When, in 1981, Margaret Thatcher met Fahd bin Abdul Aziz bin Saud for the first time, she came away distinctly unimpressed. ”You say this man runs the country,” she sniffed, ”he didn’t have a word to say for himself.”
She was wrong.
Fahd, who has died aged 84, was only crown prince of Saudi Arabia at the time, and what the British prime minister did not realise was how punctilious the house of Saud was in its notions of hierarchy. Convention dictated that when Fahd’s elder brother, King Khalid, received the British prime minister, the crown prince could speak only when spoken to.
Thatcher grasped her error the next morning. Fahd had so much to say, in fact, that their meeting ran over time. For now the crown prince was in his own office, from which he had effectively run Saudi Arabia since 1975 when, with the assassination of King Faisal, Khalid had become the third son of the kingdom’s founder, Ibn Saud, to succeed him. It was then that, more than mere heir apparent, Fahd became what the Western press called a ”strongman”. For Khalid was a reluctant monarch, in poor health, who cared more for his falcons and traditional Bedouin pursuits than affairs of state. In contrast, Fahd loved them.
The irony is that if he did not, in a formal sense, hold supreme office in 1981, Fahd enjoyed more real authority, prestige and respect then than after he himself became king after Khalid’s death, a year later.
Throughout the late 1960s and into the 1970s, Saudi Arabia, as a state and society, was very much in the ascendant, thanks to three things: the decline of the Arab revolutionary regimes that once posed such a challenge, the strong, statesman-like rule of King Faisal and — above all — oil.
Fahd had his foibles, but on a benign judgement, they were the vices of his virtues. He was far from immune to the hedonistic pleasures the West could offer. He was celebrated for his exploits at the gaming tables of the Côte d’Azur; he indulged the pleasures of the flesh with the zest his station permitted, maintaining a full complement of wives, changing junior partners as desire dictated.
Such private morality was ill-assorted with the ferocious, dogmatic puritanism of the Wahhabite school of Islam. If Islam remained one pillar of the house of Saud, money, for worse as well as better, became the other.
Fahd was the 11th of Ibn Saud’s 42 sons but, more importantly, he was the first born of his father’s favourite wife, Hassa; she bore him six others, and most of these ”Sudeiri Seven” showed special promise and ambition.
In 1953, Ibn Saud’s last year, Fahd, then 32, became the first minister of education in the backward, dirt-poor, but newly oil-producing, kingdom. In that capacity, and as interior minister from 1963 to 1975, he found himself in the thick of the perennial conflict between a cautious modernism and Wahhabite conservatism. He established the Gulf’s first university and supervised the introduction of education for women — a devilish innovation in the zealots’ eyes.
Fahd grasped, with relish, the opportunities that the first great oil shock — the quadrupling of prices after the Saudi-led use of the oil weapon in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war — ushered in for the kingdom.
He believed the house of Saud could survive and prosper into the 21st century if only it made itself the creative agent of change, the intelligent architect of development and benevolent dispenser of largesse as a means of political control.
In most countries, budget time is tax time. But, at the height of the oil boom, with $300-million in hard cash flooding the exchequer every day, Fahd’s problem was how to spend, not to raise, money. He managed to dispose of $400-billion in three successive five-year plans.
Saudi Arabia became a giant construction site. Army barracks and ministries, hospitals and universities, stadiums and supermarkets, factories and warehouses, luxury villas and popular housing estates, airports, highways and hotels — Fahd did it all at once, transforming a largely Bedouin and pastoral society into a mechanised, modernistic, city-centred one in a generation.
The kingdom’s strategic and diplomatic influence grew commensurately. Fahd, alone among Arab leaders, found himself more sought-after than seeking. He joined money to Islam as the instruments of a grand design whose cornerstone was a quid pro quo between the kingdom and the West, the United States in particular.
The Saudis’ proposition was that they contribute to the West’s economic and political wellbeing by doing their best to keep oil prices down and spending their earnings on the West’s goods, arms and know-how. Fahd lavished petro-dollars on keeping, first, communism, then Islamic fundamentalism, at bay.
Then, in 1985, the almost incredi-ble happened. With tears in his eyes, Fahd told his people that he had had to postpone the budget.
Thanks to the collapse in oil prices, the kingdom was passing through ”extremely critical circumstances”, and simply did not know how much income — already down to about a quarter of what it had been five years before — would be coming its way.
This proved, in retrospect, to be the great turning point in the fortunes of the house of Saud. These were henceforth in the descendant. The crisis struck at the basic compact the rulers had more or less successfully imposed. In granting the people the spectacular material progress that oil riches afforded, the royal house felt able to defer another form of progress, the growth of public participation in government.
Fahd’s vices gradually loomed larger than his virtues and he steadily lost prestige abroad, as well as at home. He found it harder to preserve Arab solidarity, to promote the Arab-Israeli peace process, to get as much from the US as the US was getting from him.
Nothing in this decline quite prepared Fahd for the shock of August 2 1990, when his ”friend Saddam” sent his army into Kuwait. It took the Saudi ruler five days even to officially concede that it had happened.
The country, which had made a religion of Arab consensus, now found itself in the frontline of the most dangerous conflict in modern Arab history. The US-led coalition duly liberated Kuwait, but this triumph furnished but a short respite from the sense of menace, of gathering siege, that was to afflict Fahd’s last years of effective power. Money and Islam were, as ever, at the heart of the matter.
In the summer of 1993, the international financial community was asking itself an amazing question: Was the world’s largest oil exporter, richest of the gulf’s super-rich, going broke? It was not, quite. But with at least $52-billion going on bills to Western, Arab and Muslim allies, Operation Desert Storm had been a huge, unexpected drawing on the kingdom’s accumulated reserves.
Now here was Fahd heaping yet more dazzling new hardware on his armed forces in which, for internal political reasons, he must have had less confidence than ever. It was not so much fear of another Saddam that prompted him, it was the princes’ greed for commissions and the desperate need of Western arms manufacturers to sell their products.
It all fuelled a growing popular resentment in a society whose per capita income had fallen from $15 000 to $5 000 as some of the privileges of the world’s most generous welfare state were taken away from it. Saudi austerity was, of course, rather less austere than anyone else’s. But that did little to compensate for the ever-growing costliness and corruptions of the progeny of Ibn Saud, or for the prodigious excesses of Fahd himself.
There was the $20-billion that Fortune magazine reckoned he was worth, his dozen palaces in Saudi Arabia and half a dozen in Europe, his Red Sea floating pleasure dome, his $100-million yacht and his $150-million Boeing 747, got up in the gothic style, with a three-storey lift, gold-plated hardware and special flame-proof chandeliers. And — since the Gulf War — there was also a royal bunker, proof against nuclear, chemical and biological attack, that was as vast and well-appointed as his homes above ground.
The way the West, especially the US, treated Saudi Arabia as a milch cow for its weapons, and other high-priced goods and services, was a source of growing resentment too. So was Fahd’s acquiescence in it. The bargain he had struck in the 1970s seemed a thoroughly one-sided one now. But the greater the resentment, the more dependent, in the end, he became on the US as his ultimate protector against enemies within and without. — Â