Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud Al Saʿud
1880 - 1953
Muslim leader and founder of Saudi Arabia.
Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud Al Saʿud (known as Ibn Saʿud) became the greatest of all Saudi rulers, restoring the Arabian empire of his ancestors in the early years of the twentieth century. In his reign of more than a half century he not only recovered the lost patrimony of the House of Saʿud but laid the foundations for the economically powerful Saudi Arabia, over which his sons continue to rule. Along with his ancestors Saʿud ibn Abd al-Aziz and Abd al-Aziz ibn Muhammad (rulers of the Saudi state at the turn of the nineteenth century), he was the only Arabian ruler since the early Islamic era to unify most of the Arabian Peninsula under a single political authority.
As he was growing up in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where he received a traditional education centered on the memorization of the Qurʾan, he witnessed the last act in the decline of the second Saudi state and its submission to the Al Saʿud family's central Arabian rivals and former vassals, the Al Rashid of Haʾil, a town to the north of Riyadh. His father, Abd al-Rahman, failed in the attempt to reassert Saudi independence and the ten-year-old Abd al-Aziz fled into exile in Kuwait with the rest of the family. In 1902, he led a band of forty companions on a dramatic raid that seized Riyadh from its Rashidi overlords. Over the next quarter century bold military, political, and diplomatic initiatives
brought all of Arabia except for Yemen, Oman, and the Gulf shaykhdoms under his rule.
In reestablishing Saudi authority, Abd al-Aziz self-consciously re-created the religio-political state of his Wahhabi ancestors. It was based on adherence to the strict beliefs and practices of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century Islamic reformer whose 1744 alliance with Muhammad ibn Saʿud had created the Saudi state of 1745. Indeed, he looked back to the first Islamic community under the prophet Muhammad in creating, from 1912 on, a series of communities called hujar (pl.; echoing the hijra - the migration of the prophet Muhammad and his early followers to Medina). Here unruly Bedouin tribesmen were settled as Ikhwan, brethren under the command of preacher/warriors who formed the core of Abd al-Aziz's military force. In addition to the crucial legitimacy provided by identification with Wahhabi Islam, he was able to draw on the established loyalty of many central Arabians, which derived from the significant history of rule by the House of Saʿud. Moreover, Abd al-Aziz and the Saudi clan enjoyed the advantage of membership in the great Anaza tribal federation, conferring noble (sharifian) lineage, thus joining a critical aristocracy of blood to their religious credentials. Abd alAziz was brilliantly adept in his management of tribal relations, utilizing disbursement of material benefits, application of military force, and the establishment of marital ties to build the alliances necessary to secure his power. He made astute use of the bedouin magnanimity, for which he was famous, as when he carefully contrived to avoid casualties in his capture of Hail, last stronghold of the Al Rashid, then arranged for the comfortable confinement of his defeated rivals in Riyadh. Patient and generous treatment of his rebellious cousin Saʿud al-Kabir served to deflect a challenge from within the Al Saʿud and secured the line of succession for the direct descendants of Abd al-Rahman.
If mastery of traditional sources of power in Arabian statecraft carried Abd al-Aziz through the initial phases of reconquest, it was his capacity to utilize Western inventions and techniques as well as to adjust to new international realities that enabled him to establish a state that could endure. The source of this aptitude is not obvious and may be largely traceable simply to his superior intuitive abilities. It is likely, however, that it had something to do with his youthful exile in Kuwait, where the (by Arabian standards) cosmopolitan atmosphere meant exposure to information, ideas, and people not usually encountered in the xenophobic isolation of his native Najd. Early in his career of re-conquest he met the British political resident in Kuwait, Captain William Shakespear, and developed an admiring friendship for him. Sir Percy Cox, senior British representative in the Gulf just before World War I, had a very strong influence on Abd al-Aziz, and Harry St. John Philby, a British civil servant who left his government's service to live in Saudi Arabia, provided Abd al-Aziz with advice (not always taken) and a window on the outside world. Abd al-Aziz also relied heavily on a coterie of advisers from Syria, Egypt, and other Arab countries. This awareness of the outside world helped to induce a certain pragmatism, evident early on in his search for British protection and in his 1915 treaty with Great Britain that recognized his independence and guaranteed him against aggression. Similarly, after the 1924 - 1925 conquest of the Hejaz (western Arabia, with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina), he restrained his zealous warriors and assured his retention of that key province by demonstrating to the world Muslim community that he could provide a more efficient and secure administration of the territory than the Hashimite regime that he had defeated. In 1935, he granted generous terms to the imam of Yemen, whom he had defeated in a border war, doing so both to avert possible European intervention and to avoid inclusion in his kingdom of a population whose cultural distinctiveness would have made its assimilation very difficult.
In 1928, the pragmatic realism of Abd al-Aziz came into conflict with the tribal aggression and religious militancy of the Ikhwan forces he had unleashed. The Ikhwan's revolt followed his acceptance of the British-drawn borders of Transjordan and Iraq to the north - for the first time imposing the constraints of explicit state frontiers on a society to which such notions were alien. By 1930, Abd alAziz had surmounted this threat, the gravest to his rule, making effective use of automobiles, machine guns, and radio communications to crush the revolt. The passions that drove it, however, remained alive and shook the Saudi kingdom a half century later, in November 1979, when Islamic extremists and disaffected members of the Utaiba tribe, from which many Ikhwan rebels had come, seized the Great Mosque at Mecca in an effort to overthrow the rule of the Al Saʿud.
