It was 9:00 P.M. when the car swung off Nassiriah Street onto Inter continental Road Almost immediately it slowed to take its place in line behind the other luxury automobiles waiting to go through the gates to King Faisal Hall, the building in which the grandiose royal weddings are staged. As the driver stopped at the foot of the broad steps that lead up to the entrance, a tall black man in a white thobe swung the car door open and I stepped out. There was an electric excitement in the air that I had seldom experienced among the dour Saudis. As soon as one car discharged its cargo of black-clad women, it pulled away to be replaced by another, while a crew of yelling, wildly gesturing traffic controllers directed the empty cars to parking places. To the right of where I stood, below the level of the sidewalk, was a secluded garden where the drivers who had already dispensed with their expensive vehicles gathered to beat drums and partake of the food provided by the bride's family.

Mounting the steps to the hall, I joined the veiled women streaming into the foyer. There, like the drivers outside, female servants were clustered, singing and dancing. I slowly worked my way through the crowd until I reached the entrance to the main hall, where the elaborate ritualistic exchange of greetings began. As I took the hand of the woman at the head of the receiving line, my eyes involuntarily riveted on her necklace. Covering the soft skin between her collar bones was a massive marquis-cut diamond. Radiating out from it, in groups of three, were smaller but no less perfect stones that completely encircled the princess's neck. Feeling somewhat embarrassed for staring, I moved on to shake hands with the next hostess. Her malformed arm, which denoted the prevalence of consanguineous marriage within the House of Saud, was encircled with a chunky emerald bracelet. On down the line, women were engulfed by rubies, sapphires, and more and more diamonds.

The hall itself was enormous. A peach-colored carpet, purchased especially for the wedding, ran down the length of the room, creating an aisle between dozens of spindly gilded chairs and two settees for the senior women of the family. To my left, at the front of the room, was a pole covered with dense bouquets of flowers, extending approximately twenty feet toward the ceiling. Thirty of these floral posts fanned out behind the platform where the bride and groom would sit to receive their wedding guests, and more flowers stood in great bunches on the stage. Calculating the price that fresh flowers flown in from Europe command in the Riyadh market, I estimated that the bride's father had spent over $100,000 on the floral arrangements alone. Behind me a group of professional women musicians played drums and a lone lute while they crooned the monotonous sounds of traditional Arabic wed ding songs. Sixty servant girls, many of them Oriental, dressed in matching costumes passed coffee and tea in hand-painted cups and glasses that matched the peach color scheme of the wedding.

Between the time the wedding began and the bride made her appearance, approximately two and a half hours later, the bride's sisters and myriad cousins competitively pranced up and down the aisle in chic dresses directly out of the designer salons of Europe. Their children, held in check by their Western and Oriental nannies, wore velvet suits or long brocade dresses that ranged from exquisite to tacky. It was in this clothing that the gaps in generation and sophistication within the royal family were so noticeable. An aging daughter of Abdul Aziz sat splay-legged in her place of honor on a settee. She was dressed in a sleazy black dress that had a huge flower sporting several leaves worked in cheap sequins that climbed up her stout body. On her wide- set feet, accustomed only to sandals, were ill-fitting gold lame' shoes and anchored to her head by an elastic cord was a tight black net that plastered her thin hair to her scalp. In stark contrast was the daughter of former King Faisal, representing the elite branch of the family. Tall and slim like her father, she was striking in her perfectly tailored two-piece black dress, which subtly sparkled as the tiny rhinestones woven into the fabric caught the light when she walked. I was absorbed in watching all of these scenes around me, when I was startled upright in my chair by a series of high-pitched screams emanating from behind the tall doors to my right. Then a final primordial howl filled the hall, signaling the guests to click their tongues in the old Bedouin wedding ritual. The doors flung open and four heavy-set women in tight white satin dresses slit to the hip entered the room, beating hand-held drums. They were followed by four belly dancers balancing tall candelabras, each containing twelve lighted candles, on their heads. Astonished, I watched them wiggle their hips and writhe their bodies while precariously supporting their fiery headgear. They in turn were followed by six flower girls, who preceded the bride. The bride herself wore a Western-style dress with a great train, carried by two young girls. The procession of chanting drummers, shimmying belly dancers, flower girls, bride, and train bearers took twenty minutes to traverse the long room and reach the podium. As the dancers reached a frenzied climax, they were hurried away so the groom escorted by four of his relatives could enter the hall. It was approaching 1:00 A.M. when the bride and groom finished receiving the congratulations of the guests and the party moved into the adjacent Intercontinental Hotel for the wedding feast.

The dinner perpetuated the tribal patterns established by the reign of the first al-Saud king, Abdul Aziz. As in a great tribal gathering, every woman connected to the household of either the bride or the groom, noble or servant, was invited to participate in the celebration. But there was only one narrow door into the dining room, and Saudi impatience reared its head as servants and guests fought to get through the slender opening. Taken in tow by a teenage relative of the groom, I was finally stampeded into the dining hall. There, standing before me, was a towering twenty-layer wedding cake. Beyond the cake were long tables set with plates, glasses, cutlery, an assortment of food on burners, and bottles of apple juice straight off the supermarket shelf. Everyone from the highest to the lowliest sat down together. An old woman, who I assumed was a long-time family servant, sat across from me. She wore a massive gold breastplate, probably a gift from her employer, which completely covered her breasts and dropped down below her waist. Clutching a spoon near the bowl, she ravenously shoveled food into her mouth and proceeded to grind it between her toothless gums, let ting it drool out the sides of her mouth. Choosing to look away, I saw another woman move down the dessert table methodically lifting the serving spoon from each dish, licking it, and then returning it to the bowl. I left my plate barely touched.

At 2:30 A.M., I was escorted back to the point where I originally had been dropped off early in the evening. The men in the garden were still singing as I stood waiting for the white Rolls Royce to work itself through the line of cars preceding it and pull to a stop. I said my good-byes, opened the back door, and gratefully sank into the soft leather seat for the drive home.

Royal weddings reflect many truths about the House of Saud: the lavishness of its lifestyle; the wide diversity within the family not only as to influence and position but levels of education and sophistication; the paternalism of the ruler toward the ruled that sustains the monarchy; and finally the competitiveness as well as the unity within the family.

Saudi Arabia's royal family numbers in excess of five thousand people and describes itself as "a highly privileged tribe that permeates every corner of the country." * The members of the family range from the suave and urbane foreign minister, Saud al-Faisal, to pimply adolescents in polyester suits. All claim the title of prince or princess and most demand the prerogatives of royalty.

