Of all the pressing problems facing the Saudi regime, the prickliest—and the one that has the potential to shape the kingdom’s response to all others—is royal succession. The elderly sons of Abdul Aziz, who have ruled sequentially since his death in 1953, are approaching the end of the line.
With King Abdullah eighty-nine and ailing, having lost two crown princes and anointing a third within eight months, the royal family is approaching an inflection point. It could continue to pass the crown to remaining brothers and half-brothers, the youngest of whom already is sixty-nine, but none of them appears likely to have the acumen and energy—or even the time—to usher in a new era of reform to solve the kingdom’s problems. So whether by choice of the royal family sooner or by the will of Allah a bit later, the crown is going to have to pass to a new generation of princes. This entails both opportunity and risk.
The opportunity is more obvious. In theory at least, a new-generation royal who was educated, open-minded, and above all energetic could begin seriously to tackle the country’s manifold problems by relaxing political and economic controls, and by providing more efficient and accountable government to relieve the frustrations of the sullen Saudi populace.
Given the stakes involved, however, the risk is that the diffuse and divided royal family will dither or, worse, splinter. The stakes are not merely which new-generation prince will wear the crown but the prospect that that prince’s branch of the family will then pass the crown to its sons and grandsons in perpetuity, preventing other branches of the family from ever ruling again. For nearly sixty years, the crown has passed by family consensus from one brother to the next, occasionally skipping one deemed incapable or unsuitable for leadership but otherwise following the tradition of seniority. A king might favor his own sons with particularly plum jobs, but he understood that the crown would pass next not to his sons but to his brothers. It is a system unlike that of any other monarchy. But in a kingdom in which princes often marry multiple wives and thus produce literally dozens of progeny—now adding up to nearly seven thousand princes—it is a system that has largely worked.
But brotherly succession has not always gone smoothly. The second Saudi state collapsed in 1891 because several Al Saud brothers fought one another for preeminence. Another brother tried to pick up the pieces but was defeated by the competing Al Rashid family and fled to exile in Kuwait with his teenage son—the future founder of the modern Saudi state, Abdul Aziz. Half a century later on his deathbed, that same Abdul Aziz summoned his two eldest sons, Saud and Faisal, to his bedside to avoid a repetition of history. “Join hands across my body,” he told them, “and swear that you will work together when I am gone. Swear too, that if you quarrel, you will argue in private. You must not let the world catch sight of your disagreements.”
The dying king’s words fell on deaf ears. The two brothers quickly began quarreling, and their feud continued for more than a decade. The elder, Saud, who followed his father on the throne, was extravagant in every way. In a kingdom that then had few resources, he spent lavishly on everything, including a garish new pink and gold palace surrounded by high walls to conceal swimming pools, palm groves, and fountains supplied from artesian wells drilled by Americans. Traffic lights regulated the flow of Cadillacs cruising within the palace walls. The palace’s thousands of colored bulbs periodically lit neon inscriptions from the Koran. Lighting, cooling, and irrigating his palace and grounds was said to consume more electricity and water than did all the rest of Riyadh. As the king drove to and from this desert palace, he habitually tossed handfuls of gold and silver coins from the window of his car, watching with glee as children scrambled to gather them.
Crown Prince Faisal, by contrast, was an ascetic. Deeply religious and hardworking, he lived what for Saudi royals was a simple lifestyle, following daily religious and personal rituals down to the number of pieces into which he cut his afternoon apple. Faisal and other princes had watched as King Saud squandered the nation’s resources, leaving Saudi Arabia by 1958 essentially bankrupt, notwithstanding its rising oil revenues. In that year, a delegation of royal brothers asked Faisal to head a new government of national reform and take over day-to-day governance. The Saudi people learned this only when the religious readings on Mecca radio were interrupted to announce that Crown Prince Faisal had taken over administration of the kingdom under King Saud. When Faisal went to inquire how much cash the nation had to meet its obligations, he found only 317 riyals (about $100). When he asked the National Commercial Bank, then and now the kingdom’s largest, for a loan, it refused because King Saud already had defaulted on numerous large loans.
For the next six years, the brothers carried on an increasingly public tug-of-war for leadership, bringing the country to the verge of civil war. Finally in 1963 King Saud, refusing to yield power despite his misrule, surrounded his palace with his Royal Guards. The late Crown Prince Sultan, then minister of defense, put the army on alert. Prince Abdullah, then head of the National Guard and now king, called out his troops. King Saud and his immediate extended family remained holed up at his palace. A tense nation waited to see what would happen.
Crown Prince Faisal went to work as usual each day, driving past the palace where King Saud’s guards, cradling loaded machine guns, followed him with their eyes. One day Faisal stopped. “Have you got enough to eat and drink?” he asked. “You’ve been out here for some time. I will have some coffee sent round.” The mere act of speaking to the guards was a turning point; thereafter they saluted Faisal as he drove to work. The crisis abated. But still King Saud refused to yield power.
