CHAPTER 2

In the Shadow of the Tent

I will begin with the popular image and then reveal the real man. I do not want to present the naked truth about Ibn Saud without an attempt at explaining why most readers brought up in the West think he was the greatest Arab of the twentieth century and among the greatest Arabs of all time.

Forty years ago the eccentric Orientalist-agent Harry St John Philby described Abdel Aziz Abdel Rahman Al Saud (1870-1953), the first king and founder of today's Saudi Arabia (commonly known as Ibn Saud), as 'the greatest Arab since the Prophet Mohammad'. Were Philby alone in this demonstration of ado-ration, it would be dismissed out of hand, the view of someone who was praising a friend to whom he had been an adviser for over 30 years. (The British Government sent Philby to assist Ibn Saud, perhaps to play kingmaker, in 1917 and, except for a brief absence in Jordan in the 1920s, he was part of the Saudi court until the King's death.) But dozens, if not hundreds, of others who have written on the subject before and after Philby tend to agree with him - most without being totally carried away, however. Even when these writers try to moderate their misrepresentation of facts, their documented attempt to elevate an unworthy man to the status of a great Arab and Muslim leader, they still settle for weighty statements such as 'the man who unified and brought Arabia into the 20th century' or 'the founder of modern Arabia and the leader of the Muslim world'.

While more than a few among the historians, journalists, businessmen and even CIA agents who have written books and articles about Ibn Saud allude to some of his unattractive traits such as public beheadings, amputations and floggings, his childish dependence on a full-time interpreter of dreams and his financial maintenance of hundreds of wives, they insist on seeing them either as necessary to govern the Arabs or as a source of outright amusement. There is a disturbing absence of judgment, moral or practical, which ignores the abuse of his wives, slaves and concubines. Overlooked are the fact that he roared with laughter when he told stories about hacking his enemies to death; his abuse of his personal drivers and domestic servants to the extent of regularly using the stick on them in the presence of guests; how he squandered his country's wealth and used much of it to corrupt that same country's age-old tradition of giving and receiving; and even how he used the same wealth to divide and weaken the rest of the Arabs.

The image of Ibn Saud which has filtered through to the ordinary reader is of a progressive, benevolent, wise and fun-loving autocrat who early this century unified Arabia in stages and gave his people what was best for them. Even the simple fact that the Saudis became better off under him than they were before is implicitly attributed to him. One would think some of the writers believe he discovered or invented the oil.

Ibn Saud's true record tells a different story from what Philby and others invented. Progressive, wise, benevolent and fun-loving were not words that applied to the man, and even the accounts of his more ardent supporters reveal a lecher and a bloodthirsty autocrat and Bedouin chief for hire who did not see far, did not represent his culture and set the smallest of his personal pleasures above the welfare of his people. For example, not a single school for girls was opened during his reign whereas many were started in poorer Arab countries which had become aware of the value of educating women. Nor is there a record of a single visit to a school or of the building of one hospital or clinic during Ibn Saud's more than 30 years of rule, and he turned down the request of his son Tallal to build a hospital by admonishing him to 'do something useful instead'. In fact, there is a deliberate de-emphasis by his admirers of the significance of other unpalatable facts and a pretence that they were the norm of the day. These include public beheadings and amputations, the fact that he begat 42 boys and an unknown number of girls (the latter he refused to educate at all) and that, despite the oil wealth, he was in debt for most of his life and died in that graceless state. To the long list of forgiven sins and an abysmal record of internal governance can be added his subservience to outside powers at a time when the Arabs, including the people of Saudi Arabia, wanted to be independent and free.

Unlike the rest of this book, which relies on a substantial amount of original research, this chapter is mostly dependent on the sources that were used by the people who carried the torch on behalf of his late majesty. This raises the question of why my conclusions differ dramatically from those of the loyal herd.

It boils down to the different ways we view the circumstances of Ibn Saud's rise to power and his governance. Those who celebrate him, his Western and equally guilty Arab apologists (in both cases their books depended on interviews with princes and ministers and their ranks included many of his former officials and people paid by the family to praise him), saw and continue to see the Arab as ungovernable and hence undeserving of anything except a dictator's whip to mould him into an exemplar of the false modernity practised by Ibn Saud and his family. This overblown vision of the modern world was exemplified by a fondness for gold bathroom fixtures, a preponderance of Cadillacs and an untraditional attachment to Black Label whisky, diamond rings and gold watches. Furthermore, there was an absence of social and charitable institutions (Saudi Arabia has no Red Crescent, charity organizations or professional associations and certainly no effective national health system or family planning network).

I judge Ibn Saud by a different yardstick. By this measure, the Arabs undeniably deserved better, particularly when you take into consideration the fact that better-qualified people were available to govern Arabia and that Ibn Saud did not meet the most basic requirement of a hero, that of being an expression of his culture. Indeed he represented a serious step backwards: it was a case of the uneducated Bedouin stunting urban-led progress. (Sadly but tellingly, most Arab leaders who have been accepted by and celebrated in the West are often rejected by their own people, and this includes those who were violently eliminated: the former kings of Libya and Tunisia, Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Nun Said of Iraq). Perhaps I am a romantic dreamer, but I enjoy closing my eyes momentarily to see an Arabia that never was, a place where oil wealth was used to benefit most of the people.

If I may cite the distinguished Palestinian-American man of letters Edward Said: 'Formally the Orientalist sees himself as accomplishing the union of Orient with Occident, mainly by asserting the technological political supremacy of the West. History in such a union is attenuated if not banished.' Said goes on to show how Western historians see the Arabs as 'childish and primitive'. While many of the people who wrote about Ibn Saud were not historians, they all pretended to be providing footnotes to a history which saw them ignore most of the Arabs of the Peninsula in favour of the antics of a noble Bedouin savage.

They manifested the same flawed Western attitude of which Said speaks.

A direct application of Said's eloquent statement yields an Ibn Saud who is indeed romantic, wise and wonderful if the Arab is nothing but a nomad who is 'childish and primitive' and incapable of producing better leaders. This view is totally unacceptable, however, if the Arabs are seen for what they really are: the possessors of a proud culture of great historical depth and eminently able to pass judgment on their leaders, including Ibn Saud.

I hasten to add that my seemingly radical view is quite innocent. I am not a rabid Arab nationalist nor am I a Muslim fundamentalist. I belong to both East and West and am a firm believer in Arab- Western cooperation. But I maintain that only through proper understanding can such cooperation produce positive results for both sides. Such an understanding would eliminate the subordination of history to a dramatic portrayal of a romantic desert figure regardless of his merits. It would preclude comparing Ibn Saud with Muhammad and it would eliminate the often violent misunderstandings which continue to bedevil Arab-Western and Muslim-Western relations to the disadvantage of both parties.

Now we should turn to the man himself and how to judge him. The time for the revisionist historian to play detective has come. It is time to examine Ibn Saud's early qualities as propounded by his advocates: his familial claim to the leadership of modern Arabia, his possession of a superior far-seeing mind and his fame as a military leader who united the Arabs.

It is true that by the time Ibn Saud became its leader early this century, the House of Saud had been around for some time. It had been a thorn in the side of the Arabian Peninsula's body politic since the eighteenth century, but whatever it had achieved, it was never an accepted, established monarchy recognized by other countries or an expression of the idea of a nation-state. One might compare the House of Saud to the Kurds and their periodic success in attaining autonomy. Though twice successful in controlling vast tracts of today's Saudi Arabia and capable of causing trouble for the Sultanate of Turkey which ruled it, the House of Saud accepted Turkey as the empire within which it operated and Ibn Saud himself wrote to the Sultan of Turkey, 'We've always been servants of the crown.

The members of the House of Saud belonged and still belong to the puritan Wahhabi sect. The religious beliefs and small numbers of this sect stood between them and the attainment of permanent power in a part of the world which has always attached great importance to religious affiliation and the numbers of a tribe and its followers. In fact, while they had been on and off rulers of Nejed and the city of Riyadh, the House of Saud was never totally accepted by the majority of Muslims and it was its religion-based, warlike qualities rather than its popularity, the legitimacy of its claim or its sound governance which was responsible for its notoriety. Its rule depended on a special application of force, terror, and even its own tribe, the 'Ennezza, never totally accepted it. Two of Ibn Saud's uncles and many other relatives died as a result of family and tribal feuds which originated in questions about the application of Wahhabi doctrine, what to do to become acceptable to more people and stop what one of Ibn Saud's uncles described as 'consistent bad behaviour', namely the killing of all non-Wahhabis.

From 1902 to 1925 Ibn Saud waged wars in which he defeated three more established and popular families who ruled large areas of what is now known as Saudi Arabia. He made himself king, and sometime during the 1930s sought to remedy his lack of a solid base or royal background. In an attempt to gain legitimacy and acceptance by the people through appealing to their religious instincts, he hired an Egyptian religious sheikh by the name of Muhammad Tammimi to fabricate a family tree which showed him to be a direct descendant of the Prophet. The sheikh's handiwork was sent back several times until it satisfied the upstart king. This claim has never been seriously accepted by the true descendants of the Prophet and later the same family-tree maker was hired by King Farouk of Egypt to invent a religious lineage for him. It is worth noting that Ibn Saud was friendlier towards the corrupt and lacking-in-background Farouk than any other Arab king or head of state. The sheikh obliged both status-seeking monarchs and died a relatively wealthy man, having made his fortune acquiring holiness for all those who could afford it.

But Ibn Saud's inferiority complex over his origins continued well after Tammimi's laughable efforts. In the 1940s the Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), hardly a disinterested party, sponsored a massive study of the history of the House of Saud which produced results similar to those of the Egyptian cleric. Though this study is used by most writers about Saudi Arabia to this day, the true descendants of the Prophet, the Hashemites, the family of King Hussein of Jordan, have steadfastly refused to intermarry with the House of Saud despite their poverty and the obvious financial benefits.

If the proper family, tribal and religious backgrounds were lacking, what then of Ibn Saud's reputation as a warrior and leader of men? It is pure fabrication. Even Philby admits that until he was afforded British military aid and advice, Ibn Saud's military achievements were questionable and hardly glorious. That he was a master of the gbazzu, or raid, is essentially true, but the ensuing larger reputation he gained is only acceptable if one overlooks the nature of his exploits and how he conducted himself in this narrow sphere of warfare. He was backed by the religious zealots of the Wahhabi sect, who had little regard for life but sought death in the hope of martyrdom and ascent to heaven. Ibn Saud was never a gentleman warrior even in the ghazzu.

During this time the major respectable tribes of Arabia, most certainly the other contenders for its leadership, were moving towards modernity and respect for individual property. They were settling and farming, and most tribal sheikhs lived in towns, but Ibn Saud was still in the business of raiding other tribes to steal their camels, sheep and grain. Despite the existence of a serious etiquette for this activity, which forbade the killing of the people of the raided tribe, he prided himself on never taking prisoners. He murdered all the men of the raided tribe to prevent future retaliation.

Ibn Saud's political emergence began in 1902 when he reclaimed Riyadh, the city where his family had been local sheikhs in their own right or sheikhs appointed by the local emirs. His first merciless act was to terrorize the population by spiking the heads of his enemies and displaying them at the gates of the city. His followers burned 1200 people to death. When conducting a raid, he and his followers were very much in the habit of taking young maidens back to enslave them or make gifts of them to friends. That is how Ibn Saud and his people lived at the turn of the century, before he became king and when he was a mere head of a large tribe.

Ibn Saud's insistence on continuing the ghazzu came close to getting him ejected from Kuwait, where he had taken refuge from the emirs of eastern Arabia and where the ruling Sabbah family, themselves Bedouin sheikhs who are in power to this day, frowned on the unwholesome and dishonourable activity. Western historians' presentation of the ghazzu as the norm of the day is totally untrue, and the heads of the major Bedouin tribes, who claimed hegemony over large tracts of land, did not practise it. Even if the institution was not totally unknown, the way it was practised by Ibn Saud was contrary to all Arab and Muslim traditions of generosity to the vanquished, the revered notion of a victor's mercy which went back to the Prophet.

According to the same blinkered historians and fellow-travelers, the third of the elements which distinguished Ibn Saud's youth, after his family background and natural military talent, was his wisdom despite a lack of education. There is good reason to believe the man was only semi-literate, though this is a point which is ignored by Western writers, who ascribe to him some sort of 'mysterious' desert learning and dwell on his ability to recite the Koran, poetry and Bedouin sayings. In reality, these were very ordinary attributes common to the simplest of Bedouin sheikhs.

Ibn Saud's father was definitely illiterate and at best he learned to read and sign his name (most of the documents I have seen indicate he used a seal, but some handwritten ones were simple enough for his meagre talents). For most of his life he thought all Americans were Red Indians and he died insisting that the world was flat and without learning the difference between a Catholic and a Protestant. His ignorance also extended to matters which affected the conduct of his country's internal and external policies. In the late 1940s he complained about the undue influence of the Jews on American foreign policy and attributed it to the presence of 5000 Jews in New York City.

While I do not scoff at Bedouin learning, there was in Ibn Saud very little evidence of the type of wisdom which results from it and he certainly failed to maintain a judicial system in areas which once had one. He destroyed the existing governmental structures by taking all things into his hands and encouraged slavery by personally owning hundreds of slaves. He surrounded himself with unintelligent yes-men, an insult to an established tradition which celebrated the wisdom of advisers, as recorded in many of the sayings of the Prophet. Well into the 1940s, each of Ibn Saud's sons had a young slave-entertainer attached to him known as an akiwaya, or 'little brother'. In reality they were hostage playmates.

If Ibn Saud lacked wisdom except such as appealed to the Orientalist, with his prejudices against the Arab people and wish to create romantic figures where none existed, then it is more appropriate to judge him by his obviously limited horizons. His lack of a formal education was a serious reflection on his family's status and social development and affected his ability to manage the affairs of what was at that time the biggest independent Muslim state. Literacy was sought by Bedouins and their chiefs - certainly members of the ruling families who opposed him were educated and its absence among the members of the House of Saud and Ibn Saud's repeated refusal to send his children to school provide further confirmation of his lack of appreciation of what really mattered.

So Ibn Saud's oft-mentioned major attributes during his early years, the justifications for his eventual success - his family back-ground, qualities as a military leader of men and native wisdom -are suspect, if not simply non-existent. Western historians would have us believe that he was a true hero, that the way Ibn Saud expressed these qualities was superior to the ways they were expressed by others, that they were rare qualities unavailable elsewhere. Most of this reputation rests on his ability to recite simple maxims known to most people of his time. (My own grandfather was fond of repeating 'the hand you can't bite, kiss it' and 'it is a wise man who says little and listens a great deal', two of many sayings wrongly attributed to Ibn Saud.) The same chorus of supporters shy away from conducting the necessary comparative analysis which would prove their admiring statements, and very little is said to detract from the image of the larger-than-life figure they create for their protagonist. As a matter of fact, most supporters of Ibn Saud are so outrageously prejudiced that they praise some qualities in him which they condemn in others.

At the outbreak of the First World War, beyond the already established emirates along the Gulf, there were three other families trying to replace the Ottoman Empire as governors of the Arabian Peninsula. They were the Hashemites in the western part of the peninsula, the religiously important Hijaz where the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina are located, the Ibn Rasheeds, who were the enemies of the House of Saud and co-claimants to Nejed, the middle of the country, where Riyadh is situated, and the Idrissis in Asir, the highlands which neighbour the Yemen, a mountainous area with many fertile spots and a relatively high standard of living. The eastern part of the country along the Gulf, which contains Saudi Arabia's oilfields, was controlled by Turkey until May 1914 and though there were no local leaders of note most of the people there were Shias and anti-Wahhabi.

The Hashemites were the most important dynasty and, because of their undeniable historical importance, Ibn Saud's advocates are forced to afford them full if unsympathetic treatment. They had been the guardians of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina for hundreds of years. They were and are the accepted descendants of the Prophet, educated people who spoke several languages and who were full of genuine Islamic gentility and generosity. Even their women were tutored and many busied themselves with social work. I met several of them in the 1960s - they were quite elderly by then - who spoke elegant Arabic, Turkish, English and French and discoursed freely on affairs of state and social problems. Ibn Saud's abominable treatment of women aside, they would have viewed the ghazzu and its consequences as practised by Ibn Saud with total abhorrence. It is difficult to imagine a Hashemite sharing a meal with Ibn Saud or to conceive of a Hashemite ordering summary executions, as Ibn Saud did on a large scale and with relish. (He personally executed 18 rebellious tribal chiefs and spoke proudly of how he kissed the sword covered with blood after beheading one of his tribal enemies, Ubyade Ibn Rasheed.)

