‘Come O men of Riyadh, Here I am, Abdulazziz ibn Abdulrahman of the House of Saud, Your rightful ruler.’
—Battle cry of Ibn Saud, Saudi Arabia’s first king, on defeating his rivals, the Al Rashid tribe at Riyadh in 1901
According to most historians, human civilisation first started when settlements based on permanent agriculture replaced preceding hunter gatherer societies. Sometime around 3000–4000 BC, in an area around present-day Kuwait and northern Saudi Arabia, a tribe of people known as the Sumerians arose, moved north and settled in a then-fertile region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq.
Sumeria was probably the first place in which people in the world formed a self sufficient city state. Over a period of about one thousand years, the Sumerians invented advances such as writing, the wheel, the calendar, the seven day week, the 24-hour day and the 360-degree circle. The Sumerian tongue—unrelated to any language of the modern world— was probably the world’s first written language.
That civilisations rise and fall has been the mark of history. Sumerian society stayed more or less intact for a long time, but eventually succumbed to an invading race: the Akkadians based in Akkad, the city that later became Babylon. Culturally and administratively, the Sumerians were far more advanced than their conquerors. As the two societies merged, the Akkadians adopted most of the Sumerian customs, culture and knowledge with the exception of the Sumerian language.
For a while, the Akkadians and Sumerians maintained a fractious relationship within their mixed society, reminiscent of the disharmonies between Arabs and Jews in the present day. The Akkadians spoke a Semitic tongue that is probably the genesis of the present-day languages of Hebrew and Arabic. As an identifiable race, the Sumerians, along with their language, were absorbed into Akkadian culture and disappeared from the pages of history. But their great civilising advances in administration, law, written language, agriculture and science survived them.
Forces of nature rather than forces of man eventually put paid to early settlements in Mesopotamia. The history of many semi-arid regions has proved that one effect of long periods of irrigated agriculture is environmental degradation. Contaminated by salt, the Sumerian fields became increasingly unfertile. Forests disappeared, and along with them, the wildlife that Sumerians used to supplement their diet. Rainfall declined and Mesopotamia depopulated. Today’s salt marshes of Iraq serve as a reminder of the longterm consequences of the process.
While the area north of the Arabian Peninsula, and the peninsula itself, fell into decline, similar agriculture-based societies advanced in places like Egypt, the Indus valley, China and even the Andes. With the decline of Sumeria, the Arabian Peninsula, being as desolate then as it is now, is thought to have been almost uninhabited over thousands of years. After their pivotal role in the foundation of human history, the lightly inhabited lands of the Arabian Peninsula became best known as trading routes from the Indies, the countries of the horn of Africa and the Gulf states, to Asia Minor and Europe.
Saudi Arabia is the biggest country in the Middle East and the 13th biggest country in the world. About the size of Western Europe and one quarter the area of the USA, Saudi Arabia occupies approximately 80 per cent of the Arabian Peninsula—a large slab of land, roughly rectangular in shape that juts into the northern seas of the Indian Ocean. Saudi Arabia is hot and dry, and water is scarce. Annual rainfall is low almost everywhere. The country has no permanent rivers or lakes. The desert to the north, the Nafud, extends as far as Syria and into Iraq. In the south-east, the Rub al’Khali—the ‘Empty Quarter’—is one of the most arid regions on Earth. In Saudi parlance, the Empty Quarter is simply known as ‘The Sands’. Between the deserts of the north and south, arid plains of gravelly sand stretch across the centre of the country. The eastern seaboard along the Persian Gulf is mainly flat with rolling dunes. To the west, a range of low mountains parallels the Red Sea coast, from Jordan in the north to the hill country of the Asir region in the far south-west. Only here, near the Yemen border, is there significant rainfall.
Desert landscape is a common feature in Saudi Arabia.
The total length of Saudi Arabia’s land borders are 4,400 km (2,700 miles). Bordering countries are Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman to the south-east, and the Republic of Yemen to the south. Saudi Arabia is also joined by a 24-km (15.5-mile) causeway/bridge to the island kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf (called the ‘Arabian Gulf’ by the Saudis!) The official border between these two states is set at 8 km along the causeway from Bahrain, and 16 km from Saudi Arabia. In addition to its land borders, Saudi Arabia has a total of 2,500 km (1,550 miles) of coastline on two different waterways. Egypt, Sudan and Somalia lie to the west across the Red Sea. Iran lies to the east across the Persian Gulf.
In the tradition of shifting lifestyles from Bedouin times, locations of boundaries are, for the most part, not precisely defined nor completely agreed. A most intriguing piece of haphazard cartography in Saudi Arabian recent history is its boundary with Jordan. At this point, Saudi Arabia seems to intrude into Jordan and out again for no apparent reason. According to contemporary legend, possibly apocryphal, this kink was due to some inaccurate drafting by the British wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill, who was establishing the boundaries of the world one afternoon after a very pleasant lunch. According to this story, Churchill’s hand slipped after he hiccupped from too much brandy, thereby bequeathing to Saudi Arabia several thousand square kilometres of not very valuable Jordanian land. From then on this tract of desert was termed by some as ‘Winston’s Hiccup’. No one has yet gone to war to right this wrong.
With its parched and burning sands, for much of its history Saudi Arabia has been a harsh country that offered little and received little in return. At times, as its history unfolded, it could take advantage of its strategic position between east and west. At other times, it seemed a worthless piece of real estate, a desert peninsula leading to nowhere—a vast mass of desolate empty land sticking out like a blunt finger into the Arabian Sea.
Despite the harsh environment, a small population did make a living on the Arabian Peninsula, built towns, and practised limited agriculture. In addition, the Arabs were traders. For over a thousand years until around AD 1500, Arabia provided a major trading route from India and Africa to Europe. Spices were landed on the west coast of the Persian Gulf, loaded onto camels and hauled to present-day Syria to join ancient Phoenician trading routes to the Mediterranean. Goods were also shipped across the narrow straits at the bottom of the Red Sea between modern-day Yemen and eastern Africa. In addition, the Arabian Peninsula produced a few of its own products that were also shipped to European markets—pearls from the Persian Gulf and frankincense from the gnarled grey trees of present-day Oman.
The period between the 7th–10th centuries was the most powerful era of Arab history. This was a golden age of Arab literature, astronomy, mathematics and influence. Inspired by the exploits of Muhammad, the Islamic fundamentalists of the time spread the Islamic message as far west as Morocco and Spain, into Asia Minor, and to the Far East.
As its power waned after the Middle Ages, the Arab world fell under the influence of a number of conquerors, in particular the Ottoman Turks who stayed on the Arabian Peninsula until the end of the World War I. Meanwhile, events elsewhere in the world diminished the importance of the Arab trading routes. In 1497, the intrepid Portuguese navigator, Vasco de Gama, became the first European to round the Cape of Good Hope en route to India. After that, ocean-going sailing ships operated by the great European East India trading companies, and later steamships, bypassed overland trading routes through the Arabian Peninsula. The Suez Canal, which opened in 1869, put an end to the traditional overland trade routes for all time.
