Word: fahd
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...royal family has faced remarkably little challenge. In the early years, Abdul Aziz struggled to hold together a scattered and widely disparate population of tribes. But he and his successors -- sons Saud, Faisal, Khalid and now Fahd -- were greatly aided in their task by the lucky presence beneath their feet of the world's largest reservoir of oil. The revenues from black crude -- which reached a high of $113 billion in 1981 and this year are expected to top $60 billion -- have enabled the House of Saud to create a modern state almost overnight and, in the process...
...counterpart, Westernization. The House of Saud has clung tenaciously to Wahhabism, the puritanical strain of Sunni Islam that was the driving force of Abdul Aziz's victorious Ikhwan (brethren) movement. The royal family, as well as most Saudis, believe Wahhabi fervor unifies the kingdom's diverse tribes. Though King Fahd is known not to relish meeting his subjects, he devotes an entire day each week, Monday, to conferring with the ulama, the country's religious scholars...
...Fahd proposed creating a Consultative Assembly of appointed members. He even built an imposing marble-and-glass chamber for it. But then he waffled on establishing the assembly, and now the building stands vacant on the grounds of the King's al-Yamamah Palace in Riyadh. In any case, such a body would not satisfy the nascent band of dissenters. "That's merely a halfway house," says an intellectual...
...this, the 65,700-man military is simply too small. Pentagon experts reckon the country should have a standing army of at least 100,000. Fahd's family has been leery of a powerful military; for internal security it relies on the 35,000-man National Guard, a tightly knit organization based on tribal loyalties. Still, the government has moved to expand the regular military. Earlier this month, Fahd asked for volunteers. Thousands of Saudis responded, displaying a degree of patriotism not often seen in the heterogeneous state...
Given the pressing demands of the current crisis, King Fahd has asked women to volunteer to perform "human services and medical services." This, he added, would be in the context of "fully preserving" Islamic values. Still, say some Saudi watchers, men and women will inevitably be thrown together in the workplace, just as American men and women were during the World War II mobilization...