The History of Saudi Arabia

The History of Saudi Arabia PDF Author: A M Vasilev
Publisher: Saqi
ISBN: 0863567797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

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Book Description
How has Saudi Arabia managed to maintain its Arab and Islamic values while at the same time adopting Western technology and a market economy? How have its hereditary leaders, who govern with a mixture of political pragmatism and religious zeal, managed to maintain their power? This comprehensive history of Saudi Arabia from 1745 to the present provides insight into its culture and politics, its powerful oil industry, its relations with its neighbours, and the ongoing influence of the Wahhabi movement. Based on a wealth of Arab, American, British, Western and Eastern European sources, this book will stand as the definitive account of the largest state on the Arabian peninsula.

The History of Saudi Arabia

The History of Saudi Arabia PDF Author: A M Vasilev
Publisher: Saqi
ISBN: 0863567797
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 442

Get Book Here

Book Description
How has Saudi Arabia managed to maintain its Arab and Islamic values while at the same time adopting Western technology and a market economy? How have its hereditary leaders, who govern with a mixture of political pragmatism and religious zeal, managed to maintain their power? This comprehensive history of Saudi Arabia from 1745 to the present provides insight into its culture and politics, its powerful oil industry, its relations with its neighbours, and the ongoing influence of the Wahhabi movement. Based on a wealth of Arab, American, British, Western and Eastern European sources, this book will stand as the definitive account of the largest state on the Arabian peninsula.

Kings and Presidents

Kings and Presidents PDF Author: Bruce Riedel
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815737165
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
An insider's account of the often-fraught U.S.-Saudi relationship Saudi Arabia and the United States have been partners since 1943, when President Roosevelt met with two future Saudi monarchs. Subsequent U.S. presidents have had direct relationships with those kings and their successors—setting the tone for a special partnership between an absolute monarchy with a unique Islamic identity and the world's most powerful democracy. Although based in large part on economic interests, the U.S.-Saudi relationship has rarely been smooth. Differences over Israel have caused friction since the early days, and ambiguities about Saudi involvement—or lack of it—in the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States continue to haunt the relationship. Now, both countries have new, still-to be-tested leaders in President Trump and King Salman. Bruce Riedel for decades has followed these kings and presidents during his career at the CIA, the White House, and Brookings. This book offers an insider's account of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, with unique insights. Using declassified documents, memoirs by both Saudis and Americans, and eyewitness accounts, this book takes the reader inside the royal palaces, the holy cities, and the White House to gain an understanding of this complex partnership.

Desert Kingdom

Desert Kingdom PDF Author: Toby Craig Jones
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059409
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Oil and water, and the science and technology used to harness them, have long been at the heart of political authority in Saudi Arabia. Oil’s abundance, and the fantastic wealth it generated, has been a keystone in the political primacy of the kingdom’s ruling family. The other bedrock element was water, whose importance was measured by its dearth. Over much of the twentieth century, it was through efforts to control and manage oil and water that the modern state of Saudi Arabia emerged. The central government’s power over water, space, and people expanded steadily over time, enabled by increasing oil revenues. The operations of the Arabian American Oil Company proved critical to expansion and to achieving power over the environment. Political authority in Saudi Arabia took shape through global networks of oil, science, and expertise. And, where oil and water were central to the forging of Saudi authoritarianism, they were also instrumental in shaping politics on the ground. Nowhere was the impact more profound than in the oil-rich Eastern Province, where the politics of oil and water led to a yearning for national belonging and to calls for revolution. Saudi Arabia is traditionally viewed through the lenses of Islam, tribe, and the economics of oil. Desert Kingdom now provides an alternative history of environmental power and the making of the modern Saudi state. It demonstrates how vital the exploitation of nature and the roles of science and global experts were to the consolidation of political authority in the desert.

Awakening Islam

Awakening Islam PDF Author: Stéphane Lacroix
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674061071
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
Amidst the roil of war and instability across the Middle East, the West is still searching for ways to understand the Islamic world. Stéphane Lacroix has now given us a penetrating look at the political dynamics of Saudi Arabia, one of the most opaque of Muslim countries and the place that gave birth to Osama bin Laden. The result is a history that has never been told before. Lacroix shows how thousands of Islamist militants from Egypt, Syria, and other Middle Eastern countries, starting in the 1950s, escaped persecution and found refuge in Saudi Arabia, where they were integrated into the core of key state institutions and society. The transformative result was the Sahwa, or “Islamic Awakening,” an indigenous social movement that blended political activism with local religious ideas. Awakening Islam offers a pioneering analysis of how the movement became an essential element of Saudi society, and why, in the late 1980s, it turned against the very state that had nurtured it. Though the “Sahwa Insurrection” failed, it has bequeathed the world two very different, and very determined, heirs: the Islamo-liberals, who seek an Islamic constitutional monarchy through peaceful activism, and the neo-jihadis, supporters of bin Laden's violent campaign. Awakening Islam is built upon seldom-seen documents in Arabic, numerous travels through the country, and interviews with an unprecedented number of Saudi Islamists across the ranks of today’s movement. The result affords unique insight into a closed culture and its potent brand of Islam, which has been exported across the world and which remains dangerously misunderstood.