In terms of its interest to the rest of the world, the Arabian Peninsula probably reached its lowest ebb during the 19th century. Curiosity rather than commercial interest tempted a handful of European explorers to Arabia, particularly a number of intrepid Englishmen who absorbed the Arab ways and reported their adventures back home. The best known of them was 19th century’s Richard Burton, the indefatigable traveller of Africa who disguised himself as a pilgrim, learned Arabic (he mastered around 30 or so languages) and visited Mecca by passing himself off as an Arab. These were the salad days of the Royal Geographical Society. The adventures of returning travellers were of great interest to the aristocracy of London.
In the early 20th Century, this tradition continued. T E Lawrence, ‘Pasha’ Glubb, St John Philby and Captain William Shakespear, who all roamed the deserts with tribes of Arabia, were amongst other Englishmen who succumbed to the fascinations of the Arabian Peninsula. Typical of the breed, Shakespear was described in despatches as ‘soldier by training; diplomat by profession; amateur photographer, botanist and geographer by inclination; and adventurer at heart’.
The modern state of Saudi Arabia had its origins in the Bedouin tribes that roamed the Arabian Peninsula. In 1774, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, a fundamentalist religious leader formed an alliance with Muhammad bin Saud, a local ruler in the Najd area near Riyadh. Al Wahhab and the Al Sauds pledged to pool their religious and military resources to spread Wahhab’s religious message and Al Saud military protection to surrounding tribes and settlements.
For a century and a half after the rise of Wahhabism, power in the area of present-day Saudi Arabia rested with three main family groups—the Al Sauds, the Rashids and the Hashemites— whose respective influence waxed and waned with the strength of their leaders. In 1802, Al Saud forces captured Mecca, which they subsequently lost, regained and lost again. By the end of the 19th century, the Al Saud’s fortunes reached their lowest ebb. The tribe had retreated to Kuwait where they were given refuge by the Al Sabah family who rule Kuwait to this day. Tradition and debts of honour die slowly in the Arab world. The Al Sauds returned the 100-year-old favour to the Al Sabah family when Kuwait was invaded by Iraq in the Gulf War of 1991.
From its low point in the first days of the 20th century, the fortunes of the Al Sauds took a turn for the better. In 1901, 21-year-old Prince Abdul Aziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud (more commonly known as Ibn Saud) emerged from Kuwait to avenge the defeat of his father at the hands of the Rashids. Ibn Saud undertook an intrepid journey accompanied by about 40 adventurous companions, setting out by camel on a long trip to Riyadh with the object of reconquering the city. Against the odds, and greatly outnumbered by Rashid forces, Ibn Saud and his stalwarts crept into the walled city at night and overcame the defenders.
After reconquering Riyadh and consolidating for a while, Ibn Saud turned his attention to the garrisons of the Turks on the Arabian Peninsula’s eastern seaboard. In the early 20th century, Ottoman influence was in general decline across the Middle East. In 1913, Ibn Saud’s forces overcame Turkish resistance in the area around present-day Dhahran. At around the same time, the Hashemite family—associated with the enigmatic Briton T E Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia)—was pushing the Turks out of regions on the Red Sea coast. The Ottoman cause was further undermined when Turkey aligned itself with the losing side in World War I. At the end of the war, with Franco-British troops in Istanbul, the 500-year-old Ottoman Empire was brought to a close. In the 1920s, preoccupied with defending its own borders from the Greeks in the west and the Armenians in the east, the newly installed government of the Republic of Turkey was not greatly interested in recapturing its dusty domains on the Arabian Peninsula.
The demise of the Turks left the Hashemites and Al Sauds as the two dominant forces on the Arabian Peninsula. Before too long, these two competing erstwhile British allies ended up fighting each other. Much to the chagrin of Lawrence, the Hashemites were forced to retreat to Jordan, where the family established the monarchy that has continued to this day. By 1924, the Al Sauds had gained control of Mecca and by 1932, they controlled most of present-day Saudi Arabia. Ibn Saud then declared himself king of a new nation that he named Saudi Arabia, after himself.
The alliance between ‘men of the pen’ (the Wahhabi clerics) and ‘men of the sword’ (the Al Saud warriors) has endured to the present day. The alliance is symbolised on the Saudi coat of arms as a pair of crossed swords beneath a script that proclaims God as Allah and Muhammad as the Prophet. Each year, to celebrate this alliance, the now much dispersed Saudi Royal Family holds a reunion in Riyadh featuring, as its centrepiece, a ceremonial sword dance.
The new nation of Saudi Arabia was the size of Western Europe, stretching from Transjordan and Palestine in the north to the shores of the Arabian Sea to the south. From east to west, it spanned the Arabian Peninsula, from the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. Only a few territories around the edges of the country—the present-day Qatar, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman and Yemen—escaped absorption into the new kingdom. Other than the vastness of its territory, the new nation didn’t have much going for it. It was two-thirds desert, and desperately poor. But it did occupy a strategic position in the world because it commanded two major sea routes: the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.
Developed by British interests in Persia, the first commercial oil well in the Middle East was brought into production in 1908. To maintain the flow of Persian oil to market, and in particular to the Royal Navy, the British needed to secure its sea lanes in the Persian Gulf. Well before World War I, the British had forged an alliance with Ibn Saud. In return for keeping the western shores of the Persian Gulf secure for British shipping, Ibn Saud could, from time to time, cadge a little money from the British Treasury and arms from its armoury.
Oil prospecting in Saudi Arabia started in the 1920s when Britain’s Eastern General Syndicate obtained a concession to explore for oil on the east coast of Saudi Arabia. They found oil. But having announced that oil had been ‘discovered’, the Eastern General Syndicate failed to develop the find and the concession lapsed.
In the first half of the 20th century, Arabia lived a subsistence lifestyle. A small amount of trading and pearling was conducted through the settlements on the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea coast. Riyadh, near the centre of the country, was based on its large oasis. But overall, the climate was too harsh and rainfall too erratic to support a large population. Bedouin tribes moved their meagre flocks of camels, goats and sheep from one patch of skimpy grass to another. Water was their most precious commodity and the Bedouins jealously guarded their waterholes.
Though Saudi Arabia was still desperately poor, unimaginable riches lay just around the corner or more precisely, a few hundred yards beneath the desert. Commercial oil production from the western side of the Persian Gulf first got underway in the 1930s, not in Saudi Arabia but in the offshore sheikdom of Bahrain, about 40 km from the Saudi Coast. As things turned out, the Bahrain oilfield was a small one by subsequent Middle East standards.
Ibn Saud tried to get the British to take his oil interests seriously. But the Great Depression was underway in the West and the British weren’t interested in acquiring a country that the colonialists of the 19th century would have snapped up without hesitation. Undeterred, Ibn Saud approached the Americans—at the time the world leaders in the oil prospecting. In 1933, the Standard Oil Company of California acquired the concession to prospect for Saudi Arabian oil for the bargain basement price of US$ 250,000 plus royalties on oil produced. Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company), a consortium of American oil companies, was established to find and develop Saudi oil. The world’s largest, most productive and easiest to exploit oil fields were about to get underway, culminating in the Ghawar oil field discovered in 1948 and brought into commercial production in 1951. Approximately 280 km long and 25 km wide, the Ghawar field is the biggest oil field ever discovered and likely to remain so. Sixty years later, it is still in production, producing 5 million barrels of oil per day, or around 7 per cent of world oil supply.