*From advertisement purchased by Saudi Arabia in the New York Times. April 25, 1983.

The lifestyle of the upper levels of the House of Saud is opulent. Princes maintain huge households, travel abroad for weeks at a time, and think nothing of sending an airplane from Riyadh to Paris to pick someone up. One of former King Faisal's daughters includes twelve servants in her entourage when she travels. Prince Abdullah, not regarded as one of the more ostentatious princes, once spent $9 million decorating his palace in Riyadh. The major princes maintain fleets of cars, keep stables of valuable race horses, and spend hundreds of thou sands of dollars a year on luxury items. The royals also expect every one to cater to their whims. Members of the royal family bump ordinary passengers off airplanes. The politically astute Aiyad Makkah Hotel in Mecca maintains two royal suites and forty-four princes' suites for the exclusive use of the royal family. The revolving restaurant on top of the Riyadh water tower is never used because it looks down into the garden of Princess Sara, King Faisal's favorite sister. And King Fahd's daughter Latifa refuses to sit in anything but a blue chair when she has her teeth cleaned.

The abundance of royalty is due to the sexual prowess and political needs of Abdul Aziz. He sired forty-five recorded sons by twenty-two different wives, representing most of the kingdom's major tribes. For the most part, these tribal wives remained with their families, elevated by the honor of raising a Saudi prince. The offspring of these sons then also became princes or princesses, breeding more titled offspring. To give some order to the system of royalty, the number of princes should have been restricted early, for even in Abdul Aziz's time perhaps one Saudi in five thousand was a prince. But that was and remains politically impossible.

Not every prince is ultrarich or commands real political power. To make any sense of the system, I divide the royal family into princes and "princelings." The inner circle of senior princes who actually run Saudi Arabia are in this position because of the combination of their proximity to Abdul Aziz, their abilities, their diligence, and their ambition. *

The next level of the royal family, still in the prince category, are those active in major business enterprises or in the second echelon of the bureaucracy or the military. Bandar ibn Sultan ibn Abdul Aziz, Saudi ambassador to the United States, is an example of this group of princes. The princelings, on the other hand, are far down the line of descendants of Abdul Aziz, on the fringe of the wealth, and have no power other than as a member of one or another of the power blocs in the family. There are hundreds of these hangers-on who manage to live off their limited access to the decision-makers. But they remain important in that they are al-Sauds, and no king can rule without the broad consent of the family.

*The most visible members of the present power constellation are Fahd, the king; Abdullah, the crown prince and commander of the National Guard; Sultan, minister of Defense and Aviation; Naif, minister of the Interior; and Salman, governor of Riyadh.

The history of Saudi Arabia is the history of the House of Saud, divided into epochs by the personality and leadership qualities of each of the kings.

The al-Sauds were originally nothing more than tribal rulers of Diriyah, an oasis town in the Nejd. Their influence spread and contracted according to their successes in battle with other tribal chieftains. A moment of glory was reached in the early nineteenth century when the first Abdul Aziz merged politics and Wahhabism to build a short-lived empire that challenged the interests of the Ottoman Turks. But not only did the al-Sauds lose their empire to the Turks in i8i8, they lost Diriyah itself. With their settlement razed by the cannons of a foreign army, the family moved their capital ten miles down Wadi Hanifa to Riyadh. Shortly thereafter the al-Sauds fell to fighting among them selves, when they were not under attack by their major rivals, the Rashids, rulers of the area to the north centered around Hail. By I 88o Riyadh was in chaos as rival Saud and Rashid factions fought bloody battles through the markets and alleys, hanging the losers by their necks from the battlements of the town. In I 890 the Rashids were strong enough to lay siege to Riyadh by cutting down its date palms and poisoning its wells. The al-Sauds' last supporters deserted their ruler, forcing Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal al-Saud to hide his ten-year-old son, Abdul Aziz, in a basket slung from a camel and flee Riyadh in the dark of night. The family was granted sanctuary in Kuwait. In 1901 the now grown Abdul Aziz, refusing to accept his father's resignation to defeat, put together an army of forty men and marched on Riyadh. In a combination of stealth and courage, he recaptured his father's capital for the al-Sauds and won a foothold for an empire.

*H. St. John Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (London: Constable, 1928), p.508

Lifting the Wahhabi banner and brandishing the fire of evangelism, Abdul Aziz moved out of Riyadh to control the entire Nejd by 1912. In 1913 he drove the Turks from the al-Hassa. By 1921 he had conquered parts of the Assir and moved toward Mecca, Mohammed's holy city. Ruled by the effeminate and mad Sherif Hussein, a political convenience for British interests in the area, Mecca was the jewel that Abdul Aziz sought. Fired with religious fervor and the quest for booty, his dreaded Bedouin army swept down on the city. The terrified Sherif fled and Mecca surrendered to the Wahhabis. Sending his men ahead to destroy the Shiite shrines in the city, Abdul Aziz, dressed in the simple, seamless white ihram, entered the city on October 13, 1924, not as a conqueror but as a pilgrim. There he performed his rituals "with that mixture of humility before God and arrogance towards men so characteristic of the old Wahhabis." * Abdul Aziz's conquests were nearly complete. But it was not until 1932 that Abdul Aziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal officially named his kingdom Saudi Arabia, or "Arabia of the Sauds."

The essence of the monarchy as forged by Abdul Aziz has survived. The government that he put in place was simple, direct, unorganized, and exceedingly democratic. He was a grand tribal sheikh, always accessible to his subjects. Regularly traveling his kingdom, camping at villages, he held court in a large tent, its sandy floor covered with Persian carpets and his state papers stored in wooden chests stacked in the corner. Yet Abdul Aziz was somewhat of a political genius. He did what no man before him had done: tied the quarrelsome, autonomous peoples of a major part of the Arabian Peninsula together in a nation-state. He did it by practicing the philosophy of one of his favorite quotations: "The chief of a tribe is its servant" - in Abdul Aziz's case, a servant always in need of money.

Although he lived a simple life, hundreds of people flocked to him daily with some demand or simply to be fed. A Palestinian pharmacist who joined the court in 1948 described for me what it was actually like. Wherever Abdul Aziz moved, the court, like some medieval circus, moved with him. With one visit to the king, a Saudi could file a complaint, get a meal, collect a dagger, a cloak, or a sack of sugar, dictate a marriage contract to a public scribe, have his ailments treated, and hear the Koran recited by the leading Wahhabi scholars.

