The directive of the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Salman bin Abdulaziz, was based on the proposal of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to name the electronic university after Prince Musaed bin Abdul Rahman, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is preparing to celebrate the anniversary of its National Day on the “First of the Libra,” the twenty-third of September.
Among the historical approvals is the decision of the Council of Ministers, which established September 23rd as a national day, was issued in 1965, and Prince Musaed was a member of the Council of Ministers at that time, and today comes the naming of the Saudi Electronic University in his name coinciding with the anniversary of the National Day.
The royal directive also came to revive the memory of one of the senior statesmen and a pioneer of Saudi thought, politics and administration who died about 40 years ago (December 1986), and he was not keen on publishing his biography, let alone his memoirs or memories.
As for what is available about him in the press archives, it does not go beyond official news, and the most prominent person who wrote about him was Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Shubaili, who interviewed him in television interviews, then published it in a book that included some testimonies of his contemporaries, and covered aspects of his biography. I consider it the only book that dealt with the biography and career of Prince Musaed, so I am not surprised that most of today’s generation of men and women in Saudi administration and politics do not know about Prince Musaed and his political and administrative career. Perhaps some of them first heard about it when His Highness Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, in a television interview in 2021, praised his forward-looking vision and his proposal many decades ago to develop residential complexes by the state, not the private sector. This idea was met with opposition at the time from some ministers and officials.
It is not surprising that the idea of honoring the memory of Prince Musaed bin Abdul Rahman by naming a university that was established 15 years ago was a forward-looking vision for the future of education. Prince Mohammed also revived his uncle Musaed’s forward-looking vision by establishing the Roshen Company, affiliated with the Public Investment Fund.
It is as if the maker of “Kingdom’s Vision 2030” wanted to say with this honor that every person with a forward-looking vision and diligent work to serve the nation will be honored, even if the time to implement his vision has not yet come.
Personally, I do not consider Prince Musaed only a minister or a statesman, but I also see him as one of the state’s thinkers who had a high contribution and active participation in a period of transformations and changes that required restructuring the government’s work and decision-making mechanisms. He had his approach, which became one of the rules of Saudi government work, as described by one of his most prominent assistants and successor in the Ministry of Finance, Sheikh Muhammad Aba Al-Khail: “He viewed the public job through legal foundations, which means that the public employee is entrusted with implementing the general rules established to achieve Justice... This method has become a curriculum or school in government administration whose method is summarized in adhering to the concepts and rules of public service and reviewing research topics with direct professional clarity. He was very insistent on expressing his opinion directly, defending it clearly, then adhering to what was decided and implementing it precisely, and demanding that those who worked with him abide by this rule.
Those who knew him unanimously agreed that he was characterized by wisdom, farsightedness, intelligence, distance from appearances, integrity, honesty, and pursuit of justice, depth of vision, breadth and diversity of culture, abundance of experience, realism, and ability to analyze.
As for his scientific and cultural formation, he studied in the books of Ibn Musaybih, then under the scholars of Riyadh. Sheikh Muhammad bin Jubair says: “The Prince is an assistant to the pursuit of knowledge for many sheikhs, including Sheikh Muhammad bin Ibrahim, and he used to attend their circles as a student or listener. He is counted among the students of knowledge, so they do not gossip or disagree. He also benefited from his library, reading his various books, and conducting interviews with its visitors, including students of knowledge, politicians, intellectuals, and historians. In addition to his intellectual meetings, which he holds at his home with scholars, writers, and intellectuals, in which discussions and debates take place that reflect the breadth of his understanding, the diversity of his knowledge, and the depth of his thinking.
As for the library, its headquarters were located at the edge of his house located in the Al-Hilla neighborhood inside the old wall of Riyadh, then it moved to his new home in the Al-Shumaisi neighborhood. It was the first private library to be opened to the public in Riyadh in 1944, and he was keen to provide it with rare and diverse books, magazines, and modern publications. Despite all this, he wanted to learn more through the educational tapes and programs provided by the British Broadcasting Corporation. All of this, in addition to the innate preparation, makes us face a personality with a broad intellectual formation that exceeded the limits of the traditional qualifications of an administration man at that time.
This reveals a complex philosophical intellectual formation that combined a legal foundation, cognitive depth, self-learning, and openness to the culture of the times. On the other hand, we can see this intertwined formation (the lessons of the sheikhs, early exposure to modern publications, intellectual debates, and self-learning), and its influence on the personality of Prince Musaed, which had many dimensions and combined legal discipline, a broad vision, and administrative strictness.
Despite Prince Musaed’s legal background, and Aba Al-Khail’s description of him as a jurist and a man of legal ijtihad, I noticed that his personality was characterized by strong argumentation and strength of personality, and his combination of prestige and humility, simplicity and rigor. I also saw two aspects in his thought that were rarely found in many men of the time in which he lived...