For all his Bedouin background, Ibn Saud proved commercially astute. Typical was his position in World War II. Saudi Arabia’s commercial allies, Britain and the US, were on the same side against the Axis powers. In accordance with the traditional Bedouin practice of backing only winners, Ibn Saud bided his time, remaining neutral while he established which way the wind was blowing. Though Saudi Arabia allowed the US to build an air base in Dhahran, it remained uncommitted until the last days of the war. Then, in March 1945, with the allied victory in Europe only a month away, Saudi Arabia declared war on Germany and Japan—in time, the King no doubt hoped, to avoid the conflict but share the spoils of victory.
In Saudi Arabia, royalties went to royalty. Since the King had conquered the country, he owned the country. At first the Saudi aristocracy spent their newly won oil money, as they knew best: on themselves. They built luxurious palaces, played the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, took many wives and did little to develop their country or improve the lot of the community. The infrastructure of the country and the education of its people advanced little from its state under the collection of disparate sheikdoms of 50 years before.
In 1953, Ibn Saud died, leaving behind an enigmatic memory. To his admirers, he was the great uniting force of his country. To his detractors, he was a ruthless conqueror who was cruel to the vanquished, abused women, celebrated ignorance and wasted the country’s resources in frivolous consumption. Whichever he was, after his death he left behind a country ill-equipped for the modern world.
The first king after the death of Ibn Saud was his eldest son, also called Saud. King Saud’s rule was marked by extravagance, a declining economy, an increasing gap between rich and poor, and ultimately social unrest. Saudis travelling within and outside the kingdom during this period earned an enduring reputation for ostentatious wealth and wasteful expenditure.
After some years of Saud’s erratic rule, the Saudi Royal Family progressively engineered his downfall. In 1958, King Saud was persuaded to transfer to his half brother, Crown Prince Faisal, executive powers in foreign and internal affairs. In 1959, Faisal introduced an austerity programme that, among other things, cut subsidies to the Royal Family, balanced the budget, and stabilised the currency. In 1962, Faisal was appointed prime minister. In 1964, King Saud was forced to abdicate and Faisal was crowned king.
During his reign, King Faisal strove to find the middle ground between his Western associates who urged him to increase the pace of modernisation and the Ulema—the Council of Senior Islamic Scholars—who urged him to maintain the status quo. Faisal cautiously introduced social reforms such as free community health care and the right of females to receive an education. Faisal’s progressive agenda and fiscally responsible government received widespread support both within Saudi Arabia and outside his country. In 1974, Time magazine selected King Faisal as its ‘Man of the Year’.
Though King Faisal had international support, inside Saudi Arabia his reforms were opposed by religious fundamentalists. One measure in particular that earned the reprobation of his critics was the introduction of television into Saudi Arabia in 1965. Religious fundamentalists considered TV salacious (perhaps with some cause). When opposition to TV was at its height, one of Faisal’s nephews was shot and killed by police after leading an assault on a TV station. In1975, in a tit-for-tat killing, Faisal was himself shot and killed by the dead nephew’s brother, who was publicly beheaded for his trouble.
After Faisal’s assassination, another of Ibn Saud’s sons, Faisal’s half brother Khaled, was installed on the throne. After King Khaled died in 1979, the next monarch was King Fahd, another son of Ibn Saud. Fahd died in 2005 after suffering a stroke in 1995 and spending the last few years of his reign convalescing in a clinic in Switzerland. Fahd was succeeded by his half brother, King Abdullah. By that time Abdullah, in his role as crown prince, had already been the country’s effective leader for ten years.
On his coronation Abdullah—one of the last surviving sons of Ibn Saud—assumed the titles “servant of the holy places” and “custodian of the two holy mosques” (Mecca and Medina) to suggest his influence would extend beyond the borders of his own country and into the wider Muslim world.
To understand what makes Saudi Arabia tick, one needs at least a background knowledge of Islam’s history and beliefs. Beginning in the 7th century AD, Islam was the last of the world’s great religions to get underway.
Like Christianity and Buddhism, Islam was the inspiration of a single individual—the prophet Muhammad—though later scholars and clerics also made their contributions. Muhammad was born in AD 570 to a poor family in Mecca. At the time, Mecca was an important trading post for caravans travelling to Europe and throughout the Middle East. Muhammad started his working life as a shepherd. When he was about 15 years old, he was hired by a distant and older female cousin, Khadija, who ran a trading business into Asia Minor. In this role, before the end of his teens, Muhammad travelled as far afield as Damascus, impressing Khadija with his skills as a trader.
When he reached 25, Khadija, who was 40 years old and a widow, offered to marry him and he accepted. Muhammad was Khadija’s third husband and she was his first wife. Muhammad and Khadija had two sons who died before they reached two years of age and one daughter, Fatima, who survived into adulthood. Fatima became an important historical figure after the Prophet’s death in AD 632.
The Split of the Faith
Islam divided into two denominations immediately after Muhammad died and even before his funeral. The Shia or Shi’ite sect believed the first caliphate to be Ali, the husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, and reputed to be the second person to embrace Islam. Present-day Shi’ites believe the caliphate line runs only through direct descendants of Muhammad via Ali and Fatima. (Shia or Shi’ite derives from a shortening of Shiat Ali, meaning ‘follower of Ali’.) The Sunni sect, by contrast, believed Ali to be the fourth caliphate, with the three caliphates who preceded him all dying in fairly short order. The third of Sunni’s caliphs, Uthman (AD 644–656), was murdered while at prayer and Ali succeeded him to the caliphate under dubious circumstances, with Utham’s supporters alleging that Ali was implicated in Uthman’s death. The disputants turned to violence which has marked relations between Sunnis and Shi’ites before and since. Both sides of this argument held the Qur’an as sacrosanct. At the Battle of Suffin, when the Sunnis showed up with verses of the Qur’an stuck on the sharp end of their spears, the Shi’ites were too devout to join the fight. But fighting soon resumed. In 661, Ali was murdered in an internecine dispute. Later, at the Battle of Karbala in 680, Ali’s son Hussein was also killed, but Hussein’s own son survived, thus perpetuating the Shi’ite caliphate line.
To outsiders the differences of the two denominations may seem trivial, though probably no more so than the schisms of the Christian Church. Whatever the respective merits of these opposing claims to the caliphate, over the centuries, rivers of blood have been shed contesting the issues that separate these two Islamic sects.
Before marrying Muhammad, Khadija had already accumulated a significant fortune. By the time he was 30, by trading on his own account, Muhammad had made himself a wealthy man. By that point in his life, he had the time and money to reflect on the meaning of life, and did so at considerable length. It was in these reflections that Islam had its origins.
