Saudi Arabia:

 Saudi Arabia:

Saudi Arabia, arid, sparsely populated kingdom of the Middle East.Extending across most of the northern and central Arabian Peninsula, Saudi Arabia is a young country that is heir to a rich history. In its western highlands, along the Red Sea, lies the Hejaz, which is the cradle of Islam and the site of that religion’s holiest cities, Mecca and Medina. In the country’s geographic heartland is a region known as Najd (“Highland”), a vast arid zone that until recent times was populated by nomadic tribes. To the east, along the Persian Gulf, are the country’s abundant oil fields that, since the 1960s, have made Saudi Arabia synonymous with petroleum wealth. Those three elements—religion, tribalism, and untold wealth—have fueled the country’s subsequent history.It was only with the rise of the Saud family (Āl Saʿūd)—a Najdi group for which the country is named—and its eventual consolidation of power in the early 20th century that Saudi Arabia began to take on the characteristics of a modern country. The success of the Saud family was in no small part due to the motivating ideology of Wahhābism, an austere form of Islam that was embraced by early family leaders and that became the state creed. This deep religious conservatism has been accompanied by a ubiquitous tribalism—in which competing family groups vie for resources and status—that often has made Saudi society difficult for outsiders to comprehend. Enormous oil wealth has fueled huge and rapid investment in Saudi Arabia’s infrastructure. Many citizens have benefited from this growth, but it also has supported lavish lifestyles for the scions of the ruling family, and religious conservatives and liberal democrats alike have accused the family of squandering and mishandling the country’s wealth. In addition, civil discontent increased after the Persian Gulf War (1990–91) over the country’s close ties to the West, symbolized notably by the U.S. troops stationed in Saudi Arabia until 2005.The country occupies about four-fifths of the Arabian Peninsula. It is bordered by Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; by the Persian Gulf, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman to the east; by a portion of Oman to the southeast; by Yemen to the south and southwest; and by the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to the west. Long-running border disputes were nearly resolved with Yemen (2000) and Qatar (2001); the border with the United Arab Emirates remains undefined. A territory of 2,200 square miles (5,700 square km) along the gulf coast was shared by Kuwait and Saudi Arabia as a neutral zone until 1969, when a political boundary was agreed upon. Each of the two countries administers one-half of the territory, but they equally share oil production in the entire area. The controversy over the Saudi-Iraqi Neutral Zone was legally settled in 1981 by partition, yet conflict between the two countries persisted and prevented final demarcation on the ground.

The Arabian Peninsula is dominated by a plateau that rises abruptly from the Red Sea and dips gently toward the Persian Gulf. In the north, the western highlands are upward of 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) above sea level, decreasing slightly to 4,000 feet (1,200 metres) in the vicinity of Medina and increasing southeastward to more than 10,000 feet (3,000 metres). Mount Sawdāʾ, which is situated near Abhā in the south, is generally considered the highest point in the country. Estimates of its elevation range from 10,279 to 10,522 feet (3,133 to 3,207 metres). The watershed of the peninsula is only 25 miles (40 km) from the Red Sea in the north and recedes to 80 miles (130 km) near the Yemen border. The coastal plain, known as the Tihāmah, is virtually nonexistent in the north, except for occasional wadi deltas, but it widens slightly toward the south. The imposing escarpment that runs parallel to the Red Sea is somewhat interrupted by a gap northwest of Mecca but becomes more clearly continuous to the south.There are three climatic zones in the kingdom: (1) desert almost everywhere, (2) steppe along the western highlands, forming a strip less than 100 miles (160 km) wide in the north but becoming almost 300 miles (480 km) wide at the latitude of Mecca, and (3) a small area of humid and mild temperature conditions, with long summers, in the highlands just north of Yemen.Although the country’s tribes are often considered “pure” Arabs—certainly they are the descendants of the peninsula’s original ethnic stock—a certain degree of ethnic heterogeneity is evident among both the sedentary and nomadic populations of Saudi Arabia. Variations have developed because of a long history of regionalism and tribal autonomy and because some localities have been subjected to important outside influences. Thus, the proximity of sub-Saharan Africa along the Red Sea littoral and the constant historical influx of peoples from Iran, Pakistan, and India along the Persian Gulf coast have left traces of the physical types characteristic of those peoples among the native population. Likewise, the hajj to Mecca has long brought hundreds of thousands of people annually from various ethnic groups to the country. About half of all pilgrims travel from Arab countries and half from African and Asian countries. A small number of such visitors have settled in and around the holy cities throughout the years, either out of religious devotion or because penury prevented their return home.Arabic is a Semitic language of numerous vernacular dialects that originated on the Arabian Peninsula. There are three main dialect groups in Saudi Arabia—in the eastern, central, and western parts of the country—though these are not always clearly discernible from one another because of the pervasiveness of local variations. There are various degrees of mutual intelligibility among dialect groups, but some differences are quiet pronounced. The written language, Modern Standard Arabic, is derived from Classical Arabic, the language of the Qurʾān, and is used as a literary koine within the kingdom and throughout the broader Arab world. Various dialects of Arabic from other regions are also spoken by expatriate workers, as are numerous other non-Arabic languages such as Persian, Urdu, Pashto, Tagalog, and Korean. English is widely understood.Fueled by enormous revenues from oil exports, the economy boomed during the 1970s and ’80s. Unlike most developing countries, Saudi Arabia had an abundance of capital, and vast development projects sprung up that turned the once underdeveloped country into a modern state. During that time, unemployment was all but nonexistent—large numbers of foreign workers were imported to do the most menial and the most highly technical tasks—and per capita income and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita were among the highest in the non-Western world.

Long-range economic development has been directed through a series of five-year plans. The first two five-year plans (1970–75 and 1976–80) established most of the country’s basic transport and communications facilities. Subsequent plans sought to diversify the economy; to increase domestic food production; to improve education, vocational training, and health services; and to further improve communications routes between the different regions of the country. But the economic boom was not without a price. As world oil prices stagnated in the 1990s, government policies encouraging larger families led to a marked increase in population. GDP per capita actually began to fall in real terms, and the kingdom’s young, highly educated workforce began to face high rates of unemployment and underemployment for the first time. However, those trends reversed as oil prices again rose. In addition, five-year plans were directed toward increasing the share of private enterprise in the economy in an effort to move away from dependence on oil exports and to generate jobs.