In addition to his hospitality, Abdul Aziz's reign had heavy structural expenses. His political strength lay in the towns, not with the Bedouins. But to keep his kingdom intact, he had to control the fickle Bedouins. Therefore, in 1916 Abdul Aziz ordered the Bedouin tribes owing allegiance to him to give up herding and join the Ikhwan ("Brotherhood") communities that he established in the northern Nejd. But settling the Bedouins required infusions of Abdul Aziz's money. Regularly the sheikhs were brought to Riyadh in relays to receive both religious instruction and subsidies to keep their loyalty. The sheikhs in turn distributed the subsidies among their own tribesmen to retain their fidelity. As Abdul Aziz predicted, the tribes eventually became dependent on his central authority through their dependence on his gifts. For the townsmen, Abdul Aziz kept the peace, which promoted commerce. And like the Bedouins, the townsmen found that the demands that Abdul Aziz put on his subjects were light. They too received gifts from their monarch and paid few taxes.

To finance all of this, Abdul Aziz collected pilgrims' taxes and scrambled for handouts from the British, who were interested in protecting all approaches to the Suez Canal and their access to India. The state treasury was the king's private purse, and although Abdul Aziz doled money out to his subjects like an indulgent parent, he spent almost nothing on public works. Besides a few water wells, Abdul Aziz's major public works projects were the railroad from Dammam to Riyadh and a pier for pilgrims in Jeddah. He built a hospital in Riyadh and one in Taif but these were primarily for the royal family. Even after World War II, when he began to collect significant oil revenues, "it seemed never to occur to ibn Saud (Abdul Aziz) that his overflowing wealth laid any duty on him to give his people the amenities they lacked: a medical service, schools, sanitation, roads and public transport, or any kind of insurance less whimsical than his personal bounty.

Between the time he seized Riyadh in '90' and his death in '953, Abdul Aziz experienced only one serious challenge to his rule: the Ikhwan rebellion in 1929. He survived largely because he had succeeded in establishing a personal relationship between himself and his subjects. No man or institution stood between the king and his people. For the emotions of every Saudi, those who loved him and those who feared him, were attached to the person of the king, not some impersonal bureaucracy.

*David Howatth, The Desert King: A Life of Ibn Saud (Beirut: Continental Publications, 1964),

Abdul Aziz, beloved patriarch of the Nejd, was a large man, scarred by numberless battles on the desert, and fabled for his virility. His mud palace still stands in central Riyadh just beyond the al-Masmak Fort, which he seized from the Rashids in his daring raid on Riyadh in 1901. The mud stucco structure, built in 1936, wraps around an open court- yard, where a massive date palm stands, a link between the past and the present. Whenever I entered the old palace, now painted an incongruous hospital green, with cheap inlaid glass windows shoddily in- stalled, I could feel the aura of Abdul Aziz within its walls. There is his camel's saddle and a coat of mail that looks as if it belonged in medieval Europe, not the Arabian desert. In the anteroom to the king's salon, there is a large hearth cut into the stone floor, where countless fires boiled coffee for Abdul Aziz's guests.

The salon itself is a pitiful imitation of the grand salons of Versailles, a haunting reminder that there has always lurked in the House of Saud an attachment to things of the West. A rack of Abdul Aziz's rifles has been substituted for a coat of arms. Two undistinguished grandfather clocks stand in the corners. At the front of the room is the oversize Louis XIV-style chair, upholstered in a leopard print corduroy, where Abdul Aziz sat to receive his subjects. Next to the chair is the old-fashioned European-style crank telephone, whose technology so delighted the Bedouin king.

On the roof of the old palace is a promenade with rifle holes cut in its crenellated design. As I looked out on the collapsing mud walls of the hareem, my eye was drawn across the street to the unfinished pal ace that Abdul Aziz was building in 1953 when he died. The new palace is of that same, sad pseudo-Versailles style improbably set in the desert, which looks as out of place as Abdul Aziz would have looked if he had lived to occupy it.

Abdul Aziz set the line of succession before he died. As if he fore saw problems, he named Faisal, his second oldest son, to assist Saud, his oldest surviving son, whom he named king.

The system of rule that worked so well for Abdul Aziz was disastrous in the hands of Saud. He became a lackey for the people around him who were more clever and cunning than he. Basically Saud had no sense of what it meant to be king other than to toss coins to his waiting subjects when he left the pink-walled confines of his palace. He drank heavily and saw the monarchy as a symbol that allowed him to enjoy his rights of marriage,* to savor the plaudits of his subjects seeking money, and to squander the kingdom's ever-increasing oil revenues. Saud and his family set new records in consumption. When they traveled abroad, they bought everything from the complete stock of a store's linen department to a fleet of Cadillacs. In 1954, the year after he became king, Saud spent $50 million constructing palaces in Riyadh and Jeddah and claimed the $234.8 million dollars that Saudi Arabia realized from its oil sales as the king's personal income. The effectiveness of the fledgling bureaucracy established near the end of Abdul Aziz's reign collapsed in the waste, decadence, intrigue, and corruption that consumed Saud's court. In 1958 the House of Saud hit its lowest point when Saud's economic mismanagement had all but bankrupted the country and his flirtations with Egypt's revolutionary Gamal Abdul Nasser enraged his own family and every monarch in the Middle East.

*Saud fathered at least fifty-two sons and fifty-five daughters.

Dissatisfaction with Saud brought into play the ahl-aqd wal hal ("those who tie and untie"), a group consisting of approximately one hundred of the most important princes and over sixty of the leading members of the ulema. Together the group sought to solve the problem of Saud ibn Abdul Aziz. For two years Saud's younger brother Faisal ruled in his name. Waste and corruption were stemmed. The treasury began to recover. But not all members of the family were satisfied, and much of the dissatisfaction involved money. Faisal was ruling the family as well as the country with a tight fist, stopping many royal perks. The cut in royal allowances, combined with the strong tradition of patrilineal descent in Arab families, returned Saud to the throne in 1960. By 1962 conditions were as bad as they had been in 1958. With a two billion Saudi Riyal debt and an empty treasury, conditions demanded Faisal's return. But he was no longer willing to rule for Saud; he would return only as king. On March 29, 1964, the ulema issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, that declared Saud unfit to govern. The king went into exile and died in Greece in 1969. Although the deposition of Saud kept the family and the kingdom in turmoil for four years, in the end it was as if the House of Saud had exercised a mystical instinct for survival. Power, as if by osmosis, flowed to the family member most capable of exercising it.

