BEFORE OIL13The GCC countries are typically studied as a group, but the various
monarchies bear widely different characteristics (some of the major sta-
tistics for each state are given in table 1.1).
SAUDI ARABIAThe Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the world’s only nation- state named for
the family that rules it. The kingdom is dominant over other Gulf mon-
archies in terms of population, physical area, natural resources, and geo-
political influence (table 1.1). The organizing structures of Saudi society
are among the world’s purest— meaning that Saudi culture has under-
gone relatively little influence from outsiders, making it unique in many
ways.
The al- Saud family’s power flows from two sources: its origins in
the central Arabian Desert, in the region known as the Nejd, and an
eighteenth- century alliance with the Ikhwan, an army of nomadic
Islamist followers of Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab.^6
A Saudi kingdom emerged in the central Arabian Peninsula twice in
previous eras and both times lasted less than a century. The first Saudi
state, known as the Emirate of Diriyah after the ancestral hometown of
the al- Saud, rose in the mid– eighteenth century and lasted until the
Ottoman invaders crushed it in 1818. The Emirate of Diriyah sprawled
between Oman and the Shia holy city of Karbala in southern Iraq, where
Sunni jihadis destroyed Shia shrines and put thousands to the sword.
The second Saudi state, the Emirate of the Nejd, held about half as much
territory, concentrated in the eastern half of the peninsula. The Nejdi
state lasted from 1824 to 1891, when Riyadh fell to the al- Saud’s historic
Nejdi rivals, the al- Rashid clan.
The modern kingdom is the al- Saud family’s third attempt at state-
craft. It has been in place about as long as the first. The kingdom’s found-
ing father, Abdulaziz al- Saud, or Ibn Saud, seized Riyadh and the Nejd
from the al- Rashid in 1902. Over the next thirty years, Ibn Saud and his
Ikhwan irregulars fought more than fifty battles in their quest to reas-
semble a vast kingdom covering most of the Arabian Peninsula. When