The Saudi family has devised an obvious but perhaps unprecedented device for holding on to power: consider the royal family not to number just a handful of princes but in the thousands. (Of course, it helps when the king has forty or more sons.) Then have the royals staff most high-level positions in the government and the military. Inspire a family loyalty so that internal differences can be put aside in the common purpose of ruling the country. Do this and you end up with, as the joke goes, the only family-owned business with membership in the United Nations.
In such a system, succession to the throne has immense importance. Henderson, a reporter for the Financial Times, does his topic justice with an original and well-researched study of the Saud line in the twilight years of King Fahd. He first establishes several principles of Saudi rule. It's not a simple matter: half-brothers, cadet lines, and generational solidarity all bear on succession. While nominally in the hand of the religious authorities (the 'ulama), the family actually makes the ultimate decisions on succession.
Henderson then applies these rules to today's situation and sketches five alternate scenarios. He observes that the sooner Fahd dies, the more likely he will be succeeded by Crown Prince 'Abdullah; but the longer he lives, the harder it is to predict who will follow him.
