The Arabian peninsula, the birthplace of Muhammad and Islam, became of marginal importance in Middle Eastern history not long after the Arabs began their conquests in the 7th century. Various Middle Eastern states extended their formal authority to the coastal region of the Hijaz, site of Mecca and Medina, and intermittently to Yemen, but seldom to the interior of the peninsula. The Ottomans established a hold in Yemen and eastern Arabia in the 16th century, but by the 18th century their authority was confined to the Hijaz, where the Hashemite emirs enjoyed autonomy while acknowledging Ottoman suzerainty. Throughout the peninsula powerful family and tribal elites ruled over essentially sovereign emirates. Several of the dynastic regimes established in the 18th century—in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, and Bahrain—have survived to this day.
BIRTH OF THE FIRST SAUDI-WAHHABI STATE. Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud (d. 1765), chief of a tribal emirate based in Dar'iyya in the central Arabian region of Najd, forged an alliance with MUHAMMAD IBN ABD AL-WAHHAB (1703–92), a theologian preaching a message of puritanical reform of Islam. Ibn Abd al-Wahhab criticized the laxities of Muslim observance. He sought to do away with all misguided innovations in Islam, such as the veneration of saints and Sufi rituals, and to return the faith to its fundamental scriptural principles. In the next 60 years Ibn Sa‘ud and his successors extended their domination and the Wahhabi ideas over most of Arabia. The first Saudi state was finally destroyed in 1818.
Abd al-Aziz ruled as Saudi emir after the death of his father Muhammad ibn Sa‘ud, who had unified most of Najd under his rule. He continued the expansion of Saudi control in the peninsula.
