Saudi Arabia be 4T?
Ran into this article saying that Saudi Arabia could explode any moment.
Also, I heard on the radio about the Saudis executing a prominent Shia religious leader and Shia Saudis are threatening an insurgency.
Enjoy these low gas prices while they last, they won't last much longer.
To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less.
-Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man under Socialism
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/sa...9436?cid=sm_fb
Saudi Arabia Cuts Diplomatic Relations With Iran Over Execution Protests
by Reuters and NBC News
RIYADH Saudi Arabia said on Sunday it had severed ties with Iran over the storming of the Saudi embassy in Tehran, in a worsening diplomatic crisis between the regional rivals following the kingdom's execution of a prominent Shi'ite cleric.
Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir told a news conference Iran's diplomatic mission and related entities in Saudi Arabia had been given 48 hours to leave.
"My generation, we were the generation that was going to change the world: somehow we were going to make it a little less lonely, a little less hungry, a little more just place. But it seems that when that promise slipped through our hands we didnīt replace it with nothing but lost faith."
Bruce Springsteen, 1987
http://brucebase.wikispaces.com/1987...+YORK+CITY,+NY
I think that at this point, anything may be possible in Saudi Arabia. Ethnic cleansing of Shiites to Iraq, overthrow of the House of Saud, invasion by Iran, even a takeover by ISIS, which is quite popular in Arabian society. Definitely though, if we look at Saudi history, Saudi Arabia is 4T. Saudi Arabia was established as a Wahabi Kingdom between 1910 and 1926, which was the Arabian Peninsula's last 4T (and that of the rest of the Mideast). And before that, there was a Wahabi revolt against the Ottomans during the Napoleonic Wars and therafter that was only put down by Mehmet Ali of Egypt.Originally Posted by Earl and Mooch
Someone should put together a generational history of Islam. One could take it all the way back to the time of Muhammad. One thing about Islamic society. Every 4T is expressed in terms of jihad.
one small problem with that...
Islam is not a national identity nor is it a race of people. It is a religion, and as such it would be akin to trying to piece together a generational history of Christianity.
If you are talking about say, Malaysia or Indonesia, that would be separate. Iran is separate because it is a separate nation and branch of Islam. One could definitely do a generational history of Iran from the time of the First Persian Empire to the present. The Arabic and Turkish Middle East, though, has functioned as one nation from the time the Arabs were united and Islam took over from the Byzantine Empire to the present. And Islam is the unifying force--the only unifying force. During the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim could travel freely from Iraq to Istanbul (and to Belgrade) to Egypt and Libya and even to Morocco, even though Morocco was never under the Ottomans. And settle in these places and set up a business.The Islamic Arab world has been more like the United States than like Europe. Beneath the Islamic State there were (and with the exception of Egypt which IS a coherent nation and possibly Morocco and Tunisia) there are only tribes held together by kinship. (Non-Muslim communities like the Jews and Christians or Kurds, many of whom hold pre-Muslim or non-Muslim beliefs-- or sectarian Muslim communities like the Alawites and Lebanese Shia were autonomous and sometimes persecuted (always for Jews) and held in subjugation as dhimmi--the original Jim Crow--and sometimes, like the Druse almost independent comunities in defensible mountain fastnesses). Except maybe in Egypt (and even Egypt was thoroughly Islamised and Arabised because of migrations of Arabs to Egypt the way Anglos migrated to New Mexico--or else Egyptians would still be speaking Demotic Egyptian, not Arabic with a distinctly Egyptian accent) never was a secular volkisch national consciousness as in Europe, and the current situation is showing that attempts to impose a synthetic nation state consciousness through indoctrination by authoritarian states seems to have been an abject failure. What the West did to the Arab world after 1918 was as if the Chinese split the constituent states of the US into independent countries. So as much as we wish to say that Islam is "only a religion", it is more than that. Islam is a system of law that carries out many of the functions of a state (the only basis of morality most Muslims think in terms of) , making separation of mosque and state close to impossible in Muslim nations.
And so we CAN speak in terms of generational histories of the Arab Mideast, since they functioned mostly as one to three empires at any given time and what affected one part generaly affected all of it.
Saudi Arabia is in a difficult position. The Saudis, because of their royal succession from brother to brother (all sons of Abd al Aziz Ibn Saud) have kept power in the hands of Civics and Adaptives from the 1960s to the present. Saudi Arabia went through an Awakening in the 1980s which was defused by tightening up on women's rights and religious policing and by exporting it's Idealist jihadists to Afghanistan--thus Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Only now the sons of Abd al Aziz are all in their 80s (maybe the youngest is in his 70s) and under the new King Salman, power seems to be shifting to Salman's son and Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman--who is an idealist. Thus the War in Yemen and the Nimr execution and the oil price war. We have an anomaly of a Prophet Generation that has waited years to take power from Civic fathers now getting a chance at power FOR THE FIRST TIME --during the onset of a Crisis, not an unravelling. This does not bode well for Saudi Arabia to even survive as a country, even with unqualified US support, which this time, it may not have.
