Publisher's Synopsis
This work narrates the birth and rise of Saudi Arabia until nowadays. In Volume 1 we will expose in detail the wars of unification of Arabia between 1902 to 1934, including also briefly the origins of the link between Saudis and Wahabism, in the 18th Century. This is an exciting subject, an epic that gave rise to one of the most influential countries in the world and that has only scarcely narrated in English. This story begins with a night attack of two dozen exiles during a crescent moon after Ramadan in the conventual Riyadh of 1902, led by a very tall young man known as the Leopard for his agility despite his wingspan: Abdelaziz Ibn Saud.
The book records the wars waged by Ibn Saud to unify Arabia, first against the Rashidis and the Ottomans in central Nejd; then during the Great War, with the appearance of the Hashimites of the Sharif of Mecca and the famous Lawrence and the more peripheral role that Saud had; and, finally, masterly, Saud had to broke the iron circle of Hashimite Kingdoms that was surrounding him after the Great War, the Hedjaz, Transjordan, Syria and Iraq. All ended in the struggle between the Hashimites and Ibn Saud to gain control of Sunni Islam, with the destruction of the kingdom of the Hedjaz, and, before this, the disappearance of Syrian Arab (this time against France in the battle of Kahn Maysalun). The Holy Cities of Islam where not saved from the horrors of war when drunken Russian mercenary pilots bombed them from the air on the pay of the old allies of Lawrence.
The icing on the cake of this book is the revolt of the fanatical warrior monks Ikhwan, the main combat weapon of Ibn Saud, who ended up confronting him when the monarch tried to control his massacres and looting actions on the British protectorates of Jordan and Iraq. Here also intervenes in our narrative the famous John Baggot Glubb, and his tactics of the war in the desert, and the covert war that the Ikhwan were waging against the British Empire. Everything would end in a civil war with the final victory of King Saud after the famous battle of Sibila, in which machine guns were used for the first time in deep Arabia against the attacks of the Bedouins.
Saudi Arabia was officially founded in 1932, as a union of the Kingdoms of Hedjaz and Nejd, the two swords draught in Saudi Arabia flag. It could have been Rashidi Arabia or Hashimite Arabia, but finally King Saud was able to impose himself on all his enemies and unify Arabia with a mixture of tenacity, opportunism, reckless courage, diplomacy, sometimes toughness and many other magnanimity and patience. Arabia would have been only a regional power, prominent in the Arab world but not outside it, for his control of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. His leadership in Islam would be in any case in dispute with Turkey, as Saudi Arabia has the mortal remains of the Prophet, but some relics and remains are located in Istanbul and this country was the home of the Caliph during centuries; to a much lesser extent with Jordan, whose Hashimite King descended from the Prophet; and especially with Iran, leader of the Shiites since the Khomeini Revolution in the early 1970s. However, everything changed for better for the Saudis with the discovery of huge oil reserves in the Al-Hasa region in 1938. Since then, Saudi Arabia is one of the major and most decisive actors in the world, something remarkable when we know that this was made by an exiled Bedouin prince without home in the distant 1902. And this story will be narrated in depth for the first time.
