Wahhabism is an Islamic doctrine and religious movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. It has been variously described as "ultraconservative", "far-right" "austere", "fundamentalist", or "puritan (ical)"; as an Islamic "reform movement" to restore "pure monotheistic worship" (tawhid) by devotees; and as a "deviant sectarian movement", "vile sect" and a distortion of Islam by its detractors. The term Wahhabi(sm) is often used polemically and adherents commonly reject its use, preferring to be called Salafi or muwahhid, claiming to emphasize the principle of tawhid or monotheism, dismissing other Muslims as practising shirk (idolatry). It follows the theology of Ibn Taymiyyah and the Hanbali school of jurisprudence, although Hanbali leaders renounced ibn Abd al-Wahhab's views.
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, is a country in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the largest sovereign state in the Middle East, the second-largest in the Arab world, the fifth-largest in Asia, and the 12th-largest in the world. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast and Yemen to the south; it is separated from Israel and Egypt by the Gulf of Aqaba. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid desert, lowland and mountains. As of October 2018, the Saudi economy was the largest in the Middle East and the 18th largest in the world. Saudi Arabia also has one of the world's youngest populations; 50 percent of its 33.4 million people are under 25 years old.
Diriyah, formerly romanized as Dereyeh and Dariyya, is a town in Saudi Arabia located on the north-western outskirts of the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Diriyah was the original home of the Saudi royal family, and served as the capital of the Emirate of Diriyah under the first Saudi dynasty from 1744 to 1818. Today, the town is the seat of the Diriyah Governorate, which also includes the villages of Uyayna, Jubayla, and Al-Ammariyyah, among others, and is part of Ar Riyad Province.
The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, abbreviated CPVPV and colloquially termed hai’a (committee), is a Saudi government religious authority charged with implementing the Islamic doctrine of hisbah. It traces its modern origin to a revival of the pre-modern official function of muhtasib by the first Saudi state (1745–1818). The committee was established in 1976 in its current form, with the main goal of supervising markets and public morality. It has been assisted by volunteers, and often described as Islamic religious police. It has been called mutawa, mutaween and by other similar names in English-language sources, with various translations.
Safar bin Abdul-Rahman al-Hawali al-Ghamdi is a scholar who lives in Mecca. He came to prominence in 1991, as a leader of the Sahwah movement which opposed the presence of US troops on the Arabian peninsula. In 1993, al-Hawali and Salman al-Ouda were leaders in creating the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights, a group that opposed the Saudi government, for which both were imprisoned from 1994 to 1999.
Mohammad Al-Massari is an exiled Saudi physicist and political dissident who gained asylum in the United Kingdom in 1994. He runs the Committee for the Defense of Legitimate Rights (CDLR) and is an adviser to the Islamic Human Rights Commission. In the mid-2000s, he was employed as a lecturer by the physics department of King's College London.
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, women's rights in Saudi Arabia have been severely limited in comparison to the rights of women in many of its neighboring countries due to the strict application of sharia law in place in Saudi Arabia. The World Economic Forum's 2016 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 141 out of 144 countries for gender parity, down from 134 out of 145 in 2015. The United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) elected Saudi Arabia to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women for 2018–2022, in a move that was widely criticised by the international community. Women in Saudi Arabia constituted 23% of the country's native workforce as of 2015. In 2019, 34.4% of the native workforce of Saudi Arabia were women.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Saudi Arabia:
The Houthi movement, officially called Ansar Allah and colloquially simply Houthis, is an Islamic political and armed movement that emerged from Sa'dah in northern Yemen in the 1990s. The movement was called Houthis because its founder is from the Houthi tribe. They are of the Zaidi sect, though the movement reportedly also includes Sunnis. Under the leadership of Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, the group emerged as an opposition to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, whom they charged with massive financial corruption and criticized for being backed by Saudi Arabia and the United States at the expense of the Yemeni people and Yemen's sovereignty. Resisting Saleh's order for his arrest, Hussein was killed in Sa'dah in 2004 along with a number of his guards by the Yemeni army, sparking the Houthi insurgency in Yemen. Since then, except for a short intervening period, the movement has been led by his brother Abdul-Malik al-Houthi.
