Page 242 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Blesf 239

Abdul Aziz ibn Saud’s immediate successor, his son, Saud, was not the ruler
his father had been. He seemed to be cast rather in the mould of Abdullah ibn
Faisal, who had paved the way for the dynasty’s eclipse two generations earlier.
He did not possess the authority over the tribes or over his family that his father
had wielded, nor was he blessed with the grace and ease of manner which might
have earned him his people’s affection. Yet Ibn Saud had left the ruling house
so well entrenched and buttressed in the country that it could afford, for a time
at least, the luxury of a lack-lustre monarch. Not only was the dynasty large but
it included a number of men of ability and talent. During his lifetime Ibn Saud
had drawn the shaikhly families of the major tribes into alliances with his house
by the simple expedient of marrying their daughters. While the marriages in
most cases lasted only a brief period, they produced an impressive number of
progeny. As the Al Saud were already pretty numerous, and philoprogenitive,
it is not surprising that today they are to be counted in the thousands rather
than the hundreds.
The inner or ruling circle, however, was and has remained much smaller,
consisting of Ibn Saud’s surviving brothers, of whom there had originally been
ten, and his sons, of whom there were at least thirty-seven, from fourteen
different mothers. The Al Saud married, in the main, either within the clan
itself or into a handful of families which had been so intimately associated with
the ruling house since the eighteenth century as to be virtual extensions of it -
the Thunaiyan, the Sudairi, the Jiluwi, the ahi al-shaikh (the ‘family of the
shaikh’, i.e. the descendants of Ibn Abdul Wahhab). Ibn Saud’s mother, Sara,
was a Sudairi, and so, too, was the best known of his wives, Hassa bint Ahmad
al-Sudairi. Her sons, among them Fahad, Sultan, Turki, Nayif, Salman,
Ahmad, are today, as we shall have occasion to notice in due course, the most
prominent members of the Saudi government. The mother of Saud ibn Abdul
Aziz was of the Al Araiar, the shaikhly family of the Bani Khalid who once
ruled Hasa. Faisal ibn Abdul Aziz, Saud’s half-brother and eventual successor,
was born of a mother from the ahi al-shaikh. His half-brother and successor,
Khalid, had a Jiluwi mother.
Saud ibn Abdul Aziz reigned for barely a decade, during which time he
managed to dissipate the entire fund of political capital which his father had

bequeathed to him, as well as to bankrupt the Saudi treasury (despite its
continual replenishment by oil revenues every year) through his own extravag­
ance and his inability to curb the avarice of so many of his relatives. While
much of the blame for the incompetence and corruption which were the order
of the day in Saudi Arabia during Saud’s reign could properly be laid at his
door, he was not responsible for many of the tribulations which were visited
upon him from abroad, the principal source of which was the government of
Egypt under the presidency of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
It was obvious from the late 1950s onwards that Nasser had resurrected
Mehemet Ali’s grand design of making himself master of a federation of Arab