The Ibn Rasheeds, who vied with the Al Sauds for the same fiefdom, were also settled folk with a lineage which went back several centuries and, while querulous in nature and always feuding, they too scoffed at the ghazzu and did not see the Al Sauds as their equals. The Ibn Rasheeds belonged to the noble tribe of Shamar, too big and too proud to depend on raids in the Ibn Saud fashion. They were educated people refined enough to sign friendship treaties with the Sultanate of Turkey, and ample evidence exists that they conducted their court affairs in a civilized manner. To establish the difference between the Ibn Rasheeds and the Al Sauds, all one has to do is examine contemporaneous pic-tures of the former looking regal and romantic and compare them with pictures of the dishevelled Ibn Saud and his barefoot children, including one of the present King Fahd looking desperately dusty and in need of a bath.

The Idrissis, though accepted as sharifs or descendants of the Prophet, were simpler people who lacked the stature of Hashemites or the Ibn Rasheeds; in fact there is no more to the present inclusion of them as a potential ruling family of Arabia than the fact that they were there. Still, they were educated people who lived in accordance with an Islamic tradition which preached equality, kindness and the rule of law, and they were people full of goodness and hospitality and opposed to illiteracy and violence.

So it was not a combination of rare qualities which elevated the most backward of available rulers, Ibn Saud, to the leadership of Arabia. The simple, undeniable fact behind Ibn Saud's rise to power was Britain's interest in finding someone to deputize for it on the eve of the First World War, when it was trying to wrest control of the Arabian Peninsula from Turkey's hands, and later, when the other Arab leaders were not as forthcoming. Ibn Saud's ascendancy coincided with the growing British interest in the Gulf region. It is true that the Hashemites in western Arabia cooperated with the British at the same time, but their cooperation was non-subservient and conditional, based on their historical claim and desire to become kings of all the Arabs and their belief that the British would help them achieve this aim. The Ibn Rasheeds were allied to Turkey and hence an enemy of Britain and the Idrissis were not up to the task. Ibn Saud, homeless and hungry, was there for the asking, cheap and willing to accommodate any sponsor. So great was his need for outside help that on at least two occasions he wrote to the Sultan of Turkey offering his services. For a while they were accepted, but eventually the Sultan turned him down; he considered him a nuisance.

The first contact between Britain and the House of Saud goes back to 1865, to the time of Ibn Saud's grandfather. There was an unenforceable treaty, similar to many the British were fond of signing then ignoring, with local tribal chiefs, between Faisal Al Saud and a certain Colonel Lewis Pelly. The historical record is unclear as to whether Britain was the direct or indirect sponsor of Ibn Saud's raid on Riyadh, though his use of camels and equipment beyond his means seems to suggest a mysterious source of support. That aside, no substantial contact followed until 1904, when, according to Philby: 'Ibn Saud became convinced of the value of an understanding with Great Britain.' As usual, Philby's words contain an exaggeration; Ibn Saud was not a statesman seeking a friendship with another country - all he needed was money and support against his tribal enemies.

Still hopeful of reaching an agreement with Turkey to avoid war, the British maintained discreet contact with Ibn Saud while advancing him very small sums of money to keep him in reserve. By 1911 the prospect of war was real enough to increase that contact and the accompanying subsidies. Whether he was following his own instincts or obeying instructions is unknown, but Ibn Saud used much of this money to mould the Bedouin into a bloodthirsty monster, to expand and subsidize the loss-making colonies of soldier-saints of the Ikhwan, or 'brothers'. The latter were fanatics of the Wahhabi sect to which Ibn Saud belonged, who were to provide the backbone of his conquering forces and whose savagery wreaked havoc across Arabia. Traditionally committed to individual freedom and achievement, the rest of the Muslims found the idea of the colonies and the fanaticism they produced totally unacceptable. The extremism preached there contributed to that much-exaggerated and frowned-upon Muslim belief in going to heaven when dying fighting for the right cause.

The years 1911-14 reveal how the British supported Ibn Saud and his fanatics against Turkey and all other sheikhs and princes of eastern Arabia. His success against his enemies, particularly the defeat of the Ibn Rasheeds and the occupation of the Turkish-controlled eastern part of the Arabian Peninsula, was in reality a British success. 'With Ibn Saud in Hasa -the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia], our position is strengthened,' wrote a British official in the Gulf. Later Sir Percy Cox, the British Resident in the Gulf, openly encouraged Ibn Saud to attack the Ibn Rasheeds' remaining territory to divert him from helping Turkey. Most of the other sheikhs, including the Ibn Rasheeds, had the misfortune of adhering to their treaty obligations with Turkey, the hated and crumbling outside power which, directly or through local chiefs, controlled most of Arabia at the turn of the century. Ibn Saud alone had the benefit of British financial aid, arms and advisers, initially Captain William Shakespeare and Sir Percy Cox and later none other than the famous distorter of truth Harry St John Philby, whose spy son Kim must have inherited similar unendearing characteristics.

Even the famous diarist and letter writer Gertrude Bell, a woman Orientalist-agent attached to British officialdom in the Middle East who figured more prominently in the history of modern Iraq, was occasionally with Ibn Saud to render advice and help. The nature of the Ibn Saud-British relationship which led to a friendship and cooperation treaty in 1915 can best be seen through her irreverent insistence on calling him by his first name, Abdel Aziz. The hastily prepared treaty may have elevated him to the role of a British-sponsored ruler of central and eastern Arabia but no self-reliant, self-respecting Arab sheikh or emir would have tolerated the use of his first name from any man, let alone a woman. Bell herself was much more circumspect when dealing with the Hashemites and others.

As luck would have it, soon after they helped him master eastern Arabia in 1917, the British found a similar use for Ibn Saud. Having afforded him help to conquer his and their Turkish and pro-Turkish enemies, they were now embroiled in a dispute with their hitherto western Arabian proteges, the Hashemites. The background to the British-Hashemite dispute is simple. The Hashemites, with whom the legendary T. E. Lawrence had worked to provide Britain with much-needed anti-Turkish support, wanted Britain to live up to its First World War promises to grant them independence and a free hand in most of the Arab countries and they objected to British plans to provide the Jews with a national home in Palestine. It was not only that the British could not get the Hashemites to accept British policies on either point, but also that the Hashemites' independence of mind and plans to create a large, powerful Arab country under their leadership threatened Britain's growing interests in the Middle East. These interests included not only the entrenched wish to play colonizer but also the desire to control the Gulf to protect the oil of Iran and the routes to the Indian subcontinent.

In 1924 this British-Hashemite confrontation was exacerbated by the hasty declaration of an Islamic caliphate by King Hussein of the Hijaz, clearly an attempt to serve notice that, with or without British consent, his family's claim and the Arab march towards independen~ would continue under an Islamic flag. As expected, the ensuing negotiations in Kuwait to settle the problems between the Hashemites and Ibn Saud over territorial disputes came to naught and, unsurprisingly, Ibn Saud began his thrust into western Arabia. The British ostensibly cut off aid to both sides, but the Darea Treaty of 1915 guaranteed and protected Ibn Saud's domain, so that he was fighting a war he could not lose. Many historians claim that aid to Ibn Saud was never stopped and believe that the British continued to afford Ibn Saud and his merciless Ikhwan small but crucial amounts of money and arms while London was shamefully denying these to the Hashemites. Certainly, some of the military equipment he used in his attack was expensive and he would not have been able to afford or obtain it without outside help, or indeed to use it without instructors. In the background, some British officials were explicit enough about the reason for their support to prompt Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the British India Office to state: 'The feeling is growing that it would be good if Ibn Saud estab}ished himself in Mecca.'

So the British guaranteed the victory of Ibn Saud. In 1925 the Hijaz fell to his army and the more advanced settled part of Arabia was occupied by the Bedouin hordes. As had been feared, Ibn Saud's Ikhwan followers killed hundreds of males, including children, ransacked an untold number of houses, murdered non-Wahhabi religious leaders who opposed their brutal ways and destroyed whole towns. (The words of one of their favourite war songs ran: 'The winds of paradise have blown, where are you dissenters?') It was as if the Moonies had turned violent and taken over the whole of America.

