[boeingUH60]

The royal family is actually liberal compared to the people they rule. Read about the Grand Mosque Seizure [1], wherein Salafist extremists seized Saudi's main religious site and demanded the House of Saud to step down because they were influenced by "Westernization".

After that event, the royal family struck a deal that gave the extremists more influence in exchange for holding onto power...we're talking women banned from television, cinemas shut down, extreme gender segregation, etc. It was that way until MBS, a relatively liberal person, ascended and whisked some power away from the religious police and extremists, with an iron fist, of course.

Despite their vast oil wealth, Saudi really lacks the human capital to keep the gears going without the help of foreign expats. If the oil wells hypothetically dry up tomorrow...the country is in deep trouble.

1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Mosque_seizure#

[complex_exp]

And to some quite extreme people any kind of government that is not solely based on religious wisdom expressed via the clergy is an affront to God (to Allah) - an extremely serious crime worthy of uprisings and martyrdom. Doesn't matter if it's a monarchy, a democracy, or a Soviet/Chinese style one-party system. Unless that party was exclusively filled with religious scholars.

(there's an alternative line of thought that says "you gotta follow the leader because a leaderless state is even worse", and that line of thought is generally prevailing in muslim countries; that's how one would justify having some out of the blue family running Saudi Arabia, with its two out of three most important Muslim holy places)