Ibn Saud

Abdul Rahman bin Faisal, father of Ibn Saud

Ibn Saud was born on 15 January 1875 in Riyadh in the region called Najd in central Arabia.[5][6] He was the son of Abdul Rahman bin Faisal, last ruler of the Emirate of Nejd, the "Second Saudi State", a tribal sheikhdom centered on Riyadh. Ibn Saud's mother was a member of the Sudairi family,[7] Sara bint Ahmed Al Sudairi.[8] She died in 1910.[9] His full-siblings were Faisal, Noura, Bazza, Haya and Saad.[10]

Ibn Saud's family had been a power in central Arabia for the previous 130 years. Under the influence and inspiration of Wahhabism, the Saudis had previously attempted to control much of the Arabian peninsula in the form of the Emirate of Diriyah, the "First Saudi State", until its destruction by an Ottoman army in the Ottoman–Wahhabi War in the early nineteenth century.[11]

In 1890, the House of Saud's long-term regional rivals, the Rashidis, conquered Riyadh. Ibn Saud was 15 at the time.[12] He and his family initially took refuge with the Al Murrah, a Bedouin tribe in the southern desert of Arabia. Later, the Al Sauds moved to Qatar and stayed there for two months.[13] Their next stop was Bahrain where they stayed briefly. The Ottoman State allowed them to settle in Kuwait,[14] and they settled there where they lived for nearly a decade.[13]

In the spring of 1901, Ibn Saud and some relatives, including a half-brother, Mohammad, and several cousins, set out on a raiding expedition into the Najd, targeting mainly tribes associated with the Rashidis. As the raid proved profitable, it attracted more participants. The raiders' numbers peaked at over 200, but numbers dwindled over the ensuing months.

In the autumn, the group made camp in the Yabrin oasis. While observing Ramadan, he decided to attack Riyadh and retake it from the Al Rashid. On the night of 15 January 1902, he led 40 men over the walls of the city on tilted palm trees and took the city.[15] The Rashidi governor of the city, Ajlan, was killed in front of his own fortress. The Saudi recapture of the city marked the beginning of the Third Saudi State.

King Ibn Saud signature in a document to Eqab bin Muhaya

Following the capture of Riyadh, many former supporters of the House of Saud rallied to Ibn Saud's call to arms. He was a charismatic leader and kept his men supplied with arms. Over the next two years, he and his forces recaptured almost half of the Najd from the Rashidis.

In 1904, Abdulaziz of Al Rashid (a.k.a. Ibn Rashid) appealed to the Ottoman Empire for military protection and assistance. The Ottomans responded by sending troops into Arabia. On 15 June 1904, Ibn Saud's forces suffered a major defeat at the hands of the combined Ottoman and Rashidi forces. His forces regrouped and began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Ottomans. Over the next two years, he was able to disrupt their supply routes, forcing them to retreat. The victory of Ibn Saud in Rawdat Muhanna, in which Ibn Rashid died, ended the Ottoman presence in Najd and Qassim by the end of October 1906.

He completed his conquest of the Najd and the eastern coast of Arabia in 1912. He then founded the Ikhwan, a military-religious brotherhood, which was to assist in his later conquests, with the approval of local Salafi ulema. In the same year, he instituted an agrarian policy to settle the nomadic pastoralist Bedouins into colonies and to replace their tribal organizations with allegiance to the Ikhwan.

During World War I, the British government established diplomatic relations with Ibn Saud. The British agent, Captain William Shakespear, was well received by the Bedouin.[16] Similar diplomatic missions were established with any Arabian power who might have been able to unify and stabilize the region. The British entered into the Treaty of Darin in December 1915, which made the lands of the House of Saud a British protectorate and attempted to define the boundaries of the developing Saudi state.[17] In exchange, Ibn Saud pledged to again make war against Ibn Rashid, who was an ally of the Ottomans.

The British Foreign Office had previously begun to support Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of the Hejaz by sending T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) to him in 1915. The Saudi Ikhwan began to conflict with Hussein, Sharif of Mecca also in 1917, just as his sons Abdullah and Faisal entered Damascus. The Treaty of Darin remained in effect until superseded by the Jeddah conference of 1927 and the Dammam conference of 1952, during both of which Ibn Saud extended his boundaries past the Anglo-Ottoman Blue Line. After Darin, he stockpiled the weapons and supplies which the British provided him, including a 'tribute' of £5,000 per month.[18] After World War I he received further support from the British, including a glut of surplus munitions. He launched his campaign against the Al Rashidi in 1920; by 1922 they had been all but destroyed.

