Coastal Arabia was coming into direct contact with other Christian European maritime nations, which had begun their commercial penetration of the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, English, and French followed the Portuguese. The Western nations traded with Yemen through Mocha, whose coffee trade began in the 17th century; later the Europeans opened trading stations, or “factories,” there.
By 1635 the Zaydīs of Yemen, supported by the northern tribes, had expelled the Ottomans, and the Zaydīs had their first great, if short-lived, expansion when their tribes moved into much of southern Arabia. The broken terrain made it impossible for them to maintain their supremacy, and local tribes drove out Zaydī garrisons by about the second decade of the 18th century.
In the 17th century Mecca and Medina saw a sharing of power between the locally autonomous sharifs and Ottoman Sunni governors. Mecca was important in the spread and development of Islamic theology, even for Shīʿite thinkers, while the pilgrimage reinforced a common Muslim identity among the far-flung and diverse Muslim communities of the world. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, however, there was confusion and civil war in Mecca, with disputes among the sharifian tribes and struggles at Jiddah with Ottoman officials, who, notwithstanding the virtual independence of the sharifs, still dabbled in Hejaz politics. A new element was introduced in Najd (in central Arabia) in the mid-18th century with the rise of the puritan Wahhābīs, who, because the sharifs regarded them as dangerous heretics, for a time were refused permission to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Omani expansion
In Oman events took an independent course. The Yaʿrubid dynasty—founded about 1624 when a member of the Yaʿrub tribe was elected imam—expelled the Portuguese from Muscat and set to harrying Portuguese possessions on the Indian coast. Embarking on expansion overseas—to Mombasa in 1698, then to Pemba, Zanzibar, and Kilwa—the Omanis became the supreme power on the coastal regions of the Indian Ocean, and European merchants feared marauding Omani fleets.
Muscat, Oman, spreading inland behind a 16th-century Portuguese fort (left background).© Ronsmith/Shutterstock.com
The Persians captured Muscat in 1743. The Yaʿrubids dissolved into dynastic dispute, and a leader named Aḥmad ibn Saʿīd set to liberating Oman from the Persians. He became imam in 1749, founding the Āl Bū Saʿīd dynasty. This period in Oman is marked by the crystallization of the political alignment of the tribes of the Banū Ghāfir (Ghāfirī) against those of the Banū Hinā (Hināwī).
During the 18th century the growth of the East India Company and British paramountcy in India began to affect Arabian politics and commerce most directly in the southern coastal region, while the interior was little concerned at first. Coastal Arabia now came fully into the world economy through commerce in coffee, slaves, pearls, and dates and the continuing pilgrimage to Mecca. Oman, Iran, and Sunni Arab tribes struggled to dominate the coasts of the Persian Gulf, while a series of agreements later paved the way for British control in that area. The Wahhābīs
The Ottomans, clinging to the Hejaz for religious prestige and claiming to be custodians of the Holy Cities, had little power outside their garrisons in those cities and along the pilgrim route. The bribes they gave the nomads for allowing the caravans to pass, and the need to keep food subsidies for Mecca and Medina, however, prevented their expulsion. Religious reform
The Wahhābī movement, which introduced a new factor into the pattern of Arabian politics, was founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, a reformer influenced by the writings of the 13th–14th-century pietist theologian Ibn Taymīyah, of the strict Ḥanbalī school of Islamic law. It was ʿAbd al-Wahhāb’s intention to purify Islam of polytheism and to return it to an idealized primitive state. Expelled from his hometown in Najd, he moved to Al-Dirʿiyyah, a village that had never been ruled by the Ottomans, and obtained the protection and the adherence of its chief, Muḥammad ibn Saʿūd. Resistance to the Ottomans
Propagating the doctrines of ʿAbd al-Wahhāb, Ibn Saʿūd and his son mastered all Najd. Late in the 18th century the Wahhābīs began raiding Iraq and then besieged Mecca, which they definitively conquered in 1806. The Ottomans became so alarmed at the Saʿūdī-Wahhābī peril that they urged Muḥammad ʿAlī, viceroy of Egypt, to drive the Wahhābīs from the Holy Cities. Egyptian troops invaded Arabia, and after a bitter seven-year struggle the viceroy’s forces recaptured Mecca and Medina. The Wahhābī leader was forced to surrender his capital and was then beheaded. Egyptian occupation of western Arabia continued some 20 years.
