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Toby Matthiesen traces the politics of the Shia in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia from the nineteenth century until the present day. This book outlines the difficult experiences of being Shia in a Wahhabi state, and casts new light on how the Shia have mobilised politically to change their position. Shia petitioned the rulers, joined secular opposition parties and founded Islamist movements. Most Saudi Shia opposition activists profited from an amnesty in 1993 and subsequently found a place in civil society and the public sphere. However, since 2011 a new Shia protest movement has again challenged the state. The Other Saudis shows how exclusionary state practices created an internal Other and how sectarian discrimination has strengthened Shia communal identities. The book is based on little-known Arabic sources, extensive fieldwork in Saudi Arabia and interviews with key activists. Of immense geopolitical importance, the oil-rich Eastern Province is a crucial but little known factor in regional politics and Gulf security.

This article shows how ideas of Arab nationalism, socialism, and communism spread to the Arab Gulf states. It outlines how migrant workers, teachers, students returning from abroad, and the emergence of a print culture filled with Arab nationalist and leftist ideas in the 1940s created the basis for widespread political mobilization in the oil-rich Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. After major strikes in 1953 and 1956 and a harsh crackdown, leftist activists moved underground and into exile. They continued to be active clandestinely and gathered in various capitals in the region. Members of the Shia Muslim minority in the Eastern Province played a special role in the labour movement and secular opposition groups. The latter promised the Shia inclusion in a larger political project and thus they were seen as an antidote to sectarian discrimination against this minority. The article emphasizes the importance of transnational networks, organizational resources such as libraries and social clubs, and a radicalized public sphere for political mobilization. A S U P P R E S S E D H I S T O RYThis article highlights the importance of migrating workers, teachers and students, radical transnational networks, a print culture filled with progressive ideas, and the presence of socio-economic and identitybased grievances for large-scale political mobilization. It also shows how organizational resources and pre-existing interpersonal networks, including family ties, facilitate sustained labour mobilization and strike * I would like to thank Louis Allday, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Kamil al-Khatti, and Adrian Ruprecht for their suggestions and comments on earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers, who provided very detailed comments and suggestions that have improved this article. I am indebted to a number of colleagues that have helped me along the path of researching the history of leftist movements in the Gulf, above all Q Abd al-Nabi al-Q Akri.terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi

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