Portal:Saudi Arabia

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The Saudi Arabia Portal – بوابة المملكة العربية السعودية

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Saudi Arabia's Location

Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia and the Middle East. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about 2150000 km2 (830000 sq mi), making it the fifth-largest country in Asia and the largest in the Middle East. It is bordered by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the east; Oman to the southeast; and Yemen to the south. Bahrain is an island country off its east coast. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest separates Saudi Arabia from Egypt and Israel. 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. The capital and largest city is Riyadh; the kingdom also hosts Islam's two holiest cities of Mecca and Medina. (Full article...)

Bilateral relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been strained over several geopolitical issues, such as aspirations for regional leadership, oil export policy and relations with the United States and other Western countries. Diplomatic relations were suspended from 1987 to 1990, and in 2016 for seven years following certain issues like the intervention in Yemen, Iran embassy bombing in Yemen, incidents in 2015 Hajj, the execution of Nimr al-Nimr, the attack on the Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran. However, in March 2023, after discussions brokered by China and Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia agreed to reestablish relations.

Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy established in 1932, with a post-World War II tradition of close ties to the United States and the United Kingdom. Iran's government alternated between absolute monarchy and increasing parliamentarianism, until the 1953 Iranian coup d'état increased Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's powers as monarch within a parliamentary system. The coup was supported by the army, the bazaar, the clerics, the United States and the United Kingdom. Both states were aligned with the Western Bloc in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, until the end of formal Iran-United States relations in 1980 following the Iranian Revolution. Throughout both the Cold War and the war on terror, the United States has continued to pursue a strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia. (Full article...)
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12 March 2024 –
Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund announces a $2 billion offer to buy both professional tennis tours, the ATP Tour and the WTA Tour. (The Telegraph)

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The McMahon–Hussein letter of 24 October 1915. George Antonius—who had been the first to publish the correspondence in full—described this letter as "by far the most important in the whole correspondence, and may perhaps be regarded as the most important international document in the history of the Arab national movement... is still invoked as the main piece of evidence on which the Arabs accuse Great Britain of having broken faith with them."

The McMahon–Hussein Correspondence is a series of letters that were exchanged during World War I in which the Government of the United Kingdom agreed to recognize Arab independence in a large region after the war in exchange for the Sharif of Mecca launching the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The correspondence had a significant influence on Middle Eastern history during and after the war; a dispute over Palestine continued thereafter.

The correspondence is composed of ten letters that were exchanged from July 1915 to March 1916 between Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca and Lieutenant Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, British High Commissioner to Egypt. Whilst there was some military value in the Arab manpower and local knowledge alongside the British Army, the primary reason for the arrangement was to counteract the Ottoman declaration of jihad ("holy war") against the Allies, and to maintain the support of the 70 million Muslims in British India (particularly those in the Indian Army that had been deployed in all major theatres of the wider war). The area of Arab independence was defined to be "in the limits and boundaries proposed by the Sherif of Mecca" with the exception of "portions of Syria" lying to the west of "the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo"; conflicting interpretations of this description were to cause great controversy in subsequent years. One particular dispute, which continues to the present, is the extent of the coastal exclusion. (Full article...)

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More did you know

  • ... that Murtaja Qureiris, the youngest political prisoner in Saudi Arabia, is a member of the Shia minority who may face execution for taking part in anti-government protests when he was 10 years old?

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Sources

  1. ^ Sawe, Benjamin (2017-04-25), Tallest Mountains In Saudi Arabia, Worldatlas.com, retrieved 2019-01-14
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