Aramco and Its World

Aramco and Its World PDF

Author: Arabian American Oil Company

Publisher:

Published: 1980

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780960116423

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No longer simply a handbook for Aramco employees, this volume provides background information on Islam, the Arab world, and the oil industry.

Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom's Pursuit of Profit and Power

Saudi, Inc.: The Arabian Kingdom's Pursuit of Profit and Power PDF

Author: Ellen R. Wald

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2018-04-03

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1681777185

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A history of the most profitable company in the world, Saudi Aramco, and the story behind the family that ruthlessly maneuvered to control this multi-trillion dollar enterprise. The Saudi royal family and Aramco leadership are, and almost always have been, motivated by ambitions of long-term strength and profit. They use Islamic law, traditional ideology, and harsh justice to maintain stability and their own power, but underneath the thobes and abayas and behind the religious fanaticism and illiberalism lies a most sophisticated and ruthless business enterprise. Today, that corporation is poised to pull off the biggest IPO in history. Over more than a century, fed by ambition and oil wealth, al Saud, as the royal family is known, has come from next to nothing to rule as absolute monarchs, a contrast with the world around them and modernity itself. The story starts with Saudi Arabia's founder, Abdul Aziz, a lowly refugee embarking on a daring gambit to reconquer his family's ancestral home?the mud-walled city of Riyadh. It takes readers almost to present day, when the multinational family business has made al Saud the wealthiest family in the world and on the cusp of a new transformation. Now al Saud and its family business, Aramco, are embarking on their most ambitious move: taking the company public and preparing the country for the next generation.

Pilgrimage to Mecca

Pilgrimage to Mecca PDF

Author: Lady Evelyn Cobbold

Publisher: Arabian Publishing Limited

Published: 2009-04

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780955889431

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As the first British woman convert to Islam on record as having made the pilgrimage to Makkah and the visit to the Prophet's Tomb at Madinah, Lady Evelyn Cobbold (1867-1963) cuts a unique figure in the annals of the Muslim Hajj. Lady Evelyn was in her mid-sixties when she decided to go on the Hajj. Daughter of the distinguished Scottish explorer Lord Dunmore, granddaughter of the Earl of Leicester, and great-niece of the notorious romantic Lady Jane Digby el-Mezrab, the young Evelyn Murray had spent childhood winters in North Africa. There she had been imbued with the Muslim way of life, becoming, as she puts it, 'a little Muslim at heart'. Before and after the First World War she travelled widely in Egypt, Syria and Transjordan. While strongly drawn to the Arab world, she maintained a conventional place in society at home, marrying the wealthy John Cobbold in 1891 and devoting herself to her Suffolk house and Scottish estate, her gardens, and especially deer-stalking in the Highlands, of which she was a renowned exponent. When her husband, by then High Sheriff of Suffolk, died in 1929, Lady Evelyn decided to perform the pilgrimage. Arriving at Jiddah by steamer from Suez in February 1933, she stayed with the Philbys and entered into the life of Jiddah's foreign community while waiting to obtain permission to perform the Haj. In doing so, she had to overcome the considerable suspicion surrounding foreign 'converts' who, Muslims felt, made the pilgrimage and then wrote about it as a dangerous and sensational adventure. While in Jiddah she received visits from various officials of the royal court, notably the King's son the Amir Faysal (later King Faysal). PILGRIMAGE TO MECCA is as much an account of an interior journey of faith as a conventional travelogue. It takes the form of a day-by-day journal, interspersed with digressions on the history and merits of Islam. While awaiting permission to go to Makkah, she was allowed to travel to Madinah, of which she gives an enchanting account. She is the first English writer to give a first-hand description of the life of the women's quarters of the households in which she stayed in Madinah, Makkah and Muna -- an account remarkable for its sympathy and vividness. Her book was published in 1934 to favourable reviews but has never until now been reprinted. This new edition, with a biographical introduction by William Facey and Lady Evelyn's great-great-niece Miranda Taylor, serves to rescue this unique and intriguing Anglo-Muslim from the neglect that has since befallen her, even among scholars specialising in women travellers.

