Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, (Arabic: فهد بن عبد العزيز السعود Fahd ibn ‘Abd al-‘Azīz Āl Sa‘ūd) (16 March 1921 – 1 August 2005) was the King of Saudi Arabia from 1982 to 2005.
One of thirty-seven sons of Saudi founder Ibn Saud, and the fourth of his six sons who have ruled the Kingdom (Saud, Faisal, Khalid, Fahd, Abdullah and Salman), Fahd ascended to the throne on the death of his half-brother, King Khalid, on 13 June 1982.
Fahd was appointed Crown Prince when Khalid succeeded their half-brother King Faisal, who was assassinated in 1975. Fahd was viewed as the de facto Prime Minister during King Khalid's reign in part due to the latter's ill health.
Fahd suffered a debilitating stroke in 1995, after which he was unable to continue performing his full official duties. His half-brother, Abdullah, the country's Crown Prince, served as de facto regent of the kingdom and succeeded Fahd as monarch upon his death in August 2005.
King Fahd is credited for having introduced the Basic Law of Saudi Arabia in 1992.
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.