Saudi Independence Day Quotes

growing greater by the day, David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and delegates from Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia arrived in London to meet with the British leadership. They had been summoned by British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, in order to explain the empire’s new policy toward Palestine. Jewish immigration would end. The Jews would live under Arab rule in an independent state. Ben-Gurion erupted: “Jews cannot be prevented from immigrating into the country except by force of British bayonets, British police, and the British navy. And, of course, Palestine cannot be converted into an Arab state over Jewish opposition without the constant help of British bayonets!

Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state whose legitimacy depended on the upholding of sharia law. In theory, the law and the scholars who interpreted it placed a check on the sultan’s executive authority. The abolition of the Caliphate in 1924 marked the end of the political system that had governed the Arab world for over a thousand years. First colonial governments and then newly independent, republican Arab regimes sought to replace Islamic institutions with foreign concepts such as elected legislatures, written legal codes, and secular court systems. Nearly everywhere in the Arab world, the ulama were marginalized. They became minor officials with no real political authority. Everywhere, that is, except Saudi Arabia—where there never was a colonial government or secular Arab Nationalist regime, and where the classical Islamic constitutional order in which executive power was counterbalanced by the scholars is to this day preserved in a still-recognizable fashion.