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off the northwest coast of Africa, across the Red Sea. Part of the western edge of the country is on the Persian Gulf. The country shares borders withYemen and Oman on the south;Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates on the east; and Jordan, Iraq, and Kuwait on the north. As one of the world’s top oil producers, Saudi Arabia exerts con- siderable influence in world affairs. Saudi Arabia has used its oil wealth to build a thriving economy, albeit one that runs primarily on the country’s two vast but ultimately finite resources, oil and natural gas. An oil embargo led by Saudi Arabia nearly crippled the U.S. economy in the early 1970s. Saudi diplomats convinced other oil-producing nations to stop selling oil to the United States because of U.S. support for Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. Today, Saudi Arabia is a country in transition. Oil deposits in the region will be largely depleted over the next century. Alternatives to petroleum-based fuels for automobiles are making the world less reliant on oil, and that’s bad news for the oil industry’s future as a whole. The trend toward electric vehicles is expected to lower gasoline consumption in the coming decades. Saudi Arabia hopes to perpetuate its prosperity through the development of economic opportunities like tourism and technology. The fast pace of economic expansion has required an influx of foreign workers and the rapid education of the country’s people. The economic boom began when oil production started ramping up in the 1940s. Many Saudi families have transitioned from living in nomadic tribes to the world of educated professionals in about three generations. Someone who is an established Saudi engineer likely has a grandfather who knew only a life of desert wandering. The House of Saud has ruled the kingdom since its founding in 1930. In reality, the family has ruled some portion of the peninsula, at least part of the time, since 1744.The family rose to power, then was deposed , and then returned to power numerous times during the nineteenth century.When the Saudi royal family came to power, it did so with the help of the founders of an ultra-conservative form of Islam calledWahhabism.Wahhabism began in the seventeenth century and advocates for what its adherents consider a pure form of Sunni Islam, one of the two major branches of Islam. (The other major branch is known as Shi’a Islam.The differences between the

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