THE IRANIAN PIVOT - The Revenge of Geography - page 191

Peninsula, lying between the Great al-Nafud Desert to the north and the Rub al-Khali or
Empty Quarter to the south: to the east is the coastal strip of the Persian Gulf; to the west
the mountains of Hijaz. The word “Najd” means upland. And its general elevation varies
from five thousand feet in the west to under 2,500 feet in the east. The late-nineteenth-cen-
tury British explorer and Arabist Charles M. Doughty described Najd thus:
The shrieking suany and noise of tumbling water is, as it were, the lamentable
voice of a rainless land in all Nejd villages. Day and night this labour of the
water may not be intermitted. The strength of oxen cannot profitably draw wells
of above three or four fathoms and, if God had not made the camel, Nejd, they
say, had been without inhabitant. 6
Najd is truly the heart of what Hodgson called camel-based nomadism. It was from the
bastion of Najd that Wahhabi fanatics in recent centuries set off on raids in all directions.
Though the Hijaz, adjacent to the Red Sea, held the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the
Wahhabist Najdis considered the pilgrimages to the various holy places (with the exception
of the haj to the Kaaba in Mecca) to be a form of paganism. While the holy cities of Mecca
and Medina connote Muslim religiosity in the Western mind, the truth is somewhat the op-
posite: it is the very pilgrimage of Muslims from all over the Islamic world that lends a
certain cosmopolitanism to these holy cities and to the surrounding Hijaz. The Hijaz, “with
its young, urbane, religiously varied population, has never fully accommodated to Saudi
and Wahabi rule,” writes career CIA officer Bruce Riedel. 7 The people of the Hijaz look
to the Red Sea, Egypt, and Syria for cultural sustenance, not to the austere desert of Najd
with its Wahhabis. The core fact of this history is that the Wahhabis were unable to hold
permanently the peripheries of the Arabian Peninsula, even as their adversaries found it
equally difficult to hold the heartland of Najd. The Saudi Arabia that exists today, while a
tribute to the vision and skills of one man in the first half of the twentieth century, Abdul
Aziz ibn Saud—the Najdi who conquered Hijaz in 1925—holds true to this geographical
design. 8 The state is focused on Najd and its capital, Riyadh, and does not include the sea-
board skeikhdoms of the Persian Gulf, nor Oman and Yemen.
The fundamental danger to Najd-based Saudi Arabia is Yemen. Though Yemen has only
a quarter of Saudi Arabia's land area, its population is almost as large, so that the all-im-
portant demographic core of the Arabian Peninsula is in its mountainous southwest corner,
where sweeping basalt plateaus, rearing up into sand castle formations and volcanic plugs,
embrace a network of oases densely inhabited since antiquity. The Ottoman Turks and the
British never really controlled Yemen. Like Nepal and Afghanistan, Yemen, because it was
never truly colonized, did not develop strong bureaucratic institutions. When I traveled in
the Saudi-Yemeni border area some years back it was crowded with pickup trucks filled