The Son King: Reform and Repression in Saudi Arabia
MADAWI AL-RASHEED
(HURST, 416 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

Madawi Al-Rasheed is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics who moved to London in 1990. At the time, she felt she was “the only Saudi exile in town”. Since the rise to power in 2015 of the Crown Prince and “Son King” of the title, Muhammad bin Salman (“MBS” to most observers, pictured), the duality of reform and repression that Al-Rasheed identifies in the MBS programme has pushed many more people to leave the country. 
This diaspora remains inchoate and uncounted but Al-Rasheed thinks it is capable of staging a “united front against the regime’s increasing repression”.

In part, this book is a rallying call to the diaspora and an intended corrective to those international players she thinks have fallen for the MBS “personality cult”.

This makes the “Son King” sound like a partisan pamphlet, but – as Al-Rasheed’s academic credentials suggest – it is much more than that. She wears her anti-MBS heart on her sleeve to a degree that is exasperating, but the book is also packed with information about Saudi Arabia that is fascinating in its own right.