Emirate of Diriyah

The compact

formationDrafted from Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010)

Diriyah in the 1740s was an oasis settlement in the Najd, the central Arabian plateau: date gardens, a few hundred households, a ruling family called the Al Saud, and no particular importance. Central Arabia at that date had no state, no external power governing it and very little that the outside world wanted; the Ottomans held the Hejaz and the eastern coast and had no interest in the interior.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Radosław Botev · CC BY 3.0 PL

Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was a scholar from Uyayna, the next settlement up the wadi, who had studied in Medina and Basra and returned preaching a doctrine his own community eventually found intolerable. He was expelled. In 1744 he arrived at Diriyah, and he and Muhammad ibn Saud made an agreement.

Al-Uyayna, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Haitham Alfalah · CC BY 3.0

The terms, as the tradition records them, are the founding document of every Saudi state since. The amir would defend the doctrine and enforce it; the shaykh would supply and interpret it; the amir would not be deprived of his authority and the shaykh would not be asked to give up his teaching. Political power to the Al Saud, religious power to the Al al-Shaykh — two families, two functions, one project.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Heritage Commission, Saudi Ministry of Culture · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is a small event with a very long tail. The division of authority it created outlasted the emirate that made it, was reconstituted with the second Saudi state, reconstituted again with the third, and is still the constitutional arrangement of Saudi Arabia — where the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab have held the senior religious offices for the better part of three centuries.

What the compact gave Diriyah immediately was a claim. An oasis amir who fights his neighbours is a raider; an amir enforcing tawhid on behalf of a scholar has a reason every Muslim in the peninsula is obliged to consider, and a way of converting submission into obligation. The emirate expanded across the Najd within a generation.

What the movement called itself

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010)

The doctrine is called Wahhabism by almost everyone who is not an adherent, and its adherents have generally refused the name. They called themselves al-Muwahhidun — the unitarians, those who affirm the oneness of God — and objected to Wahhabi on the grounds that naming a school after a man is precisely the error the school exists to correct.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab · Public domain

It is a common enough difficulty. The Isma'ilis of Alamut were called Assassins by everybody except themselves; the Arab client kings of the Roman frontier are called after a confederacy that later tradition merged them into. The general rule worth following is to use the name the movement or the scholarship uses rather than the one hostile outsiders supplied.

Here it does not, and the reason should be stated rather than passed over. Wahhabism is the term the entire secondary literature uses, including the literature written by scholars sympathetic to the movement. And Muwahhidun is a claim as well as a name: it implies that everybody else is not a unitarian, which is the doctrine's most contested assertion rather than a neutral label. The conventional term is used here, without endorsement.

Uthaythiyya, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

What the doctrine held is narrower than the popular account and more consequential. Its central proposition is tawhid, the absolute oneness of God, and its practical programme follows from what that rules out: intercession through saints or the dead, veneration of tombs and shrines, vows made at graves, the elaborations of popular devotion that had accumulated across the Muslim world for a thousand years. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab held that these were not lapses within Islam but shirk — association, the one unforgivable sin — and therefore that those who practised them were not, in the relevant sense, Muslims.

Al-Shinana, near al-Rass, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

That last step is the one everything else turned on, because a Muslim who is not a Muslim can be fought. It is what made a reforming doctrine into a basis for conquest, and it is why the destruction of tombs recurs on every page of this movement's history — at Karbala in 1802, at Medina in 1806, and in the Hejaz again after 1925.

Karbala and Mecca

expansionDrafted from Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010)

By the 1780s the emirate held most of the Najd. Riyadh fell in 1773. Al-Hasa, the eastern oasis province on the Gulf, Shi'i in a substantial part of its population, was taken in 1795. Then the emirate moved outwards in both directions at once.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Carsten Niebuhr · Public domain

In April 1802 a force from the Najd reached Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, took the city, killed a large number of its people and demolished the tomb of Husayn ibn Ali — the grandson of the Prophet, killed there in 680, and the central shrine of Shi'i Islam. The treasury of the shrine was carried off.

