Page 247 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

244 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

figured prominently in the history of Najd and the Qasim in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries^ usually as Saudi loyalists5 although in the late nineteenth
century they became Rashidi partisans.

The Amirs Fahad, Sultan, Turki, Nayif and Salman ibn Abdul Aziz are all
uterine brothers, the sons of Hassa bint Ahmad al-Sudairi, Ibn Saud’s senior
wife. Together with two other uterine brothers (Ahmad, the deputy governor
of Mecca, and Sattan, the deputy governor of Riyad) they make up the
reputedly indivisible clique, the ‘Sudairi Seven’. The eldest surviving son of
Ibn Saud, Muhammad, is a uterine brother of King Khalid (their mother
was a Jiluwi). He was twice passed over for the succession - once at the time of
Faisal’s accession, and again at Khalid’s - reputedly because of his unstable
character and irascible disposition. How much personal rivalry and
factionalism exists within the upper ranks of the Al Saud it is impossible to say,
since all one has to go on is rumour. Some members, in particular Abdullah,
the second deputy prime minister, whose mother was of the Shammar tribe,
are said to resent the ascendancy of the Sudairi fraternity. It may well be so.
The history of the Al Saud is riddled with feuds, conspiracies, betrayals,
violent deaths and the exploits of pretenders, a fact largely obscured by the
relative absence of dynastic troubles during Ibn Saud’s long reign. What has
occurred within the family in the years since his death - events like the
dethronement of Saud in 1964, the defection of Talal and his supporters to
Egypt, the assassination of Faisal - has been more in keeping with the past
conduct of the dynasty.
For all their quarrelsome and sanguinary proclivities, however, the Al Saud
have shown, and still show, a remarkable resilience in times of adversity, along
with a redoubtable capacity for self-preservation and cohesion, qualities which
were much in evidence at the time of Faisal’s assassination by one of his
nephews, Faisal ibn Musaid, in March 1975. The comparatively minor reper­

cussions that the crime occasioned in the kingdom were probably due as much
to the solidarity displayed by the ruling house as they were to the absence of any
subsequent signs that the murder was the product of a political conspiracy.
The assassin’s father, Musaid ibn Abdul Aziz, was an inoffensive and relatively
obscure personage, a son of Ibn Saud and the uterine brother of Abdul
Muhsin, the governor of Madina. From the limited information that reached
the outside world about the assassin, it would seem that he was a somewhat
unbalanced as well as over-indulged young man, whose mind may have
become further disturbed by his exposure to radical political notions while a
student in the United States and as an habitue of Beirut’s political demi-monde.
There was said to be a streak of insanity in his family: his elder brother, a
devout Wahhabi, had been killed while leading a violent demonstration against
the opening of a television station in Riyad. Faisal ibn Musaid’s mother was of
the house of Rashid which Ibn Saud had overthrown in 1921. He himself was
engaged to be married to a daughter of the late King Saud and was said to have