The Islamic code of conduct that Muhammad drafted was much influenced by Christianity, Judaism and the pagan religions that vied for influence on the Arabian Peninsula at the time he lived. Muhammad’s new religion amalgamated elements of these existing religions with some bold new ideas of its own. Islam adopted monotheism, the central idea of Christianity and Judaism that there was only one God, rather than the range of Gods for different purposes of the pagan religions. To Islamic scholars, both Christianity and Judaism compromised their monotheistic character by clouding the status of God with quasi-god figures. In this view, Christianity with its Holy Spirit, the Virgin Birth and the Son of God, enshrined interactions between God and humans in much the same way as the pagan religions of the Greeks and the Romans. Islam, by contrast, stripped religion down to its barest essentials: one God and one major prophet—Muhammad himself, not the Son of God, merely a man selected by God to pass his word on to the rest of mankind. Since Islam drew from Christianity which itself drew from Judaism, Islam recognised both Jesus Christ and Judaism’s Abraham as Prophets of God, though not quite on the same rank as Muhammad himself.
Of all the established religions in Arabia in the 7th century, Christianity provided Muhammad with his strongest influences. The core idea of Lent, for example, was installed as Ramadan in the Islamic calendar. Both Lent and Ramadan are periods of abstinence and religious introspection. The method by which the two prophets, Christ and Muhammad, received their instructions from God was also similar. Christ retired in solitude to a mountain to communicate with the Almighty. Muhammad retreated to a cave near Mecca and received God’s instruction through an intermediary, the Archangel Gabriel. Christ’s experiences were recorded by his disciples and incorporated into the Bible. Muhammad (who is thought to have been illiterate) later related the messages of Archangel Gabriel to scribes who then passed them onto the rest of mankind through the Qur’an, the Holy Book of Islam.
Muhammad was undoubtedly a charismatic character who inspired loyalty and self-belief. The Islamic religion was simple and held appeal. Nevertheless, Muhammad’s religious revival started unpromisingly. Like Christ before him, Muhammad found his life threatened by the establishment. The merchants of Mecca regarded Muhammad as a dangerous radical. But unlike Christ who paid for religious dissidence with his life, Muhammad retreated about 400 km (250 miles) north of Mecca to the city of Medina, where religious ideas were more fluid and the establishment less entrenched.
Muhammad arrived in Medina on 24 September 622 AD, the date that is now the first day of the Islamic calendar. He announced himself as God’s Prophet and soon attracted a following. He stayed in Medina for seven years, building his strength and debilitating his enemies by plundering the caravans sent north by the merchants in Mecca as they passed by Medina en route to the Mediterranean and Asia Minor.
Muhammad was a capable desert fighter and military strategist. His military valour and religious zeal won over the local tribes around Medina. His conquests of the Meccans laid weight to his declarations that God was on his side. Every victory over his enemy rendered Muhammad’s claims to be God’s messenger more credible.
Muhammad established a religious power base in Medina but Mecca was the centre of religion in Arabia, and the most powerful settlement in the region. It was the place to which Muhammad had to return to if his religious ambitions were to be realised. In AD 630, Muhammad led his army to Mecca, captured the city and became Mecca’s undisputed leader. Muhammad was clearly a winner and so was his new religion. Recruits flocked to the cause.
Though Islam adopted beliefs from other religions, it also incorporated its own unique features to suit Muhammad’s own circumstances and those of the wider community.
Polygamy and promiscuity were common practices in pre-Islam Arabia. Times were violent, and there was a general shortage of men. After his wife Khadija died, Muhammad accumulated several wives, some of them widows from slain followers. Thus equipped with female companions, Muhammad decreed that in the new religion, men could take up to four wives at a time on the proviso that they could all be kept in reasonable comfort. Islam recognised the rights of both parties of the marriage to divorce, stipulating that divorce could not be allowed on frivolous grounds, such as lack of looks.
The religious day was set as Friday to distinguish the holy day of the new religion from Judaism (Saturday) and Christianity (Sunday).
In Judaism of the time, women veiled their faces and covered their limbs in public to protect women from the prying eyes of men. Muhammad’s rules of Islam merely followed this practice.
A common belief of all the religions of the region— Christianity, Judaism, paganism and Islam—was that their gods dwelt in the sky above their heads rather than in the earth beneath their feet. Many religions have laid great store in objects that appear to arrive from the sky, as if cast down by gods. Meteorites, in particular, have been treasured as religious icons by a number of the world’s religions. By the time Muhammad was developing the Muslim religion, a black glossy meteorite known as the Hajar ul Aswad, blistered by fire as it burned through the atmosphere in some distant era before coming to rest on the Arabian sands, had been sanctified for over 1,000 years as the most religious object in Arabia. Well before Islam arrived on the scene, Mecca had already become a destination for pilgrims who visited the city to pay homage to the Hajar ul Aswad. By then, pilgrimages were already a mainstay of the Meccan economy. Muhammad merely adopted reverence for the Hajar ul Aswad artefact for Islam. Today, this black stone, residing atop a metre-high plinth built into a small stone structure called the Ka’abah, rates as Islam’s holiest icon in its holiest temple, the Great Mosque of Mecca.
Muhammad laid down the rules of conduct that have survived to the present day as the five pillars of Islam:
The Hajar ul Aswad is one of the holiest relics of Islam and resides within the Ka’abah.
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Bearing witness that there is no other God than Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet |
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Everyone should pray five times a day |
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Fasting between sunrise to sunset during the month of Ramadan |
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Giving 2.5 per cent of one’s assets to charity |
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Believers must try to make a pilgrimage to Mecca once in their lifetime |
The rules had various origins and served various purposes.
According to Muhammad, the Archangel Gabriel declared that God had chosen him, Muhammad, as his messenger on earth for all mankind. That Allah is God, and that Muhammad is his prophet is the fundamental belief of the Muslim faith.
There are various accounts for the requirement to pray five times a day. One is that Muhammad introduced frequent praying as a disciplinary measure for his armies. Another is that, Gabriel took Muhammad to Paradise where God demanded Muhammad and his followers pray 500 times a day. But prodded by Moses, Muhammad bargained God down to five times a day.
The idea of fasting for the month of Ramadan was borrowed from the Christian idea of Lent. Muhammad proscribed the holy month of Ramadan—30 days in the 12-month, 354-day Islamic calendar—as the month for fasting, abstaining and religious reflection
Saudi Arabia has no income tax, but zakat is a form of tax that looks, at first glance, to be a low impost (2.5 per cent), but really may be considerably higher since it is levied on assets rather than income. It is a tax of conscience that is meant to be paid by Muslims, and is not levied on guest workers.
The procedure laid down by Muhammad was, and still is, that pilgrims make their once-per-lifetime pilgrimage (hajj)to Mecca where they are obliged to perform various rituals. The hajj has to be undertaken in the last month of the Muslim calendar, the month of Dhu al-Hijjah. This was, and still is, an economic measure to boost the Meccan economy. Those who have made the pilgrimage once in their lifetime are entitled to attach the suffix hajji to their name, a status symbol in Islamic culture.