The defeat of the Al Rashidi doubled the size of Saudi territory because, after the war of Ha'il, Ibn Saud sent his army to occupy Al Jouf and the army led by Eqab bin Mohaya, the head of Talhah tribe. This allowed Ibn Saud the leverage to negotiate a new and more favorable treaty with the British. Their treaty, signed at Uqair in 1922, where he met Percy Cox, British High Commissioner in Iraq, to draw boundaries[19] saw Britain recognize many of his territorial gains. In exchange, Ibn Saud agreed to recognize British territories in the area, particularly along the Persian Gulf coast and in Iraq. The former of these were vital to the British, as merchant traffic between British India and the United Kingdom depended upon coaling stations on the approach to the Suez Canal.

In 1925, Ibn Saud's forces captured the holy city of Mecca from Sharif Hussein, ending 700 years of Hashemite rule. On 8 January 1926, the leading figures in Mecca, Madina and Jeddah proclaimed Ibn Saud the King of Hejaz.[20] He raised Najd to a kingdom as well on 29 January 1927.[21] On 20 May 1927, the British government signed the Treaty of Jeddah, which abolished the Darin protection agreement and recognized the independence of the Hejaz and Najd, with Ibn Saud as their ruler. For the next five years, Ibn Saud administered the two parts of his dual kingdom as separate units.

With international recognition and support, Ibn Saud continued to consolidate his power. By 1927, his forces had overrun most of the central Arabian Peninsula, but the alliance between the Ikhwan and the Al Saud collapsed when Ibn Saud forbade further raiding. The few portions of central Arabia that had not been overrun by the Saudi-Ikhwan forces had treaties with London, and Ibn Saud was sober enough to see the folly of provoking the British by pushing into these areas. This did not sit well with the Ikhwan, who had been taught that all non-Wahhabis were infidels. Tensions finally boiled over when the Ikhwan rebelled. After two years of fighting, they were suppressed by Ibn Saud in the Battle of Sabilla in March 1929.[22]

On 23 September 1932, Ibn Saud formally united his realm into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with himself as its king.[23] He transferred his court to Murabba Palace from the Masmak Fort in 1938[24] and the palace remained his residence and the seat of government until his death in 1953.[25]

Ibn Saud had to first eliminate the right of his own father in order to rule, and then distance and contain the ambitions of his five brothers, particularly his oldest brother, Muhammad, who had fought with him during the battles and conquests that gave birth to the state.[26]

St John Philby

Petroleum was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938 by SoCal, after Ibn Saud granted a concession in 1933.[27] Through his advisers St John Philby and Ameen Rihani, Ibn Saud granted substantial authority over Saudi oil fields to American oil companies in 1944. Beginning in 1915, he signed the "friendship and cooperation" pact with Britain to keep his militia in line and cease any further attacks against their protectorates for whom they were responsible.

His newfound oil wealth brought a great deal of power and influence that Ibn Saud would use to advantage in the Hijaz. He forced many nomadic tribes to settle down and abandon "petty wars" and vendettas. He began widespread enforcement of the new kingdom's ideology, based on the teachings of Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. This included an end to traditionally sanctioned rites of pilgrimage, recognized by the orthodox schools of jurisprudence, but at odds with those sanctioned by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. In 1926, after a caravan of Egyptians on the way to Mecca were beaten by his forces for playing bugles, he was impelled to issue a conciliatory statement to the Egyptian government. In fact, several such statements were issued to Muslim governments around the world as a result of beatings suffered by the pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. With the uprising and subsequent decimation thereafter of the Ikhwan in 1929 via British air power, the 1930s marked a turning point. With his rivals eliminated, Ibn Saud's ideology was in full force, ending nearly 1400 years of accepted religious practices surrounding the Hajj, the majority of which were sanctioned by a millennium of scholarship.

Ibn Saud established a Shura Council of the Hijaz as early as 1927. This Council was later expanded to 20 members, and was chaired by the king's son, Faisal.[28]

Ibn Saud was able to gain loyalty from tribes near Saudi Arabia, such as those in Jordan. For example, he built very strong ties with Prince Rashed Al-Khuzai from the Al Fraihat tribe, one of the most influential and royally established families during the Ottoman Empire. The Prince and his tribe had dominated eastern Jordan before the arrival of Sharif Hussein. Ibn Saud supported Prince Rashed and his followers in rebellion against Hussein.[29]

In 1935 Prince Rashed supported Izz ad-Din al-Qassam's defiance, which led him and his followers into rebellion against Abdullah I of Jordan. In 1937, when they were forced to leave Jordan, Prince Rashed Al Khuzai, his family, and a group of his followers chose to move to Saudi Arabia, where Prince Rashedi lived for several years under Ibn Saud's hospitality.[29][30][31][32]

King Ibn Saud converses with President Franklin D. Roosevelt (right) through interpreter Colonel Bill Eddy, on board the USS Quincy, after the Yalta Conference. Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (left) watches.

