Skip to main content

Abd Al-Aziz IV Ibn Saud Biography

Abd Al-Aziz IV Ibn Saud

(Kuwait, 1902-Athens, 1969) King of Saudi Arabia.He was the son of Ibn Saud III, who he succeeded to the Saudi throne in 1953, since he held until 1964.Despite his great influence in the Islamic world, his close relations with Western countries, especially the United States, earned him the enmity of numerous governments of Arab countries.

He was educated in Kuwait, where his father was in exile.In 1933, a year after the constitution of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, he was proclaimed crown prince.At the head of the Saudi troops he defeated the Yemenis in the 1934 campaign.In 1939 his father Ibn Saud III appointed him Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and Viceroy of Hedjaz.When his father established the institution of the Council of Ministers in early 1953, for the first time in the history of Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud IV became its president.

Ibn Saud

In September the king appointed him head of the military police forces.He ascended to the throne in November 1953 with the support of his brothers, after the death of his father.One of his first decisions was to name his brother Faysal Crown Prince.He continued with the modernization program of the country initiated by his father and created the ministries of Commerce, Education and Health.He made a special effort to strengthen the educational system.

Despite this Western aspect with which he endowed his government, his reign was characterized by an autocratic and personalist power, and the country continued to be plunged into a almost feudal regime.He strengthened the ties of friendship with the West and took a series of measures to facilitate the work of the oil companies.His regime was sustained thanks mainly to the high income obtained from the extraction of oil, which in turn allowed him to amass a considerable personal fortune, which made him the richest man in the world.He adopted a sumptuous way of life, which he maintained until his death.On his transfers he was accompanied by a large harem and an entourage made up of more than 150 people.When the Suez Canal Crisis broke out in 1956, Saud showed his full support for Egypt, breaking relations with France and the United Kingdom, as well as blocking the delivery of oil to both countries.

However, the arrival Money complicated the structure of the administration, which made it impossible for it to be controlled directly by the king as had happened in the kingdom until then.The country was involved in a deep internal crisis, as the king was unable to solve the problems that the country was facing.His mismanagement plunged the country into economic disaster.In 1957 he ended the separate administration for the Hedjaz region.That same year the construction of the new Nasriya Royal Palace was completed, where he established his residence.Also in 1957 he made his first state trip to the United States, a country with which he promised to allow him to continue using the Dharan air base, in exchange for the sending of instructors and war material.

His old friendship with the Egyptian leader Nasser broke down, and he began a series of trips around the world in order to replace Egypt as the main Arab power.His enmity with Egypt led him to prepare a plot against the Egyptian president; in this way, it tried to avoid the creation by Syria and Egypt of the United Arab Republic.The failure of the plot against the Egyptian dignitary made him lose much of his support in the court of Riyadh.

An illness plunged him into practically total blindness, for which he gave his brother Faysal in 1960 the presidency of the council of ministers.The new head of government assumed full control of foreign and domestic policy.He established a more austere administration and publicly lamented his brother's former profligacies, which had led to dangerous inflation.However, to avoid confrontations with the king, he announced that the sovereign continued to retain his authority and that he, as head of government, would continue to be loyal to his brother.Ibn Saud appointed Faysal as Minister of Defense in 1959, a position previously held by the sovereign's own son, Fahed.

Faysal's decision to end The censorship of the press annoyed Ibn Saud, who, fearful of losing his absolute power, returned to assume all powers in 1960.Shortly after regaining power he gave new signs of his absolutism, when he forced the Council of Ministers to accept the concession from the Jidda refinery for one of his sons.Faced with the protests that arose in the court, in June 1960 he called a meeting of the royal family, in which he established the spheres of influence of each member of the family.Shortly after, he accepted his brother's resignation.During 1961 he reaffirmed his power by directly assuming control of domestic politics with his traditional heavy hand.His actions led his brother Talal and several members of the royal family, who had attacked the feudal system, to flee the country.

He tried to reconcile with his brother in October 1962, when he appointed him prime minister.and Minister of Foreign Affairs.His illness forced him to spend much of 1963 abroad to receive various medical treatments.His absence caused internal opposition to increase considerably.One of his last appearances as king was his participation in the Cairo Conference, at the beginning of 1964.Faced with his inability to lead the government, his brother Faysal, who was in favor of a greater modernization of the country, supported by great part of the royal family, took advantage of a new stay abroad for health reasons, gave a coup and overthrew him in March 1964.

