Saudi King Quotes

If an election were held here tomorrow,” Fahd once confided to a colleague, “Bin Baz would beat us without even leaving his house.

أعدم ال سعود جهيمان لكنهم جعلوا من افكاره نهجا للدولة

Whoever wins society will win this war.”says Prince Mohammed bin Nayef

الكلاب والنعال من القاذورات التي يبتعد عنها المسلمون، لهذا السبب انتشر الفرح عند العرب عندما قام محتج عراقي برمي حذائه على جورج بوش في عام 2008م.

When Ali was killed by a Kharijite wielding a poisoned sword during Ramadan in A.H. 40 (A.D. 661), he became one of the earliest victims of Islamic terrorism.

إن القدس الشريف يناديكم و يستغيث بكم لتنقذوه من محنته , و ما أبتلى به ... فماذا ننتظر ؟ و إلى متى ننتظر و مقدساتنا و حرماتنا تنتهك بأبشع الصور ...فماذا يخيفنا ؟و هل نخشى الموت ؟ و هل هناك موتة أفضل و أكرم من أن يموت الإنسان مجاهدا في سبيل الله . الملك فيصل بن عبدالعزيز آل سعود

The Stadium Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of spectators. At Wembley, shouts from the 1966 World Cup, which England won, still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan soccer. Maracanã is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat. At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of Camp Nou in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mamés in Bilbao talk in Basque. In Milan, the ghosts of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final match of the 1974 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium. King Fahd Stadium in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

There was no law that explicitly banned women from driving in Saudi Arabia. There is none today—the Kingdom’s notorious female driving ban is a matter of social convention, fortified by some ferocious religious pressures. So some Saudi women started looking thoughtfully at their Kuwaiti sisters.

The House of Saud had executed Juhayman. Now they were making his program government policy.

Better that anger should be directed into jihad abroad than into Iran-style revolution at home.

That woman,” Bandar liked to say of the British prime minister, “was a hell of a man.

We try to transform each detainee from a young man who wants to die to a young man who wants to live. Prince Mohammed bin Nayef

America certainly did its part. But doing the sums, it is now clear that through the eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, 1981-89, Saudi Arabia actually provided more material assistance to the world’s varied assortment of anti Communist “freedom fighters” than did the United States, thus hastening the end of the Cold War and helping accomplish the downfall of the “Evil Empire.

As the Saudi king demonstrated with the “devil’s box,” and as Sun Tzu taught in The Art of War, understanding your opponents, and using that knowledge to undermine them, is the key to ultimate victory.

MODERN SAUDI HISTORY IN FIVE EASY LESSONS If you did not go hungry in the reign of King Abdul Aziz, you would never go hungry. If you did not have fun in the reign of King Saud, you would never have fun. If you did not go to prison in the reign of King Faisal, you would never go to prison. If you did not make money in the reign of King Khaled, you would never make money. If you did not go bankrupt in the reign of King Fahd . . .

If you see a poor man come into your majlis, try to speak to him before you speak to the other people,” the king told his son. “Never make a decision on the spot. Say you will give your decision later. Never sign a paper sending someone to prison unless you are 100 percent convinced. And once you’ve signed, don’t change your mind. Be solid. You will find that people try to test you.” Fahd was delivering his basic course in local leadership—Saudi Governance 101. “If you don’t know anything about a subject, be quiet until you do. Recruit some older people who can give you advice. And if a citizen comes with a case against the government, take the citizen’s side to start with and give the officials a hard time the government will have no shortage of people to speak for them.

We were not willing to be the tool of a foreign government,” remembers Sheikh Hassan today. “There were a number of people in authority in Iran who wanted to recruit us against the Saudi government. They came to us—they made quite a few approaches to us. But we told them that we wished to remain independent.” His aide Jaffar Shayeb did the political talking on the sheikh’s behalf. “We listened to what they said,” says Shayeb of the Iranians. “But we were never willing to be part of their games.

They intended to use America’s absence from the world scene to overthrow the Saudi king, expropriate the wealth of his branch of the royal family and its supporters, reconcile with Iran and Syria, and establish a modern technocratic caliphate using science and technology to raise the standing of the Muslim world to heights not seen in a thousand years.

Several prominent Saudis have told me that King Fahd at the time was nearing a decision to permit women to drive but was forced to back off by the furious public reaction

فكّروا في الكلمات الجديدة التي كان علينا أن نتعلمها خلال الثلاثين سنة الماضية : وهّابي، جهادي، أفغان عرب، عاصفة الصحراء، فتوى، القاعدة . ما الذي تشترك فيه هذه الكلمات؟

كان الأمير طلال قريبًا من عبدالله، ويشترك معه في رأيه الذي يقول إن الجرعات الكبيرة من الدين أدّت إلى التفكير الذي يدفعُ الشبابَ السعوديّين إلى الانتحار وقتل الناس جماعيًا تحت اسم الله

on December 7, 2001, Osama announced that he was leaving. “He deserted us,” remembers Al-Hubayshi bitterly. “After five weeks his people came round telling us to make our way to Pakistan as best we could and surrender to our embassies there. We had been ready to lay down our lives for him, and he couldn’t make the effort to speak to us personally. Today I think that I was made use of by Bin Laden—exploited, just like all the young kids who went to jihad. What did he care when he sent us over the horizon to die? He was as bad as the religious sheikhs back in Saudi who preached jihad in their sermons every Friday. How many of them ever sent their own sons to Afghanistan?

