COUNTRY STUDY -- SAUDI ARABIA AND EGYPT
This research paper describes, compares and contrasts the principal factors (indicators) which have shaped the respective political cultures, dominant political leadership patterns, institutions and policies of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. They include the natural environment, geographical position, religion and economic constraints and potentials.
I. Historical Evolution of Politics and the State (pre-1950)
Throughout its 6,000 year old civilization, Egypt's politics and state structures have been strongly influenced by its climate which yielded a large thinly populated arid area and a densely populated Nile River Valley whose inhabitants have been dependent for their survival on the effects of rainfall and floods. According to Metz, Egypt's political and economic system "developed around the concept of a god incarnate [the pharaoh] who was believed through his magical powers to control the Nile flood" (Egypt 8). Rule under the pharaohs generated, especially after the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in the third millennium B.C., centralized royal administrative institutions and structures. Egypt's strategic geographical position at the crossroads of Europe, the Middle East and Africa and its grain and other agricultural resources attracted many alien conquerors, Persians, Greeks under Alexander the Great and his Ptolemaic successors, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Tulinids, Ikhshidids, Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks and from 1517 to 1882 the Ottoman Turks. These foreign invaders adapted Egyptian institutions to their own authoritarian or despotic political ends.
The harsh rigors of the Arabian Peninsula's arid and desolate desert climate and topography produced a nomadic bedouin culture in which society was organized around family, tribal and clan units. Families were patrilineal (lines of descent ran through males). This patriarchal authority was leavened by extensive consultation amo...