All right. I want you to close your eyes for
a second. Just for a second. Picture the absolute
dead of night. Total darkness. It's January 15th,
1902. We are deep, deep in the heart of the Arabian
Peninsula. And the silence is just heavy. It's
that suffocating cold silence you only get in
the desert right before dawn. And we are standing
outside the walls of Riyadh. Now, you need to
forget everything you think you know about Riyadh
today. Forget the skyscrapers, the superhighways,
all of it. Oh, yeah. This is not that Riyadh.
This Riyadh is a fortress. It is a mud brick
citadel ringed by these high imposing walls.
And it is locked down tight for the night. Exactly.
And crouching in the shadows, probably shivering
because, you know, desert nights are brutally
cold, is this small group of men. 40 of them.
That's it. Just 40. It's nothing. It's a raiding
party. And leading them is this young guy. He's
tall, broad -shouldered. He's only in his 20s.
His name is Abdulaziz bin Abdulrahman Al Saud.
But history is going to know him as Ibn Saud.
And he is staring up at those walls. Staring
up at those walls, knowing that if he makes a
single wrong move, if a dog barks, if a guard
just happens to glance down at the wrong moment,
he's dead. And not just him. His entire family's
dream, their entire future, it dies right there
with him. It really is an unbelievable setup.
Yeah. It feels like it's pulled from a movie
script. By any conventional military logic, what
they're attempting is, well, it's just pure insanity.
It's a suicide mission. Totally. They aren't
an army. Like you said, they're a raiding party.
Right. And Ibn Saud, at this point, he's in exile.
He has no kingdom, no treasury. He has barely
any followers to his name. He is betting absolutely
everything on this one single night. And the
plan itself, I mean, it's not exactly a sophisticated
military operation. It feels like something a
screenwriter would come up with because it's
so audacious. They didn't have siege engines.
They didn't have cannons. They had palm trees.
That's right. It's almost comical if it wasn't
so deadly serious. They had cut down palm trunks
from a nearby oasis to use as like crude ladders.
So leaning them against the wall. just tilting
them up against these sheer clay walls in the
pitch black. And just imagine the physical tension
of that. You're climbing a shaky, splintery palm
trunk, hand over hand, trying not to let your
sword scrape against the wall and make a sound.
A sound that would get you all killed. Right.
Knowing that the Rashidi governor, a man named
Adjalan, is asleep inside that fortress just
a few hundred yards away. So they get over the
wall, but they don't attack right away. This
is the part that just... It stresses me out just
reading about it. They find a house near the
governor's fortress. They infiltrate it, and
they just wait. For hours. They effectively take
the family hostage, but quietly. They sit there
in the dark, listening to the sounds of the city
starting to wake up. The smell of coffee brewing.
They're just waiting for their moment. Because
they knew his routine. They knew Aslan's routine
perfectly. He would leave the fortress at dawn
to go and inspect his horses. He was a man of
habit, and they were counting on that. And sure
enough, just as the sun cracks the horizon, the
fortress gates creak open. Ajalon steps out and
all hell breaks loose. Absolute, total chaos.
Ibn Saud and his men, his cousins, they just
burst out of the house. They're shouting the
clash of swords. It's not a battle. It's a brawl.
It's brutal close quarters fighting in the dust.
And his cousin. Right. Abdullah bin Jaloui. Yes.
He chases the governor back towards the fortress
gate as Ajlan tries to retreat, and he cuts him
down right there in the entryway. Just like that.
The governor is dead. The garrison inside loses
its nerve. They surrender. The city falls. And
with that one desperate bloody morning, everything
changes. That is the spark. That raid is the
singular moment that ignites the flame of what
becomes the third Saudi state. It's the dramatic
return of the Al Saud family from the political
wilderness. It's an incredible story. But what's
really fascinating to me, and I think to you
as well, isn't just the action movie part of
it. It's what happens next. Exactly. Because
conquering a city with 40 men is one thing. It's
legendary stuff. But building a nation state
where there wasn't one before, from scratch,
that is an entirely different skill set. And
that is exactly the mission for this deep dive.
