Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud

Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud: The Last Son of the Founder

He ran one city for forty-eight years. When Salman became governor of Riyadh Province in February 1963 it was a mid-sized desert town; when he left the post in November 2011 it was a metropolis with universities, motorways and foreign capital. He was seventy-nine before he got the country — the last of Ibn Saud's sons to take the throne, and the man who ended the brothers' long turn at it by handing the future to his own son.

The Twenty-Fifth Son

Born in Riyadh on 31 December 1935, he was by most counts the twenty-fifth son of King Abdulaziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia. His mother was Hassa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi, which made him one of the Sudairi Seven — the seven full brothers whose shared maternity gave them the single most cohesive bloc inside a family that would eventually number thousands. He was educated at the Princes' School in Riyadh, where the curriculum ran to Islamic jurisprudence in the Wahhabi tradition alongside modern subjects. He was appointed deputy governor of Riyadh at eighteen, in March 1954.

The Family's Arbiter

Alongside the governorship he acquired the role that mattered more. Within an extended royal family estimated at some 4,000 princes, Salman was the disciplinarian — the man to whom disputes went. When King Fahd established the Descendants' Council in 2000 to settle family matters before they became public embarrassments, Salman headed it. He also chaired the King Abdulaziz Foundation for Research and Archives, the King Abdulaziz Museum, the Prince Salman Center for Disability Research and a charitable society for kidney care, and he led the Saudi committee supporting the Afghan mujahideen, touring Muslim countries to raise money and visiting Pakistan and, in 1996, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The journalist Jamal Khashoggi later criticised him over that period, arguing that Saudi money had gone to Salafist extremist groups whose presence undermined the campaign against the Soviets.

Defence, Then the Throne

He became Minister of Defence on 5 November 2011, replacing his late brother Sultan, and Crown Prince on 18 June 2012 after Nayef's death. Two elder brothers had died within a year; the succession was moving fast through a generation running out of time. King Abdullah died of pneumonia on 23 January 2015 and Salman took the throne at seventy-nine.

He moved immediately. The cabinet was reshuffled, figures associated with the previous reign were removed, bonuses were distributed to state employees and the military, and eleven government secretariats were folded into two councils: political and security affairs under Mohammed bin Nayef, and economic and development affairs under his own son, Mohammed bin Salman.

Rewriting the Succession

What followed was the most consequential internal restructuring in modern Saudi history, executed in under thirty months. In April 2015 he replaced Crown Prince Muqrin with his nephew Muhammad bin Nayef and made his son deputy crown prince. On 21 June 2017 he removed bin Nayef altogether and named Mohammed bin Salman crown prince. In September 2022 his son became prime minister, leaving Salman the first Saudi king since 1964 who was not also head of government. Two designated heirs had been displaced with no visible resistance from a family famous for resisting.

Vision 2030 and Yemen

The reign has been defined by two things running in opposite directions. Vision 2030, launched in April 2016 and driven by the crown prince, set out to diversify the economy away from oil. A 2017 royal decree ended the ban on women driving. A decree in April 2020 abolished the death penalty for crimes committed by minors, substituting juvenile detention.

Against that stands Yemen. In March 2015, weeks into his reign, Salman ordered Operation Decisive Storm against Houthi forces — the first Saudi airstrikes on another country since the 1990–91 Gulf War. The United Nations estimated 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021. Human Rights Watch documented airstrikes it described as in apparent violation of the laws of war, and human rights organisations alleged the use of cluster munitions against civilians. The King Salman Centre for Relief, established in May 2015, ran more than 400 projects in 40 countries and had spent $1.8 billion by June 2018, including prosthetic limbs for 1,839 Yemeni war casualties. Both facts are the record of the same reign. Domestically the period also produced the upheld sentence of 1,000 lashes and ten years for the blogger Raif Badawi in June 2015, and the case of Ali Mohammed Baqir al-Nimr, arrested at sixteen over pro-democracy protests and released in 2021.

The Fading King

Salman had spinal surgery in the United States in August 2010 and has suffered at least one stroke, leaving his left arm weakened. Reports have described mild vascular dementia and Alzheimer's disease. He had gallbladder surgery in July 2020 and was treated for a lung infection in May 2024. At his accession Al Jazeera noted circulating rumours about his health and his capacity for long working hours, and described him as widely believed to be conservative, holding traditional views on political reform and social change.

Why Salman Is Called a Genius

Nothing in the record supports the word in its ordinary sense, and the entry should say so first. He is a hereditary monarch with a religious education, no scholarly, scientific or creative output of any kind, and a reign in which his son has increasingly done the governing. There is no work to point to.

What is defensible is narrower and administrative. Forty-eight years running a single province, during which its capital became one of the major cities of the Middle East, is a long executive tenure with physical results anyone can go and look at — the closest thing to a merit record he possesses. Beyond that lies a genuine and specific competence: factional management. He spent decades as the trusted arbiter of a royal family of thousands, and then converted that standing, at seventy-nine and in poor health, into the swiftest reordering of the Saudi succession since the state was founded. Removing two crown princes in succession and installing a son in his thirties over the objections of an entire generation of uncles is not a trivial political act. It is the exercise of accumulated authority and precise knowledge of where every relative stands.

The honest limits are severe. The Yemen intervention he ordered has been assessed by the UN in six-figure casualty terms and by human rights bodies as involving apparent violations of the laws of war. Reporting on his cognitive decline raises a real question about how much of the past decade's policy is his at all. And absolute monarchy generates no independent evidence of a ruler's ability, because there is no arena in which he can be contradicted or tested. Whatever Salman's gift is, no one outside his family has ever been permitted to measure it.

Legacy

He is the bridge — the last king of the founder's generation and the man who handed the state to the next. Saudi Arabia after him will be run by a grandson of Ibn Saud rather than a son, which is the transition every Saudi monarch since 1953 had deferred. Salman made it happen, and made it happen on his own branch's terms. What that succession finally amounts to will be judged on his son's record, not his.