Finally the family turned to the religious ulama to adjudicate the quarrel. The ulama noted that King Saud had voluntarily given powers to his crown prince and had no justification for revoking them. The family elders asked the ulama to institutionalize this decision in a fatwa. Immediately after the fatwa was issued, some seventy princes representing all branches of the family endorsed it. The decisive role played by the ulama is a reminder to this day that those who would be king should not offend the religious leadership.
At last King Saud departed the kingdom, with all senior family members gathered at the airport in a show of unity. The new king, Faisal, stood at the end of the farewell line with his head bowed to his elder brother and kissed his hand in respect as the deposed king flew to Dhahran, Beirut, and finally Athens, where he spent most of his remaining years. King Faisal is still widely respected by Saudis as a decisive, principled, authoritarian ruler who modernized the kingdom—ending slavery and introducing education for girls both only in the 1960s—and stood up to the West with the 1973 oil embargo. After his assassination in 1975 by a nephew, the crown has passed from one half-brother to another without any visible public disagreement: from Faisal to Khalid, a reluctant and short-lived king; to Fahd, who ruled more than two decades; and now to Abdullah, who assumed the throne in 2005.
King Abdullah, 89, during one of his multiple hospitalizations, was visited by a group of his aged brothers, including the late Crown Prince Nayef, at far right. Ronald Reagan once famously said of similarly aged and infirm Soviet leaders: “They keep dying on me.” (SAUDI PRESS AGENCY)
With that history in mind, and aware that a generational change was approaching that almost surely would be divisive, King Abdullah early in his reign established a so-called Allegiance Council to create a formal process for selecting future monarchs. This council consists of the remaining sons of Abdul Aziz and the eldest son or grandson of the deceased sons of the founder. Thus, all male branches of the family have representation on the council, which consisted of thirty-five princes at its founding in 2007 but now has thirty-four since one brother, Fawwaz, died leaving only an ineligible adopted son. (Abdul Aziz fathered some forty-four sons by twenty-two wives.)
Theoretically, the system gives all council members an equal say in selecting a new crown prince when the existing one becomes king. Creating this one-man-one-vote Allegiance Council was King Abdullah’s way of trying to curb the power of the six surviving Sudairi brothers, a clique of senior princes occupying key government jobs, including minister of defense, minister of interior, and governor of Riyadh, for most of the past fifty years. Many branches of the family feared that if Crown Prince Sultan, a Sudairi, became king, he and his brothers would conspire among themselves to pass the throne from one Sudairi to the next, excluding half-brothers from other branches. The deaths of Sultan and Nayef leave only four Sudairis, and one, Salman, now is crown prince. (The Sudairi royals are the sons of Abdul Aziz by a favored and ambitious wife named Hassa bint Ahmad Sudairi, who dined with her seven sons weekly until her death and trained them to support each other over their half-brothers in the extended family. Her eldest son was the late King Fahd.)
The Allegiance Council, first announced in 2006, took more than a year to materialize, perhaps a sign of intrafamily struggles over its composition. Abdullah finally announced its membership at a family dinner in 2007. “We thank Allah Almighty who enabled King Abdul Aziz to realize the first Arab unity paving the way for the establishment of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia: the purest place on earth,” he said. Then each of the thirty-five princes swore an oath before the king: “I pledge to Allah Almighty to remain loyal to my religion, king and country, and not to divulge any of the state’s secrets, and to preserve its interests and systems, and to work for the unity of the royal family and its cooperation as well as the national unity and to perform my duty sincerely, honestly and justly.”
The Allegiance Council still has not met despite the deaths of two crown princes. The king, himself recuperating from back surgery only a few days before Sultan’s death, rose from his hospital bed to ask his brothers to pledge their loyalty to his choice for Crown Prince, Nayef, the Sudairi he had personally named second deputy prime minister in 2009, to hold the fort at home when he traveled on business as Crown Prince Sultan was abroad for medical reasons. That 2009 appointment, made without any meeting of the Allegiance Council, effectively put Nayef second in line for the throne after his ailing brother, Sultan, and seemed to undermine the very system that the king himself had created to select a new crown prince. Nayef’s ultimate confirmation as crown prince a few days after Sultan’s death surprised no one.
The king’s decision to name Nayef deputy prime minister parted the curtain on royal family divisions. Prince Talal, older than Nayef, immediately warned through Reuters that Nayef’s appointment absolutely did not mean he was crown prince in waiting. “I call on the royal court to clarify what is meant by this nomination and that it does not mean that he will become crown prince,” Talal told the news agency.
Notwithstanding Prince Talal’s view, Nayef would have been monarch had he not died in June 2012 from diabetes and poor circulation soon after being appointed crown prince. His death pleased reformers who had feared he would snuff out even the modest reforms of King Abdullah. Nayef, who served as minister of interior from 1975 until his death, was disliked by many Saudis for his role in smothering any hint of dissent by arresting those brave enough to criticize the regime even mildly and by imprisoning and executing those who actively oppose it. When reformers in 2003 were proposing a constitutional monarchy, one activist who met with an angry Nayef recalls that the prince retorted, “I don’t want to be Queen Elizabeth.” Now the crown looks likely to pass to Prince Salman, seventy-six, who was appointed minister of defense in 2011 at the death of Crown Prince Sultan, who held that portfolio for half a century. Salman became crown prince in June 2012 upon the death of Nayef eight months later. Prince Salman is described as hardworking and religiously conservative but is seen as open to at least maintaining the modest reforms of King Abdullah. Prince Salman and his half-brother Abdullah are expected to be a more harmonious duo than were Abdullah and Nayef.
