About the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia :

Saudi Arabia or ( officially : the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia ) is an Arab country, and is the largest country in the Middle East by area, located specifically in the southwest of the continent of Asia and constitutes the largest part of the Arabian Peninsula, with an area of ​​about two million square kilometers . It is bordered to the north by the Republic of Iraq and Jordan, by the State of Kuwait to the northeast, to the east by the State of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, in addition to the Kingdom of Bahrain, which is linked to Saudi Arabia through the King Fahd Causeway located on the waters of the Arabian Gulf, and to the south it is bordered by Yemen, and the Sultanate of Oman to the south East, and it is bordered by the Red Sea to the west.

The Al Saud historically ruled in Najd and large areas of the Arabian Peninsula more than once, and the current Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is considered a product and heir of those historical entities. The first of those entities was the Diriyah Emirate, which was founded by Muhammad bin Saud in 1157 AH / 1744 and remained until Ibrahim Pasha led the army of the Ottoman governor of Egypt in A campaign to eliminate it in 1233 AH / 1818 AD, and this stage is referred to as the “ first Saudi state ” , but it did not take long after the fall of the first state until Turki bin Abdullah bin Muhammad established a new emirate for the House of Saud in Najd, which took Riyadh as the capital and continued until The rulers of the Emirate of Hail seized the Emirate of Riyadh from the House of Saud in the year 1308 AH / 1891 , and that stage is referred to as the “ Second Saudi State. ”. " Later recovered Abdul Aziz Al Saud , the young man in 1319 AH / 1902 Emirate of Riyadh from the hand of Al - Rashid, in control of the entire expansion we find in 1921 and Tzmt in the Sultanate , we find even succeeded Abdul Aziz grabbing the Kingdom of the Hijaz from the hand of the Hashemites, Vensb king of the Hijaz in January 1926 And a year later, he changed his title from Sultan of Nejd to King of Nejd, and the areas controlled by the Kingdom of Hejaz, Najd and its annexes were named, and remained by that name until Abd al-Aziz united all the areas he controlled into one entity, and that was in 1351 AH / September 23 , 1932 and its name was announced . Saudi Arabia".

Saudi Arabia currently consists of 13 administrative regions, each of which is divided into a number of governorates, the number of which varies from one region to another, and the governorate is divided into centers that are administratively linked to the governorate or emirate . It contains the Grand Mosque in Mecca, and the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, which are considered the most important holy places for Muslims.

Saudi Arabia is a member of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf, the League of Arab States, the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Muslim World League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Group of Twenty, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries ( OPEC )..

Saudi Arabia enjoys a stable political and economic situation in general, and its economy is oil, as it has the second largest oil reserves and sixth gas reserves, and the largest crude oil exporter in the world, which accounts for nearly 90% of exports. The Kingdom occupies the nineteenth place among the largest economies in the world and Saudi Arabia is considered one of the influential forces politically and economically in the world, due to its Islamic position, economic wealth, control over oil prices and global supplies, and its large media presence represented by a number of satellite channels and printed newspapers.

Saudi Arabia has a cultural and civilizational heritage that goes back thousands of years, and it has witnessed major changes in the fields of culture, education and the protection of cultural heritage, according to Vision 2030 , and it is a founding member of the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization ( UNESCO ) and a member of its Executive Board elected in November 2019

Islamic history :

After the Arabian Peninsula remained a period of turmoil and economic and political instability, and many Arab tribes perished or fell into captivity or were forced to abandon their original places, the golden age of Arab civilization came with the advent of Islam, when the Messenger of Islam Muhammad was sent in the Arabian Peninsula, to spread Islam In it, the call continued until it reached outside it, east and west, which distinguished the Islamic civilization that it was not based on racial discrimination for a particular group or group, which created a suitable environment for the diversity of creativity among the various Islamic peoples..

The Islamic state took Medina as its capital and expanded its borders during the era of the Prophet Muhammad and his rightly-guided caliphs to include all parts of the Arabian Peninsula and then moved outside it, but the peninsula was not without exciting events, especially those that occurred after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, most notably the apostasy wars that It took place during the reign of Abu Bakr Al-Siddiq, during which he worked to eliminate the apostates from Islam . Then the center of the caliphate moved after the era of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs to Damascus during the rule of the Umayyad state, and the peninsula at that period belonged to the Umayyad state, which relied on the support of Arab tribes and worked to consolidate the principles of Islam in the countries they conquered and science flourished in the Umayyad era, after which the state came Abbasid, in which the center of the caliphate moved from Damascus to Baghdad to enhance the position of the Persian Gulf as a sea route for trade with China and the countries of East Africa, at the expense of the trade route through the Red Sea, but the Abbasid state’s control over the Arabian Peninsula did not last fully for more than a hundred years . The early Abbasid caliphs encouraged the pilgrimage to Mecca by improving transportation and safety.

After that, the situation in the Arabian Peninsula witnessed deterioration and turmoil with the disintegration of the Abbasid Caliphate and its inability to control all parts of the state. Then the Fatimids took control of the Hijaz and when Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi ended the Fatimid state in Egypt, he was able to impose his control over the Hijaz . Then the rule of the Mamluks extended over this country from the year 650 AH until the year 923 AH, when the Ottomans took over the caliphate after that . The Ottomans tightened their control over the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, especially the holy cities, which were under direct protection, unlike the desert and remote regions, which were not completely under their control. The time when the Ottoman Empire was fighting the European front against Austria and Russia, and the eastern front against the Safavid dynasty in Persia . At that time, weakness had spread in the Ottoman Empire, so the rulers began to rebel against its authority and tend to it and demand independence . In the middle of the fifteenth century AD, the great-grandfather of the Al Saud family, Mani’ bin Rabi’a al-Muraydi, migrated from the vicinity of Qatif to Najd, where he settled and established the city of Diriyah .

Religion in Saudi Arabia

Islam is the official state religion in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. All members of the Saudi people are considered Muslims. There is no law in Saudi Arabia that protects freedom of belief, and one of the conditions for obtaining Saudi citizenship is that the applicant must be a Muslim. Saudi Arabia faced international pressures in the way of applying Islamic law and human rights.

Islam in Saudi Arabia follows the Sunnis and the community with their four schools of jurisprudence: Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i and Hanbali, and most Saudis are Hanbalis. The Saudi government also officially adopts the Hanbali Islamic school of thought. According to unofficial statistics, 94 % of Saudis are Sunnis and 6 % are Shiites. There are about 30% of the population are foreign workers, and the majority of them are Muslims.

Saudi Arabia has two of the holiest cities of Islam, Mecca and Medina, and non-Muslims are not legally allowed to enter Mecca (although a few Westerners have managed to enter them throughout history disguised as Muslims