Ibn Saud (Abd al‐Aziz ibn Abd al‐Rahman Al Saud) (ca. 1880–1953)

AbstractAbd al‐Aziz ibn Abd al‐Rahman Al Saud was born to the Al Saud family — in reality a clan of thousands of people — in Riyadh in the Najd region of central Arabia. He is known in the West as Ibn Saud,ibnbeing Arabic for “son”; for Arabs, Abd al‐Aziz. He reasserted the power of the Saud family and, for the first time since the early Islamic era, unified most of the Arabian Peninsula in the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, created in 1932. He was the greatest of all Saudi rulers. The new state was forged in war as Ibn Saud crushed his rivals, 1902–1929. With the discovery of vast oil reserves in 1937–1938—income from which did not fully come on‐stream until after Ibn Saud's death—Saudi Arabia became one of the world's richest states and after 1945a key player in the politics of the Middle East. US oil companies exploited Saudi oil reserves, beginning a long relationship with the United States, solidified when Ibn Saud met US President Franklin Roosevelt in Egypt in 1945. By the time that the two men met, Saudi Arabia was on her way to becoming one of the world's largest oil producers, with drilling and extraction led by the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco).