The scenes circulating from Saudi Arabia’s state-sponsored entertainment festivals are no longer isolated shocks or viral controversies. They have become visual evidence of a coordinated political and social project, designed and enforced from the highest levels of power. What is unfolding is not spontaneous social change, cultural experimentation, or administrative negligence, but a deliberate campaign to forcibly re-engineer Saudi society by emptying it of its religious, moral, and historical reference points.
This transformation is not accidental. It is financed by the state, protected by security forces, and imposed as an official vision of what Saudi Arabia is supposed to become. The public celebration of nudity, aggressive sexualisation, and behaviours once widely rejected within Saudi society is not happening despite the authorities—it is happening because the authorities have chosen it as policy. The regime has decided that rupture, not continuity, is the foundation of its “new identity,” even if that rupture collides directly with the beliefs and values of the majority of the population.
Entertainment as Governance: When Transgression Becomes State Policy
The use of entertainment in Saudi Arabia today has moved far beyond leisure or cultural diversification. It has become an instrument of governance. What was once socially marginal is now elevated, amplified, and protected under official banners, while restraint, moral critique, and ethical dissent are systematically pushed out of public life.
These spectacles are not confined to private venues or underground spaces. They are staged in open arenas, branded with state logos, funded by public money, and promoted as symbols of national progress. This matters because it removes any claim that what is happening is a matter of personal choice. When the state produces, finances, and markets these events, it sends a clear political message: the values that once defined society are no longer welcome, and a new model—rooted in consumption, spectacle, and noise—is being imposed as the norm.
In this system, entertainment is no longer optional; it is prescriptive. Indulgence is rewarded and protected, while commitment to religious or moral frameworks is treated as a liability. The state does not merely allow transgression; it institutionalises it.
Silencing Values While Empowering Decay
What makes this transformation especially dangerous is the authoritarian context in which it is unfolding. At the same time that public spaces are opened to extreme displays of moral collapse, prisons are filled with preachers, reformers, and citizens whose only “crime” is holding or expressing ethical positions that diverge from the official narrative. Independent religious discourse has been dismantled, sermons are tightly controlled, and even gentle reminders or warnings are treated as political threats.
This is not a contradiction; it is a formula. Moral reference points must be neutralised so that the new identity can be imposed without resistance. By criminalising ethical speech while celebrating transgression, the regime creates a one-way cultural corridor: silence or submission on one end, spectacle and indulgence on the other.
In this sense, entertainment and repression are two sides of the same policy. One distracts and normalises; the other intimidates and eliminates alternatives. Together, they hollow out society’s capacity to object.
The Religious Establishment’s Silence: Complicity by Absence
Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this transformation is the complete silence of the official religious establishment. The absence of any meaningful response from senior religious authorities in the face of the state’s moral overhaul cannot be explained as caution or neutrality. It is complicity.
No one demanded political rebellion or institutional confrontation. What was expected—at the very least—was a moral position, a word of conscience, or even a symbolic refusal to bless the erasure of public ethics. Instead, silence prevailed. By withdrawing from the moral arena, the religious establishment has surrendered its role as a reference point and reduced itself to a decorative extension of state power.
This silence does not protect religion; it evacuates it from public life and leaves the state free to redefine concepts such as “moderation,” “reform,” and “openness” entirely on its own terms.
Manufacturing Identity, Targeting Youth
The regime does not merely host these events; it ensures their visibility. Carefully curated images are broadcast domestically and internationally to present a manufactured minority as the face of the nation. These scenes are then sold as proof of a “new Saudi Arabia,” despite the fact that they represent neither the history nor the values of the society as a whole.
Young people are the primary targets of this strategy. When the state rewards moral collapse, protects it, and punishes ethical commitment, the message is absorbed quickly: values are a burden, conformity is survival, and spectacle is safety. Over time, this creates psychological pressure that reshapes behaviour not through persuasion, but through saturation and intimidation. This is not cultural evolution—it is coercion by repetition.
An Identity Under Assault, Not Erased
What is unfolding in Saudi Arabia is not liberation, and it is not modernisation. It is a calculated effort to weaken society by dismantling its moral foundations, because a society anchored in values is harder to control. Entertainment, in this context, is not a sector; it is a weapon—used to distract, to desensitise, and to fragment.
Yet identities rooted in history and belief are not erased by administrative decrees or public relations campaigns. The identity of the land of the Two Holy Mosques is not a blank canvas to be repainted by consultants, festivals, or imported spectacles. The resistance may be muted, silenced, or criminalised—but it persists.
In moments like this, silence is not neutrality; it is surrender. And refusal—however constrained—is the last remaining form of defence against a project that seeks to turn a society with a message into a platform without a soul.
