laine Perfas: You often bring gifts and an extra bag on your reporting trips. What’s that about?
Taylor Luck: Whenever I travel, whether it’s for work or just personally in the region, I know at least once or twice I’m going to be given a gift. A lot of it has to do with Arab culture, also Kurdish culture, that people like to share with you something, a token of appreciation of your time and appreciation of having the chance to know you.
Laine Perfas: What a cool way to connect with people.
Luck: It’s a great way because I find that I have all these little tokens to remember people by and I know somewhere someone has a little something to remember me by and perhaps also remember the Monitor by.
Laine Perfas: Well, recently you just went on a reporting trip to Saudi Arabia, and it seems like they’re going through a pretty fundamental shift there. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s happening and what you’ve found?
Luck: I think without making it sound like I am promoting or denouncing what is going on in a country that, of course, has grabbed lots of headlines for many of the wrong reasons. Saudi Arabia is undergoing fundamental changes. A lot of these are top down changes from its leadership. So we decided, well, let’s see, on the ground, are these changes actually happening? Is a country that’s the largest producer of crude oil actually preparing an economy for one that oil dries up? And what does that mean for the people? How are people’s lives changing?
Laine Perfas: And at first when you went, it seemed like your approach was to tackle it like a straightforward econ story. But you had a conversation with your editor, Ken Kaplan, about possibly taking a different approach. I’m curious, what did that look like and how did it change your story?
Luck: Well, because when I was there, we had a list of about five or six stories we wanted to do, some are cultural, some are more heritage. And then we have a story, the lead story, which was about the economic changes. And after I returned from Saudi Arabia, I talked to my long suffering editor, Ken, and it became clear in our conversation that really what I was seeing was a transformation not only of Saudi Arabia’s economy, but of how Saudi Arabians live their daily lives and what they expect from their country. So suddenly our story went from something about ‘how is this major producer of oil suddenly building a new economy at a time oil prices are going through the roof’ to something about how society is fundamentally changing, how Saudis are changing the way they go to work, where they live, what they consider to be an attractive and hip area to live. So once we just hit on the word transformation, all of a sudden all these experiences that I had, which I scribbled down here and there in my notebook but never thought I would include in a story. All of a sudden, these experiences were the story. And it fundamentally changed what we wrote.
Laine Perfas: Taylor, is it surprising that Saudi Arabia is willing to go through this type of a transformation?
Luck: Well, I think there’s two different surprises. I think one is you have a leadership that was always religiously conservative, socially conservative and very slow to make decisions to all of a sudden wanting to make this transformation. And I think the other surprise is that you have a lot of younger Saudi citizens, people in their thirties, twenties, forties, who are eager for these changes. One of the things that perhaps has made this change faster than anyone expected was the fact there are tens of thousands of Saudis who studied in the United States and in Canada and Australia. So you have all these Saudis who have had exposure to a life in America. And so it’s not PR spin to say that these young Saudis, they want to live a life that’s more in line with the 21st century than this kind of conservative lifestyle, where you’re not supposed to have much of an identity outside of the religion and support for the state. And I think that one of the things that is most surprising, perhaps, is that in a country where there isn’t free speech and perhaps they have cracked down on dissidents abroad, that is guilty for the murder of a journalist – at the same time, they want to accelerate these changes in order to be more sustainable. And the younger generation has latched on to it, and they’re doing it in their own ways.
Laine Perfas: And one of the examples, actually, that you included was about two sisters who were traveling for a girls weekend. How is that an example of the transformation that you’re talking about?
Luck: When I was leaving the town of Abha, which is a town in the mountains, I was waiting at the airport to fly to Riyadh. And while I was sitting in the cafe in the airport, there were two younger women in their mid-twenties, and they were working on laptops waiting for their budget flight back to Riyadh. And so we struck up a conversation and they said that they were just, you know, they live and work in Riyadh, and normally they would take vacations outside Saudi Arabia with their families. But since the changes, they were able to take, you know, a girls’ weekend out just to kind of let off steam in Abha, in this very green and misty town. Four or five years ago, it was illegal for women to travel on their own without a male guardian. And the airports themselves used to be gender segregated. So the fact that these two women are just hanging out and taking a few selfie pics at the tarmac before they got on the plane like it was nothing, and the fact that no one in the airport batted an eye, that’s pretty cool. But all of a sudden when we’re talking about transformations, that is the transformation. It’s not about the dollars and the cents and the new gleaming skyscrapers that might be built. They became the story.
Laine Perfas: A lot of this transformation, I think you said in a previous conversation, began almost as these “castles in the sky” type of ideas. How did that help lead the transformation, even if not all of those goals were fully realized?
Luck: I think it’s pretty easy to mock some of these projects because they are, in some essence, “castles in the sky.” The Vision 2030 plans to transform Saudi Arabia has several what they call giga projects with all these almost impossible requirements: ski resorts, eternal snowfall on a mountain in the Saudi desert in northern Saudi Arabia. They’re easy to mock because some of them, most engineers would tell you, are almost impossible, if not financially prohibitive. But the fact that they’re working to achieve the impossible means that they’re making all these other changes to facilitate it. So, for example, they’ve made it much easier for people to open up a business. They’ve changed laws so you can actually do e-commerce. They’ve made it easier for people to travel and move between cities and towns. They’ve allowed women to drive because it was just completely impractical to have to hire a driver for your wife all the time, or your sister. So whether they ever achieve these “castles in the sky” or not, they’ve actually made progressive changes in their laws and regulations. And so daily life for average citizens has improved.
Laine Perfas: I think one thing as reporters that can be tricky is not painting everything with, “wow, look at all this great progress.” In your reporting, you talk about some of the challenges Saudis are also experiencing amidst this transition. How do you balance both of those things?
Luck: I think it’s difficult, right, because I think you find in a lot of American media and Western media as well, people tend to go either things are really bad, things are really horrible, there’s no progress, there’s very little hope. And then you get some people who perhaps focus only on the progress or focus on the PR spin. So a lot of what’s out there already is either black or white. And I think the difficult part, perhaps the most difficult part of journalism is that it’s not either/or. It’s yes/and. It could be yes, there’s negative things happening in this country. There’s also some positive things happening and also there’s some progress happening.
Laine Perfas: Well, thank you so much for this conversation, Taylor. I really enjoyed talking to you.
Luck: Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. We should do it more often.
Laine Perfas: Yes, absolutely.
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Laine Perfas: Thanks for listening. To find links to Taylor’s story or see a transcript of this episode, visit csmonitor.com/rethinkingthenews. This episode was hosted by me, Samantha Laine Perfas, and co-produced with Jingnan Peng. Edited by Clay Collins. Our sound engineers were Morgan Anderson and Noel Flatt. Copyright by The Christian Science Monitor, 2022.
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