THOUGH King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud ascended the throne of Saudi Arabia in 1982, he had been the effective ruler of the world’s largest exporter of petroleum products since June 1975, when he was appointed crown prince under his retiring half-brother, King Khalid.

A stroke in December 1995 forced Fahd to hand over most of his powers to his half-brother, Crown Prince Abdullah, but his approval was nevertheless needed before issues of particular weight could be settled.

Arguably, he played an equal part to that of his elder brother, King Faisal, in transforming Saudi Arabia from the backward hinterland of the Arab world into the regional power that it is today. He also led his country during such crises as the Iranian revolution of 1979, the eight-year Iraq-Iran war of the 1980s and the Gulf War of 1991 which ended in the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait.

King Fahd’s own part in the latter war was of crucial importance to the West, as was his policy within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) to keep oil prices reasonably stable.

At home, however, the King’s early promise as a reformist prince was not fulfilled. Indeed, he disappointed many by ruling as a traditional Arab monarch who recognised almost no distinction between the royal treasury and that of the state, despite the professed austerity of the Wahhabi sect which he championed. Altogether, he laid too much emphasis on the need for consensus among his more conservative brothers and the senior clergy, and, in his attempt to thwart the influence of the Islamic revolution of Iran among the world’s Muslims, his Government promoted strict Islamic observance at home and abroad, including among Muslims in the West.

While, at the time of his death, countless mosques around the world were being financed and run by Saudi Arabia, many of them paving the way for later takeovers by revolutionaries, not a single Christian church or Jewish synagogue was permitted to exist on Saudi soil.

Other major failures of the king towards the end of his rule were his refusal to grant a role in legislature to Saudi Arabia’s emerging middle class, and his inability to balance the country’s budget.

At the same time, his personal eccentricities and his failure to curb the transgressions of the estimated 10,000 princes in the land played into the hands of opponents, even though he had imposed a wall of secrecy around the government and the palace.

Even more enemies were made by his policy of overt discrimination against his Shia subjects in the Eastern Province, banning them from high office and from building new mosques.

As a result, when he handed over most of his powers to Crown Prince Abdullah on January 1, 1996, his successor inherited a grave political and economic crisis that endangered the regime’s long-term survival.

Believed to have been born in 1923 in Riyadh, Fahd was the tenth son of the Amir Abdul Aziz, who would go on to produce another 35 sons by his 22 wives. At the time, Abdul Aziz’s realm was limited to the northern and eastern parts of Arabia, though he was already on the warpath against the forces of Britain’s favourite client-chieftain, the Hashemite Sharif Hussein of Mecca.

Five years later Abdul Aziz had ended the Hashemite rule over the Muslim world’s holiest city and proclaimed himself king in Jedda, after putting thousands of his prisoners of war to the sword. But the new kingdom, which formally adopted its present name in 1932 after further expansion, remained extremely poor throughout Fahd’s childhood, almost wholly dependent on dues from Hajj pilgrims and customs duties. As late as 1938, five years after oil had been discovered in the country, these amounted only to about £1,200,000 a year.

The insularity dictated by that poverty was reinforced by the Wahhabis’ suspicions of the modern world and meant that society would hardly change for several decades. The king, for example, had to delay the introduction of the telephone and the radio — “Satan hiding in boxes” — until he had first persuaded the clergy of their “potential use to Islam”. The kingdom’s insularity also determined that the older princes received a meagre education, learning only to read the Koran and to be familiar with the basics of Sharia.

Like his brothers, Fahd was entrusted early with public office, being appointed the Governor of Jauf, the most northerly province of the kingdom, when he was only 23. Ten years later, in the year of the death of his father, he became Minister of Education at a time when the post was politically sensitive — the hostility of the Wahhabi clerical establishment to secular education was beginning to be challenged by the growing demand for Western knowledge among the young. In the same year Fahd represented his country at the Coronation in London.

In the palace dispute of 1958, which led to the transfer of executive power from King Saud to Crown Prince Faisal, Fahd sided with the latter. Consequently, he was relieved of office from 1960 to 1962 when King Saud temporarily recovered his authority. In 1962, when Faisal resumed his position as de facto monarch, Fahd re-entered the Cabinet in the key post of Minister of the Interior, which he occupied for 13 years until King Faisal was assassinated in 1975 by a nephew.

By then the principle of succession by the eldest son had been amended in favour of the monarch’s younger brother, and Fahd knew he was likely to inherit the throne. Thus when another half-brother, Prince Khalid, became king, Prince Fahd was appointed Crown Prince.

He had also tried to fill the gaps in his formal education by employing tutors and commissioning reports on important political and social subjects. Similarly, he had acquired much experience of finance and development in the course of his duties.

A severe rebuke by King Faisal is said to have been crucial in his change of lifestyle from that of an outright playboy to that of a hard-working executive, though he remained notoriously sporadic in the latter respect. He would, for example, sometimes suddenly retire to the desert in a fleet of luxurious caravans for weeks, or he might keep visiting dignitaries waiting for hours because he had stayed up late the previous night. He never acquired enough fluency in English not to have to rely on interpreters.

