First Saudi State

The First Saudi State, officially the Emirate of Diriyah, was founded in central Arabia in 1744 and destroyed by an Egyptian army in 1818. It was the first state built on the alliance between the House of Saud and the religious reformer Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, an alliance on which modern Saudi Arabia still rests.

The Najd, the central plateau of Arabia, was a land of desert, oases and small towns, home to settled farmers and merchants and to Bedouin tribes. It was politically fragmented, with towns ruled by local emirs who fought each other, and was largely outside the control of the Ottoman Empire, which held the Hejaz and parts of the coast. Diriyah, in the Wadi Hanifa near today's Riyadh, was one such town, ruled by the Al Saud family since the fifteenth century.

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was born in 1703 in the town of al-Uyaynah, into a family of Hanbali religious scholars. He studied in Medina and Basra, and began preaching a strict monotheism, tawhid, condemning practices he considered idolatry, such as praying to saints, venerating tombs and sacred trees, and the use of amulets. He drew on the medieval scholar Ibn Taymiyya. His teaching angered local leaders, and he was expelled from al-Uyaynah.

In 1744 he went to Diriyah, where the emir Muhammad ibn Saud agreed to protect him. They made a pact: the Saudis would support and spread his teachings, and he would support their political authority. The followers of the movement called themselves muwahhidun, "those who affirm the unity of God"; outsiders called them Wahhabis.

Muhammad ibn Saud and his son Abd al-Aziz, who ruled from 1765, conquered the towns of the Najd over several decades, taking Riyadh in 1773. The Saudi state collected zakat, the religious tax, from towns and tribes, enforced religious practice and destroyed shrines. It expanded into al-Ahsa in the east, on the Persian Gulf, and raided Iraq and the Gulf coast.

In 1802 a Saudi force sacked the Shia shrine city of Karbala, in Iraq, killing thousands and destroying the dome of Husayn's tomb, which shocked the Muslim world. In 1803 Saudi forces took Mecca, and in 1805 Medina, demolishing domed tombs, including those in the Baqi cemetery, and restricting the pilgrimage caravans from Syria and Egypt. Abd al-Aziz was assassinated in 1803, probably in revenge for Karbala, and his son Saud continued the expansion, reaching as far as Oman and the Syrian desert.

Diriyah grew into a prosperous capital, with mud-brick palaces, mosques and houses in the At-Turaif district. Scholars came to study there, and trade flourished.

The loss of the holy cities was a serious blow to the Ottoman sultan, who claimed to be their protector. He ordered Muhammad Ali, the governor of Egypt, to act. Egyptian forces, led by Muhammad Ali's son Tusun, retook Medina in 1812 and Mecca in 1813. Ibrahim Pasha, another son, invaded the Najd in 1816, using artillery to take towns one by one. After a six-month siege, Diriyah surrendered in September 1818. Ibrahim's troops destroyed the town. The Saudi emir Abdullah ibn Saud was sent to Istanbul and executed, and many members of the Saudi family and religious scholars were killed or exiled to Egypt.

In 1824 Turki ibn Abdullah founded the Second Saudi State, with its capital at Riyadh, which lasted until 1891. In 1902 his descendant Abdulaziz retook Riyadh and founded the third state, today's Saudi Arabia. The ruins of At-Turaif in Diriyah are now a World Heritage Site and a major heritage project.

Our maps show the First Saudi State on the 1783, 1800 and 1815 maps, with an outline of up to about 660,000 square kilometres, entirely in today's Saudi Arabia, and Riyadh inside it. On the 1878 map, the region is shown simply as Arabia. For the modern kingdom, see Saudi Arabia.