Word: faisal
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Outside the Cabinet building, where Faisal had spent so many long workdays dealing with affairs of state and receiving his subjects, white tents were set up to shelter the dignitaries who had come to attend the funeral. The rules of Islam's strict Wahhabi sect, to which King Faisal be longed, stipulate that a man's body should be buried as soon as possible after his death; Faisal's funeral, however, was delayed 36 hours in order to await the arrival of foreign delegations...
...accordance with Wahhabi tradition, Faisal's body was washed with soap and hot water, wrapped in a seamless white sheet, and covered by a dark brown shroud. The corpse lay in state briefly at the al Id al Kabir Mosque, which was sur rounded by more than 100,000 mourning Saudis. "Where goes our knight?" some cried. "Where goes our protector against confusion and poverty?" During the fatiha, the introductory in vocation, and again during the prayer for the dead, Arab dignitaries prostrated themselves on the ground. At length, the King's body was transported, with...
King Khalid's first official statements were aimed at as suring the Saudis and the rest of the world that nothing was about to change. "King Faisal," he said, "laid the foundations for a good policy to develop Saudi Arabia and its relations with other countries. I will complete his mission and continue with his policies." Khalid, a quiet man who has never cared much about public affairs, will rely heavily on Crown Prince Fahd; though Khalid took the title of Premier, he named Fahd First Deputy Premier and also allowed him to retain his previous powerful post...
...other hand, Fahd may be more willing than Faisal to accept the existence of Israel as a permanent state in the Middle East, provided that the Israelis relinquish all the territory they seized during the Six-Day War and that they reach an accommodation with the Palestinians...
Internally, Khalid and Fahd will continue the ambitious development Saudi Arabia has set for the next decade based on its oil revenues ($28.9 billion last year). Industrialization will inevitably add to the pressures on the regime to relax Faisal's insistence upon conformity to Islamic laws. So will the presence of up to 2 million foreign workers and dependents in a country whose own population is only 5.7 million...