Saudi Royals

How many are there? If you want plenty of heirs—and in the Middle East they generally do—there’s no production system to equal polygamous marriage: male heirs of the blood royal come off the assembly line with astonishing regularity. As for the grand total, men, women, and children, would there be 30,000 royal Saudis by now? That was the figure given by Robert Baer two years ago, but as he pointed out with some asperity at the time, the family continually grows, and there could be from 31,000 to 32,000 today.

Royal polygamy and its problems

Glancing first at some historical facts about royal polygamy in the Islamic world, we notice that it was always associated with violence and killing. Even with strict rules of inheritance and succession, an unseemly and bloody contest for titles and wealth took place each time a new king was enthroned.

Old-time division amongst the sons dangerously dispersed family estates—unless some of the numerous polygamously-bred candidates were eliminated. In Stanislav Andreski’s words, “Constant strife was the natural outcome of such circumstances. Sometimes the extermination of candidates to high office was institutionalised: in the Ottoman Empire, for instance, a sultan was obliged by law to kill off all his brothers upon his ascension to the throne.”

Similar strife occurred elsewhere in the world when the same tense situation arose. “In the Central African kingdoms of Ankole and Kitara the sons of the kings had to fight for the succession until only one of them was left alive.” In India, at the Rajput court I visited in the 1980s (RS speaking) I was shown the apartments used in earlier centuries by various wives of the reigning Maharaja, and it was explained to me with a sadly apologetic smile how poison had been used to cull their offspring.

Another feature of royal polygamy is the intensification of class differences and the tendency to class war. The upper class buys lots of extra wives, creating what sociologists call “hypergamy” as women move up in the system, acquiring royal status as they go, and the resulting children have the status of their fathers. The lower class cannot afford multiple wives, and must watch as its women are bought and accumulated by the rich. Andreski again:

If the privileged classes are growing faster than the lower, then, in order to maintain their customary standard of living they must be continually raising their share of commodities produced by the latter, thus exacerbating the antagonism between classes…

Increasing family, decreasing resource

While this treats the process as zero-sum, which economic growth is certainly not, there are nevertheless resemblances to the Saudi situation. Especially when, as Robert Baer emphasizes, there is actually a shrinking resource base:

Throughout the 1990s, the royal family kept growing and growing. A prince might sire forty to seventy children during a lifetime of healthy copulation; however, the resources to support the growing population of the entitled were shrinking, not just in relative terms but absolutely. Young royals were pushing up from below, chafing at leaders who were slipping into their late seventies and eighties…

The House of Saud currently has some 30,000 members. The number will be 60,000 in a generation, maybe much higher. According to reliable sources, anecdotal evidence, and the Saudi gossip machine, the royal family is obsessed with gambling, alcohol, prostitution, and parties. And the commissions and other outlays to fund their vices are constant.

What would the price of oil have to be in 2025 to support even the most basic privileges—for example, free air travel anywhere in the world on Saudia, the Saudi national airline—that the Saudi royals have come to enjoy? Once the family numbers 60,000, or 100,000, will there even be a spare seat for a mere commoner who wants to fly out of Riyadh or Jidda? Reformers among the royal family talk about cutting back the perks, but that's a hard package to sell.

Appeasing the Jihadis

Plainly, this could be a problem for the Saudis down the track. But is it a problem for us? From Baer’s analysis it most certainly is, since royal control of all power and wealth in the kingdom has two effects. On the one hand it encourages princely rivals for the throne to fund radical causes in order to gain popularity (When in the late 1990s Prince Abdul Aziz was seeking Wahhabi support in his bid to become king, after King Fahd had a stroke in 1995, the prince threw money in all directions, and organized a $100 million aid package for the Taliban). On the other hand it drives more and more young men, fresh from an increasingly fundamentalist educational system, to become jihadis. In Baer’s words:

Among men, at least, the Saudis have an admirably high literacy rate, especially for a place that only three generations back was inhabited mostly by nomadic tribesmen. About 85 percent of Saudi men aged fifteen and older can read and write, as opposed to less than 70 percent of Saudi women of the same age.

But because in recent years the Saudi education system has been largely entrusted to Wahhabi fundamentalists, as a form of appeasement that many in the royal family hope will direct the fundamentalists' animus at foreign targets, its products are generally ill prepared to compete in a technological age or a global economy.

Today two out of every three Ph.D.s earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Doctorates are only very rarely granted in computer sciences, engineering, and other worldly vocations. Younger Saudis are being educated to take part in a world that will exist only if the Wahhabi jihadists succeed in turning back the clock not just a few decades but a few centuries.

November 2005