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Besides the growth of our economy and the effort to diversify, which I think is self explanatory, a major initiative undertaken under my government has been the expansion of social rights especially for women and tolerance of other religions. This isn’t obviously a very tedious effort, as every move that is made might have enormous repercussions. It is for this reason that we have cracked down on religious fundamentalists in the last two years.

Under my father’s reign, he courted these fundamentalists, brought them into government, and heeded their advice for most of the time. However, they were keeping us in the 14th century. Once my brothers and I began to take part in governance we helped my father learn more about the West and its customs, as well as the standards that most of the rest of the world held. Unfortunately he was quite old at the time and was never able to enact these reforms himself, but amongst his final wishes was that we would carry on his legacy after his death.

Since then, we’ve established an advisory legislature in 2002, granted limited suffrage in 2006, ended the mandated death sentence for homosexuality in 2009, established women suffrage in 2011, altered the apostate law in practice from a death sentence to revocation of citizenship in 2012, gave women the right to serve in legislature in 2014, the right to drive in 2015, and now last year in 2018 mandated that 50% of the legislature must be women.

This of course wouldn’t be possible without our current circumstances, with nearly 60% of our population under the age of 30, and over 70,000 studying abroad each year. The fundamentalists, who previously represented a large percentage of our populace, have found themselves in the minority, and for this reason have thrown their support behind radical groups like the Ikhwan.