The Christian religion spread by ideology, whereas Islam spread by a combination of ideology, military conquest and trade. No other religion in recorded history spread as quickly as Islam. In AD 635, five years after its inception, the forces of Islam captured Damascus; in AD 636, Jerusalem and by AD 641, Alexandria (then the capital of Egypt). By AD 650, Islamic forces had reached Afghanistan and India in the east, and Tripoli in the west. The Arab-Islamic empire then stretched an east-west distance of about 5,000 km. By contrast, Christianity took hundreds of years to become a predominant religion. The first Roman emperor who converted to Christianity was Constantine in the year AD 321.
Over the 100 years after Muhammad’s death, Islamic influence expanded into southern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and what is now Pakistan. While political boundaries have ebbed and flowed in the intervening centuries, the religious map remains much the same now as it was then, except that Arab traders later added Malaysia and Indonesia to the Islamic club.
Arab civilisation during the Middle Ages produced many innovations not the least of which was mathematics based on the decimal system and the concept of ‘zero’. Arab numerology, now universally adopted, greatly simplified arithmetical operations compared to the system of Roman numerals that it replaced. (It is much easier to multiply 338 by 8 than to multiply CCCXXXVIII by VIII.) The Arabs also developed algebra and trigonometry and excelled in medicine, astronomy and the arts.
In the Middle Ages, Jews in Europe were mercilessly persecuted by Christians. In the light of present-day tensions, it would now seem odd that European Jews of the time welcomed the Muslim invaders as liberators. Jews of societies the Muslims conquered in Middle Age Europe were treated on the same level as Christians in the new society—as second-class citizens. For Jews of the time, this was an improvement. Christians by contrast, dropped down a peg in the hierarchy.
Today, Islam is the second biggest religion in the world after Christianity. In 2011, 22 per cent of the world’s population were Muslims against about 33 per cent for Christianity. Islam is also the world’s fastest growing religion, principally because it flourishes in countries that experience high population growth. Few countries are expanding their populations faster than Saudi Arabia, which has an annual population growth rate of around 1.5 per cent.
Visitors to Saudi Arabia cannot help avoid being struck by the strength of the country’s religious belief. Islam makes great demands of its flock. Saudis expect their God to take a much more detailed and personal interest in every aspect of their life than do even the most dedicated Christians. By the same token, God imposes more stringent demands on his believers.
Whereas in Christian countries, Sunday is the day for religious activity, in Saudi Arabia, religion is scheduled for every day of the week. Saudis make official contact with their God five times a day through their salat prayers and many more times by references to God that pepper normal conversation. When Saudis greet each other, shake hands in greeting and saying farewell, they do not say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye, have a good day’. When they meet you, they will most likely say Al-Humdoolillah (‘Praise be to God’). On leaving you, they will most likely say fee amanellah (‘May God go with you’). During a normal conversation, God may be called to account to bless you, your children, your parents, though normally not your wife. (In Saudi Arabia, discussion of people’s wives is akin to prying, and out of bounds in polite conversation.) God may be asked to protect you (Allah iyatech stir) or leave you in peace (allah ihennik). God is continually praised (Subhamdallah) for whatever might or might not be happening. The Saudi Arabic equivalents for ‘probably’ and ‘maybe’ are Inshallah—’if God wills it’—defining the Saudi expectation that God regulates the minutiae of everyone’s life.
Maybe atheists exist in Saudi Arabia, but almost all Saudis you will meet discharge their spiritual commitments whatever the state of their personal beliefs. Praying is politically and socially acceptable to a point where it is almost compulsory. At the personal level, relaxing the daily rigorous expressions of belief may be akin to a dangerous political statement in a land where religious police are constantly on patrol.
Daily prayers are conducted at a mosque if one is in the vicinity. If not, other arrangements are made. Most business offices and public buildings have a prayer room. In the absence of suitable facilities like mosques and prayer rooms, a prayer mat pointing in the appropriate direction can be set down on any convenient level surface.
In days gone by, the call to prayer was uttered by a religious functionary, called a muezzin, who would lean out from the balcony of the citadel of the mosque and summon all believers within earshot to join him in prayer. Nowadays, there are too many mosques and too few muezzins to go round to continue this ancient practice. Instead of muezzins, the call to prayer is made through loudspeakers by whichever worshipper happens to reach the mosque first.
The call to prayer follows a set format that any visitor to the country will get to know since it is repeated 1,825 times in a normal year and 1,830 times in a leap year. The prayer call is repetitive. It has about eight words, the same words that are written on the Saudi flag. Freely translated, the message is ‘God is great. There is no other God but God and Muhammad is his prophet’. In Arabic, the message has a mesmerising alliterative cadence that sounds to the non-Arabic ear something like ‘allah Akbar... al ah, ill illah illah allah’.
A royal decree has proclaimed that no point in an urban area of Saudi Arabia can be more than 800 metres from a mosque. But Saudi Arabia is a large country, and not quite sufficient mosques have so far been provided to meet this requirement. The decree on mosque spacing has transformed mosque construction into a minor industry. The number of mosques increased by about 4 per cent per annum over the period from 1995 to 2004—about double the rate of population increase. By 2004 there were 50,538 mosques in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has also financed the construction of about 2,000 mosques in other countries and has built a large number of religion-based colleges and schools both at home and abroad to introduce the young to the faith.
One of the extreme effects of the 800-metre mosque spacing rule is audio-overlap. In some areas three different versions of the prayer are delivered by three different believers starting at three different times and singing in three different keys. Non-Muslims can find the frequent calls to prayer exasperating, particularly the first one for the day at between five and six in the morning. No one in Saudi Arabia really needs an alarm clock.
The most solemn event on the Islamic calendar is Ramadan— the ninth month of the Islamic year—the month that Muslims abstain from their earthly pleasures. Mandatory activities include fasting from dawn to dusk, giving up smoking and abstaining from sex. Ramadan is a period in which believers are expected to endure long periods of introspection and communication with their God.
The rules of fasting merit further elaboration. During Ramadan, Muhammad prescribed that nothing should be eaten between sunrise and sunset, but with exceptions that Muslims can use to their advantage if they feel so inclined. Exempt from fasting are children, the sick, the old, menstruating females and travellers. What constitutes a traveller is interpreted fairly generously. To some extent, just about everyone travels somewhere each day. Therefore most people can mount some sort of an argument that they can be spared the rigours of fasting if they feel so inclined. In fact, not many Saudis try to escape their fasting obligations. During Ramadan, most Saudis try to comply with the rules.
What Saudis give up during daylight hours in Ramadan, they may more than make up for at night. In recent times, the night hours of Ramadan have become a celebration of feasting and perhaps, overindulgence. During Ramadan, shops in places like Jeddah stay open all night. Supermarket complexes do a roaring trade. Packed restaurants serve food from dusk to dawn. According to apocryphal reports, many Saudis gain weight during Ramadan, their month of fasting.
That aside, guest workers dealing with their Arab hosts are advised to bear the rigours of Ramadan in mind. Muslims forgoing their oral and other pleasures may be more tense and irritable during Ramadan than they usually are. Tempers can fray. Fewer community services are available. Many shops will remain closed during daylight hours. Schools work on reduced hours. Some business people, Saudis and expats, schedule their breaks away from the country during Ramadan. Not only does business slow down, but tensions during the month tend to run higher than normal.
