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“Only one of the last five crown princes has eventually become king,” Khalid al-Jabri noted to me, optimistically. But everything I see suggests that his ascent is certain, and that the search for alternatives is forlorn. Two of those four also-ran crown princes were sidelined or replaced by MBS himself.
Saudi Royal Family
His last interview with non-Saudi press was more than two years ago. The CIA concluded that he had ordered Khashoggi’s murder, and Saudi Arabia’s own prosecutors found that it had been conducted by some of the crown prince’s closest aides. They are thought to have dismembered Khashoggi and disintegrated his corpse. His half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, gradually took over most of the king's responsibilities until Fahd's death in August 2005. Abdullah was proclaimed king on the day of Fahd's death and promptly appointed his younger brother, Sultan bin Abdulaziz, the minister of defense and Fahd's "Second Deputy Prime Minister", as the new heir apparent. On 27 March 2009, Abdullah appointed Prince Nayef Interior Minister as his "second deputy prime minister" and Crown Prince on 27 October.[22] Sultan died in October 2011 while Nayef died in Geneva, Switzerland on 15 June 2012.
India-Saudi Arabia ties crucial for stability, welfare of region and world: PM Modi - The Indian Express
India-Saudi Arabia ties crucial for stability, welfare of region and world: PM Modi.
Posted: Mon, 11 Sep 2023 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Fêting Eid Al Fitr in Saudi Arabia: Tourist Spots, Pyrotechnics, Mini-vacations, and Beyond
The late 19th century marked the birth of Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, the first king of modern Saudi Arabia. Known to the West as Ibn Saud, he was born in Riyadh, located in the Emirate of Nejd, the second Saudi State, in 1876. After the rival Rashidi family seized Saudi lands, Ibn Saud escaped with his father to Kuwait to escape further persecution. Saud spent his youth consolidating power and demonstrating his military strength across the Arabian Peninsula.
Miteb bin Abdullah al Saud
The Saudi Royal family attempted to play the puppet master that led Arabia into the 21st century and preserve the institutions that propped up their power. During his reign, King Fahd worked to keep the Middle East at peace and used his experience in foreign affairs to his benefit. He spent many years attempting to resolve the Lebanese Civil War, including hosting a convention of members of the Lebanese Parliament in 1989. The meeting resulted in a peace agreement, leading to a period of reconstruction funded by the Saudi Arabian government and other Arab states. The eldest of the Sudairi Seven, the seven sons of Hussa Sudairi and the largest group of brothers in the line of inheritance, Fahd led an important faction within the Saudi Royal family.
Saud served as a commander in Abdulaziz's conquests that led to the establishment of Saudi Arabia in 1932. He was the viceroy of Nejd from 1926 to 1932, and he also represented his father in neighboring countries. He played a role in the financial reforms of Saudi Arabia, preparing the first state budget in 1948 and establishing the Saudi Central Bank in 1952. The fact that U.S. troops are withdrawing from the kingdom makes no difference to Al Qaeda.
Salman, the current king and at 86 one of the youngest of Abdulaziz’s brood, saw the perils of unchecked gerontocracy and anointed a successor from the next generation. King Salman’s sons include Faisal, 51, who has a doctorate in international relations from Oxford; and Sultan, 65, a former Royal Saudi Air Force pilot who in 1985 spent a week on the space shuttle Discovery as a payload specialist. Either of these competent and educated men, citizens of the world, might have been a natural successor.
Death and funeral
After backlash to Fahd’s reforms by radical Islamic groups, he reformed the country with caution while still trying to modernize, since the country was stuck alternating between a conservative Islamic state and an attempt for modern society. In an attempt to quell the radical groups, he ordered the use of Saudi security forces to use violent force if necessary. The Ramadan/Yom Kippur War would be the most important war Faisal would oversee. Faisal notoriously levied his position to force OPEC to embargo all Western countries who provided aid to Israel. Countries such as the US had provided weapons and aid to Israel which shifted favor away from the Arab forces, as a result Faisal used OPEC as a tool against the West to stop aid to Israel.
