Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Dies
Leader Promoted Stability in Face of Democratic and Islamist Movements That Have Roiled Arab World
RIYADH— King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, who insulated Saudi Arabia from the Islamist and democratic forces roiling the Middle East in the name of stability, died at about age 90, according to a royal court statement early Friday morning.
Abdullah’s half-brother, Crown Prince Salman who is 79 years old, was declared king and Prince Muqrin 69, became crown prince, according to the statement, which was read on state television.
Born before his father founded the modern Saudi state in 1932, Abdullah focused his final years on internal and external security threats to a nation he had seen grow into an oil giant and center of political and religious power in the region
In one of his final statements, an address before the nation’s consultative Shoura Council read by his half-brother and heir to the throne earlier this month, Abdullah emphasized that his country was “blessed with security and stability” in the heart of a volatile region.
Abdullah’s half-brother Salman, shown in November at a G-20 meeting in Australia, has been declared king.
For Abdullah, who is widely believed to have run Saudi Arabia for the decade before his accession to the throne in 2005 following the death of his stroke-disabled brother King Fahd, stability was the paramount virtue. He abhorred the revolutions that brought religious fundamentalists to power in Iran in 1979 and then unseated longtime fellow rulers in Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia three decades later.
“The development we are working at must be gradual,” the king said in February 2013 at the swearing-in of new members of his Shoura Council, the closest semblance to a parliament in Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy. On the king’s order, the council for the first time added women—30 of them. Like their male counterparts on the council, however, their powers remain purely advisory.
For the House of Saud, Abdullah’s death brought to the fore the politically delicate issue of succession. Saudi law leaves the sitting monarch wide discretion in appointing his successor, stipulating only that the throne passes to the “most upright” of the sons and grandsons of the kingdom’s founder, King Abdulaziz al Saud.
The next in line to the throne is the Saudi state founder’s youngest surviving son, Muqrin bin Abdulaziz. His appointment as deputy crown prince last year by Abdullah, Salman and other senior members of the royal family made clear that none of Abdulaziz’s grandsons was deemed strong enough to ensure a unified and orderly transition of power.
While Saudis will often say in the privacy of their homes that infighting among Abdulaziz’s grandsons and their families is a greater threat to Saudi Arabia’s existing order than popular revolution, the ruling family’s emphasis on order and obedience lowers the likelihood of any power struggle that spills over into civil unrest, political analysts said. This emphasis on continuity also means shifts in the government’s domestic and foreign policies are expected to be slight.
The U.S. had an often fraught relationship with Abdullah in recent years, according to American and Arab officials. The late Saudi monarch was incensed by President Barack Obama ’s failure to follow through on his threats in 2013 to launch military strikes on the Syrian regime for its alleged use of chemical weapons. And Riyadh didn’t believe the White House showed strong enough support for Middle East allies, particularly in Egypt, following the eruption of Arab Spring revolts in 2010.
Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud speaks at his private residence in Jeddah in June 2014. ENLARGE
Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud speaks at his private residence in Jeddah in June 2014. PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/PRESS POOL
Secret talks between the U.S. and Iran over its nuclear program also were viewed in Riyadh as a sign of a weakening American-Saudi alliance and evidence that the White House was willing to work behind Abdullah’s back, according to Saudi officials.
U.S. officials said they’ll seek to quickly work with Saudi Arabia’s new rulers to stanch the crises in the region, ranging from Yemen’s civil war to the Islamic State insurgency in Iraq and Syria. American officials have voiced concerns over whether the new monarch will be able to consolidate his power fast enough to respond to these regional threats.
Abdullah saw the future of Saudi Arabia and America as linked, and declared himself a loyal ally of the U.S. As he sought to buttress the kingdom’s status as the standard-bearer of both the world’s Sunni Muslims and the region’s Sunni monarchies, he shared Washington’s reservations over the regional ambitions of Shiite Muslim Iran.
Together with Washington, his government fought al Qaeda and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden , who was as determined to depose the House of Saud as he was to punish America for deploying “infidel” troops on Saudi soil. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, Saudi security forces all but eradicated the kingdom’s al Qaeda branch. Saudis have helped foil at least two new plots to bomb American airliners since 2010, according to U.S. and Saudi officials.
In its defense of Sunni interests against what it viewed as Iranian and Shiite encroachment, Saudi Arabia led a Gulf military force into Bahrain in March 2011 to bolster the Sunni royal family there amid protests, some violent, by the island’s Shiite majority. One reason for the kingdom’s supply of arms and money to antigovernment rebels in Syria was Syrian President Bashar al-Assad ’s ties to Iran and to Hezbollah, the Tehran-allied Lebanese Shiite military and political movement.
As he sought to buttress Saudi Arabia’s status as the standard-bearer of both the world’s Sunni Muslims and the region’s Sunni monarchies, the king shared Washington’s reservations over the regional ambitions of Shiite Muslim Iran.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Abdullah talk before a meeting at the king's desert encampment in Rawdat al-Khuraim on Jan. 5, 2014. ENLARGE
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Abdullah talk before a meeting at the king's desert encampment in Rawdat al-Khuraim on Jan. 5, 2014. PHOTO: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/PRESS POOL
His antipathy for Iran and Shiism weren’t Abdullah’s only political preoccupations. Under his rule, Saudi Arabia also opposed political reform movements in the Middle East, whether armed or unarmed, Shiite or Sunni, Islamist or secular.