Ibn Saud was definitively dethroned in November 1964, when Faysal was proclaimed king of Saudi Arabia by a council of ulama and emirs.The dethroned monarch accepted the invitation of one of his oldest enemies, Egyptian President Nasser, and settled in Cairo.Later, he moved to live in the Greek town of Cavouri, which was in the vicinity of Athens.He died in 1969 from a heart attack.With his death, one of the last absolute monarchs of the East disappeared.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Phoenician numbers

In History Today Online we explained in a previous post which were the Arabic numerals, but the truth is that they are not the only ones, and although somewhat complicated to understand, the truth is that the Phoenician numbers are perhaps much more difficult.In History Today Online we talk to you now of which are the Phoenician numbers. The Phoenicians also known as Canaanites, although they were a civilization that occupied a region called Canaan and was a territory that currently encompasses Israel, Syria and Lebanon.They always stood out for their art, closely linked to the different Mediterranean influences and as not for an alphabet that they created and that is in fact the origin of the alphabet that we know today, they also had a numerical system and that we tried to decipher below. The Phoenician Numbers: The main basis of the Phoenician numbers, are the angles and the stripes since these are the base they used to create the different numbers.Depending on how e...

Dwijendralal Ray Biography

Dwijendralal Ray (Also called Dwijendralal Roy, Dwijendra Lal Roy, D.L.Ray, Rèi Dvi-Endralal or Rai Dvigendralal; Krishnagar, 1863-1913) Indian poet and playwright.Born into a wealthy family (he was a member of the Brahmin caste, the first in the social ladder of India), he received a careful academic training. Dwijendralal Roy In his youth he became known as a writer through some satirical theatrical pieces; But his true recognition as a playwright came with the premiere of his historical dramas that, from a patriotic approach, seek to recover the main customs and customs of India, as well as its popular literary traditions. Part of its plot material comes from the Mahabharata , the huge epic poem that recounts, in Sanskrit, the confrontation between the forces of Good and Evil, embodied in the clans of the Pandavas and the Kauravas.His best-known plays are Mevarpatan , Durqadas and Candragupta . This love for the historical and cultural richness of India is also prese...

Heinrich maier Biography

Heinrich Maier (Heidenheim, 1867-Berlin, 1933) German philosopher.He produced a "critical realism", along the lines of H.Driesch.He is the author, among other works, of Aristotle's syllogistics (1896-1900) and of The philosophy of reality (1926-1935).

X-ray history

The X-rays were discovered in 1895 and from there they became a very revolutionary application in many branches of science, from astronomy to radiographs that we have not done so many times.the 120th anniversary of the X-rays knowing his inventor and the research that led him to such an important scientific advance. Article index Who invented the X-rays? The inventor or, rather, the person who discovered the X-rays was Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen , a German physicist who was focused on the field of electromagnetics Nothing else to present his discovery, Rontgen's theory received great attention from critics and public, and was translated into French, English or Russian. Although it is not a name as well known today as that of others you celebrate writers, the name of Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen is written in gold letters in the medical field, where he has had and has and numerous applications.The importance of his discovery was such in his day that he was the first Nobel Prize ...

The medieval knight in combat

At the beginning of the eleventh century, some warriors on horseback distinguished themselves from the mass of free men.Why? Between the 8th and 9th centuries, the methods of combat had been radically transformed, and only a small number of people knew how to master the select service of weapons and become a knight . If we see in a movie an army full of thousands of thousands of knights, or a man who gets on a horse and automatically fights like a medieval knight , we must never lose sight of the fact that this is pure fiction and, it goes without saying, an insult to the work and education that the Knights of the Middle Ages carried out for years. Being a gentleman was extremely difficult .First of all, it required money.Horses, weapons , and the armors were among the most expensive objects of that time. The cavalry was increasingly taking center stage in the story medieval , was not always made up of powerful warriors and lords. The Carolingian fighter In the time ...

