The first clear sign that an announcement of King Fahd's death was imminent came with the news in late June that Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a nephew of the late king, was resigning as ambassador to Washington, a post he had held for 22 years. King Fahd's death was announced a few weeks later, and Crown Prince Abdullah formally took power.
The Washington shift, in other words, was an opening shot in a succession battle that, while in the initial stages seems to have gone smoothly, inevitably pits rival princes from various competing branches of the Saudi ruling family against one another. The relationship between King Abdullah and the new Washington ambassador, Prince Turki, illustrates how personal relationships among princes will remain crucial to the kingdom's future—and how personal rivalries may also prove destabilising.
There is a further complication: Prince Bandar is the son of defence minister Prince Sultan, who was made crown prince on the announcement of King Fahd's death. Despite losing his job in Washington, Bandar can therefore jostle for a prominent role in the new regime in the shadow of his powerful father. Prince Sultan is one of six full brothers of the late king—the others include Riyadh governor Prince Salman and interior minister Prince Naif—who represent the main rivals to their half-brother King Abdullah. Ultra-conservative and yet self-indulgent, they deeply distrust Abdullah, mainly because he is close to the progressive Al-Faisals and because of his talk of the need for an anti-corruption drive.
Nevertheless, in many ways the succession could not have come at a better time. Saudi Arabia is flush with oil money, and Abdullah recently completed a successful meeting with George W Bush. Abdullah, moreover, is the first king since his half-brother Faisal, who ruled from 1964 to 1975, to be genuinely popular among the Saudi masses. He has positioned himself as a strong Muslim leader, shunning the decadence and indulgence that has made so many other members of his large family infamous, while trying to unite the kingdom's warring factions in the name of a more moderate Islam. A simple man known for speaking his mind, he has an undeniable bond with the impoverished and disenfranchised in Saudi society— even visiting slums to hear the concerns of their inhabitants. In the two and a half years I spent working and travelling in Saudi Arabia, I never met anyone who had a good word to say about King Fahd, or a bad word to say about Abdullah.
However, even if he turns out to be a genuine reform-minded king like Faisal, Abdullah is at best a short-term answer to Saudi Arabia's problems. At least 80 years old, his health cannot be assumed. Even his designated successor, Crown Prince Sultan, is at least 76 years old. The passing of the second generation, of whom Sultan and the interior minister Prince Naif are the last, is not far off, and is likely to lead to competition that could be far more destabilising.
The dominance of the sons of the founder of modern Saudi Arabia, King Abdul Aziz, and the opportunity of each to serve as monarch are one of the kingdom's most distinctive traits. Abdul Aziz, who founded the kingdom in 1932, had at least 40 sons. Princes Salman, Sultan and Naif are among the most prominent of the 22 still thought to be alive. They could overlook their own jealousies, if not for the common good, then at least to maintain their own positions in the hierarchy.
But that is far more difficult for the so-called third generation of powerful princes—the grandsons of King Abdul Aziz. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of them, many educated in the west and the majority perhaps eager one day to wear the crown. They have many mothers and countless half-brothers and cousins in their ranks. Since there is no clear line of succession after Crown Prince Sultan, those princes in their forties and fifties are jostling for position. Among them are Prince Bandar, the billionaire businessman Prince al-Waleed Bin Talal, and King Fahd's favourite son, Abdul Aziz, once notorious for being the wealthiest teenager in the world.
The world will remember King Fahd himself principally for allowing American troops to use Saudi Arabia as a base for their attack on Iraq in 1991. It was an act that cemented the kingdom's 60-year oil-for-security alliance with the US, but which turned the kingdon's hardline Islamists against the House of Saud. Allowing "infidel" troops on Saudi Arabia's holy soil brought to the fore historic tensions, and was an illustration of the ruling al-Saud family's attempts always to have it both ways: to be a force for controlled modernisation while upholding tradition; to be the ally of the west, especially the US, while both influencing it and keeping its corrupting influences at bay, and empowering an extremist Wahhabi religious establishment at home that ultimately seeks the west's destruction. No one better personified these absurd contradictions than King Fahd himself: a notorious womaniser, drinker and gambler, he took the title "Custodian of the two Holy Mosques."
While the radicals' charges of corruption and hypocrisy against the al-Saud dynasty resonate, so, too, does the al-Saud's appeal for stability and quiet. After all, one of the worst charges in Islam is that of "fitna," the dissension and the chaos created by rebellion. But over time, calls for radical reforms will continue and may well increase, even as they risk causing greater instability. Two forces are working against stability: the rapid social changes brought about by the oil wealth of the 1970s, and the population growth, including the huge cohort of youth that has become used to wealth, education and the ways of the west.