Western historians, notwithstanding the role played by the mer-ciless sword, would have us believe that Ibn Saud was welcomed wherever he conquered. This calls for a reassessment of the later, commonly accepted reputation of Ibn Saud, the one he acquired as a result of his British-sponsored conquests: that of the unifier of the Arabs. The vital question is whether Ibn Saud had any interest whatsoever in unifying the Arabs. There is not a single reliable report to suggest that the idea of Arab unity ever interested the man and, according to many diarists of the time, including his one-time minister and ambassador to London, Hafez Wahbeh, he always waited for British sanction before he proceeded.

After Riyadh, Ibn Saud's first conquest was of Hassa, the eastern area where the oil was later discovered, but at that time its only importance was its strategic proximity to British interests and its people were Shias, the Wahhabis' dreaded enemies, who were hardly welcoming. His war with the Ibn Rasheeds was nothing more than a tribal blood feud, but they were allied to Turkey and thus the enemies of the British. His subsequent invasion of Hashemite territory was prompted by fear of their substantial claim to Arab leadership, something the British opposed to such an extent that Lord Crewe blatantly announced: 'What we want is not a united Arabia, but a disunited Arabia split into principalities under our suzerainty.' Indeed a truly independent, united Arabia under the rightful claimants to leadership would have relegated Ibn Saud to a secondary position. (The Hashemites in fact saw him as a minor player who should have recognized their supremacy.)

Unlike others who were truly interested in Arab unity, Ibn Saud knew very little about the Arabs in other countries and had no contact with them or appreciation of their political or social structures - even the moderately advanced ways of Hijaz did not sit right with him. His membership of a minority sect who believed that other Muslims, the great majority of the people of the Arabian Peninsula, were heretics who should be punished for their supposed apostasy stood in the way, as did his belief that Arabs beyond the Peninsula, the Iraqis, Syrians and the rest, were city people who were not to be trusted. A belief in big or small Arab unity would have been strange for members of a sect who, dangerously small and hence vulnerable where they were, would have been rendered much too weak to govern a greater entity. A belief in Arab unity would presuppose a belief in the idea of a nation-state and Ibn Saud never saw or governed his kingdom as anything except one big tribe. We must conclude that his conquests were no more than raids which, through British support, assumed a permanent nature.

There is the implicit suggestion by some Western historians that the other leaders of the time were not interested in Arab unity. This is patently untrue. The Hashemites never wavered from their wish to unify the Arabs in one big, strong country but, as already noted, it was this very wish which landed them in trouble with their erstwhile allies the British. As the true proponents of Arab unity, they responded to the challenge to the Arab position in Palestine and opposed it whereas Ibn Saud was totally unaffected by it. The latter's indifference offended the sensibilities of Arabs and Muslims who worried about the loss of Arab territory and Jerusalem, Islam's third holiest city, to the Jews. Indeed the Hashemite vision of Arab unity extended beyond Palestine to include Iraq, Syria and Jordan.

The real story of Ibn Saud's conquest of the country which he named after himself is much simpler. He represented a fanatical group of fighters and this minority, threatened by its lack of a broad popular base and committed to the idea of the ghazzu, joined outside powers to assume power in the land. (British and French colonial rules, in the Middle East and elsewhere, are full of examples of this extension of the divide-and-rule policy and they used the Alawites and Druze in Syria and continue to use the Kurds in Iraq in the same manner.) To repay the British for their assistance, Ibn Saud signed a lopsided friendship and cooperation treaty with them in 1927 which the Hashemites had turned down in a better version, and, among many others, the historian, and perhaps greatest authority on Arab unity this century, George Antonius, speaks of the Hashemite King Hussein thus: 'There is little doubt that if he had signed the treaty he would have retained his throne.' Ibn Saud signed it and it made him dependent on Britain. He ceded the external affairs of his country to Britain to oversee and Britain did not send him an ambassador for years, just a Resident, a title reserved for His Majesty's colonial officers.

The treaty also guaranteed that Ibn Saud's minority would never indulge in deviationist policies, like the ones which eventually wrecked the Hashemite-British alliance, to threaten their masters' interests. Overall, his aims remained a reflection of British strategy and David Howarth, author of the unusually balanced The Desert King and probably Ibn Saud's only critical British biographer, delivers the judgement: 'Not even Ibn Saud could say where he would have been without British help, protection and advice.'

The substantial record of British financial and military support for Ibn Saud is there for all to see. And in 1915, well before he assumed the titles King and Sultan, the British gave him the title Sir, which they bestowed on no other Arabian chief except Sheikh Mubarek of Kuwait, and again in 1935 he was awarded the Order of the Bath. (He looks utterly ridiculous wearing the sash and dangling over his Arab dress the jewelled star of a Knight Commander of the Indian Empire which goes with the title.) As for Britain's official claim that it was unable to restrain his attacks and conquest of the Hashemite part of Arabia, the Hijaz, among others the British press of that time complained bitterly about the British Government subsidizing the Arabs to fight each other. And, even when all claims that the British undermined the Hashemite war effort are dismissed, the British Government itself did a great deal to prove this claim false. Before and after his conquest of the Hijaz it prevented Ibn Saud, on occasion by using the RAF against him, from marching into Iraq and Jordan; to George Antonius, 'They had restrained Ibn Saud in the past.' But then it was more convenient for the British to stop him attaining total hegemony over all of the Arab countries, another indication that unifying the Arabs, even under a subservient ruler, was against their interests.

The false allegation that Ibn Saud was a great unifier suggests that the people in the areas he conquered supported such a union under him. Given the very simple fact that tolerance was against Wahhabi teachings and traditions and the Wahhabis' consequent behaviour against others, particularly the Shias, the historians who claimed and continue to claim that are indulging in a ridiculous day-dream. To subdue the population of Ibn Saud's conquered realm, the fanatical Wahhabi Ikhwan committed serious massacres in Taif, Bureida and Al Huda among other places, but, when their brutal ways remained unchecked, they went further and tried to destroy the tomb of the Prophet and remove the domes of major mosques because of their anti-Wahhabi ostentation. For the same reasons, they even desecrated the Mecca graveyards of the Sunni Muslims, to which religious persuasion the majority of the people of the country belonged. This is not to detail their genocide against the Shias of the eastern part of today's Saudi Arabia; to the Wahhabis the Shias were especially unacceptable and had to be eliminated.

The religious problem aside, Ibn Saud's supposedly excellent relations with the Bedouin tribes were hardly that and there is little to praise on that score. Between 1916 and 1928 there were no fewer than 26 anti-House of Saud rebellions by the Bedouins and each of them ended with the Ikhwan-led forces of Ibn Saud indulging in mass killings of mostly innocent victims, including women and children. (Ibn Saud's cousin Abdallah bin Mussalem bin Jalawi beheaded 250 members of the Mutair tribe and he himself set an example for his followers by personally beheading 18 rebels in the public square of the town of Artawaya.) The tribes of Ajman and Najran show the after-effects of these massacres to this day, for there is a gap of a whole generation. The Shammar tribe suffered 410 deaths, the bani Khalid 640 and the Najran a staggering 7000. And the cities were not far behind. Muhammad Tawil and Muhammad Sabhan organized two city-based conspiracies to rid their people of the scourge of the Arabs, and the cities of the Hijaz suffered the consequences. It was an atmosphere where the sword of the executioner had a recognizable name, the rakban, or 'necker', and it was as well known and feared as the guillotine during the French Revolution. It is used to this day and apologists for the House of Saud still report this fact with the minimum of comment.

To General Sir John Baggot Glubb, Ibn Saud 'used the massacre to subdue his enemies'. But 'Glubb Pasha' stops short of citing the recorded statistics and events produced by the Saudi campaign to subdue the Arabian Peninsula. No fewer than 400,000 people were killed and wounded, for the Ikhwan did not take prisoners, but mostly killed the vanquished. Well over a million inhabitants of the territories conquered by Ibn Saud fled to other countries: Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait. The political parties of the Hijaz disappeared never to resurface, the more advanced people of the Hijaz were denied the right to hold public office, the huge Shammar tribe was driven to Iraq, and the educated were deemed dangerous and the target of harassment. Even the animal life of the country suffered when Ibn Saud, disregarding the traditional Bedouin respect for game and its preservation, proceeded to take his cronies on hunting trips on which they sat in the back of cars using relays of rifles to kill hundreds of animals at a time. Hence the disappearance from the region of the ostrich and oryx and several rare birds.