With the Ikhwan revolt behind him, Abd al-Aziz moved to draw together the disparate parts of his extensive realm. Since Sharif Husayn ibn Ali had assumed the title King of the Hijaz, Abd al-Aziz adopted the same title after conquering that province; he coupled it somewhat incongruously with the title Sultan of Najd and Its Dependencies in 1926. In the following year, he elevated the second title as well to monarchical status, in effect creating a dual monarchy. In 1932, Abd al-Aziz abandoned this arrangement and explicitly identified the country with the Al Saʿud family by naming it the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The two earlier Saudi states had been Wahhabi commonwealths, largely isolated from the outside world and ruled by a Saudi imam, the title emphasizing religious authority and obligations. The new kingdom, while remaining committed to its original religious purpose, was a nation-state that developed an expanding network of relations with other nations, including the establishment of close ties with secular states beyond the Arab-Islamic world.
To secure the future stability of the state he had created and to preserve the continued rule of his line, in 1933, Abd al-Aziz formally designated his eldest surviving son, Saʿud, to succeed him. This action, which senior princes, religious leaders, and tribal chiefs publicly endorsed, departed from the usual practice of Arabian tribal society. In addition to guaranteeing that future kings would come from Abd al-Aziz's branch of the Al Saud, it was doubtless also intended to avert the fratricidal conflict that had destroyed the second Saudi state at the end of the nineteenth century. It was understood that Faisal (Ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saʿud), the next eldest brother, who possessed a much more impressive intellect and had, as foreign minister and viceroy for the Hijaz, exhibited a much greater capacity for public affairs, would succeed Saʿud. Abd al-Aziz may have had several reasons for favoring Saʿud as his immediate successor, but the establishment of seniority as the determining factor in succession was clearly preeminent. Saʿud and Faisal became rivals, but Saʿud's incompetence eventually drove the senior princes and religious leaders to depose him in favor of Faisal. Nevertheless, the principle that Abd al-Aziz established has, with certain qualifications, been preserved and served to maintain the stability of the kingdom.
The crucial economic and security relationships with the United States, a central pillar of the king-dom's foreign policy, grew from decisions that Abd al-Aziz took in the latter phase of his rule. In 1933, he granted the first oil concession to a U.S. company; he signed a petroleum exploration agreement with Standard Oil of California (SOCAL), choosing it over its British rival, the Iraq Petroleum Company. He did so largely because SOCAL could offer more money for his impoverished treasury but also because he saw an advantage in counterbalancing his close relationship with Great Britain with ties to a faraway country having no political involvement (as yet) in the Middle East. There followed the creation of the Arabian American Oil Company consortium and the exploitation of the world's largest oil reserves, bringing staggering wealth to the companies and the kingdom, and the creation of an intimate alignment with U.S. industry that largely determined the course of Saudi Arabia's economic modernization and development. From this time on - especially on radio, in news-reels, and in newspapers - he became known as King Ibn Saʿud.
Equally significant for Saudi Arabia's future were the agreements that Ibn Saʿud made with the United States to assure his country's external security. The king's meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt on a U.S. Navy cruiser in Egypt's Great Bitter Lake, in February 1945, prefigured the close, if informal, U.S. - Saudi security alliance that developed after World War II, as British power declined. In 1947, the king waved aside the suggestion of his son Prince Faisal, the foreign minister, that Saudi Arabia break diplomatic relations with the United States over the Truman administration's support for the United Nations partition plan for Palestine - which paved the way for the creation of an independent Israel and contravened a pledge that Roosevelt had made to Ibn Saʿud. The king, however, expected the United States to offer him something in exchange and, between 1947 and 1950, secret U.S. undertakings gave the king the assurances he sought without a formal treaty. Thus the foundations were laid for the far-reaching security relationship - embracing arms sales, military training, and the massive defense infrastructure whose scope was revealed only forty years later, in the course of the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation of the Gulf Crisis of 1990 - 1991.
The last years of the long rule of Ibn Saʿud, when his physical health was in decline, were an unhappy coda to an extraordinary career. As massive oil income began to flow in the early 1950s, the king displayed little understanding of the economic or social implications of vast wealth - and some of the ostentation that became the hallmark of his reign was apparent before his death. Politically, he was no longer able to master the novel and complex challenges of a very different world than the one he had earlier dominated. The government of Saudi Arabia remained the simple affair that suited a largely traditional desert monarchy, with a small retinue of advisers and a handful of rudimentary ministries that had been established in an ad hoc manner. Somewhat ironically, the last significant governmental act of the old king was to create the Council of Ministers, until today the source of executive and legislative authority in the kingdom.
In November 1953, King Ibn Saʿud died at al-Taʾif in the Hijaz. He was buried with his ancestors in Riyadh.
Bibliography
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— MALCOLM C. PECK
