Oil wealth facilitated Saudi Arabia's rapid modernization. Yet the resulting social changes produced tension in the kingdom between religious and state leaders, as well as between these two groups and the new elites. The Kuwait-Iraq crisis demonstrated both Saudi regional weakness and its importance to the U.S.-led West. It also increased the religious and socio-political tensions in the kingdom which threaten its stability. This work examines the contemporary tensions which form today's Saudi society and directs its path to the future.

This much-revised edition of Professor Abir's Saudi Arabia in the Oil Era now includes consideration of both Gulf Wars. Abir examines the social and political forces that have shaped Saudi Arabia, including the impact of Islam and of Westernization, drawing heavily on Saudi sources. There is also essential analysis of regional security dilemmas and of the country's prospects in the post-Gulf War era.

This study of political relations in the Middle East analyzes the reasons behind the instability of the region.

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

When I began a survey of source material for this book in the early 1980s, I was somewhat surprised by the paucity of sources relating to socio-political dynamics in modem Saudi Arabia both in European languages and Arabic. Thus, William Rugh's article 'Emergence of a New Middle Class in Saudi Arabia' (1973), for instance, remains a classic to this day. In the field of social anthropology I found only a handful of serious studies of the Saudi population produced by western and Arab scholars (Katakura, Lancaster, Cole, Shamekh, and :tfamzah's outdated work). Other sources in Arabic largely dealt with the kingdom's geography and tribal division, past history to the twentieth century, the reign of Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud, and the rise of the Wahhabi movement and its impact on the Arabian Peninsula. The contribution of Saudi scholars of good standing to the subject was minimal, as the Saudi modem elites were beginning to emerge in the middle of the century and only lately have they begun to publish worthwhile scholarly studies of their society and government - studies inhibited, unfortunately, by the character of the regime and its strict censorship laws.

This book is about the socio-political dynamics in modern Saudi Arabia both in European languages and Arabic. It discusses the changes that the country, society, educational system, government, politics of Saudi Arabia underwent due to modernisation.

Saudi Arabia has undergone a rapid social and economic transformation. When Ibn Saud declared the nation a unified kingdom in 1932, the majority of its population was nomadic and lived in a state of poverty or semi-poverty. Now the processes of modernisation, financed by the exploitation of the country's vast oil reserves, have produced a prosperous and predominantly urban population. However, this social change has not been without its tensions; the emergence of a rising middle class has called into question the monopoly of power of the House of Saud, its involvement in the kingdom's economy and its oil and foreign policy, while the rapid urbanisation of the rural population has eroded the traditional social structures and has not solved, but in some cases promoted, social division. This book, first published in 1988, explores the recent history of the Saudi oil state in an analysis of the struggle for social and political power in modern Saudi Arabia.

First Published in 1980. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This text analyzes the USSR's interest in the countries of the Persian Gulf. The book places such interest within the context of the USSR's relations with the Arab world and the complexities of power politics.

This study of political relations in the Middle East analyzes the reasons behind the instability of the region.