As if these divisive and brutal moves within the territory under his domain were not enough, the picture is completed by Ibn Saud's relations with the rest of the Arabs and Muslims. As already mentioned, he tried to invade Jordan and Iraq; he conducted a quarrel with Kuwait over their common frontier; he broke off diplomatic relations with Egypt over a simple incident concerning the colourful way the Egyptians sent their annual delegation to the Muslim Hajj; and he waged a war on the Yemen in an attempt to annex some of its land and stop it claiming Aden from Britain. In the larger Muslim world, his dispute with the Muslims of India and others over doctrine culminated in his ordering one of their visiting delegations to leave his country, an undiplomatic move which flew in the face of traditional Arab hospitality and was a clear denial of the right of every Muslim to be near his or her holy places. In fact an Islamic conference objected to Ibn Saud's assumption of the un-Islamic title of King (liberal Islam maintains that there is no Majesty but Allah's). Unsurprisingly, the only Muslim support he ever got was from some British colonies, and even that was lukewarm.

Ibn Saud's internal, Arab and Muslim policies were total failures, hardly the stuff to create unity. In short, the only thing he had going for him was his relationship with Britain. The latter played along to serve its own interests, including not wanting Islam's holiest shrines to fall to an unfriendly ruler. Thus, rather than acting as unifier of the Arabs, Ibn Saud afforded an outside power, Britain, the comfort of keeping the Arabs and Muslims divided and protected its commercial and political interests, which opposed the presence of a unifier at the Arab helm.

Ibn Saud grew up in a tent. Instead of adapting to his new status as a peer of the British Empire, the Sultan of Nejed and King of the Hijaz (the name Saudi Arabia was coined later, in 1932), he took the tent with him. The tent and, in this case, the mentality it represented - a total lack of organization and appreciation of what a country is, desert picnics, the harem, hunting and spending time gabbing with his cronies, telling them the same tales of his exploits in different versions because the original stories were fundamentally untrue - took precedence over all semblances of modernity and sensible governance.

In 1925 the guards at the gates of the fort-like structure that was Ibn Saud's palace belonged to the fanatical Wahhabi Ikhwan, a fearsome-looking band armed with swords or daggers, bandoliers and old muskets. There was nothing decorative or friendly about them; they were dusty warriors and they looked as if they were guarding someone who was out of place and perhaps afraid for his life. Inside, in the diwan or stateroom, Ibn Saud ruled supreme. He always began his day in that room with the reading of the Wird, the Muslim rosary. This was meant to imbue the atmosphere with the right Muslim spirit. A huge beige and gold room, the diwan was lined on three sides by ordinary wicker chairs divided by cushions of heavy brocade, while the floor was covered with mats and Persian carpets. Ibn Saud reclined on a bench on his elbow in front of a bay window, something no sensible Arab ruler in the twentieth century would have done, and took time to make himself comfortable.

He would begin the court proceedings with a saying, most of the time a statement aimed at explaining what he and the place he inhabited were all about, an attempt at self-justification which smacked of protesting too much:

'The Arab understands two things only: the Word of Allah and the sword. Compared with His word the accepted Arab notions of loyalty, brotherhood, hospitality, honour and beauty amount to very little. And the imported ideas of freedom, equality and representative government do even less. The word of the Koran is supreme; all is derived from it and everything is subordinated to it. The sword is how the Word is carried out.'

Whether these exact words, which pervert the tenets of Islam and its commitment to justice and individual rights, were used on more than one occasion or how Ibn Saud varied them was immaterial; the message was always the same. His daily justification of his rule was tantamount to the constitution of the land, and given the fact that until he conquered it in 1925 the Hijaz had had an elaborate constitution which incorporated Islamic teachings in a sensible manner, the enormity of Ibn Saud's regressive homilies becomes clear. It was the application of the sword or its equivalent which held sway and which was new.

Ibn Saud had no organized army to underpin his supremacy, but he depended on the Ikhwan and his family and felt safe. His huge country, the size of the United States east of the Mississippi, had been divided into districts or emirates under the control of his relatives and in-laws. Their parochial supremacy was an extension of his and in addition they used local Bedouins to enforce their ways. And to re-mold the relatively advanced cities of the Hijaz Ibn Saud created the Ikhwan-run Committee for the Advancement of Virtue and Elimination of Sin (CAVES).

Typical of the areas placed under the governance of Ibn Saud's relatives was the mostly Shia eastern province of Hasa, which fell under Abdallah bin Mussalem bin Jalawi, a cousin and comrade-in-arms who figured brutally in the occupation of the city of Riyadh and the killing of all members of the defending garrison who surrendered. Most of the people in the province belonged to anti-Saudi tribes and the majority were Shia Muslims. Philby wrote of the effects of the rule of bin Jalawi, in his uncritical book Arabia,i Jubilee: 'the province never again troubled the central government. But as usual, the chief creator of the legend of Ibn Saud said nothing as to why. In reality bin Jalawi executed thousands of people, amputated the arms of the poor for stealing bread and mercilessly settled old scores, the chiefs of the anti-Saud tribe of Hazzami disappeared, and he violated the most fundamental Arab code of honour and executed someone who came to see him to negotiate a settlement.

Other provinces were run by Al Shaikhs and Al Thunyans, also cousins and fellow Wahhabis, the Sudeiris, Ibn Saud's favourite in-laws, and Ibn Saud's own sons. Not a single outsider attained the position of province governor, nor was there a single educated governor among those appointed by Ibn Saud, not even in accordance with Islamic ways. In fact the province governors were selected for their loyalty and ability to suppress dissent and proceeded to institute a reign of terror and add to the heavy toll of Ibn Saud's seemingly endless wars. By the time they had subdued the country, they had carried out 40,000 public executions and 350,000 amputations, respectively 1 and 7 per cent of the estimated population of four million.

In the cities, CAVES ran riot. Equipped with sticks to administer on-the-spot justice, its puritan Ikhwan members flogged its victims at random. People were punished for wearing Western clothes, gold, perfume or silk, for smoking and the men for not wearing a moustache or a beard. Singing was completely forbidden, the work of the chief devil, flowerpots were too decorative and were destroyed, and the Ikhwan occasionally tapped their sticks on people's windows to remind them of the time for prayer. A man's home, sacred according to Muslim tradition, provided no protection, and the Saudi writer Nasser Al Said remembers how CAVES zealots broke into his grandmother's house and flogged him in her presence when he was a boy of eight. Naturally nobody dared turn down a proposal of marriage by a CAVES member, and as a result people took to keeping their women indoors.

To establish Ibn Saud's idea of justice it is enough t6 cite four unrelated examples of how he himself administered it. He continued to dabble in the smallest things to prove that his justice was uniform and that the province governors and CAVES were not acting on their own. Sometime during the early 1930s, Ibn Saud's 24 drivers went on strike for higher pay. While their salaries and what they demanded are not known, it is safe to assume theirs must have been a desperate situation to drive them to this dangerous action. Ibn Saud reacted by firing every one of them, revoking their driving licences for life and deporting those among them who were not Saudis. On another occasion the palace electricians organized a work stoppage because they had not been paid for three months, and they too were fired. And on a third occasion Ibn Saud responded to a case of alleged buggery by ordering a summary execution of the three accused without a thorough investigation. (Islamic sharia, or religious, laws are so profound and exact that they have been adopted by many legal systems in the world and they require four eye-witnesses for conviction.) In the fourth incident, which Philby, Wahbeh and others would have us accept as a sign of benevolence and justice, he had a thief imprisoned instead of having his arm amputated. According to them, Ibn Saud ordered the family of the thief, who stole because of poverty, to provide the man with food while he was in prison.