The event that immediately led to Fahd being declared Crown Prince to the reclusive King Khalid was one of the most traumatic in the history of the House of Saud. On March 25, 1975, one of King Faisal’s nephews, Prince Faisal ibn Musaid, shot him dead during an audience for the Oil Minister of Kuwait. The assassin’s elder brother had been killed by the Saudi police ten years earlier during an abortive attempt to destroy a radio transmitter, a device considered an agent of the Devil by Wahhabi fundamentalists. But suspicion fell on the US Central Intelligence Agency on account of the assassin’s US education and Washington’s displeasure with King Faisal’s leadership of the Arab oil boycott after the Arab-Israeli war of 1973.

The mystery has not been resolved, but the assassination does not appear to have been the result of a conspiracy. The assassin, who was subsequently beheaded, had a history of mental imbalance, as well as participation in clandestine radical politics.

Those were indeed turbulent times, with the first major test of the resolve of the new de facto ruler arising in December. Pro-Palestinian guerrillas led by the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramirez Sanchez (Carlos the Jackal) kidnapped 11 Opec ministers at a conference in Vienna and eventually set them free in Algiers. It was said that Prince Fahd had paid millions of dollars in ransom to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by George Habash, in exchange for the Saudi Oil Minister Ahmad Zaki Yamani. A tendency to attempt to buy off adversaries was to prove an enduring trait in the reign of the future king.

As expected of an old-fashioned sultan, King Fahd tried to buy affection, too. In the 1980s he reportedly ordered the establishment of an annual stipend of $300 million for his favourite teenage son, Prince Abdullah. Among foreign royal figures, he appeared devoted to the Prince of Wales and said he could not understand why the British gave “so much trouble to their future king over a mere woman”.

To emphasise the Saudi royal family’s Islamic legitimacy, Fahd was called the Custodian of the Two Holy Shrines (Mecca and Medina), rather than king.

On the whole, the major decisions of his rule were dictated by his innate caution and his tribal distrust of neighbours. These included his refusal to back the Camp David peace accords between Egypt and Israel in 1978-79, despite his private approval of the accords, and his appointment of a consultative assembly, Majlis al-Shura, in 1993, 30 years after it had been promised. Even so, the 60 male members of the assembly were all appointed by the king and could only suggest legislation.

The lengthy consultations among the senior princes by which Fahd arrived at decisions were evident after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. With Iraqi troops along the Kuwaiti-Saudi border appearing poised to seize the oil fields of the Eastern Province, it took the king an entire week to decide whether to ask for Western military help.

In the build-up to that war, Fahd tried to mediate in the border dispute between President Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Sheikh Jabir al-Sabah, the Emir of Kuwait. He urged the Emir to capitulate to Iraq’s demands and thought he had succeeded. But Saddam chose not to believe him. At that moment, said one of his close advisers, “the King realised Kuwait was doomed”.

Once it had been decided to evict Iraqi forces from Kuwait, however, all the resources of the state were mobilised to ensure a quick victory, despite the overwhelming backing of Arab public opinion for Saddam. Saudi-financed Muslim clerics were persuaded to issue fatwas to justify the stationing of Christian and Jewish soldiers on Saudi soil to protect the holiest shrines of Islam from a neighbouring Muslim state, and even the country’s own armed forces were placed under the effective command of an American general, Norman Schwarzkopf.

After the war King Fahd appeared to have two main aims: to persuade the US not to take any serious steps that might result in the overthrow of Sunni Arab minority rule in Iraq, and to strengthen his armed forces so that no other regional power might again endanger his borders.

To this end the King ordered $50 billion worth of the latest US and European weapons. This policy created severe financial constraints at a time when the oil markets were depressed. His defence budget, which exceeded a third of all spending, required increased oil production as barter for arms, even though the policy helped to reduce the price of oil and affect the state’s finances elsewhere.

In January 1994 Saudi crude oil fetched only about $12 a barrel, and the king was forced to announce a 20 per cent reduction in spending. This threatened tens of thousands of jobs in the US and Europe and delayed numerous projects inside Saudi Arabia.

For a man who had only once shed tears in public — when he had to announce that he had failed to balance the Government’s budget — the latter failure was specially painful. But Fahd was himself partly responsible for it. Though he rarely sacked an official, he did sack his independent-minded Oil Minister, Sheikh Yamani, in 1986, to increase oil prices once more. While this policy paid off at first, it eventually encouraged the industrialised countries to resort to energy-saving measures and to explore other sources of energy.

In 1995 King Fahd replaced more than half of his 28 ministers with younger technocrats, and the performance of the economy improved somewhat. But the year’s most important development was the emergence of a violent Islamic opposition that targeted Western military experts as symbols of the king’s pro-Western foreign policy. After the death of five Americans in one explosion, the kingdom asked Britain to expel Saudi Arabia’s best-known opposition figure, Dr Mohammad al-Masari. This caused a storm in Britain and was thwarted in the High Court. In any case, the king’s failure to institute democratic reform enabled the armed opposition in the kingdom to spread to most major cities.

The road had been paved for the rise of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network which benefited from the resentment of rich Saudis who felt they did not enjoy enough influence inside the state.

To the end, Fahd remained one of the most mysterious figures of his time. A rare glimpse of his inner world came to light in 1990, courtesy of Iraqi intelligence which had bugged a telephone conversation between him and the ruler of Qatar to orchestrate oil policy among the Gulf Arabs in opposition to Iraq. He told Sheikh Khalifa: “When we were poor, when we rode donkeys and had difficulty finding a few dates to eat, no one asked about us. They only acknowledge us now because we have money.”

King Fahd bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, ruler of Saudi Arabia, was believed to have been born in 1923 in Riyadh. He died on August 1, 2005.