Faisal tore down the walls of Nassiriah, the mini-city built by Saud for his family, claiming that they separated the king from his people. Only the main gate still stands, a reminder of the folly of Saud's monarchy. Hardly the reluctant heir to the throne who is so often portrayed, Faisal ordered Saud's portrait and any mention of him struck from public view. It was as if six years of history disappeared from the kingdom and the succession had gone from Abdul Aziz directly to Faisal.

Faisal is by far the most interesting of the post-Abdul Aziz kings. He was both the best educated and the most worldly wise of the al- Saud monarchs. Yet he embodied the old Wahhabi ideals of piety and devotion. He wisely understood the need to lead Saudi Arabia into the modern world while at the same time preserving the sanctity of its traditions. Adopting the classic position of an Islamic conservative, he shepherded his people backward into the future.

The Saudis both greatly respected and greatly feared Faisal Living austerely himself, he put a stop to the ostentatious spending and unseemly behavior of the royal family. The construction of elaborate palaces ceased. He reduced allocations for the royal family. He banned the importation of Cadillacs because they represented the sumptuous living identified with Saud. And he, at last, separated the income of the nation from the income of the king. Upholding the authority of Islam in everything that he did, Faisal became revered as a leader who had restored the dignity of the monarchy and, reaching beyond the kingdom, promoted unity in the Arab world.

Faisal came to the throne in one major crisis - the deposition of a king - and died in another - assassination. On March 25, 1975, as he left a majlis ("audience") with his subjects, he was shot by one of his nephews, Faisal ibn Musaid. Theories as to a motive range from the assassin's alleged use of the drug LSD to radical political ideas absorbed in the West. The most accepted theory is that it was a revenge killing. The assassin's brother was killed in 1965 in a violent demonstration against Faisal's decision to inaugurate television in the kingdom. For his crime, Faisal ibn Musaid was beheaded in Riyadh's Justice Square on June 18, 1975.

During the years that I was in Riyadh, a corpselike villa stood on the corner across the street from the hospital. Land all around was eaten up by construction, yet it still stood, half finished, a ghost crumbling a little more each year. Although the truth remains with the royal family, the widely accepted rumor is that this was the house being built by Musaid ibn Abdul Aziz, father of the assassin, when Faisal was killed. It now stands as a symbol to all who would strike at the al Sauds' chosen leader.

Like the presence of the other great figures of Saudi Arabia's history, Abdul-Wahhab and Abdul Aziz, the presence of Faisal still lingers over the kingdom. I could see the green slate roof of Faisal's al Ma'ather palace from my window and could easily walk to its gate. Passing beneath the sycamore trees that line the long drive, I watched ordinary Saudi families sitting on mats spread out on the grass, enjoying the coolness of the shade. There was a tranquility here that became increasingly hard to find as Riyadh bustled and boomed. I had been there many times, but shortly before I left Saudi Arabia for the last time, I went back to that palace. Peace still reigned there. It was as if the spirit of Faisal continued to rule his flock.

The death of Faisal tested the unwritten, largely untested system of succession in the House of Saud. The order of succession set by Abdul Aziz in which Saud, the oldest son, became king, with Faisal, next oldest son, as his deputy established the precedent of the throne being passed from brother to brother rather than from father to son. The four successors of Abdul Aziz have all been brothers in order of age except for those who have stepped aside. But there is no firm line of succession. The throne is not inherited but bestowed after extensive consultations within the family and with the religious hierarchy. It is a system that has been little tested except in the periods of crisis surrounding the deposition of Saud and the assassination of Faisal. Although in these situations the family overcame internal bickering for the common good, the ill-defined system contains all of the elements of instability. As a result, anyone's claim to the crown is elusive.

When Faisal died, the next king by age should have been Mohammed. * But in the aftermath of Saud's removal from the throne, Mohammed renounced his place in the line of succession. The reasons remain locked within the family. Nicknamed "the father of two devils," Mohammed was a traditionalist, interested in Arabic poetry and possessed of a violent temper. The kingship may not have been acceptable to either Mohammed or the rest of the family, and certainly by 1975, when the family was currying its progressive image, Mohammed represented a throwback to the past. For what had been happening within the House of Saud during the reign of Faisal was that future candidates for king were working their way up the hierarchy through the bureaucracy. The major princes, such as Fahd, Abdullah, Sultan, and Naif, all held important governmental posts. Yet on the death of Faisal, the family and the ulema were not yet ready to switch to a technocrat king nurtured within the bureaucracy. So a deal was struck between rival factions of the family and with the religious leaders. Khalid, the oldest brother following Mohammed, became king. Then Naif and Saad, the next two oldest sons of Abdul Aziz following Khalid, stepped aside, allowing Fahd to assume a new title, crown prince.

*This is the same Mohammed who had Princess Mishaal executed.

*Khalid, known to be in poor health, was an interim king, chosen to allow the family time to chart its course for the future.

As it turned out, he proved to be an excellent choice. During his seven years on the throne, Khalid reigned and Fahd ruled. Khalid had the demeanor of a true sheikh, a kind, generous, pious man, whose bearing was regal but not haughty. He exhibited great patience with his subjects and chose to spend his happiest hours on the desert with his beloved Bedouins. Hundreds flocked to his weekly majlis, and, like his father, he sometimes shared his dinner with a thousand of his male subjects. He lived rather simply and seemed removed from the royal scramble for a percentage of government contracts. Khalid could preside over Saudi Arabia's great strides toward modernization and remain untainted by the stigma of Westernization because he was so much himself a Saudi. I remember seeing Khalid leaving the horse races late one winter afternoon. In the middle of his excited retinue, he quietly stood, his cane supporting the weight of a hip replaced in 1977. Lacking the charisma of Abdul Aziz, the decadence of Saud, and the authority of Faisal, he was a perfect father figure, one perhaps taken aback by the excitement around him. Because of his personal characteristics and the economic ability to take care of the needs and wishes of his subjects, the al-Sauds' unique political system hummed along under the tutelage of Khalid.

Faisal's moves toward modernization, especially after the 1973 oil embargo, left the basic mechanisms by which the House of Saud ruled remarkably intact. It was Faisal who made the decision to create an elaborate welfare state rather than bring the people into the political process. The monarchy remained, as it was under Abdul Aziz, a highly personalized relationship between the ruler and the ruled, a relation ship now girded by enormous sums of money. This unique method by which it ruled preserved the position of wealth and privilege that the House of Saud enjoyed.

*Since 1953 Fahd had held the offices of minister of Education, minister of the Interior. and second deputy premier.

