Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia (ⁱ/ˌsɔːdiː əˈreɪbiə/, ⁱ/ˌsaʊ-/), officially known as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is an Arab state in Western Asia constituting the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula. With a land area of approximately 2,150,000 km² (830,000 sq mi), Saudi Arabia is geographically the second-largest state in the Arab world after Algeria. Saudi Arabia is bordered by Jordan and Iraq to the north, Kuwait to the northeast, Qatar, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to the east, Oman to the southeast, and Yemen to the south. It is the only nation with both a Red Sea coast and a Persian Gulf coast, and most of its terrain consists of arid inhospitable desert or barren landforms.

The area of modern-day Saudi Arabia formerly consisted of four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, and parts of Eastern Arabia (Al-Ahsa) and Southern Arabia ('Asir). The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was founded in 1932 by Ibn Saud. He united the four regions into a single state through a series of conquests beginning in 1902 with the capture of Riyadh, the ancestral home of his family, the House of Saud. The country has since been an absolute monarchy, effectively a hereditary dictatorship governed along Islamic lines. The ultra-conservative Wahhabism religious movement within Sunni Islam has been called "the predominant feature of Saudi culture", with its global spreading largely financed by the oil and gas trade. Saudi Arabia is sometimes called "the Land of the Two Holy Mosques" in reference to Al-Masjid al-Haram (in Mecca), and Al-Masjid an-Nabawi (in Medina), the two holiest places in Islam. The Kingdom has a total population of 28.7 million, of which 20 million are Saudi nationals and 8 million are foreigners.

Senior

Senior may refer to:

See also

Arabian Peninsula

Arabian Peninsula, simplified Arabia (Arabic: الجزيرة العربية‎ al-jazīra al-ʿarabiyya, « Arabian island ») is a peninsula of Western Asia situated north-east of Africa on the Arabian plate. From a geological perspective, it is considered a subcontinent of Asia.

It is the largest peninsula in the world, at 3,237,500 km² (1,250,000 sq mi). The Arabian Peninsula consists of the countries Yemen, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as well as parts of southern Iraq and Jordan. The peninsula formed as a result of the rifting of the Red Sea between 56 and 23 million years ago, and is bordered by the Red Sea to the west, the Persian Gulf to the northeast, the Levant to the north and the Indian Ocean to the southeast. The Arabian Peninsula plays a critical geopolitical role in the Middle East and Arab world due to its vast reserves of oil and natural gas.

Before the modern era, it was divided into four distinct regions: Hejaz, Najd, Southern Arabia and Eastern Arabia. Hejaz and Najd make up most of Saudi Arabia. Southern Arabia consists of Yemen and some parts of Saudi Arabia and Oman (Dhofar). Eastern Arabia consists of the entire coastal strip of the Arab side of the Persian Gulf (the Khaleej).

Trump

A trump is a playing card which is elevated above its normal rank in trick-taking games. Typically an entire suit is nominated as a trump suit - these cards then outrank all cards of plain (non-trump) suits. In other contexts, the term trump card can refer to any sort of action, authority, or policy which automatically prevails over all others.

Etymology

The word "trump" derives from "trionfi" or "triumph", documented as the name of a card game in 1529 and which spawned the game Ruff and Honours, which in turn led to Whist. Trionfi was also the name of the original card game for which tarot cards were designed, and in it the tarot cards had the role of what are now called trumps; later card games, beginning with Triomphe, started using one of the ordinary suits as a replacement for the tarots when a tarot pack was not available.

Trump in card games

In most games, the relative rank of cards within a suit is the same in trump and plain suits, but they may sometimes differ, for example in Klabberjass, Euchre, or Eighty Points.

Ahmad Khatami

Ahmad Khatami is a senior Iranian Ayatollah, as well as a senior member of the Assembly of Experts. In December 2005, Ali Khamenei appointed him as Tehran’s substitute Friday prayer leader.

He was born in the city of Semnan, Iran. He studied at seminaries in Qom and Semnan.

In 2006, during the Pope Benedict XVI Islam controversy, Khatami asked the Pope to "fall on his knees in front of a senior Muslim cleric and try to understand Islam." In 2007, he addressed the death sentence issued by Imam Khomeini against Salman Rushdie, saying "In the Islamic Iran that revolutionary fatwa of Imam [Khomeini] is still alive and cannot be changed." In regard to the 2009 Iranian election protests, Khatami denounced demonstrators as rioters who wage war against God ("mohareb"), (a capital crime in Islamic law), and more recently accused reformist presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi of Mohareb as "leaders of sedition."

References

External links

Quotations related to Ahmad Khatami at Wikiquote