Ignominiously reined in by their ruler, the Ikhwan became deeply offended especially as they considered themselves the religious Army of God. The rude rebuff drove them to question their unwavering loyalty for their King. Thus the first crisis of clergy and King was conceived.

Another casualty of Feisal’s return to power was Abdullah Tariki, the general director of petroleum and mineral resources. Tariki is a well-known figure in global oil politics, mostly because in 1960 he cofounded, along with Venezuelan oil minister Juan Perez Alfonso, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as the OPEC cartel.

In Panama, I knew Noriega himself was the object of controversy. The "arms deal" was the final stage of Operation Carrier Pigeon where the planes were to wait in Saudi Arabia until all bank transactions were cleared and the load was ready for disbursement. Saudi Arabian King Fahd would then fund the Contras via Noriega for Reagan after all evidences had been properly covered up -- just as he had done in Afghanistan. After the shipment, there would be no further deals through Noriega involving Fahd, because Noriega could no longer be trusted. Besides, Fahd had increased diplomatic relations with Mexico for covert operations, and Iran-Contra was just beginning to heat up. Noriega did not seem to be upset by the news of losing Saudi Arabian business, although he was somber and took some time to respond. His translator was working over some complex computer equipment after I delivered the message. I left Noriega's yacht with John and a brief message for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon.

Every king had tried to put his imprint on the city and the mosque; some were worse than others. King Faisal had been a parsimonious man and the expansion works reflected as much—measured and reasonable, nothing too ostentatious. The current ruler, King Fahd, was a spender who disliked all that was old. He loved glitz and gold. More ancient neighborhoods were being torn down, and Mecca’s classical Islamic architecture was vanishing rapidly. Ugly modern buildings were rising, and more chain hotels were being built to accommodate yet more pilgrims.

Bats. Bats were the first visual proof I had that stealth really worked. We had deployed thirty-seven F-117As to the King Khalid Air Base, in a remote corner of Saudi Arabia, out of the range of Saddam’s Scuds, about 900 miles from downtown Baghdad. The Saudis provided us with a first-class fighter base with reinforced hangars, and at night the bats would come out and feed off insects. In the mornings we’d find bat corpses littered around our airplanes inside the open hangars. Bats used a form of sonar to “see” at night, and they were crashing blindly into our low-radar-cross-section tails

Even a woman in labor will not be admitted into a hospital without her guardian or at least a mahram. Police cannot enter a home during a robbery, and firefighters are forbidden from entering a home during a fire or medical emergency if a woman is inside but does not have a mahram present. In 2014, Amna Bawazeer died on the campus of King Saud University when school officials refused to allow male paramedics to enter the female-only school after Amna collapsed from a heart ailment. The same story repeated itself in 2016 at Qaseem University when male paramedics were not allowed on campus to treat a female student, Dhuha Almane, who subsequently died. It is not a stretch to say that death is preferable to violating the strict code of guardianship and mahrams.

PROMISE TO BLESS THOSE WHO BLESS ISRAEL                   In Genesis 12:2-3 God delivers a promise to Israel that He has never repealed and has always fulfilled:            “I will make you into a great nation  and I will bless      you;  I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.  I will bless those who bless you, and whoever        curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be          blessed through you.”            America has been greatly blessed as it has blessed Israel, beginning with Israel’s founding in May, 1948. On October 28, 1946 President Truman wrote to King Saud of Saudi Arabia, informing the King that he believed “that a national home for the Jewish people should be established in Palestine.” The next year, 1947, President Truman instructed the State Department to support the U.N. plan for partition, and reluctantly, it did so.

The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)

In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic– marriage. No Saudi official will admit on the record that the Kingdom’s terrorist problem might boil down to sexual frustration, but if a social system bans hot-blooded young men from contact with the opposite sex in their most hot-blooded years, perhaps it is hardly surprising that some of them channel this frustration into violence. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries,” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Mohammed turns up for the wedding. When Khaled Al-Hubayshi was released from Al-Haier prison early in 2007, he wasted no time finding himself a bride at government expense.

