Saudi Arabia

A state built on an alliance between a family and a religious movement, holding the two holiest cities in Islam and the largest conventional oil reserves. The pact between Muhammad ibn Saud and the preacher Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in 1744 tied dynastic ambition to a purifying doctrine, and the two earlier Saudi states were destroyed by Ottoman and Egyptian forces before Abdulaziz retook Riyadh in 1902 and spent thirty years conquering the peninsula, proclaiming the kingdom in 1932. Oil was found in commercial quantity in 1938 and Aramco became the largest company on earth by revenue. The state has no written constitution beyond the Quran, and custody of Mecca and Medina, where around two million pilgrims perform the hajj annually, is the monarchy's central claim to legitimacy. The 1979 seizure of the Grand Mosque prompted a decades-long tightening of religious enforcement, and Saudi funding spread its interpretation of Islam widely. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers on 11 September 2001 were Saudi. Since 2017 Mohammed bin Salman has permitted women to drive and opened entertainment while imprisoning critics and ordering the killing of Jamal Khashoggi. Vision 2030 aims to diversify beyond oil. The country has about thirty-six million people and covers most of the Arabian peninsula. Arabic is the sole official language. It has no permanent rivers or lakes. Around a third of residents are foreign nationals. Al-Hijr, the Nabataean site at Hegra, was its first World Heritage listing. The Rub al-Khali, the Empty Quarter, is the largest continuous sand desert on earth.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history