Acting as the sheikh of a tribe, Abdul Aziz summoned the leaders to Riyadh. Over weeks, he tirelessly received his dissident followers in his majlis, plied them with food and reached into his tin trunk to gather coins to meet their requests. In the end, most—but not all—Ikhwan leaders returned to their settlements as loyal subjects. Having pacified the majority, Abdul Aziz struck the rebels.

In early 1929, central and northern Arabia became the scene of widespread guerrilla warfare as the rebelling Ikhwan attacked villages, caravans and tribes loyal to the king until Abdul Aziz defeated them in the last great traditional bedouin battle fought from the backs of camels and horses. Although mechanized warfare would soon thereafter come to the Arabian Peninsula, Abdul Aziz continued to rule as a tribal sheikh. His majlis was where his subjects came to bring their grievances and collect their due as members of their king’s tribe. To hold the system together, Abdul Aziz physically appeared in all parts of his kingdom, putting enormous demands on his time and limited resources.

BEYOND TRIBAL politics, Abdul Aziz also faced the challenge posed by great- power rivalries of the Ottoman Empire and Britain in the Persian Gulf and Mesopotamia. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Mubarak of the small sheikhdom of Kuwait reigned as a master of manipulation, playing off one great power against another. When Abdul Aziz returned to Kuwait from his years with the Al Murra, Mubarak invited him to sit in on his audiences. In his role as protégé, he met traders, merchants and travelers as well as government representatives from England, France, Russia, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. In expanding his education beyond religion and tribal rivalries, he also sharpened his perceptions of the imperial powers—their aims as well as their relative strengths and weaknesses—as he watched Mubarak skillfully play one against the other. One thing became clear: if Abdul Aziz wanted to restore the empire of the Al Sauds, he would need the goodwill and protection of the British along the west coast of the Persian Gulf. At the same time, he came to understand that he must avoid provoking armed intervention against him by the Turks. Consequently, in the years prior to World War I, Abdul Aziz continually kept the region’s two established great powers in confusion. The Turks knew Abdul Aziz was courting Britain along with themselves, and the British knew that every time he approached them for support, he had, at the same time, pledged to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire his unswerving loyalty.

Abdul Aziz benefited from a string of British imperial officers responsible for the Persian Gulf who considered him the most gifted leader of the interior of the Arabian Peninsula. None acted as a greater advocate for Abdul Aziz than the young William Shakespear, who came to Kuwait as political resident in 1909. On meeting Abdul Aziz for the first time, Shakespear discovered that he displayed none of the xenophobia or narrow-minded fanaticism commonly associated with Wahhabis. He also recognized that Abdul Aziz was a political realist.

Although Abdul Aziz sought British naval protection, London’s goal on the Arabian Peninsula was not another protectorate. It was to maintain good relations with Turkey and thus thwart German, French or Russian designs on Britain’s Indian empire. London also feared that any friction with Turkey and the caliphate might inflame anti-British sentiment among Muslims in India. In this thinking, Abdul Aziz seemed merely the weak ruler of an isolated minor statelet.

But in 1913, Shakespear warned his superiors that Abdul Aziz intended to move out of the Najd into Hasa and Qatif. Since both fronted on the Persian Gulf, Britain would be forced into relations with him whether London wanted them or not. As predicted, Abdul Aziz did take Hasa in 1913. With it came the continuing need to balance one great power against the other. To Turkey, he gave his personal assurance that he remained “an obedient servant of the Sultan,” promising to maintain order in the province and expressing his willingness to serve as governor on the sultan’s behalf. To Britain, he said his ambition was to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands, not interfere with the coastal emirates with which Britain had treaties. Again he asked Britain to give him financial and naval protection from the Turks. London refused.

In March 1914, Britain and the Ottoman Empire reached an agreement in which the two imperial powers divided the whole of the Arabian Peninsula. London took the territory running southwest from Qatar in the East, across the Rub’al Khali and along the northern borders of Yemen and the Aden protectorates to the Red Sea. Everything to the north of the line, including all of the Najd, Hasa and the Hejaz, belonged to Istanbul. With London determined to reach an agreement with Turkey that would protect Britain from the Persian Gulf to India, the British wooed Abdul Aziz to Kuwait, where he was cornered and forced to submit to the Anglo-Ottoman Treaty.

