A Brief History of Saudi Arabia: Incense Roads, the Prophet's Cities, a Desert Dynasty and the Oil Age

Companion pieces: If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia (what daily life feels like now; this is how it got that way), Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People (the religion itself, in depth) and A Brief History of Iran (the rival across the Gulf).

On 21 March 2026, Saudi Arabia gave Iran's military attaché and four of his colleagues 24 hours to leave the country. For three weeks the kingdom had been under fire. After the United States and Israel attacked Iran on 28 February, Iran answered with hundreds of missiles and drones aimed at its Gulf neighbours. Most were shot down, but two drones hit the US embassy in Riyadh, energy facilities in the east were repeatedly targeted, and with the Strait of Hormuz blocked, the Red Sea port of Yanbu became the kingdom's only way to ship its crude to the world. By October the war had a second front: Houthi missiles were falling on the airports of Riyadh and Abha, fired from Yemen, where Saudi Arabia has been fighting since 2015.

It was not the year the planners of Vision 2030 had in mind. Ten years earlier, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had promised to wean the country off oil, open it to tourists and turn the desert into a showcase of the future. By 2026 women were driving, cinemas had reopened after a 35-year ban, and the kingdom was preparing to host the 2034 World Cup. But the most famous megaprojects were being cut back, executions were at record levels, and the state that had built itself on oil money and religious legitimacy was being tested from every direction at once.

To understand how a kingdom only declared in 1932 came to hold Islam's two holiest cities, the world's second-largest proven oil reserves and one of the most closely watched rulers on Earth, you have to go back a long way: to the incense caravans, to a merchant in Mecca who said he heard the word of God, and to a pact sworn in an oasis town in the 1740s. This is that history, told at length.

In this history

1. Before the kingdom: incense roads and caravan cities (to c. 570 CE)
2. The Prophet and the first caliphs: two ways of telling it (c. 570–750)
3. Holy cities on the edge of empires (750–1700s)
4. The preacher and the prince: the first and second Saudi states (1727–c. 1891)
5. Ibn Saud and the making of the kingdom (1902–1932)
6. Oil, Aramco and the boom (1932–1979)
7. 1979: the siege of Mecca and the turn to piety (1979–1990)
8. The Gulf War, al-Qaeda and 9/11 (1990–2015)
9. The Mohammed bin Salman era (2015–2025)
10. Saudi Arabia in 2026
11. How to understand Saudi Arabia today

Part 1 — Before the kingdom: incense roads and caravan cities (to c. 570 CE)

Saudi Arabia covers about four-fifths of the Arabian Peninsula. Much of it is desert: the Rub' al-Khali, the "Empty Quarter", which dominates the south, is the largest sand area in the world, and smaller sand seas, the Nafud and the Dahna, arc across the north and centre. There are no permanent rivers. People survived where water could be found: in oases fed by underground aquifers, in the wadis that flood after rare rains, and on the coasts.

That geography produced three very different regions, and they still matter:

The Asir mountains in the south-west, green and terraced, form a fourth world closer to Yemen.

People of the peninsula

Arabia has been inhabited for a very long time. In the south-west, the Ḥimā Cultural Area, inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in 2021, holds rock carvings of hunting scenes, animals and daily life spanning some 7,000 years, along with inscriptions in half a dozen scripts left by travellers and armies who camped at its wells. UNESCO describes it as the oldest known toll station on an important desert caravan route; its wells have been in use for at least 3,000 years.

On the Gulf coast, the ancient kingdom that Sumerian texts call Dilmun was centred on the island of Bahrain but left related sites on the nearby Arabian mainland. Around 2000 BCE it was a trading hub between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, shipping copper, pearls, dates and stone beads. Even then, the eastern coast of Arabia lived by the sea.

In the north-west, the oasis of Tayma was important enough in the 6th century BCE that the kings of Babylon used it as a summer capital. Further south, around AlUla, older local inscriptions in a script scholars call Lihyanite still mark the sandstone.

The incense road

What linked these places was trade, above all in frankincense and myrrh, aromatic resins harvested from trees that grow in what are now southern Oman, Yemen's Hadhramaut and the Horn of Africa. The ancient world burned them in worship, used them as medicine, and paid handsomely. Caravans of camels carried them north along the western side of the peninsula towards the Mediterranean world. Oasis towns along the route grew rich by supplying water, protection and markets, and by charging tolls.

Two sites show what that wealth could build:

• Qaryat al-Faw, on the edge of the Empty Quarter, sat at a strategic junction of the trade routes. UNESCO, which inscribed the Al-Faw archaeological area in 2024, counts nearly 12,000 archaeological remains there, from Stone Age tools to the ruins of the city itself, which was abandoned around the 5th century CE.
• Hegra (also called al-Hijr or Mada'in Salih), near AlUla, was the southern city of the Nabataeans, the Arab people whose capital was Petra in Jordan. Between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE they carved 111 monumental tombs into its sandstone outcrops, 94 of them with decorated façades, and dug wells into the rock to farm the desert. It became Saudi Arabia's first World Heritage site in 2008, and UNESCO notes that it bears inscriptions in Lihyanite, Thamudic, Nabataean, Greek and Latin: a crossroads in stone.

UNESCO describes Hegra's tombs as a meeting of Assyrian, Egyptian, Phoenician and Hellenistic influences, cut into the same rock. Long before Islam, Arabia was not isolated. It was where the ancient world's trade routes met.

Nabataean power in the Hejaz lasted from about 100 BCE to 200 CE. In the centuries that followed, the old caravan cities faded, and al-Faw was abandoned around the 5th century.

Arabia on the eve of Islam

By the 6th century CE, Arabia sat between two great rival empires, the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) in the north-west and the Sasanian Persian in the north-east. Most Arabians were organised into tribes and clans. Some were Bedouin herders moving between pastures with camels and goats; others were farmers in oases, or merchants and craftsmen in towns.

