Sudairi Seven
powerful alliance of seven full brothers within the House of Saud
The Sudairi Seven (Arabic: السديريون السبعة, As Sudayriyyūn as Sabʿah), also spelled Sudairy or Sudayri, is the commonly used name for a powerful alliance of seven full brothers within the Saudi royal family. They are also sometimes referred to as the Sudairi clan (Arabic: عائلة السديري ʿĀʾilat as-Sudayrī) or the Sudairi faction. They are among the forty-five sons of the country's founder, King Abdulaziz. The King had more sons with their mother, Hussa bint Ahmed Al Sudairi, than he did with any of his other wives.
The oldest of the Sudairi Seven (Fahd) served as King of Saudi Arabia from 1982 to 2005; the second- and fourth-oldest (Sultan and Nayef) served as Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, but predeceased King Abdullah; and the sixth-oldest (Salman) succeeded Abdullah as king in 2015. One of the Sudairi Seven, Prince Turki, had broken off with his brothers in 1978. Following the death of Prince Abdul Rahman in 2017 only the two youngest of the Seven (Salman and Ahmed) survive, with the youngest brother, Prince Ahmed, under house arrest by order of King Salman.
Origins and composition
In the early twentieth century, King Abdulaziz rapidly expanded his power base in Nejd to establish the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, and became its first king. As part of this process of expansion, he married women from powerful Nejdi and other Arab families to cement his control over all parts of his new domain. It is believed he married as many as 22 women as a result.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sudairi Seven” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.