Dissertation_Dr Faisal Almubarak

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departments to handle the growing government functions, health clinics, royal guest
department, security and army, among others.
Abdul-Aziz authorized the creation of a small advisory body on legislative matters,
called Majlis Ashshura (Consultative Counsel) as well as local municipal, village, and
tribal counsels. In 1931, six departments were established to handle provincial affairs of
which each respective department's head formed Majlis al Wukala (Council of Agents).
Abdul-Aziz denied the Hijaz region constitutional autonomy, for Hijaz, traditionally the
center of power in Arabia, demanded careful attention by the new Najdi control. The King
ruled through his viceroy, Faisal, who was no less absolute in the province than elsewhere
in the country. However, the King gave the Hijaz region representative institutions over
which his second son, Amir Faisal, presided.
These institutions were later to grow into ministries. They included the agency of
finance, foreign affairs, and defense. Their purview expanded beyond the Hijaz area to the
entire nation during the decade of the 1940s. Following the Najdi control, Hijaz's cities of
Jeddah and Makkah progressively lost their institutions, hence centrality in the nation's
political sphere, to the new capital, Riyadh. The growth of state apparatuses was
culminated in the promulgation of the Council of Ministers in October, 1953, one month
before Abdul-Aziz's death. These developments marked the transition from the
chieftainship of the old order to the bureaucratic ministerial administration of contemporary
Saudi Arabia.
Generally speaking, the political development model which Saudi Arabia has been
following since its founding by Abdul-Aziz and later carried by his heirs corroborates what
Huntington and Nelson describe as the autocratic model of development. In this model,
power is concentrated, formal political participation is nullified, economic growth is
enhanced and socioeconomic equality is promoted as a way of securing appeal to legitimacy
among the governed masses. 11 To secure its control, Huntington and Nelson argued, the
government must maintain control of power and create an effective bureaucracy to
implement policy. In less endowed developing countries, such a task is formidable. In the
case of Saudi Arabia, the government used its oil revenues to attain wide leaps in pushing
for modernization without duly disturbing the delicate balance of social groups, whether
traditionalists, secularists, upper or low income groups, while excluding the urban middle
class from politics. In short, in the Saudi model of development, accelerated modernization