Religion was varied. Many tribes honoured local gods and goddesses, often at sacred stones and shrines. Jewish and Christian communities lived in parts of the peninsula. In Mecca, a dry valley town, stood a shrine, the Kaaba, that drew pilgrims from across the region; the town's leading tribe, according to tradition, was the Quraysh, merchants who ran caravans to Syria and Yemen. Islamic tradition calls this era the jahiliyya, "the age of ignorance", a term that expresses a believer's judgement rather than a historian's description; archaeologists, studying the same centuries, find literate, connected and religiously diverse societies.

Part 2 — The Prophet and the first caliphs: two ways of telling it (c. 570–750)

Everything about Saudi Arabia, from its flag to its legitimacy, rests on what happened in Mecca and Medina in the early 7th century. There are two ways to tell the story: as Muslims receive it through their tradition, and as historians reconstruct it from surviving evidence. Both deserve respect, and they should not be blurred together.

The account of the Islamic tradition

According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad was born in Mecca around 570 CE into the Hashim clan of the Quraysh. His father died before he was born and his mother when he was a small child. He became a merchant and, around 595, married a wealthy widow and merchant, Khadija.

In 610, while he was meditating in a cave on a mountain outside Mecca, the archangel Gabriel appeared to him with the first words of the Qur'an, which Muslims understand as the literal speech of God. Revelations continued for the rest of his life. Muhammad began to preach that there is one God (Allah), that idols must be abandoned, that the rich must care for the poor, and that every person will face judgement. His preaching threatened the Meccan elite, whose wealth was tied to the shrine and its gods, and his followers were persecuted.

In 622, after his clan withdrew its protection, Muhammad and his followers emigrated to Yathrib, an oasis to the north that became known as Madinat al-Nabi, "the city of the Prophet", or simply Medina. This emigration, the hijra, is so central that the Islamic calendar counts its years from it. In Medina, Muhammad was both prophet and leader of a community. He repulsed Meccan attacks in 625 and 627, made a truce with Mecca in 628, and later brought the city under his rule, clearing the Kaaba of idols and rededicating it to the one God. In 632 he led the "Farewell Pilgrimage" to Mecca, the model for every hajj since, and died in Medina that June.

What historians say

Historians face a sources problem. The Qur'an, which most scholars agree took shape very early, contains little concrete biography. Most details of Muhammad's life come from the sira, the biographical literature, written down mainly in the 8th and 9th centuries. The single most important early work, by Ibn Ishaq (died 767–68), survives only in later reworkings, the best known by Ibn Hisham (died 833–34). These accounts do not always agree, and some contain miracles or episodes that resemble Biblical stories.

By comparing them carefully, scholars have identified common elements already in circulation by the late 7th century, and a few basic details are confirmed by non-Muslim sources, a Syriac chronicle and an Armenian history, written within a few decades of his death. Physical evidence also helps: in 2015, radiocarbon testing at Oxford dated the parchment of two Qur'an leaves held by the University of Birmingham to between 568 and 645 CE, with 95.4% probability, placing the manuscript close to the lifetime the tradition gives Muhammad.

Most historians hold that the core of the traditional story, a prophet in Mecca, an emigration to Medina, a new community that united much of Arabia within his lifetime, is sound, while individual episodes are harder to verify. Believers and historians are asking different questions: one about meaning and revelation, the other about evidence. Neither can settle the other's question.

The caliphs, and the move away from Arabia

Muhammad left no undisputed successor. His close companion Abu Bakr became the first caliph ("successor"), followed by Umar, Uthman and Ali: the four whom Sunni Muslims call the Rashidun, the "rightly guided" caliphs (632–661). Under them, Arab armies took Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Iran and Armenia. They also adopted the Islamic calendar and established an authoritative reading of the Qur'an. A dispute over Ali's succession, and the civil wars around it, split the community into the Sunni majority and the Shi'a, who believe leadership should have passed through Ali and the Prophet's family. That division still shapes Saudi politics, from the kingdom's own Shi'a minority in the east to its rivalry with Iran.

In 661 Mu'awiya, himself a native of Mecca, founded the Umayyad dynasty and ruled from Damascus. In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and moved the centre of power to Iraq, where they built Baghdad. This was the great paradox of Arabian history: the peninsula gave the world a religion and an empire, and then the empire moved away. For the next twelve centuries Mecca and Medina were the spiritual centre of Islam but almost never the political one.

Part 3 — Holy cities on the edge of empires (750–1700s)

For a thousand years after the Abbasids, the history of what is now Saudi Arabia splits into separate stories that rarely touched.

The Hejaz: pilgrims and protectors

The Hejaz was ruled from far away: by Baghdad, then by dynasties based in Egypt, and from 1517 by the Ottoman Turks. Day-to-day authority, though, stayed with the sharifs of Mecca, local nobles who claimed descent from the Prophet and governed the holy cities in the empire's name.

The economy of the Hejaz was the pilgrimage. Every year pilgrims arrived overland in great caravans, and they also came by sea through Jeddah, which UNESCO describes as a major port for Indian Ocean trade from the 7th century and the gateway for those arriving by ship. UNESCO calls the city a thriving multicultural centre; its tower houses, built by merchant families in the late 19th century in the Red Sea coral-stone tradition, are now a World Heritage site.

For most of history, the Hejaz looked outward: to the Red Sea, to the Indian Ocean and to the millions of pilgrims who arrived from every corner of the Muslim world. Najd, a few hundred kilometres inland, looked inward.

Najd: oasis towns and tribes

Central Arabia was left to itself. No empire thought it worth conquering. Its people lived in walled oasis towns, growing dates, wheat and vegetables with water drawn from deep wells, or as Bedouin moving their herds between seasonal pastures. Towns were ruled by local emirs from leading families; tribes were led by sheikhs whose authority depended on generosity, skill in war and consent.

Life was hard and politics local. Raiding between tribes, and protection payments from towns to tribes, were normal. Drought could ruin a town. Literacy was limited, but poetry was prized, and in some towns families of religious scholars, the ulama, served as judges and teachers.

