How Saudi History Is Written

Before telling the story of King Abdulaziz, it is worth asking how that story has been written. One historian of the period argues that a historian’s job is not to memorise names and dates, but to approach history with method: to judge which information is reliable, to handle sources that contradict one another, and to stay objective, which he calls the hardest part. Documents and sources, he says, never give the full picture of the past; they offer hints from which the historian has to deduce it.

He compares the historian to a man standing on a hill, describing a scene on the other side that his listeners cannot see, an image from John Lewis Gaddis’s The Landscape of History. In his own book, Asawer Min Wahm Attarikh, he applies the idea of relativity to history and suggests that even our best knowledge of the past reaches only about seventy percent certainty.

A longer national story

In this view, Saudi national history is the history of the Saudi person and place within Saudi geography. It reaches back to the ancient civilisations that lived on this land, such as the Nabataeans, the Minaeans, Madian and Kindah.

He rejects the idea that Saudi history is only a hundred years old. He traces the Saudi story some 1,600 years back, to the fifth century AD, when Obaid ibn Tha’laba migrated from the west of the Arabian Peninsula and settled in Hijr Al-Yamamah. He sees one line of similar projects, each gathering the people of Bani Hanifa into a community in this area, from Obaid ibn Tha’laba to Mani Al-Muraydi, Imam Mohammed ibn Saud, Imam Turki ibn Abdullah and King Abdulaziz.

Counting from Mani Al-Muraydi’s arrival in the region in 850 AH (1446 AD) and the founding of Diriyah, the story is about six hundred years old. The First Saudi State itself arose about three hundred years ago.

Interruptions, not falls

The usual account says the First Saudi State fell in 1233 AH and the Second rose in 1240 AH, and that the Second fell in 1309 AH before the Third rose in 1319 AH. This historian argues that neither state truly fell. These were interruptions. Historians even argued over when the Second State began: Dr. Abdulfattah Abu Aliyah dated it to Imam Faisal’s second reign in 1259 AH, and Munir Al-Ajlani said he was wrong. He considers this a debate about a problem that did not exist.

He offers a comparison. After Tamerlane defeated the Ottomans at Ankara and captured Sultan Bayezid I, Ottoman rule was interrupted from 1402 to 1413 AD, until Mehmed I. Yet nobody speaks of a “second Ottoman state”.

When Diriyah was taken, Imam Turki made a tactical withdrawal and began to resist. Ibrahim Pasha stayed in Diriyah for less than a year, and the Ottoman army could not settle because the people did not welcome it. A story makes the point: Imam Turki once went to buy dates from a woman in the town of Al-Helwa, and when he went to pay, she told him to pay her by recovering Riyadh.

In the same way, the Second State was brought down while its Imam, Abdulrahman, was still alive, and ten years later he returned.

He traces the “fall and rise” framing to the year-by-year style of the Saudi chronicles, such as those of Ibn Bishr and Muqbil Al-Dhukair, and stresses that it was not intentional. He presents his own view as a reasoned position that other historians may reject. He still uses the familiar terms First, Second and Third Saudi State so that people understand, and this site does the same.

The sources

Sources on the First Saudi State are scarce. Its main official source is Ibn Ghannam, who lived at the time. Later writers mostly relied on him, so any mistake of his could be repeated. Other sources include Fathullah Al-Saygh, who came with the French expedition (whether he really visited Diriyah is disputed), the Omani writer Sheikh Mansour, who wrote from what merchants and pearl traders told him, and the traveller Burckhardt. There is also a report in the Paris Army Museum, and three or four reports in the British archives.

Sources on the Second Saudi State are more detailed and were written locally. For the Kingdom, they are plentiful: local histories, the writings of advisers, and documents. Archives around the world hold many documents on King Abdulaziz, and some have still not been studied.