*WASHINGTON: *Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman is set tomeet with US President Donald Trump in Washington on Tuesday.
Mutual rival Iran will be high on the agenda, but the 32-year-old strongmanprince will also be looking to showcase his sweeping changes to Saudisociety and an increasingly assertive foreign policy that includes the warin Yemen and an ongoing diplomatic feud with Qatar.
The following are quotations from an interview he gave to CBS News onSunday.
Prince Mohammed has implemented some reforms on women’s rights, looseningclothing restrictions, pushing for greater participation in the workforce,and, significantly, lifting a ban on women driving.
But guardianship laws, which require women to seek the permission of malerelatives for a host of activities, remain in place.
“We have extremists who forbid mixing between the two sexes and are unableto differentiate between a man and a woman alone together and their beingtogether in a work place. Many of those ideas contradict the way of lifeduring the time of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH),” he said.
“We are all human beings and there is no difference.”
The prince acknowledged Saudi society was dominated by particularly harshstrain of conservative Islam, which he traces back to 1979, the year of theIslamic Revolution in Iran and the seizure by extremists of the GrandMosque in Mecca.
“We were victims, especially my generation that suffered from this a greatdeal,” he said.
“This is not the real Saudi Arabia. I would ask your viewers to use theirsmart phones to find out. And they can google Saudi Arabia in the 70s and60s, and they will see the real Saudi Arabia easily in the pictures.
“We were living a very normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries.Women were driving cars. There were movie theaters in Saudi Arabia. Womenworked everywhere. We were just normal people developing like any othercountry in the world until the events of 1979.”
He defended at length his anti-corruption purge which saw many of thekingdom’s princes and tycoons detained for several weeks inside Riyadh’sluxurious Ritz-Carlton hotel – widely seen as an attempt to cement his gripon power.
“What we did in Saudi Arabia was extremely necessary” and legal, he said.
He said he was able to recover more than “$100 billion” of ill-gottenwealth from the detainees, but added: “The idea is not to get money, but topunish the corrupt and send a clear signal that whoever engages in corruptdeals will face the law.”
The prince has been accused of hypocrisy over his opulent lifestyle at atime his government is preaching greater austerity of its citizens and hasimposed new taxes.
He was recently revealed as the owner of a French chateau described as theworld’s most expensive home, according to a report in the New York Times.
But he insisted his wealth was a private matter. “As far as my privateexpenses, I’m a rich person and not a poor person. I’m not Gandhi orMandela.”
He added: “But what I do as a person is to spend part of my personal incomeon charity. I spend at least 51 percent on people and 49 on myself.”
As heir to the throne after his father King Salman dies, the young princecould be set to rule the kingdom for the next half century or more.
Asked what could stop him, he replied: “Only death.”