Abdullah bin Abdulaziz
Abdullah bin Abdulaziz ran Saudi Arabia for twenty years and was king for ten of them. He commanded the National Guard, the tribal force that balances the regular army, from 1962 until his death - fifty-three years in one post. He was crown prince from 1982 and the effective ruler from Fahd's stroke in 1995, so his reign was already a decade old when it formally began in 2005. He was the most reform-minded ruler the country had had, which says as much about the country as about him. He put women on the appointed consultative council and gave them the municipal vote from 2015, opened a mixed-sex science university at Thuwal that the religious police were barred from, sent tens of thousands of students abroad on state scholarships, and allowed a national dialogue that included Shia clerics. He also presided over a state that executed people for sorcery and flogged a blogger for a website. His foreign policy is the answer to the two gap years. In 2002 he put forward the Arab Peace Initiative, offering Israel recognition by every Arab state in exchange for the 1967 borders. In 2011 he sent troops across the causeway to help the Bahraini monarchy put down its protests, gave the deposed Tunisian president refuge, and financed the Syrian opposition against Assad. In 2014 he joined the American-led coalition against the Islamic State and Saudi aircraft flew strikes over Syria, against a movement whose theology came partly from Saudi schools. He died in January 2015 with the Yemeni government collapsing and oil below fifty dollars.
- Lived: 1924 CE – 2015 CE
- Nationality: Saudi
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
