RIYADH: The coffee was served, then the dates. And at that, Prince Talal, the son of Saudi Arabia’s founder and long the ruling family’s bete noire, smiled wryly. “This is what we used to live on,” he said, “dates and camel’s milk.”

It was his way of saying: To look ahead, sometimes we need to look back. Talal is 75 now, still tall and formidable, with a glimmer of defiance as he smoked a cigarette, cautiously doled out by an aide. But humbled by back pain, he is a shadow of the man once known as Saudi Arabia’s ‘Red Prince’. The colour represented his politics, a leftist bent that as a young man turned him against the ruling Saud family, shook the kingdom and led him into exile in Lebanon and Egypt.

“Here, the family is the master and the ruler,” he said of his brothers and cousins, as he sat at Fakhariya Palace. “This style can’t continue the same way. There has to be change in the nature of authority, if things are going to change in the kingdom itself.”

Talal takes a debate about democratic reform in the Arab world, defined lately by the Bush administration, and illustrates a broader, more enduring context, one that speaks to experience rather than promise.

Talal advocates a constitution that would bind an absolute monarchy by law, ‘a social contract between the ruler and those who are ruled’. The parliament, now an appointed, relatively toothless body known as the Consultative Council, would be at least partially elected, with the right to oversee the budget, monitor the government and question ministers, he said.

Women? “Right now, we have more than two million female students,” he said, shaking his head. “When they graduate, where are they going to go? Either you close the schools and leave them to illiteracy or you grant them an opportunity to work.”

Talal was reputed to be the favourite son of Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, the desert warrior who fielded a puritanical army in his conquest of much of the Arabian Peninsula between 1902 and 1925. He became king in 1932, eventually siring Talal and 35 other recognised heirs, the descendants of an array of marriages that cemented his connections with the country’s fractious tribes. Talal’s mother was a servant who, it is said, eventually became his favourite wife.

Talal was among the savvier of the children, spending time in Beirut, where he married Mona Al-Solh, the daughter of Lebanon’s first post-independence prime minister. (One of their children, Walid bin Talal, is a billionaire Saudi investor.) For Talal, Lebanon was an introduction to pan-Arab aspirations, espoused by the leading Solh family, and was a taste of the emerging cosmopolitanism of Beirut.

The years after the king’s death in 1953 were unsettled. Power was inherited by his eldest son, Saud ibn Abdul Aziz, a spendthrift more adept at showering largesse on the tribes than administering the country. His brothers soon contested his rule, and Talal navigated the rivalries for influence. Early on, the present Saudi king, Abdullah, was an ally, and in time as a minister, Talal began pushing for reform — a constitution, elections, a parliament and free press. Together, he and his allies became known as the ‘Free Princes’, a name taken from the Free Officers that overthrew Egypt’s monarchy in 1952 and were eventually led by Gamal Abdel-Nasser. He admits now to moving too fast.

“We were too young,” he said. “We wanted 100 per cent, but if we took 50, even 60 per cent, we would have been blessed.”

King Saud rejected the idea of a constitution, and Talal bitterly criticised the decision in statements to Egyptian and Lebanese newspapers. When Talal went for vacation in Beirut in 1961, the king moved against him, declaring him persona non grata.

He recalled the confrontation at the Saudi Embassy in Beirut as the ambassador asked him and his brothers to turn over their travel documents: “I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t have reasons, it’s the order of King Saud.’ I said, ‘If the passport is the property of Saud, go ahead. If the passport is the property of the kingdom, then I have every right to keep it.’ And I gave him the passport.”

Against his better judgment, Talal and four brothers sought help in 1962 from Nasser, who had electrified a generation with promises of Arab unity, the liberation of Palestine and denunciations of regimes he deemed regressive, Saudi Arabia among them. Unlike most of the Saudi royal family, Talal was enamoured with the Egyptian president — he feels the same today, he said — but he feared being exploited.

“I said to Nasser, we came here just for the passports because we want to go to Lebanon. I didn’t want to stay with him. I knew his policy. I knew his way of thinking,” Talal said. “He told me, ‘I’ll give you 500 passports.’”

The passports didn’t come for two months. In the meantime, Talal spoke on the Voice of the Arabs, a Cairo-based radio station that often carried Nasser’s stentorian voice. The speeches — denouncing Saudi Arabia’s rulers and calling for democratic reform — solidified his reputation as the Red Prince. It would be another two years before he returned to Saudi Arabia.

For years, Talal remained silent, amassing a fortune and running a philanthropy. But in past years, he has begun pressing the issue of reform again, often from Fakhariya Palace. To him, the family can bring about change by redefining its role.

“In the 21st century, the king should be the guardian of the law, but the laws and legislation should come from the people, and the people should elect the members of the parliament,” Talal said, sitting next to a rendering of the family tree.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service