The conversation lightened during the midday banquet the king hosted for our delegation. It was a lavish affair, like something out of a fairy tale, the fifty-foot table laden with whole roasted lambs and heaps of saffron rice and all manner of traditional and Western delicacies. Of the sixty or so people eating, my scheduling director, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and senior advisor Valerie Jarrett were two of the three women present. Alyssa seemed cheery enough as she chatted with Saudi officials across the table, although she appeared to have some trouble keeping the headscarf she was wearing from falling into the soup bowl. The king asked about my family, and I described how Michelle and the girls were adjusting to life in the White House. He explained that he had twelve wives himself—news reports put the number closer to thirty—along with forty children and dozens more grandchildren and great-grandchildren. “I hope you don’t mind me asking, Your Majesty,” I said, “but how do you keep up with twelve wives?” “Very badly,” he said, shaking his head wearily. “One of them is always jealous of the others. It’s more complicated than Middle East politics.

The Swiss are rich but like to hide it, reserved yet determined to introduce themselves to everyone, innovative but resistant to change, liberal enough to sanction gay partnerships but conservative enough to ban new minarets. And they invented a breakfast cereal that they eat for supper. Privacy is treasured but intrusive state control is tolerated; democracy is king, yet the majority don’t usually vote; honesty is a way of life but a difficult past is reluctantly talked about; and conformity is the norm, yet red shoes are bizarrely popular. It is perhaps no surprise that the Swiss are contradictory, given how divided their country is. Since its earliest days Switzerland has faced geographic, linguistic, religious and political divisions that would have destroyed other countries at birth. Those divisions have been bridged, though not without bloodshed, but Switzerland remains as paradoxical as its people. While modern technology drives the economy, some fields are still harvested with scythes (all the hilly landscape’s fault); it’s a neutral nation yet it exports weapons to many other countries; it has no coastline but won sailing’s America’s Cup and has a merchant shipping fleet equal in size to Saudi Arabia’s. As for those national stereotypes, well, not all the cheese has holes, cuckoo clocks aren’t Swiss and the trains don’t always run exactly on time.

The best way not to have to use your military power is to make sure that power is visible. When people know that we will use force if necessary and that we really mean it, we’ll be treated differently. With respect. Right now, no one believes us because we’ve been so weak with our approach to military policy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Building up our military is cheap when you consider the alternative. We’re buying peace and we’re locking in our national security. Right now we are in bad shape militarily. We’re decreasing the size of our forces and we’re not giving them the best equipment. Recruiting the best people has fallen off, and we can’t get the people we have trained to the level they need to be. There are a lot of questions about the state of our nuclear weapons. When I read reports of what is going on, I’m shocked. It’s no wonder nobody respects us. It’s no surprise that we never win. Spending money on our military is also smart business. Who do people think build our airplanes and ships, and all the equipment that our troops should have? American workers, that’s who. So building up our military also makes economic sense because it allows us to put real money into the system and put thousands of people back to work. There is another way to pay to modernize our military forces. If other countries are depending on us to protect them, shouldn’t they be willing to make sure we have the capability to do it? Shouldn’t they be willing to pay for the servicemen and servicewomen and the equipment we’re providing? Depending on the price of oil, Saudi Arabia earns somewhere between half a billion and a billion dollars every day. They wouldn’t exist, let alone have that wealth, without our protection. We get nothing from them. Nothing. We defend Germany. We defend Japan. We defend South Korea. These are powerful and wealthy countries. We get nothing from them. It’s time to change all that. It’s time to win again. We’ve got 28,500 wonderful American soldiers on South Korea’s border with North Korea. They’re in harm’s way every single day. They’re the only thing that is protecting South Korea. And what do we get from South Korea for it? They sell us products—at a nice profit. They compete with us. We spent two trillion dollars doing whatever we did in Iraq. I still don’t know why we did it, but we did. Iraq is sitting on an ocean of oil. Is it out of line to suggest that they should contribute to their own future? And after the blood and the money we spent trying to bring some semblance of stability to the Iraqi people, maybe they should be willing to make sure we can rebuild the army that fought for them. When Kuwait was attacked by Saddam Hussein, all the wealthy Kuwaitis ran to Paris. They didn’t just rent suites—they took up whole buildings, entire hotels. They lived like kings while their country was occupied. Who did they turn to for help? Who else? Uncle Sucker. That’s us. We

Oil jumps as Saudi king's death feeds market uncertainty Abdullah died early on Friday and his brother Salman became king, the royal court in the world's top oil exporter and birthplace of Islam said in a statement carried by state television.

The very word “bank” caused heartburn among the Saudis, who associated it with the collection of interest. For that reason, when the king accepted Young’s draft charter and created the central bank by royal decree in 1952, the institution was called the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, or SAMA, the name it still bears.

