Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia,[c] officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,[d]
is a country in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the
Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately
2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is
geographically the largest sovereign state in Western Asia,
the second-largest in the Arab world (after Algeria), the
fifth-largest in Asia, and the 12th-largest in the world.
Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north,
Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab
Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast and Yemen to the
south; it is separated from Egypt and Israel by the Gulf of
Aqaba. It is the only country with both a Red Sea coast and
a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of
arid desert, lowland and mountains. As of October 2018, the
Saudi economy was the largest in the Middle East and the
18th largest in the world.[9] Saudi Arabia also has one of
the world's youngest populations: 50 percent of its 33.4
million people are under 25 years old.
The territory that now constitutes Saudi Arabia was the site
of several ancient cultures and civilizations. The
prehistory of Saudi Arabia shows some of the earliest traces
of human activity in the world.[13] The world's
second-largest religion,[14] Islam, emerged in modern-day
Saudi Arabia. In the early 7th century, the Islamic prophet
Muhammad united the population of Arabia and created a
single Islamic religious polity.[15] Following his death in
632, his followers rapidly expanded the territory under
Muslim rule beyond Arabia, conquering huge and unprecedented
swathes of territory (from the Iberian Peninsula in the West
to modern-day Pakistan in the East) in a matter of decades.
Arab dynasties originating from modern-day Saudi Arabia
founded the Rashidun (632–661), Umayyad (661–750), Abbasid
(750–1517) and Fatimid (909–1171) caliphates as well as
numerous other dynasties in Asia, Africa and Europe.
The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of
mainly four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd and parts of
Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir).[21]
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud.
He united the four regions into a single state through a
series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of
Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud.
Saudi Arabia has since been a totalitarian absolute
monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed
along Islamist lines. The ultraconservative Wahhabi
religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the
predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global
spread largely financed by the oil and gas trade.[22][23]
Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy
Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca) and
Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in
Islam. The state's official language is Arabic.
Petroleum was discovered on 3 March 1938 and followed up by
several other finds in the Eastern Province. Saudi Arabia
has since become the world's second largest oil producer
(behind the US) and the world's largest oil exporter,
controlling the world's second largest oil reserves and the
sixth largest gas reserves. The kingdom is categorized as a
World Bank high-income economy with a high Human Development
Index and is the only Arab country to be part of the G-20
major economies.
The kingdom has the world's fifth-highest military
expenditure and, according to SIPRI, was the world's second
largest arms importer from 2010 to 2014. Saudi Arabia is
considered a regional and middle power. In addition to the
GCC, it is an active member of the Organisation of Islamic
Cooperation and OPEC.
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