The government does not conduct census on religion and ethnicity but some sources estimated the percentage of Shiites in Saudi Arabia from 15% to 20% of approximately 20 million natives of Saudi Arabia. The modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was formed in 1932 by the House of Saud, who are followers of a movement within Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism or "the Wahhabite mission". Followers of the Wahhabite mission—who dominate religious institutions, courts and education of the kingdom—believe that "Muslims should return to the interpretation of Islam found in the classical texts, the Quran and the Sunnah." They also believe that "Muslims who seek intercession from holy men, such as the imams revered by Shiites, are not 'true' Muslims." While attempts to force conversion of Shiites have been infrequent, they face severe discrimination in Saudi Arabia and even executions.
The Umma Islamic Party is a political party in Saudi Arabia that was formed on 10 February 2011 in response to the Arab Spring. Formed by a collective of opposition members including Islamists and intellectuals, the party is pro-reform and demands representation and an end to absolute monarchy in the country. The party is run by a ten-member coordination committee and requested official recognition from the government as an official party. On 18 February, most of the party co-founders were arrested by Saudi authorities. All except for Sheikh Abd al-`Aziz al-Wuhaibi were released later in 2011, subject to travel and teaching bans, after agreeing in writing not to carry out "anti-government activity".
The Human Rights First Society is a non-governmental and non-profit organisation which seeks to promote human rights in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is one of the few independent groups in Saudi Arabia monitoring human rights, along with the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association, the Society for Development and Change and the Association for the Protection and Defense of Women's Rights in Saudi Arabia. The HRFS was initiated as an organisation dedicated to protecting and defending human rights in Saudi Arabia according to Islamic teachings. The HRFS stands for applying the rule of law, freedoms of expression and association, and abolishing all discrimination in Saudi society on the basis of gender or religious beliefs.
Dissidents have been detained as political prisoners in Saudi Arabia during the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Protests and sit-ins calling for political prisoners to be released took place during the 2011–2012 Saudi Arabian protests in many cities throughout Saudi Arabia, with security forces firing live bullets in the air on 19 August 2012 at a protest at al-Ha'ir Prison. As of 2012, recent estimates of the number of political prisoners in Mabahith prisons range from a denial of any political prisoners at all by the Ministry of Interior, to 30,000 by the UK-based Islamic Human Rights Commission and the BBC.
Abdullah Hamid Ali al-Hamid or "Abu Bilal" is a Saudi poet, former Arabic professor, human rights activist and a co-founder of the Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association (ACPRA). He has been imprisoned several times for supporting the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Saudi Arabia.
It is thought that in Saudi Arabia it is socially acceptable to hit women or children to discipline them, and while yes, the older generations do hit children and some of them may hit women, the current generations are growing out of the habit of hitting children to discipline them, knowing that it can cause problems to the child currently and in their future, but hitting women is considered by most of the next generations taboo, unethical and inhuman.
Walī is an Arabic word with a number of meanings, including "custodian", "protector", "helper", "a man close to God", or "holy man", etc. "Wali" is someone who has "Walayah" over somebody else, and in fiqh particularly "an authorized agent of the bride in concluding a marriage contract ", where the Wali traditionally selects the bride groom. The practice of forbidding girls and women from traveling, conducting official business, or undergoing certain medical procedures without permission from their male guardian by law continued in Saudi Arabia until 2019 when the laws were reversed.
A number of prominent Saudi Arabian princes, government ministers, and business people were arrested in Saudi Arabia on 4 November 2017 and the following few weeks after the creation of an anti-corruption committee led by Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman.
The Tiger Squad, according to an unnamed source interviewed by the London-based online news outlet Middle East Eye following the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi in October 2018 and a BBC source inside Saudi Arabia who has a relative in the squad, is a Saudi team that consists of approximately fifty Saudi officers.
