The Rise of Saudi Arabia • 243centuries, the Saudis managed to spread their rule and Wahhabi doctrines
to most of northern Arabia, using methods similar to those of the Khari-
jites centuries earlier. They even took Mecca and Medina, destroying or
damaging many of the tombs and other shrines that are part of the Mus¬
lim hajj. You may remember that the Ottoman sultan sent Mehmet Ali's
army to the Hijaz to expel these Wahhabis, whose threat to the Ottomans
in this sensitive area had the potential to undermine their legitimacy in
other Muslim lands. After years of desert warfare, the Saudi-Wahhabi
combine was defeated, and the Turks garrisoned the Hijaz. Although Wah¬
habi doctrines continued to spread to the Persian Gulf region and even to
India, the Saudi family was confined to central and eastern Arabia. It
fought for power with the Rashid dynasty, which enjoyed Ottoman back¬
ing and seemed by 1900 to have triumphed over the house of Sa'ud.
The man known to us as Ibn Sa'ud (Saudis call him Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd
al-Rahman) was born in Riyadh, the Saudis' home base, in 1880. When he
was ten, the Rashids drove his family out. The Saudis took refuge near the
Rub' al-Khali (the Empty Quarter, in the eastern part of the Arabian Penin¬
sula) among the Bani Murra, a tribe so poor and primitive that its people
are called the bedouins' bedouin. Among these desert desperadoes Ibn
Sa'ud learned to ride and shoot expertly and to deal with other tribal Arabs.
Later the Saudis were given asylum by the shaykh of Kuwait, a fishing port
near the head of the Persian Gulf. There Ibn Sa'ud began learning about the
outsiders who now coveted the Arabian Peninsula, one of the few lands not
already carved up by the great European empires. Actually, Arabia in 1900
had a patchwork of local and foreign rulers, too many to be listed in a con¬
cise history. Let us just say that Sultan Abdulhamid was extending Ottoman
control into formerly autonomous lands, such as the coastal region east of
Najd called al-Hasa. Some of the Arab shaykhs along the Persian Gulf had
made treaties allowing the British to manage their defense and foreign rela¬
tions. But young Ibn Sa'ud craved neither protection by foreign Christians
nor dependency on the Ottomans, whom the Wahhabis saw as backsliders
from Islam; he wanted to retake Riyadh from the Rashid dynasty. Heading
a small band of loyal Wahhabis on a night raid, he successfully regained his
ancestral capital in 1902. This was the first episode in an epic that has been
told time and again by Saudi and foreign chroniclers.
The Emergence of the Saudi Kingdom
This epic is the story of how, over the span of thirty years, most of the
tribes and emirates of the Arabian Peninsula became united under Ibn