The crush of men waved their arms in the air and shouted that they loved Sharif. He spoke into a microphone, but it was broken and no one could hear anything he said. Speech over, Sharif climbed down from the counter and slipped into a bulletproof black Mercedes, courtesy of his good friend, King Abdullah, who had also shipped Sharif back to Pakistan in a Saudi royal plane. Now,

One report described how on June 22, 1998, forty Chechens were quietly brought to a secret military camp located seventy-five miles southeast of Riyadh. Over the next four months, they were trained in explosives, hand-to-hand combat, and small weapons. A lot of time was set aside for indoctrination into Wahhabi Islam. Salman, the governor of Riyadh and the full brother of King Fahd, was the camp’s sponsor.

We see here that Christ was appointed by God to be the heir of all things. When Christ sent out his apostles to disciple the nations, it was based upon this inheritance, an inheritance already given and established. Christ owns it all already. Understanding this makes a great difference in our preaching—is the tone of our message one of begging or declaring? We are commissioned to declare to the world an accomplished fact. Christ is King. This is not a campaign to get everyone to vote for him so that he might become president at some future date. This is a word already spoken from heaven. All authority in heaven and on earth is in the palm of Jesus Christ. This means his inheritance includes Saudi Arabia, Israel, Canada, the United States, China, and Argentina. It all belongs to him already—he bought it with his blood. Why

Tim Graham Tim Graham has specialized in photographing the Royal Family for more than thirty years and is foremost in his chosen field. Recognition of his work over the years has led to invitations for private sessions with almost all the members of the British Royal Family, including, of course, Diana, Princess of Wales, and her children. For at-home photographs, I found her chatty and easy to work with, and her sense of humor always showed through. Tours could be eventful. On one occasion, while photographing her at a Saudi Arabian desert picnic, I was walking backward in front of her--a position quite normal for photographers. What I didn’t realize while concentrating on hr was that I was backing straight into a fire. Just in time, the Princess called out to warn me, but couldn’t suppress her giggles as I stepped into the flames. She was a very lively person to photograph. You had to keep your camera on her at all times, because in a split second there could be just the picture of her expression or response to someone she was meeting or something that had happened. She had the ability to charm and relax whoever she met, whether the man in the street or a nation’s president. If things went wrong in the job, it always made her laugh--and it’s true to say that she must have found some of her royal duties a bit monotonous and stifling and been glad of some light relief.

the first research study on abused wives was published by the King Saud specialist Medical Center and it found ninety percent of the women in the study had seen their mothers go through the same abuse?

As a matter of fact, Islam does not negate critical inquiry. Muslim scholars who understand this viewpoint are supportive of stem cell research, genetic engineering and robotics within ethical bounds. Even traditional Muslim scholarship in early-twentieth century was not skeptical of evolution as a scientific explanation, which can be seen in the writings of Syed Qutb and Maulana Syed Abul-Ala Maududi. Several Muslim scientists conduct research in evolutionary biology and also teach it including Mohammed Alassiri of King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Ehab Abouheif, Canada Research Chair at McGill University; Fatimah Jackson, Professor of Biological Anthropology at the University of North Carolina and Rana Dajani, Associate Professor at Hashemite University, Jordan.

Saudi Oger’s Saad Hariri, a dual citizen who also happened to be the prime minister of Lebanon, was struggling to keep the cash flowing too. The Oger business was poorly managed, so it had little cushion for a slowdown in payments. Saad desperately tried to win Mohammed bin Salman’s approval, building an extension to King Salman’s expansive seaside palace in Tangier for Mohammed. And when Mohammed suggested he’d like a more direct passageway in the Royal Court to access the foyer of his cousin Mohammed bin Nayef’s section, Saad himself stayed up through the night with workers to cut through marble and concrete to get the job done. Mohammed thanked him but clearly felt no exchange had taken place. Saad hadn’t won any goodwill.

The First Saudi State ceased to exist, but the surviving Al Saud learned two important strategic lessons: first, you must obtain modern military equipment and second, you can lose everything if you quarrel with the superpower of the day. King Salman, the current ruler, has not forgotten either of those lessons.

Since 1744, the protection and propagation of Islam has remained the Al Saud dynasty’s motivating ideology. It contributed significantly to the success of King Abdulaziz’s nation-building program and was a strategic choice at odds with that of more secular nationalist Muslim leaders such as Mustapha Kemal Ataturk or the Shah of Iran.

From that bitter defeat, the Al Saud learned another strategic lesson: above all else, do not use force against each other; keep family disputes peaceful and private; and unite quickly and firmly against anyone who violates this rule. Modern-era Kings Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, and Abdullah all respected this stabilizing principle. King Salman and his ambitious Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, have not.

In the 1890s, Kuwait offered a dramatically more cosmopolitan and commercially vibrant environment than Riyadh. As a result, by his middle teens the future King of Saudi Arabia had acquired firsthand experience of dynastic politics, humiliating exile, and desert warfare. He spoke some English and had watched Sheikh Mubarak conduct commercial and diplomatic relations with Europeans. He was a very unusual young man for his time and place, and he stood six foot, four.