We're going to try and understand how this guy,
this tribal raider with 40 men and a palm tree
for a ladder, transforms into the monarch sitting
on the deck of a U .S. warship meeting with President
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It's an incredible arc.
How does he go from a refugee in Kuwait to the
founder of a global energy superpower? It's a
journey from really the medieval world to the
modern world, all within a single lifetime. And
the central theme, the thing you have to keep
in your head to understand him, is balance. Balance
between what? Ibn Saud was a master of balancing
ancient tribal traditions, the old ways of raiding
in honor with ruthless modern 20th century geopolitics.
He knew when to use the sword, but crucially,
he also knew when to put it away and sign a contract.
Well, let's rewind a bit from that raid, because
to really get why it was such a monumental gamble,
we have to understand just how low the Al Saud
family had fallen. You said they were exiles.
How did they lose? Who's Riyadh to begin with?
The Al Saud family wasn't new to this game. Not
at all. They had been a dominant power in Central
Arabia for over 130 years. There was a first
Saudi state, then a second Saudi state. But politics
in Arabia at that time was incredibly volatile.
Think of it like a constant series of shifting
alliances. A tough neighborhood. The toughest.
And by the time Ibn Saud is a teenager, around
1891, the second state is completely collapsing.
Their chief rivals. the Rashidi dynasty who were
based in the north in Hale. And they had powerful
friends. They did. They were backed by the Ottoman
Empire. And this Ottoman -Rashidi alliance just
crushed the Al Saud. They effectively wiped them
off the map, politically speaking. So at 15 years
old, Ibn Saud isn't some prince living in a palace.
He is on the run. He is a refugee. And I really
want to emphasize what that exile looked like.
This wasn't a comfortable political asylum in
London or Paris. No five -star hotels. No. In
1891, the family flees Riyadh and goes straight
into the desert. They take refuge with the Almura,
a Bedouin tribe deep in the Rub al -Khali. The
empty quarter. The name alone tells you everything.
It's one of the harshest desert environments
on the entire planet. We're talking endless sand
dunes, unimaginable heat, almost no water. And
Ibn Saud spent his formative teenage years there,
living in a tent, moving with the camel herds,
eating dates and camel milk. So this is where
he learns to be tough. This period stripped away
any softness he might have had. It connected
him viscerally to the Bedouin way of life, to
their honor codes, their dialects, their poetry.
He learned their incredible resilience because
he had to. It was survival. And after a desert,
they move around a bit, right? Qatar, Bahrain,
and then they finally land in Kuwait. Yes. And
Kuwait is the next phase of his education. If
the desert was his boot camp, you could say Kuwait
was his. Yeah. Well, his grad school in statecraft.
How so? Because in Kuwait, the ruler was Sheikh
Mubarak al -Sabah. Also known as Mubarak the
Great. And he was a master politician, a real
operator. Ibn Saud spent countless hours just
sitting in Mubarak's Machiavelli's daily court
and just watching. Just absorbing it all. Absorbing
everything. He watched how Mubarak handled tribal
disputes, how he played the Ottomans against
the British, how he dealt with foreign merchants
and diplomats. It was a masterclass in pragmatism
and power politics. But I read that Ibn Saud's
father, Abdul Rahman, he hated this. He was this
very pious, very religious guy, and he did not
approve of Mubarak at all. That's a key tension
in Ibn Saud's life right there. You have his
father, Abdul Rahman, who represented the strict,
uncompromising Wahhabi faith. the religious conscience.
