Nasser Al Saeed

Nasser Al Saeed (1923–unknown) was a Saudi Arabian writer and the founder of the Arabian Peninsula People's Union (APPU).[1] He was one of the most significant critics of the Saudi royal family.[2] He was kidnapped in December 1979 in Beirut, Lebanon, and there has been no information about his whereabouts since then. His case is the first reported instance of the state-sponsored abduction by Saudi Arabia.[3]

Nasser Al Saeed
Nasser Al Saeed in 1956
Born1923
Disappeared17 December 1979 (aged 56)
Beirut
StatusMissing for 43 years, 10 months and 8 days
NationalitySaudi Arabian
OccupationWriter
Years active?-December 1979
Known forCriticisms against House of Saud
Founder of the Arabian Peninsula People's Union
Notable workTarikh Al Sa'ud (1963)

Biography

Al Saeed was born in 1923[4] and hailed from a family from the Shammar tribe based in Hail.[5][6] He was employed in Aramco.[7]

Al Saeed involved in protests against the royal establishment in 1947 due to the inefficiency of Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries to end the attempts to establish an Israeli state in the Middle East.[8] The protests became much more intense following the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the recognition of the state by the U.S. which had close ties with Saudi Arabia.[8] His opposition continued in the 1950s through radio broadcast.[1] Al Saeed was one of the leaders of the strike among Aramco workers in 1953.[4] Following this incident he was put under house arrest in Hail.[5][9] At the end of the same year and in the early days of 1954 Al Saeed and other strike leaders formed the National Reform Front.[4] They were secular and leftist and had connections with both Najdi and Hijazi people.[4] In 1956 following the riots Al Saeed left Saudi Arabia and settled in Damascus, Syria, where he established the Nasserist Union of People of the Arabian Peninsula (ittihad sha'b al-jazira al-'arabiyya) in 1959[6][10] which was renamed as the Union of the Sons of the Arabian Peninsula.[9] In 1960 the Union became a member of the Arab National Liberation Front which also included the Free Princes Movement founded by the Saudi royals led by Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud.[9] Al Saeed established the APPU in 1960.[11] In 1963 he went to Sanaa, Yemen, where he founded an office for his organization.[1][9] Later he left the Arab National Liberation Front and returned to Syria.[9]

Work

His book, Tarikh Al Sa'ud (Arabic: History of Al Saud), was published in 1965.[12] In the book Al Saeed claimed that in 1943 the Saudi ambassador to Egypt, Abdullah bin Ibrahim Al Mufaddal, asked Muhammad Al Tamimi to create a fake family tree for the Al Saud family and the family of Muhammad Abd al Wahhab, founder of Wahhabism, and to relate them to the origins of Prophet Muhammad.[13] It is also argued in the book that the Al Saud have Jewish roots.[14] Ghassan Salamé remarks that Tarikh Al Sa'ud is not objective and lacks the necessary evidence to support its strong claims against the Saudi royal family.[6]

Disappearance and aftermath

During his visit to Beirut, Lebanon for interviews with Arab and Western media, Al Saeed was abducted in the Hamra district of Beirut by Saudi agents on 17 December 1979.[2] Just before his kidnapping Al Saeed praised those who seized Great Mosque in Mecca in November 1979.[1] He described the seizure as a revolution that was the result of newly emerging controversies in Saudi Arabia.[15][16] He added that the incident was organized by the opposition forces[17] and carried out by military officials and tribesmen and that each revolutionary Muslim had a right to capture the Ka'ba as the prophet Mohammed did in order to satisfy his conscience.[15]

In the kidnapping of Al Saeed Abu al Zaim, one of the Fatah movement's senior figures, helped Saudi agents.[2] The mediator of this collaboration was the Fatah leader Yasser Arafat who was paid by the Saudi authorities for it.[18] Al Saeed was taken to his native country by the agents, and his fate has been unknown since then.[2][10] Based on the Arab media reports Ghassan Salamé states that Al Saeed was executed immediately after he was brought to Saudi Arabia.[6] Saudi Arabia denied any role in his disappearance.[19]