During the heyday of the oil boom, I weekly saw King Khalid ibn Abdul Aziz al-Saud on television, standing unprotected by guards or seated behind an improbable Louis XIV desk, receiving his guests at his majlis. Except for the serving boys dispensing endless cups of highly sweetened tea, it was impossible to separate the monarch's entourage from the suppliants. All were scattered out on ornate French brocade sofas, dressed in the universal Saudi costume of white thobe and gutra. True, some thobes were whiter and newer than others and some of the waiting men chose to sit rather than sprawl, but within the king's chambers all were received with equal respect and hospitality. Unlike the isolated splendor of the court of the former shah of Iran, Saudi Arabia's monarchs have followed the Bedouin traditions. As with the tribal sheikh, the lowliest peasant still regards access to his king as his inherent right. The king, in turn, recognizes that he retains the allegiance of his followers only as long as he is responsive to their needs. Historically, this has been the strength of the House of Saud. For in reality, the absolute monarchy of the al-Sauds has been more akin to ward politics than despotism. Like skillful politicians the rulers play one group against another in a population defined by conflicting interests. These groups are then reunited under the king, himself defined by the multiple roles he fills. For the uninitiated, the whole exercise appears to be a rerun of "Who's on First." But this is a highly sophisticated game with high stakes, which has succeeded because of the nature of the Saudi social structure. Saudi society molds itself by first dividing vertically into classes and then dividing again, horizontally, into regional interests and tribal structures. In other words, every Saudi defines himself by his economic class, kinship group, and geographic region. Consequently, no individual or group ever has a single interest that is not blunted by a competing interest. Politics as practiced by the House of Saud, therefore, is a shell game where the pea of royal patronage and favors is rapidly shifted between classes, regions, and tribes in such a way as to keep at least two of the three roles in which every individual perceives himself satisfied at any given time.

The class structure is dominated by the royal family, composed of the direct descendants of Abdul Aziz. Next in order are the Juffalis, Alirezas, and other great merchant families, who rival the royal family in wealth but not in power. Then, dropping precipitously on the ladder of riches and influence, is the growing middle class, largely comprised of small traders, white collar clerks, and junior civil servants, who form the rapidly expanding urban society. Since few Saudis will accept positions as manual laborers or even as blue collar workers, there is virtually no Saudi working class in the cities. Therefore, the rural peas ants and the nomads are at the bottom of the ladder financially, but not in terms of political influence.

Each of these social classes identifies itself by shared economic interests. But in Saudi Arabia, class interests are often superseded by regional interests, which range from the zealous enforcement of religious rules to the regional development of water sources. Because the Hijaz, the al-Hassa, the Assir, the north, and the Nejd each has a distinct way of life, each is in competition with the others for political power that infringes on purely class interests.

But then these regions further divide into an expanded tribal system, which the House of Saud has tied to the king through the emirate sys tem. * There are two types of tribes in the al-Sauds' political constellation. First there is the traditional kinship group, such as the influential Utaibah tribe of the Nejd, and then there are political "tribes," such as the peasants of the Assir. It is this second type of tribe that is the most complex of all the kingdom's social groupings. It is also the weakest. For a "political tribe" to exercise power, it must bring together people with a common economic interest who live in the same geographic area and share the same way of life.

With these myriad political divisions, the House of Saud rules by addressing itself in any situation to whichever identity the disgruntled element of the population is attaching its loyalty to at that particular moment: class, region, or tribe. The system works because for a Saudi each of these identities is clear-cut and seldom comes into conflict with the others. A Hijazi merchant, for instance, selling his silks and vel- vets in a smart shop in Jeddah would never find himself in a showdown with a rural peasant of the Shahram tribe who farms the hills of the Assir. His class does not put demands on the same economic re sources, his regional interests do not put demands on the same natural resources, and the tribe to which each belongs has neither a common demand nor a past dispute. With the multitude of groups in the kingdom, they are seldom thrown into competition with one another over resources or policy. The genius of the ruling family has been to keep it that way. The king's main function is not to rule by decree but to forge a consensus within and among all of these groups, plus the ulema and the royal family, before making government policy. As a result, the government of Saudi Arabia is characterized by endless consultation between the rulers and all facets of society. No mater how critical, no decisions are made before the all-important consensus is reached. This precludes rapid responses or innovations for any problem, no matter how urgent it might be. Western advisers trying to develop everything from primary education to petrochemical industries are driven to distraction by a government that stalls rather than moves. In one instance, while architects and builders waited, construction of the hospital for the King Saud University's medical school was halted for several years. Before work could proceed, a consensus had to be reached on whether or not it was acceptable for male and female students to share the same x-ray and laboratory facilities. What the Westerners on this project, whose complaints I listened to endlessly, failed to grasp was that this glacial movement of the decision-making process was essential in maintaining political stability and would not be hurried for the convenience of the Westerners.

*This is the system of local rule. Originally based on the alliance between the King and the sheikhs, it now encompasses the fledgling system of municipal government headed by local mayors.

Early in the oil boom, the first wrinkles in the House of Saud's time- honored political formula began to appear. Like a menacing time ma chine, development was creating changes that could not be controlled and threatened to outstrip the consensus process. In the realm of religious orthodoxy, for example, the more progressive urbanites were becoming restless with the overwhelming power of the ulema. In the rural areas, on the other hand, people still demanded a strict Wahhabi style state. In the pressures of the oil boom, if the consultations necessary to achieve consensus dragged on interminably, the progressives were dissatisfied; but if they proceeded too fast, the traditionalists be- came disaffected. It was in these circumstances that the House of Saud manipulated the three-pronged nature of interest groups. Deftly using a tit-for-tat approach, it gave something to one interest group while taking something else away to satisfy another group. With the House of Saud in control of petroleum revenues and government spending, the rulers were in a position to take care of their own interests. While the Third Development Plan was being formulated, there were loud complaints from rural interests about both the economic and political thrust of government being aimed at the decadent cities. To deal with the conflict, the government continued to pour money into Riyadh but sent more matawain into the streets to visibly enforce the observance of prayer time among the urbanites. In addition, the Ministry of Municipalities and Rural Administration (MOMRA) was instructed to provide every rural settlement in the kingdom something immediate and tangible. When I was working on MOMRA's massive submission for the Third Plan, I noticed that morgues were being built in many communities, while others were given only a fence around the cemetery to keep out the wild desert dogs. When I asked why, I was told that the settlements designated for morgues had received fences in the Second Plan. Those designated for fences under the Third Plan would get morgues under the Fourth Plan and those settlements with morgues would move on to slaughterhouses.

