Saudi Arabia's history: three states of one family since 1727

What lay in Arabia before the Saudi states

The land inside today's borders was settled long before any of the three Saudi states. Archaeologists announced in May 2021 that An Nasim, an Acheulean site in the Hail region with 354 artefacts, was about 350,000 years old. In June 2020 the journal Antiquity published a 35 metre triangular stone monument at Dumat al-Jandal dated to the seventh millennium BCE. Rock art in the Hail region was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015.

Along the Gulf coast, records from Uruk name a place called Dilmun from the third millennium BCE. Scholars cited by Wikipedia place its first centre in what is now the Eastern Province, with Tarout Island as the probable port, before the centre moved to Bahrain around 2200 BCE. In the north-west the kingdom of Lihyan, centred at Dedan near modern al-Ula, flourished between the sixth and second centuries BCE.

The Nabataeans took Hegra from the Lihyanites around 65 BCE and held the caravan routes of the northern Hejaz until Rome annexed their kingdom in 106 CE. UNESCO counts 111 monumental tombs at Hegra, 94 of them with decorated facades cut straight into the sandstone between the first century BCE and the first century CE, and wells that are still in use. It was the first World Heritage property inscribed in Saudi Arabia, in 2008. In the centre of the peninsula the Kindite dynasty ruled a confederation of tribes from Qaryat al-Faw in the fifth century CE; the cultural landscape of al-Faw was inscribed in 2024.

How Mecca and Medina set the Hejaz apart

Muhammad was born in Mecca in about 570, began preaching there in 610 and moved to Medina in 622. By his death in 632 the tribes of Arabia had been joined in one Muslim polity, and within decades his successors had carried Muslim rule from Iberia to India. The political centre of the Muslim world moved to the conquered lands, and Arabia became peripheral to the state its people had founded.

The two holy cities did not. Mecca holds the Kaaba and Medina the Prophet's tomb, and from the seventh century they drew pilgrims from across the Muslim world. UNESCO dates Jeddah's role as Mecca's official port to the caliph Uthman ibn Affan, and the city grew up on the pilgrims who arrived by sea and the Indian Ocean goods that came with them. In 930 the Qarmatians, an Isma'ili movement then dominant in eastern Arabia, sacked Mecca and carried off the Black Stone.

From the tenth century to the twentieth the Hejaz was ruled by the Sharifs of Mecca, who usually owed allegiance to whichever empire held Baghdad, Cairo or Istanbul. Selim I acquired Mecca and Medina for the Ottomans in 1517, and in the sixteenth century the Ottomans added the Red Sea coast and al-Hasa on the Gulf, partly to keep Portuguese ships out of the Red Sea. The interior, Najd, stayed a patchwork of small emirates and tribes over which Istanbul's claim was mostly nominal.

Why Diriyah became the seat of a state

According to the Saudi Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Mani' ibn Rabi'a al-Muraydi led his clan from the Gulf coast back to Wadi Hanifa in Najd in 1446 and founded Diriyah by joining two settlements, Ghasaybah and al-Mulaybeed. His descendants ruled the town for about 280 years. One of them, Muhammad bin Saud, was born there in 1679 and became its ruler on 22 February 1727. The ministry credits him with uniting the town, securing the pilgrimage and trade routes that passed through it and fortifying its walls.

In 1744 he joined forces with Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabi movement, which Wikipedia describes as a strict puritanical form of Sunni Islam. Wikipedia describes that alliance as the ideological impetus for Saudi expansion and the basis of dynastic rule to this day, and Britannica calls Wahhabism the state creed. Wikipedia's article on the first state still dates it from 1744 to 1818.

The government moved the date. A royal decree of 27 January 2022 made 22 February a public holiday, Founding Day, marking the founding of the first Saudi state in 1727. Saudipedia states that sources which tied the state's origin to the preacher's arrival in Diriyah used a date that is "much later than the founding date and is not related to the state's emergence". The two dates describe two readings of the same state: one counts from a ruler taking power in his town, the other from the religious alliance that drove its expansion.

The town itself survives as ruins. UNESCO inscribed the At-Turaif district of ad-Dir'iyah in 2010, as the first capital of the Saudi dynasty: a fifteenth-century foundation of adobe palaces in the Najdi style built on the edge of the oasis, which became the seat of the House of Saud's temporal power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

How the first two Saudi states were destroyed

Under Muhammad bin Saud's son Abdulaziz and grandson Saud, the state pushed out of Najd to the Gulf coast, into Asir and north into Ottoman Iraq. Its forces sacked Karbala, the Shia shrine city, in 1801 or 1802 (Wikipedia's two articles disagree); the first-state article puts the dead at over 5,000. The Hejaz followed: Wikipedia's history article dates the capture of Medina to April 1804 and of Mecca to 1806, while its main article gives 1803 for Mecca. Saudipedia credits Saud with leading the pilgrimage himself each year and with beginning the custom of the Saudi state supplying the Kaaba's covering, the kiswah.