Only Abdulaziz’s half-brother, Mohammed, would not swear allegiance to Crown Prince Saud. Mohammed did not dispute his older brother’s right to rule, but he had been part of the band that took Riyadh in 1902 and had fought in many campaigns during the Wars of Unification. Mohammed felt that he or his eldest son, Khalid, had a legitimate right to be considered Abdulaziz’s successor. It was the future King Faisal who finally persuaded his uncle to pledge allegiance to Crown Prince Saud—thus playing a role very similar to the one his own son, Khalid al-Faisal, would play sixty years later in resolving another succession dispute.

When Yemen’s Imam Ahmad bin Yahiya (1881–1962) died in his sleep, Republican military officers quickly sought to overthrow the ancient, religiously-based Hamid al-Din dynasty. The Republicans claimed that Saudi Arabia had unjustly seized the Jizan and Najran provinces from Yemen in 1934 and demanded their return. King Saud’s government rejected that claim and supported the Yemeni royalists with arms, money, and subsidies to cooperative tribes. Egypt’s President Nasser—who supported the socialist, Arab Nationalist Republicans—hoped to add Yemen to the United Arab Republic that he had created with Syria, and to use the country to overthrow the House of Saud.28 Today, King Salman fears that Iran has similar intentions in Yemen.

Religious conservatives had long boasted that when King Abdullah died, they would remove the liberal, religious-police chief that he had installed, restore the conservative ulama that he had fired, and shut down the co-educational university that he had founded. King Salman initially gave them much of what they wanted.

The entire world saw Mohammed bin Salman kneel and kiss the hand of his deposed cousin, promising to always seek his advice. Mohammed bin Naif shook his younger cousin’s hand and swore allegiance to him as the new crown prince. No new deputy crown prince was named then—or has been since. The following month an entirely new security agency, reporting directly to the king through the Royal Diwan and Mohammed bin Salman, was created. Known as the Presidency for State Security, it took over nearly all police and internal intelligence work

After November 4, 2017, only King Salman or MBS had direct control over any of the kingdom’s security forces.

Having been in government all his life, Salman was well aware of Saudi Arabia’s structural economic problems and administrative inefficiencies. He had watched Qatar and the United Arab Emirates develop more rapidly than Saudi Arabia. He saw talented, educated young Saudis moving to Dubai, New York, and London. Above all, he recognized that the long-running partnership of brothers managing the kingdom could not last much longer. Preserving the dynasty would require a powerful and determined king who could both engineer the transition to third-generation leadership and diversify the country’s economy. Intending to rule as a reforming autocrat, Salman was looking for ideas—and his younger son, Mohammed, seemed to have some.

MBS believed that recent Saudi kings had ceded too much authority to the ulama, technocrats, and tribes. He intended to reassert centralized control. He also intended to maintain Saudi predominance in the Arabian Peninsula and increase Saudi influence in Syria, Iraq, and Egypt. Implicitly, this meant competing with Iran while exploring co-existence and cooperation with Israel.

Within four years of ascending to the throne, King Salman has thus dramatically changed Saudi Arabia’s political structure. The old system—in which various senior princes ran independent, uncoordinated ministries and where senior technocrats were allied to one senior prince or another—has been dismantled. The king has appointed dozens of new judges and replaced every minister and military service chief, some more than once. Across the Saudi government, all senior technocrats now owe their position not to a variety of princely patrons but solely to the patronage of King Salman and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

King Salman appears to have engineered a peaceful handover of power from the sons of King Abdulaziz to his grandsons. Third-generation princes now serve not only as crown prince but in nearly all provincial governor, deputy governor, and royal cabinet positions. Like the young team of brothers that King Faisal assembled in the 1960s, the grandsons of King Abdulaziz installed by King Salman and MBS expect to govern Saudi Arabia into the foreseeable future.

Faisal had appointed Mohammed’s younger full brother, Khalid (1913–1982), deputy prime minister in 1962. That implied, but did not confirm, that Khalid would become crown prince. Only in 1965 did King Faisal officially decree that Khalid would be his successor

King Faisal is often credited with saving the Saudi monarchy. He certainly centralized and institutionalized it.

King Faisal was assassinated in March 1975 by his nephew, Prince Faisal bin Musa’id bin Abdulaziz.

within hours of Faisal’s death the Council of Senior Princes declared Crown Prince Khalid the new king. As expected, the Second Deputy Prime Minister Fahd became the new crown prince.12 In what had become an established pattern, the new king became prime minister and the new crown prince became deputy prime minister. The putative third in line, Abdullah, became the new second deputy prime minister.

Because he was the governor of Riyadh, where most Al Saud princes lived, King Fahd had assigned him the role of “referee” in family disputes and disciplinarian for wayward princes. Sometimes referred to as the “Prince of Princes,” Salman maintained a private jail for princes and was well aware of which family members abused their royal status.