But splintering the population into interest groups is only one part of the formula with which the House of Saud rules. The other part is constructed on the wide range of religious, traditional, and secular roles on which the king bases his authority.

The king is first and foremost the emir. A position described in the Koran, an emir is a local ruler of either a village or a tribe, who commands his position by possessing enough power to ensure that the Islamic code of laws is enforced within his community. Abdul Aziz began his career as the emir of Riyadh after he seized the town by force of arms. After uniting Saudi Arabia and declaring himself king, he assumed another religious title, that of imam, or "law giver." Al though monarchy is not addressed in Islamic theology, the wily Abdul Aziz adopted the title of imam to imbue his rule with a certain religious legitimacy.

In addition to these religious roles, Abdul Aziz also became the "sheikh among sheikhs.' Under the old Arab tribal system, the sheikh was responsible for settling disputes within the community. Like the emir, his authority was established by his prowess at war and existed only as long as he could demonstrate his control over others. Abdul Aziz once again established the pattern of applying old practices to a new concept. The idea of a nation-state on the Arabian Peninsula was more Western than Arab. By adopting the posture of a sheikh ruling a tribe, Abdul Aziz succeeded in creating an image with which the people, still tied to village, tribe, and family, could identify. Although the assumption of the title of king was a break with tradition, the actual combining of the roles of emir, imam, and sheikh had long been practiced on a tribal level. So it was as the enforcer of Islamic law and the sheikh of the tribe that Abdul Aziz and his successors ruled until the oil boom made it necessary for the king to adopt roles not associated with tribal rule.

Modernization has demanded that the king also become head of a bureaucracy and the commander in chief of the armed forces, functions unknown in tribal practice. * Being king of Saudi Arabia is not easy. To rule, the king must control all of the sources of his power and authority. As chief emir, he has to maintain the support of local leaders. As immam, he must protect religious orthodoxy to keep the support of the ulema. As sheikh, he has to command the loyalty of the tribes. As premier and commander in chief, he has to manage the bureaucracy and retain the loyalty of the military. In all, it is an incredible balancing act, but one which the House of Saud has managed well.

At the heart of the al-Sauds' success is a government structured in such a way that almost every individual has ready access to those in power. To prove their religious orthodoxy, Saudi kings are highly visible leaders of the faithful. Every king with the exception of Saud has been identified with major projects in the holy cities. Just as King Faisal spent $300 million expanding the Grand Mosque at Mecca and King Khalid spent another $300 million completing it, Fahd has financed a major renovation and enlargement of the Prophet's mosque at Medina. A hajj season seldom passes that the king does not go to Mecca to kiss the Black Stone. And every year some high-ranking member of the family is present for the washing of the Kaaba.

There is a golden road between the crown and the tribal sheikhs, paved with gracious hospitality, various economic rewards, and direct entree to the king. But access to the king is not limited to the ulema and the sheikhs. At the king's weekly majlis, his lowliest subjects kiss his cheeks, then his nose, and finally his shoulder as they press their crumpled pieces of paper with their requests on his majesty. And every Saudi realistically expects the king to deliver.

In the physical absence of the king, members of the royal family are scattered around the kingdom as local officials, personal representatives of the king. Prince Khalid al-Faisal, governor of the Assir, once said, "If you can't put them [the people] in touch with a ministry or other authority, you may have to help them yourself." **

* There is a crucial division of the power of the armed forces into the National Guard and the more conventional military forces under the authority of the Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The National Guard is recruited from the tribes and so is an institution that ties the tribes to the House of Saud. The army, navy, and air force are largely recruited from the urban areas or from people with no strong identity with the tribal system of the Nejd. See Chapter 14.

**Quoted in David Holden and Richard Johns, The House of Saud (London: Holt, Rinehart and winston, 1981), p.462.

In fact, it seemed during the golden days of the boom that almost every Saudi had a patron prince through family and tribal connections or simply as a servant in a royal household. On behalf of his wards, the prince interceded with the bureaucracy, doled out emergency cash, arranged admittance to the hospital, helped pay bride prices, and so on.

Despite the labors of his deputies, ultimately it is the king, as the sheikh of sheikhs, who is responsible for seeing that all in his flock prosper. Through the reign of Khalid, the king was still very much like a Bedouin sheikh. He was the first among equals in a society where every man is intensely independent. His authority depended not on institutions but on his skills in handling men. And like the Bedouins, all Saudis believed that the king was responsible for all - good or bad - that befell them.

With great political skill, the House of Saud came through the 1970's with its political machinery intact in spite of the '979 uprising of religious fundamentalists in Mecca. Through the tumult, their sources of power remained the emirate system, the National Guard, and the Ministry of Defense and Aviation. The regime could stay in power as long as it controlled two of these three major power centers. Into Fahd's reign, which began in 1982, power was distributed evenly enough so that Saudi Arabia remained relatively stable, because the major segments of society continued to exercise their will through one of the channels of influence open to most Saudi citizens.

Although the Bedouin were poor, they were extremely powerful through their ties with the National Guard, the emirate system, and a king who had great affection for them. Approaching the Bedouin in loyalty to the king was the peasant class, which made up 40 percent of the population. They were also tied to the crown through the emirate system. As beneficiaries of land distribution and generous subsidies from the government, they had little to quarrel about. The antagonisms they harbored were directed at the bureaucracy, which irritated them, and the urban merchants, who they believed cheated them. As long as they perceived the kingdom's religious orthodoxy continuing, they remained placid. The professional military remained loyal through the position afforded them by their rulers. They were well paid, granted generous fringe benefits, and enjoyed a position that approached in status the knights of medieval Europe. That left the urban classes. Most were employed as traders, where the government ensured that they did fairly well financially. No income or property taxes were 1evied. Commercial trade was limited to Saudis, protecting them from competition from foreigners. And the government guaranteed access to generous interest-free loans for business and financing for houses. Of all of the Saudis, it was the lower-level civil servants who were probably the most discontent. They were educated, and so had rising expectations, but they had no power base through the military, the emirates, or even the ministries, a situation little noted by the usually astute House of Saud.

The government ministries still have little political power, but they do contain the expertise necessary to keep the machinery of government operating. In '953, shortly before he died, Abdul Aziz established the rudiments of government structure by creating the Majlis al Wuzara (Council of Ministers). Before the oil embargo, the Council was composed almost entirely of sons of Abdul Aziz and Islamic theologians. Then in October 1975, to accommodate the Western-educated, urban middle class, the number of positions on the Council of Ministers was increased from fourteen to twenty with only eight of the positions being held by princes and two by Islamic leaders. The rest were staffed by rising technocrats.

