Sheltered between the cradle of civilization and the busiest trade routes of the ancient world, the Arabian Peninsula is home to millennia-old civilizations that have blossomed and thrived in some of the world’s harshest conditions. For many Westerners, their vision of the Arab world is skewed by contemporary political news, but Arabia is a land […]
Where Pigeons Don’t Fly follows Fahd, a boy growing up in Riyadh, from early childhood to the point where he flees Saudi Arabia to Britain in search of greater personal freedom. Fahd’s childhood is traumatised by his father’s involvement in the armed attack on the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and his subsequent premature […]
The importance of the region that is recognised today as Saudi Arabia (with its neighbours) can hardly be underestimated, let alone overlooked by the rest of the world, not merely because of its geographical location and religious significance to a large segment of the world’s population due to the location of Islam’s two holiest shrines […]
This comprehensive history of Saudi Arabia provides coverage of its emergence in 1745 through to the 1990s. It presents the evolution of the social and political structures of Saudi society, the Wahhabi movement (Muwahhidun – believers in one God) for a reform of Islam, the impact of the “oil factor”, and Saudi Arabia’s place in […]
Structured around the themes of identity and change, this is an examination of the forces affecting the attitudes, motivation and aspirations of the new generation in Saudi Arabia and exploration of the tension between perceptions of tradition and modernity. Crucial to this is an explanation by the youth of Saudi Arabia themselves of how they […]
The House of Saud can no longer bribe its people and Arab neighbours into silence. Throughout the Middle East, Islamic movements deplore the Saudi royal family’s waste of the country’s wealth on private expenditure and costly Western armaments. They are also opposed to the immorality of a dynasty whose men have purchased women in bulk […]