84 Facts About Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is a country on the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia.

Saudi Arabia is the only country with a coastline along both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland, steppe, and mountains.

Pre-Islamic Arabia, the territory that constitutes modern-day 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.

Saudi Arabia 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 an absolute monarchy, where political decisions are made on the basis of consultation among the King, the Council of Ministers, and the country's traditional elites that oversee a highly authoritarian regime.

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Saudi Arabia has since become the world's second-largest oil producer and the world's largest oil exporter, controlling the world's second-largest oil reserves and the fourth-largest gas reserves.

Saudi Arabia is home to the world's third-largest immigrant population.

Saudi Arabia underwent an extreme environmental fluctuation in the Quaternary that led to profound evolutionary and demographic changes.

Saudi Arabia has a rich Lower Paleolithic record, and the quantity of Oldowan-like sites in the region indicate a significant role that Saudi Arabia had played in the early hominin colonization of Eurasia.

Thus, the idea that colonists from Saudi Arabia had emigrated to southern Mesopotamia and founded the region's first sedentary culture was abandoned.

Shortly before the advent of Islam, apart from urban trading settlements, much of what was to become Saudi Arabia was populated by nomadic pastoral tribal societies.

Saudi Arabia soon became a more politically peripheral region of the Muslim world as the focus shifted to the vast and newly conquered lands.

In 1727, the Emirate of Diriyah established in the area around Riyadh rapidly expanded and briefly controlled most of the present-day territory of Saudi Arabia, sacking Karbala in 1802, and capturing Mecca in 1803.

Subject to this suzerainty, Saudi Arabia was ruled by a patchwork of tribal rulers, with the Sharif of Mecca having pre-eminence and ruling the Hejaz.

On 23 September 1932, the two kingdoms of the Hejaz and Nejd were united as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and that date is a national holiday called Saudi National Day.

In 1972, Saudi Arabia gained a 20 per cent control in Aramco, thereby decreasing US control over Saudi oil.

In 1973, Saudi Arabia led an oil boycott against the Western countries that supported Israel in the Yom Kippur War against Egypt and Syria, leading to the quadrupling of oil prices.

Saudi Arabia was succeeded by his brother, King Fahd, who added the title "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" to his name in 1986 in response to considerable fundamentalist pressure to avoid the use of "majesty" in association with anything except God.

Saudi Arabia invited the Kuwaiti government and many of its citizens to stay in Saudi Arabia, but expelled citizens of Yemen and Jordan because of their governments' support of Iraq.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy; however, according to the Basic Law of Saudi Arabia adopted by royal decree in 1992, the king must comply with Sharia and the Quran, while the Quran and the Sunnah (the traditions of Muhammad) are declared to be the country's constitution.

Saudi Arabia is authoritarian, and some critics regard it as a totalitarian state.

Saudi Arabia has undergone a process of political and social reform, such as to increase public transparency and good governance, but nepotism and patronage are widespread when doing business in the country; the enforcement of the anti-corruption laws is selective and public officials engage in corruption with impunity.

Saudi Arabia is almost unique in giving the ulema a direct role in government.

Saudi Arabia is unique among modern Muslim states in that Sharia is not codified and there is no system of judicial precedent, giving judges the power to use independent legal reasoning to make a decision.

However, in 2021, Saudi Arabia has announced new judicial reforms which will lead to an entirely codified law that eliminates discrepancies.

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Saudi Arabia joined the UN in 1945 and is a founding member of the Arab League, Gulf Cooperation Council, Muslim World League, and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

Between the mid-1970s and 2002, Saudi Arabia expended over $70 billion in "overseas development aid".

China and Saudi Arabia are major allies, with relationship between the two countries growing significantly in recent decades.

The Saudi Arabia government considered the two-month uprising as a "security threat" posed by the Shia who represent the majority of Bahrain population.

On 25 March 2015, Saudi Arabia, spearheading a coalition of Sunni Muslim states, started a military intervention in Yemen against the Shia Houthis and forces loyal to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was deposed in the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.

Saudi Arabia was involved in the CIA-led Timber Sycamore covert operation to train and arm Syrian rebels.

In March 2015, Sweden scrapped an arms deal with Saudi Arabia, marking an end to a decade-old defence agreement with the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia has been seen as a moderating influence in the Arab–Israeli conflict, periodically putting forward a peace plan between Israel and the Palestinians and condemning Hezbollah.

Saudi Arabia halted new trade and investment dealings with Canada and suspended diplomatic ties in a dramatic escalation of a dispute over the kingdom's arrest of women's rights activist Samar Badawi on 6 August 2018.

Pressure on Saudi Arabia to reveal the truth about the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi from the US and European countries has increased.

The famine in Yemen is the direct result of the Saudi Arabia-led intervention and blockade of the rebel-held area.

In 2017, as part of its nuclear power program, Saudi Arabia planned to extract uranium domestically, taking a step towards self-sufficiency in producing nuclear fuel.

On 24 August 2017, the kingdom signed a memorandum of understanding with China National Nuclear Corporation to explore and assess uranium On 4 August 2020, a report claimed that Saudi Arabia has constructed a facility in the desert near Al-'Ula for extracting uranium yellowcake from uranium ore with the help of China.

On 17 September 2020, The Guardian released an exclusive report revealing that Saudi Arabia was paving the way for domestic production of nuclear fuel.

Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.

Saudi Arabia said that Saudi has been funding an ideology that leads to extremism and the leaders of the kingdom are not aware of the consequences.

Kingdom has a long-standing military relationship with Pakistan, it has long been speculated that Saudi Arabia secretly funded Pakistan's atomic bomb programme and seeks to purchase atomic weapons from Pakistan, in near future.