Out of the Desert

Out of the Desert PDF

Author: Ali Al-Naimi

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2016-11-03

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0241978394

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The extraordinary memoir of global oil's former central banker Ali Al-Naimi is the former Saudi oil minister - and OPEC kingpin - a position he held for the two decades between August 1995 and May 2016. In this time, Al-Naimi's briefest utterances moved markets. But it wasn't always that way. Al-Naimi was born into abject poverty as a nomadic Bedouin in the 1930s, just as US companies were discovering vast quantities of oil under the baking Arabian deserts. From his first job as a shepherd boy, aged four, to his appointment to one of the most powerful political and economic jobs in the world, Out of the Desert charts Al-Naimi's extraordinary rise to power. Described by Alan Greenspan as 'the most powerful man you've never heard of', Al-Naimi's incredible journey proves that anyone can make it - even a poor Bedouin shepherd boy. This is his exclusive inside story of power, politics and oil. His Excellency Ali Ibrahim Al-Naimi is the former Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. One of the most powerful economic and political jobs in the world, he held this post from August 1995 to May 2016. Prior to that he held a wide range of leadership positions in the Kingdom's national oil company, Saudi Aramco. He was the first Saudi national to be named President of the company in 1984 and became the first Saudi CEO in 1988. Al-Naimi joined the company, then called Aramco, as an office boy in 1947. A Bedouin, he was born in the deserts of eastern Arabia in 1935.

A Mediterranean Feast

A Mediterranean Feast PDF

Author: Clifford A. Wright

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 1999-10-20

Total Pages: 844

ISBN-13: 0688153054

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A groundbreaking culinary work of extraordinary depth and scope that spans more than one thousand years of history, A Mediterranean Feast tells the sweeping story of the birth of the venerated and diverse cuisines of the Mediterranean. Author Clifford A. Wright weaves together historical and culinary strands from Moorish Spain to North Africa, from coastal France to the Balearic Islands, from Sicily and the kingdoms of Italy to Greece, the Balkan coast, Turkey, and the Near East. The evolution of these cuisines is not simply the story of farming, herding, and fishing; rather, the story encompasses wars and plagues, political intrigue and pirates, the Silk Road and the discovery of the New World, the rise of capitalism and the birth of city-states, the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition, and the obsession with spices. The ebb and flow of empires, the movement of populations from country to city, and religion have all played a determining role in making each of these cuisines unique. In A Mediterranean Feast, Wright also shows how the cuisines of the Mediterranean have been indelibly stamped with the uncompromising geography and climate of the area and a past marked by both unrelenting poverty and outrageous wealth. The book's more than five hundred contemporary recipes (which have been adapted for today's kitchen) are the end point of centuries of evolution and show the full range of culinary ingenuity and indulgence, from the peasant kitchen to the merchant pantry. They also illustrate the migration of local culinary predilections, tastes for food and methods of preparation carried from home to new lands and back by conquerors, seafarers, soldiers, merchants, and religious pilgrims. A Mediterranean Feast includes fourteen original maps of the contemporary and historical Mediterranean, a guide to the Mediterranean pantry, food products resources, a complete bibliography, and a recipe and general index, in addition to a pronunciation key. An astonishing accomplishment of culinary and historical research and detective work in eight languages, A Mediterranean Feast is required--and intriguing--reading for any cook, armchair or otherwise.

Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an

Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an PDF

Author: Denise Spellberg

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2014-07-01

Total Pages: 418

ISBN-13: 0307388395

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In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom—a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America. But unlike most of them, by 1776 Jefferson could imagine Muslims as future citizens of his new country. Based on groundbreaking research, Spellberg compellingly recounts how a handful of the Founders, Jefferson foremost among them, drew upon Enlightenment ideas about the toleration of Muslims (then deemed the ultimate outsiders in Western society) to fashion out of what had been a purely speculative debate a practical foundation for governance in America. In this way, Muslims, who were not even known to exist in the colonies, became the imaginary outer limit for an unprecedented, uniquely American religious pluralism that would also encompass the actual despised minorities of Jews and Catholics. The rancorous public dispute concerning the inclusion of Muslims, for which principle Jefferson’s political foes would vilify him to the end of his life, thus became decisive in the Founders’ ultimate judgment not to establish a Protestant nation, as they might well have done. As popular suspicions about Islam persist and the numbers of American Muslim citizenry grow into the millions, Spellberg’s revelatory understanding of this radical notion of the Founders is more urgent than ever. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a timely look at the ideals that existed at our country’s creation, and their fundamental implications for our present and future.