Different factions within the royal household are now likely to fight for dominance. It is, of course, possible that the leaders of the next generation will be as adroit as some of Saudi Arabia's past leaders, notably King Faisal, who famously remarked at the height of the oil boom: "In one generation we went from riding camels to riding Cadillacs. The way we are wasting money today, I fear the next generation will be riding camels again."
Ultimately, Saudi Arabia's future is now dependant on how King Abdullah decides to face the immediate future: whether he deals with reality head on, as Faisal did, or continues to allow all those around him to bury their heads in the oil-rich sand. The social and economic problems he inherits from decades of mismanagement under King Fahd are monumental. The unemployment rate is officially 9 per cent, but actually much higher. Some 75 per cent of the population is under the age of 30, while all the kingdom's leaders are over 70. Saudi researchers estimate that over half of the workforce has no high school diploma.
The various strategies available to the ruling family in the face of greater restlessness among the people may all fail. It is easy enough to observe that a house divided against itself will fall, and perhaps even to hope that the al-Saud family will realise this rather than allow divisions to seize control. For waiting in the wings are those most disciplined and determined—and desperate to seize the oil wealth and claim all the prestige that comes with the governorship of the two holy shrines—the followers of Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden.
Meanwhile, while the Bush administration's middle east agenda has focused increasingly on promoting democracy and freedom throughout the region, Saudi Arabia followed a contrary agenda, whose sole avowed focus is counterterrorism. Riyadh's fight against terrorism and repeated calls for national unity provided a façade behind which the monarchy abandoned the few reform initiatives previously in place and reversed any movement toward democratic change.
After 11th September, the Saudi royal family took a religious approach to the ensuing domestic crisis. By appealing to the kingdom's hardcore Wahhabi constituency—specifically, by arguing that the royal family endorsed a "truer" version of Islam than the terrorist organisations—the regime tightened its grip on the population. This agenda became clearer as subsequent developments unfolded, including the ousting of Muhammad Al-Rashid, a reform-minded education minister, replaced by the antisemitic Abdullah Al-Obaid, who has blamed "the Jews" for linking Islam and terrorism; an increase in mass arrests of Christians living in Saudi Arabia; a drastic increase in the number of beheadings; and a witch-hunt of the local gay community.
Despite these realities, Riyadh continued to promote the illusion that it is pursuing reform-minded policies. For example, the February 2005 municipal elections were virtually meaningless in practice, with women denied the right to vote and Wahhabi hardliners emerging victorious; not even the royal family bothered to participate. Indeed, the elections once again symbolised that long-standing historical contradiction within Saudi foreign policy: the royal family must appease both its Wahhabi constituents and the US, even though the two parties are inherent enemies. Abdullah's first decree as monarch reflected this: he released three liberal reformers jailed for calling for a constitutional monarchy, but also granted freedom to an extremist who has justified attacks on westerners in the kingdom.
This contradiction has created an unstable foundation for US-Saudi relations, a point amply demonstrated by both 9/11 and the Iraq war. After all, even as it has tried to appease Washington on some Iraq-related issues, Riyadh has failed to stop more than 2,500 Saudi citizens from travelling to Iraq to organise or carry out acts of terrorism that undermine the nascent government. A recent study suggested that more than 60 per cent of all suicide bombers in Iraq are Saudis.
The Saudi regime has accrued at least $60bn from record-high oil prices, and so has the financial means to win the hearts and minds of Saudi citizens on its own, without relying on the imposition of hardcore Wahhabi rule. But the regime views any such measures as a threat to its survival. Rather than initiating democratic change, the royal family has endorsed huge public projects that emphasise the importance and superiority of the monarchy and its exorbitant surplus.
The House of Saud can no longer perform its historic role of providing cradle-to-grave support to its subjects, and third-generation princes are beginning to wake up to the consequences of their elders having bought, rather than earned, the loyalty of the people. Their subjects no longer enjoy the benefits they did in the oil boom years—excellent healthcare, free education, rapidly developing infrastructure, guaranteed employment—meaning the continued indulgence of the senior al-Saud princes is distancing the two groups as never before.
The liberals, though, are tarred in their turn by their association with the west, with its often crude anti-Saudi propaganda in the US media that damns all Saudis as extremists, blindly equates Islam with terror, labels the kingdom "kernel of evil," and endorses plans for an imperial US-invasion to take control of the oil fields.
In such a political environment, the al-Saud family, in its continued reliance on the west, is caught between a rock and a hard place and exposed for the double game it has played with both its people and the US for decades. King Abdullah, like King Fahd, now has his work cut out trying to keep the game working.
