The Arab world is undergoing its most transformative change for a century. There are factors in this transformation that could plunge the Arab world into more disintegration, violence and chaos than what we have been seeing in the last five years. Yet, also within this transformation, there are changes that could salvage the Arab world, and usher it on a new trajectory of regeneration.

Aside from the uprisings, regime-change, and civil wars, the key development that the Arab world has witnessed in the last few years has been the fall of the Arab state system of the past seven decades. The nation states in the Eastern Mediterranean that Britain and France created after the First World War and the fall of the Ottoman Empire have been unravelling. In Iraq and Syria central state authority has collapsed. Lebanon’s various political factions have for over a year and half now been unable to agree on a president, leaving the country effectively a shell-state where the government undertakes administration and coordination, while its different religious and feudal communities retain their own political structures and foreign alliances. Eight years after the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas took control of Gaza and broke off relations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, a cohesive Palestinian political entity remains elusive.

For over two decades, Somalia, which commands a strategic location at the strait linking the Red Sea with the Indian Ocean, has been ruled by a coterie of war lords. The chaos there has given rise to multiple threats afflicting East Africa—violent Islamism, pirating, human trafficking. On the other side of the Arab periphery, close to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, the Sahara separating North and West Africa has effectively fallen under the control of violent Islamists, of which Boko Haram is the most famous. The region’s main economic activities now are trading in arms, drugs and humans.

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When Muhammad bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince, visited New York earlier this year, the face of Ahmed Mater, the kingdom’s most celebrated artist, was beamed onto an enormous billboard in Times Square. In recent years, he has been feted at exhibitions in London, New York and Venice. He dominates the Saudi art scene so thoroughly that his peers struggle for attention. “He’s the only artist anyone writes about,” says one Saudi curator. In 2017 Mater was appointed as artistic director of the Prince’s cultural and educational foundation, entrusted to promote art across the kingdom and liberalise the school system. He plays a crucial role in the enormously ambitious plan for economic and social transformation, which aims to wean the country off reliance on oil revenues, strip down the power of clerics and dispel a reputation for medieval obscurantism and misogyny.

Prince Muhammad has travelled the world to convince business leaders, tech titans and entertainment impresarios that Saudi Arabia is a place where both popular and high culture can flourish. For the first time in over 30 years, cinemas show films. For the first time ever, pop stars perform in concert halls. Mater has accompanied the prince on his pilgrimage as the epitome of the country’s artistic reawakening. When the Saudi Crown Prince met Xi Jinping, he brought Mater along and gave the Chinese president one of his paintings as a gift.

The story behind Mater’s rise is more complex and ambiguous than his current pre-eminence suggests. It illuminates the unprecedented liberalisation that many of the country’s cultural elite are experiencing at the moment, as well as the compromises with power that they must still make. Mater did not reach the pinnacle without help. But some of his companions have fallen by the wayside. “Of course”, one Saudi artist tells me, “it wouldn’t have happened without Ashraf.”

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