Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1924-2015)

Abdullah held important political posts throughout most of his adult life, beginning in 1961 when he was appointed Mayor of Mecca. The following year, he became Commander of Saudi Arabian National Guard. He also served as deputy defence minister and was named the Crown Prince when King Fahd ascended to the throne in 1982. After […]

Abdullah held important political posts throughout most of his adult life, beginning in 1961 when he was appointed Mayor of Mecca. The following year, he became Commander of Saudi Arabian National Guard. He also served as deputy defence minister and was named the Crown Prince when King Fahd ascended to the throne in 1982. After King Fahd suffered stroke in 1995, Abdullah became the de facto ruler until he was formally enthroned a decade later.
King Abdullah was a moderniser whose innovations in construction and management impacted on the educational, political and religious sectors the Kingdom in his ten-year rein. More than 70, 000 Saudi citizens benefitted from scholarships under which they were sent to study in over 25 countries. There are currently more than 22, 000 Saudi students studying in the United States alone.
Among Abdullah’s most important contributions to contemporary Saudi society was his reform of the Kingdom’s succession mechanism through the establishment of the Alliance Council (Hay’at al-Bay’ah) in December 2007.
Some of Abdullah’s gender development policies in the deeply conservative Kingdom included a September 2011 decree that recognized women’s right to vote in municipal council elections with effect from this year. In July 2012, the Kingdom granted approval to Saudi women athletes to compete in the Olympic Games for the first time, despite strong opposition by religious conservatives. In January 2013, King Abdullah appointed thirty women to the Consultative Assembly (or Shura Committee) and modified the related law to require that no less than 20 percent of the 150-member Council must be women.
King Abdullah also had his footprints in interfaith dialogue. He was the first Saudi monarch to visit the Vatican and had talks with Pope Benedict XVI in November 2007. In 2008, Saudi Arabia and Spain jointly organized an Interfaith Conference in Madrid, the outcome of which thereafter led to the 2010 proclamation of the World Interfaith Harmony Week. In 2011, an agreement for the establishment of the King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz International Centre for Interreligious and Intercultural Dialogue in Vienna was signed between the governments of Austria, Spain, and Saudi Arabia. The Centre, which formally took off in 2012, had Saudi’s Foreign Minister Saud Al Faisal as its first secretary general and Austria’s former Federal Justice Minister Clandia Bandion-Ortner as the first deputy secretary general. At a 2008 discussion at the United Nations General Assembly, Abdullah urged countries of the world to “promote dialogue among civilizations, cultures, and peoples, as well as activities related to the culture of peace”, and called for actions at the global, regional and sub-regional levels. Abdullah developed an Arab peace plan commonly referred to as “Abdullah Plan” to achieve mutually agreed resolutions of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The initiative was adopted by the Arab League.
But the Kingdom is viewed by many as playing the Western card, particularly the U.S., in the Middle East. The U.S. is also accused of exploiting religious fault-lines between mostly Sunni Saudi and Shia Iran to shape its policy in the region.
Saudi Arabia is the largest oil producer; its policies affect the commodity’s global price. The recent fall in crude price has been attributed to Abdullah’s refusal to cut Saudi oil production quota. This has served two purposes, discouraged the search for alternative sources of fuel in the West and, intended or not, strained the economies of many countries with which the Kingdom is at odds.
King Abdullah has also been recognised for his philanthropy, including the January 2005 expenses to separate a pair of Polish co-joined twins at Riyadh’s King Abdulaziz Medical City. Abdullah donated over 300, 000 US dollars to furnish a New Orleans high school rebuilding after the Hurricane Katrina disaster; 500 million dollars to the UN World Food Programme in 2008 and another 50 million dollars in cash and $10 million worth of relief materials for the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan, China. Abdullah was succeeded by his 79-year-old half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.