Khalid bin Abdulaziz
Khalid bin Abdulaziz did not want to be king and had the Grand Mosque seized by armed men in his fourth year. He was made crown prince after Faisal took the throne, and by every account he asked not to be. He was in poor health, had an interest in falconry and the desert rather than administration, and left most of the government to his half-brother Fahd. He became king in March 1975 when Faisal was shot at close range by a nephew during a public audience. His seven years were the peak of the oil money. Revenue had quadrupled after 1973 and the kingdom spent it on ports, roads, desalination plants and two industrial cities built from nothing at Jubail and Yanbu. Foreign workers arrived in millions. 1979 broke the confidence of it. In January the Shah fell in Iran, giving the region a revolutionary Shia republic across the Gulf. In November several hundred armed men seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca, declared one of their number the Mahdi, and held the holiest site in Islam for two weeks. It was retaken with the help of French advisers, and the survivors were beheaded in public. Weeks later the Soviet army entered Afghanistan. The answer to all three was religious. The state gave the clerical establishment more authority over public life rather than less, funded religious education abroad on a large scale, and began paying for the Afghan resistance alongside the United States and Pakistan. Khalid also founded the Gulf Cooperation Council in 1981. He died of a heart attack in 1982, and the consequences of his fourth year outlasted him by decades.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1982 CE
- Nationality: Saudi
- Roles: head_of_state, royalty
