ABSTRACT
The Saudi kingdom is a historical alliance which has lighted on a crock ofgold. In the eighteenth century the Saudi clan and the puritan sect of the Wahabis formed an alliance which was so successful that it got possession, early in the nineteenth century, of the holy places of Mecca and Medina and pushed its tentacles as far afield as the areas now called Syria and Iraq. Success was temporary, for with the help of Egyptian arms the Ottoman sultan threw the Saudis back into the desert whence they had erupted and for the rest of the century they had to struggle with neighbouring clans to stay alive. They barely did, but fortune returned to them with the young Abdul Aziz ibn Saud (c. 1880-1953), whose sword created a new realm, called from 1932 the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The crown of this kingdom belongs to the family of Saud, all the sons of a deceased monarch having claims over grandsons. Abdul Aziz was succeeded by four sons: Saud (1953-64), Feisal (1964-75), Khaled (1975-82) and Fahd; and in 1995 there were in existence some 30 or more princes of this generation and perhaps 6,000 adult princes related to Abdul Aziz in lesser degrees. Territorially, the kingdom was nearly coextensive with the Arabian peninsula, bounded by the strategic waterways of the Persian Gulf and Red Sea; but to the east and south a number of principalities and republics impaired the tidier pattern which seemed to have been designed by nature but was not yet accomplished by Saudi man. The departure of the British in 1971 from the Gulf and Aden removed one great power from the area without substituting another.