Since the abdication of King Saud in 1964, the sons of King Abdulaziz have transferred political power four times without violence or public protest: to Khalid in 1975, Fahd in 1982, Abdullah in 2005, and Salman in 2015. This is a much better record than many of the Arab World’s so-called republics. In a region where violent coups and revolutions have been more common than orderly political transitions, the Al Saud’s consistent ability to transfer power swiftly and peacefully has contributed to their legitimacy

The free princes were a group of King Abdulaziz’s younger sons led by Prince Talal, who felt politically marginalized and claimed to support a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament and supreme court. In King Saud’s new cabinet, Prince Talal became finance minister

Five years into King Saud’s reign, the country was facing bankruptcy. Civil servants, soldiers, and contractors were not being paid. The American-owned oil company Aramco refused to make additional loans against future Saudi production.19 The Saudi Riyal was devalued by 50 percent, inflation soared, and there was labor unrest in the Eastern Province. By 1957, the kingdom was forced to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which insisted on seeing the country’s first detailed budget. That financial plan sharply reduced royal family living expenses. Over the next six years privy-purse expenditures fell by two thirds. In Riyadh, many half-finished palaces were abandoned, and infuriated princes correctly blamed their distress on King Saud’s financial mismanagement.

King Saud never intended to quietly fade away. Now he saw a chance to mobilize discontented clerics, merchants, tribal leaders, and some mid-ranking princes. He began blocking Faisal’s appointments for judges and governors. In November 1960, King Saud refused to approve Prime Minister Faisal’s proposed budget. A frustrated Faisal submitted a letter stating that “As I am unable to continue, I shall cease to use the powers vested in me as from tonight.”26 Faisal did not use the word resign, but that was how Saud chose to read it. King Saud used Faisal’s letter as the pretext to reclaim his role as prime minister, and then created a new cabinet in an alliance with the so-called free princes.

By 2015, the transition to third-generation princes was imminent and managing that process would be King Salman’s most important challenge. When King Abdulaziz died in 1953, it had taken a decade of periodic crises to resolve the manner in which the second generation of princes would govern. The system that they eventually created of thirty-four brothers sharing power, served the kingdom well for many years. The king was always first among equals with final authority and some kings were clearly more dominant than others, but all had sought to maintain family unity.

On the day of King Abdullah’s death, King Salman appeared to resolve this difficult issue by appointing his nephew, the 55-year-old Prince Mohammed bin Naif or MBN to be the deputy crown prince and third in line of succession. This move to a third-generation prince was an historic event, which effectively ended the political hopes of Abdulaziz’s few remaining sons. Many in Riyadh believed that by making the transition to third-generation leadership while a second-generation king was still on the throne to supervise the process, King Salman had taken the most important step of his reign on his first day in office.

King Faisal established a Council of Senior Princes to advise him on succession issues and to supervise succession in the event of his death. This Council initially included two of Abdulaziz’s brothers, Abdullah and Musa’id, as well as five of his sons: Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah, Sultan, and Nawwaf.

King Abdulaziz had selected his next two successors informally with a pact between his two eldest sons. King Faisal sought to make this process more secure, transparent, and predictable. Prince Fahd (1921–2005) was the seventh of Abdulaziz’s surviving sons. He had strongly supported Saud’s abdication, and as the oldest of the Sudairi Seven brothers had thrown their considerable political weight behind Faisal.9 Thus in 1967, Faisal selected Fahd to fill the newly created position of “second deputy prime minister.

King Abdulaziz passed away at Taif, near Mecca, on November 9, 1953.

Having abandoned the free princes, dismissed the liberal technocrats, frightened the ulama, alienated merchants, and cooled relations with the United States, King Saud had few friends left. In October 1962, the Al Saud family and the ulama again pressured him into accepting the return of Crown Prince Faisal as prime minister. Faisal immediately removed Saud’s sons from the cabinet and installed the team of brothers and half-brothers that would govern Saudi Arabia for the next fifty years.

King Saud abdicated formally and peacefully in November 1964. With the Minister of Defense Prince Sultan and the Commander of the National Guard Prince Abdullah aligned with Faisal, Saud had little choice.

during the first few weeks of his reign, King Salman made very few changes as he sought to embrace and reassure all stakeholders in the Al Saud’s coalition.

The Al Saud are most firmly united when the monarchy is threatened. Then they close ranks, as they eventually did against King Saud. The most threatening period of King Khalid’s reign began on the first day of the Islamic year 1400—November 29, 1979—when several hundred Islamic extremists seized the Great Mosque in Mecca.

The genuine sorrow over King Abdullah’s passing was accompanied by relief at the smooth succession that followed. Crown Prince Salman immediately became the new king and promoted his half-brother, Deputy Crown Prince Muqrin, to be the new crown prince.

