House of Saud in the context of "Saudi Aramco"

The Sultanate of Nejd (Arabic: سلطنة نجد, Salṭanat Najd) was the third iteration of the Third Saudi State, from 1921 to 1926. It was a monarchy led by the House of Saud, and a legal predecessor of modern-day Saudi Arabia. This version of the Third Saudi State was created when Abdulaziz ibn Saud, Emir of Riyadh, declared himself sultan over Nejd and its dependencies. On the 2nd of December 1922, the Nejd signed an agreement with Kuwait defining their border with each other. The border would be a straight line along the 29th parallel. In December 1925, the Kingdom of Hejaz surrendered to the forces of ibn Saud, who was thereafter proclaimed king of the Hejaz in January 1926 and merged his dominions into the Kingdom of Hejaz and Nejd.

Manama (Arabic: الْمَنَامَة al-Manāma, Bahrani pronunciation: [elmɐˈnɑːmɐ]) is the capital and largest city of Bahrain, with an approximate population of 297,502 as of 2012. Long an important trading center in the Persian Gulf, Manama is home to a diverse population. After periods of Portuguese and Persian control and a short invasion from the ruling dynasty of Saudi Arabia, followed by a longer invasion by Oman, Bahrain established itself as an independent nation in 1971 following a period of British hegemony.

Manama has a history spanning several centuries. First mentioned in Islamic texts as early as the 14th century, Manama remained a small trading port until it came under Portuguese control in the early 1500s. In 1602, the Safavid Persians expelled the Portuguese, and Manama became a regional center for commerce and pearling. By the late 19th century, it had grown significantly due to trade and was declared the capital of Bahrain in 1971 when the country gained independence from British protection. Since then, Manama has evolved into a modern financial hub in the Persian Gulf region.

The history of Saudi Arabia as a nation state began with the emergence of the Al Saud dynasty in central Arabia in 1727 and the subsequent establishment of the Emirate of Diriyah. Pre-Islamic Arabia, the territory that constitutes modern Saudi Arabia, was the site of several ancient cultures and civilizations; the prehistory of Saudi Arabia shows some of the earliest traces of human activity in the world.

The world's second-largest religion, Islam, emerged in what is now Saudi Arabia. In the early 7th century, the Islamic prophet Muhammad united the population of Arabia and created a single Islamic religious polity. Following his death in 632, his followers rapidly expanded the territory under Muslim rule beyond Arabia, conquering huge and unprecedented swathes of territory (from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to modern-day Pakistan in the east) in a matter of decades. Arab dynasties originating from modern-day Saudi Arabia founded the Rashidun (632–661), Umayyad (661–750), Abbasid (750–1517), and Fatimid (909–1171) caliphates, as well as numerous other dynasties in Asia, Africa, and Europe.

The first Saudi state (Arabic: الدَّوْلَةُ السُّعُودِيَّةُ الْأُولَىٰ, romanized: ad-dawla as-suʿūdiyya al-ʾūlā), officially the Emirate of Diriyah (Arabic: إمارة الدرعية, romanized: ʾimāra ad-dirʿiyya), was a state that existed between 1744 and 1818, when the emir of a Najdi town called Diriyah, Muhammad I, and the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab signed a pact to found a socio-religious reform movement to propagate the Wahhabi religious doctrine under the political leadership of the House of Saud.

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden (10 March 1957 – 2 May 2011) was the founder and first general emir of al-Qaeda. Ideologically a pan-Islamist, Bin Laden participated in the Afghan mujahideen during the Soviet–Afghan War of the 1980s, and supported the Bosnian mujahideen during the Bosnian War of the 1990s. Opposed to American foreign policy in the Middle East, Bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996 and supervised numerous terrorist attacks in various countries, including the September 11 attacks in 2001 in the U.S.

Born in Riyadh to the aristocratic bin Laden family, he studied at Saudi and foreign universities until 1979, when he joined the mujahideen fighting against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1984, he co-founded Maktab al-Khidamat, which recruited foreign mujahideen into the war. As the Soviet war in Afghanistan came to an end, Bin Laden founded al-Qaeda in 1988 to carry out worldwide jihad. In the Gulf War, Bin Laden's offer of support to Saudi Arabia against Iraq was rejected by the Saudi royal family, which instead sought American aid.

The king of Saudi Arabia, officially the king of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Arabic: ملك المملكة العربية السعودية, romanized: Malik al-Mamlakat al-ʿArabiyat as-Suʿūdiyya), is head of state of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who holds absolute power. He is the head of the Saudi Arabian royal family, the House of Saud. The king is the commander-in-chief of the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces and the head of the Saudi national honors system. The king is called the "Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques" (خادم الحرمين الشريفين; Khadim al-Haramayn aš-Šarīfayn), a title that signifies Saudi Arabia's jurisdiction over the mosques of Masjid al-Haram in Mecca and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi in Medina. The title has been used many times through the history of Islam. The first Saudi king to use the title was Faisal; however, King Khalid did not use the title after him. In 1986, King Fahd replaced "His Majesty" with the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, and it has been since used by both King Abdullah and King Salman. The king has been named the most powerful and influential Muslim and Arab leader in the world according to The Muslim 500.

The Saudi conquest of Hejaz, also known as the Hejaz-Nejd War, was a campaign by Abdulaziz al-Saud of the Saudi Sultanate of Nejd to take over the Hashemite Kingdom of Hejaz in 1924–25, ending with conquest and incorporation of Hejaz into the Saudi domain.

The Emirate of Nejd and Hasa was the second iteration of the Third Saudi State from 1913 to 1921. It was a monarchy led by the House of Saud. The state was formed after Saudi forces seized al-Hasa from the control of the Ottoman Empire garrison, during the Conquest of al-Hasa. It was the direct antecedent of the Sultanate of Nejd, and a legal predecessor of modern-day Saudi Arabia.

A niqāb, niqab, or niqaab (/nɪˈkɑːb/; Arabic: نقاب), also known as a ruband (Persian: روبند) or rubandah (روبنده), is a long garment worn by some Muslim women, in order to cover their entire body and face, excluding their eyes. It is an interpretation in Islam of the concept of hijab, and is worn in public and in all other places where a woman may encounter non-mahram men. Most prevalent in the Arabian Peninsula, the niqab is a controversial clothing item in many parts of the world, including in some Muslim-majority countries.

While face veiling practices have ancient roots across various cultures in the Mediterranean, Middle East, and Central Asia, the modern form of niqab became more widespread particularly since the late 1970s Islamic revival, especially among Sunni Muslims throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This phenomenon was encouraged by the rise of "Petro-Islam" under the House of Saud; the propagation of hardline Sunni Islamic doctrines from the oil-producing Arab countries, beginning in earnest after the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, would quickly come to mold the Saudis' ideological response to the religious zeal that the Iranian Revolution had stirred among Shia Muslims. Sponsorship by Saudi Arabia of mosques throughout many Muslim-majority countries led to the increased adoption of Wahhabism and Salafism globally, resulting in the rise of the niqab as one of the more noticeable consequences of the Saudi strain of Islamic revivalism, which flourished greatly throughout the late 20th century. It also consolidated the newfound religious and cultural dominance of Sunni-majority Saudi Arabia over the Arab countries as a whole, effectively serving as a social countermeasure to the religious and cultural influence of Shia-majority Iran.