Change Comes to the Kingdom.

• Author: Smith, Patricia
• Position: INTERNATIONAL - Saudi Arabia

For decades, Saudi Arabia was one of the most conservative and restrictive countries on Earth. But a new crown prince is loosening social controls and trying to open up the country to the world.

One evening in June, Hessah Alajaji did something revolutionary: She jumped into the driver's seat of her parents' Lexus and drove five minutes from her home in Riyadh to a McDonald's to grab a bite to eat.

Alajaji, 33, was among the first women in Saudi Arabia to get a driver's license when it became legal on June 24. Until then, women had been forced to rely on male relatives or hired drivers to take them where they wished to go.

"I hoped I would experience this one day," Alajaji says. "But I never thought it would happen in my lifetime."

Allowing women to drive is just one of many changes that have come recently to Saudi Arabia, one of the most socially conservative nations on Earth. Women can now do other things that were once forbidden without getting a man's permission, such as applying for a job or appearing in court. And all Saudis, who once had few avenues for entertainment available to them, can now go to one of the country's new movie theaters, see a live concert, or attend a poetry reading or even a monster truck rally.

"In the nearly 40 years I've been going there, Saudi Arabia was like watching a silent movie," says journalist Karen Elliott House, who's written extensively about the country. "There wasn't any sound because the status quo was the purpose of life. Now it is like an Imax movie on fast-forward. Everything is changing."

The man behind all this change is the country's crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. Just 33 years old, he's the son of 82-year-old King Salman, who designated him heir to the throne last year. It's not only social changes that Prince Mohammed is pushing through. He's also taking steps to modernize Saudi Arabia and open it up to the rest of the world.

"I believe in the last three years, Saudi Arabia did more than in the last 30 years," the crown prince recently told Time magazine.

A Powerful Nation

Saudi Arabia is one of the most powerful nations in the Middle East. Its influence stems largely from its oil wealth--it has almost 20 percent of the world's known oil reserves--and its position as the birthplace of Islam and the guardian of the religion's two most sacred sites, in Mecca and Medina.

It's also an important U.S. ally in the region, a relationship that has had a lot to do with oil: Eighty years ago, an American company struck oil in Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. has been a top importer of Saudi crude for decades (see "Saudi Arabia & the U.S.").

King Salman is a member of the Al Saud family, which has ruled Saudi Arabia since 1932, and his authority has been near absolute. For decades, a strict fundamentalist interpretation of Islam known as Wahhabism has governed all aspects of life in Saudi Arabia, with the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad effectively serving as a constitution.

One of the most important ways Saudi religious law has affected life in the nation is in its treatment of gender relations. Unrelated men and women have been completely segregated from one another. Women have had to wear black head-totoe coverings called abayas in public. Marriages have been arranged by families, with the couple usually meeting for the first time when they become engaged.

And under the country's so-called "guardianship laws," women have traditionally needed written permission from a male relative before they can get a job, attend college, leave the country, or even undergo a medical procedure.

But over the past few years, some of these restrictions have begun to break down, due to Prince Mohammed's growing influence. Women can now apply for government jobs or retail jobs at malls without a guardian's permission. They can be lawyers and appear in court. They can attend soccer games and other sporting events that once were open only to men. Women have their own ID cards for the first time, and they're allowed to register to stay at hotels in the country on their own.

"There is no doubt that there is a deep transformation happening in Saudi now," says Kristin Smith Diwan of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, D.C.

For decades, the ban on women driving had been the most obvious sign of the restrictions, and many Saudi women rejoiced to see it end.

"The lifting of the...