Emirate of Nejd

Six years later

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

Ibrahim Pasha demolished Diriyah in 1818, deported the ruling families to Egypt and beheaded the imam in Istanbul. In 1824 Turki ibn Abdullah, a cousin of the executed imam who had avoided the deportation, took Riyadh and reconstituted the state.

Riyadh · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

Six years is not long. The reasons it was possible are the reasons central Arabia had been left alone for a thousand years, and they govern everything that follows. An Egyptian army could reach the Najd and could not afford to stay in it: garrisons had to be supplied across eight hundred kilometres of desert from the Hejaz, at a cost out of all proportion to a province that produced dates and camels. Muhammad Ali had what he had been commissioned to get, which was the holy cities. The interior was handed back to whoever could hold it.

Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Survey: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

And the doctrine had not been deported. The scholars of the Najd, the Al al-Shaykh among them, went on teaching what they had taught, and the compact of 1744 did not need renegotiating — it needed a Saudi amir to be the other party to it again.

Turki made Riyadh the capital rather than rebuilding Diriyah, which was rubble and under a prohibition, and Riyadh has been the capital of every Saudi state since. He ruled ten years and was assassinated by a cousin in 1834.

Riyadh · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

What the second state was, and how it differed from the first, comes down to one thing. The first expanded by raiding, and the raiding paid for the expansion. This one lived on the zakat of the oases it already held.

The court at Riyadh

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

In 1862 a European travelling under a false name as a Syrian doctor reached Riyadh and stayed for weeks, treating patients and being entertained. He is the only detailed outside witness of the second Saudi state, and he is a hostile one: he loathed the doctrine, wrote for a London audience, and has been accused since of embroidering. His judgements of people are frequently vicious. His descriptions of how things were arranged are another matter.

What he found was a working capital. Rich householders receiving in well-carpeted rooms with an ostentatious pile of coffee pots — two for use and ten for show — and poor ones in low, ill-lit ground-floor rooms; strangers in town on business; gardens a mile or more outside the walls where people went for the day. A place with enough commerce to attract visitors and enough surplus to keep gardens.

ETH Zürich, Bildarchiv · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Photograph: Arnold Heim · CC BY-SA 4.0

The other half of the compact

The figure who mattered most to him is the one who shows the state's constitution still running a century after it was made.

Abd al-Latif was the great-grandson of the preacher who had made the compact at Diriyah in 1744, and he was qadi of Riyadh and head of the religious establishment. Palgrave describes a handsome, fair-spoken man with a palace, wide gardens and a throng of slaves, who after the king was unquestionably the first personage in the capital and in the whole state — and in many respects, he adds, more powerful than Faysal himself.

The bargain of 1744 was that the amir would enforce the doctrine and the preacher would supply it, and that neither would take over the other's function. Here it is, still operating: two families, two functions, and the religious half strong enough that a visitor thought it the stronger.

There is one more detail and it is the sharpest thing in the account. Abd al-Latif had been carried off to Egypt as a child with the rest of his family by the pasha who destroyed the first state, and was educated in Cairo. He came back with an ease of conversation Palgrave found startling in a qadi of Riyadh, and used it to run the strictest religious establishment in Arabia.

Palgrave's own explanation of him is a long, spitting comparison to Ottoman officials who had seen Paris and hated it, and it says more about Palgrave than about the man. The fact underneath is simply reported: the head of the Wahhabi ulama in 1862 had been educated by the empire that had demolished Diriyah, and came home to rebuild what it had knocked down.

Library of Congress · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · W. G. Palgrave · Public domain

What the state reached

The second state did not go back to the Hejaz — that lesson had been taught in 1818 and again in 1838 — but it did not stay inside the Najd either.

By the time Palgrave was travelling, Riyadh's authority ran east to al-Hasa and the Gulf coast, where he went on afterwards, and tribute was being taken from further round the coast still. The pattern is the opposite of Diriyah's: not a doctrinal expansion towards the holy cities, but a commercial one towards the sea, into the districts with dates, pearls and ports.

Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · The Graphic · Public domain

It is the same family, the same doctrine and the same constitution, pointed ninety degrees away from where the first state had pointed. That was a deliberate choice, and it kept them alive for sixty-seven years.

The imam who stayed home

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

Faysal ibn Turki ruled, in two stretches interrupted by five years in an Egyptian prison, for about thirty years, and the emirate under him is the second Saudi state at its most stable.

The interruption is the formative event. In 1838 Muhammad Ali sent a second expedition, took Riyadh, and carried Faysal to Cairo as a prisoner; he escaped in 1843 and was back in Riyadh within months. The lesson, and it was learned, was that Egypt could reach the Najd whenever it was worth paying for — and that what made it worth paying for was the Hejaz.

