Ibn Saud: The Desert Warrior

(Quartet, £25)

The beauty of this book, which presents the legacy of Ibn Saud, is that it travels beyond the life of Saudi Arabia’s founder to create a portrait of a nation’s history that embraces rebellion, war and exploration on an iconic scale.

Strip away the golden chalice of oil that has made the Middle Eastern country so wealthy and one is captivated by the desert, the Hajj pilgrimages and the Bedouin who ruled the waves of sand.

This was the terrain of nomads and Ibn Saud was a “man of destiny”, as the spy Kim Philby would have it. The environment in which he was raised was harsh in the extreme, where “whole caravans, whole armies have been lost and buried in the whirlwind” (a quote from Gibbon).

At the age of ten, Saud is traversing the most desolate place on earth — the red sands of the Dahna desert — fleeing from his father’s vengeful tribal enemies.

One can experience the fear as they escape, and it is a prelude to a life of emotions as the young Saud becomes a powerful ruler steeped in revolts until he becomes the undisputable king of Saudi Arabia.

The majority of books about Arabia, except for those of explorers like Doughty and Palgrave, are highly scholarly, but the authors of this panoramic study enrich with novelistic eyes the drama that surrounds Saud’s invincible path to power, while retaining a firm, if poetic, grip on the history of the country, almost ten times the size of the United Kingdom. The Middle East has rarely been a place of peace and thus to arrive at such a destination in a country trapped between British and Ottoman interests was a daunting task for the young Saud, who was born in Riyadh. Defiant and proud of his native land, he conquered to establish unity in a series of battles and then took to the world stage at a vital time when the Arabs revolted against the Ottoman empire. Later there are intriguing passages describing Saud being courted by Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War.

The biggest blot on the House of Saud, however, was to come well after his death in 1953. For 15 of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center were from Saudi Arabia and it suffered a great backlash in the wake of the New York tragedy.

Still the nation is considered by many to be the lynchpin of Islamism, retaining its landmark position of political and strategic value in the oil-rich region.

Darlow and Bray fill for us in this classic book a void on our understanding of what is likely to remain a mysterious and exotic land.