You're listening to a podcast from the BBC World Service. This is Hard Talk with me, Stephen Saka.

Thanks for downloading this edition of the program. I do hope you enjoy it.

My guest today has been following the extraordinary and appalling story of the murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi with a grim sense of familiarity and foreboding.

Abdullah al-Aouda is a Saudi academic based in the United States. He knew Khashoggi pretty well.

They both had made homes in the U.S. capital, having ruffled feathers in their Saudi homeland

with their talk of political reform and democratization.

Abdullah al-Aude also knew well the determination of the Saudi government,

dominated by young Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to crack down on dissent and independent

political, religious and cultural thought. Al-Aude's father, Salman, one of the country's

best-known independent-minded clerics, is currently languishing in a Saudi prison, facing terrorism

and extremism charges which carry with them a death sentence. So what is happening inside the Saudi

kingdom? Just a couple of years ago, the crown

prince was seen in the west as the harbinger of a transformational modernization agenda.

Now he appears to be intent on imposing a brand of authoritarianism more brutal than that of

any of his predecessors. Has the killing of Khashoggi done anything to change the

narrative? Well, Abdullah Al-Aouda joins me now from Chicago. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you so much

for hosting me. Let's start with your reflections on a pretty remarkable and pretty grim two months for those people like you

who knew Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi writer and journalist. Let me ask you, were you,

are you still shocked and surprised by what happened to him? Yes, I'm absolutely shocked the atrocity of killing the veteran

journalist and Saudi, you know, figure Jamal Khashoggi was really saddening and horrible in every

way. You had things in common with him because in a sense both of you went into exile in the United

States because you felt you could no longer live inside your homeland in the kingdom of Saudi

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