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‘Araby the Blest* 227

autumn of I818. Dariya was razed to the ground, its inhabitants dispersed and

the Saudi imam sent a prisoner to Constantinople, where at the close of the year
he was publicly beheaded in the square of Aya Sophia.
The Wahhabis rapidly recovered from their defeat. Within little more than a
decade they had reasserted their authority over central and eastern Arabia and
established a new capital at Riyad, a few miles to the south of the ruins of
Dariya. Then, in 1837-8, they were vanquished a second time by an Egyptian
army sent to subdue them as part of Mehemet Ali’s grand design to establish
an Egyptian imperium over the Arab provinces of the Ottoman empire, from
Syria in the north to the Yemen in the south. A member of the Al Saud, Khalid
ibn Saud, who had been taken a prisoner to Cairo in 1818, was set up as a
puppet ruler in Riyad in place of the legitimate imam, Faisal ibn Turki, who
was sent a captive to Egypt. When Mehemet Ali was forced in 1841 to give up
all his conquests outside Egypt and restore the Hijaz to Ottoman rule, Khalid
ibn Saud was deposed by one of his relatives. The latter was himself deposed
and imprisoned for life when Faisal ibn Turki was released from captivity and
returned to Riyad in 1843.
Faisal ibn Turki’s reign over the next twenty years was the most tranquil
experienced by a Saudi ruler in the nineteenth century. He had no rivals within
Najd or among the numerous members of the Saudi clan, and he averted the
hostility of the Sublime Porte by continuing to acknowledge his status as an
Ottoman dependant, in token of which he paid an annual tribute to the
Hashimite sharif of Mecca, who governed the Hijaz in the name of the
Ottoman sultan. To compensate for the inactivity he was compelled to observe
on the western limits of his territory, Faisal tried at intervals to extend his
authority over Bahrain, Qatar, Trucial Oman and the sultanate of Oman. On
each occasion he ran into opposition from the British government in India,
which, as we have seen, was determined to prevent the extension of Wahhabi

influence over the maritime tribes of the Arabian littoral.
When Faisal died in 1865 he was succeeded by his son, Abdullah. Almost
from the day of his accession Abdullah ibn Faisal had to contend with the
unrelenting efforts of his younger brother, Saud, to unseat him, an ambition in
which Saud ibn Faisal succeeded at the outset of 1871. In desperation Abdullah
sought the assistance of the Ottoman vali of Baghdad, who responded by
dispatching a military expedition to Hasa in May 1871. Although the Turks
occupied the coastal districts and the Hasa oasis without much difficulty, it
became obvious with the passage of time that they had neither the resources
nor the stomach for an advance into Najd. Not until the death of his brother
Saud of smallpox in January 1875 was Abdullah ibn Faisal able to regain and
resume the imamate.
It was a much truncated realm that he now ruled. Hasa had been annexed in
full sovereignty by the Turks earlier in the year and incorporated in the newly
created vilayet of Basra. Over most of the Qasim the shadow of Saudi rule fell