I am reading about Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, a senior member of the Saudi Arabian royal family and son of the first King of Saudi Arabia. His mother was Armenian and this is Wikipedia's basic summary of the marriage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talal_bin_Abdulaziz_Al_Saud#Early_life
Prince Talal was born in 1931. He is the twentieth son of King Abdulaziz.[2][3] His mother was an Armenian woman, Munaiyir, whose family escaped from the Armenian Genocide experienced under the reign of the Ottoman Empire.[4] Munaiyir was presented by the emir of Unayza to Ibn Saud in 1921 when she was 12 years old and Ibn Saud was 45.[4] Their first child was born when she was 15 years old, a son named Talal. Following tradition, Munaiyir became known as Umm Talal, "mother of Talal". However, in 1927, the three-year-old Talal died. In 1931, Talal was born and named in honor of his late brother, following the Bedouin tradition. It is unknown when Abdulaziz divorced his fourth wife and formally wed Munaiyir. She is reported by her family to have remained illiterate all her life and convert to Islam.[4] Munaiyir was regarded by British diplomats in Saudi Arabia as one of King Abdulaziz’s favourite wives. She was as known for her intelligence as for her beauty.[5] She died in December 1991.[6]
I cannot find much info about this marriage beyond Wikipedia. Aside from the fact that the King of Saudi Arabia was a paedophile, was his marriage to this Armenian girl as benign as Wikipedia implies? It says she survived the Armenian genocide with her family, but was she just one of those orphaned Armenian girls spared during the genocide because she looked pretty and then sold into marriage without the consent of her parents? Or perhaps her parents did indeed survive the genocide but she was kidnapped and taken to Arabia?
Thank you if anybody has information on this girl and her marriage, particularly if you know of Arabic sources.
Wikipedia’s own citations to this article, answer some of your questions:
Apparently, Munayer’s family, including both parents and two siblings, survived the genocide. They were actually in Arabia, traveling south “along old caravan routes deep in the interior of Wahhabi Arabia” according to the link.
However, there are a lot of questions it raises. They fled the genocide in 1915, when Munayer was only 6 years old. She was given as a gift to King Abdulaziz in 1921, when she was 12, by the Emir of Unayza. When did she become the Emir’s property, and how? What happened in those 6 years?
If you consider the geography and political situation at the time, there was no Saudi Arabia. King Abdulaziz ruled a small kingdom in the southern Nejd, centered around Riyadh. The region of Unayza (modern Al Qasim) was part of Shammar, under the rule of the Rashids. The western part of the peninsula was its own separate Vilayets - Hejaz and Yemen. And in between all these were large tracts of almost empty desert, which were disputed territory. Abdulaziz was wandering around, fighting some tribes, making alliances with others, consolidating his rule.
Up north, following the League of Nations mandates, there was British Iraq and British Trans-Jordan, and further west, British Palestine. North of them was French Syria and French Lebanon. There is no obvious reason why anyone fleeing Armenia would enter the Arabian desert. Whether escaping to Beirut or Persia, the route would be very different. Perhaps as the story speculates, they were just lost. Or perhaps they had friends or relatives among Christian or Jewish communities which still existed in Arabia at the time.
At any rate, sometime before 1921, Munayer became the Emir’s property. It doesn’t say if she was forcibly taken from her parents or if they just sold her to the Emir. Both these things happened often enough. Or they may have gotten lost in the desert and died of thirst and she may have been rescued. Or she may have been captured by bandits and traded to the Emir. It just says she was 12 years old in 1921 when she was given to Abdulaziz by the Emir, and she was 15 when she had her first son Talal, and thus she became Umm Talal.
I would be careful about calling Abdulaziz a “pedophile” as you have. There is a long Arab tradition of marrying girls off at a young age, but that doesn’t mean they have sex right after they’re married. It’s more a means for ensuring their virginity, because if they grow up in the husband’s household then the husband’s family has control over them and can ensure their virginity. All we can be sure of is that if she had a son at 15, then she was taken to Abdulaziz’s bed at 14. That’s still the legal age of consent in many European countries, including Austria, Italy, Spain, etc.