Ibn Saud positioned Saudi Arabia as neutral in World War II, but was generally considered to favor the Allies.[33] However, in 1938, when an attack on a main British pipeline in the Kingdom of Iraq was found to be connected to the German Ambassador, Fritz Grobba, Ibn Saud provided Grobba with refuge.[34] It was reported that he had been disfavoring the British as of 1937.[35]

In the last stage of the war, Ibn Saud met significant political figures. One of these meetings, which lasted for three days, was with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt on 14 February 1945.[36] The meeting took place on board USS Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake segment of the Suez Canal.[36] The meeting laid down the basis of the future relations between the two countries.[37]

The other meeting was with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the Grand Hotel du Lac on the shores of the Fayyoun Oasis, fifty miles south of Cairo, in February 1945.[38] Saudis report that the meeting heavily focused on the Palestine problem and was unproductive in terms of its outcomes, in contrast to that with Roosevelt.[38]

In 1948, Ibn Saud participated in the Arab-Israeli War, but Saudi Arabia's contribution was generally considered token.[33]

Following the naming of Prince Saud as his heir Ibn Saud left most of his duties to him, and he spent most of his time in Ta'if.[39]

While most of the royal family desired luxuries such as gardens, splendid cars, and palaces, Ibn Saud wanted a royal railway from the Persian Gulf to Riyadh and then an extension to Jeddah. This was regarded by all of his advisers living in the country as an old man's folly. Eventually, ARAMCO built the railway, at a cost of $70 million, drawn from the King's oil royalties. It was completed in 1951 and was used commercially after the king's death. It enabled Riyadh to grow into a relatively modern city. But when a paved road was built in 1962, the railway lost its traffic.[40]

Ibn Saud in 1934

Ibn Saud (right) and Iraqi King Faisal I (left) in 1931

In accordance with the customs of his people, Ibn Saud headed a polygamous household comprising several wives and concubines. According to some sources, he had twenty-two consorts. Mohammed Leopold Weiss reported in 1929 that one of his spouses poisoned him in 1924 which caused poor sight of one eye.[41] He later forgave her, but at the same time divorced her.[41] On the other hand, many of his marriages were contracted in order to cement alliances with other clans, during the period when the Saudi state was founded and stabilized. He was the father of almost a hundred children, including forty-five sons.

Ibn Saud was a tall man[41] standing between 1.93 m (6 ft 4 in)[42][43] and 1.98 m (6 ft 6 in).[44]

In regard to essential values for the state and people, he said, "Two things are essential to our state and our people ... religion and the rights inherited from our fathers."[50]

Amani Hamdan argues that the attitude of Ibn Saud towards women's education was encouraging, since he expressed his support in a conversation with St John Philby in which he stated, "It is permissible for women to read."[51]

His last words to his two sons, the future King Saud and the next in line Prince Faisal, who were already battling each other, were "You are brothers, unite!"[26] Shortly before his death, Ibn Saud stated, "Verily, my children and my possessions are my enemies."[52]

Ibn Saud was experiencing heart disease in his final years, and he was half blind and racked by arthritis.[39] In October 1953, his illness became serious.[53] He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the palace of Prince Faisal in Ta'if on 9 November 1953 at the age of 78.[5][54][55] Prince Faisal was at his side.[55]

Funeral prayer was performed at Al Hawiya in Ta'if.[5] His body was brought to Riyadh where he was buried in Al Oud cemetery[5][56] next to his sister, Noura.[57]

The US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles stated after Ibn Saud's death that he would be remembered for his achievements as a statesman.[58]

On 23 November 1916 during the Three Leaders Conference in Kuwait Ibn Saud was given the Star of India and the Order of the British Empire by Percy Cox.[59]

Ibn Saud was appointed an honorary Knight Grand Commander of the Order of the Indian Empire (GCIE) on 1 January 1920.[60] He was awarded the British Order of the Bath (GCB) in 1935,[61] the U.S. Legion of Merit in 1947,[62] and the Spanish Order of Military Merit (with White Decoration) in 1952.[63]

• King of the Sands (2012 film) – a biopic film on Ibn Saud directed by Najdat Anzour

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Ibn Saud

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Ibn Saud (category)

• An article on his marriages and children (in Arabic)
• "Ibn Sa'ud" . Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). 1922.
• Newspaper clippings about Ibn Saud in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW