Word: fahd
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. KING FAHD BIN ABDUL AZIZ AL SAUD, 84, monarch who kept Saudi Arabia stable during two decades of regional and domestic crises; after several strokes and diabetes left him largely incapacitated for the past decade; in Riyadh. Fahd's rule, which now passes to his half-brother Crown Prince Abdullah, was marked by an effort to balance his country's traditionalist religious faith with the imperative to build a modern state. A fan of the U.S., he transformed the once primitive desert kingdom into a gleaming bastion of skyscrapers and expressways and oversaw a massive expansion of Islam...
...terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, orchestrated by Saudi native Osama bin Laden and carried out by 15 Saudi militants, ensured that Fahd would go down in history as the Saudi ruler who turned a blind eye to growing Islamic extremism. To protect the regime from spreading Islamic revolution following Ayatullah Khomeini's overthrow of the Shah of Iran, Fahd gave the Kingdom's ultra conservative Islamic establishment the green light to promote an ever rigid Wahhabi form of Islam so long as it continued to recognize the legitimacy of the House of Saud as Saudi Arabia's political leadership...
...year era ended in Saudi Arabia Monday when King Fahd bin Abdulaziz al Saud succumbed to his numerous ailments and died in a Riyadh hospital at the age of 84. Fahd effectively took the reins of power in 1975, serving as the de facto ruler under his brother King Khalid and then becoming King himself upon Khalid's death in 1982. Apart from Ibn Saud, the family patriarch who founded the country after conquering Arabian tribes, King Fahd has left a mark on the country-for better or worse-that no other ruler has rivaled...
...Fahd hoped to be remembered as the great modernizer who was also a faithful servant of Islam; a pro-American leader who used the Kingdom's vast oil wealth to build schools, hospitals, roads and airports as well as to commission a vast reconstruction of Islam's holiest mosques in the Saudi cities of Mecca and Medina. But many Saudis will also recall the Fahd era for the profligate lifestyle of many senior members of the royal family-and for the regime that ultimately needed the U.S. to save it from its neighbors, such as Iraq...
...Fahd leaves grave challenges behind for his successor, King Abdullah, 81, though as royal advisors are anxious to point out, Abdullah has been the Kingdom's ruler in all but name since Fahd began his decade-long health decline with a stroke in 1995. Fears of a messy succession struggle subsided when immediately after announcing Fahd's death following a bout with pneumonia Monday morning, Saudi television also declared that Abdullah would become King and that he had named Prince Sultan, 77, the powerful head of the Saudi armed forces, who recently recovered from colon cancer, as his crown prince...