Word: saud
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Austerity Behind. By Saud's decision, Saudi Arabia is leaving behind a two-year stretch of austerity that a man of his royal tastes found painful-even though the program was useful and was ably run by Saud's younger brother, Crown Prince Feisal, 56, the hawk-nosed heir to the throne. Taking over virtually all powers in 1958, Feisal proceeded to turn in surplus budgets and stabilize the faltering rial at five to the dollar. He clipped the King's and the princes' spending money until they howled. He also patched up Saud...
Last December, with the backing of most of the princes and after many tearful quarrels, Saud accepted Feisal's resignation as Premier and took the job himself. To get the economy moving, Saud turned to another brother, Prince Talal, 30, who as Finance Minister runs the country with the help of its most powerful commoner, Abdullah Tariki, 42, Minister of Petroleum, Mines and Education...
Progress that is almost daring by Saudi standards is being made in education. The school population has quadrupled in ten years to 100,000, and the education budget has gone up tenfold. Saud has donated at least ten of his 24 palaces for schools. At King Saud's Sons' Institute, inside the Naziriyah compound, children of slaves sit next to young princes. Risking the displeasure of the austere Wahabi sect of Islam, which believes that woman's place is in the harem and behind the veil, Tariki has put several thousand girls in school...
...Some of them go into the army, others into the civil service. Egyptian teachers and technicians in Saudi Arabia total 50,000, and Radio Cairo is the average Saudi's favorite station. As a counterweight, the government has recently been encouraging a native Saudi nationalism. Two months ago, Saud told the U.S. that it would have to get out of its big Dhahran airbase when the lease ran out in 1962. Recently, all non-Saudi taxi drivers lost their licenses, and Bedouins, according to one observer, "were hauled off their camels and into the driver's seat...
...country of many tribes and little sense of nationalism, old Ibn Saud tried to unify his nation in the traditional Arab way: by "marrying" the daughter of a chieftain for a night. Thus the 1,000 princes are a cross section of tribes; and politics in Saudi Arabia, where no man has a vote, is largely palace politics...