He saw Mubarak's court as worldly, maybe even
a bit immoral and corrupt. But Ibn Saud saw something
else. Ibn Saud saw the utility of it. He realized
that to rule effectively, you couldn't just pray
and be pious. You had to negotiate. You had to
make deals. You had to be pragmatic. He learned
you could be a devout man in your heart, but
a shrewd politician in the Majlis. So he's got
the toughness from the desert. He's got the political
savvy from Kuwait. But who actually lights the
fire under him? Who pushes him? to go back and
risk everything to take Riyadh. Because honestly,
staying in Kuwait seems a lot safer. This is
where we have to talk about one of the most important
and often overlooked figures in Saudi history,
his paternal aunt, Jawara bint Faisal. Tell me
about her, because in a lot of these histories,
women tend to be in the background, but she seems
to be front and center. She was a force of nature.
From all accounts, she was the keeper of the
family's honor. While some of the men were, you
know, resigned to their fate in exile, feeling
defeated, Jawara was the fire. She had this terrifying
amount of pride in the Al Saud lineage, and she
wouldn't let it die. So what was she telling
him? What was her message? She was essentially
challenging his manhood, his destiny. She would
sit with him and recount the glorious stories
of their ancestors of the first and second states.
She would say things like, are you going to be
content living on the charity of others? Or are
you going to reclaim what is rightfully yours?
Wow. She instilled this sense of inevitability
in him. She made him believe that it wasn't a
choice. It was his duty, his destiny. That's
incredibly powerful. It's like she was the architect
of his ambition. Absolutely. And it wasn't just
a youthful influence. Even after he became king,
he visited her almost every single day until
she died in 1930. She was his most trusted advisor,
his confidant. And while we're on the subject
of the powerful women who shaped him, we can't
forget... His sister, Nora. No, you can't. They
were incredibly close. She was just a year older
than him. And in a society where men's names
and lineage usually dominate everything, Ibn
Saud's personal battle cry, his public boast
when he was charging into combat, was Ana Aku
Nora. Which means... I am the brother of Nora.
That tells you everything you need to know about
the respect and love he had for her. Her name
was his source of pride. So, fueled by his aunt,
backed by his sister, armed with the lessons
of the desert and Kuwait, He takes Riyadh. We've
covered that incredible raid. But taking one
city doesn't make a kingdom. He's surrounded
by enemies. How does he actually expand from
there? It was a long, hard grind. That's the
only way to describe it. 1902 right up until
the 1920s. It's just constant low -level warfare,
a series of raids and counter raids. He's fighting
the Rashidis in the north. He's fighting Ottoman
proxies. He's trying to bring other tribes into
his fold. So it's a slow process. Very slow.
Yeah. And he ran into a fundamental problem with
his army. The traditional Bedouin tribal levy,
the way wars had been fought for centuries, it
just wasn't built for state building. Why not?
I mean, there are legendary fighters, right?
They were incredible individual fighters, fearless.
But they were unreliable as soldiers in a long
-term campaign. Their loyalty was to their sheik,
to their tribe. not to some abstract idea of
a state. So if things got boring. Or if it was
time to harvest the dates, they went home. If
they captured enough loot from a raid, they considered
the job done and they went home. You can't conquer
a continent with an army that clocks out whenever
they feel like it. So he needs a standing army,
a professional army. But he doesn't have the
money to pay mercenaries. Exactly. And this is
where we see Ibn Saud's real genius and also
where he creates his most dangerous weapon. Enter
the Ikhwan. The Brotherhood. The Brotherhood.
Around 1912, he starts this movement. And it's
so much more than just a military force. It's
not just about fighting. No. It was a massive
piece of social engineering. Ibn Saud realized
he needed to fundamentally break the old tribal
cycle of loyalty. So he established these agricultural
colonies called shahr, or settlements. And what
was the pitch? He went to the nomadic Bedouin
and said, stop wandering. This life of constant
movement is un -Islamic. Settle down here in
these villages. I will give you land. I will
give you wells. I will give you religious teachers.
