A fierce power struggle between Ibn Saʿud's most senior sons, Saʿud and Faysal, erupted immediately after he died. Throughout the 1950s, the Saʿudi state came close to collapse on several occasions and the future of the country seemed uncertain as a result of the volatile internal political struggle between the two Saʿudi brothers.

Throughout this period, the political upheavals of the Arab world (the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the Arab–Israeli war of 1967) influenced political and social events in Saudi Arabia. Various external ideologies, for example, Naṣir's pan-Arabism and socialism and later Iraqi/Syrian Baʿthism threatened the very foundation of Saʿudi rule and became the impetus for the development of Faysal's Islamic politics in the early 1960s. Faysal highlighted the Islamic credentials of the Saʿudi state. This became a counter-strategy with which Saudi Arabia aimed to undermine the wider claims of Arab nationalism and establish itself as an important player in Arab regional politics after decades of remaining on the margins of an Arab world dominated by Egypt.

This chapter is a chronological account of the internal political struggle within the Saʿudi royal family against the background of the Arab regional context. While the internal rivalry between Saʿud and Faysal had its own local reasons, the political struggle cannot be fully understood without exploring Saudi Arabia's relationship with the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s.