David Commins: evaluation

Transcript context

…To what extent should I think of Saudi as a nation of immigrants? As you know, bin Laden family has roots in Yemen. Prince Al Waleed bin Talal, who I think is still number two owner at Twitter, has Armenian and Lebanese descent. Overall, how many of the Saudis are actually Saudi in origin? I have no idea. I’ll just say that. I’ll say that. Yes, if you take away the one quarter of the population that are foreign workers, of the 75% that remain, I would say probably a very small number are descended from people outside Arabia, because certainly, the royals and wealthy Arabian families in general had a long history of marrying or having children with slaves. That was legal until the early 1960s. It doesn’t seem that the majority, or even close to majority of Arabs, owned slaves in Arabia over the centuries. It was a small number of better-off Arabs. In terms of immigrants, people moving to Arabia, very few people moved to Arabia from other parts of the Middle East because it was very poor. The largest site of immigrant settlement was Mecca and Medina, and that would have been from pilgrims who journeyed months overland from West Africa, or weeks through the Indian Ocean from Southeast Asia, and once you got there, a lot of them stayed. So that you did have permanent colonies from Java, from Bukhara in Central Asia, but central Arabia, the Saudi homeland, very little. One reads of these families who maybe came over from Yemen, they’re then in Saudi, they’ve whitewashed the origins a bit, pretend they’re long-standing Saudis. Is that common?…

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