King Fahd

Obituary

Aug 4th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Fahd ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud, King of Saudi Arabia, died on August 1st, aged probably 83

POOR King Fahd. He stood upon his going for so long that speculation about the Saudi monarchy had come to centre not on the prince who would replace him, or even on the prince who would replace that prince, but rather on the slightly less geriatric princes who might or might not be next down the line.

It is also a little ironic that the most active period in his fairly indolent life was probably when he was crown prince to his ailing and lethargic half-brother King Khaled. He became king in 1982. But then, after a few years, the Fates turned cruelly against him. He was plagued with ill-health and, by the early 1990s, was becoming forgetful. After a major stroke in 1995, he had to cede all power to his ambitious, if almost equally elderly, half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah, who has now become king officially.

King Fahd's father was Saudi Arabia's prolific founder, Abdel Aziz ibn Saud. As the eldest of the seven sons by the king's favourite wife, Prince Fahd was groomed for power. At the age of only 30 or so, he became education minister. Unkind voices suggest that he was illiterate at the time (he had had a traditional courtly education at the special school for princes in Riyadh and later studied Wahhabi Islam, the strictest form of the creed, in Mecca), but the demands of the new ministry of education were unlikely, at that stage in the kingdom's history, to be all that pressing. He was swiftly promoted to interior minister and then, in effect, to deputy prime minister under his forceful half-brother, King Faisal, who reigned before Khaled.

Prince Fahd was intelligent and subtle, with a most brilliant and disarming smile; but he was said to be lazy, and had a lot of wild oats to sow. He liked the West, and western pleasures in particular. In the 1950s and 1960s he was a playboy enjoying the proceeds of the kingdom's growing oil revenues in the casinos and hotels of Monte Carlo. Even at home he lived life to the full. One former ambassador recalls meeting him at an embassy party with a glass in one hand, a cigarette in the other and a Lebanese beauty on each arm.

But then there was the famous occasion, during King Faisal's reign, when he returned to the kingdom after losing several million dollars at a casino in the south of France. Faisal summoned him to his presence, and slapped him across the face. From then on, Prince Fahd was more circumspect, applying himself to statecraft and distancing himself from the more corrupt of his freespending relations.

His youthful excesses, however, took their revenge, as they are tiresomely inclined to do. Diabetes was probably one consequence. He was a heavy smoker: another diplomat remembers him smoking two cigarettes at the same time, one for the left hand, the other for the right, with an ashtray for each. He was also overweight, causing weak knees. Being king ensured that special arrangements were made. One of his palaces had the world's smallest escalator, just one step, so he would not strain himself walking between two rooms with different floor levels.

The league of gentlemen

His last years were bad, and to be forgotten. He was Saudi Arabia's longest-serving monarch after his father, Abdel Aziz. But the title of king remained to him as a dignity only; talks of any substance were conducted with Prince Abdullah.

Better to remember his middle years. And, indeed, there is quite a lot he should be credited with, albeit in a modest way. As education minister, flush with oil money, he built great numbers of schools and universities; he also agreed with educating women, though in practice he did not advance them much. And he set up, or rather began the setting up, of a rather more systematic form of government. In 1992 he issued a decree setting out formally the process of succession. He also planted what may be the earliest roots of democracy: an appointed consultative council of senior gentlemen.

In 1981, as crown prince, he proposed an eight-point peace plan to end the Arab-Israeli conflict, which was adopted, after controversy, by the Arab League. (It laid down that Israel should exist in peace so long as it withdrew from all the territory occupied in the 1967 war, and let all the refugees return. Unsurprisingly, Israel threw it out.) He also helped, as a founder-member of the Tripartite Arab Commission, to bring Lebanon's civil war to an end; he was host to a meeting of the warring factions that resulted in the signing of the 1989 Taif accord.

But he will probably be best remembered as the leader who, against opposition from within the royal family, and defying the Saudi tendency to delay awkward decisions, brought American forces into Saudi Arabia in 1991 to defend the kingdom against Iraq's Saddam Hussein. Saudi Arabia was duly saved, but the presence of half-a-million foreign fighting men and women was a deep shock to both Saudi self-esteem and the country's conservative Muslim culture. King Fahd had no truck with terror; on his watch, though probably by Prince Abdullah's act, Osama bin Laden was stripped of his citizenship, and thousands of radical preachers were ejected from their mosques. But the consequences of his cosiness with America are still being played out.

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