The consequences of that single day are still running. It made the doctrine a matter the Ottoman government could not ignore, since a state that claims to protect the Muslim world cannot allow one of its shrine cities to be sacked by its own nominal subjects. And it established a hostility between this movement and Shi'i Islam that two centuries have done nothing to soften; every subsequent episode in that quarrel, down to the present, is argued about with 1802 in it.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Robert Clive · Public domain

The following year they took Mecca, and in 1805 Medina. The tombs in the Baqi cemetery at Medina were levelled; the pilgrimage caravans from Egypt and Syria were refused entry on the grounds that those who came with them were not Muslims; and the sharif was displaced — the first time in eight centuries that the holy cities were held by a power which regarded the whole sharifian arrangement as illegitimate.

Medina · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

Khalili Collections · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Muhammad Sadiq Bey · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the moment the emirate's trajectory becomes fatal rather than impressive. The Ottoman sultan's most valuable title was servant of the two noble sanctuaries — the half of the 1517 inheritance from Cairo that Istanbul put at the centre of its own description of itself. A sovereign who claims that title and does not hold the sanctuaries is making an empty claim in public, annually, in front of the whole Muslim world.

Istanbul could not answer it with its own army, which was in no condition to campaign in Arabia. It gave the commission to somebody who could.

Loads of gold and silver

peakDrafted from Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (1830)

The Wahhabi state at its height is usually described through its wars. It is more informative to look at how it collected money and what it did with the money, and a Swiss traveller who spent years in Arabia while the state still stood wrote both down.

Every winter the collectors left Diriyah and dispersed across the whole of the Wahhabi districts, exacting payment — his word is strictness — and then returned to the capital with loads of gold and silver.

The rates were fixed and modest. One Spanish dollar for every five camels. The value of one for every forty sheep or goats. About seven shillings for a horse or a mare. It was paid in cash, and the ruler had at first insisted on Spanish and Imperial dollars before consenting to take Turkish coin.

Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (1830) · Photograph: B. Seguy · CC BY-SA 4.0

Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (1830) · Photograph: Hannes Grobe · Public domain

That is zakat — the alms every Muslim owes — collected as the central tax of a state, by officials, annually, in specie, from tribes across most of a peninsula. The doctrinal claim and the fiscal system are the same instrument.

Land held for men, not rent

The ruler's own estates were let on terms Burckhardt thought worth explaining to a European reader by analogy with feudalism: the tenants paid no yearly rent at all, and instead were obliged to keep a fixed number of armed camel-riders ready to march at any time.

When an expedition was planned they were told where to meet, and made their own way there in small parties or singly. Across the Najd the general obligation was reportedly one man in ten.

Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (1830) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

So the state's two revenues were a cash tax on livestock and a standing obligation of armed men on land, and neither required a treasury clerk to value a harvest or a standing army to be fed between campaigns. It is an extremely cheap way to run a country, and it explains how an oasis reached the Hejaz and Karbala within two generations.

What it did not command

The traveller is equally clear about the limits, and he had the advantage of meeting the people concerned in the desert rather than at court.

The northern Anaza had not paid tribute for several years. Every Anaza group he met on his journey was in rebellion, while keeping up an appearance of good understanding: their chiefs abstained from tobacco and professed the Wahhabi faith, and the ordinary people cared little for the new doctrine — they sang and they smoked — but always mentioned Ibn Saud's name with respect.

That is the true reach of the thing. A ring of formal conformity around a core that actually paid, with the outer tribes performing the doctrine's visible prohibitions and ignoring the rest, and everybody careful about the name.

Burckhardt, Notes on the Bedouins and Wahábys, Collected During His Travels in the East (1830) · Photographer unknown, published by H. St J. Philby · Public domain

The library

The last part is the one that contradicts the usual picture hardest.

The Wahhabis had established schools in every village and obliged fathers to superintend their children's instruction. At Diriyah, learned men had assembled very valuable libraries collected from all over Arabia, and some of their scholars were writing treatises of their own.

What they wanted most was history. Whatever historical manuscripts could be found at Mecca, at Medina and in the towns of Yemen had been bought up and carried off to the Najd, and Saud's library was, in Burckhardt's judgement, unquestionably the richest collection of Arabic historical manuscripts then in existence.

He adds one more thing. Saud had gathered the best poets of the desert at Diriyah, delighted in poetry, and rewarded those who excelled at it very liberally.

A movement remembered for destroying tombs and shrines was also, at its capital, a school system, the largest history library in the Arabic-speaking world, and a court that paid poets well. Both are true at once, and the second is what an oasis looks like when it has been receiving loads of gold and silver every winter for fifty years.

