Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with armed young men, loyal to this sheikh or that, even as the presence of the Yemeni
government was negligible. Estimates of the number of firearms within Yemen's borders
go as high as eighty million—almost three for every Yemeni. I will never forget what an
American military expert told me in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a: “In Yemen you've got
well over twenty million aggressive, commercial-minded, and well-armed people, all ex-
tremely hardworking compared with the Saudis next door. It's the future, and it terrifies the
hell out of the government in Riyadh.”
Saudi Arabia is synonymous with the Arabian Peninsula in the way that India is syn-
onymous with the subcontinent. But while India is heavily populated throughout, Saudi
Arabia constitutes a geographically nebulous network of oases separated by vast waterless
tracts. Thus, highways and domestic air links are crucial to Saudi Arabia's cohesion. While
India is built on an idea of democracy and religious pluralism, Saudi Arabia is built on
loyalty to an extended family. And yet whereas India is virtually surrounded by semi-dys-
functional states, Saudi Arabia's borders disappear into harmless desert to the north, and
are shielded by (in the most part, Bahrain excepted) sturdy, well-governed, self-contained
sheikhdoms to the east and southeast: sheikhdoms that, in turn, are products of history and
geography. It was because the territories of present-day Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the
United Arab Emirates all lay along the trade route of the nineteenth century's greatest mari-
time power, Great Britain, and particularly along its route to India, that Britain negotiated
deals with its skeikhs that led to their independence following World War II. Large oil de-
posits tell the rest of the story of these “Eldorado States,” in the words of British Arabist
Peter Mansfield.
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