Page 244 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

‘Araby the Bles? 241

East. He was baulked of his object by the British occupation of Aden in
January 1839, just as he was to be denied command of the ‘direct’ route by the
opposition of the major European powers and the British intervention in Syria
the following year. In Nasser’s scheme the Yemen was to be the forward base
for the subversion of British rule in Aden, opening up an avenue of approach
through southern Arabia to the oilfields of the Gulf.
It did not quite work out in this way. The Egyptian campaign in the Yemen
certainly had its repercussions in both Saudi Arabia and Aden; but in Saudi
Arabia it brought about the deposition of Saud ibn Abdul Aziz in November
1964 and his replacement by his far more capable half-brother, Faisal; while
the British withdrawal from Aden in 1967 came after Nasser’s armies had been
decisively defeated by Israel and his political reputation had been dealt a blow
from which it never fully recovered. He was saved from utter disgrace, and
Egypt from certain bankruptcy, by Faisal’s offer in August 1967 to underwrite
him financially, the condition for his deliverance being a total Egyptian with­
drawal from the Yemen.
Nasser tried one last gambit in Arabia. The Amir Talal ibn Abdul Aziz and
his brothers had made their peace with Faisal after his accession and returned

home, but the ex-king, Saud, after his forced abdication had taken up resi­
dence in Egypt. He had in the two or three years before his abdication affected
to espouse the cause of constitutional reform in Saudi Arabia, not, it need
hardly be remarked, out of any profound or even shallow conviction of its
desirability but simply as a tactical measure in the contest for power with Faisal
and his coterie. Now, in the apparent hope that it might help prepare the path
for his return, he began preaching the doctrine of reform from exile in Egypt.
His activities provoked heated protests from Faisal to Nasser at this abuse of
his financial generosity, protests to which the latter responded by declaring his
innocence of any collusion with Saud, least of all of casting him in the role of
pretender to the Saudi throne. The affair was resolved by the death of the
hapless ex-king, long a prey to illness and failing sight, in Athens in February
1969.

For the first two decades after the Second World War Saudi Arabia remained
much as it had been before the coming of oil, an enclosed, inward-looking
country inhabited by some three and a half million people scattered over
thousands of square miles of desert, plateau and mountain range. The greatest
concentrations of population were in the Hijaz and Asir in the west, in Hasa in
the east, and in the towns and settlements of the Qasim and the central uplands
of Najd. Smaller groups dwelt in what were basically oasis towns, like Hail in
the north, Najran in the south and Jabrin in the east, while a sizable proportion
of the population (perhaps as much as a third) was Bedouin. Most of the
inhabitants derived their living from agriculture or pastoralism, much of it at
subsistence level. Society was still organized along rigidly tribal lines. Illiteracy