Saudi Arabia has a long list of outstanding orders for arms, including 27 more combat aircraft from the UK, 154 combat aircraft from the US, and a large number of armoured vehicles from Canada.

The $15 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia is believed to be the largest arms sale in Canadian history.

In 2017, Saudi Arabia signed a 110 billion dollar arms deal with the United States.

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Saudi Arabia is Britain's largest arms customer, with more than £4.

The authoritarian regime ruling the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is consistently ranked among the "worst of the worst" in Freedom House's annual survey of political and civil rights.

Saudi Arabia abstained from the United Nations vote adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, saying it contradicted sharia law.

Saudi Arabia occupies about 80 per cent of the Arabian Peninsula, lying between latitudes 16° and 33° N, and longitudes 34° and 56° E Because the country's southern borders with the United Arab Emirates and Oman are not precisely marked, the exact size of the country is undefined.

Except for the southwestern regions such as Asir, Saudi Arabia has a desert climate with very high day-time temperatures during the summer and a sharp temperature drop at night.

Saudi Arabia is home to five terrestrial ecoregions: Arabian Peninsula coastal fog desert, Southwestern Arabian foothills savanna, Southwestern Arabian montane woodlands, Arabian Desert, and Red Sea Nubo-Sindian tropical desert and semi-desert.

Saudi Arabia has the world's second-largest proven petroleum reserves and the country is the largest exporter of petroleum.

Challenges to the Saudi Arabia economy include halting or reversing the decline in per-capita income, improving education to prepare youth for the workforce and providing them with employment, diversifying the economy, stimulating the private sector and housing construction, and diminishing corruption and inequality.

In November 2005, Saudi Arabia was approved as a member of the World Trade Organization.

The cities will be spread around Saudi Arabia to promote diversification for each region and their economy, and the cities are projected to contribute $150 billion to the GDP.

Saudi Arabia is increasingly activating its ports in order to participate in trade between Europe and China in addition to oil transport.

Saudi Arabia is completely self-sufficient in a number of foodstuffs, including meat, milk, and eggs.

Dates, once a staple of the Saudi Arabia diet, are now mainly grown for global humanitarian aid.

Shortly thereafter, Saudi Arabia began exporting wheat to some 30 countries, including China and the former Soviet Union, and in the major producing areas of Tabuk, Hail, and Qasim, average yields reached 8.

Saudi Arabia is a major exporter of fruits and vegetables to its neighbours.

The Al Jouf farms are located in Sakaka, a city in the north-western part of Saudi Arabia, which is a deeply-rooted in history.

Saudi Arabia is suffering from a major depletion of the water in its underground aquifers and a resultant break down and disintegration of its agriculture as a consequence.

Saudi Arabia ranked as a major buyer of agricultural land in foreign countries.

Saudi Arabia population has grown rapidly since 1950 when it was estimated to be 3 million, and for many years had one of the highest population growth rates in the world at around 3 per cent a year.

Virtually all Saudi Arabia citizens are Muslim, and almost all Saudi Arabia residents are Muslim.

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The official and dominant form of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia is commonly known as Wahhabism, which was founded in the Arabian Peninsula by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the 18th century.

Saudi Arabia allows Christians to enter the country as foreign workers for temporary work, but does not allow them to practice their faith openly.

In 2018, Saudi Arabia ranked 28th worldwide in terms of high-quality research output according to the scientific journal Nature.

Saudi Arabia was ranked 66th in the Global Innovation Index in 2021, up from 68th in 2019.

Saudi Arabia has been ranked among the 26 best countries in providing high quality healthcare.

Saudi Arabia expelled 800, 000 Yemenis in 1990 and 1991 and has built a Saudi–Yemen barrier against an influx of illegal immigrants and against the smuggling of drugs and weapons.

In November 2013, Saudi Arabia expelled thousands of illegal Ethiopian residents from the kingdom.

Saudi Arabia is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.

Saudi Arabia has centuries-old attitudes and traditions, often derived from Arab civilization.

The main factors that influence the culture of Saudi Arabia are Islamic heritage and Bedouin traditions as well as its historical role as an ancient trade centre.

The Saudi Arabia government has often been viewed as an active oppressor of Shia Muslims because of the funding of the Wahhabi ideology which denounces the Shia faith.

Saudi Arabia is one of the few countries that have "religious police", who patrol the streets "enjoining good and forbidding wrong" by enforcing dress codes, strict separation of men and women, attendance at prayer (salat) five times each day, the ban on alcohol, and other aspects of Sharia (Islamic law).

In 2019, Saudi Arabia allowed women to travel abroad, register for divorce or marriage, and apply for official documents without the permission of a male guardian.

However, in 2016, the Saudi Arabia cabinet has drastically reduced the power of the religious police and barred it "from pursuing, questioning, asking for identification, arresting and detaining anyone suspected of a crime", making them effectively "non-existent" in the public sphere anymore.

Six cultural sites in Saudi Arabia are designated as UNESCO World Heritage Sites: Al-Hijr Archaeological Site; the Turaif district in the city of Diriyah; Historic Jeddah, the Gate to Mecca; Al-Ahsa Oasis; Rock Art in the Hail Region; and Hima Cultural Area.

Saudi Arabia participates in the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage in Conflict Areas, created in March 2017, with a contribution of 18.

In July 2019, UNESCO signed a letter with the Saudi Minister of Culture in which Saudi Arabia contributed US$25 million to UNESCO for the preservation of heritage.

However, in August 2019, the kingdom's strategy received criticism for appearing as a method of sportswashing soon after Saudi Arabia's US-based 2018 lobbying campaign foreign registration documentations got published online.

Saudi Arabia has one of the fastest 5G internet speeds in the world.