Farm the land and dedicate your lives to the
pure, strict worship of God. Wait a minute. He
took nomads, people whose culture had been defined
by roaming for thousands of years, and told them
to become farmers. That sounds like an incredibly
hard sell. It was. It went against everything
they knew. But he offered them something more
powerful than tradition. salvation and a new
identity. A religious identity. Precisely. He
replaced their old identity. I am from the Anaza
tribe or I'm from the Muter tribe with a new
unifying identity. I'm an Ikhwan. I am a soldier
of God. He convinced them that loyalty to him
as their imam was a religious duty. And if they
died fighting for him, they were martyrs who
would go straight to paradise. That is... A terrifyingly
effective tool. You're taking guys who are already
some of the toughest fighters on Earth and you're
giving them a cause they are willing to die for,
no questions asked. It weaponized their faith.
The Ikhwan became his shock troops. They were
utterly fearless. They were fanatical. They would
charge machine guns armed only with swords, believing
they were invincible. They terrified every one
of their enemies. And with this new force, he's
finally able to push out of the central desert,
the Nej. Yes. And by 1924, he's ready for the
big move, the prize jewel, the conquest of the
Hejaz. Which is the western coastal region. We're
talking about Mecca, Medina, the port city of
Jeddah. This is the real turning point. Before
this, he's a powerful desert chieftain, maybe
a king of Central Arabia. But if he takes the
Hejaz, he becomes something else entirely. He
becomes the custodian of the holy cities. He
enters the global stage. And the Hejaz was ruled
by a different dynasty. It was ruled by the Hashemites,
led by Sharif Hussein bin Ali. And his family
had held power there for 700 years. They were
the traditional guardians of the holy places.
And the Ikhwan just rolled over them. Pretty
much. The Hashemite forces were no match for
the religious fervor of the Ikhwan. They captured
Mecca in 1924. Sharif Hussein abdicated and fled.
Suddenly, Ibn Saud is ruling two completely different
worlds. You've got the Nedged. rugged, tribal,
insular, fanatically religious. And now you've
got the Hejaz. Cosmopolitan, full of pilgrims
from all over the world, merchants, foreign diplomats,
a much more moderate version of Islam. That sounds
like a management nightmare. How do you possibly
govern those two very different places with the
same set of laws? You don't. And this shows his
pragmatism again. For years, he actually ran
them as two separate countries in a personal
union. He's the king of Hejaz and the sultan,
later king, of Nejd. A dual monarchy. So Saudi
Arabia didn't exist yet. Not yet. It wasn't until
September 23, 1932, that he formally merged the
two realms and declared the unified kingdom of
Saudi Arabia. But before he could even get to
that point, he had to face the terrible consequences
of his own creation. And in the Ikhwan. Yes.
This is the classic Frankenstein's monster moment
of his story. The Ikhwan were built for one thing.
Holy war. For jihad. And their worldview... Anyone
who wasn't a strict Wahhabi Muslim was an infidel,
a kafir, who deserved to be attacked and converted
or killed. Which was a very useful belief when
they were attacking Ibn Saud's enemies inside
Arabia. Exactly. But now the conquests are basically
over. Ibn Saud is trying to be a statesman. He's
signing treaties with the British. He's drawing
official borders with the new states of Iraq
and Transjordan. And the Ikhwan don't care about
borders. To them, a border on a map is a blasphemy.
They look across into Iraq and Jordan and say,
the people on the other side are Shia infidels.
God wants us to raid them. They don't care about
some line on a map drawn by a British diplomat.
So they start launching raids across these new
international borders into British protected
territories. They do. They raid into Iraq. They
massacre civilians. And the British are absolutely
furious. They have the Royal Air Force there.
They tell Ibn Saud, control your men or we will
bomb them back to the Stone Age. So Ibn Sa'd
is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Completely
stuck. He tries to reason with the Ikhwan leaders,
men like Faisal al -Dawash and Sultan bin Bajad.
He tries diplomacy, but they turn on him. They
call him a traitor. They accuse him of going
soft, of bowing to the Christian British infidels.
So it's leading to a civil war? It is the ultimate
test of his rule. He has to make a choice. Is
he a tribal raider leading a religious movement?
