Maram

“Those who suffer a defeat are often branded by history as lacking in talent, whereas it is frequently circumstances that are unfavourable to them.”
― Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia

“There were no large-scale irrigation facilities or huge tracts of irrigated and cultivated land in medieval Arabia. Combined with the isolation of the oases, this meant that there was no need for a centralized government.”
― Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia

“The profession of driver was very attractive to the bedouin: the replacement of a camel by a truck as a means of transport did not humiliate even a shaikh’s son and corresponded to the nomads’ traditional mentality.136 Aramco opened special centres where young bedouin were trained in driving and truck maintenance.137 In the 1950s and 1960s the government encouraged the sale of cars to the bedouin, and some of them sold their camels and bought trucks. Grants and gifts from the king enabled the tribal nobility to buy motorized transport of their own. Trucks replaced camels, where the terrain permitted their use.”
― Alexei Vassiliev, The History of Saudi Arabia

“when the United States and Britain denied their non-propertied classes and their female citizens suffrage, or when the US operated a colonial system of slavery, genocide, and racial apartheid, no culturalist arguments were advanced to explain this grave democratic deficit among white Euro-American property-owning Protestant Christian men either (the only exception was the use by antebellum Northern white abolitionists of culturalist arguments against Southern whites as sexually excessive and libertine—on account of having learned such traits from their Black slaves and from living in a warmer climate—and confining of women, but no arguments were offered to explain the racism of Northern whites against Blacks and Native Americans, let alone Northern intolerance of Catholics and Mormons or discrimination against women).”
― Joseph A. Massad, Islam in Liberalism