Obituary : King Fahd, Man of Maddening Contradictions

King Fahd of Saudia Arabia, right, died today. He was succeed by Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdel Aziz, left. Crown Prince Abdullah has been the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia since King Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995. (Saleh Rifai - AP)

By Thomas W. Lippman

Special to The Washington Post Monday, August 1, 2005; 6:36 AM

King Fahd ibn Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia, who died Monday, was a man of maddening contradictions who ruled a country of maddening contradictions.
By turns profligate and abstemious, corrupt and correct, energetic and lazy, dedicated and indifferent, he demonstrated both voracious appetites and undoubted abilities. Fahd, believed to be 83, was admired as a forward-looking modernizer and loathed as a corrupt autocrat, sometimes by the same analysts.
His greatest accomplishment was to hold his country together and preserve his family's rule in an era of immense pressures both domestic and external.
Slowed by illness in the past several years, he became largely a figurehead, appearing on television on ceremonial occasions but leaving most key decisions to his younger brothers. After suffering a stroke in late 1995, Fahd officially transferred his authority to his half-brother and heir apparent, Crown Prince Abdullah. The transfer was ostensibly temporary and Fahd officially reclaimed his power several weeks later, but he has exerted little direct control over the kingdom's day to day affairs. His official title, by which he was always identified in the Saudi media -- was "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" in Mecca and Medina. Fahd adopted that label in 1986, during a time when the kingdom was still recovering from its greatest domestic trauma, the 1979 seizure by religious fanatics of the Great Mosque at Mecca, the holiest site in Islam and Fahd was polishing his credentials as the protector and guarantor of the faith.
In international affairs, Fahd was a relative moderate on Israel, a proponent of stable oil prices and a usually reliable strategic and economic partner of the United States. Conservative Saudis and Muslims around the world reviled him for allowing U.S. and other foreign troops to establish themselves in the kingdom in preparation for the 1991 Persian Gulf war -- the offense that made the House of Saud the principal target of Osama bin Laden -- but Fahd's admirers praised his courage in breaking out of Saudi Arabia's xenophobic tradition and to make a crucial decision in defense of the Kingdom's strategic interests.
As a young prince, Fahd originally made his mark as an advocate of increased educational opportunities for the Saudi people, but as ruler he was no liberal in domestic affairs. His government often resorted to harsh justice to keep his subjects in line, with public beheadings the preferred instrument of authority, and Fahd was widely criticized by Saudis and foreign residents alike for greatly increasing the authority of the country's conservative religious establishment in the 1980s.
Within the Saudi royal family, however, Fahd was known as an affable compromiser who sought to restrain brothers and cousins who advocated even tougher measures to preserve the country's rigidly orthodox social and religious customs.
As king since 1982 and de facto ruler for several years before that under a weak predecessor, Fahd presided over the spectacular modernization of the country while campaigning to keep its social, political and religious environment as close as possible to what they were in the desert backwater of his youth.
Fahd's name and face were familiar to everyone in the Arab world but he was never a figure of admiration to the Arab masses or a revered leader in the mold of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. That was not Fahd's aim or his destined role. In the unique environment of Saudi Arabia, Fahd did what he was born to do: Preside over a family-run enterprise, keep potential rivals bottled up or bought off, paper over the cracks in Saudi society and defend the House of Saud against its innumerable enemies.
During Fahd's eventful lifetime, his country changed to an almost incomprehensible degree. When he was born in 1921, before oil was discovered, the Arabian peninsula was a remote, impoverished and sparsely populated land where schools were few, roads and hospitals fewer and the sword was the law.
As a young cabinet minister, as crown prince and as king, Fahd was by reputation a driving force in channeling untold billions of the country's oil revenue into construction of roads, hospitals, housing, airports, communications networks and schools, including schools for girls. The great challenge he faced as king was balancing the inevitable pressure for social change engendered by this material transformation with the kingdom's insular, conservative social and religious traditions.
Fahd's father was the legendary Abdulaziz ibn Saud, founder and first king of Saudi Arabia, who overcame rival clans to unify the country under his rule. Fahd was one of 40-plus sons delivered by 22 of Abdulaziz's many wives, but he had a special place in the family hierarchy from birth because his mother was Hassa Bint Ahmad Sudeiri, reportedly Abdulaziz's favorite wife.
Fahd and six brothers born of the same mother, popularly known as the "Sudeiri Seven," have dominated the royal succession and kingdom's politics since the death of Abdulaziz in 1953, although Fahd's crown prince, Abdullah, commander of the National Guard, was born of a different mother.
Under the system established by Abdulaziz, the Saudi Arabian state, the Saud family and the government are one and the same. State revenue, including the billions earned from world's greatest crude oil reserves, is family revenue. Family decisions are national decisions; there is no legislature and no written constitution other than the Koran.
A "Basic Law of Government" promulgated by Fahd in 1992 specifies that the throne shall always pass to male descendants of Abdulaziz, that the Koran is the law and that the role of the citizenry is "submission and obedience" to these sources of authority.
Fahd continued the tradition in which male members of the Saud family hold virtually all important government positions except those requiring technical expertise such as the ministry of petroleum and the governorship of the central bank. Those posts are usually given to commoners sufficiently sophisticated to wheel and deal in international meetings but not politically threatening to the monarch. Fahd gave these non-royal officials considerable leeway but when they incurred his displeasure they were gone, as Petroleum Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani -- an international celebrity -- discovered when Fahd abruptly dismissed him in 1986.