Or is he the head of a state? He has to choose
between the religious zealots who built his throne
and the stability and future of the state itself.
And he chooses the state. He chooses the state.
In 1929, at the Battle of Sibylla, he rides out
with his loyalists. And this time, he brings
modern weapons that the British had supplied
him. He brings machine guns. Against his own
brotherhood. Against the men who conquered the
kingdom for him. It was a slaughter. The Ikhwan
cavalry charged with their swords and rifles
just like they always had. And Ibn Saud's machine
gunners just mowed them down. It was brutal,
and it must have been incredibly personal. These
were men he had fought alongside for decades.
But it sent a message. It sent the clearest possible
message to the entire world. Saudi Arabia is
not a rogue religious movement anymore. It is
a country. It has borders, and it will respect
them. The days of endless jihad are over. That
really does feel like the moment the kingdom
became real. It wasn't just a personal conquest
anymore. It was a functioning government with
rule. Precisely. And that brings us right to
the geopolitical tightrope he had to walk. Because
you can't survive, let alone build a nation in
the Middle East in the early 20th century, without
dealing with the dominant power in the region,
the British Empire. The British seem to be everywhere
in this story, pulling the strings behind the
scenes. But... Ibn Saud seems to play them differently
than other local leaders did. He's never really
their puppet. No, he's far too clever for that.
He's always very transactional with them. You
can see it in the Treaty of Deren, which he signed
back in 1915. What was the deal there? It was
a classic protectorate agreement. He agrees to
make his lands a British protectorate, meaning
he won't deal with any other foreign power without
their consent. In exchange... They gave him a
subsidy of 5 ,000 pounds a month and, more importantly,
a shipment of modern rifles. 5 ,000 pounds a
month. That's a huge amount of money back then.
So he's essentially on the British payroll. He
is. But listen to how he justified it. He essentially
said, I'll take their gold and I'll take their
guns to fight my enemies, but I will never, ever
give them my soul or my land. He used the British
to help him finally defeat the Rashidis, who
were backed by Britain's enemy, the Ottomans.
But he always kept them at arm's length. He never
let them get too close. Never. He refused to
let them station troops in his capital. He refused
to let them run his administration like they
did in Egypt or Iraq. He took the money, but
he kept his sovereignty. And as soon as he becomes
strong enough, he renegotiates the entire deal.
Right. By 1927, he's conquered the Hejaz. He
controls Mecca and Medina. He's the most powerful
man in Arabia. He doesn't need their protection
anymore. So he signs the Treaty of Jeddah. And
in that treaty... Britain formally recognizes
his complete and total independence. No more
protectorate. He is a sovereign king on the world
stage. OK, fast forward to World War II. And
this is the part of the story that just blew
my mind when I was reading the notes. Saudi Arabia
is officially neutral. But there's this bizarre
story about a German diplomat. Fritz Kraube,
a fascinating character. He was the Nazi ambassador
to Iraq. When the British cracked down on a pro
-German government in Iraq in 1941, Graba had
to flee for his life. Where does he go? He runs
to Ibn Saud. And Ibn Saud gives him refuge. He
hides him. Wait a second. This is in the middle
of World War II. The British are his main allies.
They're fighting a life -or -death struggle against
Nazi Germany. And Ibn Saud is sheltering a Nazi
ambassador. That seems incredibly reckless. Why
would he poke the bear like that? It was a calculated
risk. It was his way of signaling to the British
and to the world, I am not your colonial subject.
