Interesting news from Saudi Arabia...

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8. That must have been a terrible class...

Thanks for the huge compliment! I get most of this stuff from Google, though I do have to go look at a real book sometimes.

re Prince Mohammed bin-Salman: I should probably be realistic and note that reformers in Saudi Arabia often come to unhappy ends.

e.g., King Faisal in the 1960s-70s was known as a modernizer and reformer. He started the first schools for females. Though the fundamentalist religious leaders kicked up such a fuss, he put them in charge of the curriculum.

That was mild compared to the uproar when he brought TV to Saudi Arabia in 1963.

In 1966, shortly after the TV station went on the air, religious fundamentalists in the Saudi Army attacked it. They saw it as the work of the Devil, despite Faisal's assurances that it would be strictly Islamic.

The leader of that attack was Prince Khaled bin Musaid - King Faisal's nephew. To his credit, when Faisal learned that he allegedly said: "No one in this country is above the law." Prince Khaled was killed in the battle to re-take the TV station.

In 1975, King Faisal was assassinated by Prince Faisal bin Musaid - another nephew, and the brother of the dead Prince Khaled. Up until that time, Faisal bin Musaid had lived in San Francisco and was a famous partier/doper. Evidently he had a conversion to Muslim fundamentalism at some point.