A Saudi rebel prince has vision for reform

By Anthony Shadid

updated 3:41 a.m. ET May 14, 2006

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - The coffee was served, then the dates. And at that, Prince Talal, the son of Saudi Arabia's founder and long the ruling family's bete noire, smiled wryly. "This is what we used to live on," he said, "dates and camel's milk."

It was his way of saying: To look ahead, sometimes we need to look back.

Talal is 75 now, still tall and formidable, with a glimmer of defiance as he smoked a cigarette, cautiously doled out by an aide. But humbled by back pain, he is a shadow of the man once known as Saudi Arabia's "Red Prince." The color represented his politics, a leftist bent that as a young man turned him against the ruling Saud family, shook the kingdom and led him into exile in Lebanon and Egypt.

His voice is softer these days, mellowed perhaps by failure, but the words about his family remain remarkably the same.

"Here, the family is the master and the ruler," he said of his brothers and cousins, as he sat at Fakhariya Palace. "This style can't continue the same way. There has to be change in the nature of authority, if things are going to change in the kingdom itself."

Talal is many things: for 50 years, the most liberal figure in a family that remains the most conservative and traditional of the Persian Gulf's monarchies and tribal dynasties; a philanthropist who brings a ruthlessness to business that he once saved for politics; a glimmer of light for the kingdom's liberals, many of whom acknowledge that change here will probably only come under the auspices of religion and its modernization, not through the secular talk of civil society and individual rights.

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Perhaps most compelling, though, is that Talal takes a debate about democratic reform in the Arab world, defined lately by the Bush administration, and illustrates a broader, more enduring context, one that speaks to experience rather than promise. His calls for change are little different than in the 1950s and '60s, when he was dismissed as a communist sympathizer; he remains a critic of U.S. policy, citing Iraq's trauma as the latest example. To Talal, the battle itself is not new, only the players. And in his words are a sense of vindication for ideas he believes are no less crucial today.

"The world has changed, not me," he said. "History has proved the rightness of what I was talking about."

"Some of the members of the family were against those ideas," he added. "Now they're talking about them."

On politics, women, reform
These days, Talal advocates a constitution that would bind an absolute monarchy by law, "a social contract between the ruler and those who are ruled." The parliament, now an appointed, relatively toothless body known as the Consultative Council, would be at least partially elected, with the right to oversee the budget, monitor the government and question ministers, he said.

Women? "Right now, we have more than 2 million female students," he said, shaking his head. "When they graduate, where are they going to go? Either you close the schools and leave them to illiteracy or you grant them an opportunity to work."

He laughed. "Can you imagine, can anyone imagine, that women cannot drive in Saudi Arabia?" he said.

His list went on: Progress is impeded by "the opposition of religious extremists." The religious establishment, long the allies of his family, should stand aside as the country forges a division of power -- judicial, executive and legislative. Along the way, the kingdom, he said, must determine the mechanism of passing the monarchy from the aging sons of the country's founder to their grandsons before simmering rivalries between the branches of the House of Saud flare into the open.

"The goal remains the same," he said, "the participation of people in forming opinions and making decisions."

The same words, a different era: "Now we're freed from the notion of the Red Prince, the name the Americans gave me."

Talal was reputed to be the favorite son of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the desert warrior who fielded a puritanical army in his conquest of much of the Arabian Peninsula between 1902 and 1925. He became in king in 1932, eventually siring Talal and 35 other recognized heirs, the descendants of an array of marriages that cemented his connections with the country's fractious tribes. Talal's mother was a servant -- some say of Circassian origins, others say Armenian -- who, it is said, eventually became his favorite wife.

Talal was among the savvier of the children, spending time in Beirut, where he married Mona al-Solh, the daughter of Lebanon's first post-independence prime minister. (One of their children, Walid bin Talal, is a billionaire Saudi investor.) For Talal, Lebanon was an introduction to pan-Arab aspirations, espoused by the leading Solh family, and was a taste of the emerging cosmopolitanism of Beirut.

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