Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud (Arabic: عبد العزيز بن عبد الرحمن آل سعود; 15 January 1875[note 3] – 9 November 1953), known in the Western world mononymously as Ibn Saud (Arabic: ابن سعود; Ibn Suʿūd),[note 4] was the founder and first king of Saudi Arabia, reigning from 23 September 1932 until his death in 1953.

[1] Ibn Saud was the son of Abdul Rahman bin Faisal, Emir of Nejd, and Sara bint Ahmed Al Sudairi.

Ibn Saud reconquered Riyadh in 1902, starting three decades of conquests that made him the ruler of nearly all of central and north Arabia.

[3] As King, he presided over the discovery of petroleum in Saudi Arabia in 1938 and the beginning of large-scale oil production after World War II.

[5][6] He was the fourth child and third son of Abdul Rahman bin Faisal,[7] one of the last rulers of the Emirate of Nejd, the Second Saudi State, a tribal sheikhdom centered on Riyadh.

[15] In 1891, the House of Saud's long-term regional rivals led by Muhammad bin Abdullah Al Rashid conquered Riyadh.

[17] Ibn Saud developed a rapport with the Kuwaiti ruler Mubarak Al Sabah and frequently visited his majlis.

[7] On 14 November 1901 Ibn Saud and some relatives, including his half-brother Muhammad and several cousins (amongst them Abdullah bin Jiluwi), set out on a raiding expedition into the Nejd, targeting mainly tribes associated with the Rashidis.

[19] These events led to a decrease in the number of Ibn Saud's raiders, and his father also asked him to cancel his plans to capture Riyadh.

This victory also weakened the alliance between Mubarak Al Sabah, ruler of Kuwait, and Ibn Saud due to the former's concerns about the increase of Saudi power in the region.

[17] In the same year, he instituted an agrarian policy to settle the nomadic pastoralist bedouins into colonies and to replace their tribal organizations with allegiance to the Ikhwan.

The British Foreign Office had previously begun to support Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and Emir of the Hejaz, by sending T. E. Lawrence to him in 1915.

He met Percy Cox, British High Commissioner in Iraq, to draw boundaries[31] and the treaty saw Britain recognize many of Ibn Saud's territorial gains.

[31] In 1925, Ibn Saud's forces captured the holy city of Mecca from Sharif Hussein, ending 700 years of Hashemite rule.

[35] On 20 May 1927, the British government signed the Treaty of Jeddah, which abolished the Darin protection agreement and recognized the independence of the Hejaz and Nejd, with Ibn Saud as their ruler.

The few portions of central Arabia that had not been overrun by the Saudi-Ikhwan forces had treaties with London, and Ibn Saud was sober enough to see the folly of provoking the British by pushing into these areas.

[citation needed] Ibn Saud's newly found oil wealth brought a great deal of power and influence that he would use to advantage in the Hejaz.

In fact, several such statements were issued to Muslim governments around the world as a result of beatings suffered by the pilgrims visiting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

With his rivals eliminated, Ibn Saud's ideology was in full force, ending nearly 1,400 years of accepted religious practices surrounding the Hajj, the majority of which were sanctioned by a millennium of scholarship.

For example, he built very strong ties with Rashed Al-Khuzai from the Al Fraihat tribe, one of the most influential and royally established families during the Ottoman Empire.

"[55] Ibn Saud positioned Saudi Arabia as neutral in World War II, but was generally considered to favor the Allies.

[60] The other meeting was with British prime minister Winston Churchill in the Grand Hotel du Lac on the shores of the Fayyoun Oasis, fifty miles south of Cairo, in February 1945.

Mohammed Leopold Weiss reported in 1929 that one of Ibn Saud's spouses had poisoned the King in 1924, causing him to have poor sight in one eye.

[68] One of the significant publications about Ibn Saud in the Western media was a comprehensive article by Noel Busch published in Life magazine in May 1943 which introduced him as a legendary monarch.

[75] He gave two of his salukis, a male and a mate, to British Field Marshal Sir Henry Maitland Wilson who brought them to Washington D.C., USA.

From a young age, she ingrained in him a strong sense of family destiny and motivated him to regain the lost glory of the House of Saud.

[78][79] Another assassination attempt occurred in 1951 when Captain Abdullah Al Mandili, a member of Royal Saudi Air Force, tried to bomb the King's camp from an airplane.

[80] Ibn Saud's eldest son Turki, who was the crown prince of the Kingdoms of Nejd and Hejaz, died at age 18, predeceasing his father.

[88] Ibn Saud repeated the following views about the British authorities many times: "The English are my friends, but I will walk with them only so far as my religion and honor will allow.

"[96] In some instances he made use of antisemitic tropes, calling the Jews a "dangerous and hostile race" with an "exaggerated love of money",[94] accusing them of "making trouble wherever they exist" or igniting conflicts between Muslims and Christians.