Ramadan and the Infidel
The strictures of Ramadan are not imposed on non-believers provided the forbidden pleasures are practised discreetly. You can do more or less as you like in your own home, but foreigners caught smoking, drinking or eating in public have been sent to prison until Ramadan ends. (Once you are in captivity, you will surely abstain from these bodily pleasures.)
Since the 354-day Islamic year is shorter than the Gregorian year, the months of the Arabic calendar regress through the solar years. Ramadan travels backwards through the seasons, from summer, through spring to winter and back to summer on an approximate 33-year cycle. When Ramadan falls in summer, things are particularly tough on believers. In summer, the fasting period from dawn to dusk is longer than in winter and the non-fasting period from dusk to dawn is shorter. In addition, the weather is hotter, making the obligation to refrain from drinking more trying.
As the days of Ramadan pass, everyone looks forward to the new month of Eid-el-Fitr. The first three days of Eid-el-Fitr, marking the end of Ramadan, are the biggest holidays on the Saudi calendar. During this period, all the activities that were given up during Ramadan are resumed in earnest. These three days are a period of feasting, gift-giving and general letting go; the rough equivalent of Christmas in the Christian calendar. This is the most likely time that you will receive a gift from your Saudi employer, if you have one. If offered, the gift should be accepted, but not with over-effusive thanks. Gifts tend to be accepted in Saudi without tremendous fanfare. Generally, you are not expected to return the favour. However, it’s not a bad idea to present some sort of token of your esteem to your Saudi boss when returning to work from a major break, like an overseas trip.
Arabs may feel a sense of nationhood less strongly than say Americans or Germans. The principal source of identity in Arab culture is the family. The extended version of the family is the tribe. Beyond tribal identity comes the notion of the wider tribe—the feelings of Arab brotherhood and of belonging to an even bigger group—the Islamic world. A further source of identity is the religious sect to which an individual belongs. Given this combination of allegiances, patriotism to a particular country may rank a long way from the top in the hierarchy of belongingness. As a result, Arab countries such as Iraq, split across tribal lines, have made somewhat incoherent nations. Similar tribal schisms, perhaps less pronounced, exist in Saudi Arabia.
Underlying many of the troubles of the Middle East have been disputes of boundaries decreed a century ago by foreigners in remote cities such as London, Paris or Washington. In the Middle East, the most obvious and vexing case of boundaries drawn with little regard to the indigenous population was Israel, which was partitioned from the Arab world by the West without the consent and/or the knowledge of its Palestinian inhabitants. Israel is a particularly poor example of the modern-day fashion in some countries for multiculturalism. Nearly a century after the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which later led to the creation of Israel, the consequences of this unilateral declaration of statehood live on, no closer to a resolution. The Israeli problem underlies much of the tension within Saudi Arabia itself and the Arab world in general.
Since the end of World War II, Israel has fought four wars with its neighbours. Egypt, Iran and Iraq have seen one revolution each. Lebanon, the meeting point of Christianity, Islam and Judaism was shattered by its own cultural conflicts and twice devastated by the Israeli invasions of 1982 and 2006. Iraq and Iran staged a re-enactment of World War I trench warfare in which the atrocities of World War I were repeated down to the gassing of troops in trenches. Like in World War I, each side fought the other to a standstill with little territorial conquest and massive loss of life on both sides. Almost continuous civil wars have also been fought within and across countries defined by lines on maps drawn with little regard to traditional tribal boundaries.
It’s handy to have a scapegoat for various causes and the Arabs have supplied plenty to the Western world. In 1982, Beirut was reduced to near rubble in Israeli air attacks. During the 1970s and 1980s, Libya, a desert country with a population then of about 3 million people, was accused of plotting against the West. In 1986, Tripoli was bombed into submission by the US with UK assistance for an incident in a Berlin nightclub which, it was later found, had been perpetrated by Syrians. Two Intifadas (uprisings)—the first between 1987 and 1993 and the second starting in 2000—saw Palestinian teenagers (described in the Western press as ‘terrorists’) throwing stones at Israeli battle tanks blasting away their rundown villages. Helpless to defend against the F-16-delivered missiles, helicopter gunships and tanks of the Israelis, the Palestinian teenage terrorists became their own weapons-delivery systems, detonating bombs strapped around their waists, thereby blowing themselves up along with their victims. Such is the desperation of life in the Palestinian territories.
At the turn of the century, scapegoat attention shifted from Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to the terrorists of 11 September 2001, the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda. After that we had the second Gulf War.
If the West has been hard on the Arab world, the Arab world has also been hard on itself. In 1956, the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, floated the notion of a Pan-Arab alliance to annex the Suez Canal. But these aspirations of Arab unity were never fulfilled. Arab countries split too easily along their traditional tribal lines. No recent event typifies this more than Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. At issue was an ancient territorial dispute that could never be resolved to the satisfaction of both parties. Two claimants wanted to own the same piece of land under which lay one of the Middle East’s largest oilfields. Iraq exercised its historical claims to the disputed territory. The United States saw its oil interests threatened. A massive force was mobilised. Iraq was defeated but not conquered and remained a thorn in the side of Western powers until the war of 2003, which saw Saddam Hussein deposed and eventually executed.
Pan-Arab Brotherhood: Still Work In Progress
In 1982, the Gulf Arabs set up the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as a union of Gulf States along the lines of the European Union. A major objective of the GCC was to fend off Iran, which labelled the union as an “American Club”. But the rival Arab states were unable to unify their objectives. At the 2002 GCC summit, Saudi Arabia’s Abdullah, now king, then the Crown Prince, pondered the failure of 20 years of attempted Arab integration. Said Abdullah:
“...we have not yet created a united military force that deters enemies and supports friends. We have neither achieved a common market, nor formulated a unified position on political crises.”
Compared to most countries in the region, Saudi Arabia has been relatively peaceful. Throughout the conflicts in the Middle East, self preservation has been Saudi Arabia’s dominant motive. The Al Sauds may perceive they have more to gain out of a divided Arab world than a united one. In 1952, Nasser toppled King Farouk from the Egyptian throne. The Pan-Arabian aspirations of Nasser were not well received by the Al Sauds. The last person the Saudi Royal Family wanted to lead the Arab world was a kingtoppling Egyptian. They felt the same about Colonel Qaddafi who, in 1969, dispossessed Libya’s King Idris in similar circumstances. The Saudis supported the Yemeni royalists in their fight with Nasser and supported the Christian Phalangists against their Muslim rivals in Lebanon. They provoked Iraq into action in the Iran-Iraq war, lending Iraq US$ 30 billion in military aid that was later used against the donors in the first Gulf War.
Saudi Arabia’s policy of neutrality has been successful enough. Since the Turks departed its territories almost a century ago, Saudi Arabia has never been attacked or occupied by a foreign power. All of Saudi Arabia’s land boundaries pass through mostly uninhabited desert regions with mostly friendly countries. The other borders are its two coastlines. With the exception of the oil rich border with Kuwait—the Saudis’ natural allies, the kingdom’s boundary areas have little commercial value. Supported by the US, the country remains in a sound strategic position against outside invasion.