The power of the ministries, and, therefore, their influence within the Council of Ministers, grew with national wealth as their technical know-how became critical in keeping Saudi Arabia functioning. But the premiership and the pivotal portfolios of the ministries of Defense, Interior, and Foreign Affairs, as well as the National Guard and the governorships of the important provinces, stayed in the hands of the royal family. For all of their ability, training, and reputation, the ministers remained managers, not policymakers. That was left to the king and the senior princes.* The ministers have influence in that they have input into the consensus process, but if no consensus emerges or if the interests of the royal family come into focus, the decision rests with the king and a handful of his brothers. During the reign of Khalid, this inner circle, the core of power, was made up of Fahd, Abdullah, Sultan, Naif, Miteib, Salman, and the elder Mohammed.

* In their decisions, the interests of the approximately thirty-member Council of the Ulema and the equally large Council of Princes who represent the broad interests of the royal family play a prominent role. The Council of Ministers is another, coming together in the tent of the sheikh, a place in which to express opinions that go into the consensus process. There is no fixed system for reaching any decision but rather a series of consultations from which decisions emerge.

Throughout the reign of Khalid, the bureaucracy was held in line by the same mechanisms that held other segments of the population together. Those in the upper levels had their access to power through family or tribal connections. Those in the lower levels collected the financial rewards of Saudi citizenship and cashed in on opportunities for petty graft afforded by their government jobs.

The royal family appeared to be protecting itself from its enemies, but the question remained whether or not it could protect itself from its own corruption and internal rivalries. When oil prices skyrocketed, members of the royal family became wealthy in a variety of ways. In the 1960's, a tight-fisted King Faisal distributed vast amounts of arid, empty desert land among his family as a way of placating their demands for a share in the kingdom's resources without allowing them to dip into the government's treasury. Neither Faisal nor the grumbling princes could possibly have foreseen the explosion of real estate values that would follow the oil embargo. A hectare of land, which was worth perhaps $3 when it was distributed, could command $6,000 by 1980. And the demand for land came from everywhere - for roads, airports, residential housing, pipelines, universities, sewage treatment facilities, power stations. Even now when the government wants to build something, a prince is usually there to demand top price for his real estate.

A second source of wealth for members of the royal family is patronage. The major ministries and the armed forces are staffed with members of the royal family. For every purchase that the government makes, the princes who negotiate the contract receive their cut. Such a system is ripe for abuse. A prince I know has made millions of dollars buying equipment for the air wing of the Saudi army. Consequently, in ministry after ministry, purchases are often determined not by need but by who is on the receiving end of the commissions.

The third major way for members of the royal family to acquire wealth is by becoming the legally required Saudi partners of foreign construction and service companies doing business in the kingdom. All of the major international construction companies, such as Blount and Bechtel, have members of the royal family as business partners who procure the government contracts for the company and then collect a percentage of the profits. Or companies doing business with the government can be totally Saudi owned. Two of King Fahd's sons own management companies that the government hires to manage certain of its hospitals. Often, as I bumped over a road being repaved for the sixth time, I wondered which prince had the concession on road work in Riyadh.

The royal percentage takers are everywhere. Probably the most avaricious member of the royal family is another of Fahd's sons, Mohammed. Owner of Al Bilad, the holding company for his many interests, Mohammed began getting rich from contracts with the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications (PT,T) when he was only twenty-five years old. In 1977 his greed became public when American ambassador William Porter, speaking for American, Japanese, West German, and French companies cut out of a deal with PIT, complained about a contract that Mohammed engineered between the Saudi government and a consortium headed by N. V. Phillips, the Dutch electronics concern, and L. M. Ericcson, the Swedish telephone company Phillips' price was about five times that which the Western consultants hired by PTT estimated it would cost. Retreating from the public exposure, the government canceled the contract. It has been estimated that if it had gone through, Mohammed would have received a commission of 20 percent of the total cost, or $1.3 billion.

Almost all deals involving members of the royal family are simple contractual arrangements between the ministries and privately owned (or, perhaps more aptly, "princely" owned) companies. A direct cut from Saudi oil revenues is the special and highly secret purview of only a very select number of princes, whose deals rarely come to light. The Wall Street Journal reported that in November 1980 Saudi Arabia ordered one of the four American oil companies that formed the old ARAMCO consortium to begin selling 140,000 barrels a day of Saudi crude to a mysterious buyer in Japan called "Petromonde." The official agreement with Saudi Arabia called for the Japanese firm to pay $32 a barrel, but word soon leaked out from Japan that Petromonde would resell the oil to Japanese refiners for $34.63 per barrel. The extra $2.63 a barrel represented a "commission" that would net the dealer $368,200 a day, or $11 million a month. International oil industry investigators soon learned that Petromonde was not a Japanese company at all but a London-based concern with the same London telephone and telex numbers as Al Bilad. Discovered, embarrassed Saudi officials canceled yet another of Mohammed ibn Fahd's deals.

The Petromonde case came as close as anything to documenting the payment of large commissions to members of the Saudi royal family to obtain Saudi oil during the days of oil shortages Known as "princely oil", it provided staggering amounts of money to selected members of the House of Saud and represents one of the components of the glue that holds the royal family together. Prominent princes expect a big share of the kingdom's wealth, which goes into their private fortunes and supports an intricate system of private patronage. Among the major beneficiaries of the system was the ubiquitous Prince Mohammed ibn Abdul Aziz (d. 1983), the older brother of kings Khalid and Fahd. When he renounced his place in the succession to the throne, Mohammed is said to have been allowed to allocate a share of Petromin's oil* in return for under-the-table commissions from his agents, who then contacted buyers. One deal turned down by an American company could have netted the prince $1.2 million a day.

The sacrosanct oil resources of Saudi Arabia are better protected from the financial manipulations of the royal family than other areas of the Saudi economy. While oil shortages lasted, only the highest ranking members of the family ever had access to oil deals, and then only those involving a small percentage of total production. During the boom, there were too many other less politically sensitive ways for people of privilege to make money. Besides land, joint ventures, and government contracts, there was income from capital invested abroad and an inside track on currency manipulations from the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency, which controlled the value of the Saudi Riyal.

