The Desert King - A Life of Ibn Saud

In 1901, ibn Saud, 21 years old and penniless, rode out from Kuwait with forty men mounted on camels to reconquer his father's kingdom. 50 years later he died, the undisputed ruler of most of Arabia and probably the second richest man in the world. The twin ambitions of his extraordinary and exciting life were to unite Arabia and to purify it; in the name of religious reform he spread his domain from sea to sea and captured the holy city of Mecca. He was a gallant fighter in hand-to-hand battles with sword and musket, and a master of the immemorial strategy of desert war: but he also won over recalcitrant sheiks by his clemency and charm. He often defeated rebels only to reinstate them and marry their sisters or daughters. He is said to have married 300 times. By patience and a native diplomatic flair he kept foreign powers at bay: Turkiye, who sent a doomed army to die in the desert, and Britain, whose representatives were a handful of brilliant eccentrics such as William Shakespear, Harry St John Philby and T.E. Lawrence. But by a stroke of irony it was America who eventually drew the great oil dividends from the desert and earned unimaginable wealth for ibn Saud - wealth which inevitable brought the degradation of his life's ideals...