Of his thirty-four living sons, only Faisal was with him at the end. When Saud arrived from Jeddah, Faisal rose to greet him and immediately swore allegiance to his older brother as the new king. Faisal then took a ring off their dead father’s finger and presented it to his brother in a gesture of loyalty.12 As his father had instructed him to do, King Saud publicly proclaimed Faisal his crown prince and confirmed his appointment as Viceroy to the Hejaz.

Saud was also devoted to his father. In 1936, when a knife-wielding Yemeni assassin attacked King Abdulaziz in Mecca, the crown prince spontaneously stepped in front of his father and took the blade in his own shoulder. Many believe it was this incident that compelled Abdulaziz not to sideline Saud for his more able half-brother, Faisal.

There was a distinctly liberal flavor to this cabinet, particularly among the technocrats, which did not reflect the conservative king’s views so much as those of the new allies whom he thought he needed.

In Riyadh, King Saud’s brothers became convinced that his foreign policy bungling, combined with his economic mismanagement, was putting their family at risk. The elder brothers agreed that Saud should keep his throne but relinquish all executive authority to Faisal. King Saud accepted this arrangement in March 1958. Crown Prince Faisal became prime minister, appointed himself finance minister, and began to balance the kingdom’s budget. He cut spending across the board, suspended development projects, canceled agriculture subsidies, delayed payments to contractors and tribal sheikhs, imposed import controls on luxury goods, and devalued the riyal. He reduced stipends for royal family members and obtained new loans from Aramco as well as leading merchants, including Osama bin Laden’s father Mohammed.24 At the same time, oil production increased by more than 50 percent from 1 million barrels a day in 1957 to 1.6 million barrels a day in 1962.25 The kingdom’s budget was balanced and its currency stabilized. The inflation rate fell sharply. By 1960, Faisal’s austerity had reduced not only the national debt, but also his own popularity with the tribes, merchants, and princes.

King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, which left him increasingly weak and unable to govern during the last decade of his life. When he died in August 2005, his younger half-brother, Abdullah (1924–2015), who had been crown prince for twenty-three years and effective regent for ten, was immediately declared king. Fahd’s younger full brother, Prince Sultan (1928–2011), remained minister of defense and became crown prince and deputy prime minister. The number-three post of second deputy prime minister, which King Faisal had created, was left vacant for the first time in thirty-eight years. Many had expected this third position to go to Sultan’s full brother, Interior Minister Naif (1934–2012), but King Abdullah baulked at the prospect of two full Sudairi brothers becoming king one after the other. In fact, from the beginning of his reign, King Abdullah sparred with the six remaining Sudairi brothers, who still firmly controlled the Ministries of Defense and Interior as well as the governorship of Riyadh. Only in 2009, when Crown Prince Sultan’s health had deteriorated to the point at which it became clear that he would never be king, did King Abdullah declare Prince Naif second deputy prime minister.

King Abdullah presided over a royal family increasingly concerned that the powerful Sudairi brothers—particularly Sultan, Naif, and Salman—would engineer a takeover of the Saudi government.

Had King Abdullah overseen the effective use of the Allegiance Council, the evolution of succession in Saudi Arabia might have been very different. As it was, when the Council approved Mohammed bin Naif as crown prince in 2015 and Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince in 2017, it was regarded as little more than a rubber stamp for the king’s decision. As stated in the Basic Law of Governance, succession remained very much the prerogative of the king.

the Allegiance Council, in which the Sudairis could be outvoted.29 The Council, created in 2007, represented an interesting but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to institutionalize the Saudi succession process. It consisted of King Abdulaziz’s surviving sons and a grandson representing each son who had died. It was intended that a new king would propose up to three candidates for crown prince to the Allegiance Council, which would attempt to form a consensus around one name.

King Abdulaziz respected, consulted, and depended on all of the Al Saud, but his first strategic choice regarding succession was that power would transfer to his sons rather than his brothers or cousins. From the outset, he intended to marginalize all but his direct descendants, much as King Salman appears to be doing today.

In March 1964, King Saud’s health had improved, and he wrote to Prime Minister Faisal demanding the full restoration of his authority. Neither Faisal nor the Al Saud family would agree. Instead, the third eldest brother, Mohammed bin Abdulaziz, marshaled family support for a religious ruling or fatwa that would permanently reduce King Saud to a respected head of state. Faisal would remain prime minister and no longer need to consult King Saud on any internal or external matters

by appointing so many sons to senior positions, King Saud made clear his intention to pass power on to them rather than to his brothers. This was neither King Abdulaziz’s intention nor something King Saud’s brothers would abide.

King Saud appeared ready to use force against family members.

. King Saud eventually recognized that this liberal cabinet was costing him more support than it produced, and that the free princes had political aspirations of their own. In September 1961, he fired them and appointed more of his own sons to senior positions.

