King Fahd: 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 was the house of Saud in its notions of hierarchy. The kingdom's founder, the swashbuckling bedouin warrior, Ibn Saud, had required that his sons stand in his presence. And when, one by one, they succeeded to his throne, they preserved such deferential conventions.
When Fahd's elder brother, King Khalid, received the British prime minister, the crown prince could only speak when spoken to.
Thatcher grasped her error 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 of Ibn Saud's sons to succeed him. It was then that, more than mere heir apparent, Fahd became what the western press called "strongman". For Khalid was a reluctant monarch; in poor health, he cared more for his falcons and traditional bedouin pursuits than affairs of state. In contrast, Fahd loved them.
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 an ideological and strategic challenge, the strong, statesman-like rule of King Faisal and - above all - oil.
Thus Fahd was at the heart of the extraordinary process that transformed the kingdom from a primitive backwater, with barely a school, hospital or paved road, into a financial giant, a bastion of Middle East stability and mainstay of western interests, with a pivotal influence on the politics of the Gulf, and the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Fahd had his foibles but, on a benign judgment, they were the vices of his virtues. He inclined to indolence, and was much less assiduous in his attendance at family consultations than he should have been. He could, however, make up for this with impulsive bouts of extraordinary, if rather chaotic, application.
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. It was true, of course, that there had been no greater voluptuary than Ibn Saud himself. The trouble was that his sons, in emulating their father, did so with the crass, jet-setting vulgarity of nouveaux riches of a type - bedouins-turned-billionaires - that the world had never seen before. 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, and first born of his father's favourite wife, Hassa. Realising, it seems, that he would be king one day, he started taking private lessons in the English he had never been taught in a childhood bereft of formal schooling.
He asked his friends to tape extracts from the books that had most impressed them; thus he delved into the memoirs of Winston Churchill or Anthony Eden, and learned of US politics under presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. He was credited with liberal and progressive views, and was said to be ready for the political and constitutional reforms, diluting royal power, which the Kennedy administration was urging as a response to the challenge of Egypt's president Nasser and Arab revolutionaries.
In 1953, Ibn Saud's last year, Fahd, aged 32, became the first-ever minister of education in the still 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. 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, and one they likewise opposed with public protest and occasional violence.
More than any other member of his family, he 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 a largesse as a means of political control. At the height of the oil boom, with $300 million 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.
Saudi Arabia's strategic and diplomatic influence grew commensurately. Taking control of foreign policy, he now joined money, on a characteristically munificent scale, to Islam as the instruments of a grand design whose cornerstone was a quid pro quo between the kingdom and the west, the US in particular.
The Saudi proposition was that, as the world's largest oil exporter, they should contribute to the West's threatened economic and political wellbeing by doing their best to keep prices down and spending their earnings on the West's goods, arms and know-how. The West, meanwhile, should furnish the kingdom with protection, and improve the standing of both sides in the Arab and Muslim worlds by adopting a more even-handed approach towards the Arab-Israel conflict.
Saudi Arabia thus became the foremost guarantor of Arab solidarity, the capital Riyadh a natural forum for summit meetings of the ever-quarrelsome kings and presidents.
A 1985 collapse in oil prices proved a turning point in the fortunes of the house of Saud. The crisis struck at the basic compact the rulers had more or less successfully imposed on the ruled, whereby granting the people the spectacular material progress that oil riches afforded, the royal house had felt able to defer the growth of public participation in government. But now the bounty was drastically reduced, and the commoners whom the princes had enriched and educated were now to seek political power, to grow impatient with the royals who persisted in denying it to them.
And as this process developed, Fahd's vices gradually loomed larger than his virtues. He steadily lost prestige abroad, as well as at home.
He was unprepared for the terrible shock of August 2nd, 1990, when his "friend Saddam" sent his army into Kuwait. It took him five days even to officially concede that it had happened. By inviting 500,000 "infidel" soldiers on to his soil, he drew the jibes of critics who wondered if Saudi Arabia was now more the servant of the Americans than Islam, and asked why the Saudi armed forces, on which Fahd had lavished billions, were so hopelessly incapable of defending the kingdom on their own?
The US-led coalition duly liberated Kuwait. Yet the victory 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, in commoners' eyes, 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 which 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 the world's largest oil exporter 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. That western-Saudi 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.
Militant Islamists were in the van of these. Here lay a great irony. Fahd had exploited an extreme version of Islam, at least the outward show of it, as an instrument of political power. But he now found himself under challenge from an opposition which, to elevate itself above the official morality, espoused an ideology in some ways even more extreme and narrowly doctrinaire.
In response to the challenge, Fahd did, at long last, acquiesce in his long-promised reforms. In 1993, he established a consultative council, composed of leading citizens selected by himself, and set about reining in his government's runaway finances. But it was not enough to appease the Islamists. The new breed of scholars and preachers kept up their agitation against both secular and religious authority.
In November 1995, Saudi Arabia was shaken by terrorist violence of a kind it had never experienced before. A giant car-bomb killed five Americans at a training mission in Riyadh. But Fahd's health was deteriorating faster than that of his kingdom. He suffered a stroke, and, in January 1996, entrusted the management of government affairs to his brother, Crown Prince Abdullah.
Fahd is believed to have had three wives and eight sons. The eldest son, Faisal, predeceased him.
Fahd bin Abdul Aziz bin Saud; born 1921; died August 1st, 2005