If every American, and indeed everyone in the Western world, knows where they were at the moment they heard the news of President Kennedy's killing, the same is true of Sa'udis and their King Faisal.
On 25 March 1975 an announcer, his voice choked with emotion, gave out the news on Riyadh Radio that King Faisal was dead, then broke off sobbing. His wounded cry was broadcast all over the Middle East, and in Sa'udi cities the streets were silent. People could not believe what had happened and, numbed, they withdrew into their own homes.
I reminded Thamer Mofarrij, the son of one of my former bosses in Saudi Arabia, of this momentous event and he posed the question, "Why you think he was killed?" Why indeed?
Robert Lacey in his excellent book The Kingdom - which, incidentally, is banned inside the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia - devotes a whole chapter to it:
The King's twenty-six-year-old nephew, Faisal ibn Musa'id, was the younger brother of Khalid ibn Musa'id, the prince who had been killed ten years earlier after the attack upon the Riyadh television station, and Faisal ibn Musa'id shared his brother's erratic moods. He had hopped from college to college in America, smoked pot at Berkeley, was picked up with LSD in Colorado, and got into at least one bar-room brawl with a girlfriend; the State Department had had to work hard to keep the prince out of the courts. When Faisal ibn Musa'id returned home, his uncle the king decreed he be detained inside the Kingdom for a while. He had disgraced the family with his escapades abroad, and some said that this travel ban was the reason for the young prince's anger. Others said the boy was moved to avenge the death of his brother Khalid. On the night of 24 March 1975 Prince Faisal ibn Musa'id sat drinking whisky with another of his brothers, Bandar, and some friends. It was the typical bored evening with a bottle which passes for nightlife among more inhabitants of the Kingdom than they care to acknowledge, and it was to go on for Bandar ibn Musa'id and his friends till 6 a.m. next day - television, whisky, cards, whisky, a bit of food, some more whisky, until soon after dawn everyone was stretched out asleep on sofas round the room. It was not so much a party, more a way of whiling away the night for people to whom the day had still less to offer. But Faisal ib Musa'id did have plans for the coming day, and he drank little. He went to his room before midnight, and next morning around 10 a.m. he was at the palace of his uncle the king, waiting in the anteroom outside the royal office. A delegation from Kuwait was there, come to discuss oil, and Ahmad Zaki Yamani went in ahead of them to brief the king before the meeting. Ahmad Abdul Wahhab, King Faisal's chief of protocol, was puzzled by the arrival of the young prince, whom he did not recognize. Family meetings were usually held at Faisal's home, not in office hours, and Abdul Wahhab went in with Yamani to find out what the king wanted to do about his nephew. Faisal ibn Musa'id, meanwhile, had discovered that he knew one of the Kuwaiti delegation, Abdul Mutalib al Qasimi, the young Oil Minister, whom he had met during his brief time in Colorado, and, when the door was thrown open to welcome in the Kuwaitis, the young prince went in with them. Ahmad Zaki Yamani, Ahmad Abdul Wahhab and a television crew filming the king's reception of the oil delegation were horrified spectators of what happened next. As King Faisal reached forward to embrace and kiss his nephew, the young prince pulled a small pistol from the pocket of his thobe and shot three times at point-blank range. The first bullet went under the chin, the second through the ear, the third grazed the forehead. King Faisal was rushed to hospital still alive and was given massive blood transfusions while doctors massaged his heart. But the artery in his neck had been torn apart and within the hour the king was dead. |
No one could make sense of the killing: a mixed-up assassin thrown off balance by the temptations of the West, an ancient impulse for blood revenge, the memory of the television station riots, the majlis tradition of open access to the ruler: the circumstances of Faisal's slaying were queerly strung with the same elements of old and new that the king had tried to weave together in his eleven-year reign.
Today the inhabitants of the Kingdom look back to the reign of Faisal as to a golden age. Things were simpler then, it seemed. The kingdom had a leader who made the whole world tremble, and who made his people tremble too; for no single member of the Al Sa'ud will ever again to able to rule Arabia in such absolute fashion.
