page_title: Ibn Saud
section_title: Rise to power
hierarchical_section_title: Ibn Saud / Rise to power
caption_attribution_description: English: A document of King Abdulaziz yo oqab bin mohaya العربية: وثيقه من الملك عبدالعزيز الى عقاب بن محيا
context_page_description: Abdulaziz ibn Abdul Rahman ibn Faisal ibn Turki ibn Abdullah ibn Muhammad Al Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, was the first monarch and founder of Saudi Arabia, the "third Saudi state". He was ruler of the whole Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from 23 September 1932 to 9 November 1953 but ruled parts of it as early as 1902.
  He reconquered his family's ancestral home city of Riyadh in 1902, starting three decades of conquests that made him the ruler of nearly all of central and north Arabia. He consolidated his control over the Najd in 1922, then conquered the Hejaz in 1925. He extended his dominions into what later became the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. As King, he presided over the discovery of petroleum in Saudi Arabia in 1938 and the beginning of large-scale oil production after World War II. He fathered many children, including 45 sons, and all of the subsequent kings of Saudi Arabia through at least the year 2020.
context_section_description: Following the capture of Riyadh, many former supporters of the House of Saud rallied to Ibn Saud's call to arms. He was a charismatic leader and kept his men supplied with arms. Over the next two years, he and his forces recaptured almost half of the Najd from the Rashidis.
  In 1904, Abdulaziz of Al Rashid (a.k.a. Ibn Rashid) appealed to the Ottoman Empire for military protection and assistance. The Ottomans responded by sending troops into Arabia. On 15 June 1904, Ibn Saud's forces suffered a major defeat at the hands of the combined Ottoman and Rashidi forces. His forces regrouped and began to wage guerrilla warfare against the Ottomans. Over the next two years, he was able to disrupt their supply routes, forcing them to retreat. The victory of Ibn Saud in Rawdat Muhanna, in which Ibn Rashid died, ended the Ottoman presence in Najd and Qassim by the end of October 1906.
  He completed his conquest of the Najd and the eastern coast of Arabia in 1912. He then founded the Ikhwan, a military-religious brotherhood, which was to assist in his later conquests, with the approval of local Salafi ulema. In the same year, he instituted an agrarian policy to settle the nomadic pastoralist Bedouins into colonies and to replace their tribal organizations with allegiance to the Ikhwan.
  During World War I, the British government established diplomatic relations with Ibn Saud. The British agent, Captain William Shakespear, was well received by the Bedouin. Similar diplomatic missions were established with any Arabian power who might have been able to unify and stabilize the region. The British entered into the Treaty of Darin in December 1915, which made the lands of the House of Saud a British protectorate and attempted to define the boundaries of the developing Saudi state. In exchange, Ibn Saud pledged to again make war against Ibn Rashid, who was an ally of the Ottomans.
  The British Foreign Office had previously begun to support Sharif Hussein bin Ali, Emir of the Hejaz by sending T. E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) to him in 1915. The Saudi Ikhwan began to conflict with Hussein, Sharif of Mecca also in 1917, just as his sons Abdullah and Faisal entered Damascus. The Treaty of Darin remained in effect until superseded by the Jeddah conference of 1927 and the Dammam conference of 1952, during both of which Ibn Saud extended his boundaries past the Anglo-Ottoman Blue Line. After Darin, he stockpiled the weapons and supplies which the British provided him, including a 'tribute' of £5,000 per month. After World War I, he received further support from the British, including a glut of surplus munitions. He launched his campaign against the Al Rashidi in 1920; by 1922 they had been all but destroyed.
  The defeat of the Al Rashidi doubled the size of Saudi territory because, after the war of Ha'il, Ibn Saud sent his army to occupy Al-Jouf and the army led by Eqab bin Mohaya, the head of Talhah tribe. This allowed Ibn Saud the leverage to negotiate a new and more favorable treaty with the British. Their treaty, signed at Uqair in 1922, where he met Percy Cox, British High Commissioner in Iraq, to draw boundaries saw Britain recognize many of his territorial gains. In exchange, Ibn Saud agreed to recognize British territories in the area, particularly along the Persian Gulf coast and in Iraq. The former of these were vital to the British, as merchant traffic between British India and the United Kingdom depended upon coaling stations on the approach to the Suez Canal.
  In 1925, Ibn Saud's forces captured the holy city of Mecca from Sharif Hussein, ending 700 years of Hashemite rule. On 8 January 1926, the leading figures in Mecca, Madina and Jeddah proclaimed Ibn Saud the King of Hejaz. He raised Najd to a kingdom as well on 29 January 1927. On 20 May 1927, the British government signed the Treaty of Jeddah, which abolished the Darin protection agreement and recognized the independence of the Hejaz and Najd, with Ibn Saud as their ruler. For the next five years, Ibn Saud administered the two parts of his dual kingdom as separate units.
  With
caption: King Ibn Saud signature in a document to Eqab bin Muhaya
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ExifOffset": "38", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "800", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "597"}