Emirate of Diriyah as the first Saudi State

The history of the Saudi state and the Saudi dynasty really becomes interesting in 1744 in the town of Diriyah, which is very close to the modern city of Riyadh in the region of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Najd. This is an important term to know if you're studying Saudi Arabia because this central region of the Arabian Peninsula is really the stronghold of the House of Saud.

Diriyah was a successful town in the early 18th century, but the emir of Diriyah, Muhammad bin Saud, forges an alliance with a religious leader, Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab. That alliance is a very strong one. Muhammad bin Saud's son marries Muhammad bin Abdul's daughter to really seal that alliance, and the Wahhabis could be viewed as a fundamental sect of Sunni Islam.

With that purest religious fervor, this alliance is very successful. Over the next several decades, you have the emirate of Diriyah continuing to grow, first conquering much of the Najd and Eastern Arabia. Then, as we go into the early 19th century, as we go into the early 1800s, it conquers Western Saudi Arabia and much of the territory you would now associate with the modern Saudi state.

Now of note is that they conquered the western portion of the Arabian Peninsula known as the Hijaz. The reason why this is significant is that you have to remember the context: at this time, the Ottoman Empire, with Constantinople as its capital, was nominally in control of most of the Middle East, including Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula. But all of a sudden, you have this emirate that starts off in Diriyah and is now able to conquer a big chunk of the Arabian Peninsula, including two of the holiest places in all of Islam.

On top of that, the emir of Diriyah and the Wahhabi religious leaders say that the ruler of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan Mustafa IV, is not the valid leader of Islam; he is not the true caliph of Islam. In 1802, an estimated 12,000 Wahhabis go to Karbala and sack the city. They destroy the shrine of Hussein, who is a revered figure amongst Shia Muslims, and they kill an estimated four to five thousand people.

Karbala is also under Ottoman control, so the Ottomans are not happy about this. You have a fundamentalist sect of Islam in the Wahhabis controlling most of the Arabian Peninsula, including the holiest sites in all of Islam. They're saying that the Ottoman rulers, the Sultan, is not the true caliph of Islam. On top of that, they're causing internal strife within the Ottoman Empire with the Shias by sacking Karbala.

To make things even more complicated for the Ottomans, in Egypt, you have another leader who's trying to exercise his autonomy, Muhammad Ali. So the Ottomans have a plan: why don't we get Muhammad Ali to send some of his troops to focus on the emirate of Diriyah? They order Muhammad Ali to take on the emirate of Diriyah, and this is what becomes the Ottoman-Wahhabi War.

Now, by the time the war is in full swing, the Sultan in Constantinople is Mahmoud II. Muhammad Ali sends his sons, who are eventually successful in taking back Mecca and Medina, and then they lay siege to the town of Diriyah. Eventually, they're able to take it in 1818.

They send the leaders of the House of Saud and the Wahhabis to Constantinople, including the current emir at the time, Abdullah bin Saud. Just to get a sense of the family tree up to this point, this is Abdullah, who is the last emir of the emirate of Diriyah. He gets captured by the Egyptian forces on behalf of the Ottomans. You can see he is the great grandson of Muhammad bin Saud.

"Bin Saud" means "Muhammad son of Saud," so the whole dynasty is named after Saud, who was a previous emir of Diriyah. But Muhammad bin Saud is the one who really formed that alliance with the Wahhabis, which enabled the emirate of Diriyah to become a major power in the Arabian Peninsula, eventually taking over most of the peninsula.

Abdullah was sentenced to death in Constantinople, but before he was beheaded, he was forced to listen to music because, according to the Wahhabis, that was considered sacrilege, while the Ottomans had no problem with it. They were really trying to rub it in that before you die, you're going to have to do something that you, the Wahhabis, view as sacrilege.

But I will leave you there, as we will see that the emirate of Diriyah is the first of three major Saudi states that will each control most of the Arabian Peninsula. In the next video, we're going to see the Saudi state come back with the emirate of Ned. In blue here, you see the rulers of the emirate of Ned, and then after that, we will talk about the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, whose rulers you see here in green. We'll go into a lot more depth than that, but you can see that they all are descendants from Muhammad bin Saud.