I am the master in my own house. I make my own
decisions about who enters my tent. It showed
that streak of fierce independence. He was always,
always hedging his bets, making sure no single
foreign power ever thought they owned him. But
as the war comes to an end, it's clear the British
influence is fading. And a new player is entering
the chat. The United States. Yes, and this all
culminates in one of the most famous and consequential
meetings in modern history, February 14th, 1945,
aboard the USS Quincy. You really have to visualize
this scene. It's so improbable. You have an American
heavy cruiser, a symbol of modern military power,
anchored in the great bitter lake of the Suez
Canal. And on the deck, the American sailors
have set up a traditional Bedouin tent, complete
with Persian carpets and cushions, because the
king refused to sleep in a cramped cabin below
deck. And on one side, you have FDR. Franklin
Delano Roosevelt. He's visibly ailing at this
point, exhausted from the Yalta conference, just
months away from his own death, sitting in his
wheelchair, the leader of the free world. And
on the other, striding onto the deck, is Ibn
Saud. This towering, scarred desert warrior dressed
in his traditional robes. A man who built a kingdom
with a sword. It could not be more different.
A New York aristocrat who grew up with immense
privilege and a Bedouin king who grew up a refugee
in the desert. And yet they clicked. Instantly.
By all accounts, there was a real genuine chemistry
between them. They smoked together. Ibn Saud
was a heavy smoker, they joked. FDR, with his
famous charm, treated Ibn Saud not as a curiosity
but as an equal. And he gave him that famous
gift. He did. He gave Ibn Saud one of his spare
wheelchairs as a gift because the king had severe
arthritis and had trouble walking. And Ibn Saud,
in return, gave him a diamond -crusted sword.
Now contrast that meeting with his meeting with
Winston Churchill just a few days later. Oh,
the Churchill meeting was a complete disaster.
It was a clash of cultures. Churchill tried to
smoke a cigar and drink brandy in front of the
king, which was deeply offensive to his strict
Wahhabi values. Churchill lectured him about
British imperial interests. It was formal and
cold. Whereas FDR asked for his advice. Exactly.
FDR treated him like a wise elder statesman.
And that chemistry, that respect, it mattered
enormously. It fundamentally shifted the entire
center of gravity of the Middle East. Because
Ibn Saud made a choice? He made a strategic decision
right then and there. The future wasn't with
the old declining British Empire. It was with
the Americans. They were far away. They didn't
have a history of colonialism in the region.
And they just wanted to do business. And the
business, of course, was oil. We've danced around
the oil, but we need to set the context here.
Before oil, Saudi Arabia was poor. Not just,
you know, not rich, like truly deeply poor. Destitute
is the word. Their entire national economy was
based on three things. Dates, camel livestock,
and the fees from the annual Hajj pilgrimage
to Mecca. That was it. And if the pilgrims didn't
show up? The country starved. Which is exactly
what happened during the Great Depression and
World War II. The pilgrimage traffic dried up
and the state was literally bankrupt. So when
American geologists from Standard Oil of California,
what we now call Chevron, started digging around
in 1933, it was a massive lifeline. A desperate
one. And for years they found nothing. It looked
like a total bust. But they finally struck commercial
quantities of oil in 1938 at Damum Well No. 7.
And that discovery changed the DNA of the country
forever. It went from a subsistence economy to
a petrostate almost overnight. Almost. And by
1947, Ibn Saud had made it explicit. He told
an American diplomat that he preferred American
investment and loans over anyone else, over any
international agency. He saw the U .S. as a straightforward
business partner, not a colonial overlord. And
that partnership would define the next 80 years.
I want to pivot away from the maps and the oil
concessions for a minute and talk more about
the man himself. We keep calling him the Desert
King. But what was he actually like to be around?
Physically, as we said, he was overwhelming.
Over six feet tall, which was gigantic for that
time and place. He had this booming voice and
apparently an incredibly magnetic personality.
Very charming when he wanted to be. But his body
was a map of his own history. Completely. Covered
in scars from dozens of battles, bullet wounds,
sword slashes. And you mentioned his eye earlier.
Yeah, that he had poor sight in one eye. Yes.
Reports from the 1920s describe a white film
over one of his eyes. And the cause is just chilling.
It wasn't a battle wound. It was a poisoning
attempt, supposedly by one of his wives back
in 1924. He survived, obviously, but it left
its mark. A constant reminder that his enemies
weren't just on the battlefield. That brings
up his family life, which is, I mean, it's complex,
to put it mildly. That's one way to put it. The
numbers are staggering. He had 22 official consorts
over his lifetime and fathered at least 45 sons
who survived to adulthood. But we have to look
at this through the lens of tribal politics,
not modern romance. Every marriage was a treaty.
