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A reason to smile: After years in the shadows, Saudi women are finally seeing real reforms.

Last week, a senior official in one of the world’s wealthiest states suggested that one third of all government jobs should go to women.

Switzerland? Denmark? France?

Wrong, the country is Saudi Arabia, and the senior official is Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the crown prince. In a state that has embraced the most misogynous readings of the Koran and a society that remains deeply patriarchal, Prince Sultan’s statement was truly revolutionary.

As Sultan’s older brother, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, visits Spain, Poland, and France this week, it may not be obvious that Saudi Arabia is undergoing a substantive transformation, but it is. Although the Kingdom’s diplomatic exploits capture the headlines—its efforts to counter Iranian influence in the Arab world, support for peace in Lebanon, and the Saudi-sponsored Arab League peace initiative to name just a few—its domestic changes are likely to be more far-reaching, durable, and consequential.

The Saudi monarch is pushing forward a surprisingly reformist domestic agenda, but his task is delicate. Five key actors will determine how this drama plays out: The 20 or so senior princes (including the king), the civil service, the merchant class, younger princes, and the religious establishment. King Abdullah can win this fight, but he can’t do it alone. By seeing Saudi Arabia as more than just a place to sell arms, buy oil, or fight terror, Europe and the United States can tilt the balance of power toward more reformist elements and marginalize the forces of religious reaction. The stakes couldn’t be higher: King Abdullah is battling not just stubborn conservatives and parts of his own family who are resistant to change, but Saudi history itself.

Modern Saudi Arabia took form in the middle of the 18th century, when a puritanical Islamic reformer, Mohammed Ibn Abdulwahab, made an alliance with an Arabian tribal prince, Mohammed ibn Saud. It was a trade of religious legitimacy for political power, an alliance that endures today. The trouble is that the Islam of Mohammed Ibn Abdulwahab adheres to a narrow definition of the Salaf, the traditions and practices emulated by companions of the prophet Mohammed, and has narrowed further through subsequent interpretation by members of the Saudi religious establishment. It is, as a result, deeply antimodern. (When the late King Faisal sought to introduce television in the mid-1960s, the religious establishment balked—that is, until the king showed them an image of a religious man chanting verses from the Koran on the black-and-white screen.)

This alliance—of an antimodern religious establishment and a ruling family with modernizing elements—has shaped modern Saudi Arabia, often for the worse. In the early 1980s, the late King Fahd, fearful of the effects of Iran’s Islamic Revolution and reeling from a Saudi extremist attack on the Grand Mosque of Mecca, sought to co-opt the more conservative Salafists. So, he made a bargain: While the king and the civil service would still control the hardware—defense, finance, oil, and foreign policy—he essentially handed over the software—the education system and the courts—to conservative forces.

During the next two decades, the Salafists proceeded to reprogram Saudi society: Religious police roamed the streets, confronting those who did not pray or women who showed too much hair; extremist teachers spewed anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Shiite invective; religious courts stifled women’s rights; well-funded Saudi universities created a generation of Islamic studies majors with few marketable skills; and funds poured into all corners of the Muslim world to support extreme Salafist thinking. All the while, the clerics sought to shut out foreign influences that could corrupt Saudi morals.

Of course, Saudi Arabia was not Afghanistan under the Taliban. Other social forces counterpunched, most notably the civil service, the prominent merchant families, the urban intelligentsia, and a handful of modernizing princes. Meanwhile, regions of the Kingdom with histories of cosmopolitanism—most notably the Hijaz in western Saudi Arabia where Mecca is located—resisted the encroaching social conservatism. Moreover, the tens of thousands of Saudi elites who studied in the United States in the 1970s and 80s brought back with them modern ideas about business and economic development; satellite television, which first appeared in the early 1990s, brought still more “corrupting” foreign influences into millions of Saudi living rooms.

Still, the empowerment of the Salafists in the King Fahd era was enough to stunt the Kingdom’s development and raise religious radicalism to dangerous new heights. That’s why King Abdullah’s quiet reversal is so important—and potentially revolutionary. Through acts small and large, he has already marginalized the Salafists in favor of the civil service and merchants, who have, in return, used their traditional spheres of influence—business, trade, and government policy—to promote change in society.