Reform-minded member of the Saudi royal family known as the Red Prince who championed democracy and women's rights
Talal bin Abdulaziz was a senior member of the Saudi Arabian royal family – a son of the modern kingdom's founder and first ruler, half-brother of its subsequent monarchs, and uncle of the present and deeply controversial Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Like many Saudi princes, Talal was also immensely wealthy, but he was a far from conventional member of a dynasty long renowned for its caution and conservatism. He was defiantly liberal, a staunch advocate of reform, and a champion of greater democracy and women's rights in a kingdom where both concepts were alien.
The Red Prince, as he was known, paid for his views. In the early 1960s Talal was effectively exiled after founding the Free Princes Movement to campaign for political liberalisation. For several years he stayed in Cairo and allied himself with President Nasser of Egypt, the arch-enemy of the Saudi regime, before making his peace with King Faisal and returning home.
For the rest of his long life Talal continued to advocate reform, but enjoyed little success. He died just weeks after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi (obituary, October 23, 2018), the journalist killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October, allegedly on the orders of the crown prince, and scarcely a year after embarking, aged 86, on a hunger strike to protest against his nephew's new "tyranny".
Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was born in Taif in 1931, the 20th of the 45 sons of King Abdulaziz, the founder of Saudi Arabia. His mother was Munaiyir, an Armenian woman whose family had fled the genocide perpetrated on her people by the Ottoman Empire in 1915. Reputedly illiterate but beautiful, she was the king's fifth wife, marrying him when she was 12 and he was aged 45. Munaiyir converted from Christianity to Islam and was said to be Abdulaziz's favourite wife. Talal duly became one of his favourite sons.
Raised and educated in his father's palace in Riyadh, Talal was one of the first Saudi princes to travel widely and to learn foreign languages. His father put him in charge of the palace finances while he was still in his teens and appointed him communications minister in 1952.
By that stage Talal had become one of the richest Saudi princes. He had also married the first of the four wives with whom he would have 15 children. His nine sons include Al-Waleed bin Talal, the businessman, investor and philanthropist who parlayed a $600,000 gift from his father in the 1980s into one of the world's biggest fortunes.
During the 1950s Talal was said to have opened the first private hospital and the first girls' school in Riyadh. He resigned as communications minister in 1955, but was appointed minister of finance and national economy in 1960. By that stage his father's successor, King Saud, was locked in a deepening feud with his brother, Crown Prince Faisal. Talal and several of his brothers formed the Free Princes Movement, which called for a constitutional monarchy with many of the king's powers devolved to a national council and the development of a constitution to replace laws based on a clerical interpretation of the Koran.
Talal was punished with de facto exile for airing these almost heretical ideas. He divided his time between Beirut, where he took the daughter of a former Lebanese prime minister as his second wife, and Cairo. For a while he became a pariah in his homeland as he openly criticised the Saudi regime. His properties were seized, his assets frozen and his passport revoked. In 1964, however, after Faisal deposed King Saud, Talal declared his loyalty to the new king and was allowed home.
For many years thereafter he largely eschewed politics in favour of humanitarian work, including serving as a special envoy for Unicef and as a founding member of the Independent Commission on International Humanitarian Issues in Geneva.
As one of the more westernised of the Saudi royals, Talal employed a British nanny and American teachers for his children. "My branch of the family was always different from the rest of Al Saud – open, controversial and diverse. We celebrate Christmas," Princess Sara, a daughter by his third wife, once told an interviewer.
A curious episode occurred in 2012 that cast some doubt on Talal's liberal credentials: Princess Sara sought political asylum in Britain for herself and her four children, saying that she feared for her safety in Saudi Arabia. "Everything goes back to a certain aspect that I don't discuss in public," she said. "Something happened with my father and he didn't take it lightly. He retaliated against me and wanted to crush me. I had been his closest. I had been his favourite. It shook my world."
By the turn of the century Talal had regained his position as a key member of the Al Saud family, serving as a senior adviser to Crown Prince Abdullah, a half-brother who succeeded to the throne in 2005. He became a member of the Allegiance Council, a group of senior princes that Abdullah formed in 2006 to choose the crown prince, the heir apparent, as all King Abdulaziz's sons died or reached old age.
Yet he remained a maverick, resigning from the council in 2011 after another of his half-brothers, Prince Nayef, a staunch conservative, was named crown prince. Talal complained that the council had been bypassed and again called for a constitutional monarchy. In 2015 yet another half-brother, Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, succeeded Abdullah as king and two years later Mohammed bin Salman, Talal's nephew and the new king's son, was named the crown prince.
At first sight the elevation of MBS, as he is known, seemed a partial vindication of Talal's fight for reform. MBS portrayed himself as a social liberal and one of his early acts was to give women the right to drive that Talal had long advocated, but he has been accused of orchestrating the murder of Khashoggi.
MBS also ordered the detention, ostensibly on grounds of corruption, of 200 members of the Saudi elite in the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh two years ago. Three of Talal's sons, including Al-Waleed, were among those detained in what was seen as a move by MBS to consolidate his power. Defiant to the last, Talal embarked on a hunger strike, reportedly losing 20lb in a month and, perhaps, hastening his death.
Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Saudi prince and reformer, was born on August 15, 1931. He died on December 22, 2018, aged 87