Jeddah

Jeddah (sometimes spelled Jiddah or Jedda ; English pronunciation: /ˈdʒɛdə/; Arabic: جدة‎ Jiddah or Jaddah, IPA: [ˈdʒedda, ˈdʒidda]) is a city in the Hijaz Tihamah region on the coast of the Red Sea and is the major urban center of western Saudi Arabia. It is the largest city in Makkah Province, the largest sea port on the Red Sea, and the second-largest city in Saudi Arabia after the capital city, Riyadh. With a population currently at 3.4 million people, Jeddah is an important commercial hub in Saudi Arabia.

Jeddah is the principal gateway to Mecca, Islam's holiest city, which able-bodied Muslims are required to visit at least once in their lifetime. It is also a gateway to Medina, the second holiest place in Islam.

Economically, Jeddah is focusing on further developing capital investment in scientific and engineering leadership within Saudi Arabia, and the Middle East. Jeddah was independently ranked fourth in the Africa – Mid-East region in terms of innovation in 2009 in the Innovation Cities Index.

Jeddah (horse)

Jeddah (1895–1909) was a British Thoroughbred racehorse and sire. In a career that lasted from 1897 to 1899 he ran nine times and won three races. In the summer of 1898 he became the first horse to win the Epsom Derby at odds of 100/1, and followed up by winning the Prince of Wales's Stakes at Royal Ascot. He was retired to stud after a single, unsuccessful race in 1899, but had serious fertility problems and made no impact as a stallion.

Background

Jeddah, a big, leggy chestnut horse standing 16.3 hands high, was bred at by his owner James Walker Larnach. at his Eaton Stud. His sire Janissary was an extremely well-bred colt who won the St James’s Palace Stakes in 1880, but, apart from Jeddah, had little success at stud. Jeddah’s dam, Pilgrimage was an exceptional racemare who won both the 1000 Guineas and 2000 Guineas in 1878. She had also been successful as a broodmare but had failed to produce a foal for several seasons and was thought to be barren, enabling James Larnach to buy her in 1894 for 160 guineas. Surprisingly, she proved to be in foal, and produced Jeddah, described by a groom at the stud as “biggest and weakest” foal he had ever seen, in the following year at the age of twenty. Pilgrimage died at the age of twenty-three, on the day that Jeddah won the Derby. Jeddah was sent into training with the royal trainer Richard Marsh at his Egerton House stable at Newmarket, Suffolk.

Battle of Jeddah (1813)

The Battle of Jeddah (Turkish: Cidde Muharebesi) was fought in 1813 at the west Arabian port of Jeddah as part of the Ottoman–Saudi War. The Ottoman army of Tusun Pasha arrived from Medina, and a new army led by his father Mohammed Ali Pasha arrived from Egypt. The Egyptian forces recaptured the city immediately, and the Ottoman-appointed Sharif was sent to Constantinople as a prisoner. A few days later, these forces captured Mecca itself, and Sultan Mahmud II restored Ghalib Efendi as the Sharif of Hejaz.

See also

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.