Then fate intervened in the form of World War I. Britain and the Ottoman Empire now were on opposite sides, and Whitehall sent Shakespear to enlist Abdul Aziz as an ally. Rather than joining the British war effort, wily Abdul Aziz decided to play for time. Shakespear reported to London that Abdul Aziz would not move to make matters “either easier for us or more difficult for the Turks as far as the present war is concerned, until he obtains . . . some very solid guarantee of his position, with Great Britain practically as his suzerain.”

By December 1915, the two parties, which had been dancing around each other for a decade, now reached out to each other. Abdul Aziz needed British protection against the Ottomans, the Hashemites and the Rashids. He also needed British arms and money to deal with tribal revolts inside his territory. Britain needed to neutralize any potential ally of Turkey in the face of appalling casualties on the western front and the disaster unfolding in the Dardanelles campaign. Yet, when London decided to back the Arab revolt, it turned to the sharif of Mecca, not Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud.

In 1908, the Ottoman sultan had appointed Husayn Ibn Ali as sharif of Mecca. For eight hundred years, the post of sharif, protector of the two holy cities and the holy places, had been filled by a member of the Hashemite family. As strife between the Young Turks and the sultan escalated in the lead-up to World War I, Husayn continued in his post, exercising considerable autonomy. Thus Britain judged him the most effective face of the British-financed Arab revolt against the Turks. Once more, Abdul Aziz’s position dropped from a significant force to a minor figure within the game of great-power politics. Worse was to come.

After World War I, the British put the Hashemites, rivals of the Al Sauds, on the thrones of Transjordan and Iraq. They also continued to maintain their protectorates along the Arabian Peninsula’s eastern coast. France seized Greater Syria. With no other countervailing weight to put on the scales, Abdul Aziz feared for the independence of his kingdom. Then the oil prospectors came calling in the 1930s. Turning his back on mighty Britain, Abdul Aziz placed his potential oil resources in the hands of America, a country far away that carried little history of imperialism. Throughout the remainder of his reign, the United States provided Saudi Arabia the protective cover Abdul Aziz needed to ensure his kingdom’s sovereignty.

ABDUL AZIZ Ibn Saud died at his palace in Riyadh on November 9, 1953, at the age of seventy-three. He carried into death all the scars of his battles to build and defend a kingdom encompassing most of the Arabian Peninsula, from the southern borders of Iraq and Jordan to the northern border of Yemen, and from the east coast of the Red Sea to the west coast of the Persian Gulf, including the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. He left it to the Al Saud name, his forty-three sons and the Wahhabi ulema. He also bequeathed the wealth that his negotiations with international oil companies had delivered and the security that the United States provided.

But he also left his country, his people and his heirs with the flaws of his legacy. Abdul Aziz never made the transition from tribal sheikh to head of state. Nor did he ever differentiate between the resources of the sheikh and the resources of the government. Tormented by the fear of family infighting that destroyed the first Al Saud empire, he established a system of succession to the throne that today endangers the very family it was designed to protect. On the death of the founding father, his oldest son, Saud, became the king. Since then, Saud’s brothers, one by one, have succeeded to the throne through a byzantine system operated by the family and legitimized by the Wahhabi establishment. Although the House of Saud has avoided a rupture, the system has proved problematic. Saud, weak and corrupted, was forced out by the family. Faisal, the most revered of the kings who followed Abdul Aziz, was assassinated by his nephew. Khalid, regarded by his subjects as a kindly sheikh, reigned while his brother Fahd ruled. As crown prince and king, Fahd pushed development and shunned the bedouin ethos and religious piety of his predecessors. It is the current king, Abdullah, combining the attributes of a great bedouin sheikh, pious Wahhabi and cautious reformer, who comes closest to the model of Abdul Aziz. He is now in his late eighties and in poor health. Through his death, the House of Saud escaped the succession of the long-time defense minister, Sultan, who was detested by most Saudis. That leaves Prince Nayef to succeed Abdullah if the pattern holds. As head of the dreaded security services, he claims neither the charisma nor the respect earned by Abdul Aziz, Faisal and Abdullah. He is also seventy-nine years old.

Pullquote: At six feet four inches tall, he stood a foot above those he sought to lead. Beyond size, he radiated genuine charisma, pulling people to him like a magnetic force.Image: Essay Types: Book Review