Despite the existence of Islamic law courts to deal with minor crimes between insignificant people, there was clearly no law in Saudi Arabia under Ibn Saud. He and his Wahhabi followers applied their harsh justice with little respect for the religious and other ways of most of the people. The highly developed legal system which had existed in the Hijaz was destroyed; the civil courts, which were modelled on the eighth-century ones of the Abbasid caliphate, were disbanded and replaced by Wahhabi-administered religious ones; and the tribal law which prevailed in other parts of the country was replaced by the much stricter tenets of the Wahhabi sect. The source of justice in the country worked in accordance with a simple progression: Ibn Saud, his family and the Wahhabi sect, the latter a collection of fanatics who decreed that the only reading matter permissible was the Koran and religious scripts. The Arabs of the desert, perhaps the greatest exponents of lyric poetry in history, had to do without such writings.

But the backward way in which Sharia law was interpreted and justice was administered, essentially licence for the few and repression of the many, was not an isolated reflection of the overall step backwards that the rule of Ibn Saud represented. The ways he dealt with the rest of the affairs of state from his Diwan were equally telling.

The head of the treasury, now referred to by most writers as the Minister of Finance, was one Abdallah Al Suleiman. A strange little man who had been an accountant with a small trading firm in India, Al Suleiman had two qualities which endeared him to Ibn Saud. The first was his lack of threatening tribal connections - he was a nobody - and the second was his unwholesome ability to play court jester and overlook his master's cruelty. Physically unimposing and effete in manner, he was on the receiving end of Ibn Saud's crude jokes about sexual prowess. Ibn Saud never missed a chance to allude to his Minister of Finance's lack of sexual vigour and the latter took the barbs meekly, with a benign smile, and continued to provide his employer with his services even after the latter killed his brother with his stick in a characteristic fit of anger.

But more important than who Al Suleiman was and how he was abused was his deliberate or unintentional willingness to initiate the tradition that reduced the treasury to nothing more than the guardian of a huge, disorganized, highly questionable family business. He dealt with the debts of members of the family, often squeezing and threatening the creditors until they wrote them off. He also prevailed upon many wealthy merchants to advance money to His Majesty in return for commercial concessions and favours, even when there were none to be offered. As we will see later, even after oil wealth changed the financial character of the country, Al Suleiman still continued to place the insatiable needs of Ibn Saud and his family above the needs of the country. In 1950 the funds for important projects, including the building of bridges, were held up so that the family could afford a lavish simultaneous wedding for six of Ibn Saud's sons. This is why Al Suleiman was jokingly referred to as the 'Minister of Everything', including procurement.

Indeed there was nothing resembling a ministry of anything beyond finance, though this concerned Ibn Saud very little and he accepted it because he enjoyed tormenting Al Suleiman. Not even foreign affairs or defence merited organized ministries, and, as we have seen, the interior, justice and Islamic affairs were administered in Ibn Saud's inimitably reprehensible Wahhabi fashion. Again it is important to remember that the Government of the Hijaz had had a senate whose members indulged in open, healthy debate, and indeed a cabinet. Indeed the last cabinet to exist before the Saudi conquest had as members people who belonged to thriving political parties who advocated specific policies aimed at improving the lot of their people.

Under Ibn Saud what appears to have mattered more than a senate or a cabinet and the implied responsibility to the people which goes with these was the new invention of an ad hoc council of advisers. Philby was a member of this inner circle, as were Abdel Rahman Al Damulgi, Hafez Wahbeh, Rashad Pharoan, Yusuf Yassin and Fuad Hamza - an obvious Englishman, an Iraqi, an Egyptian, two Syrians and one Lebanese. The council had not a single Saudi member and the attributes of its alien members were highly questionable, to say the least. Beyond the dubious contributions of Philby, Yusuf Yassin appears to have specialized in the procurement of young blondes from his native Syria.

In all this there is something strange which recalls the ways of Hitler. The Fuhrer depended on a group of butchers to enforce his policies and his inner circle was made up of outsiders, mostly territonal Germans, who were isolated from the mainstream of his country and had no connection with the traditional sources of power and guidance, Germany's General Staff or the Church. Likewise, Ibn Saud's advisory group were hardly tribal and spoke with accents the Saudis did not understand.

And as with Hitler and other dictators, Ibn Saud dealt with his inner circle on a one-to-one basis, and its members were never organized and did not constitute a body which could be held responsible for its actions. Ibn Saud was in the habit of seating whoever had something to discuss with him next to him and the affairs of state were conducted in whispers and reflected the opinions of outsiders whose main concern was the maintenance of their position. Interestingly, two of the advisers, Damulgi and Rashad Pharoan, were doctors of medicine like Hitler's Dr Morell, people who had greater access to Ibn Saud than most, and they and the many medical men who followed them as advisers administered virility potions, particularly the aphrodisiac Orston, to enhance his legendary sexual appetite. (The father of arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi was among Ibn Saud's personal doctors and Ghaith Pharoan, the son of Dr Rashad Pharoan, became a billionaire and is presently wanted for questioning in connection with the BCCI scandal and the family of Dr Midhat Sheikh Al Ard are still connected with the House of Saud.)

If Ibn Saud's court and the way he conducted himself in it seem strange, isolated and unresponsive, then the way he managed his own family is even more bizarre. There were too many children for him to afford them the love or fatherly care for which the Arabs are known and he took no steps to educate them. Even if we play his game and ignore female members of his brood, there is no record that any of his sons went to college either; certainly none of the four sons who succeeded him on the throne had ever attended a university, their schooling having come to an end during their early teens. The 42 sons and unknown number of daughters (some estimates place their number at over 125) were left to their mothers to rear and their status was often a reflection of their mothers' positions and they were called after them. Prince Tallal was the son of an Armenian, Fahd was important because his mother was a tribal Sudeiri and ones whose mothers were slaves did not matter at all.

"I've never had a meal with a woman." "Learning does not become women." These two statements indicate the attitude of Ibn Saud to women. To him a woman was no more than a combination of a source of pleasure and a breeding machine, an exchangeable commodity, and his response to a complaint about keeping his harem in a windowless basement was to state that 'windows let lovers in'. A good example of this attitude is the history of his marriages to Hassa Al Sudeiri. Ibn Saud married her then divorced her and she married his brother. He later wanted her back, prevailed on his brother to divorce her, and remarried her. She produced seven sons, including the present King Fahd. Later Ibn Saud married a number of her cousins and relatives.

As a matter of fact Ibn Saud turned sex into an instrument of policy, and perhaps the only way he tried to unify Arabia was in bed. At any one point he had four wives, four concubines and four slaves to satisfy his desire, but he replaced the groups of four regularly, and importantly he married into over 30 tribes and used these links to get closer to them and gain their support. Even when they were inclined to refuse him, the tribes were too afraid to do so and the present Crown Prince Abdallah's mother belonged to the Shammar, Ibn Saud's old tribal enemies. One could say with truth that most of Saudi Arabia is related to the House of Saud by marriage. Ibn Saud was not only a lecher, but a show-off too, and when a tribe spread rumours that he was losing his virility he paid them a surprise visit and 'shamed' them by deflowering one of their girls.

But it was pure, non-political sex that was uppermost in Ibn Saud's mind. He confided to Philby and others that he had had several hundred virgins and he was in the habit of deflowering young girls then giving them away as presents. Philby was on the receiving end of this largesse; nor did his Westminster and Oxford education stand in the way. (I myself saw one such 'present' looking completely lost, waiting for Philby in the lobby of the St George Hotel in Beirut while he sat in the bar drinking with the Sunday Times correspondent John Slade-Baker.) Indeed, beyond not recognizing his national anthem and not knowing what to do when told what it was, the only memorable comment attributed to Ibn Saud during his one visit to Egypt, except for his exile in Kuwait the only time he journeyed outside Arabia, amounted to an expression of his preoccupation with sex: 'This country is full of pretty women and I would like to buy some of them and take them back home. How about £100,000 worth of them?'

Other results of Ibn Saud's personal backwardness and inadequacy add to this picture of a careless parent and a lecher. During his lifetime his sons took to emulating him and marrying dozens of women each and Philby referred to 'the youngsters going wild every time they went away'. Not only did they abuse people openly, but the use of the stick became a family tradition, and one of them, Prince Mishari, went as far as assassinating the British Vice-Consul in Jeddah for not giving him more whisky. Prince Nasir distilled some poisonous stuff at home and killed four of his guests, while another son thought all European girls clad in bikinis were for sale, just like meat in a butcher's shop, and a third returned home from a foreign trip to tell his father of the most amazing thing in the world: a restaurant where he could watch girls swim under water.

