App alerts men if wife approaches Saudi Arabian airport

Saudi Arabia owns the second largest oil reserve in the world, with an estimated stock of more than 260 billion barrels, equivalent to 16% of the global total.

But what not everyone knows is that this was only discovered thanks to the Americans.

Legend has it that when they found oil, King Abdul al-Aziz ibn Saud said: “Shut up the well. Too much money causes problems.” The true story is far less glamorous.

Founded in 1932 by the same ibn Saud, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia was a desert country, extremely poor, which came from a history of struggles between different tribes. And I needed money.

Then, in the 1930s, American oil workers offered $170,000 worth of gold to the king to allow drilling on Saudi soil. One of the longest and most controversial partnerships in history was sealed.

Oil brought enormous wealth. Saudi Aramco, the country’s state-owned oil company, earns more than R$ 2 billion a day.

And it is this money that helps to pay for the luxury and eccentricities of hundreds of Saudi princes and businessmen, who spend huge sums all over the world. These are luxury cars, yachts, jewelry.

The palace of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman al Saud has 317 rooms.

Millionaire prizes are distributed in camel races and luxury cars to be detonated for pure fun.

But the most important thing is that oil has revived a country in the middle of the desert. Modern cities sprouted from the sand in just a few decades.

However, this money was also widely used for the construction of Islamic centers and mosques, establishing conditions so that only the ideals of Wahhabism could be taught in these places – the most radical form of Islam in the world, practiced in Saudi Arabia.

The first article of Saudi law says that the Qur’an and the Word of the Prophet are the country’s constitution.

app to monitor women

By law, husbands and fathers are the guardians of women, and until recently some religious leaders openly advocated freedom for men to beat their wives and daughters.

The Saudi government has also created an app that sends an SMS alert to men if a wife approaches the airport or border region.

Some of them need multiple apps as they have more than one wife. It is estimated that over a million Saudis are in polygamous marriages.

Practicing Christianity is illegal, as is any other religion except Islam.

Films and music were also considered heresy. And any opponent of the regime can be tortured or even beheaded.

But this double life, of an incredibly rich country, filled with oil and, at the same time, shackled to the past by extremist Islamism, may be about to change.

Oil is not inexhaustible, and more and more specialists have pointed out the need to diversify sources of income.

“To get rich, they only needed to use the soil instead of using and developing the population, along with its energy and entrepreneurship”, according to Thomas Friedman, columnist for the American newspaper The New York Times.

“What the Saudis need to do is free themselves from dependence on oil and have a productive, industrialized economy like the countries of the West,” says Tarek Masoud, a professor of public policy at Harvard University.

How this is going to happen and what impacts we can expect for the future are themes of the documentary “Saudi Arabia: the Kingdom of Secrets”, which CNN Brasil airs this Saturday (11), at 10:45 pm, right after the CNN Travel & Gastronomy .