The Founding of Saudi Arabia

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed in 1932 (1351 AH), the culmination of three decades of conquest and consolidation by Abdul Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud (rahimahu Allah), known in the West as Ibn Saud. His rise had begun in 1902 with a daring raid that recaptured Riyadh, and in particular its old mud-brick fort, the Masmak, from a rival house, restoring Saudi rule to the Najd from which the family's first and second states had sprung. Over the following years he subdued the Najd, took the eastern region of al-Hasa, and in 1925 conquered the Hijaz with the holy cities of Makkah and Madinah, ending the Hashemite kingdom there. In 1932 he united his domains into a single Kingdom of Saudi Arabia under his family's name, founded, as the earlier Saudi states had been, on the long alliance with the reform movement of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. At its founding the kingdom was still a poor land of oases, caravans, herders and pilgrims; its capital, Riyadh, remained a modest mud-brick town of palm gardens and camel markets, and the immense oil wealth that would transform the country, and with it much of the modern Muslim world, was only discovered at the end of the decade and would not flow in quantity until after the Second World War. This scene depicts Riyadh around the founding in 1932, the great adobe Masmak fort over the oasis town, the camel market and the date baskets, an Arabian capital on the eve of its transformation.