Fahd Al Sahra :: The Diplomat King

When, in 1981, Margaret Thatcher met Fahd bin Abdul Aziz for the first time, she came away unimpressed. “You say this man runs the country,” she sniffed; “he didn’t have a word to say for himself.” She was wrong.

Fahd was crown prince at the time, and what Thatcher didn’t realize was how very punctilious is the House of Saud in its notions of hierarchy. Deferential conventions helped preserve both the cohesion of a vast royal family and the allegiance to it of a people still denied even the outward trappings of popular sovereignty. So when King Khaled received her, Fahd, also there, could only speak when spoken to.

She grasped her error next morning. He had so much to say that their meeting ran over time. This time he was in his own office, from which - Khaled being such a reluctant monarch - he had effectively run the country since 1975. The irony was, however, that if he did not formally hold supreme office at the time, he enjoyed more real prestige and respect than when he became king a year later.

Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, the Saudi monarchy was very much in the ascendant thanks to the decline of Arab “revolutionary” regimes, the statesmanlike rule of the late King Faisal, and oil. Fahd masterminded the process that transformed the kingdom from a primitive backwater into a financial giant and bastion of Middle East stability.

He had his obvious foibles. He was not immune to the materialist pleasures of the West, but this was part of an openness of mind encompassing a willingness to promote some of the higher Western values. The ruling house had its Wahhabi zealots, but it was always far more forward-looking than the hidebound religious establishment that was the other bulwark of the unique Saudi theocracy - and usually more so than the country’s citizens.

In 1953, at 32, Fahd became the kingdom’s first-ever education minister. From then on, he was in the thick of the perennial conflict between a cautious modernism and Wahhabi conservatism. He supervised the introduction of education for women, as devilish an innovation in the zealots’ eyes as television was to be a few years later.

In 1970, he launched the country’s first “five-year plan,” later grasping with relish the challenges which the first great oil shock of 1973 ushered in. He believed the House of Saud could survive and prosper into the 21st century if it became the creative agent of change, intelligent architect of development, and benevolent dispenser of largesse. At the height of the boom, Fahd’s problem was how to spend, not raise, money. Disposing of $400 billion in three five-year plans, he transformed a largely pastoral society into a mechanized, modernistic and urban one in a generation.

Saudi Arabia’s strategic influence grew commensurately. Arab leadership passed from the “revolutionary” to the traditionalist camp. In international forums, Fahd, alone among Arab leaders, found himself “more sought after than seeking.” He now joined money, on a munificent scale, to Islam as the instruments of a grand design whose cornerstone was a quid pro quo between the kingdom and the U.S. It went like this: Saudi Arabia would contribute to American economic and political well-being by doing its best to keep oil prices down and spend its earnings on American goods and know-how; the U.S. would furnish the kingdom with protection and improve its own standing, and Saudi Arabia’s, in the Arab and Muslim worlds with a more evenhanded approach toward the Arab-Israel conflict.

Saudi Arabia became the foremost guarantor of Arab solidarity. Fahd lavished petro-dollars on keeping, first, communism, then Islamic fundamentalism, at bay. He cultivated his “brother Saddam Hussein,” calling him “the sword of Islam” when he went to war against Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran, backing the accolade with huge subventions.

Then, in 1985, the almost incredible happened. The annual Saudi budget had become as fixed a rite in the service of Mammon as was the Mecca pilgrimage in the service of God. Every January, Fahd went on television to announce it. But that year, a tearful monarch admitted to his people that he had had to postpone the announcement. Thanks to the collapse in oil prices, the kingdom was passing through “extremely critical circumstances.” This proved, in retrospect, to be the great turning point in the House of Saud’s fortunes, henceforth in the descendant. The negative effects of immense wealth now began outweighing the positive ones.

The admission struck at the compact between rulers and ruled. Relatively forward-looking culturally, socially and economically, the House of Saud was far less so politically and constitutionally. In granting its people material progress, it deferred public participation in government. But now that the bounty was drastically reduced, the commoners it had enriched and educated sought political power, growing impatient with princes whose corruptions grew as their own earnings diminished.

Fahd steadily lost prestige. Yet nothing quite prepared him for the shock of August 1990, when his “friend Saddam” sent his army into Kuwait. It took the Saudi regime five days to officially concede it had happened. The continued absence of democracy underlined how Fahd had disappointed early expectations of him. That was the worst thing. But what, too, of the issues Saudis would have raised if democracy there had been? Of the fact that the country, which had made a religion of Arab consensus, now found itself in the front line of the most dangerous conflict in modern Arab history? Or that the “custodian of the two holy places” had invited 500,000 “infidel” soldiers onto his soil? For why were the Saudi armed forces, on which the regime had lavished billions, so hopelessly incapable of defending the kingdom on their own?

The U.S.-led coalition liberated Kuwait. Yet the triumph furnished but a short respite from the gathering menace of Fahd’s last years of effective power. Money and Islam were, again, at the heart of it.

In 1993, international financiers began asking whether the world’s largest oil exporter was going broke. It wasn’t, quite. However, Kuwait’s liberation had forced the kingdom to draw hugely on accumulated reserves. Yet here was Fahd still heaping dazzling new hardware on his discredited armed forces. It wasn’t so much fear of “another Saddam” that prompted him, but the princes’ greed for commissions.

It all fuelled growing popular resentment in a society whose per capita income had fallen from some $15,000 to $5,000. Saudi “austerity” was less austere than anyone else’s. But that didn’t compensate, in commoners’ eyes, for the ever-growing costliness of the progeny of Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, the kingdom’s founder, or for the excesses of the king himself. The way the West milked the kingdom was a source of growing resentment too. The Western-Saudi bargain Fahd had struck in the 1970s was one-sided. But the greater Saudi resentment, the more dependent the king became on the U.S. against enemies within and without.

Ironically, militant Islamists were among these. The regime had exploited an extreme version of Islam as an instrument of its political power. But Fahd found himself challenged by an opposition that, to raise itself above official morality, espoused an Islam even more extreme. In response, Fahd at last acquiesced in reforms. But the Consultative Council he set up in 1993 was carefully composed of leading citizens, all of whom he selected.

It didn’t satisfy the Islamists. The new breed of scholars and preachers kept up their agitation. The most striking of them, the brilliant, articulate, resourceful Abdullah Masaari, became a political refugee in London, and, from there, exploited fax machine and the Internet to disseminate reports on the deeds and misdeeds of the Saudi regime.

In 1995, a new kind of terrorist violence shook the kingdom. A giant car-bomb killed five American soldiers in Riyadh. But Fahd’s health was deteriorating faster than that of his kingdom. He suffered a stroke, and in 1996 entrusted government affairs to Crown Prince Abdullah. For the rest of his days the monarch who had ruled so long before he reigned became the ailing figurehead who continued to reign, but no longer ruled.

David Hirst was for a long time Middle East correspondent for London’s The Guardian. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR.