Saudi Arabia a Politically Unique Country

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

Saudi Arabia is a very unique country.

It’s the only state in the world named after a large royal family. It is home to Mecca and Medina, the holiest cities in Islam, and its religion is a severe – its supporters would call it pure – form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. 

And it sits on the world’s second largest oil reserves, estimated to be at 267 billion barrels. The Ghawar oil field, the world’s largest, has estimated reserves of 70 billion barrels.

Saudi Arabia regards itself as the spiritual leader of the world’s Muslims – and sees Shi’a Iran as a religious as well as political rival. It is a founding member of the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), an organization created to provide collective security against Tehran. Its other members are Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Most of the Arabian peninsula’s independent states, including Nejd and Hejaz, were conquered by the Saudi royal family between 1902 and 1927, and the consolidated kingdom was named Saudi Arabia in 1932. 

A few years later, the king, Abdulaziz al Saud, authorized a team of American engineers from Standard Oil of California to explore the desert bordering the Persian Gulf. In 1938 they discovered what would turn out to be the largest supply of crude oil in the world.

After the king’s death in 1953, five of his sons in succession have ruled Saudi Arabia as an absolute monarchy. The current monarch, Abdullah bin Abdulaziz al Saud, ascended to the throne in 2005.

A founding member of OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries), Saudi Arabia remains the world’s largest oil exporter, producing about nine million barrels per day. Its economy is largely backed by its oil industry, which accounts for more than 95 per cent of exports and 70 per cent of government revenues.

Thanks to the Internet, the young know all about life in more open Arab societies and in the West. As unrest spread throughout the Arab world in 2011, the Saudi state faced mounting pressure to introduce reforms. King Abdullah granted more rights to women, including the right to vote and run in municipal elections, and to be appointed to the consultative Shura Council.

He also announced increased welfare spending and a promise to build 500,000 homes for the poor, as well as opening the public sphere to quasi-independent civil society associations.

But at the same time public protests were banned, after small demonstrations in the mainly Shi’a Eastern Province along the Persian Gulf, where 90 per cent of the country’s oil reserves are located. The king warned that threats to the nation’s security and stability would not be tolerated.

Saudi troops also participated in a crackdown in 2011 on unrest in neighbouring Bahrain, whose Sunni royal family was under threat from its predominantly Shi’s population.

When U.S. president Barack Obama visited Riyadh in March, Saudi leaders expressed alarm at his diplomatic initiative with Iran, which it suspects is continuing its program to develop nuclear weapons. Saudi Arabia fears an American-Iranian accommodation at the expense of the Arab world and has threatened to acquire its own nuclear arsenal should Iran acquire these.

Yet all the GCC states except Saudi Arabia and Bahrain approved the interim nuclear agreement reached by the U.S. and Iran in November 2013. And Qatar has backed the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Saudis consider a “terrorist organisation.”

The Saudis also provide aid to the Sunni rebels in Syria, who have been trying to overthrow Bashar al-Assad’s Shi’a regime, which happens to be Iran’s main ally in the region.

Aware that the Saudi kingdom cannot forever rely on oil revenues, Abdullah wants to diversify the economy and reduce the underproductive public sector. So now about a quarter of each yearly budget goes toward education and vocational training. The Ministry of Higher Education has placed its emphasis on technical, engineering, science and medical programs.

But all of this takes time. Meanwhile, as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Karen Elliott House, who has been visiting the kingdom for more than 30 years, writes in her 2012 book “On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines -- and Future,” the country remains a maze “in which Saudis endlessly maneuver through winding paths between high walls of religious rules, government restrictions and cultural traditions.”