The first is the legal sense, which I observed through my attendance at some of his councils in Taif and listening to his conversations and visions. This is supported by his organizational imprint in the agencies he took over, the influence of which still remains today. This is particularly evident in the Office of Grievances and General Control, then in the Ministry of Finance, in addition to the testimony of Sheikh Saleh Al-Hussein, the legal expert for the Ministry of Finance during the reign of Prince Musaed: “In his discussions about jurisprudence, (law), economics, or politics, he was often embarrassed - With his acquaintances - specialist foreign experts who may initially be arrogant with their expertise, then find themselves facing a man who is familiar with matters and understands their dimensions.
The second is the reformist tendency through his intellectual project, which was represented in his ideas and visions towards reform, renewal of thought, and development of society. Since his childhood, the man was concerned with the public good and the future of the nation. He was not a theoretician. He tried to implement what he preached, not only in his private life, but in all the responsibilities and tasks entrusted to him, and he continued to do so throughout his life.
What is noteworthy about this is that in 1940, when he was in his twenties, he wrote two letters in which he expressed some of his ideas and visions, and he considered them the beginning of the foundation of his intellectual project. As for the title he chose for the intellectual series that he began publishing and intended to continue publishing, “Advice to My Brothers in Religion and Lineage,” the first message was titled “The Goals That Islam Aims for, Our Position on them, and a Statement of What Must Be Done,” and the second was titled “On Education and Education,” in which he called for general reform and the renaissance of society, keeping pace with the times, developing education and the necessity of learning the arts and sciences, encouraging publishing, opening public clubs, establishing schools for girls and special clubs for women, and other ideas that It was not welcomed at the time, so he stopped issuing more of it.
What is striking here is not the ideas alone, but the history of their presentation. Some of what he called for in the early forties did not become part of the social and educational transformation until many years later, and from this angle it is possible to understand the description of his ideas as having transcended the time environment in which they appeared.
Dr. Abdul Rahman Al-Shubaili says that Prince Musaed, in his methods and review of the topics of the two treatises, followed the methodology of historians and social scientists in adopting the philosophy of history, while drawing lessons from the study of causes and effects, and that the enlightened thought and advanced opinions they contained transcended the era in which they were written, and the surroundings and environment in which they appeared.
As for his political and administrative career, he began attending the councils of King Abdulaziz, then King Saud, with senior advisors without being officially appointed. The first position he held was the presidency of the Board of Grievances (October - October 1954), then the Controller of State Accounts (June - June 1957), then he became an advisor to the King, a Minister of State, and a member of the Council of Ministers (August - August 1957), in addition to his presidency of the Board of Grievances and General Audit. He became Minister of the Interior (July - July 1960), then Minister of Finance and National Economy (March 1962) until he requested his exemption (August 1975). During this career, he was assigned a number of political tasks, and headed a number of councils and committees. Among them: The Special Committee, as well as the Islamic Affairs Committee at the Royal Court.
However, there are 3 remarkable milestones in his political and administrative career, all of which indicate his intellectual abilities and political standing, and reflect features of his personality, yet no light was shed on them...
The first: his nomination to the Ministry of Education during the reign of King Abdul Aziz, when the king asked him to express what he wanted. The prince says: “So I presented some matters on which my success depended, but there were many sensitivities at that time regarding reform and change in education, so the situation froze.”
Second: His acting presidency of the Council of Ministers, and the statement issued by the Office of the Prime Minister stated that he was appointed to carry out the work of the Chairman of the Council, Prince (King) Faisal, during his absence on his hospital trip in Switzerland (October to December - December 1959), and Prince Musaed was considered the only one to hold the title of acting Prime Minister.
Third: He assumed the presidency of the committee preparing the basic system of government, formed by a decision of the Council of Ministers after the announcement of the ministerial statement known as the Ten Point Program (November 1962). The committee included in its membership: Ministers Ibrahim Al-Suwaiyel, Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Abdul Rahman Aba Al-Khail, Judge Sheikh Muhammad bin Jubair, and member of the Shura Council Ahmed Muhammad Jamal. It appears to me that the committee completed its work and prepared the draft system, but the circumstances at that time were not conducive to approving it.
That is the intellectual prince, Musaed, son of Imam Abdul Rahman, who was a bridge between the generation of the Imam and the generation of the ministry, the minister in the state of institutions, the thinker who established rules and theories for government work that are still in place, and wrote early on reform, development and education, the intellectual who opened his private library to the public, before public libraries were opened, and the jurist who was versed in the sciences of Sharia and its purposes, who established the Office of Grievances and Control, before the administrative judiciary and financial control became an established tradition, and he managed finances. More than a decade, in the most important years of building the modern economy, in addition to that it was a university in which senior statesmen graduated, without obtaining a university degree.
