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Saudi Arabia
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Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam and home to Islam's two holiest shrines in Mecca and Medina. The king's official title is the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques. The modern Saudi state was founded in 1932 by ABD AL-AZIZ bin Abd al-Rahman AL SAUD (Ibn Saud) after a 30-year campaign to unify most of the Arabian Peninsula. A male descendent of Ibn Saud, his son ABDALLAH bin Abd al-Aziz, rules the country today as required by the country's 1992 Basic Law. Following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Saudi Arabia accepted the Kuwaiti royal family and 400,000 refugees while allowing Western and Arab troops to deploy on its soil for the liberation of Kuwait the following year. The continuing presence of foreign troops on Saudi soil after the liberation of Kuwait became a source of tension between the royal family and the public until all operational US troops left the country in 2003.
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As a political unit, Saudi Arabia is of relatively recent creation. Its origins lay with the puritanical Wahhabi movement (18th cent.), which gained the allegiance of the powerful Saud family of the Nejd, in central Arabia. Supported by a large Bedouin following, the Sauds brought most of the peninsula under their control, except for Yemen and the Hadhramaut in the extreme south. The Wahhabi movement was crushed (1811–18) by an Egyptian expedition under the sons of Muhammad Ali. After reviving in the mid-19th cent., the Wahhabis were defeated in 1891 by the Rashid dynasty, which gained effective control of central Arabia.
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Saudi Arabia has an oil-based economy with strong government controls over major economic activities. Saudi Arabia claimed to be in possession of 260.1 billion barrels of oil reserves as of 2003, about 24% of the world's proven total petroleum reserves. It ranks as the largest exporter of petroleum and plays a leading role in OPEC. Moreover, according to the Saudi government, the proven reserves increase gradually as more oil fields are discovered, unlike most other oil-producing countries. It must be noted... that, those figures have been contested and that Saudi Arabia's actual reserves may be notably lower. The petroleum sector accounts for roughly 75% of budget revenues, 40% of the GDP, and 90% of export earnings.
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Saudi Arabia has four main regions. Najd, the geographic center and political and cultural core, is a vast plateau that combines rocky and sandy areas with isolated mountains and wadi systems. Agricultural oases are the sites of villages, towns, and cities. This area's rangelands have long sustained nomadic pastoral production and are the homelands of the main Bedouin communities. Najd is bordered to the west by the regions of Hijaz and Asir along the Red Sea. A narrow coastal plane known as Tihama is predominant in the south, while a mountain chain with a steep western escarpment runs through these areas.
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Saudi Arabia is not only the homeland of the Arab peoples—it is thought that the first Arabs originated on the Arabian Peninsula—but ... the homeland of Islam, the world's second-largest religion. Muhammad founded Islam there, and it is the location of the two holy pilgrimage cities of Mecca and Medina. The Islamic calendar begins in 622, the year of the hegira, or Muhammad's flight from Mecca. A succession of invaders attempted to control the peninsula, but by 1517 the Ottoman Empire dominated, and in the middle of the 18th century, it was divided into separate principalities. In 1745 Muhammad ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab began calling for the purification and reform of Islam, and the Wahhabi movement swept across Arabia. By 1811, Wahhabi leaders had waged a jihad—a holy war—against other forms of Islam on the peninsula and succeeded in uniting much of it. By 1818, however, the Wahhabis had been driven out of power again by the Ottomans and their Egyptian allies.
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On October 9, 2000, Saudi Arabia approved plans for setting up a new utility company in the twin industrial cities of Yanbu and Jubail. The company, named Marafiq, was founded by the Royal Commission, the Public Investments Fund, Saudi ARAMCO, and SABIC, with local investors ... holding a stake. UCO may be privatized when it becomes profitable. In the meantime, UCO has begun several water and power projects in Yanbu and Jubail. In July 2004, Marafiq issued a request for proposals (RFP) for a $2.5 billion, 2,400-MW, 79-mmg/d (of water), gas-fired IWPP in Jubail.
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