Holding the holy cities challenged the Ottoman sultan directly, and Istanbul gave the task of ending it to its viceroy in Egypt, Muhammad Ali Pasha. His son Tusun landed in the Hejaz in 1811 and took it back; a second army under Ibrahim Pasha marched into Najd from 1816. Diriyah was besieged for months (seven, in Saudipedia's account) and surrendered in 1818. The last imam of the first state, Abdullah bin Saud, was sent to Istanbul and executed there.

The family returned in 1824 and ruled Najd as the second Saudi state, with Riyadh as its capital from 1825. It held less ground and faced a rival dynasty, the Al Rashid of Ha'il, who fought the Al Saud for the interior for the rest of the century. By 1891 the Al Rashid had won, and the Al Saud went into exile in Kuwait. The Hejaz, meanwhile, went back to the Sharifs under Ottoman supervision after Egyptian troops left in 1840.

How Abdulaziz assembled the third state

In 1902 Abdulaziz bin Abdul Rahman, known abroad as Ibn Saud, returned from Kuwait and took Riyadh. By 1906 he had pushed the Al Rashid out of Najd, and in 1913 he took al-Hasa from the Ottomans, which gave him the Gulf coast. His main instrument was the Ikhwan, a Wahhabi tribal army founded in 1912. He stayed out of the Arab Revolt that the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali, launched with British support in 1916, defeated the Al Rashid in 1921 and took the title Sultan of Najd.

The Hejaz came next. Britain withdrew its support from Hussein in 1923, Ikhwan forces took Mecca and the rest of the Hejaz in 1924 and 1925, and on 10 January 1926 Abdulaziz declared himself King of the Hejaz. The Treaty of Jeddah, signed on 20 May 1927, gave British recognition to his Kingdom of Hejaz and Najd. When Ikhwan leaders tried to carry the conquest into British-protected Transjordan, Iraq and Kuwait, he fought them, and they were defeated at the Battle of Sabilla in 1929.

On 23 September 1932 a royal decree joined the two kingdoms as al-Mamlaka al-Arabiyya as-Su'udiyya, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The name is built on the dynasty's own: Wikipedia notes that "Saudi" is a nisba adjective formed from Al Saud. Borders with Transjordan, Iraq and Kuwait came from treaties of the 1920s, with neutral zones shared with Iraq and with Kuwait, and the 1934 Treaty of Ta'if ended a short war with Yemen and partly fixed the southern line. The date of the decree is now National Day.

What oil changed for the new kingdom

The new kingdom lived on limited farming and the revenue of the pilgrimage. Oil was found in commercial quantities in the Eastern Province on 3 March 1938, and production was in full swing by 1949 under Aramco, then a United States company. In February 1945 Abdulaziz met President Franklin D. Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal, where, in Wikipedia's account, they agreed by handshake that Saudi Arabia would supply oil in exchange for American military protection.

Abdulaziz died in 1953, and every king since has been one of his sons, which the Basic Law of 1992 writes down: the right to rule is confined to his sons and their sons. Spending ran ahead of revenue under King Saud, and in 1964 the royal family deposed him in favour of his half-brother Faisal. Saudi Arabia joined the Arab oil boycott of the United States and other Western supporters of Israel in 1973, and oil prices quadrupled. The state took a 20% share in Aramco in 1972 and bought out the American interests in 1980. Faisal was assassinated by a nephew in 1975.

Why the Grand Mosque siege hardened the kingdom

Two events of 1979 shaped policy for a generation. The revolution in Iran raised fears of unrest among the Shia minority of the Eastern Province, where the oil is, and the Qatif uprising followed that year. Then armed Islamist militants seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca, accusing the royal family of corruption; the government took it back after ten days and executed those captured. Its answer was to give the religious scholars a larger role and enforce stricter public norms, including the closure of cinemas.

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, King Fahd invited American and coalition troops onto Saudi soil, and Saudi forces fought in the war of 1991. In March 1992 the king issued the Basic Law, and in December 1993 a Consultative Council of a chairman and 60 members, all appointed by the king, was inaugurated. Fahd said at the time that a system based on elections was "not consistent with" the kingdom's Islamic creed, which favoured consultation, shura.

What changed in the kingdom after the Arab Spring

The first nationwide municipal elections were held between February and April 2005, with women excluded; in 2015 women voted and stood for the first time. When protests spread across the Arab world in 2011 the government announced benefits for citizens of $36 billion on 22 February that year, with no political reform attached, and sent troops into Bahrain.

The later reforms came from the top. In March 2015 Saudi Arabia intervened militarily in Yemen's civil war, mobilising 150,000 troops and 100 fighter jets. On 25 April 2016 the government launched Vision 2030, a plan to reduce the economy's dependence on oil. The powers of the religious police were curbed from 2016, and a royal decree of 26 September 2017 gave women the right to drive from 24 June 2018. In 2017 about 200 princes and businessmen were detained at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh in what the government called an anti-corruption move. The killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, after he had criticised the government, drew criticism from many countries, and several international companies withdrew from an investment conference in Riyadh that year.

Founding Day belongs to the same period. By dating the state from 1727, the 2022 decree gives the kingdom a history that begins with a ruler and his town, and Saudipedia's account of the day speaks of "the strong connection of its citizens with their rulers" across three centuries.