The abdication of King Saud made it clear that the sons of King Abdulaziz would follow their father’s intentions regarding succession. Saudi Arabia would not become a monarchy based on primogeniture. It would be a family enterprise in which both age and ability shaped a consensus as to who should lead the family and the kingdom. The manner in which the struggle was resolved demonstrated why Saudi princes have generally spent more energy preserving the family franchise than fighting each other for absolute power. Senior Saudi princes do not need to fight to the death.

They were racing westward along the A89 Autoroute, the chief of the Israeli secret intelligence service and the future king of Saudi Arabia.

Then Abdulaziz did something revolutionary. He dismissed the leaders of two major Ikhwan tribes. He announced that Abdulaziz Daweesh would replace Faisal Daweesh as chief of the Mutair, and Ibn Ruba’yan would replace Sultan ibn Bijad as paramount sheikh of the Utaibah.20 This was unprecedented. Abdulaziz was the imam of the Wahhabis, just as King Salman is today. As such he was the community’s supreme political and spiritual leader, but no existing tradition allowed him to depose tribal chiefs. It was not at all clear that Abdulaziz could enforce such changes, but it was very clear that he intended to limit tribal independence and create a strong central government.

King Abdulaziz ruled for fifty-one years and saw his realm transformed from a remote, desert chieftaincy into a founding member of the United Nations. Yet he created no governing institutions beyond himself.

Abdulaziz responded by calling his third national conference in less than a year. The meeting was held in September 1929 at Ash Sha’ra between Riyadh and Mecca, and this time it was decisive. The king sought and received firm public support for harsh retribution against Daweesh and his followers. The resolution stated that those who revolted would now be tried and punished as common criminals according to Islamic law for the deaths they had caused. Anyone giving them aid would have their property confiscated.26 Those living in the “corrupted” Ikhwan camps would be evicted. This was the turning point in Saudi Arabian history that established the supremacy of the central government over the tribes. Those who supported the old ways were now outlaws, not holy warriors. Nothing like this had ever happened in Arabia before—and still has not happened in either Yemen or Afghanistan.

The most senior clerics are the grand mufti and other members of the Committee of Senior Scholars. They are appointed by the king. There are approximately twenty of them, and they operate through three sub-organizations whose convoluted names are perhaps best translated as the Presidency for Proselytization, the Commission for Religious Rulings and the Council of Senior Scholars.

Worried about claims that the Al Saud were not Islamic enough, Kings Khalid, Fahd, and, for the most part, Abdullah, did more waiting than reforming as Saudi Arabia’s cultural norms slid increasingly out of line with the rest of the world. King Salman, on the other hand, did not wait. He recognized that times had changed, and with them the demographics, opinions, and aspirations of most Saudis. By 2015, most Saudis were under thirty years of age, and very few thought the Earth was flat. Most thought that women should be allowed to drive. Traditional cultural values, which had provided a valuable stabilizing force during the social upheaval of oil booms, were becoming a liability for an economy that needed to improve its productivity and labor force participation rates.

At no point in the past sixty years have the senior ulama openly opposed the Al Saud on matters of political importance. They ultimately ratified the use of force against the Ikhwan, the introduction of the telegraph and radio, the deposition of King Saud, and the education of women.

General Motors dealer, Al Jomaih, was based in Riyadh.16 The king and crown prince no doubt also recognized that the Nejd, with its tribal orientation and religious conservatism, had been, and probably always would be, the region of the kingdom most devoted to the House of Saud. They began an affirmative action program for Nejdis in both business and government.

The king and crown prince no doubt also recognized that the Nejd, with its tribal orientation and religious conservatism, had been, and probably always would be, the region of the kingdom most devoted to the House of Saud. They began an affirmative action program for Nejdis in both business and government.

Unlike the Al Rasheed of Ha’il, the Al Saud had not traditionally engaged in commerce. Abdulaziz sought to promote the merchants’ prosperity because he relied on them for taxes, customs duties, and loans. He did not compete with them and instructed his sons to stay out of business. King Saud continued his father’s policy, and in 1956 and 1959 issued royal decrees prohibiting princes and civil servants from engaging in private business.

Unlike the Al Rasheed of Ha’il, the Al Saud had not traditionally engaged in commerce. Abdulaziz sought to promote the merchants’ prosperity because he relied on them for taxes, customs duties, and loans. He did not compete with them and instructed his sons to stay out of business. King Saud continued his father’s policy, and in 1956 and 1959 issued royal decrees prohibiting princes and civil servants from engaging in private business. King Faisal, however, recognized the need for change. With more and more princes coming of age, they could not all be given large stipends or senior government positions—nor could they be prohibited from earning a living. King Faisal’s own son, Abdullah, had served as minister of the interior but wanted to go into business. When a new decree was issued in 1976 allowing members of the royal family to engage in commerce, Prince Abdullah al-Faisal became Saudi Arabia’s Sony dealer.20 This fundamental legal change ensured that the Al Saud would eventually join the kingdom’s commercial, as well as its social and political, elite.