Word: abdullah
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...year reign, Emir Abdullah as Salem as Sabah transformed his Connecticut-sized sheikdom of Kuwait from a poverty-plagued sand pile at the head of the Persian Gulf into the world's most prosperous Arab state. With a national income of $30,000 a year per native family, his 468,000 people became the wealthiest on earth. The rea son: beneath the waterless desert lies one quarter of the world's oil. Though that fortune was all his own by dynastic right, Sheik Abdullah squandered none of it on sybaritic pleasures, used his billions in royalties to drag...
Tears on the Air. A frugal patriarch who kept only one wife and one Cadillac, Sheik Abdullah became a sugar daddy to other Arab nations by financing their projects with giant loans ($470 million last year). So it was that when he died at 70 last week from congestive heart failure, that much of the Arab world joined in Kuwait's mourning...
Such veneration was shrewdly earned. Having negotiated Kuwait's independence from Britain in 1961, Abdullah (with British help), resisted Iraqi threats to occupy his realm, then turned enmity to friendship with a loan. He created a Parliament to share his power and refused to veto its actions even when he disapproved of them. With $700 million a year in oil income, Kuwait became one of the world's major financial powers; its millions on deposit in London are a principal prop for the hard-pressed British pound. While his people enjoyed free education, medical care and telephone service...
Slender Successor. As Abdullah wished, the Council of Ministers quickly proclaimed his brother, Premier Sabah as Salem as Sabah, 51, as Kuwait's new Emir. Like his brother, Sabah is a kind and conservative aristocrat, and a devoutly religious nondrinker. The resemblance ends there. Abdullah was tall and portly, and had a commanding, fatherly presence. Sabah is short (5 ft. 5 in.), slender, and a good deal less commanding. "Sabah is quietly weak." said one Kuwaiti official, "while Abdullah was quietly strong...
Died. Emir Abdullah as Salem as Sabah, 70, progress-minded ruler of oil-rich Kuwait; of congestive heart failure; in Kuwait (see THE WORLD...