Marx’s Arabian Apostles: The Rise and Fall of the Saudi Communist Movement

Saudi Arabia’s historic communist movement is considerably overlooked in the literature on secular dissent in the kingdom. This article attempts to address this gap by offering a historical account of the movement’s early formation, dispersion, radicalization and, ultimately, transformation into the Communist Party of Saudi Arabia. This metamorphosis from a diffuse and ideologically eclectic organization into a more orthodox, Soviet-style, and structurally coherent party, paradoxically, marked the Saudi movement’s political twilight as it assumed an organizational and intellectual straitjacket that contributed to its demise.