Wealth in Saudi Arabia is not evenly spread across the county. The Eastern Province, the location of the oil fields and the country’s wealth generator, is noticeably poorer than the central and western half of Saudi Arabia where most wealth is spent.
The Eastern Province is Saudi Arabia’s Northern Ireland, a centre of dissent within the Kingdom, with a Shia community of up to 15 per cent of the local population. Like minority groups in many countries, the Saudi government discriminates against its Shi’ite citizens both economically and socially. Shi’ites cannot hold public positions. They cannot participate in the judiciary. They cannot join the army. They cannot join the public service. Saudi Shi’ites may feel a stronger affinity with the majority Shi’ite populations in Bahrain and Iran than they do with the power group in Riyadh.
Over 25,000 Saudis, mostly from the Eastern Province, have travelled overseas to fight for various Muslim causes, amongst them Bosnia, Chechnya, Palestine and Afghanistan. Upon returning home, these warriors were treated not as heroes, but as troublemakers. Many of them were arrested as dissidents and detained in jail for long periods. In recent times numbers of volunteers to such foreign causes has greatly declined.
Prisoners of Conscience
Political and religious differences of opinion have long been the basis of detention within Saudi jails. Detention without charge or trial for long periods is commonplace as are floggings and other torture. In recent times, Amnesty International reports that the worldwide “war on terror” following the 9/11 raid has been the pretext for recent rounds of arrests.
Dr Shaim al-Hamazani, Jamal al-Qosseibi, Hamad al-Salihi and ‘Abdullah al-Magidi were tried in September, having reportedly been detained without charge or access to lawyers at al-Ha’ir prison foralmost two years.
Dr Matrouk al-Falih and Muhammad Sa’eed Tayyeb were arrested in 2004 for calling for reform. Muhammad Sa’eed Tayyeb was reportedly required to sign a statement at the time of his release that he would not again call for political reform.
Sa’ad Bin Sa’id Bin Zu’air was also detained without charge or trial from June to August, during which he was held incommunicado in ‘Ulaisha prison, Riyadh, after he was interviewed on the satellite TV station, Al-Jazeera.
—Amnesty International Annual Report, 2007
Arabs and Jews can trace their antecedents to Semites who lived on the Arabian Peninsula at about the time that civilisation was first emerging in the region. The eternal struggle for supremacy in the Middle East is between distant members of the same family. Arabs regard the Jewish race as their delinquent brothers. The Jews regard the Arabs likewise.
Jews and Arabs coexisted in the Middle East for centuries after the two races assumed their separate identities. Judaism remained a strong force on the Arabian Peninsula until the rise of Islam, but the advent of Muhammad was a watershed event in Jewish/Arab relations. When Muhammad was first establishing Islam as a state religion, those who refused to convert from Judaism were either executed or banished from Mecca. Much of the present-day enmity between the Jews and the Arabs stems from that time.
The Palestinian dispute is central to dissent in the Middle East. On their maps of the world, Saudi Arabia does not recognise Israel at all. The land mass to the west of Jordan and to the east of Egypt is designated ‘Palestine’. A particular problem from the Saudi point of view in the Palestine question was the backing of Israel by the United States—the trading and military partner the kingdom does not wish to offend. King Faisal supplied 20,000 troops to Jordan during the 1967 Six-Day War and was devastated when Israel triumphed. According to some accounts, after that King Faisal never smiled again for the rest of his life.
During the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the kingdom sent troops and weapons to aid the Arab states. In both the 1967 and 1973 wars, Saudi Arabia briefly cut off, then reinstated, oil supplies to the West. (Saudi Arabia also briefly cut off oil supplies to Britain and France for supporting Israel against Egypt during the Suez Canal crisis of 1956.)
For all that, Saudi Arabian support for the Palestinian cause has been ambivalent. The Saudis, who don’t particularly mind seeing other Arab nations disunited, have provided support to extreme groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad as well as the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). During the first Gulf War, in response to the Palestinian support for Iraq, the Saudis expelled Palestinians guest workers and cut off financial aid to various Palestinian organisations, including the PLO.
Commercial oil production in Saudi Arabia commenced in 1938 at modest flows, and continued at about 300,000 barrels per day through World War II. After the war, serious oil revenues started to flow into the Royal treasury and additional oil wells on the eastern seaboard were drilled. In 1948, a pipeline—the TransArabian Pipeline, more commonly called the Tapline—was built to carry oil from the Persian Gulf oilfields to the Mediterranean port of Sidon, in Lebanon. The Tapline passed through four politically volatile countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The project was a technical success, but the Tapline crossed some of the most politically sensitive countries in the world. In particular, the Golan Heights in Syria, became a regular battlefield between the Israelis and the Syrians. Over its working life, the Tapline was often out of action and sometimes sabotaged. In any case, after the development of supertankers, its use became uneconomic. In the 1990s, after a tiff with Jordan, Saudi Arabia shut down the Tapline for good. These days, oil is shipped by tankers from the Gulf to its various destinations around the world.
Though the Saudi oilfields were originally developed by foreign oil companies, over the years Saudi Arabia bought back the rights to its own oil. In 1950, Saudi Arabia negotiated a 50-50 profit-sharing arrangement with the US oil companies in the Aramco consortium. In 1974, the Saudis increased their share of Aramco and in 1980, assumed full control of the company.
During the 1950s, oil was sold to a free market that established its own prices according to the laws of supply and demand. Saudi Arabian oil—abundant, near the surface, and close to the coast for loading into oil tankers—was cheaper to extract and ship to world markets than oil from most oilfields. Extraction costs of Saudi oil, according to one estimate, were US$ 0.25 per barrel.
Since oil was sold to the free market, regulating the oil price directly was impossible. Oil was cheap. The way to control the oil price, the Saudis realised, was to control production. Since about a dozen countries in the world were major oil exporters, production controls could work if a significant number of these exporters operated a cartel.
In September 1960, at a conference in Baghdad, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran and Kuwait founded the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) where all member nations would agree on production targets for the various producing countries and thereby maintain oil prices. Despite occasional internal political tensions, OPEC has held together to the present day.
In 1973, using the latest iteration of the Arab-Israeli war as a pretext, OPEC shut down production, pushing up the price of oil by 400 per cent overnight, precipitating what in economic circles became known as the ‘first oil shock’. Over the ensuing years, when production resumed, billions of dollars from oil revenues flowed into the treasury.
OPEC operations weren’t always successful. In the 1980s and 1990s when members of OPEC exceeded their own production quotas, the oil price dropped from a high of US$ 40 per barrel to a low point of around US$ 5. A further burden on the treasury was a US$ 51 billion debt to the US for the costs of protecting the country in the first Gulf War from a rumoured invasion by Iraq. Added to this was US$ 30 billion that the Saudis incurred bankrolling the military efforts of Saddam Hussein in its fight a few years earlier with Iran. The cost of maintaining the Royal Family— estimated by some at US$ 10 billion per year—was also burdensome.