The second Saʿūdī-Wahhābī kingdom began when Turkī, of a collateral Saʿūdī branch, revolted and in 1824 captured Riyadh in Najd and made it his capital. He was succeeded by his son Fayṣal. By 1833 Wahhābī overlordship was generally recognized in the Persian Gulf, though the Egyptians remained in the Hejaz.
After Fayṣal’s death the fratricidal ambitions of his two eldest sons allowed Ibn Rashīd, ruler of Ḥāʾil in Jabal Shammar to the north, to take Riyadh. Ibn Rashīd ruled northern Arabia until he died in 1897. Meanwhile, the Saʿūdīs in 1871 had lost the fertile Al-Ḥasā to the Ottoman Turks, and the family ultimately took refuge in nearby Kuwait.
Ibn Rashīd’s son and successor became involved in a struggle with the sheikh of Kuwait, which enabled the greatest of the Saʿūdīs, Ibn Saʿūd (ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz II), to retake Riyadh in 1902 and establish the third Saʿūdī kingdom. By 1904, through raiding and skirmishing, Ibn Saʿūd had recovered much of the earlier Saʿūdī territory. In 1912, to bring the nomads under control, he set up agricultural settlements colonized by Wahhābī warrior groups called Ikhwān.
Ibn Saʿūd (ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz II), founder of the third Saʿūdī kingdom and the country of Saudi Arabia.Camera Press/Globe Photos
When World War I broke out, Kuwait renounced allegiance to the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Saʿūd fought the pro-Ottoman Rashīdīs but otherwise remained inactive. The Hejaz
The Meccan sharifs were merely the nominees of Egypt until 1840, when the Egyptians evacuated Arabia. Thereafter the sharifs were usually semiautonomous beside the Ottoman governors of the Hejaz. Improved communications after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 allowed the Ottoman Empire to send troops by sea to Arabia. An attempt to establish direct administration in the Hejaz in the 1880s failed when the sharifs and the population objected to Ottoman reforms. Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī, appointed grand sharif in 1908, also successfully resisted Ottoman measures aimed at centralization by means of the new Hejaz Railway from Damascus to Medina. Yemen
In 1839 the British took Aden, ruling it and the island of Socotra (at the entrance to the Gulf of Aden) from India; the port of Aden became valuable as a coaling station. In 1849 the Ottoman Turks occupied the Yemeni Tihāmah but could not hold Sanaa in the interior until 1872. They were never able to break the resistance of the Zaydī tribes completely and were forced to an accommodation with the imam, Yaḥyā ibn Muḥammad, a few years before World War I. Aden developed into a large town and port, especially after the Suez Canal opened. Protectorate treaties concluded with the independent tribes around Aden were gradually extended inland. Many Yemenis worked overseas, especially in India and Southeast Asia. The gulf states
In 1835 the Qawāsim coastal tribes of the Persian Gulf, earlier conquered and inspired by the Wahhābīs, were induced to bind themselves by a maritime truce to end hostilities with the British by sea, and the truce was made permanent in 1853. In Oman, Sulṭān ibn Aḥmad, revolting against his uncle the imam in 1793, gained mastery of the coastal towns. The British made Omani Zanzibar, in East Africa, a protectorate in 1890. The extension of British influence over Bahrain culminated in 1900 with the opening of a British political agency. The British also persuaded the gulf states, Zanzibar, and the Ottomans to help suppress the slave trade. World War I