In 1993, a year after issuing the basic government law, Fahd ordered what amounted to ambitious reforms in the context of Saudi Arabia. He decreed that members of the Council of Ministers could serve no more than four years and were prohibited from using their positions for personal financial gain -- a provision that, if enforced, would halt one of the world's richest gravy trains.
Fahd also appointed a 60-member 'Consultative Assembly' of prominent individuals, since expanded to 120. This group has no power other than the collective prestige of its members, but defenders of the Saudi system say it is legitimately reflective of Saudi tradition, in which the royal family rules by consensus of the people and that the consultative assembly is a useful way for the king to obtain input from outside his own circle. According to members, this assembly has the authority to propose new laws but not to enact them without royal assent.
Outsiders' knowledge of Saudi affairs in Fahd's youth is sketchy. By most accounts, Fahd was a favorite of his father's and groomed from his early days for a position of importance and eventual succession to the throne. He had little formal education other than training in the Koran, but learned traditional Arabian skills such as falconry and camel racing from his father. Abdulaziz reportedly kept young Fahd nearby during Council of Ministers' meetings, ready for whatever tasks needed doing.
At the age of 24, at a time when few Saudis had traveled outside the Arabian peninsula, Fahd went to San Francisco to participate in the 1945 international conference that wrote the United Nations charter. He developed a strong attachment to things American, an attachment that earned him his reputation as the most pro-American and pro-Western of the ruling princes.
In 1953 he was appointed education minister, a post in which he began creation of a modern educational system that now includes several universities, including universities for women. He moved in 1962 to the key post of interior minister, the kingdom's chief guardian of security and public order. That was a time of tension in Saudi Arabia, provoked by a conflict with Egypt's Nasser over the civil war in Yemen and exacerbated by internal debates over whether and when to oust Abdulaziz's successor, the weak and erratic King Saud.
The princes did finally remove Saud in 1964, with Fahd playing an important role in a bloodless and orderly transition that placed his older brother, Faisal, on the throne.
Fahd was building up an impressive resume, but it took him some time to overcome the playboy reputation he had built up in the 1950s with notorious bouts of debauchery and carousal in the fleshpots of Beirut and Europe.
According to one 1990 account in Time magazine, Fahd was "a sybarite who virtually abandoned his desert kingdom for a career of overseas carousing.
"He drank Scotch freely [even though alcohol is prohibited in Saudi Arabia], ordered caviar by the pound, attended the raunchy shows in the nightclubs of Beirut so frequently that he knew all the leading belly dancers by name, engaged in myriad liaisons with women (he is said to have paid the wife of a Lebanese businessman $100,000 a year to make herself available) and, if the old stories are to be believed, gambled away $1 million in the casinos of Monte Carlo during a single weekend."
Most accounts of Fahd's life say he changed his ways, or least moderated his public displays of excess, after his older brother, then Crown Prince Faisal, summoned him home for a warning that his behavior was jeopardizing his claim to succession.
Faisal, who became king when Saud was deposed, was assassinated in 1975, to be succeeded by the amiable but ineffectual Khalid, who was troubled by a weak heart and paid little attention to governing. Fahd was designated crown prince. In that capacity, he presided over several years of spectacular growth and change as the kingdom cashed in on fast-rising oil prices.
In those days Saudi Arabia was awash in money. Its ports were so clogged with ships bearing goods that perishables had to be unloaded by helicopter. Almost overnight, freeways and air conditioning supplanted caravans and tents.
Many people in Saudi Arabia became immensely rich, including Fahd and members of his immediate family and a network of brokers and middlemen who were in favor with the ruling princes. While ordinary Saudis benefited from a state largesse matched in few other societies -- free education and medical care, subsidized housing, tax-free wages -- many also became resentful of the obvious profligacy of the super-rich, whose lavish palaces sprang up around Riyadh and Jeddah.
As the bills came due in the 1980s and oil prices plummeted, Fahd faced a new challenge: maintaining the lifestyle to which Saudis had become accustomed in a time of dwindling resources. Fahd responded by emphasizing an effort to promote private-sector industries and diversity the country's economy away from oil, but his success was limited because the country has few natural resources other than petroleum. The most critical moment of Fahd's rule came when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 and appeared poised to go after Saudi Arabia as well. Despite the billions spent on military equipment, Saudi Arabia was clearly unprepared to defend itself. Fearing Saddam Hussein more than he feared domestic reaction to the presence of tens of thousands of non-Muslims, Fahd acquiesced to the deployment in his country of the U.S.-led international expeditionary force that was to drive the Iraqis out of Kuwait in 1991.
That decision may have saved his kingdom, but it also exposed Fahd to virulent criticism from Saudi Arabia's rigidly conservative religious establishment and from nationalists who questioned why foreign troops -- including women -- were needed after the country had spent so many billions on defense.
The war cost Saudi Arabia a reported $50 billion to $60 billion, compounding the country's economic problems just as criticism of the foreign influx reached its peak. Fahd's response, as soon as the war ended, was to close the kingdom back in on itself, shedding whatever liberalizing influences the troops may have represented and cracking down on all forms of political dissent and public disorder. Within a few months after the troops left, visitors to the kingdom found few traces of what had been a massively disruptive foreign presence.
The portly, fun-loving Fahd was renowned for his erratic work habits.
Weeks would pass in which he all but ignored affairs of state in favor of camping in the desert with his brothers while papers piled up unattended on this desk. Then he would work almost nonstop for several days, preferably in the Red Sea port city of Jeddah, which he always preferred to the more austere Riyadh.
Fahd was married and had at least six sons, and may have had daughters as well.