Saudi Arabia

• 1. Introduction

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  Saudi Arabia is the only country on Earth with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. It covers roughly 2,150,000 square kilometers, the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, making it the largest country in the Middle East and the twelfth-largest in the world. Most of that vast space is arid desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains, with no permanent rivers at all. Its capital is Riyadh, and within its borders sit Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam. Yet this enormous kingdom is younger than many of the people who live in it. The state was founded in 1932, and today roughly half its population is under 25 years old. How did a land of nomadic tribes and ancient trade routes become a high-income economy and the world's leading oil exporter? Why is a country named after a single family ruled as an absolute monarchy? And what happens when oil wealth meets one of the strictest religious movements in Sunni Islam? The answers reach back tens of thousands of years and forward into a kingdom still arguing with itself about how much to change.

• 2. A Kingdom Named For A Family

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  On the 23rd of September 1932, King Abdulaziz issued a royal decree naming his new state al-Mamlaka al-ʿArabiyya as-Suʿūdiyya. In English it is usually rendered as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but it literally means the Saudi Arab Kingdom. That single word, Saudi, carries the whole logic of the country. It is a nisba, an adjective formed from the dynastic name of the royal family, the Al Saud. Its very inclusion expresses the view that the country is the personal possession of that family.

  The name Al Saud is built by adding Al, meaning family of or House of, to the personal name of an ancestor. That ancestor is Saud ibn Muhammad ibn Muqrin, father of the dynasty's 18th-century founder, Muhammad bin Saud. The royal family today dominates every level of the political system. The number of princes runs into the hundreds, with most power held by the roughly 200 male descendants of Ibn Saud. The 13 regional governorships and the key ministries are generally reserved for the family. In a state said to belong to the Al Saud and named after them, the line between public assets and private royal wealth has often been described as blurred.

• 3. The Desert And The Empty Quarter

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  The Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, sprawls across 647,500 square kilometers of the country's southeast, the largest contiguous sand desert on Earth. Saudi Arabia occupies about 80 percent of the Arabian Peninsula, lying between latitudes 16 and 33 degrees north. Because its southern borders with Oman and the United Arab Emirates are not precisely marked, the country's exact size is technically undefined. The United Nations Statistics Division estimates 2,149,690 square kilometers.

  Jabal Soudah, in the mountainous southwest province of Aseer, rises to 3,015 meters and stands as the highest point in the country. The land also holds more than 2,000 dormant volcanoes. Lava fields in the Hejaz, known locally as harrat, form one of Earth's largest alkali basalt regions, covering some 180,000 square kilometers. Summer days commonly average around 113 degrees Fahrenheit and can climb to 129. Yet the lowest recorded temperature, minus 12 degrees Celsius, was measured in Turaif, and annual snowfall is not uncommon in the mountains of Tabuk Province.

  The Red Sea coast hides a different world entirely. More than 1,200 species of fish live there, around 10 percent of them found nowhere else. Some 2,000 kilometers of coral reef line the coastline, including formations so unusual they defy classic Darwinian reef classification, generally attributed to the area's high tectonic activity. The date palm, Phoenix dactylifera, grows widely across this dry land and serves as a national symbol.

• 4. Before Islam

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  Human habitation in the Arabian Peninsula dates back about 125,000 years, and a 2011 study found that the first modern humans spread east out of Africa around 75,000 years ago across the Bab-el-Mandeb. In the Hail region, a 350,000-year-old Acheulean site named An Nasim may be the oldest human habitation site in northern Saudi Arabia. The peninsula is regarded as central to understanding the evolution and dispersal of humanity.

  In the Neolithic period, the Al-Magar culture flourished in what is now southwestern Najd. It was among the world's first to involve the widespread domestication of animals, particularly the horse. In northwestern Saudi Arabia, rock engravings discovered in 2017 show hunting scenes with what appear to be domesticated dogs resembling the Canaan Dog. Dated to more than 8,000 years old, they are the earliest depictions of dogs in the world.

  The kingdom of Lihyan grew from a sheikdom of Dedan at the end of the 7th century BC. By the early 3rd century BC it commanded great influence from its strategic position on the caravan road, ruling from Yathrib in the south to parts of the Levant. The Gulf of Aqaba was once called the Gulf of Lihyan. The Lihyanites fell to the Nabataeans around 65 BC, and the Nabataean domain was eventually annexed by the Roman Empire, which renamed it Arabia Petraea and held it until 630. Centuries earlier, the Midianites of the northwest had been among the earliest to exploit the domestication of camels, navigating the harsh terrain their neighbors could not.