Ibn Saud confirmed that all Western women were for sale, wanted to know more about the dazzling underwater restaurant and forgave Nasir. In response to the murder of the Vice-Consul, he paid the widow £70,000 and released the family drunk after a prison term of a few months - in all likeli-hood the same month saw the execution, imprisonment and flogging of dozens of people for the mere possession of alcohol and both the release of the Prince and the execution of others did not get the attention they merited from the West-ern press and governments. Indeed Britain forgave the Prince and frowned on journalists who attempted to investigate the murder.

Towards the end of his life, his doctors' potions made Ibn Saud absent-minded and repetitive. Talk about sex seemed to take an even greater amount of his time and he regretted his inability to produce more children even when many of his sons were roaming the globe in the company of prostitutes, leaving behind stacks of unpaid bills and distributing like calling cards gold watches with the picture of their father on the dial. The institutionalization of lechery and ignorance was well on its way.

The tide of corruption that flowed all around Ibn Saud felt suffocatingly pervasive. As a result, the role of the Ikhwan came to an end in 1929. Like all groups which act as a dictator's instrument of suppression during his rise to power, they fell victim to Ibn Saud's quest for respectability. The Ikhwan had become dizzy with power and success. Not only did they behave like a state within a state and ignore the central government, but they had their military colonies and their own code of honour. With Saudi Arabia subdued, Ibn Saud no longer needed them and they became an embarrassment.

The seemingly inevitable confrontation between Ibn Saud and the Ikhwan reached a climax not over their brutal and stupid internal policies, arbitrary executions, murder, amputations and the fact that they regularly cut telephone lines because the tele-phone was an instrument of the devil, but because they accused him of subservience to the British and their ways and demanded an end to his pro-British policies. Indeed there were many signs of this subservience: Britain continued to provide him with a subsidy of £60,000 a year, the equivalent of two thirds of the country's annual income, and the important business of settling the new kingdom's boundaries was exclusively in British hands. Above all, Philby, who had undergone a suspect conversion to Islam and donned the clothes of the Arab of the desert, was always at Ibn Saud's side, and when not there he was in London to consult with the Foreign Office over ways to consolidate the rule and extend the influence of its friend. In fact, Philby and to a lesser degree Churchill, wanted to make Ibn Saud King of the Arabs in return for furthering British policies which included acceptance of a Jewish state in Palestine. When the suggestion was made to President Roosevelt, he turned it down because America was uncomfortable with the role of king-maker.

Ibn Saud set his relationship with his sponsors above his connection with religious zealots for whom he no longer had any use. As usual in these situations and as with Ernst Ro~hm and the SA in the Night of the Long Knives what triggered the bloodbath is not very clear, but, with Philby there to advise Ibn Saud, a vicious battle between the Ikhwan and the loyalists took place at the village of Sabila and was followed by others. Ibn Saud had the benefit of British-supplied equipment, including armoured personnel carriers, and this proved too much for the Ikhwan leader, Faisal Duwish, and his followers. Five thousand Ikhwan were killed, and the rest, including Duwish, fled to Kuwait and then Iraq. They were pushed out of Iraq and the RAF bombed them, forcing Duwish and a few hundred survivors to surrender. Duwish, according to H. R. P. Dickson in The Arab of the Desert 'the man who did more than anyone to put Ibn Saud in power', died in prison a year and a half later, in mysterious circumstances.

In the period which followed there was little need for the type of mass killings that had been practised by the Ikhwan, but the House of Saud still found it convenient to follow a policy of selective suppression and elimination. In the religious domain, the Shias had to pay a special tax because they were heretics. Among their personal targets were some of their old enemies, such as the Ibn Rasheeds, and the methods they used were despicably un-Arab. In 1946 Abdallah bin Mutaib bin Rasheed was invited to dinner in the palace of Ibn Saud's son Nasir (who later poisoned his guests with bad booze) and killed there. And very early in 1953 Muhammad bin Tallal bin Rasheed was killed in his home. In both cases the victims were unarmed and rather helpless and there was no investigation of either murder. The Idrissis of Assir disappeared altogether, after Saudi pressure drove them from the Yemen, and members of Duwish's tribe of Mutair were killed in groups of twos and threes. The Hashemites had escaped the country, but some of their old loyalists met sudden unexplained accidents or were imprisoned for life, and death by poisoning in a crude, painful way became a common occurrence. So much for the Arab tradition of protecting those living under your roof.

The Saudi attempt to neutralize all potential sources of political opposition had another, indirect aspect to it. So long as they did not threaten him, Ibn Saud abetted all disputes between the tribes and allowed them to turn into blood feuds while he sat on the sidelines until it became convenient for him to intervene and make both sides beholden to him. The very important anti-Ibn Saud merchant class in the relatively developed Hijaz was undermined, and favours went to foreigners who were politically unconcerned and reliable. The Ah Rezas, Iranians; Sharabatlis, Egyptians; Salha, Lebanese; bin Mahfouz, Yemenis; Philby (who became the agent for Ford), British; and Turkuman and other traders became wealthy and rose to prominence in a way which recalls the composition of Ibn Saud's circle of advisers.

But these internal acts of a Bedouin police state aside, from the time he completed his conquest of Arabia until the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the late 1930s, Ibn Saud relied on the British subsidy and revenues from the Muslim Hajj to support himself (nothing was done for the country). Then suddenly there was oil.

The first oil concession was granted to Britain's Eastern General Syndicate in 1923. The company paid Ibn Saud a few thousand pounds, spent two years prospecting, confirmed the existence of some oil and then did nothing. From the late 1920s until 1933 Philby unsuccessfully tried to interest others in taking over the concession. When the depression affected the number of Muslims making the Hajj, reduced Ibn Saud's income and drove him deeper into debt, the concession was auctioned and, despite last-minute attempts by Ibn Saud to get a British company to make a sensible offer, Standard Oil of California won it for $250,000.

On signing one of the many interim agreements which led to the ratification of the final concession, the original American representative, one Charles Crane of the bathroom fixtures family, presented Ibn Saud with a present. The box of Californian dates which Crane gave Ibn Saud was a measure of how the world viewed the man. It was not simply carrying coals to Newcastle, but represented a stunning statement about the limited horizons of the recipient, the same man who years later fell asleep while signing the final concession agreement with Lloyd Hamilton of Standard Oil of California.

It took time to produce oil in commercial quantities, and in 1935 Dhahran, the base for the American prospecting operations, had one car. Even in 1939, ARAMCO (the Arabian-American Oil Company, a consortium of Standard Oil of California and three other companies) still used 700 camels to do much of its work. But by then, the company was beginning to realize the colossal potential of its concession. The oil of eastern Saudi Arabia was (and is) present in huge quantities and located at shallow depths in flat lands with no vegetation in them and very near the water for transportation. It was and remains the cheapest place to produce oil in the whole world.

The value and importance of Saudi oil assumed greater sig-nificance during the Second World War. The USA's Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, saw Saudi oil as the solution to the coming dependence of America on foreign sources. For strategic reasons which included difficulty of transporting it, a production ceiling was placed on Saudi oil for most of the war, but the US Government, worried that poverty might endanger the stability of a country which held an important key to its future, saw fit to make substantial direct and British-managed contributions and grants to Ibn Saud. All the money went into his pocket, but if the 1933 oil agreement was the beginning of America's invasion of the country, then the payments made by its Government represented the transfer of Saudi Arabia from the British to the American sphere of influence. To realize the full significance of this move, one has to remember that America withheld its recognition of Saudi Arabia until 1934; it took place shortly after Crane's famous gift was made.

At the end of the war Saudi Arabia was producing 300,000 barrels of oil a day and America's direct financial assistance was no longer needed. Ibn Saud had been helped through a difficult time and the Americans' commitment to support him was sealed when he met President Roosevelt in February 1945 in Egypt, the only Arab leader to be so honoured. (For the trip he took 200 live sheep with him and one of the ship's officers discovered a sackful of aphrodisiacs in his room.) All his obvious shortcomings were dismissed, and Roosevelt made it clear that the USA was committed to Ibn Saud as the primary Arab leader and made statements about safeguarding the territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia, something which was confirmed and elaborated by President Truman. Interestingly, Roosevelt, a chain-smoker, refrained from indulging in the habit in the presence of Ibn Saud, whereas a few days later Churchill refused to abstain. This simple act of accommodation and respect has determined the behaviour of American presidents in the presence of Saudi monarchs ever since: they always treat them with considerable, if almost naive, deference.

