Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah dies at age 90

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, the powerful U.S. ally who ruled the Islamic regime for the past 20 years, has died, according to Saudi state TV. He was 90.

Abdullah was born in Riyadh in 1924, one of the dozens of sons of Saudi Arabia’s founder, King Abdul-Aziz Al Saud. Abdullah was selected as crown prince in 1982 on the day his half-brother Fahd ascended to the throne. He became de facto ruler in 1995 when a stroke incapacitated Fahd and ascended to the throne when Fahd died in 2005.

Abdullah is widely known for the small but significant ways he reformed the country, including loosening restrictions on the country’s women and the acceptance of modern culture. He invited women to sit on the Shura Council, an unelected body that advises the king and government. He also promised women could run in municipal elections in 2015, allowed two female athletes to compete in the Olympics for the first time in 2012, and granted a small handful of licenses to women to work as lawyers. A university with co-ed classes also opened in the kingdom during his rule and is named after him.

While Abdullah was king, color started appearing in the all-black abayas women must wear in public, state-run TV started playing music, and book fairs opened their doors to female writers and some previously banned books.

Still, religious freedom in the country remains next to nil. Even Abdullah had to be careful not to anger the ultraconservative Wahhabi clerics whose strict interpretation of Islam directs life in Saudi Arabia and who have given religious legitimacy to the Al Saud family’s rule.

“High school textbooks in Saudi Arabia contain highly inflammatory passages that dehumanize or call for violence against non-Wahhabi religious groups such as Christians, Jews, Hindus, Shiites and Sufis,” wrote U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., last year in a letter to President Barack Obama calling for the United States to put more pressure on Saudi Arabia to improve human rights and offer religious freedoms. Rubio was one of several lawmakers to lobby the president on those reforms before Obama’s visit to Saudi Arabia in March 2014.

Wahhabism is believed to have contributed to the ideology of al-Qaeda—15 of the 19 hijackers in the 9/11 terror attacks were from Saudi Arabia. After the attacks, Abdullah worked to distance himself from al-Qaeda and form an alliance with the United States. His commitment to eradicating al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia helped cement his relationship with the United States, but it also resulted in the group’s flight to neighboring Yemen, where it formed a new and dangerous group: Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has taken credit for the terror attack earlier this month on the Paris offices of the publication Charlie Hebdo.

During Abdullah’s reign, Saudi Arabia and the United States also found a common enemy in Iran. Abdullah saw Iran as his country’s biggest rival for power in the region and pushed the United States to do more to counter Iran’s influence. Saudi Arabia’s backing of rebels in Syria—in effort to overthrow the Iran-friendly regime of President Bashar al-Assad—is believed to have worsened the civil war there and contributed to the rise of ISIS in Syria and northern Iraq. Fears of the growing militancy in the region prompted Abdullah to commit Saudi airpower to a U.S.-led coalition fighting the extremists.

Abdullah’s death was announced on Saudi state TV by a presenter who said the king died at 1 a.m. on Friday. His successor was announced as 79-year-old Prince Salman, according to a Royal Court statement carried on the Saudi Press Agency. Salman, Abdullah’s half-brother and his crown prince, had recently taken on some of the ailing king’s responsibilities. Abdullah had more than 30 children from approximately a dozen wives.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.