Yemen Endures

Yemen Endures PDF Author: Ginny Hill
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190862793
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
Why is Saudi Arabia, the world's largest oil exporter, involved in a costly and merciless war against its mountainous southern neighbor Yemen, the poorest country in the Middle East? When the Saudis attacked the hitherto obscure Houthi militia, which they believed had Iranian backing, to oust Yemen's government in 2015, they expected an easy victory. They appealed for Western help and bought weapons worth billions of dollars from Britain and America; yet two years later the Houthis, a unique Shia sect, have the upper hand. In her revealing portrait of modern Yemen, Ginny Hill delves into its recent history, dominated by the enduring and pernicious influence of career dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh, who ruled for three decades before being forced out by street protests in 2011. Saleh masterminded patronage networks that kept the state weak, allowing conflict, social inequality and terrorism to flourish. In the chaos that follows his departure, civil war and regional interference plague the country while separatist groups, Al-Qaeda and ISIS compete to exploit the broken state. And yet, Yemen endures.

Black Wave

Black Wave PDF Author: Kim Ghattas
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
ISBN: 1250131219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
A New York Times Notable Book of 2020 “[A] sweeping and authoritative history" (The New York Times Book Review), Black Wave is an unprecedented and ambitious examination of how the modern Middle East unraveled and why it started with the pivotal year of 1979. Kim Ghattas seamlessly weaves together history, geopolitics, and culture to deliver a gripping read of the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between between Saudi Arabia and Iran, born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy. With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became mortal enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and distorted religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led to Iran’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, the assassination of countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS. Ghattas introduces us to a riveting cast of characters whose lives were upended by the geopolitical drama over four decades: from the Pakistani television anchor who defied her country’s dictator, to the Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings all the way to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Black Wave is both an intimate and sweeping history of the region and will significantly alter perceptions of the Middle East.

Freya Stark in Southern Arabia

Freya Stark in Southern Arabia PDF Author: Malise Ruthven
Publisher: Ithaca Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
In 1934 Freya Stark, encouraged by her recent awards from the Royal Geographical and Royal Central Asian Societies, set out to explore the Incense Road in Arabia. The magnificent canyons of Wadi Hadhramaut, stretching for 350 miles inland from the coast, inspired Dame Freya to produce some of her best photographs. The fortified cities with their mud-brick skyscrapers and luscious palm groves perched along the valley beneath towering cliffs are amongst the most visually stunning sights in the world. This once-rich region, home to the Queen of Sheba and made prosperous as a trading route between India and Europe, was by then part of the Aden Protectorate under British rule, but very little of the country had been explored by Westerners. Dame Freya's particular empathy with local people, speaking their own language, resulted in charming pictures of people she worked or travelled with, and the homes and costumes of the period. She travelled in the country twice during the 1930s, and both times was forced to leave due to illness. However, her pictures of Aden, Mukalla and Shibam are exceptional in evoking traditional life in this fertile region of Arabia. During the second world war she returned to Aden and was sent by the Ministry of Information to counter Italian influence in the neighbouring Kingdom of Yemen. Armed only with her charm and a primitive cinema projector, she helped persuade the legendary Imam Yahya to keep his country out of war. Forty years later, at the age of 83, she returned to North Yemen, revisiting some of the places she remembered most fondly.

Desert Diplomat

Desert Diplomat PDF Author: Robert W. Jordan
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 1612347401
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
In the spring of 2001, George W. Bush selected Dallas attorney Robert W. Jordan as the ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Jordan's nomination sped through Congress in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, and he was at his post by early October, though with no prior diplomatic experience, as Saudi Arabia mandates that the U.S. Ambassador be a political appointee with the ear of the president. Hence Jordan had to learn on the job how to run an embassy, deal with a foreign culture, and protect U.S. interests, all following the most significant terrorist attacks on the United States in history. From 2001 through 2003, Jordan worked closely with Crown Prince Abdullah and other Saudi leaders on sensitive issues of terrorism and human rights, all the while trying to maintain a positive relationship to ensure their cooperation with the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq. At the same time he worked with top officials in Washington, including President Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, and Tommy Franks. Desert Diplomat discusses these relationships as well as the historic decisions of Jordan's tenure and provides a candid and thoughtful assessment of the sometimes distressing dysfunction in the conduct of American foreign policy, warfare, and intelligence gathering. Still involved in the Middle East, Jordan also offers important insights into the political, economic, and social changes occurring in this critical region, particularly Saudi Arabia.

The History of Saudi Arabia

The History of Saudi Arabia PDF Author: Wayne H. Bowen
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
Build an understanding of a country undergoing dramatic and accelerating changes in this new edition of The History of Saudi Arabia. Taking readers from the Saudi Arabia of pre-Islamic times to the present day, this revised edition in the Histories of Modern Nations series examines how the current efforts to transform the Kingdom fits into the long history of the region. The Arabian Peninsula – the birthplace of Islam – has a long heritage of multiple intersecting civilizations. In recent years, major events in Saudi Arabia have left a mark not only within the region itself but also around the world. The country continues to undergo significant developments, as the government, led by Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, aims to end its reliance on fossil fuels and build a dynamic society, without bringing into question its authoritarian political system, national security structure, and absolute monarchy. Bring your knowledge up to date with revised information, based on new findings and historiography, on the political, military, religious, economic, and diplomatic history of the country. In addition, this book discusses events such as: – The rise of Muhammad bin Salman – known as MBS – as the new crown prince under his father King Salman, who took the throne in 2015 – Vision 2030, a set of reforms designed to create a revived society, a robust economy, and a more vital national state – The Saudi intervention in Yemen as part of the new King's foreign policy – Goals to diversity the economy from oil to tourism and biotechnology – Reforms impacting the status of women and the roles of the religious police

Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia PDF Author: Anthony H Cordesman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429966008
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
With this multivolume study, Anthony H. Cordesman once again proves that he is a leading authority on the affairs of the Middle Eastern states. Cordesman led this comprehensive net assessment of the political, economic, energy, security (both internal and external), and military trends in each of the Gulf states, as well as the power projection cap