The Fall of Diriyyah

In 1818 (1233 AH) the oasis capital of Diriyyah in Wadi Hanifa, in the Najd of central Arabia, was stormed and broken, and with it fell the first Saudi state, the Emirate of Diriyyah that had grown from the pact of 1744 between the scholar Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (rahimahu Allah) and the emir Muhammad ibn Saud. Over the previous decades the state founded on that alliance had expanded across Najd and into the Hijaz, taking Makkah and Madinah in 1803-1805, which alarmed the Ottoman government, whose sultans bore the guardianship of the two holy sanctuaries. The Ottomans charged Muhammad Ali Pasha, their powerful viceroy in Egypt, with crushing it. After earlier campaigns recovered the Hijaz, his son Ibrahim Pasha drove deep into the Najd and laid siege to Diriyyah for some five to six months through 1818, his Egyptian and Ottoman troops with their artillery reducing the town quarter by quarter against a stubborn defence. The Najdi chronicler Uthman ibn Bishr, in his Unwan al-Majd fi Tarikh Najd, records the long siege, the breaching of the defences, and the capitulation of the last Saudi imam of Diriyyah, Abdullah ibn Saud, who came out to terms; the Egyptian chronicler Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti gives the campaign from the Egyptian-Ottoman side. After the surrender Ibrahim Pasha had the walls, palaces and the at-Turaif quarter systematically demolished and the population dispersed, so that Diriyyah could never again serve as a capital. Abdullah ibn Saud was taken to Cairo and then to Istanbul, where he was executed. The movement, called Wahhabiyya by others and a call to tawhid by its adherents, remains among the most contested subjects in the Muslim world, embraced by some and sharply criticised by others; the assessment of its teaching lies outside the scope of this scene, which records the historical destruction of the state. The Saudi house would later rebuild a second state from nearby Riyadh, and a third in the twentieth century. This scene depicts the fall itself, the breached adobe walls and the surviving watchtower above the palm gardens, with the townspeople driven out among the ruins and the victorious Ottoman-Egyptian column under its red banner drawn up before the town.