Saudi Arabia

To begin to understand Saudi Arabia, one must first take a look at how the country was founded. The emergence of what was to become the Saudi royal family began in Nedj in the early 18th century when Muhammad bin Saud, founder of the dynasty, joined forces with the religious leader Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, founder of the Wahhabi movement, a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam.

This alliance provided the ideological impetus to Saudi expansion and remains the basis of Saudi Arabian dynastic rule today— hierarchic, ultraconservative, and steeped in bedouin traditions.

The country was formally founded in the 1930s following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire but was always based on the idea of expansion across the Arabian Peninsula, which can be seen in the level of diversity across the Kingdom today, from the Yemeni tribes of the southwest to the bedouins of the center, and the multiculturalism in the Hejaz.

When the Saudi Arabian authorities unexpectedly announced a tourist evisa in September 2019, decades of ultraconservative, insular behavior as it relates to foreigners’ ability to travel across the largest nation on the Arabian Peninsula nation was suddenly overturned.

These images come from two cross-country self-driven road trips in 2019 and 2021 covering the regions of Hejaz, Ha’il, Tabuk, Makkah, Madinah, Jazan, Asir and Najran.