Every single one was the strategic alliance.
He married the daughter of the powerful Suderi
chief to lock down that clan's loyalty. He married
into the Shamari tribe his old enemies to neutralize
them. He literally knit the disparate tribes
of the kingdom together. through the bonds of
marriage. And the legacy of that strategy is
still running the country today. Literally every
single king of Saudi Arabia since his death,
Saud, Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah and the
current king. Salman, they are all his direct
sons. We are, as of today, still living in the
era of the children of Ibn Saud. But for all
this immense power and wealth that came later,
there are all these stories of his extreme personal
generosity. It's like he never forgot what it
felt like to be hungry in the desert. He really
didn't. In Riyadh, he established the Thulane
Guesthouse. It was basically a massive royal
soup kitchen that fed thousands of poor people
every single day. Huge vats of rice, meat and
porridge. Anyone who was hungry could go there
and eat. And there's that famous story about
his cloak. It's a great anecdote. He was out
in the desert and saw an old man shivering in
rags. Without a second thought, Ibn Saud took
off his own expensive cloak, draped it over the
man, and gave him a handful of gold coins from
his purse. He had a quote about the oil wealth,
didn't he? Something about sharing it. He did.
He said, I haven't obtained all this wealth by
myself. God has bestowed it upon me, and all
of you have a share in it. At least initially,
he really did view the oil money as God's provision
to feed and care for his people. But we have
to talk about the contradictions. because he
was a man of massive, glaring contradictions.
We can't ignore the darker side of his rule.
For example, he's meeting with FDR, the leader
of the free world, but he travels to that meeting
with enslaved people in his entourage. That is
the starkest and most difficult contradiction
for us to understand. Slavery was a deeply ingrained
part of the social fabric of Arabia at the time.
Ibn Saud regulated it in 1936, trying to improve
conditions and limit the trade, but he didn't
abolish it. Why not? He either couldn't because
it would have caused a massive social upheaval,
or he wouldn't because he was still a man of
his time and place. It wasn't formally abolished
until 1967 by his son King Faisal. It just shows
you that while he was a modernizer in some ways,
he was still deeply, deeply traditional in others.
And yet, speaking of modernizing, he pushed for
technology that his own advisors thought was
completely insane. The railway. The Daman to
Riyadh Railway. A true passion project for him.
His advisors called it an old man's folly. They
said, Your Majesty, why do we need a train across
the desert? It's a waste of money. But Ibn Saud
was stubborn. He saw the bigger picture. He knew
it would unite the kingdom. Right. It would move
goods. It would move troops. It would connect
the oil -rich coast to his capital in the heartland.
So he used the first oil royalties to pay for
it, cash down. He understood that a modern nation
needs infrastructure. You can't run a kingdom
on camelback forever. And he also had some surprisingly,
well, progressive views for his time and place
on women. He did. He famously told the British
explorer St. John Philby, it is permissible for
women to read. Now, to our modern ears, that
sounds like... the barest of bare minimums. Right.
But in the deeply conservative Nedged in the
1930s, that was a radical statement. He believed
in education for girls as well as boys, even
if the society around him was extremely resistant
to the idea. There's one more complex topic we
need to touch on, his view on Zionism and Jewish
people. The source material calls it complex,
but what does that actually mean on the ground?
It means he held two very different thoughts
at the same time. Politically and religiously,
he was fiercely and implacably anti -Zionist.
He viewed the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine
as an absolute catastrophe for the Arab and Muslim
world. He used very harsh, very strong religious
rhetoric calling the Zionists enemies of Islam.
But he made a distinction between Zionism as
a political movement and Jewish people in general.
It seems so. For example, during the Hebron massacre
in 1929, when Arab mobs killed Jews in Palestine,
he publicly condemned it. He said it violated
the principles of Islam. He had non -Zionist
Jewish friends and business associates he spoke
of highly. So his anger seems to have been very
specifically directed at the political project
of creating Israel, though he certainly used
the anti -Semitic language and tropes of his
time to express it. As we move into the 1950s,
the king is getting old, the oil is flowing,
the money is pouring in, but he seems more worried
than ever. He was exhausted. You have to remember,
this man had spent 50 years in near constant
warfare and political struggle. He'd built the
kingdom, but now he had to preserve it. And the
new oil wealth was bringing a host of new problems.
Corruption. Corruption, greed, his son spending
lavishly. He was worried that the money would
rock the soul of the nation, that it would destroy
those simple, tough desert values that he cherished.
And on top of all that, he was deeply worried
about succession. Deeply. His eldest and... probably
favorite son, Turkey, had died tragically back
in the flu pandemic of 1919. So his two most
senior remaining sons were Saad and Faisal. And
they were polar opposites. Saad was the older
one. Saad was the crown prince. He was charming,
personable, very popular. But he wasn't. He wasn't
very competent with money or governance. Faisal,
the next in line, was brilliant. He was sharp,
ascetic, a born diplomat and statesman. And Ibn
Saad knew Faisal was the more capable son, didn't
he? Oh, he knew. There's a famous quote attributed
to him. I only wish I had three Faisals. But
the tradition of primogeniture, of the eldest
son inheriting, was strong. He couldn't skip
over Saud to appoint Faisal without risking a
massive family feud, maybe even a civil war.
So he kept Saud as crown prince. And what were
his last words to them? His final advice to his
sons was simple. You are brothers. Unite. He
knew, he absolutely knew, that if they fought
amongst themselves, the kingdom he had spent
his entire life building would crumble into dust.
He died of a heart attack at his palace in Taif.
And here's the final poetic and telling detail
of his life. At the time of his death, he was
one of the richest men in the world. He controlled
a literal sea of oil. But in accordance with
his strict Wahhabi faith, which forbids the idolization
of the dead or building monuments, he was buried
in an unmarked grave. Just a simple mound of
dirt in the allowed cemetery in Riyadh. Right
next to his sister, Nora. No headstone, no mausoleum.
The founder of a kingdom buried like any other
man. Wow. OK, so let's zoom out. We've covered
a huge amount of ground here from that desperate
raid to the meeting on the USS Quincy. What is
the big takeaway? Why does Ibn Saud's story still
matter so much to someone listening today? I
think it matters because his story is the DNA
of the modern Middle East. Ibn Saud did something
that was thought to be impossible. He took a
region of disparate, warring tribes, people who
had no concept of a nation state. and he welded
them by force and by faith into a unified country.
He bridged centuries in a single lifetime. He
literally bridged the gap between the 12th century
and the 20th century. But, and this is the crucial
part, he did it by creating this fundamental
built -in tension. The tension between tradition
and modernity. Exactly. He built the state using
the most extreme, fervent religious zeal, the
Ikhwan. But he sustained and secured that state
using the most pragmatic modern tools, oil politics
and treaties with the West. He had to crush the
zealots when they threatened the state. But the
state itself is still founded on that unique
religious identity. So the tension we see in
the region today, this constant push and pull
between radical modernization and extreme religious
tradition, that's not new. That was baked in
from the very beginning by the founder himself.
It is the fundamental paradox of the Saudi state.
Given Saud, somehow managed to personally balance
on that tightrope for 50 years. His sons and
grandsons are still walking on that same tightrope
today. And that leads to a final thought for
you to chew on. Ibn Saud created a nation by
first unleashing and then taming religious fanaticism
for the sake of state stability. How does a nation
founded on such a contradiction navigate the
future? That tension he created is his most enduring
and perhaps most challenging legacy. The image
of that old lion sitting in his palace making
men for his nation. That's gonna stick with me.
A powerful legacy indeed.