The Gulf: An Exquisite Balancing Act

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One was a sybarite who virtually abandoned his desert kingdom for a career of overseas carousing. He drank Scotch freely, ordered caviar by the pound, attended the raunchy shows in the nightclubs of Beirut so frequently that he knew all the leading belly dancers by name, engaged in myriad liaisons with women (he is said to have paid the wife of a Lebanese businessman $100,000 a year to make herself available) and, if old stories are to be believed, gambled away $1 million in the casinos of Monte Carlo during a single weekend.

The other is a King known for caution bordering on indecision and endless consultations before taking any action. His fiscal prudence is so extreme that he once became tearful on television while confessing that he could not balance his country's budget. He has for years conducted an exquisite balancing act among factions in his royal family, between the West and the Arab world, between the tug toward high-tech modernization and the impulse to preserve the semifeudal culture of his kingdom.

They are, strangely, the same person: Fahd ibn Abdul Aziz, King of Saudi Arabia and Custodian (of the holy places of Mecca and Medina), a form of address he prefers to Your Majesty. And the difference between the profligate prince and the cautious King reflects something more than the aging of the young hell raiser into a 69-year-old monarch whose 275-lb. bulk has so weakened his knees that he has trouble walking. Some 37 years ago, Fahd went through a conversion that, though forced on him, has had a lasting effect.

In 1953 the ascetic Crown Prince (later King) Faisal summoned his younger half-brother Fahd and told him he was disgracing himself and the kingdom. It was time, said Faisal, for Fahd to come home and devote himself to serious matters of state. Implicit in the rebuke was a warning that Fahd was endangering his chances of succeeding to the crown. As one of seven sons borne by the favorite wife of the legendary Abdul Aziz (generally known as Ibn Saud), who created Saudi Arabia, Fahd was among those in line someday to be King. But there was, and is, nothing automatic about the succession; like almost every other major decision in Saudi Arabia, it reflects a consensus of the royal family.

Spurred by shame and ambition, Fahd tamed his playboy ways and became Minister of Education just as the oil money was beginning to pour in. Though his formal education had been confined to a few years at a kuttab (Koranic school), Fahd built schools by the hundreds and several universities. He later served as Interior Minister, and in 1975, when King Faisal was assassinated and succeeded by another brother, Khalid, Fahd became Crown Prince. Khalid, troubled by a weak heart, paid little attention to affairs of state; Fahd in effect ran the country for years before he succeeded to the throne on Khalid's death in 1982.