Morocco’s royal family is small and

Morocco’s royal family is small and not especially powerful. Mohammed
VI has just one brother (who holds no state post other than a
pair of nominal military ranks) and one ten-year-old son. Michael Herb
asserts categorically that in Morocco the king’s relatives “do not maintain
any sort of monopoly over the key cabinet posts.” In Saudi Arabia,
by contrast, there may be as many as seven-thousand princes, and senior
figures among them run the key ministries of state. The founder of the
current regime, Ibn Saud (1876–1953), had 22 wives and 45 sons. Most
of his sons, too, had many wives and many sons. Since Ibn Saud’s death
more than sixty years ago, every Saudi king has been one of his sons,
including the current occupant of the throne, 89-year-old Abdullah. The
heir-apparent, Abdullah’s 78-year-old half-brother Prince Salman, is
also Saudi Arabia’s first deputy premier and defense minister. “The extended
royal family,” writes a journalistic observer, “is said to include
roughly thirty thousand members” who control nearly all important state
posts