Special Section: QUIET KING, STRONG PRINCE

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One reason for the enduring success of the House of Saud is that in moments of crisis its members stand together. Last week the princes demonstrated family solidarity when, in accordance with a prearranged plan, they named Crown Prince Khalid, 62, successor to the assassinated King Faisal and his half brother Fahd, 53, the new Crown Prince and heir apparent.

The House of Saud forms a kind of single-party government in Saudi Arabia. Its members include more than 3,000 princes as well as an estimated 2,000 women whose husbands and sons have special princely privileges. Unfettered by any constitution or laws determining the royal succession, the members decide who will be the country's King. The princes showed extraordinary prescience a few weeks ago by settling on the succession to Faisal and thereby averting a family schism following the King's death.

The issue was over which half brother of King Faisal should succeed him: the ailing, ineffectual Khalid, who a decade earlier had been named Crown Prince following Faisal's accession to the throne, or the able, ambitious Prince Fahd, Saudi Arabia's Second Deputy Premier (King Faisal held the title of Premier, Khalid was First Deputy Premier) and Minister of the Interior. Fahd was widely known as the second most powerful man in the country; he had the additional advantage of being the senior member of the "Sudeiri seven"; among 31 surviving sons of Ibn Saud, this sep tet has the same mother, Hossa, a member of the powerful Sudeiri family from the Najd region of central Arabia.

Fahd was opposed by a number of his half brothers, who wanted to limit the power and influence of the omnipresent Sudeiris; for example, Prince Sultan is Minister of Defense, Prince Ahmed is deputy governor of Mecca, while Prince Salman is governor of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia's capital. Fahd probably had the strength to displace Khalid as heir apparent, but to avoid a devastating family fight he agreed to the compromise under which Khalid would become King and he would be named Crown Prince.

Khalid, variously known to his countrymen as "the quiet prince" and "the man of the desert," is a most reluctant monarch. Like Faisal, he had a circumscribed education, acquired in mosque schools and with Islamic tutors. From childhood he was close to Faisal, and although he served under his elder brother in various government posts from 1934 on, he never developed much taste for public affairs. His passions are falconry (he has one of the best collections of falcons in the world) and the desert life. In earlier years he liked nothing better than to visit tribes in the desert and engage them in a favorite Bedouin contest, camel-milk drinking; he won more often than not. He used to hunt big game in Africa and India, and decorated the walls of his palace in Riyadh with elephant tusks and tiger heads; he also founded a local zoo. But he curtailed many of his activities after undergoing open-heart surgery in Cleveland three years ago. In his unassuming way, Khalid, the father of seven daughters and five sons, is a widely popular man, well known for helping people who are ill or in trouble. Both his temperament and his health suggest that "the quiet prince" will be a relatively inactive Saudi King.