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FIRST EDITION. 8vo. pp. 306. Publisher's original pale-blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, cartographic endpapers. Black & white photographic frontispiece of Ibn-Saud, decorative double-page maps of Arabia spanning front and back endpapers, 5 maps of Arabia (one full-page). Some spotting to first and last few leaves, some gentle sunning to cloth, generally a very good example. One of the first book-length biographies of the founder of the dynasty, written with admiration and based on first-hand encounters with the ruler, who finally had managed to make himself king in 1932. 'This book is the intimate study of a King Ibn Saud, who is to-day Lord of Arabia. To procure the details necessary for constructing and describing the development of the life of Ibn Saud, H.C. Armstrong visited Arabia and stayed as his guest. Ibn Saud is a fanatic of the strictest puritan teaching of Islam. He lives by the absolute rules of the Koran. In common with Mustapha Kemal, he started from nothing and by his own personality fought his way to success. Born in Riad, the capital of Central Arabia, Ibn saud was forced as a child to fly with his father and take refuge with the savage tribes of the Great South Desert. He grew up a peniless refugee in a cosmopolitan port. When he was twenty-one, with six comrades he raided Riad and captured the Fort, called on the people to help him, took the town and, against immense odds, held it. For twenty years he fought continuously up and down the country against the Turks, against rivals, attempts at murder, and internal treachery, until he had forced the tribes to accept him as master and had conquered all Central Arabia. Then he expanded to the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, even capturing the Sacred City of Mecca and all the Sacred Land of the Hejaz, so that he has become the greatest figure in the Moslem world. H.C. Armstrong has described the development of the rough Bedouin youth, the penniless refugee through war and hardship, into the ruler, the King, the Lord of Arabia. His personal life, his creation of a fighting force and a stable people; how he reacted to success and defeat; his shrewd diplomacy, his marriages and his one great abiding love for his queen, Jauhara; and how with material success there grew in him a belief that he had a divine mission to accomplish' (text on wrappers we had previously).
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