Sultan bin Abdulaziz

Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud (1928 – 22 October 2011) (Arabic: سلطان بن عبدالعزيز آل سعود‎), called Sultan al-Khair (Arabic: سلطان الخير‎, Sultan of goodness) in Saudi Arabia, was the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia from 2005 to 2011.

Early life and education

Sultan was born in Riyadh in 1928. He was the 12th son of King Abdulaziz and his mother was Hassa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi. He was the second of the Sudairi Seven. Prince Sultan, along with many of his brothers, received his early education in religion, modern culture, and diplomacy at the royal court.

Early experience

His career in public service began in 1940 when he was made a deputy to then Riyadh governor or emir, Prince Nasser. In 1947, Prince Sultan replaced Prince Nasser as governor of Riyadh. Prince Sultan also assisted King Abdulaziz's attempts to establish a national administrative system based on the Islamic Sharia law during this period. In 1947, Prince Sultan oversaw ARAMCO's construction of the Kingdom's rail link between Dammam and Riyadh. He was appointed as the kingdom’s first minister of agriculture in 1953 and minister of transport in 1955.

Abd al-Aziz

Abd al-Aziz (Arabic: عبد العزيز‎, DMG: ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz), frequently also transliterated Abdul Aziz, is a male Muslim given name and in modern usage, surname. It is built from the Arabic words Abd, al- and Aziz. The name means "servant of the Almighty", Al-Azīz being one of the names of God in the Qur'an, which give rise to the Muslim theophoric names.

The letter a of the al- is unstressed, and can be transliterated by almost any vowel, often by u. So the first part can appear as Abdel, Abdul or Abd-al. The second part may appear as Aziz or Azeez, or in other ways. The whole name is subject to variable spacing and hyphenation.

It may refer to:

Males

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia (ⁱ/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, ⁱ/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km² (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast, and Yemen to the south. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid inhospitable desert or barren landforms.

The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. The country has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamic lines. The ultra-conservative Wahhabism religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spreading largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca), and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. The Kingdom has a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million are Saudi nationals and 8 million are foreigners.

Sultan

Sultan (/ˈsʌltən/; Arabic: سلطان‎ sulṭān, pronounced [sʊlˈtˤɑːn, solˈtˤɑːn]) is a noble title with several historical meanings. Originally, it was an Arabic abstract noun meaning "strength", "authority", "rulership", derived from the verbal noun سلطة sulṭah, meaning "authority" or "power". Later, it came to be used as the title of certain rulers who claimed almost full sovereignty in practical terms (i.e., the lack of dependence on any higher ruler), albeit without claiming the overall caliphate, or to refer to a powerful governor of a province within the caliphate.

The dynasty and lands ruled by a sultan are referred to as a sultanate (سلطنة salṭanah).

A feminine form of sultan, used by Westerners, is sultana or sultanah; however, this styling misconstrues the roles of wives of sultans. In a similar usage, the wife of a German field marshal might be styled Frau Feldmarschall (in French, similar constructions of the type madame la maréchale are quite common). The rare female leaders in Muslim history are correctly known as "sultanas". However, the wife of the sultan in the Sultanate of Sulu is styled as the "panguian" and sultan's chief wife in many sultanate in Indonesia and Malaysia is known as "permaisuri". Special case in Brunei, the Queen Consort is known as Pengiran Isteri with suffix Pengiran Anak if the queen consort is a royal princess.

Crown prince

A crown prince or crown princess is the heir apparent to the throne in a royal or imperial monarchy. The wife of a crown prince is also titled crown princess.

Description

The term is now borne as a title mainly in Asia, Scandinavia, and the Middle East; but it may also be used generically to refer to the person or position of the heir apparent in other kingdoms. However, heirs apparent to non-imperial and non-royal monarchies (i.e., wherein the hereditary sovereign holds a title below that of king/queen, e.g., grand duke or prince), crown prince is not used as a title, although it is sometimes used as a synonym for heir apparent.

In Europe, where primogeniture governs succession to all monarchies except those of the Papacy and Andorra, the eldest son (Spain) or eldest child (Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom) of the current monarch fills the role of crown prince or princess, depending upon whether females of the dynasty enjoy personal succession rights. The eldest living child of a monarch is sometimes not the heir apparent or crown prince, because that position can be held by a descendant of a deceased older child who, by "right of representation", inherits the same place in the line of succession that would be held by the ancestor if he or she were still living (e.g., Carl Gustaf, Duke of Jämtland, was Crown Prince of Sweden from 1950 to 1973, as the senior grandson by male primogeniture of King Gustaf VI Adolf of Sweden, although the former Prince Sigvard, Duke of Uppland, was Gustaf VI Adolf's eldest living son, and Prince Bertil, Duke of Halland, his eldest living dynastic son during those years).