Saudi Arabia
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SAUDI ARABIA
Al-Mamlaka al-Arabiya as-Saudiya (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) Capital: Riyadh Population projection, 2020: 34·71m. GNI per capita, 2015: (PPP$) 51,320 HDI/world rank, 2015: 0·847/38= Internet domain extension: .sa KEY HISTORICAL EVENTS Nomadic tribes have existed across the Arabian peninsula for thousands of years. The pre-Islamic period saw the development of civilizations based on trade in frankincense and spices, notably, from about the 12th century BC, the Minaeans in the southwest of what is now Saudi Arabia and Yemen. The Sabaean and Himyarite kingdoms flourished from around 650 BC and 115 BC respectively, their loose federations of city states lasting until the 6th century AD. Although increased trade brought these civilizations into contact with the Roman and Persian empires—the two great regional powers before the advent of Islam—they remained, for the most part, politically independent. The Nabataeans, an Aramaic people whose capital was at Petra, modern-day Jordan, spread into northern Arabia over a period covering the 1st century BC and the 1st AD before annexation of their territory by Rome. Persian influence was prevalent along Arabia’s eastern coast, centred on Dilmun which covered parts of the mainland and the island of Bahrain. By the 6th century AD the Hejaz region in northwestern Arabia was becoming increasingly powerful and an important link in the overland trade route from Egypt and the Byzantine Empire to the wider East. One of the principal cities of Hejaz was Makkah (Mecca), a staging post on the camel train routes and site of pilgrimage to numerous pre-Islamic religious shrines. The leading tribe in the city was the Quraysh, into which the Prophet Muhammad was born in 570. Muhammad and his followers (known as Muslims) took control of Makkah in 630. He had earlier declared himself a prophetic reformer, destroying the city’s pagan idols and declaring it a centre of Muslim pilgrimage dedicated to the worship of Allah (God) alone. Muhammad died in AD 632, by then commanding the loyalty of almost all of Arabia. The leaders who succeeded Muhammad, known as caliphs, spread the Islamic faith throughout and beyond the Arab world. However, Arabia itself began to fragment and by the latter part of
the 7th century it had become a province of the Islamic realm, although the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah retained their spiritual focus. Meanwhile, increasingly remote from the main centres of Islamic authority under the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate dynasties, Arabia became an arena for sectarian divisions—Shia, Sunni and Kharijite—which developed within the Islamic faith. After 1269 most of the Hejaz region came under the suzerainty of the Egyptian Mameluks. The Ottoman Turks conquered Egypt in 1517 and, to counter the influence of the Christian Portuguese presence in the Gulf region, extended their nominal control over the whole Arabian Peninsula. Portuguese traders were followed by British, Dutch and French merchants during the 17th and 18th centuries, the British gradually securing polit
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