King Faisal Of Saudi Arabia – Alexei Vassiliev

One of the Saudi pilots told the media that there was an underground organization in Saudi Arabia that comprised both officers and civilians, and that all of them were waiting for a suitable occasion to strike, which apparently would not be long in coming. Several commoners in the Saudi government signed a memorandum appealing to the kingdom to recognize the YAR.

The royal family was split over the issue. Talal had by then moved to Cairo and been joined by princes Badr, Fawwaz and Saad. They set up a “committee of free princes” to insist on fundamental change in the Saudi political system.6 Meanwhile, other princes such as Khalid were helping the royalists. The infirm Saud had been preparing to leave the country for treatment anyway. His indecision in the face of a most serious challenge to the regime induced the main members of the royal family to speed up the transfer of prime ministerial powers and full control of the government to Faisal.

When Faisal returned to Saudi Arabia, he formed a government that excluded both Saud’s sons and the commoners who insisted on recognizing the YAR. Khalid became deputy prime minister; Sultan, minister of defence and aviation; Fahd, minister of the interior; and Abdallah, National Guard commander. In early November 1962, Faisal made public his reform programme, consisting of ten points. It adopted a basic constitutional law drawn from the Qur’an and the sunna, which took into account changes in society; it was to outline “the basic principles of government and relations between the ruler and the ruled”, and declare “the citizens’ fundamental rights, including the right to express one’s opinion freely within the framework of the Islamic faith and general law and order”.

Under the programme, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice and the judiciary system were to be reformed, and new codes were to be introduced to improve economic activity. Faisal declared that one of his major tasks was to raise the nation’s social standards, and instituted the provision of free medical services and education, subsidies to the needy and protection of the workers from unemployment. “The government strives seriously to introduce important changes into the forms of public life and make the means of entertainment available to its citizens,” he said.

There were provisions for the total abolition of slavery, its prohibition and the liberation of all slaves.7 The government bought out male slaves at $700 and female slaves at $1,000 until 7 July 1963. From then on all slaves were considered free. Most of the freed slaves, particularly those previously owned by the members of the royal family, chose to remain with their former masters as cooks, drivers, nannies and bodyguards.

The programme provided for establishing a justice ministry and a labour and social-issues ministry, and confirmed the need to develop the majlis al-shura.

The light was dazzling. A scorching sun the colour of copper seared the ground, though it was still too early for the real summer inferno. The sky looked neither light- nor bright blue but bleached, as though faded from the heat, and appeared to reflect the grayish desert; the glare was torture for the eyes. In the big house of the noble Riyadh ‘alim Abdullah ibn Abd al-Latif, however, one of the rooms was in semi- darkness: there his daughter was in labour.

At last, the infant arrived. To everyone’s delight, it was a boy. In those days no one could know the baby’s gender in advance, and even the highest-placed and richest families had neither doctors nor midwives. The newborn’s grandmother washed the baby in warm, clean water. (At that time no one in Riyadh had electricity, but clean well water was abundant.) The boy’s father Abd al-Aziz, the Emir of Najd, known in Najd as well as abroad by his family name of Ibn Saud, gave an abaya (a warm cloak) as a gift to the messenger who had brought the glad tidings.

It was April 1906, or, according to the Muslim calendar, the month of Safar, 1324 ah. As a rule Najdi chroniclers did not give the exact date of a child’s birth even in noble families, but tied it instead to some prominent event; in the same month of the same year, Ibn Saud had defeated his rival Ibn Mitab of the House of Ibn Rashid, ruler of the Jabal Shammar, in the battle of Rawdat Muhanna. The emir returned to the capital, and within seven days of the boy’s birth, at a ceremony at his father-in-law’s house, Ibn Saud named his son “Faisal” in honour of his own grandfather.

Faisal, whom the Western media would later call “the mightiest Arab ruler in centuries”, would become the king of a country blessed with a quarter of the world’s oil reserves and possessing the two holiest sites of Islam – Mecca and Medina.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

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