See also

References
  1. "Saudi Arabia's long and dark history of abductions". Middle East Eye. 12 October 2018. Retrieved 21 April 2021.
  2. Paul Khalifeh (28 January 2019). "Saudi dissident in Beirut believes he escaped same fate as Khashoggi". Middle East Eye. Retrieved 21 April 2021.
  3. Kareem Fahim; Loveday Morris (5 November 2018). "Saudi campaign to abduct and silence rivals abroad goes back decades". The Washington Post. Istanbul. Retrieved 21 April 2021.
  4. John Chalcraft (Spring 2011). "Migration and Popular Protest in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf in the 1950s and 1960s". International Labor and Working-Class History. 79 (1): 28–47. doi:10.1017/S014754791000030X. S2CID 145662704.
  5. Rosie Bsheer (February 2018). "A Counter-Revolutionary State: Popular Movements and the Making of Saudi Arabia". Past & Present. 238 (1): 233–277. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtx057.
  6. Ghassan Salamé (1989). "Political Power and the Saudi State". In Berch Berberoglu (ed.). Power and Stability in the Middle East. London: Zed Books. pp. 87, 89. ISBN 978-0-86232-809-2.
  7. Claudia Ghrawi (2016). "A Tamed Urban Revolution: Saudi Arabia's Oil Conurbation and the 1967 Riots". In Nelida Fuccaro (ed.). Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. doi:10.1515/9780804797764. ISBN 9780804797764.
  8. Victor McFarland (2020). Oil Powers. A History of the U.S.-Saudi Alliance. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 48. doi:10.7312/mcfa19726. ISBN 9780231197267. S2CID 242347150.
  9. Mordechai Abir (2019). Saudi Arabia In The Oil Era: Regime and Elites; Conflict and Collaboration. New York; Abingdon: Routledge. p. 9. ISBN 978-1-00-031069-6.
  10. Toby Matthiesen (2014). "Migration, Minorities, and Radical Networks: Labour Movements and Opposition Groups in Saudi Arabia, 1950–1975". International Review of Social History. 59 (3): 491. doi:10.1017/S0020859014000455.
  11. "The Arabian Peninsula Opposition Movements". Middle East Report (130). February 1985.
  12. J. E. Peterson (December 1991). "The Arabian Peninsula in Modern Times: A Historiographical Survey". The American Historical Review. 96 (5): 1444. doi:10.2307/2165280. JSTOR 2165280.
  13. Said Mahmud Najm AI. "The Emergence of Al Wahhabiyyah Movement and its Historical Roots" (PDF). Federation of American Scientists. p. 25. Retrieved 29 April 2021. Translated version of a secret document presented to the Iraqi General Military Intelligence Directorate.Amiri
  14. "Servant of the British Empire: On the founding of Ibn Saud's kingdom". Al Akhbar. Beirut. 29 October 2014. Retrieved 19 May 2021.
  15. Michel G. Nehme (October 1994). "Saudi Arabia 1950-80: Between Nationalism and Religion". Middle Eastern Studies. 30 (4): 930–943. doi:10.1080/00263209408701030.
  16. Thomas Hegghammer; Stéphane Lacroix (February 2007). "Rejectionist Islamism in Saudi Arabia: The Story of Juhayman al-ʿUtaybi Revisited" (PDF). International Journal of Middle East Studies. 39 (1): 115. doi:10.1017/S0020743807002553. S2CID 163081762.
  17. Toby Matthiesen (Summer 2020). "The Cold War and the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia, 1975–1991". Journal of Cold War Studies. 22 (3): 45. doi:10.1162/jcws_a_00950. S2CID 221118100.
  18. Rada Soubra Barrage (2007). The domestic challenging facing Saudi Arabia (MA thesis). Lebanese American University. p. 19. doi:10.26756/th.2007.50.
  19. William B. Quandt (1981). Saudi Arabia in the 1980s: Foreign Policy, Security, and Oil. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. p. 93. ISBN 9780815772859.
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