Zamzam and the star

peakDrafted from Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829)

Burckhardt reached Mecca in 1814, a year after the Wahhabis had been pushed out of it, among people who had lived under them for a decade. His account of what the occupation had actually done is more interesting than either side's version of it, because he is interested in money.

British Library · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Henry Colburn, London · Public domain

Start with the well. Before the Wahhabis came, Zamzam belonged to the sharif, and the water — the holiest water in Islam, which pilgrims come a very long way to drink — was a monopoly, sold at a high price. One of Saud's first orders on arriving at Mecca was to abolish the traffic, and Burckhardt records that the water was still being dispensed free when he was there.

Khalili Collections · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Anonymous, Ottoman · CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

That is the movement in its most sympathetic form: a reformer arrives and stops a holy city charging for its holiness. Burckhardt, who had no particular sympathy for the doctrine, sets it down without comment and then sets down the rest.

British Library · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Engraved for Travels in Arabia, 1829 · Public domain

The rest is Medina. Burckhardt had already written a history of the Wahhabis and summarises it here. During the siege, the chiefs of the town seized a great deal of the treasure of the Prophet's mosque — all the gold vessels — ostensibly to distribute among the poor, and finally divided it among themselves. When Saud took the town he went into the Hujra himself, penetrated behind the curtain, and took everything valuable he found there: vessels set with jewels, earrings, bracelets, necklaces, offerings sent from every part of the Muslim world, and, most famous of all, a brilliant star of diamonds and pearls that hung directly above the tomb, which the Arabs called the Kawkab al-durri.

Then the transaction that says the most. Part of what he took, Saud sold to Sharif Ghalib of Mecca. The rest he carried to Diriyah.

Burckhardt then does the arithmetic, because the treasure had become a legend and he distrusted legends. Ghalib valued his purchase at a hundred thousand dollars. The Medina chiefs' gold was perhaps a hundredweight, worth forty or fifty thousand. What Saud took away was mostly pearls and coral and was probably worth no more than Ghalib's purchase. Total, perhaps three hundred thousand dollars — considerable, he says, but far from the inestimable sum people liked to imagine. No money was ever kept there, because cash given to the mosque was distributed among its attendants at once.

He adds the suspicion any accountant would: given how long the offerings had been accumulating, the total ought to have been far larger, and it would be strange if the governors of Medina and the guardians of the tomb had not been drawing on it for centuries already.

Put the three things in a row and the Wahhabi decade in the Hijaz is legible. The sharif's charge for sacred water was abolished. The shrine's accumulated treasure was taken, partly sold back to the sharif who had been collecting that charge, and partly carried into the Najd. And a heavy poll tax was imposed on the pilgrims who were still allowed to come, while the Syrian caravan was stopped altogether.

What changed was not whether the holy cities produced a revenue. It was who collected it, and on what grounds.

The Egyptian army

contractionDrafted from Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010)

Muhammad Ali of Egypt was the Ottoman governor of a province he had made effectively independent, and he was building a state on European lines — an army with French instruction, conscription, a fleet, an industrial base. The Hejaz commission suited him: it earned Ottoman credit, it occupied his army usefully, and it put Egyptian troops in control of the holy cities.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Félix Mengin · Public domain

His son Tusun landed on the Red Sea coast in 1811 and took Medina in 1812 and Mecca in 1813, which recovered the sanctuaries and did not touch the emirate. For that, Muhammad Ali sent his other son.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Giuseppe Buccinelli · CC0

Ibrahim Pasha's campaign from 1816 is one of the more thoroughly executed expeditions of the period. He went inland with artillery and engineers, methodically, taking the fortified oasis towns of the Qasim one at a time instead of chasing a mobile enemy across a desert, and reduced the Najd town by town over two years. It is the answer to the strategic problem that had made central Arabia ungovernable for everyone before him: he did not try to defeat the tribes, he took the walls and the wells.

The emirate had no reply. Its army was tribal cavalry raised on obligation and enthusiasm, and it had never faced a regular force with siege guns. The doctrine that had converted submission into obligation could not raise men against Muslims fighting under the sultan's authority as readily as it had against Shi'is and shrine-visitors.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Artist unknown · Public domain

In April 1818 Ibrahim reached Diriyah and besieged it. It held for about five months and surrendered in September.