Lebanese prime minister Najib Mikati, who heads a caretaker government with reduced powers, on Friday suggested that Paris was reviewing its proposal and would submit a new one to Beirut. Israel’s foreign minister said on Saturday that a planned incursion into Rafah, where more than one million displaced Palestinians are sheltering, could be suspended should a deal emerge to release the Israeli hostages. Salman is not seen as the real leader of the country since MBS has consolidated so much power in the government. Salman and MBS have brutally cracked down on dissidents through turning a Ritz Carlton, formerly a luxury hotel in Riyadh, into a high end prison for members of the House of Saud accused of corruption. King Abdullah was an ascetic man despite his luxurious lifestyle, displaying a desire to humble himself and connect with his desert roots. Abdullah reportedly refused to be called “your Majesty” and discouraged commoners from kissing his hands.
First Saudi state
During the 1990s and 2000s, Saudi Arabia was a net exporter of vision, but it was a jihadist vision. (The projected cost is in the hundreds of billions of dollars, a huge sum even for Saudi Arabia.) But many good ideas look crazy at first. In the old Saudi Arabia, and even to an extent today, corruption and bureaucracy layered on each other to make an entrepreneur’s nightmare. No matter where you are, you cannot walk anywhere, except perhaps to your local mosque. Instead it is huddled in a mostly empty corner, as if seeking sustenance and inspiration from Jordan and Israel. The day after my trip to the mosque, I stopped by a Starbucks in Taif.
At present, little exists but an encampment for the employees of the Neom project, a small area of tract housing. Regular buses take them to shop in the nearest city, Tabuk, which is itself a city only by the standards of the vacant, rock-strewn desert nearby. Neom’s administrators say they expect it to attract billions of dollars in investment and millions of residents, both Saudi and foreign, within 10 to 20 years. MBS said Neom is “not a copy of anything elsewhere,” not a xerox of Dubai. But it has more in common with the great globalized mainstream than with anything in the history of a country that, until recently, was remarkably successful at walling off its traditional culture from the blandishments of modernity. Yet after spending hours in MBS’s company, and in the company of his allies and enemies, I was convinced that neutering the clergy was not just symbolic.
In 2018, Saudi Arabia made history for lifting the ban on women’s driving, which had been protested for years. The King and MBS had also created a plan to diversify Saudi Arabia’s economic portfolio, named Vision 2030. Vision 2030 is meant to remove Saudi Arabia’s oil dependence and diversify in areas such as the housing market, bring in foreign investment, increase people’s quality of life, attract tourism and make religious pilgrimages easier. The 25th son of King Abdulaziz, he is the current head of the House of Saud and leader of Saudi Arabia.
In France, revolution worked out just as badly for the House of Bourbon as it did for the clergy. (Diderot famously wrote that the entrails of the priests would be woven into ropes to strangle kings.) The House of Saud wanted the anticlerical revolution while conveniently omitting the antiroyalist one. I wanted to see how that alliance between monarch and sansculottes was working.
Faisal made significant strides in Saudi Arabia’s domestic development. He set out to make a unified law code, dictated by the Quran and Islamic belief, and promoted social well being and Islamic morality. His government created a social security system and abolished slavery.
Mohammed was replaced in January 2013 by his cousin, Saud bin Nayef. One of his daughters, named Hajer, died outside the Kingdom following an illness on 17 November 2011. Saud succeeded his father Abdulaziz as King on 9 November 1953 upon the latter's death.[2][16] He ascended the throne in a political climate very different from the time when his father Abdulaziz established his Kingdom. During this period, technical co-operation, primarily in the guise of the arrival of 35 experts during 1952 and aimed at generating planned economic growth within the Kingdom also received a major boost. King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud is the King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. King Salman was crowned on 23 January 2015 following the death of his elder brother, King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.
He used his education to continue his brother’s policies to modernize Saudi Arabia using the West as a tool to facilitate that. For instance, Fahd allowed Western technicians to oversee industrial diversification and development in the country. Faisal was seen as a leader in the Arab world and made important decisions during his rule.
Three years later, however, the countries reconciled, and the Saudi government tweeted out a photo of MBS and Hitler—that is, Qatari Emir Tamim Al Thani—wearing board shorts and smiling at MBS’s Red Sea palace. The fight between them had been no big deal, “a fight between brothers.” The relationship is now “better than ever in history.” The dissenters remain in prison, however, and I do not mean the Ritz-Carlton. Such terms of service have enabled senior princes to mingle their personal wealth with that of their respective domains.[citation needed] They have often appointed their own sons to senior positions within their own portfolios.
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