But given the age of both men, at some point soon the Al Saud family will have to make the generational change to a grandson of the founder. The Allegiance Council, which already has a majority of grandsons, might be assumed to favor a member of the next generation. But given the deference to age in Saudi society, especially in the royal family, the grandsons are likely to defer to their remaining uncles’ judgment. Moreover, the competing interests of the multiple grandsons may well serve to block one another’s ambitions. One grandson on the Allegiance Council confides that the grandsons’ numerical advantage won’t affect the outcome. “We will simply follow what the senior members of the family say.”
Another grandson acknowledges that groups of family members are already meeting regularly these days to discuss the changes they all know are coming. He insists all will go smoothly. “The only difference is that instead of being loyal to our uncles, we will be loyal to our cousins,” he says of the impending generational change. “In the next two to five years this will cease to be an issue.” The family, he says, is trying to organize a whole series of moves to arrange succession not just at the top but at key ministries like defense, interior, and foreign affairs, each of which was held for decades by the same princes who now are either dead or dying. (Defense, as noted, has been filled by Prince Salman.) “It is like a rosary,” he explains. “You can’t move one bead without moving them all. So the family wants to move all the beads at once.”
This is another way of saying that the family hasn’t yet balanced issues of internal equity, so the country simply will have to wait for better or at least more energetic leaders. The leadership has essentially been on hold since 1995, when King Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke and Crown Prince Abdullah became acting king and ruled without a functioning partner or crown prince for a decade. In 2005, when Fahd died and Abdullah became king in title as well as fact, he named Sultan his crown prince, but within two years Sultan was in New York seeking treatment for cancer; he died in October 2011. So for at least fifteen years, the kingdom has been without a team who could make the sclerotic Saudi bureaucracy function. All important decisions wind up at the king’s desk. Now the kingdom once again has both a king and a crown prince, yet both are infirm and cannot provide energetic, let alone visionary, leadership.
So Saudis watch and wait, having no input into the succession decisions but aware that rivalries and tensions within the family clearly could break into the open and that a royal house divided might not stand. It obviously is in the self-interest of the Al Saud family to ensure smooth transitions, but in a family of thousands of princes and several dozen different branches, consensus could prove elusive. And if the family settles for another aged son of the founder to succeed Salman, the country’s sad status quo would simply continue to run its downward course.
If, however, the throne can be passed to a new-generation royal, there will at least be an opportunity for change. That next generation includes numerous princes with the education, experience, and energy to tackle the kingdom’s many problems. And several appear to be actively jockeying, including Khalid al Faisal, son of the late King Faisal and governor of Mecca; Muhammad bin Fahd, son of King Fahd and governor of the Eastern Province; Muhammad bin Nayef and Saud bin Nayef, both sons of the late Crown Prince Nayef and top officials in his Ministry of Interior; Al Waleed bin Talal, Saudi Arabia’s most successful businessman and son of the crotchety Prince Talal bin Abdul Aziz, a lifelong advocate of democratic reform by the royal family; Khalid bin Sultan, son of the late Crown Prince Sultan and deputy minister of defense; and of course their younger uncles, Ahmad bin Abdul Aziz and Mugrin bin Abdul Aziz, sixty-seven, the youngest surviving sons of the founder. At the most simplistic level, a new-generation monarch might be capable of working a full day and at least press the sclerotic bureaucracy to implement, rather than deep-six, royal decrees, as so often now occurs. Such a driver of change, of course, could crash, but in the absence of an alert and active driver, the kingdom seems doomed to sink ever deeper into the mire of unproductive dependency, with all the mounting frustrations that such indignity provokes.
Four of the princes who would be king. Each is among the not-so-young younger generation of grandsons of the country’s founder.
Khalid al Faisal, 72, governor of Mecca, a moderate, modern prince known for his religious rectitude, is the son of the late King Faisal. (GETTY IMAGES)
Muhammad bin Nayef, 53, deputy minister for security at the Ministry of Interior and son of the late Crown Prince Nayef, works closely with U.S. security agencies on counterterrorism. (GETTY IMAGES)
Muhammad bin Fahd, 61, governor of the oil-rich Eastern Province and son of the late King Fahd, is widely known for amassing a personal fortune. (GETTY IMAGES)
Khalid bin Sultan, 63, deputy minister of defense and son of the late Crown Prince Sultan, is a billionaire horse breeder with close ties to the U.S. military. (GETTY IMAGES)
Saudis watch the diminishing line of Al Saud brothers and the impending generational succession as if it were an old-fashioned time bomb with a lit fuse. The wick burns ever shorter, advancing a moment of explosion that could destroy life as they know it. But they are powerless to remove the bomb or snuff out the flame. All they can do is watch, wait, and worry.