This widespread corruption in the royal family generated little hostility directly toward the family during Khalid's reign. Censorship re moved press scrutiny. There was a certain acceptance of corruption in the royal family as long as everyone else got a fair share of the pie. Furthermore, within the values of the culture, most people, from the poorest Bedouin to the richest merchant, consider anyone who does not use his position to enrich himself and his relatives as a fool. But most of all, educated Saudis blamed corruption on the influences of the West that arrived with the oil boom. Abdul Aziz had made no secret of distributing money as a way of maintaining loyalty among the princes and potential rivals. But the amounts of money involved were generally small. Saudis like to believe that big payoffs were not part of the scheme until the arrival of droves of Westerners hustling to capitalize on Saudi Arabia's riches. As one Saudi economist told a Western journalist, "If there's a corruption problem in Saudi Arabia, it's because you taught us how." *

* Petromin as originally created was in charge of the development of petroleum and minerals. Its role has now been reduced to the regulation and distribution of oil for domestic consumption.

Access to large sums of money is a major source of competition between factions of the royal family. Other threats to family solidarity arise from conflicting values, the pace of modernization, rivalries between branches of the family, and the pure ego satisfaction of being considered important. The House of Saud always has two faces: conflict and unity. Constantly beset by varying degrees of infighting, the al-Sauds have twice fallen from family infighting (1865-66 and 1881). But the present dynasty has lasted in an unbroken line through the deposition of one king, the assassination of another, the natural deaths of two, and the orderly succession of the fifth - an admirable record for politically turbulent Arabia. Although rivalries exist over power and policy, the family motto could be "In unity there is strength." Although I have heard women in the family snarl at the mention of some prince's name, there is a general recognition within the family of the interests of all and an accommodation of all.

Perhaps how the family operates can be demonstrated by their fond ness for horse racing, the family's favorite sport. During the winter months of January and February, the princes gather on Monday after noon following the third prayer call to pit their European- and North American-bred horses against each other at the Equestrian Club in the Malaaz district of Riyadh. From time to time, I was allowed to attend. Over several years, as the upper class became more comfortable with Westerners, my place moved from the lower side bleachers to a seat directly behind the royal box. From there I watched the descendants of Abdul Aziz sip tea and calmly watch each other's horses. There was no excitement, no cheering, for there was really no contest. The winner of the major races is decided on a rotating basis.

One afternoon a son of Prince Abdullah arrived just prior to the last race. With him were his two young daughters, carefully coiffeured, wearing matching silk dresses that brushed the tops of their patent leather shoes. Predictably, his horse won. Holding his daughters' hands, the prince moved to the track and proudly lifted the trophy above his head while photographers snapped his picture. That evening on television, I saw a rerun of the race. When the horses rounded the last turn, the jockeys reined in their horses, allowing the horse of the victorious prince to thunder across the finish line. Next week, it would be someone else's turn to win.

* David Ignatiua, "Royal Payoffs," Wall Street Journal, May I, 1981, p.23.

Yet the hostilities between the competing power groups within the family have been a poorly kept secret. Every time Khalid was felled by another bout of poor health, the question of the succession rattled through the kingdom. Like the urban-rural split of the population, the royal family splits between the progressives and the traditionalists. During Khalid's reign, the progressives, often viewed as overly Westernized, were led by Crown Prince Fahd. The traditionalists were led by Abdullah. Khalid formed the bridge between the two. But the progressives were the major power bloc in the family because of the tenor of the times and their organized strength within the family itself. Fahd is a Sudairi as well as an al-Saud, giving him an added power base in one of Saudi Arabia's most powerful families. The crafty Abdul Aziz married a Sudairi in appreciation of this political fact and produced seven sons by her. By 1980 the Sudairi brothers controlled the minis tries of Defense and the Interior, the governorship of Riyadh, and the deputy governorship of Mecca, and Fahd reigned as crown prince.

Abdullah, commander of the National Guard and second deputy premier, represented the conservative, tribal interests in the kingdom. His Bedouin inclinations and multiple wives were a severe embarrassment to the progressive elements of the family, who craved the respect of foreign leaders and the international press. Abdullah expounded the rhetoric of a strong nationalist, a stance at odds with the pro-American policy of Fahd and his brothers. Among the Saudi public, Abdullah's pronounced stutter was considered a severe handicap in speaking to his subjects, who regard the poetic use of the language as the mark of a true sheikh. There was intense speculation about whether or not Abdullah would be chosen crown prince on the death of Khalid and even more doubt that he would ever become king.

It was during the late 1970's that the infamous 'Sudairi Seven" were suspected of plotting to set up their own line of monarchs. When Khalid died, so the scenario went, Abdullah, a half brother and the next oldest son of Abdul Aziz after Fahd, would be dealt out and the title of crown prince would go to Sultan, minister of Defense and Aviation.

Watching the various elements in the royal family jockey for power was a favorite spectator sport in Riyadh. For me, it was part of my job as journalist. The obstacles to political reporting in Saudi Arabia rank with those in the Soviet Union. In the murky, devious realm of royal politics, all decisions are made behind closed doors. Since secrecy is a way of life, there are no leaks and nuances are the only way to judge who is on top. Among the methods I used were to keep count of how many times Fahd's picture as opposed to Abdullah's appeared on the front page of the Arab News. As I might have viewed events at the Kremlin, I watched who was sent on foreign missions, who was chosen to appear at ceremonial functions, who was absent or who appeared at public functions of groups outside any person's constituency. I kept track of who was out of the country when important decisions were announced or who was absenting himself from the kingdom for a long vacation. I had one distinct advantage over other reporters: I had access to certain aspects of the royal family's health care. So Byzantine is the court of the al-Sauds that the pecking order, who was up and who was down, was often reflected in whether the mother of a new royal baby was put in a room, a suite, or given an entire floor. Or I noted how many guards were assigned to each royal patient, how many cars were in the entourage when the patient arrived at the hospital, who commanded the most nurses, who received the most flowers. When King Khalid was in the hospital after an overdose of bromides almost killed him, I watched to see which princes and ministers were admitted to see him, how often they came, and how long they stayed.

During Khalid's reign, Abdullah's picture was largely absent from the newspaper. He made almost all his public appearances with the National Guard. His palace was southwest of the city, on the road to al-Kharj, not clustered with those of his brothers. His wives came to the hospital, had their babies, and went home. And the only time I saw him as a patient, he was walking bare headed toward an examining room in one of those humiliating hospital gowns that stopped short of his knobby knees. Only one security guard preceded him, and the director of the hospital, marching behind, bore his folded clothes.

Fahd and Abdullah as individuals were not as important in the political alignment as the power bases they represented. The House of Saud reflects the same conflict that divides Saudi society itself: the promise of progress and the pull of tradition. If both Fahd and Abdullah were to die, the conflict between their supporting groups would remain.