Hufuf, al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

So Faysal did not go near the Hejaz. He consolidated the Najd, took and held al-Hasa on the Gulf coast, exacted zakat from the tribes, corresponded respectfully with the Ottoman authorities in Baghdad and Basra, and stayed inside the one part of Arabia nobody else wanted enough to garrison. The emirate's relations with the outside world in this period are conducted by letter and by the payment of small sums, and its army fought nobody who had artillery.

Österreichische Nationalbibliothek · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Mehmed Hulusi · Public domain

That is a strategy, and it shows in what the state lived on: the tax of the oases it governed, and nothing at all from raiding, which is what had paid for the first state's expansion.

India Office Records, British Library · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · F. F. Hunder, Survey of India · Public domain

It was also a strategy with an expiry date, because it depended entirely on there being an imam. The emirate had no administration to speak of, no standing force, no revenue that did not require collection by somebody the tribes would obey, and no rule about who that somebody should be after the current one died. Faysal died in 1865 leaving four sons.

The war of the brothers

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

Abdullah, the eldest, succeeded. Saud, the second son, disputed it, and the two of them fought over the imamate for a decade — taking and losing Riyadh several times, drawing in the tribes of the Qasim and al-Hasa, and appealing outside for help, which is what quarrelling claimants in small states have always done and which reliably costs more than it buys.

Abdullah appealed to the Ottomans, who took the opportunity to occupy al-Hasa in 1871 and kept it for forty years — so a Saudi imam's request for help cost the state its only coastline and its only customs revenue. Both sides appealed to Muhammad ibn Rashid of Ha'il, an amir whose family had been installed by Faysal and had served the Saudi state as governors, and who arbitrated with increasing authority and decreasing deference.

Hufuf, al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

By the 1880s the imam in Riyadh was Ibn Rashid's dependant. In 1887 Ha'il took the city outright and installed a governor; in 1891 the last serious Saudi attempt to recover it was beaten at Mulayda, and the family left for Kuwait.

Hufuf, al-Hasa, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

There was no rule of succession, and this is what the absence of one cost. The emirate had a doctrine that gave it a claim on every Muslim in Arabia, an alliance with a scholarly house that had held for a century and a half, and no answer at all to the question of which of four brothers should be imam. Twenty-six years after Faysal's death the state was gone, and nobody outside Arabia had had to do anything about it.

It is the most reliably repeated lesson in the history of states this size: a polity whose cohesion is one man does not survive him, and a doctrine is not a constitution.

Kuwait

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

Abd al-Rahman ibn Faysal, the last imam of the second state, left the Najd after Mulayda and settled with his family in Kuwait, as a pensioner of the Al Sabah. He had a son, then about fifteen, called Abd al-Aziz.

Royal Geographical Society · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Capt. W. H. I. Shakespear · Public domain

The state ends there, in 1891, conquered by the family that had begun as its own appointed governors at Ha'il — a reversal about as complete as one gets.

Eleven years later the boy came back over the desert with about forty men and took Riyadh in a night attack, and the third Saudi state begins — the one that became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932.

Hafar al-Batin, Saudi Arabia · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

What the two failed Saudi states left the third is worth setting out, because it is not obvious and it is most of the answer to why the third worked.

They left the compact, which had survived a demolition and a civil war and did not have to be renegotiated. They left a doctrine with an established scholarly class in the Najd, teaching continuously through both collapses. They left a capital, Riyadh, which had been the seat of the state for sixty-seven years and was recoverable in a single night by forty men because everyone knew what it was. And they left a precise diagnosis of what had gone wrong twice: the first state was destroyed because it took the Hejaz and provoked a power that could reach it, and the second because it had no rule about succession.

Riyadh · Al-Rasheed, A History of Saudi Arabia (2010) · Photograph: Saudi Press Agency · CC BY-SA 4.0

The third state took the Hejaz anyway, in 1925, at a moment when no power was in a position to send an army for it.

What the doctor would not sell

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

The war that destroyed the second Saudi state was fought between two sons of Faysal after his death in 1865. It can be dated earlier than that, because in November 1862 one of them tried to buy poison from a visiting doctor, and the doctor wrote it down.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Photograph: Julia Margaret Cameron · CC0

Palgrave was at Riyadh under a false name, practising medicine, and had got close enough to the heir apparent to be given amateur lectures in pharmacy — from which, he says, Abdullah had learned enough to know the poisonous qualities of various drugs, and of strychnine in particular. When Palgrave announced that he was leaving the capital, Abdullah asked him to leave behind some useful medicines for the public benefit, and in particular to entrust him with the powerful drug whose effects everyone had been admiring.

Wellcome Collection, London · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0

Palgrave said what a doctor says about pharmacy in unlearned hands. It was treated as a pretext. The prince said he could leave out the other ingredients if he liked, but the strychnine he must have, at any price Palgrave cared to name.

Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Franz Eugen Köhler · Public domain

He asked twice more. At the third meeting, on the nineteenth or twentieth of the month, he called Palgrave to sit beside him at the far end of the coffee hall, out of earshot of the attendants, dropped the pretences entirely, and stated the reason he wanted it — though not, Palgrave says, the name of the person it was for. He would accept no excuse, conscientious or otherwise.

Palgrave refused, and a few nights later a rap came at the door after dark. It was the prince's confidential retainer. The king sends for you; come with me at once. Could his companion come? The king wants you alone. Should he bring a book? There is no need. Palgrave delayed long enough to have coffee made for the messenger and to tell his companions to stay awake, and then walked through the dark streets to the palace, where he was left standing in the courtyard while word was taken in.

The room he was shown into had no light but the fire on the hearth. Abdullah sat silent at the far end. Opposite him was Abd al-Latif — the great-grandson of the preacher who had made the compact at Diriyah, head of the religious establishment — and a few others of the Zealots' party. At the other end of the hall stood a dozen armed men. Palgrave gave the greeting; Abdullah did not return it.

Nothing was done to him in the end, and he got out of Najd. That is not what the episode is for.

The name Abdullah would not say was his brother Saud's. Their father was still alive and still holding the two of them apart, and Palgrave, watching the nobles and even the visiting strangers take sides, thought Faysal's life was the only thing restraining them — a silken thread round two tigers. Faysal died three years later and the thread went. Saud and Abdullah fought each other across the Najd for the rest of their lives, one or the other holding Riyadh at intervals, the emirate shrinking with every round, until in 1891 the Rashidis of Ha'il took what was left of it and the Saudi family went into exile in Kuwait.

Wellcome Collection, London · Palgrave, Narrative of a Year's Journey Through Central and Eastern Arabia, 1862-63 (1865) · Wellcome Collection · CC BY 4.0

A foreign doctor turned down a request for strychnine in a coffee hall in 1862, and the state still had twenty-nine years to run. What he had actually been shown was the mechanism: a succession with no rule in it, two candidates who both had followings, and a religious establishment already sitting on one side of the room.

The imam in the garden

afterlifeDrafted from Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928)

The last ruler of the second Saudi state did not die with it. He lost Riyadh to the Rashidis, went into exile in Kuwait with his family, watched his son take the town back in 1902 with about forty men, and then lived on in that town for another thirty years while the son built a third state around him.

Darat al-Malik Abdulaziz, Riyadh · Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

In the summer of 1918 a British political officer spent forty-two days as a guest in the palace at Riyadh, and Abd al-Rahman is in his diary — not as a former sovereign, and not as a pensioner, but as a presence.

He is called the Imam. Not the former imam: the Imam, in the ordinary way, as the man's name. The best garden in the whole oasis belonged to him, and the party went out to picnic in it — thin date clusters that year, but peach trees loaded with fruit just ripening and an enormous vine trellis hanging with grapes, and they sat by an irrigation runnel in the shade of a sidr tree eating fruit and talking.

Riyadh · Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Photograph: H. St J. Philby, published 1922 · Public domain

What he had become

The clearest picture of his position is an incident three weeks later.

On the morning the expedition was to leave, a heavy haze hung between earth and sky, dark clouds were about, and a curious yellow light lay over Riyadh. It was odd enough that the Imam Abd al-Rahman sent round to the Englishman to ask whether the sun was eclipsed.

The visitor knew it was the twenty-fifth of the lunar month and no eclipse was possible, but made a show of consulting the Nautical Almanac before pronouncing that there was no cause for nervousness — and his verdict, he notes, was accepted as conclusive.

Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Published by H. St J. Philby, 1922 · Public domain

That is what the imamate of the second Saudi state had come to in its last holder: a very old man with the finest garden in the capital, addressed by the title, sending a servant across town to ask a foreign guest whether the sky meant anything.

The point of keeping him

None of this reads as humiliation, and there is no sign that anyone intended it as one. It is closer to the opposite.

Abd al-Rahman had abdicated the imamate in his son's favour in 1902 rather than resume it himself, which is not the usual behaviour of a displaced ruler with an adult heir. What he retained was the title and the standing, and what his son got was a claim that ran back through him to Faysal, to Turki, to the men who had rebuilt the state in 1824 — and behind them, through the same family and the same compact with the same clerical house, to the oasis in 1744.

The third Saudi state's whole legitimacy is that continuity, and it was walking around Riyadh in 1918 in the shape of an old man in a garden.

The second state failed in the way small states fail — a succession fought between brothers, clients who became patrons, a capital lost to a neighbour. It transmitted nothing institutional, because it had almost no institutions to transmit. What it handed on was a title, a family, an arrangement with a clerical house, and a boy in Kuwait who had been told what his grandfather had held.