c. 1904 - 1975
King of Saudi Arabia, 1964 - 1975.
Faisal ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saʿud was the third son of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud Al Saʿud (known in the West as Ibn Saʿud), born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, probably in 1904 or 1905, though some accounts place his birth on 9 April 1906, to coincide with one of his father's important early victories. With no full brothers and no half brothers close to him in age, Faisal grew up in relative isolation. He left the royal court at an early age to study under his maternal grandfather, a prominent religious scholar, which served to reinforce that isolation.
Faisal assumed military, political, and diplomatic responsibilities at a young age. He led Saudi forces in the Asir campaign of 1920 and by 1926 was his father's viceroy in charge of the recently conquered province of Hijaz. This included responsibility for the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina and the annual hajj (pilgrimage). He early developed a special, broadly informed expertise in the area of foreign affairs; this began in 1919 when he represented his father on a diplomatic mission to Europe, the first of the Al Saʿud family to do so. In 1930, Faisal officially became foreign minister, retaining that position until his death in 1975, with only a brief interruption, thus making him the longest serving foreign minister in the twentieth century.
Faisal's natural intelligence and his success on important state assignments, such as representing Saudi Arabia at the creation of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, clearly marked him as the ablest of the sons of Ibn Saʿud. Yet in 1933, Ibn Saʿud had the family recognize Faisal's elder brother Saʿud, the crown prince, as successor despite Saʿud's obvious lack of intellectual gifts or meaningful preparation for rule. Faisal had doubtless hoped, perhaps expected, that his demonstrated abilities would have secured him the succession, consistent with the well-established Arabian custom of choosing the ablest near relative of the deceased as the new shaykh or amir. Ibn Saʿud evidently sought to avoid intrafamily rivalries that had fatally weakened the Al Saʿud during his own father's generation. Though Faisal came to feel contempt for his incompetent elder brother, he insisted in family councils on a scrupulous adherence to the oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to Saʿud that he had led the family in swearing. To do otherwise would, in his view, have established a dangerous precedent in undermining the family's rule.
King Saʿud's reign, 1953 - 1964, brought nearly constant crisis, with a pattern of events in which the Al Saʿud called Faisal to assume responsibility for the government, although Saʿud subsequently re-asserted his claim to power. In early 1958, the kingdom was financially bankrupt from Saʿud's profligacy and at risk because of his ill-conceived challenge to Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser and radical Arab nationalism. Faisal then assumed executive powers, imposing for the first time fiscal austerity with real limits on princes' pensions and a true budget. He came to a modus vivendi with Nasser, with whom he had earlier been careful to cultivate tolerable relations, though ideologically they were poles apart. By 1959, Saʿud had forced Faisal out of the government and allied himself with a group of reformist half brothers, the Free Princes, whose embarrassing public split with the rest of the Al Saʿud and declaration of solidarity with Nasser helped to place the kingdom in real peril.
In 1962, Faisal once again assumed executive powers as prime minister, doing so as a republican coup was about to overthrow the traditional ima-mate in Yemen and Saudi Air Force officers were preparing to defect to Cairo (Egypt). Faisal revamped the Council of Ministers and established the team of princes that continues to lead Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s. This included the progressive and ambitious Fahd and Sultan ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saʿud. They comprise part of the largest and most powerful grouping of full brothers in the family, those born to the favorite wife of Ibn Saʿud, Hassa bint Ahmad Al Sudayri. Fahd at forty-one was both interior minister and, in a new departure, was designated second deputy prime minister behind Prince Khalid, while thirty-eight-year-old Sultan ibn Abd al-Aziz Al Saʿud became defense minister, the position he holds today. To counterbalance them, Faisal selected the traditionalist Abdullah who, in contrast both to the king and the Al Sudayri family enjoyed close ties with the Arab tribes, a constituency whose support was critical to the monarchy. Faisal himself, with his genuine piety and austere morality well established (after sowing a few youthful wild oats), secured the support of the crucial religious establishment. Faisal's care in creating and maintaining balance in the government was key to preserving stability. Thus, when Saʿud's final attempt to recover his powers led the senior princes, backed by a fatwa (ruling) from the ulama (religious establishment), to force his abdication in 1964, the government had been put in place that would endure with few changes through King Faisal's own eleven-year rule and then Khalid's seven years as king, with its core still intact in the early 1990s.
The creation of an efficient, stable government in place of the circle of cronies or inexperienced sons on which Saʿud had heavily relied was typical of the reforms that Faisal enacted. They were meant not to open up the political system in a modern, democratic sense but to enable it to confront the challenges of the twentieth century, so as to preserve the kingdom's traditional values. Thus, Sultan, Fahd, and King Faisal's brother-in-law Kamal Adham, head of the state intelligence service, were given full rein to build up the military and internal security establishments. Bright young technocrat commoners - such as Ahmad Zaki Yamani, who long served as petroleum minister, and Ghazi alQusaybi, for many years minister of industry and electricity - began to play significant roles, though without political power, as the bureaucracy began a rapid expansion. Modern public instruction at all levels underwent massive expansion, with girls admitted for the first time, reflecting the king's realization of the necessity of an educated population. The press and radio broadcasting experienced rapid expansion and, against strong conservative opposition, Faisal introduced television - he saw the need to diffuse information rapidly in a modern state and viewed the print and broadcast media as means of promoting national unification.
Faisal met external dangers to the kingdom with reliance on restored prestige and stability at home and on bold initiatives when required. Financial assistance to Yemeni royalists helped to checkmate the radical threat in that quarter, and Nasser's defeat in the Arab - Israel War of 1967 greatly strengthened Faisal's hand in dealing with the Arab nationalist challenge. As oil revenues mounted toward the end of his reign, "riyal diplomacy" helped to moderate the behavior of radical recipients of largesse and to strengthen conservative regimes. The new wealth gave substance to Faisal's attempt to promote an international policy based on the conservative values of Islam. In 1970, he took the lead in establishing the Organization of the Islamic Conference as an intended alternative to the Arab League (the League of Arab States). Ultimately, however, Faisal knew that Saudi Arabia's security against external threats - principally the Soviet Union, its regional allies, and proxies - could come only from the United States. This dependence placed Saudi Arabia in the painful dilemma of being intimately linked to the principal supporter of Israel. The dilemma became an acute crisis in U.S. - Saudi relations when Faisal led the imposition of the 1973 - 1974 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo after President Richard M. Nixon's decision to resupply massively Israel's armed forces during the Arab - Israel War of 1973. It was typical of Faisal's pragmatic realism that, within months of that crisis, the U.S. and Saudi governments had signed agreements, especially the Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation, that created unprecedented links between the two countries.
In his statecraft, Faisal balanced a fundamental commitment to traditional values with an informed acceptance of the means of creating a strong modern state. He combined a rigorous Islamic view of the world with a sophisticated realpolitik, and he devoted himself unswervingly to the survival of Saudi Arabia. It is likely that, next to his father, Faisal will be remembered as the greatest of the twentieth-century Saudi rulers.
Bibliography
Beling, Willard A., ed. King Faisal and the Modernisation ofSaudi Arabia. London: Croom Helm; Boulder, CO: Westview, 1980.
Bligh, Alexander. From Prince to King: Royal Succession in theHouse of Saud in the Twentieth Century. New York: New York University Press, 1984.
Holden, David, and Johns, Richard. The House of Saud: TheRise and Rule of the Most Powerful Dynasty in the Arab World. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.
Lacey, Robert. The Kingdom. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
— MALCOLM C. PECK