Humberto Fernández Morán Biography

Humberto Fernández Morán (Maracaibo, Venezuela, 1924-Stockholm, Sweden, 1999) Venezuelan scientist.Inventor of the diamond blade, he was a pioneer in electron microscopy techniques and decisive in the process of scientific modernization of his country, in which he founded the Venezuelan Institute of Neurology and Brain Research (IVNIC). Humberto Fernández carried out his first studies between the capital of Zulia, Curaçao and New York.In 1936 he entered the German School of Maracaibo and the following year he left for Germany, where he finished high school at the Schulgemeinde Wichersdorf high school in Sallfeld.At the age of fifteen, he began his medical studies at the University of Munich.During the Second World War, six days before the Normandy landing (1944), in a basement and under low aerial bombardment, he graduated in medicine with Summa cum laude . Humberto Fernández Morán The following year he revalidated his degree at the Central University of Venezuela and worked ...

Jose Rizal Biography

José Rizal (José Rizal y Alonso; Calamba, Philippines, 1861-Manila, 1896) Filipino politician and writer.He began his university studies with the Jesuits in Manila, and in 1882 he entered the University of Madrid, from which he graduated in medicine and in philosophy and letters.During a trip to Europe he wrote Noli me tangere , an anti-colonial novel in which he denounced the abuses of the Spanish Administration in the Philippines, where its publication was prohibited.Rizal, whose political militancy had begun in the university cloister, was strongly opposed to the inordinate power of the Spanish Catholic Orders.In this sense, his work El filibusterismo summed up his nationalist ideology, which he later spread through the Philippine League, a secret society he founded in Hong Kong. Thanks to a government opening, in 1887 he was able to return to his homeland, but the close police surveillance to which he was subjected forced him to leave the following year.He returned in 1892,...

Corrado Alvaro Biography

Corrado Alvaro (San Luca di Calabria, 1895-Rome, 1956) Italian writer.Initially linked to costumbrismo, as the stories of La siepe e l'orto (1920) reveal, Corrado Alvaro ventured along other paths that relate him to the so-called "Italian magical realism".This way of understanding literature, lyrical and fantastic, expresses the opposition between the mythical past of the Calabrian lands and the present of misery and backwardness that shaped that Italian region in the first half of the 20th century.This primitive and uncontaminated world appears in the stories of The Beloved at the Window (1929) and in the short novel Gente en Aspromonte (1930), considered his best work. Corrado Alvaro Corrado Alvaro took part in the First World War as an infantry officer, and was wounded in the Carso battles in 1916.He worked as a journalist in Il Resto del Carlino and until 1920 in Il Corriere della Sera , the year in which he obtained his doctorate in Philosophy and Let...

Claes oldenburg Biography

Claes Oldenburg (Stockholm, 1929) American artist.Along with Andy Warhol, he is considered one of the most prominent figures in pop art , a trend inspired by mass culture that reached its peak in the 1960s.At the age of five he moved with his family to Chicago.In 1950 he graduated from Yale and went on to study at the Chicago Institute School of Art.In 1956 he moved to New York, where he soon met other happening and environment artists (Jim Dine, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow and Geoge Segal, among others). Claes Oldenburg In connection with these experiences he presented his first solo exhibition at the Judson Gallery (1960) under the title of The street .In it he gathered figures and objects made with cheap materials (cloth, cardboard, paper), forming a unique evocation of the urban landscape. A year later he exhibited The Store , a space crammed with facsimiles of food, clothing and other objects, made mainly of wire, plaster and fabric, and painted in bright colors.The i...

Angel Zárraga and Argüelles Biography

Ángel Zárraga y Argüelles (Durango, 1886-Mexico, 1946) Mexican painter and poet.Very soon he began to combine his interest in the visual arts with his innate literary vocation, and the sum of both creative activities made him one of the great figures of Aztec culture of the first half of the 20th century. As a member of the Mexican diplomatic corps, for several years he was stationed in Paris as cultural attaché to the Aztec embassy.In the French capital, Ángel Zárraga y Argüelles had the opportunity to establish contact with the main artistic figures of the moment, to learn about the latest trends and currents in European art and to participate in different groups such as the Society of Decorating Artists of Paris, which provided the opportunity to extend the field of his artistic creations to the noblest spaces of old Europe. Thus, the Mexican painter was commissioned to execute the frescoes that decorate the crypt of the church of Suresnes, the Via Crucis of the church of Meu...