Saudi Arabia does have resources other than oil. Its minerals include small amounts of gold, silver, iron copper, zinc, manganese, tungsten, lead, sulphur, phosphate, soapstone and feldspar. Saudi Arabia also has a small agricultural sector. The country’s traditional crop is dates, of which Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest producers. Elsewhere in the country, about two million tonnes of wheat was produced under irrigation by desalinated water and at a cost that is likely to be a great deal higher than global free market prices. The country even exported some wheat to other countries. This policy has recently been reviewed. Saudi Arabia is currently phasing out growing of wheat, instead securing its further food supplies by purchasing farms in wheat-growing countries.
For all its aridity, according to census information, Saudi Arabia sustains a population of 7.4 million sheep, 4.2 million goats, half a million camels and a quarter of a million cattle. The south-west of the country, where the annual rainfall is around 400 mm (16 inches), is the main source of agricultural products. Coffee, fruit, vegetables and cereal crops are grown in these highland regions. But the aggregate economic results from these activities is modest. Oil, subject to its erratic highs and lows in price, is the main game and has been for many years.
Even as recently as 2002, the economy was sagging under the influence of low oil prices and accumulated debt. Economic salvation came courtesy of the oil price rise that started in 2003.
In 2005, in response to pressure from the US administration, Saudis from the government and Aramco announced plans to ramp up Saudi oil production from ten million barrels per day to 15 million phased over a number of years. This level of production hasn’t happened, and according to most geologists is probably unrealistic. As things turned out, the 50 per cent increase in production wasn’t necessary—at least in the short term. The oil price peaked in July 2008 at around US$ 147, then went into a long decline. In February 2009, with the price of oil at around US$ 35, Saudi Arabia, in its role as leader of OPEC, was endeavouring to convince its OPEC partners that salvation for the oil price lay in production cuts rather than production increases.
Warlords have traditionally ruled Arab societies. The 20th century brought little change to this practice. A mixture of emirs, kings, dictators, presidents, sheiks and mullahs—none of them elected—has ruled most of the nations in the region.
In December 2010, however, politics in the Middle East took a sudden turn. After a Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire in protest against the government of his country, the Arab Spring was launched. By 2012, long-time dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya had been toppled by popular violent uprisings. The rich governments of the GCC countries, including Saudi Arabia, reacted by giving out cash handouts to its citizens, in the hopes that the Arab Spring ‘fever’ would not affect its populations as well.
Saudi Arabia remains an old-style kingdom still held together by a 250-year-old alliance between the Al Saud family and the reactionary Wahhabi scholars. The King is prime minister and appoints his own ministers, mostly senior members of his own family. Key government offices are all held by family members. Most of the cabinet are princes, brothers, half-brothers, sons and nephews from the House of Saud.
Ibn Saud’s 30-year campaign to unite the country started a one-man population explosion. Two or three generations since Ibn Saud arrived on the scene, an extraordinary number of people can claim the royal bloodline. Two generations on, grandsons of Ibn Saud number around 1,400. Estimates of the size of the present-day Royal Family range from 5,000 to 25,000 depending on who’s being counted. Of this impressive tally, one hundred or so are senior princes, a few thousand are second-ranking emirs and sheiks and the balance, lesser lights.
The institution of the monarchy, with its centralised power and long periods of reign, has stamped the kingdom with the personality of the current monarch. Under Saudi protocol, succession of the monarchy flows to the ‘oldest and most upright’ of princes. As a result, successive kings of Saudi Arabia have been increasingly old men. When he ascended the throne in 2005, King Abdullah was 81 years old. Next in line was Crown Prince Sultan who claimed to have been born in 1928, though some authorities think he had exaggerated his youthfulness. (No accurate records were kept in the 1920 and 1930s when Sultan was born.) After Prince Sultan’s death in 2010, Prince Nayef, a half brother of the king and the kingdom’s Minister of the Interior since 1975, became Crown Prince. However, one of Abdullah’s more radical changes to the political order has been the establishment of the Allegiance Council, a body composed of the surviving sons and grandsons of Ibn Saud, for the purpose of electing Saudi Arabia’s kings. Upon a reigning monarch’s death, succession is passed down to the crown prince. The Council’s job at this time would be to meet and approve the new king’s choice of a crown prince, or to nominate a new one if the king’s choice is rejected. Naturally, nominees would be chosen from among the Council members themselves.
Princes who married 50 to 100 wives in a lifetime are not uncommon in the House of Saud. Of all the kings who have so far sat on the Saudi throne, only King Faisal had fewer than ten wives. The sheer size of the Royal Family has been both a strength—in the extent of its integration into the wider community—and a weakness as princes compete with each other for positions of power. Given its massive size, the Royal Family has closed ranks pretty well to hold out against such quaint Western notions as democracy and the right to vote. One of the family’s techniques of reducing the power of their own dissidents has been to get rid of them. In the 70 years so far that the monarchy has stayed intact, it has publicly executed three of its own and privately disposed of a number of others.
The Wahhabi religious order also has a strong role in government. Although Saudi princes select the King, their choice must be approved by the Ulema, which also acts as an advisor to the government on a wide range of issues.
A Saudi answer to those who criticise the kingdom as undemocratic is to cite the complaints handling authority, the Majlis Al Shura, or Shura Council, appointed by the king in 1992. The Majlis, a committee of 150 delegates with no law-making power, serves as a forum to discuss the issues of the day. To underscore the alliance between the political and religious wings in the country, all appointments to the Majlis are ratified by the Ulema.
In theory, all Saudi citizens can take their grievance to the Majlis, and meet face-to-face with the king or other members of the Royal Family. In practice, the Majlis system is impractical in a nation with one king and over 20 million citizens. Even though the king typically passes over matters to be settled to aides, in the time available, only a fraction of the issues that constituents wish to present are heard.
One of the agenda items of the Majlis committee, but yet to be implemented, is the establishment in Saudi Arabia of a bill of rights. Saudi Arabia remains a country where full and frank discussions with the authorities are not encouraged. The Board of Grievances (Diwan al-Mazalim) established under the Chief Judge, has the judicial power to investigate and resolve complaints between the people and the government. Though represented as a public forum, it is widely believed that complainants assume a certain level of risk of being punished as dissidents.
There are 13 administrative centres in the kingdom each with a governor appointed by the king. All provincial governors so far appointed have been princes from the Royal Family. In addition, large cities appoint their own municipal governments. Local affairs in smaller settlements are governed by a council of elders.
The year 2005 saw a cautious experiment with democracy in Saudi Arabia. In Riyadh, representatives for half the seats on the town council were elected to office, with the other half appointed by the Royal Family. Only men were entitled to vote in the Riyadh council elections. Voter enthusiasm was muted. Only 30 per cent of the eligible voters bothered to register. Only about 150,000 votes were cast out of an eligible enrolment of over a million. On the other hand, the 700 candidates competing for seven council seats in Riyadh joined in the spirit of the occasion and campaigned vigorously. Campaign techniques ranged from traditionalstyle hospitality dispensed from Bedouin tents to websites and campaign promises transmitted as text messages to cellphones.
In September 2011, after a delay of two years since its official announcement, municipal elections were held in the kingdom. In a much publicised statement in the same month, King Abdullah announced that women would be able to vote and stand for election in the 2015 municipal elections.
