Epidemics and Reforms: Experience of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Saudi Arabia is one of the key countries in the Middle East and the Arab-Muslim world. The processes developing in this country, determined by both internal and external factors, are directly related to the development of the surrounding geopolitical space. In this regard, there arises the need to study the essence of such processes, their circumstances as well as the driving forces behind them. One of these factors is the epidemic of such diseases as A/ H1N1, MERS, and the coronavirus COVID-19. The author views this factor as an accelerator of socio-political transformations taking place in Saudi Arabia after 2009. These transformations were based on the experience of previous years already accumulated by the Saudi authorities. They took the form of implementing “national projects” aimed at restructuring the national education and health system. The results of the implementation of these projects were manifested in the country’s ever-wider opening to the outside world, consistent reduction of the influential religious establishment, and increasing role of the new “educated class,” which has been turned into a supporting pillar to the authorities. The government took on new forms of legitimation and won in the struggle for the minds of people, pushing the ulema away from influencing their political decision. The post-traditional Saudi society, as it was in the early 2000s, acquired features of modernity under the influence of the “educated class,” while Saudi Arabia itself began to be considered as an integral and a full-fledged element of the international community.