The king warned in particular of what he saw as the threat from Islamist movements. “There are no half-solutions, and we are not going to kill this evil unless we exert strenuous efforts,” he said in 2013.
While the clamor for change could be muffled or ignored by some of the region’s state-run media outlets, at home it couldn’t be shut out completely, due to the popularity of social media especially among tech-savvy Saudi youth.
“If you are fine, we are fine,” was the oft-repeated, benevolent maxim attributed to Abdullah toward his people. As political upheaval spread through the region after 2011, Saudi YouTube videographers turned the phrase against the government, in unusual public criticism of the regime.
“Are you fine?” the filmmakers asked, knocking on the doors of crumbling tenements in Riyadh, revealing little-discussed poverty in the world’s top oil exporter. The government detained the filmmakers. It didn’t charge them, and all were released.
Saudi officials often depict the kingdom as a steward of the world economy and a leader of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) because it maintains the production capacity to pump extra oil when needed to calm a volatile market, thanks to its large reserves.
As oil prices steeply declined in the last few months of 2014, the kingdom rejected calls to cut output, a decision that brought prices even further down and put pressure on its oil-dependent budget. Saudi officials justified that decision as a move to protect the nation’s share of the world’s energy market.
In response to the political ferment that still convulses the region, Abdullah increased social welfare spending and pledged hundreds of billions of dollars for the construction of universities, hospitals and other capital projects.
To address housing needs among the kingdom’s growing population, he instituted a mortgage system in 2012. A year later, in a bid to integrate Saudi Arabia more deeply into the global economy, he changed the Saudi weekend from Thursday and Friday to Friday and Saturday, despite objections from religious conservatives that the altered workweek more closely resembled the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths.
Yet having embarked on a massive spending program, the government’s finances are today on an unsustainable path. Some 46.9% of Saudi Arabia’s 27.3 million people are under the age of 24, among whom expectations for a well-paying public-sector job and generous government entitlements remain high, consuming an ever larger amount of the nation’s oil wealth.
In recent years, the government has undertaken to reduce the size of the foreign work force that the country in its early years depended upon for its development. Immigrants, however, still make up more than 30% of the population, and Abdullah leaves behind a country still heavily reliant on cheap foreign labor to perform jobs most young Saudis, even unemployed ones, don’t want.
To his supporters, Abdullah was a benign and at times surprisingly progressive monarch. In a kingdom governed by one of the world’s most stringent interpretations of Sunni Islam, moderates among his supporters saw him as a safeguard against some of the harshest demands of the Saudi religious establishment. With the country’s Shiites, whom most Sunnis regard as infidels, he started a formal dialogue.
Abdullah’s liberal critics maintained that his reputation as a reformer was overstated. They complained his government used religious conservatives as an excuse for refraining from any push for greater modernization and more political freedom. They cite his toughening of legal sanctions against those who criticize the government and its clerical loyalists and the jailing of dozens of political activists, especially after the Arab Spring uprisings in other countries.
During Abdullah’s reign, Saudi women—legally required to have male guardians throughout their lives—saw some easing of enforcement of the controls imposed on them but little broadening of their rights. While Abdullah himself said publicly he saw no harm in women driving, his government ignored women’s petitions and protests demanding they be allowed to drive.
Abdullah’s own existence derived from a tribal tradition for securing peace after conflict. His mother, Fahda, was a member of the al-Rashidi, for decades the most powerful tribe opposing Abdulaziz al Saud in his drive to conquer most of the Arabian Peninsula. When Abdulaziz finally defeated the Rashidi in 1921 on his way to the establishment of the kingdom 11 years later, he married Fahda. Abdullah’s birth year was most commonly given as 1924, though the precise date of his birth isn’t recorded.
When Abdullah was born, the country’s literacy rate was below 5%; now, it is about 85%. Mud walls surrounded the central city of Riyadh, and gates to the city were locked at night. Older Saudis recall easier days when they would meet Abdullah and his brothers in the streets, and can pinpoint the moment in their youths when they first saw a truck in the kingdom, or heard a radio.
Throughout his reign, Abdullah wore a coal-black mustache and spade-shaped beard, dyed to give a hint of vigor at odds with a posture deeply bowed by back ailments.
More than many of his brothers, Abdullah appeared genuinely popular among Saudis. In family homes and in cafes, many ordinary Saudis spoke of him as more caring for the general welfare and less covetous of the kingdom’s wealth than his brothers.
“After Abdullah, there’s no one,” a Saudi Bedouin poet, traditionally Arabia’s truth-tellers and recorders of history, said privately in summer 2012, with a dismissive flip of the hand.
FIT FOR A KING
Abdullah’s Rise to Power
About 1924 Abdullah is born.
Jan. 1, 1996King Fahd cedes power to half-brother Abdullah.
Oct. 28, 2001 Abdullah warns the U.S. that its failure to end Israeli-Palestinian violence could prompt the kingdom to reconsider its ties with the U.S.
Feb. 27, 2002 Abdullah pushes an idea for a broad Arab-Israeli peace process.
December 2002 Abdullah moves to rein in lavish royal weddings.
Aug. 1, 2005 King Fahd dies. Abdullah becomes king soon after.
May 16, 2008Abdullah rebuffs U.S. request for higher oil production.
July 6, 2008Oil markets deal a blow to Saudi Arabia’s efforts to calm prices.
2010-2011 Abdullah sends troops into Bahrain and Yemen to help support allies.
Dec. 25, 2014Saudis unveil a high-spending 2015 budget.
Jan. 23Abdullah dies.