• 5. From Diriyah To Unification

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  The Al Saud story begins at the town of Diriyah, where Muhammad bin Saud became emir on the 22nd of February 1727. In 1744 he joined forces with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi movement, a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam. That alliance gave Saudi expansion its ideological engine and remains the basis of dynastic rule today. The Emirate of Diriyah grew fast, sacking Karbala in 1802 and capturing Mecca in 1803, before the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mohammed Ali Pasha, destroyed it in 1818.

  Through the 19th century the Al Saud fought the rival Al Rashid for control of the interior. By 1891 the Al Rashid had won, and the Al Saud were driven into exile in Kuwait. Then in 1902, Abdul Rahman's son Abdulaziz, later known as Ibn Saud, recaptured Riyadh and created the third Saudi state. He gained the support of the Ikhwan, a tribal army inspired by Wahhabism and led by Faisal Al-Dawish, which had grown quickly after its founding in 1912.

  The Ikhwan helped Ibn Saud take Al-Ahsa from the Ottomans in 1913 and conquer the Kingdom of Hejaz in 1924 to 1925. But after the conquest, the Ikhwan turned against him, angered by his apparent move toward modernization and the growing number of non-Muslim foreigners. They were defeated in 1929 at the Battle of Sabilla, where their leaders were massacred. On Ibn Saud's behalf, Prince Faisal declared the unification of Hejaz and Nejd, and that date is now a national holiday called Saudi National Day.

• 6. Oil And Its Shadows

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  In 1938, vast reserves of oil were discovered in the Al-Ahsa region along the Persian Gulf coast. Full-scale development began in 1941 under the US-controlled Aramco. A kingdom that had relied on limited agriculture and pilgrimage revenues was transformed. By 1976, Saudi Arabia had become the largest oil producer in the world, and in 1980 it bought out the American interests in Aramco entirely.

  Oil became a political weapon. In 1973, Saudi Arabia led an oil embargo against Western nations that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War, an action that quadrupled oil prices and triggered a global oil crisis. The ulema, the body of Islamic religious leaders, backed that embargo, one example of their direct role in major government decisions. Today the oil industry accounts for roughly 63 percent of budget revenue and 67 percent of export earnings. The kingdom holds the world's second-largest proven petroleum reserves and the sixth-largest natural gas reserves.

  Wealth reshaped society without softening religious rule. Two events in 1979 left a long shadow. The Iranian Islamic Revolution raised fears that the Shi'ite minority in the oil-rich Eastern Province might rebel. Then Islamist extremists seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, holding it for 10 days before the government regained control and executed those captured. The royal family responded by enforcing stricter religious observance, including the closure of cinemas, and by handing the ulema greater power over education and social behavior.

• 7. Faith, Law, And The Guardians Of Doctrine

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  The Al ash-Sheikh are the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, and they remain the country's leading religious family, second in prestige only to the Al Saud. Nearly 300 years ago the two families formed a mutual support pact. The Al Saud uphold and propagate Wahhabi doctrine, and in return the Al ash-Sheikh lend their religious authority to legitimize the royal family's rule. The two are bound further by a high degree of intermarriage.

  Sharia is the primary source of law, drawn from the Quran and the Sunnah. Saudi Arabia is unique among modern Muslim states in that Sharia is not codified and there is no system of judicial precedent. Judges, who tend to follow the Hanbali school known for its literalist reading, use independent reasoning, so divergent judgments can arise even in nearly identical cases. Retaliatory punishments, or Qisas, are practiced; an eye can be surgically removed at the insistence of a victim who lost his own. Families of someone unlawfully killed may choose between the death penalty or accepting diyya, blood money. In 2021, the kingdom announced reforms to codify its laws entirely and eliminate these discrepancies.

• 8. A Kingdom Reforming, Slowly

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  In June 2018, the Saudi government issued a law allowing women to drive, reversing a long-standing prohibition. Historically, Saudi women were effectively treated as legal minors under the male guardianship system, a situation described as gender apartheid. Since then the kingdom reports it has reversed bans on women becoming lawyers, engineers, and geologists, added its first female newspaper editors, diplomats, and public prosecutors, and placed a woman at the head of the Saudi stock exchange.

  Reform has not erased criticism. A 2025 Guardian investigation found that the Dar al-Reaya, officially care homes, still functioned as jails for women institutionalized by their families for disobedience, with reports of solitary confinement and flogging. The kafala system binding migrant workers has been linked by human rights groups to slavery, and in 2025 the kingdom broke its record for annual executions for the second consecutive year. Saudi Arabia abstained from the UN vote adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying it contradicted Sharia.

  The reforms run alongside an economic gamble. Under Vision 2030, the Public Investment Fund is pushing to localize up to 75 percent of the components used in the country's renewable energy projects by that year. The aim is a country less dependent on the oil that built it, led by the youngest population in much of the world and a Crown Prince, Mohammed Bin Salman, who has served as prime minister since 2022.