The east: dates, pearls and the Gulf

The great oasis of al-Hasa was among the most productive farmland in Arabia. UNESCO, which lists it as a World Heritage cultural landscape, counts 2.5 million date palms and calls it the largest oasis in the world. Along the coast, men dived for pearls in the summer months. The region's population included a large Shi'a community, and it was usually tied to powers in Iraq or the Gulf rather than to Najd.

How ordinary people lived

Across the peninsula, life before oil was organised around family and tribe. Most people never travelled further than the next market town or, once in a lifetime, to Mecca. Houses in Najd were built of mud brick; Hejazi houses used coral stone. Coffee, dates and bread were staples; meat was for feasts. Hospitality was a duty and a matter of honour, a value that the If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia piece describes in today's terms. Disease, famine and infant death were common: as late as 1960, the World Bank estimates, life expectancy at birth in Saudi Arabia was about 45 years.

Part 4 — The preacher and the prince: the first and second Saudi states (1727–c. 1891)

The modern kingdom traces its origins to an oasis town on the edge of Wadi Hanifa, near today's Riyadh: Diriyah. Founded in the 15th century, it was ruled in the early 18th century by the Al Saud family. And here the story already divides into two accounts, an official one and one told by many historians, which differ in emphasis rather than facts.

The founding date: 1727 or 1744?

In January 2022 a royal order declared that Saudi Arabia would mark 22 February every year as Founding Day, commemorating February 1727, when Imam Muhammad bin Saud began his reign in Diriyah. The official account presents that date as the founding of the first Saudi state.

For most of the 20th century, by contrast, most accounts dated the state's real beginning to an alliance struck around 1744 (some sources say 1745) between Muhammad bin Saud and a religious reformer, Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The new emphasis on 1727 places the dynasty, rather than the religious movement, at the centre of the national story. The official explanation is that 1727 is simply when the state began. Many observers have read the change as part of the crown prince's wider effort to loosen the clerics' hold on national identity. Both dates are real events. The disagreement is about which one made the state.

The reformer

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in Uyaynah in 1703 into a family of judges and scholars and travelled widely as a young man. When he came home he preached a return to what he considered the pure monotheism of early Islam. Influenced by the 14th-century scholar Ibn Taymiyya, he condemned practices he saw as innovations that compromised the oneness of God: the veneration of saints and their tombs, the seeking of intercession from holy men, and much of the Sufi tradition.

His preaching made enemies. The powerful chief of al-Hasa threatened Uyaynah's ruler, who in the end expelled the preacher rather than kill him. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab went to Diriyah, where Muhammad bin Saud took him in. The two men swore oaths of mutual support: the emir would defend and spread the reformer's teaching; the reformer would give religious legitimacy to the emir's rule. That bargain, between the House of Saud and the religious establishment led for generations by Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's descendants, lasted, in one form or another, for nearly three centuries.

What to call it, and how to judge it

Outsiders call the movement Wahhabism, a name its followers have generally disliked. They describe themselves simply as Muslims following the call to pure monotheism (tawhid), or as Salafis, followers of the "pious forebears". UNESCO's description of Diriyah calls it "the Salafiyya reform" and describes the citadel of at-Turaif as the centre of both Saudi power and the reform's spread.

Expansion

The alliance proved formidable. The Saudi-Wahhabi forces took Uyaynah and parts of al-Hasa; Riyadh resisted for 27 years before falling. When Muhammad bin Saud died in 1765, his son Abdulaziz carried the campaigns further; Ibn Abd al-Wahhab lived on in Diriyah until his death in 1792.

The movement then burst out of Najd. In 1801 or 1802 (accounts differ) Saudi forces sacked the Shi'a holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, plundering and damaging its shrines. In 1803 they took Mecca. That same year Abdulaziz was assassinated in the mosque at Diriyah by a Shi'a man, in revenge for Karbala. His son Saud took Medina in 1804–05 and, year after year, presided over the hajj. By then the Saudi realm stretched from the Gulf to the Red Sea and from Iraq's desert edge to the borders of Yemen and Oman.

The Ottoman answer

The Ottoman sultan could not accept a rival controlling the holy cities and turning back pilgrim caravans. He handed the task to Muhammad Ali, his powerful governor of Egypt. Egyptian forces landed in the Hejaz and, after early defeats, retook Mecca and Medina in 1812. In 1816 another of Muhammad Ali's sons, Ibrahim Pasha, took command and pushed into Najd, winning over the tribes along his route. He reached Diriyah in April 1818. After a siege of several months the Saudi ruler, Abdullah ibn Saud, surrendered in September. He was sent to Istanbul and beheaded; local religious leaders were executed; and Diriyah was razed. Its ruins, the citadel of at-Turaif, were inscribed by UNESCO in 2010.

Restoration and collapse: the second Saudi state (1824–c. 1891)

The first state was destroyed, but the faith and the family survived. In 1824 Turki, a grandson of Muhammad bin Saud, drove the Egyptian garrison out of Riyadh, which has been the Saudi capital ever since. This second Saudi state was smaller and more cautious. Turki accepted nominal Ottoman sovereignty, kept on friendly terms with the British in the Gulf, and recovered al-Hasa.

Its history was a cycle of murder, exile and return. Turki was killed by a cousin in 1834. His son Faisal, who had been carried off to Egypt as a prisoner in 1818 and escaped in 1828, avenged him and ruled, lost his throne to another Egyptian expedition in 1837–38, was taken back to Cairo, and returned in 1843 to rule until 1865. Under Faisal, the state was simply run: judges and governors sent out from Riyadh, taxes collected even from the tribes, and poetry and history writing flourishing. He extended Saudi influence as far as the Buraimi oasis and the Omani hinterland, and only British intervention stopped direct Saudi rule over the Gulf's western shore.

