Saudi Arabia is formally the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), a nation on the Arabian Peninsula in Western Asia. It has an acreage of about 2,150,000 km2 (830,000 sq mi), making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the Arab globe, and also the largest in Western Asia. It is surrounded by the Red Sea to the west; Jordan, Iraq, and also Kuwait to the north; the Persian Gulf, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates to the eastern; Oman to the southeast; and also Yemen to the south.

Bahrain is an island country off the eastern shore. The Gulf of Aqaba in the northwest divides Saudi Arabia from Egypt. Saudi Arabia is the only country with a shoreline along both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, as well as a lot of its terrain includes dry desert, bog, steppe, and also mountains. Its capital and largest city is Riyadh. The nation is home to Mecca as well as Medina, both holiest cities in Islam.

Pre-Islamic Arabia, the region that comprises contemporary Saudi Arabia, was the website of several old societies as well as human beings; the prehistory of Saudi Arabia shows a few of the earliest traces of human activity on the planet. The world’s second-largest religious beliefs, Islam, arised in what is now Saudi Arabia. In the early 7th century, the Islamic prophet Muhammad joined the population of Arabia and also produced a single Islamic spiritual polity.

Following his death in 632, his fans swiftly broadened the area under Muslim policy past Arabia, overcoming massive and also extraordinary swathes of territory (from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to parts of Central and also South Asia in the eastern) in an issue of years. Arab dynasties stemming from contemporary Saudi Arabia established the Rashidun (632– 661), Umayyad (661– 750), Abbasid (750– 1517), and Fatimid (909– 1171) caliphates, in addition to numerous various other empires in Asia, Africa, and also Europe.

The area of contemporary Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of mostly four distinctive historical areas: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia (‘Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by King Abdulaziz (referred to as Ibn Saud in the West). He united the four regions into a solitary state through a series of occupations beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the genealogical house of his family, the Al Saud.

Saudi Arabia has actually because been an absolute monarchy, where the king, the princes of the big Al Saud royal household and also the country’s traditional elites have overseen a very tyrannical regimen.

The ultraconservative Wahhabi spiritual motion within Sunni Islam has been called a “primary feature of Saudi culture”, although the power of the religious establishment has actually been dramatically worn down in the 2010s. In its Basic Law, Saudi Arabia remains to specify itself as a sovereign Arab Islamic state with Islam as its main religion, Arabic as its main language, and also Riyadh as its funding.

Saudi Arabia is occasionally called “the Land of the Two Holy Mosques” in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca) and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam.