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III.— Internal Affairs.
General Situation.
210. The discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia in commercial quantities, whicn
occurred in February 1938, is bound to have important consequences. The remoter
possibilities, e.g., that any rich oil-bearing country may some day be a bone of
contention between Great Powers, may be left aside, and the more immediate
effect examined. If, as the company concerned have come to believe, Hasa
contains an important oil-field of the Iraqi or Persian order, the revenue accruing
to the Government in the way of a royalty, at something like £1 sterling on
every 3 tons of crude oil, may in a year or two be very large. At present
the main source of revenue is the pilgrimage; the principal item of expenditure,
the subsidising of the tribes. The ruler acquires funds by means of the collection
of pilgrim dues which fluctuate with the economic situation in other countries
and must, in any case, be collected through officials of doubtful ability and
honesty, and he is dependent on these funds for the distribution of the annual
subsidies whereby , the tribes are kept quiet. Oil revenues, on the other hand,
will be obtained from the unresisting earth by a foreign company which will
pay them into a foreign bank where they will be safe from any unauthorised
hand, and this should contribute much towards the stability of the established
regime. The regime might be even further strengthened if the oil revenues
allowed the ruler to reduce the dues on pilgrims, thereby leaving more money
for the pilgrims to spend in the country, and thus contenting the Hejazis, who
used to live on the pilgrimage and now see their income greatly diminished or
completely gone.
211. With every year that Ibn Saud lives the question of the stability of
the regime after his death becomes more urgent. For years his health has
been watched with an anxious eye with that factor in mind. As statesmen go,
he is by no means an old man; indeed, he is apparently two years younger than
the age which has usually been attributed to him in these reports, for he informed
His Majesty’s Minister at Riyadh, after a careful calculation, that he was 58
(Moslem) years, which is 56 by calendar reckoning, and this agrees with the
belief that he was 20 when he captured Rivadh in January 1902. But his public
and private life has been unusually exhausting, and he looks more than 56, and
he has had many private worries recently, in particular, the death of his
favourite “ wife,” Umm Mansur, an Armenian slave, and the serious illness of
her successor. Mr. Philby declares that Ibn Saud is becoming very slack
physically and very difficult to stimulate to any action requiring mental or moral
energy. Allowance must be made for the fact that Mr. Philby may have tried
to make Ibn Saud adopt some violent policy which the King's habitual caution
led him to reject, but it is certain that Ibn Saud is becoming physically inert
and moves very slowly and heavily and dislikes having to mount stairs; that
he is very fussy about his health, and this not merely because of the decline
in his sexual vigour; and that there is proof of some indifference to public affairs
in that during the summer he spent on supervising the building of a new palace
at Riyadh a length of time which he would never have spared from work a few
year ago. At the same time, when the necessity to take action about Palestine
arose in November, he threw himself into the problem with a vigour which seemed
undiminished.
212. There is always plenty of gossip, usually ill-informed, about supposed
dissensions in the Royal family. Apart from the common belief that the second
son, Faisal, is jealous of the heir apparent, there are strong rumours that the
third and fourth sons of the King, Muhammad and Khalid, are also hostile to
him. There is good reason to believe that the Amir Khalid, son of the King’s
elder brother Muhammad, was regarded as an active danger to the heir apparent
until his death as the result of a car accident in 1938 removed him from the scene.
Such was the hostility between the cousins that Khalid’s death was in many
quarters not accepted as accidental, but there is no doubt whatsoever that this
suspicion was entirely without foundation. Nevertheless, the enormous size of
the Royal family is bound to complicate the task of Ibn Saud’s successor. Apart
from nephews and other more distant relatives, Ibn Saud has twenty-six or more
sons. The ages of the four eldest are, roughly : Saud, 37; Faisal, 33 ; Muhammad,
26; Khalid, 23. Mansur is not far behind Khalid in age, and there are several