In terms of world affairs, the Saudi Arabia which emerged from the Second World War was a radically changed place. Financially self-sufficient for the first time since its creation, it was given by the Cold War and the emerging Arab-Israeli problem a strategic and political importance it had never had and, in particular, Soviet moves to befriend the Muslims enhanced the value of the country's holy places.

Two questions need to be answered at this point: why the Americans managed to snatch the oil concession from British hands and place the country under American hegemony, and whether this development made any difference to the direction Ibn Saud took in running the country. Amazingly, the question regarding the oil concession is shrouded in some mystery. British lethargy was undoubtedly part of the reason the Americans managed to get it, but it is hardly the whole reason. Some argue that the British had enough oil in neighbouring Iran, Iraq and Bahrain (Kuwait followed later), but, though true, this cannot be the whole reason either. In all likelihood, a third factor was the more aggressive approach by the American oil companies, who foresaw their country's need of foreign oil, were willing to pay for it and convinced their government of the importance of Saudi Arabia's reserves. So, as in many other instances, the American companies went in first and were followed by their government. But neither of them, nor the slow-acting British, realized the vastness of the Saudi oil reserves or their eventual importance.

There was nothing new in the reasons for America's adoption of Saudi Arabia, oil, strategic and Arab positions and the Muslim holy places, but America's emergence as a replacement for Britain was part of a larger global realignment. Britain came out of the Second World War tired and weakened and faced a considerable number of colonial problems. As with many other countries which were too important to release', the USA moved in to fill the vacuum.

While one can only theorize about what might have happened had Saudi Arabia remained under Britain's umbrella, there is a traceable major way in which America's involvement made a difference. For the most part, Britain had no reason for direct involvement in Saudi Arabia's internal affairs except when they affected its interests, and limited itself to influencing the country's direction in accordance with a policy aimed at protecting Britain 5 position in the Gulf and keeping a single Arab country from becom-ing powerful enough to threaten this regional stance. There was nothing beyond the presence of Philby-type advisers to warrant dictating special internal policies as long as they contributed to the elements already mentioned and as long as the consolidation of Ibn Saud's brutal rule went ahead unthreatened and unimpeded. (See The Trivialization of Everything.)

But in countries where the British ran the oil industries the picture was different: Britain's policy was an extension of its paternalistic colonial outlook. In Iran, Iraq and the rest the British prevailed upon the local governments to use some of their oil income for education and development projects, mostly to avoid future trouble. This is where America's attitude differed dramatically, for its traditional anti-colonial policy stood between it and telling Ibn Saud what to do with the oil income. As a result, serious British diplomatic attempts to steer Saudi Arabia towards using some of the oil money wisely were hotly and successfully resisted by the Americans. It was not the first time American oil companies had dictated their country's foreign policy and exploited countries with little regard for the welfare of their people; they had had a long history of supporting South American dictators. The Americans played right into Ibn Saud's hands by allowing him to see the oil revenue as his own private income.

The difference between the policies of Britain and the USA showed in many ways, even in the field of education. For example, the British saw to it that Iraq sent students to be educated overseas and most were selected on merit and placed under an obligation to perform well and repay the money spent to educate them. Ibn Saud sent fewer students to be educated overseas and they tended to be his relations and sons of tribal chiefs, and there was no requirement for them to do well or repay the costs of their education. Not only did the Iraqis achieve much better results from- their overseas student missions, but in 1936 in their country they had 50,000 students to Ibn Saud's 700.

The overall results of America's hands-off policy were disas-trous. There was not a single American hint as to how the huge oil revenues should be spent and not a penny of the $400 million paid to Ibn Saud between 1946 and 1953 was used for development. In 1946 the country's record of expenditure showed a mere $150,000 for building schools and $2 million for the royal garage. And Ibn Saud's sons followed his ways. The Crown Prince built a palace for $10 million then razed it when he disliked the way it looked and built one for $30 million. Another prince drove a Cadillac until the petrol ran out then gave it away and bought another with a full tank. In terms of the way he ran the country, Ibn Saud himself appeared to be as oblivious to what could be done with this sudden wealth as the rest of his family and he ordered ARAMCO, even then the country's largest employer, to double the salaries of all its employees, an act which led to an inflationary spiral. In one year alone he gave away 35,000 gold watches which carried his likeness on their dials and, against the advice of all around him, ordered the building of a railway because he liked the idea. Even the aeroplane, that expression of modernity which finally penetrated his kingdom, was subject to his archaic whims and all aircraft required his permission to land and take off, while those travelling from Jeddah in the west to Dhahran in the east had to make a stop in Riyadh, just in case His Majesty or members of his family needed them.

By 1950, Dhahran, the Saudi oil centre, was the biggest Ameri-can city between Paris and Manila. Two aeroplanes, crudely called Camel and Gazelle, shuttled oil workers and executives in and out of Saudi Arabia. America's Strategic Air Command had built a huge airbase to protect the oilfields, chewing gum and wearing jeans had become fashionable and American steaks and potato chips had invaded the country. Meanwhile, Ibn Saud, a firm believer in djinn and afreet (spirits), was receiving a huge income which allowed him to indulge his ignorance, lack of understanding and vulgarity.

The number of Ibn Saud's advisers increased, but still there was not a single Saudi among them and none of them had an interest in anything beyond his pocket. (He never had an official American adviser, though Colonel William Eddy, a close friend of Roosevelt's and the USA's first Minister to Saudi Arabia, knew him well enough to proffer advice.) Ibn Saud's talk about sex became exceptionally base and he bragged about never seeing the face of a woman whom he bedded. The number of doctors whose job it was to keep him virile had now increased to about 10 per cent of all the doctors in the country. His profligate ways continued: he bought 40 Packards (the most vulgar car of the 1940s) at a time, built palaces, including one with the biggest air-conditioning system in the world, and gold fittings and fixtures and Paris perfumes began to appear in his bathrooms. And, as with the sons of South American dictators, ARAMCO hedged its bets by taking Ibn Saud's sons on foreign trips and introducing them to wine, women and song. Outside of his immediate entourage the country remained poor and there was at least one incident when beggars who tried to accost his motorcade to ask for money were beaten to death.

Ibn Saud's family and relatives continued to run the country in his name. Their salaries depended on how much there was in the treasury. The tribal chiefs were bribed into allegiance, and Ibn Saud persisted in abusing the Shias, favouring outsiders and frowning on girls' education. As with Hitler and the SA, he felt secure enough to reintegrate the Ikhwan by creating the White Guard (later the National Guard), an all-Bedouin and Wahhabi force to protect himself and his family. In the background cholera, blindness and syphilis were rampant and strikes were outlawed (funnily, he heard about this activity at second hand and banned them, not because there was a threat, but because he disliked the idea).

Within the Arab world, with the exception of Farouk, Ibn Saud still got along with no one. He joined the Arab League but refused to participate in any moves towards closer Arab cooperation while loudly stating that the only real unity among a people is brought about by the sword. Indeed his only forays into the field of inter-Arab politics were divisive. To weaken his neighbours and maintain his position, he paid Syria to quarrel with Iraq, and Egypt to feud with Syria, and claimed for himself some oil-rich areas which belonged to the United Arab Emirates and Oman (the Bureimi oasis). Saudi Arabia was the only Arab country which did not send army units to fight in Palestine -whether rightly or wrongly to the outside world is immaterial -a definitely un-Arab stance.

When Ibn Saud died in 1953, and despite the oil income and the huge monetary advances (to keep him in debt) made by the oil companies, his country was in a state of financial and administrative chaos for which he and Abdallah Al Suleiman, his 'Minister of Everything', bore responsibility. The total number of Government employees was around 5000, no infrastructure to cope with the country's new status existed and his eldest son and heir was a simpleton - at 52 he had married 100 times. Nor was there a Saudi cabinet during his lifetime; the first one was created a few months after he died.