Ibn Saud

Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman Al Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, built the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia by conquest over three decades, starting from a night raid on Riyadh in 1902 with a few dozen men. He united most of the Arabian Peninsula under his family's rule, proclaimed the kingdom in 1932, and lived to see the discovery of the oil that would transform it. Every Saudi king since his death has been one of his sons.

He was born in Riyadh on 15 January 1876 into the House of Saud, which in alliance with the Wahhabi religious movement had twice ruled much of central Arabia. The first Saudi state had been destroyed by an Ottoman army early in the nineteenth century, and the second was crushed by the rival Al Rashid dynasty, who took Riyadh in the early 1890s. The family fled, sheltering with Bedouin, then briefly in Qatar and Bahrain, before settling in Kuwait for nearly a decade. There the young Abdulaziz frequented the court of the Kuwaiti ruler Mubarak Al Sabah, while his aunt Jawhara urged him to restore his family's power.

In late 1901 he set out with relatives on a raid into the Nejd, against his father's advice. On the night of 15 January 1902 his small band climbed the walls of Riyadh and took the city, killing the Rashidi governor. Supporters flocked to him, and within two years he had won back about half of the Nejd. The Ottomans sent troops to aid the Rashidis and defeated him in 1904, but he turned to guerrilla warfare, and by 1906 the Ottoman presence in central Arabia had ended. By 1912 he controlled the Nejd and the east coast. Around then he founded the Ikhwan, a militant religious brotherhood of settled Bedouin who became the spearhead of his later wars.

During the First World War the British courted him; the Treaty of Darin of December 1915 made his lands a British protectorate. He crushed the Rashidis between 1920 and 1922, roughly doubling his territory, and the Uqair agreement of 1922 fixed borders with British-controlled territories, notably Iraq. In 1925 his forces took Mecca from the Hashemite Sharif Hussein, and in January 1926 he was proclaimed King of the Hejaz. The Treaty of Jeddah of May 1927 saw Britain recognise him as independent ruler of the Hejaz and Nejd.

His Wahhabi allies were less easily satisfied. Ikhwan leaders, who regarded all non-Wahhabis as unbelievers, rebelled when he stopped their raids into British-protected territories; he defeated them at the Battle of Sabilla in March 1929. On 23 September 1932 he merged his realms into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi doctrine was enforced across his lands, and shrines and cemeteries in the holy cities, including the al-Baqi cemetery, were demolished.

In 1933 Ibn Saud granted an oil concession, and in 1938 the American firm now known as Chevron struck oil. Large-scale production followed the Second World War, during which Saudi Arabia stayed officially neutral. In February 1945 he met Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal, a meeting that laid the basis of the Saudi-American relationship, and also met Winston Churchill in Egypt. He was a firm opponent of Zionism, and Saudi Arabia sent a small force to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

Ibn Saud married many times, often to bind tribes and clans to his dynasty, and fathered almost a hundred children, including 45 sons. In his last years, in poor health, he left most duties to his son Saud, named crown prince in 1933. He died of a heart attack at Taif on 9 November 1953, aged 77, and was buried in Riyadh. His sons Saud and Faisal succeeded him in turn, and the throne has passed among his descendants ever since.

Our 1900 map shows Arabia shortly before he retook Riyadh, the 1914 and 1920 maps cover the years of his expansion from the Nejd, and the 1938 map shows the unified Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.