8BEFORE OILof Christianity, the great civilizations— the deserts of the Arabian Pen-
insula languished outside this current. Most of the action took place else-
where, in Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt, where plentiful fresh
water enabled food surpluses and the construction of great cities.
For two distinct periods, however, the Arabian Peninsula played a
central role in human history. The first dates to 622, when the Prophet
Muhammad founded the Islamic faith. The formation of Islam launched
the golden age of the Arabs, enshrining the Arabian Peninsula forever
as the geographic and cultural heart of the Islamic world. By the thir-
teenth century, Arabs had conquered much of the known world and
spread their faith from Spain to China. For four centuries, Arabs led the
Western world in philosophy, science, medicine, and poetry, even pre-
serving European knowledge during the medieval “dark age” that
gripped that continent.
But as Islam spread into more temperate lands, its command centers
followed. In a paradoxical turn of fate, the glories of the Arab Empire
largely bypassed Arabia. The western Arabian cities where Muhammad
began preaching, Mecca and Medina, remained holy shrines of pilgrim-
age, but after the prophet’s death in 632, most of the Arabian Peninsula
sank back into isolation. The caliphates were administered from faraway
capitals: Damascus, Cordoba, Baghdad, and Cairo. Punishing geogra-
phy mired Arabia in a thousand- year time warp. Human settlement was
deterred by the endless dunes and jagged wadis (canyons), the searing
climate, the dearth of fresh water, and the limits of sea navigation.
The second golden age of the Arabian Peninsula is the one this book
focuses on: the age of oil, which unfolded on Arabia’s Persian Gulf coast
1,300 years after the Prophet’s death. The birth of this new era is the focus
of chapter 2.
Between the two golden ages of Islam and oil was a long epoch of iso-
lation. Elsewhere in the world, global empires rose and fell, and civili-
zations were transformed by conquest, colonization, and technology. The
Arabian Peninsula’s geographic quarantine allowed the sheikhdoms of
the Gulf to develop traits that remain relevant to this day, including
a robust tribal culture and distributional autocratic rule that has its
basis in the earliest forms of Arabian societal organization. The Gulf ’s