المملكة العربية السعودية

Saudi Arabia is overwhelmingly Islamic and has always been ruled under the Shari‘a, or Islamic law. The sheer existence of an additional legal system in Saudi Arabia, besides the Islamic Shari‘a, is regarded as an offense against the Islamic character or modernity of the country and its judicial system. Islamic law is supreme in Saudi Arabia, and the idea of the divine right of kings, used to justify absolute monarchies in Christian Europe, would be considered heresy. As divine law, it is immutable and unchangeable. As constitutional law it cannot be amended.

The question of succession is the core issue of contention among the members of the Saudi royal family. Ever since its advent in the second half of the 18th century, the dynasty has been suffering from this problem and been trying to overcome it, succeeding as often as failing. This problem is due to the power structure inspired by the local system of kinship.

For the past 50 years, Saudi Arabia has been endlessly engaged in defending and expanding its position in the Middle East. This is, in part, a function of its self-image as the guardian of Mecca and Medina, the two holiest shrines in the Islamic world, but it also reflects its dominant role as the world’s largest repository of oil and as one of its largest producers. Ironically, these two factors behind the Kingdom’s foreign policy have made, at times, uncomfortable bedfellows, particularly when set against its domestic politics and foreign attitudes towards them.

The siege of the Grand Mosque in November 1979 came on the heels of the Islamic Revolution in Iran. Juhayman al-‘Utaybi, the leader of the rebels, though, seemed not be very much inspired by what had happened next door. Whatever he may have noticed from Iran’s turmoil — and it might not have been too much because he never watched TV and rarely browsed newspapers — he deemed it to be irrelevant because Iranians were Shi‘ites, incorrigibly stuck in their heretic beliefs.

Since it emerged in Yemen around three decades ago, the country’s Salafi movement has maintained complex, if not tense links with Saudi Arabia.^[1] Before establishing a Yemeni manifestation of Salafism with its own features and clerics,

In 1979, Saudi-Russian relations were extremely poor. The two countries did not even have diplomatic relations — nor had they since the 1930s. Many observers regarded Soviet military support for Marxist regimes in Ethiopia, South Yemen, and Afghanistan as ultimately aimed at surrounding the oil-rich Kingdom and bringing about the downfall of its US-allied ruling family. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the uncertainty about whether the Iranian Revolution might evolve in a Marxist direction only served to intensify the perception of a Soviet threat to the Kingdom.

Economists and political analysts who write about Saudi Arabia often say that the most difficult part of their research is finding accurate statistics about the Kingdom. Population, food production, water resources, oil and gas reserves, industrial output — many kinds of data that are essential to sound planning and accurate evaluation cannot be taken at face value, especially if they are generated by Saudi government agencies.

The past 30 years of the Saudi-American relationship have seen highs of intense geopolitical cooperation and the lows of the post-September 11, 2001 period. What has tied those ups and downs together is the fluctuating relationship between both governments and the transnational Salafi Islamist movement. Both governments fostered the movement — domestically in Saudi Arabia and as an international force — during the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. Both have seen the movement shift from a tool of their foreign policies to a threat.

In various entries in his unpublished diaries, British Mesopotamian officer Harry St. John Philby, on special mission to central Arabia during 1917-1918, recorded the minutes of his many private “interviews” with Ibn Saud. He concluded that the newly re-emerging Wahhabi movement under Ibn Saud would, with British political and military support, effectively serve British military and political objectives in the Arabian Peninsula and beyond during the ongoing war and in its aftermath.

The Obama Administration confronts a vexing set of challenges across the greater Middle East, an area that stretches from Egypt in the west, Afghanistan and Pakistan in the east, Central Asia in the north and Yemen in the south. In the midst of this “arc of instability” sits Saudi Arabia, a long-standing partner whose relationship with the United States has been enduring but fraught.

Originally posted on June 2009

Originally posted June 2009

Almost immediately after the triumph of the Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini and the new Iranian leadership turned against Saudi Arabia and its ruling family.

Originally posted January 2009

The Arab world, especially the Gulf countries, face many environmental threats and problems such as desertification, biodiversity loss, marine and coastal areas pollution, air pollution, and water scarcity and quality. Beside these traditional environmental threats, various other environmental problems have begun to emerge in the last few years, related to military conflicts, construction and demolition debris, and climate change.

Over a single week in late 2007, the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King ‘Abdullah bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, authorized the establishment of a Supreme Court, issued by-laws for his 2006 succession edict that named its permanent members, and ordered his foreign minister to take necessary steps to counter the rise of the kingdom’s regional hegemonic foe, Iran.