Estimates of the number of slaves in his kingdom ran from several thousand into the tens of thousands; several hundred served openly in the monarch’s Riyadh palace. When a slave concubine gave birth to a son, she received her freedom, and in a few rare cases, her son was acknowledged as legitimate. Abdulaziz ultimately recognized about forty-five legitimate sons, who became his royal heirs; the number of his daughters and other children is unknown.4
For all of his seeming profligacy, the king maintained an austere and pious lifestyle. He did not drink or smoke or permit his aides to wear silk; he prayed five times a day; and in his court the dominant sound from day to day was the quiet clink of coffee cups and the rhythmic chanting of Koran readers. He never doubted that God had called him to rule his desert kingdom; he would do his best to answer this call, and to conform to Islam’s laws, but the rest was in divine hands. The form of Islam he had been taught was severe and intolerant. In the Hejaz, there were Shias and Sufi mystics, and scholars from every historical school of the Sunni tradition. But in the Riyadh court of Abdulaziz there was only the simple and insistent creed of Mohamed Abdul Wahhab, an eighteenth-century desert preacher who had rejected virtually all adornment, art, music, and technology as blasphemy. In the isolated high desert of central Arabia, as the Jeddah architect Sami Angawi put it, “you have either day or night, you have cold or hot. You don’t have these shades. Even the music is only one string…It’s either black or white. It’s either you’re with me or against me.”5 Yet the religious passion of the king’s Wahhabi followers caused him continual trouble—particularly the Ikhwan, or “Brotherhood,” a militia of unbending radicals Abdulaziz created to conquer his enemies. When the Ikhwan threatened to revolt against Abdulaziz because they felt he was not religious enough by their exacting standards, the king turned his guns on them. At the same time, to hold his throne, he had to continuously appease his court’s Islamic scholars, the ulema.
He debated with these ulema about the attractions and dangers of modern technology. Through his contacts with the British, Abdulaziz came to understand the outlines of Europe’s industrialization and the dizzying array of products and comforts it had created. He had no desire at all to adapt to European civilization, but its gadgets intrigued him greatly. He never left the Arab world and he mocked English finery and pomposity. During a desert meeting with a British officer, he strode into an elaborate colonial tent outfitted with plush chairs, and announced, “Here we are in modernity! Bring tea, boy!” He urged his robed Bedouin retinue to join him on the carved chairs: “Let’s be modern!” He mocked, but he also imitated: By the 1930s he had ordered his own European furniture for his Riyadh majlis.
He particularly liked radio sets, through which he could follow European news without ever leaving his palace. The Marconi wireless network he began to build on the Arabian Peninsula during the early 1930s also offered an important, even revolutionary means for Abdulaziz to monitor and control events in his own kingdom. He set up radio stations in major cities and a central operations room in Riyadh from where he could track potential rebels on the periphery of his domain and dispatch orders or units of his army. He struggled to persuade Riyadh’s deeply suspicious Islamic scholars that these radio devices were permissible; among other things, the scholars strenuously objected to the music that came on to signal BBC news bulletins. Because it was impossible to anticipate exactly when this music would appear, Abdulaziz persuaded the scholars that the fault was with the radio knobs, not the radios or broadcasts. He also sought to persuade his religious scholars that the telegraph was not a form of sorcery.
Businessmen in Jeddah plied the king with Ford and Chevrolet automobiles, which he used to hunt gazelles in the desert. He would race along in the front seat beside his Bedouin driver, chasing his hunting falcons as they plunged to attack the fleeing antelopes, pecking out their eyes before the men completed the ceremonial kill. Thundering through the rough desert, Abdulaziz ground his cars down quickly and often left them to rust. In 1927 his royal garage had 250 Fords and Chevrolets, and it grew ever larger.6
The business agent who supplied Abdulaziz with Fords and Marconi radios, and who increasingly infiltrated his court and provided it with an air of burlesque intrigue, was Harry St. John Philby. He had graduated from Cambridge University with a First Class degree in Modern Languages, joined the Indian Civil Service, and later worked in Iraq, but he quit Britain’s colonial service and became increasingly bitter about his government. Still, he desperately wished to be recognized in England as the foremost Arabian geographer and traveler of his time. During the 1920s he attached himself to Abdulaziz as an informal adviser and converted to Islam; the king endowed him with the new name of Abdullah. He was a “stocky, bearded figure in Arab dress, fiercely and fearlessly argumentative, unalterably British and yet more Arab than the Arabs,” one acquaintance wrote. Yet for all his airs, he was “neither a soldier nor a poet…the kind of man who is always out of step.” When not attending the king’s Riyadh court, Philby lived in a comfortable house in Jeddah, where he set up his Ford dealership and collected baboons.7
Perhaps because Philby was so skeptical about the British government—he was ultimately arrested during the Second World War for promoting the causes of Nazi Germany—Abdulaziz came to rely upon him for independent advice in his dealings with Europeans and Americans. He presented Philby with a slave girl as a gift, and granted him permission to travel across the peninsula, documenting its flora and fauna for books and lectures Philby delivered to English geographers. And it was Philby who controlled the crucial negotiations during the 1930s for mining and oil concessions.
Winston Churchill had converted Britain’s navy from coal to oil during the First World War and by doing so helped usher in the oil age. Britain had locked up supplies in Iran and Iraq, but American explorers had begun to poke around the Middle East as well. An American oil company, SOCAL (Standard Oil Company of California), had the insight to put Philby on its payroll; the company paid him $1,000 a month and promised a bonus of $10,000 if it won a concession from the Saudi king, plus an additional $50,000 in royalties if significant amounts of oil were discovered and exported. Abdulaziz had run up huge debts to Philby by purchasing cars and radios from him, and an oil deal with SOCAL offered not only cash in Philby’s pocket, but a potential revenue stream from which the king could pay off his debts. Philby seemed determined to keep Britain out of Saudi Arabia. The deal he helped to broker, signed with SOCAL in 1933, provided Abdulaziz with 50,000 British pounds’ worth of gold, and the promise of an equal amount if oil was discovered in commercial quantities, plus additional royalties.8 The king displayed little personal interest in oil; he was much more interested in parallel explorations for minerals and especially water. But to finance his enormous family, to quell the peninsula’s tribes and other political rivals, he desperately needed gold.
As soon as he had it, Abdulaziz began to spend it. Like many of the newly wealthy, he and his sons decided that they would enjoy a bigger and finer place to live, and so in Riyadh and just outside its walls, a palace building boom began. At the same time, to the east, along the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Americans had arrived to begin drilling for oil; they began to construct houses, schools, offices, and warehouses.
It was an excellent time and place to be an enterprising young man in the building trades.