King Fahd Leaves Behind Doubtful Saudi Future

The death of Saudi King Fahd marks the beginning of the end of the old way of doing things in Saudi Arabia. His successor, formerly Crown Prince Abdullah, is 81, and therefore, unlikely to last very many years on the throne. If he embarks on a huge reform program, the conservative opposition with the royal house as well as in Islam will merely have to wait him out. And if he does not, the pressure cooker will continue to heat up. Saudi Arabia is due for change, but not just yet.

When Abdul Aziz ibn Saud kicked out the Hashemites and founded Saudi Arabia, oil was not a big deal in the Arabian desert. Oil revenues in 1938, five years after oil was discovered in the kingdom, came to about £1,200,000 a year. Most of the funds in the royal treasury, which often was indistinguishable from the king’s wallet, came from custom duties and Hajj pilgrims. With the wealth oil brought, and with the fundamentalist slant of Islam in the region, the political landscape has changed radically but the ruling family has not.

One must remember that the fundamentalist Wahhabis’ suspicions of the modern world reaches into just about everything. The first king of Saudi Arabia had to delay the introduction of the telephone and radio until he could square it with largely uneducated clergy (they could recite the Koran and little else) – they originally condemned these inventions as “Satan hiding in boxes.” Only when he could convince them of their “potential use to Islam” did they relent. TV and movies also had that hoop to leap through, while the internet is still confusing to Wahhabism.

The late King Fahd was an important man before ascending the throne in 1982, and it took a stroke in 1995 to render him a mere figurehead. In all that time, he used the oil money to bribe the clergy to shut up and to make trouble elsewhere. One can argue that it was a cowardly device, but one must admit it prevented a revolution – the House of Saud is still in place.

The ascension of King Abdullah, as he will now be known, places a caretaker king in power at a time when the oil wealth remains, when Wahhabism is on the rise thanks to the spending the Fascislamists did with their extortion money, and when the US and others are embarrassed by having as an ally a nation that doesn’t let women drive, that produces terrorists that fly airplanes into buildings, and that doesn’t let its people vote beyond rigged local elections. This situation can’t last, and when the torch is passed to the next generation of Saudi princes, a conflagration may ensue. Just not yet.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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