The Kingdom hired well
Lebanese advisors in the building of Saudi Arabia, and what it says about both.
There is a habit in diaspora writing of claiming credit. It is usually the weakest thing on the page, and it is worth avoiding here, because the real story is better than the boastful version.
Saudi Arabia was built by Saudis. King Abdulaziz Al Saud unified the country and every decision that mattered was his. What is interesting, and genuinely unusual for the period, is who he chose to have in the room while he made them.
From the 1920s onward the King recruited educated, multilingual Arabs from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and Palestine into the machinery of a state that did not yet exist. Not as figureheads. As translators, drafters, negotiators and ambassadors, doing the technical work of turning a new country into one that other countries would deal with.
That was a decision about talent, made by a ruler who could have surrounded himself with people who agreed with him. Several of those he chose came from Mount Lebanon.
Fuad Hamza joined King Abdulaziz’s court in December 1926 as a translator and personal adviser. He was born in Abey, in Mount Lebanon, in 1899, of Druze background, and educated at the American College of Beirut and the Jerusalem Law School.
One point of honesty before anything else. His origins are genuinely contested. Some sources describe him as Palestinian, and The Times reported in 1936 that his family came from Ramallah. The record here says a Lebanese connection has to be real rather than convenient, so it is stated plainly rather than tidied away: he was born in Mount Lebanon, and where his family came from before that is disputed.
What is not disputed is what he did.
By 1930 he was deputy foreign minister. In 1931 he sat on the council of deputies as undersecretary of foreign affairs. He signed a treaty of amity with Egypt in 1936. He took part in the London Conference on Palestine in 1939. He served as Saudi ambassador to France, and later as envoy to the United States. In 1947 he was made minister of development. He held the deputy foreign minister role until he died in 1951, aged fifty two.
He worked directly under Prince Faisal, the future king. For roughly twenty five years, a man from a village in Mount Lebanon helped draft how the Kingdom spoke to the rest of the world.
Rihani was not an official. He was a Lebanese American writer from Freike who, in 1922, travelled through the Arabian Peninsula meeting its rulers at a moment when almost no outsider had.
He and King Abdulaziz became friends. Rihani acted as an informal interpreter of the Saudi position to Western diplomats and, in 1928, published Ibn Sa’oud of Arabia: His People and His Land, which introduced the King and his project to English speaking readers who had barely heard of either.
That is a particular kind of service, and an easy one to underrate. Before a state has embassies it needs someone who can explain it. Rihani did that for Saudi Arabia in the language of the countries that would decide how to treat it.
He is already on this record for the Pen League in New York. It is the same man, and the same skill, pointed at a different problem.
Hariri’s Saudi story starts with construction, not politics.
In 1977 he took a contract to build a palace at Taif for King Khalid, ahead of an Islamic summit, in six months. He delivered. That performance won the confidence of the then crown prince Fahd and led, unusually, to Saudi nationality.
What followed was two decades as King Fahd’s envoy on Lebanon. From 1983 he shuttled between capitals working toward an end to the civil war.
The credit here needs stating carefully, because the popular version overstates it. King Fahd entrusted the direction of the Lebanon effort to Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Kingdom’s ambassador in Washington. Hariri was the moving part: travelling, negotiating, and paying to bring dozens of Lebanese deputies to Taif in 1989 for the conference that produced the agreement ending fifteen years of war.
The Taif Agreement was a Saudi achievement, hosted on Saudi soil and driven by Saudi authority. Hariri was the Lebanese instrument of it, and it is hard to think of another private businessman of any nationality who has done something comparable for the country he came from.
He became Prime Minister of Lebanon in 1992 and remained close to the Saudi court until his assassination in 2005.
Read together, these are not stories about Lebanese influence over Saudi Arabia. They are stories about a Saudi state confident enough to hire the best people it could find, at a time when it had every excuse not to.
That confidence is the striking part. A new country, in a hostile century, building its foreign ministry with the help of a Druze lawyer from Mount Lebanon, and letting a Lebanese American writer explain it to the world.
The Lebanese side of it fits a pattern this record keeps finding. Not capital, not territory, not power. Language, drafting, negotiation, the ability to move between worlds and be trusted in both. It is what the Lebanese kept exporting, and it is what kept getting hired.
Both halves of that deserve the credit. One side knew what it needed. The other could do it.