After Faisal died, his sons fought each other for the throne. Their civil war gave an opening to a rival dynasty in the north: the Al Rashid of Ha'il, who controlled the main pilgrim route from the east and had close ties with the Ottoman government. By the 1890s Ha'il was, in Britannica's phrase, "the undisputed capital of all desert Arabia". By the early 1890s the Rashidis had taken Riyadh, and the head of the Saud family, Abd al-Rahman, fled with his household into exile in Kuwait. Among his children was a boy of about ten, Abdulaziz, who would become known to the world as Ibn Saud.

The Saudi state was destroyed twice and rebuilt twice. The family learned two lessons that still guide it: stay united, and never let an outside power, or a rival at home, catch you divided.

Part 5 — Ibn Saud and the making of the kingdom (1902–1932)

The night raid on Riyadh

In 1901 Ibn Saud, then somewhere between 22 and 26 years old, rode out of Kuwait with about 40 followers. On 15 January 1902, with a picked group of 15, he scaled the walls of Riyadh, surprised the Rashidi governor and his escort before the gate of the Masmak fort and defeated them. The townspeople hailed him as their ruler. The raid became the founding legend of the modern state.

Thirty years of conquest

Holding Riyadh was only the start. The Rashidis, with substantial Ottoman help in men and supplies, fought back, and the struggle swung back and forth through 1904. In 1906 his rival Ibn Rashid was killed in battle, Ibn Saud secured the withdrawal of Ottoman troops from Qassim, and he became master of central Arabia. In 1913 he took al-Hasa from the Ottomans, gaining the Gulf coast.

His most original creation was the Ikhwan ("Brethren"). From 1912 he encouraged Bedouin to give up wandering and settle in agricultural colonies called hijras, the first at al-Artawiyyah. There, religious teachers instructed them in Ibn Abd al-Wahhab's teachings, and by the end of the decade nearly 100 such settlements had produced a fervent army bound by faith rather than tribe.

During the First World War, Britain courted him. A treaty in December 1915 recognised his rule under British protection and paid him a subsidy of £5,000 a month. Britain also backed his rival in the west, Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who launched the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916 and proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz. After the war Hussein's sons became kings of Iraq and Transjordan, leaving Ibn Saud surrounded by British-protected Hashemite thrones.

The conquest of the Hejaz

In 1921 Ibn Saud defeated the last Rashidi emir and annexed the north. In 1924 Hussein was proclaimed caliph in Mecca, which the Ikhwan called heresy, and in September they attacked the Hejaz. They took Taif, where they massacred male civilians, and then Mecca, which they entered unopposed. Medina and Jeddah surrendered by the end of 1925. Hussein abdicated; his son Ali left the country. On 8 January 1926 Ibn Saud was proclaimed king of the Hejaz in the Great Mosque of Mecca. He now held the holy cities, the pilgrim revenues and the port of Jeddah.

Turning on the Ikhwan

The Ikhwan wanted to keep going, into Iraq, Transjordan and Kuwait, all under British protection. Ibn Saud knew that would bring war with Britain. The zealots accused him of betraying their cause, resented his taxes, and attacked him for innovations such as telephones, automobiles and the telegraph, and for sending a son to Egypt, a land of "unbelievers". In 1928–29 their leaders rose against him. With the support of the townspeople and the Najdi scholars, he crushed them at the battle of al-Sabalah (Sibilla) in March 1929; in 1930 the British rounded up the last rebels in Kuwaiti territory and handed their leaders over. Power passed decisively from the tribes to the king and the towns.

On 23 September 1932, by royal decree, his dual kingdom of the Hejaz and Najd became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, named after the family. The date is still celebrated as National Day.

Ibn Saud built his kingdom with the Ikhwan and then destroyed them to keep it. The pattern, using religious fervour to win power and then curbing it to keep power, recurs throughout Saudi history, most dramatically in 1979.

Part 6 — Oil, Aramco and the boom (1932–1979)

A poor kingdom

The new kingdom was poor. Its revenue came mainly from the dues of the holy cities, customs at Jeddah and taxes. In May 1933 Ibn Saud signed an oil concession with an American firm, the Standard Oil Company of California (today's Chevron). For five years its geologists drilled dry or disappointing wells in the Dammam dome near the Gulf coast. In 1937 the company's executives asked their chief geologist, Max Steineke, for advice; he told them to keep drilling. In March 1938, Dammam Well No. 7, later nicknamed the "Prosperity Well", struck oil in commercial quantities. The first tanker was loaded in 1939.

On 14 February 1945, returning from the Yalta conference, President Franklin Roosevelt met Ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal. That meeting is often seen as the symbolic start of the relationship that has defined Saudi foreign policy ever since: American security for the kingdom, Saudi oil for the West. Saudi Arabia declared war on Germany in 1945 and became a founding member of the United Nations.

In 1944 the operating company took the name Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company. That year it paid more in taxes to the US government than it paid Saudi Arabia in royalties; by 1950 Ibn Saud had received, by Britannica's account, a total of only about $200,000. A new agreement in 1950 required Aramco to pay the kingdom an income tax of 50% of its net operating income. By the time Ibn Saud died, on 9 November 1953, he was receiving some $2.5 million a week.

Saud and Faisal

Ibn Saud had dozens of sons. Succession passed among them, brother to brother, for more than sixty years. Under the first, Saud (king 1953–64), government became increasingly wasteful and lavish, and extravagant spending led to deficits and foreign borrowing despite the new revenue. In 1958, in an economic crisis, Saud handed full executive powers to his half-brother Faisal, the crown prince. Their rivalry ended on 2 November 1964, when the royal family, backed by the National Guard and the ulama, deposed Saud and proclaimed Faisal king. As Britannica puts it, Faisal was simply more competent.

Faisal (king 1964–75) was far more active in economic and educational development. Saudi Arabia had helped found OPEC at the Baghdad conference in September 1960, alongside Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and Venezuela. Abroad, the kingdom's great rival was the pan-Arab nationalism of Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser, whose propaganda attacked the Saudi monarchy and whose troops, from 1962, backed Yemen's new republic against royalists supported by Riyadh.

How life changed

For ordinary people, the change between the 1930s and the 1970s was enormous. Oil money paid for roads, schools, hospitals and airports. Riyadh and Jeddah swelled as people moved to the cities, and most of the Bedouin settled in towns or farming communities. Foreign workers arrived in large numbers to build and run the new economy.

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated October 2026). GDP per person in current dollars swings with oil prices: note the rise after 1973 and the fall in the 1980s.

Boom, embargo and the welfare kingdom (1973–1979)

The oil weapon

In October 1973, Egypt and Syria attacked Israel. When the United States resupplied Israel, Arab oil producers led by Saudi Arabia cut production and embargoed shipments to the United States and other supporters of Israel. The US State Department's historians describe what followed: the price of oil per barrel "first doubled, then quadrupled", imposing huge costs on consumers and shaking whole economies. The embargo was lifted in March 1974, after American diplomacy produced disengagement agreements between Israel and its neighbours.

For Saudi Arabia, the embargo was a demonstration of power and the start of an avalanche of money. The same year the government bought a 25% stake in Aramco, raising it to 60% in 1974 and to 100% in 1980. In 1988 the company became the Saudi Arabian Oil Company, Saudi Aramco, wholly owned by the state. In the 1970s and 1980s the kingdom was the world's largest oil producer and played a leading role in setting OPEC's production and prices.

In 1970 the average Saudi produced about $1,500 of output a year. By 1980 the figure was over $27,000. Few societies have ever been flooded with so much money so quickly.

The rentier bargain

Political scientists call states like Saudi Arabia rentier states: governments that live on income from a natural resource rather than taxes on their citizens. The money flowed to the state, and the state distributed it: free schooling and health care, cheap fuel and power, housing help and secure government jobs for citizens. In return, citizens were expected to accept the rule of the royal family without elected representation. "No taxation without representation" worked in reverse: no taxation, and no representation.

The bargain delivered real gains. Life expectancy rose by almost ten years between 1970 and 1980 alone, and schools and universities multiplied. It also created lasting problems: an economy dependent on one commodity, a private sector run largely by foreign labour, and citizens accustomed to public employment.

Faisal's death

On 25 March 1975, King Faisal was shot dead by his nephew, Prince Faisal ibn Musaid. He was succeeded by his half-brother Khalid (1975–82), with Fahd as crown prince and, in practice, the man running the government. Development continued at breakneck speed, and so did the tensions it created: between the new consumer society and the religious conservatives who saw it as a betrayal of the faith.

Part 7 — 1979: the siege of Mecca and the turn to piety (1979–1990)

Four shocks in one year

1979 transformed the Middle East, and Saudi Arabia was at the centre of it.

• In February, the Islamic Revolution in Iran replaced the Shah with a Shi'a theocracy that challenged the legitimacy of monarchies and claimed to speak for all Muslims.
• In March, Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel; Saudi Arabia joined most Arab states in breaking relations with Cairo.
• In November and December, the Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized by Saudi militants, and Shi'a protests broke out in the Eastern Province in sympathy with Iran's revolution.
• In late December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.

The seizure of the Grand Mosque

At dawn prayers on 20 November 1979, about 200 armed men took over the Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam, while worshippers from all over the world were gathered in its courtyard. Their weapons had been hidden in closed coffins placed in the courtyard, as if for funeral prayers. Their leader, Juhayman al-Otaybi, a 40-year-old preacher who had served as a soldier in the National Guard, had written pamphlets condemning the royal family's decadence and accusing the clerics of colluding with it. A speaker announced that the Mahdi, the redeemer whom some hadith predict at the end of time, had arrived in the person of Juhayman's brother-in-law, Muhammad al-Qahtani.

The siege lasted about two weeks. A fatwa from the kingdom's senior clerics first had to clear the army to use force inside the sanctuary. Saudi forces, advised by French special-operations officers, eventually used gas to drive the rebels out of the rooms beneath the mosque, and Juhayman surrendered. Casualties ran into the hundreds. Just over a month later, 63 rebels were publicly executed in eight cities across the kingdom; Juhayman was the first to die.

The aftermath

The rebels lost, but in a sense their ideas won. The royal family concluded that its legitimacy depended on being seen as more devout, not less. In the BBC's summary, hardline clerics gained the upper hand over the royal family, and the kingdom stayed on an ultra-conservative path for most of the next four decades. One of Juhayman's demands had been the removal of women presenters from television; a former follower later told the BBC that after the siege "no female presenter appeared on TV again". When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, one young Saudi, Osama bin Laden, son of the founder of one of the Middle East's largest construction firms, began raising money for the Afghan resistance.

In March 2018, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman told an interviewer that before 1979, "We were living a normal life like the rest of the Gulf countries, women were driving cars, there were movie theatres in Saudi Arabia." The claim simplifies a long history: the kingdom was deeply conservative before 1979 too. But it shows how 1979 has become the reference point in the official story: the moment the country took a wrong turn that the crown prince says he is reversing.

Fahd's kingdom

King Khalid died on 13 June 1982, and Fahd became king, ruling until 2005, longer than any king since his father. He bought sophisticated American and British weapons and kept close ties with Washington. Kings since his time have used the title "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques". The 1980s oil glut cut prices and revenue sharply: GDP per person fell from more than $27,000 in 1980 to about $11,000 in 1990. The welfare state, the jobs and the subsidies had to be paid for with less, and the young population kept growing.

Part 8 — The Gulf War, al-Qaeda and 9/11 (1990–2015)

Iraq invades Kuwait

On 2 August 1990, about 100,000 Iraqi troops overran Kuwait in a matter of hours. Fearing that Saddam Hussein would invade Saudi Arabia next, King Fahd, breaking with tradition and with the approval of the kingdom's highest religious official, invited the United States and other countries to send troops to protect the kingdom. The US-led coalition air war began on 16–17 January 1991 and ended with Iraq's defeat and retreat from Kuwait on 28 February.

The war saved the kingdom but unsettled its society. Many Saudis asked how a government that had spent so much on defence still needed non-Muslim outsiders to protect it. Two opposition currents emerged, one Islamist and one liberal and modernist. Islamist dissidents condemned the presence of American troops so close to the holy cities. In November 1995 a bomb at a US-run National Guard training centre in Riyadh killed five Americans and two Indians; in June 1996 a huge explosion at a housing complex for US Air Force personnel killed 19 American servicemen. Osama bin Laden, now openly hostile to the royal family, was stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 and in 1996 moved to Afghanistan under Taliban protection.

Fahd responded with limited institutional change. On 1 March 1992 Fahd issued a Basic Law of Government, which opened the succession to Ibn Saud's grandsons as well as his sons, and a statute creating an appointed Consultative Council (Majlis al-Shura). He was careful to say the laws confirmed existing practice: the government had long held that the Qur'an and the Prophet's example were the country's constitution. No national elections were introduced, and political parties remain illegal.

11 September 2001

Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers who attacked the United States on 11 September 2001 were Saudi citizens, according to the 9/11 Commission's account of who they were; two more were from the UAE. Bin Laden himself was born in Riyadh. The attacks threw a harsh light on the kingdom: on its religious education, its charities and the ideas it had exported. Many Americans came to see the alliance as morally compromised. Saudi officials replied that al-Qaeda's chief target was the Saudi state itself, which the bombings of the 1990s had already shown.

The kingdom refused to join the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and that year the two governments agreed to withdraw US forces from Saudi soil. The removal of Saddam Hussein, though, strengthened Iran, and rivalry with Tehran became the organising principle of Saudi foreign policy.

Abdullah's cautious reforms

Fahd suffered a stroke in 1995, and his half-brother Abdullah ran the government until he became king on 1 August 2005. Abdullah was a reformer by Saudi standards. He held the country's first municipal elections in 2005 (for men only), created an Allegiance Commission of princes in 2006 to help choose crown princes, made broad changes to the judiciary, armed forces and ministries in February 2009, and appointed the first woman deputy minister. In 2011 he announced that women would be appointed to the Consultative Council and could vote and stand in the 2015 municipal elections. The kingdom joined the World Trade Organization in December 2005.

When the Arab uprisings of 2011 shook the region, Saudi Arabia used its wealth and influence to hold back revolutionary change. Saudi-led Gulf troops went into Bahrain to help its monarchy put down mass protests. Riyadh financed friendly monarchies in Jordan, Morocco and Oman and supported rebels against the hostile regimes in Syria and Libya.

Part 9 — The Mohammed bin Salman era (2015–2025)

A generational leap

King Abdullah died in January 2015. His half-brother Salman became king and immediately made his son Mohammed bin Salman, then 29, defence minister and head of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, the main body for economic policy. For the first time, power began to pass from Ibn Saud's sons to a grandson. In June 2017 the king removed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef and named Mohammed bin Salman crown prince; in 2022 he also became prime minister. Born on 31 August 1985, he is widely known by his initials, MBS, and is the kingdom's de facto ruler on behalf of his elderly father.

Vision 2030

On 25 April 2016, MBS launched Vision 2030, a plan to diversify the economy away from oil, grow the private sector, attract tourists and foreign investment, and get more Saudis, especially women, into work. It came with giant projects funded by the Public Investment Fund, the sovereign wealth fund, which grew to close to $1 trillion: the Red Sea resorts, the Qiddiya entertainment city, and NEOM, a $500 billion zone in the north-west whose centrepiece, "The Line", was to be a city 170 kilometres long. In 2019 a small slice of Saudi Aramco was listed on the Riyadh stock exchange.

The social opening

The most visible changes came in daily life, and they were real.

Women entered the workforce in large numbers. The World Bank's modelled estimates put the share of Saudi women in the labour force at about 20% in 2017 and about 34% by 2021, a level maintained since. Unemployment fell. For young Saudis, the country of the 2020s is far more open in daily life than the one their parents knew, and that change is the heart of the crown prince's appeal at home.

The crackdown

At the same time, MBS concentrated power in his own hands to a degree no Saudi ruler had held since the founder. In November 2017 dozens of princes, business leaders and officials were detained in what was billed as an anti-corruption campaign; critics saw it as a way to sideline rivals and seize assets. Even as it gave women new rights, the government cracked down on women activists who kept pressing for more.

The killing of Jamal Khashoggi

On 2 October 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist aged 59, who had gone into self-imposed exile in the United States in 2017 and become a critic of the crown prince, entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain papers he needed to marry. He never came out. After weeks of denials, the Saudi government admitted that he had been killed inside the building and called it a "rogue operation".

Three bodies have examined the killing, and their findings differ:

The Saudi foreign ministry rejected the American assessment, saying those responsible had been tried and that the kingdom rejected "any measure that infringes upon its leadership, sovereignty, and the independence of its judicial system". Western leaders kept dealing with him; in November 2025 he was received at the White House by President Donald Trump.

The war in Yemen

In 2014 the Houthis, a rebel movement from northern Yemen that Riyadh regards as an Iranian proxy, seized much of the north of the country, including the capital, Sanaa, and the government fled. In March 2015 a coalition led by Saudi Arabia, with the UAE as its main partner, intervened to restore the government of President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, in what was named Operation Decisive Storm. Saudi planners seem to have expected a campaign of a few months; it became a multiyear stalemate.

The human cost was terrible. Coalition air strikes often killed civilians and disrupted vital services; in 2016 a UN panel of experts reported to the Security Council that some coalition actions may have amounted to war crimes. The Houthis shelled cities, laid mines and fired missiles and drones into Saudi Arabia. In November 2021 the UN Development Programme projected that the war would have caused 377,000 deaths by the end of 2021, about 60% of them from indirect causes such as hunger and preventable disease, and estimated that 70% of those killed were children under five.

On 2 April 2022 a UN-brokered truce took hold. No peace deal followed, but a relative calm lasted for more than three years. Saudi officials argue that they intervened to stop an Iranian-backed militia seizing a neighbouring state and firing missiles at Saudi cities. Critics, including many UN officials and human rights groups, argue that the coalition's way of fighting caused one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

Foreign policy and the Qatar blockade

Days after becoming crown prince in 2017, MBS led Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt into a blockade of Qatar, accusing it of supporting terrorism and being too close to Iran; Qatar denied the charges. The embargo ended with a declaration signed at AlUla in January 2021. Since then the kingdom has bid for ever larger sporting events, culminating in the 2034 World Cup.

Human rights, at their strongest and weakest

The government points to the social reforms, to women's employment and to the release of some prominent prisoners as proof that the kingdom is modernising. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2026, acknowledged that at least 44 people jailed for peaceful expression were released between December 2024 and February 2025, but reported that Saudi Arabia carried out at least 322 executions by early December 2025, more than in any previous year, many for nonviolent drug offences, including the journalist Turki al-Jasser in June 2025. It also argued that male guardianship survives in the 2022 Personal Status Law and that migrant workers still face wage theft and deadly conditions.

Part 10 — Saudi Arabia in 2026

The people

The 2022 census found 32,175,224 people living in the kingdom: 18.8 million Saudis (58.4%) and 13.4 million foreign residents (41.6%). The country is young: the median age is 29, and 63% of Saudi citizens are under 30. The World Bank estimates the population had grown to about 37 million by 2025.

A kingdom under fire

The year began with Saudi Arabia trying to stay out of a war between the United States, Israel and Iran. It could not. From the first days after 28 February, Iranian missiles and drones targeted the kingdom's air bases, oil and gas plants and cities. Saudi authorities say the vast majority were intercepted, but energy facilities in the east were hit repeatedly, two drones struck the US embassy, and with Iran blocking the Strait of Hormuz, the Red Sea port of Yanbu became the only export outlet, until a drone fell on a refinery near it too. By March the foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan, said trust in Iran had been "shattered", and the kingdom expelled Iran's military attaché and four embassy staff.

Yemen, again

The second front opened in Yemen. In December 2025 the Southern Transitional Council, a southern separatist force backed by the UAE, seized much of Hadramawt and al-Mahra. On 30 December Saudi Arabia accused the UAE of pressing the separatists to attack and bombed what it said was a weapons shipment at the port of Mukalla; the UAE denied the shipment held weapons and announced that it would withdraw its remaining forces from Yemen. In January 2026 Saudi-backed government forces retook the south and moved into Aden, and the STC's leader fled. The public quarrel between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, partners since 2015, became one of the year's defining facts of Gulf politics. In April the UAE also announced that it was leaving OPEC, the cartel Saudi Arabia has long led.

Then, in September, the Houthis launched an offensive that, as the UN Security Council heard on 9 October, sharply escalated what it called the 12-year-long war. Houthi missiles and drones struck Saudi airports and energy facilities; three people were killed in attacks on the airports of Abha and Riyadh over two days in early October. Inside Yemen, Houthi forces encircled the city of Taiz. By 30 October the UN refugee agency reported that more than 280,000 people had been displaced by the renewed fighting, and the World Food Programme said 800,000 people in Taiz had been cut off from aid.

Vision 2030, revised

The war came on top of an economic squeeze. A fall in oil prices before the conflict had already forced the government to rethink its spending. In May 2026 the BBC reported that some of the most striking Vision 2030 projects were being "watered down, put on hold or even abandoned". The Line was being reduced from 170 kilometres to a first phase of a few kilometres; Britannica now describes a projected length of about 2.4 kilometres by the early 2030s. The winter resort of Trojena was reined in and the 2029 Asian Winter Games it was to host moved to Kazakhstan, and the Cube, a building big enough to hold the Empire State Building twenty times over, was dropped. Supporters of the programme say retrenchment is normal for a plan of this size and that its real achievements, women's work, tourism, a non-oil private sector, are intact. Sceptics, such as Ellen R. Wald, author of Saudi, Inc., see a familiar pattern of splashy announcements followed by downsizing, one she traces back to King Abdullah's "economic cities".

Workers and the World Cup

Saudi Arabia's reliance on foreign labour remains its most debated social fact. Since March 2021, according to the International Labour Organization, most private-sector migrant workers can change employers after a year without their employer's permission. Critics say the kafala sponsorship system that ties workers to employers still gives employers too much power. In late 2025 the ILO's Governing Body accepted for examination a complaint alleging that Saudi Arabia was failing to observe its conventions on forced labour, wage protection and discrimination, and asked the government to respond by January 2026. The scrutiny will intensify as the kingdom builds stadiums for the 2034 World Cup.

Part 11 — How to understand Saudi Arabia today

Key dates

Who's who

Five ideas that unlock the country

1. The pact between palace and pulpit is changing, not ending. From 1744 to the 2010s, the Al Saud ruled with the religious establishment as junior but indispensable partners. Mohammed bin Salman has sharply curtailed the clerics' power over daily life, but the state's legitimacy still rests on Islam: the king is Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the Qur'an is the constitution, and the government now defines what "moderate Islam" means. The ulama have not been dismissed; they have been made to follow the palace's lead.

2. Oil made the modern state, and the state has never escaped it. Every era since 1938 has been shaped by the oil price: the 1950s debts, the 1970s boom, the 1980s bust, the 2010s squeeze that produced Vision 2030, and the 2026 war that sent prices up while making exports dangerous. Diversification is the official goal of every Saudi plan, and oil still pays most of the bills.

3. The social contract is being rewritten. The old bargain offered citizens jobs, subsidies and stability without taxes or political voice. The new one adds entertainment, personal freedoms and economic opportunity, especially for women, while tolerating even less political dissent. Whether young Saudis will accept more freedom in daily life in exchange for less freedom of speech is the central political question of the 2020s.

4. Security has always come from outside. From the British subsidy of 1915 to the USS Quincy in 1945, the American troops of 1990 and the US military presence that drew Iranian fire in 2026, the kingdom has relied on foreign protectors while building up its own forces. The tension between needing the United States and resenting dependence on it runs through the whole story.

5. Saudi Arabia is three countries in one. The cosmopolitan Hejaz, with its pilgrims and ports; the Najdi heartland, conservative and loyal to the dynasty; and the oil-rich east, with its large Shi'a population, have never been identical. Add the millions of foreign workers who make up two in five residents, and the kingdom looks less like a single society than a carefully managed coalition.

Saudi Arabia is a country where the past is literally underfoot, Nabataean tombs, the Prophet's mosque, the ruins of Diriyah, and also a country being rebuilt so fast that its rulers sometimes seem to want to start history again. Both impulses are part of the same story.

The takeaway

The Arabian Peninsula was a crossroads of incense trade and caravan kingdoms long before it became the birthplace of Islam in the 7th century, after which the empire it launched moved its capitals away. In the 18th century an alliance between the Al Saud of Diriyah and the reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab created a state that was destroyed in 1818, revived and lost again, and rebuilt by Ibn Saud between 1902 and 1932. Oil, found in 1938, turned a poor desert kingdom into a wealthy rentier state allied with the United States and guarded by a conservative religious establishment that grew even stronger after the shock of 1979. Since 2015 Mohammed bin Salman has opened Saudi social life, concentrated power and tried to diversify the economy, while the Khashoggi killing, the Yemen war and record executions have defined his critics' view of him. In 2026 the kingdom faces Iranian and Houthi attacks, a rift with the UAE and a scaled-back Vision 2030, still balancing faith, oil and foreign protection, as it has for a century.

Try this: look at the Saudi flag. The words on it are the Islamic declaration of faith, "There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God", and beneath them is a sword. Using this piece, write one sentence on what each element says about how the kingdom understands itself, and then one sentence on what a critic might say about the same symbols. If you can write both fairly, you have understood the central argument about Saudi Arabia.

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Saudi Arabia" (history sections: "The Wahhabi movement", "Ibn Saud and the third Saudi state", "The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia", "Foreign affairs", "Reign of King Abd Allah", "Foreign policy since the end of the Persian Gulf War", "Political process", "The Persian Gulf War and its aftermath"), and articles "Ibn Saud", "Faisal", "Fahd", "Osama bin Laden", "Ibrahim Pasha", "Muhammad" (by Nicolai Sinai), "Mohammed bin Salman" (updated January 2026), "Hejaz", "Ha'il", "Ikhwan", "Dilmun", "Rashidun", "Umayyad dynasty", "Abbasid caliphate", accessed via the Internet Archive, October 2026.
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre listings: Hegra (1293), At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah (1329), Historic Jeddah (1361), Al-Ahsa Oasis (1563), Ḥimā Cultural Area (1619), Al-Faw Archaeological Area (1712), Land of Frankincense, Oman (1010).
- University of Birmingham, "Birmingham Qur'an manuscript dated among the oldest in the world" (22 July 2015).
- Saudi Aramco, "Our history" (company timeline, archived 2019–20): 1933 concession, 1938 discovery, 1973–80 state purchase, 1988 Saudi Aramco, 2019 listing.
- US Department of State, Office of the Historian: "Oil Embargo, 1973–1974" and "The Gulf War, 1991"; OPEC, "Brief History".
- BBC News, "Mecca 1979: The mosque siege that changed the course of Saudi history" (2019) and On This Day, 21 November 1979.
- The 9/11 Commission Report (2004), chapters 5 and 7 (nationalities of the hijackers).
- Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, "Khashoggi killing: UN human rights expert says Saudi Arabia is responsible" (19 June 2019); US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Assessing the Saudi Government's Role in the Killing of Jamal Khashoggi (released 26 February 2021); BBC News reports of 7 September 2020 and 26 February 2021 (Saudi verdict and Saudi response).
- UNDP projection of Yemen war deaths (23 November 2021), as reported by Al Jazeera; Al Jazeera on the 2022 truce; UN News, Yemen coverage of 9–30 October 2026; BBC News, 30 December 2025 and 8 October 2026; Al Jazeera, 7 January and 21 March 2026; BBC News, 7 January 2021 (Qatar embargo ends).
- General Authority for Statistics (GASTAT), first results of the 2022 census, as reported by Saudi Gazette (31 May 2023); World Bank, World Development Indicators (data updated 8 October 2026).
- Reuters, 24 April 2016 (Vision 2030 launch); BBC News, 24 June 2018 (driving ban ends) and 25 May 2026 ("How Saudi Arabia's spending spree reached the end of the line"); The Hindu, 13 December 2017 (cinema ban lifted); Al Arabiya, 27 January 2022 (Founding Day); The Guardian, 11 December 2024 (2034 World Cup).
- International Labour Organization, Saudi Arabia: Regulatory framework governing migrant workers (updated December 2023) and Governing Body decision on the article 26 complaint (355th session, 2025); Human Rights Watch, World Report 2026, Saudi Arabia chapter.

Go deeper
- 📘 A History of Saudi Arabia — Madawi Al-Rasheed (Cambridge, 2nd ed. 2010; the standard scholarly history, by a Saudi-born critic of the monarchy)
- 📘 The Kingdom (1981) and Inside the Kingdom (2009) — Robert Lacey (lively, well-sourced narrative histories of the dynasty, from Ibn Saud to King Abdullah)
- 📘 The Siege of Mecca — Yaroslav Trofimov (2007; the gripping reconstruction of 1979 and why it mattered)
- 📘 MBS: The Rise to Power of Mohammed bin Salman — Ben Hubbard (2020; a New York Times correspondent's portrait of the crown prince and his reforms)
- 🌐 UNESCO: Hegra Archaeological Site and At-Turaif District in ad-Dir'iyah (the Nabataean tombs and the first Saudi capital)
- 🌐 UN human rights expert's findings on the Khashoggi killing (the primary document, in the rapporteur's words)
- 🌐 Related pieces in this library: If I Was Born in Saudi Arabia; Islam: From Mecca to Two Billion People; Pilgrimage: Why Humans Walk to Holy Places; A Brief History of Iran and A Brief History of the United Arab Emirates (this series)