The town was pulled down

endDrafted from Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010)

Diriyah was not garrisoned or annexed. It was demolished — the walls, the towers, the palaces and the houses systematically pulled down and the date palms cut, on orders intended to ensure that nothing could be rebuilt there and that the movement would have no centre to return to.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Radosław Botev · CC BY 3.0 PL

Abdullah ibn Saud was sent to Cairo, then to Istanbul, where he was displayed and beheaded. Members of the Al Saud and the Al al-Shaykh were deported to Egypt. The emirate ended completely, and by the standards of the period the suppression was thorough.

KU Leuven Libraries · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Pascal Coste, lithographed by Charles Motte · CC0

It did not take. Six years later a cousin of the executed imam, Turki ibn Abdullah, was in Riyadh reconstituting the state — the Egyptian garrisons could not hold the interior any more than anybody else had been able to, and the doctrine had not been deported with the families that professed it. That is the next record.

Two things belong at the end.

The first is who exactly did this. The army was Egyptian, raised by a governor in the process of making himself independent, who within a decade would be at war with the sultan who had commissioned him. The war was nonetheless fought on Ottoman authority, in the Ottoman sultan's name, to recover a title that was his — so the destruction of the emirate is properly the sultan's act and was carried out by a man who would shortly be his enemy. It is a case where the honest answer is a sentence and the field takes an id.

The second is what the emirate demonstrated, which nobody at the time drew the right conclusion from. Central Arabia had been left alone for a thousand years because it was poor, empty and expensive to reach, and everyone had assumed it was therefore politically inert. In sixty years an oasis of a few hundred households, with a doctrine and no money, took the eastern coast, sacked a shrine city in Iraq and held Mecca. Ibrahim Pasha's campaign proved that the interior could be conquered by a state that really wanted to; the century after it proved that no state did.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: HK Woo · CC BY 3.0

The old capital

afterlifeDrafted from Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865)

Forty-four years after the bombardment, a European travelling through central Arabia in disguise came past Diriyah and looked at what was left.

The ruins of an enormous palace, he wrote, and of a scarcely less enormous mosque, still remained. And then the observation that does the work: the old capital, amid all its present desolation, displayed traces of much greater regularity and ornament than Riyadh could boast.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Photograph: Tom and Linda Anderson · Public domain

The living capital of the Wahhabi state, in other words, was a shabbier place than the dead one. Riyadh in 1862 was the seat of a working government with an army, a treasury and a religious establishment, and it did not look as good as the town that had been shelled flat in 1818 and abandoned.

British Library · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Engraved for Narrative of a Year's Journey, 1865 · Public domain

What was destroyed and how

The same traveller collected the account of the end from people who remembered it, and it is worth having because it explains why nothing was rebuilt.

After the field battles were lost, the last ruler entrenched himself in Diriyah and Wadi Hanifa lay open. The Egyptians came up and assaulted once and were thrown back. Their commander did not try again. He ringed the town, cut it off, and invited it to surrender.

Then twenty days passed in which neither side fired a shot. The defenders were holding everything back for the final assault and would not sally; they returned no answer at all to repeated offers of terms. A relief force gathered elsewhere in the Najd and was intercepted and scattered on the way. On the twenty-first day the commander sent in a last offer of honourable capitulation, and the messenger came back without an answer.

The artillery was ranged on the heights. The bombardment began at sunset and went on without a break until sunrise, six thousand shot and shell into the town in one night, and morning came up on crumbling walls, heaps of rubble, people dead and dying under their own houses.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Photograph: Tom and Linda Anderson · Public domain

He entered without parley and without opposition.

The point of pulling it down

Diriyah was not sacked in the ordinary way and left to recover. It was systematically demolished and its population dispersed, and the Egyptians were explicit that the object was to make sure nothing could gather there again. The last ruler was sent to Constantinople and beheaded.

It very nearly worked, and the way it failed is the interesting part.

The state came back six years later, in a different town a short way down the same wadi, under a cousin of the executed man, with the same doctrine and the same arrangement between the same two families. What could not be reassembled was the place. Diriyah stayed a ruin, and the second Saudi state governed from Riyadh instead — which is why the capital of the Najd for the next century and a half was a town that had been a provincial settlement when the movement began.

The palace and the mosque that a European traveller stopped to admire in 1862 were the physical record of what fifty winters of tribute had built, and they were already the best-looking thing in central Arabia because nobody had had that kind of money since.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Photograph: HK Woo · CC BY 3.0