Abdulaziz Ibn Saud

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud conquered most of the Arabian peninsula with a few thousand men and founded the state that carries his family's name. He was born in Riyadh and grew up in exile in Kuwait after the Rashidis destroyed the second Saudi emirate, and in 1902, at about twenty-six, he retook Riyadh with a party of some forty men in a night attack on the governor's fortress. The following thirty years were spent taking the rest: al-Hasa from the Ottomans in 1913, Hail and the Rashidis in 1921, the Hijaz and the holy cities from Sharif Hussein in 1925. His instrument was the Ikhwan, Bedouin settled into agricultural colonies and taught a rigorous Wahhabi doctrine, who fought with a conviction ordinary tribal levies did not have. They then became his problem. When he stopped at the borders the British had drawn with Iraq and Transjordan, and accepted telephones, cars and infidel treaties, the Ikhwan judged him to have abandoned the cause and raided across the frontiers anyway. He destroyed them at Sabilla in March 1929, using machine guns and cavalry against the men who had won him his kingdom, which settled permanently that the state commanded the religious movement and not the other way round. The kingdom was proclaimed in 1932. Oil was found in commercial quantities in 1938 and he met Roosevelt aboard a cruiser in the Great Bitter Lake in 1945, the meeting that began the American relationship. He had dozens of sons, and every Saudi king since has been one of them.

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