Arabia, history ofhistory of the region from prehistoric times to the present.





Pre-Islamic Arabia, to the 7th Century adcentury ce
Prehistory and archaeology


Stone Age settlements of fishermen and shellfish eaters going back to the 3rd millennium bc bce have been found on the northeast coast and in the islands of Faylakah and Bahrain. Surface scatters of flint implements are seen in many places in the peninsula, as are undatable but probably ancient rock drawings for which affinities have been thought to exist with rock drawings in the Sahara.







Sabaean and Minaean Kingdomskingdoms




Sabaean rulers—who are mentioned in Assyrian annals of the late 8th and early 7th centuries bc bce (although some scholars date Sabaean inscriptions to about the 6th century bc bce)—were responsible for impressive constructions both cultic and irrigational, including the greatest part of what is now visible of the dam; but there are traces of earlier dam works, and the silt deposits indicate agricultural exploitation far back in prehistory.









Other pre-Islamic Yemeni kingdoms






In the last decades of the 3rd century ad ce, a Ḥimyarite ruler named Shammar Yuharʿish ended the independent existence of both Sabaʾ and Hadhramaut; , and, inasmuch as Qatabān had already disappeared from the political map, the whole of Yemen was united under his rule. Thereafter, the royal style was “king “King of Sabaʾ and the Raydān and Hadhramaut and Yamnat.” Arabic writers call him and his successors the Tabābiʿah (singular Tubbaʿ), and, because in the centuries immediately preceding Islam Yemen was dominated by the Ḥimyarites, the Arabic writers (followed by many 19th-century Europeans) apply the term Ḥimyaritic to all pre-Islamic monuments of Yemen, irrespective of date or location.

The Tubbaʿ kings

A major break with the past was made in the 4th century ad ce, when the polytheistic religion of the earlier cultures was replaced by a monotheistic cult of “The Merciful (Raḥmān), Lord of heaven and earth.” There was also an increasing interest, both friendly and hostile, in central Arabia. Already in the 2nd and 3rd centuries ad ce Sabaean, Ḥimyaro-Sabaean, and Ḥimyarite rulers had employed central Arabian Bedouin mercenaries; and the first Tubbaʿ king, Shammar Yuharʿish, sent a diplomatic mission to the Sāsānian court at Ctesiphon.


Central and northern Arabia

The oasis of Taymāʾ in the northern Hejaz emerged briefly into the limelight when the Neo-Babylonian king Nabu-naʾid (Nabonidus, reigned c. 556–539 bc bce) took up his residence there for 10 years and extended his power as far as Yathrib. A few important monuments of this time are known.

Dedān and Al-Ḥijr







The dynasty of the Ghassānids, though often called kings, were in fact Byzantine phylarchs (native rulers of subject frontier states). They had their headquarters well within the Byzantine Empire, a little east of the Sea of Galilee at Jābiyah Jābiyyah in the Jawlān (Golan) area; , but they controlled large areas of northwestern Arabia, as far south as Yathrib, serving as a counterpoise to the Sāsānian-oriented Lakhmids in the northeast. The Ghassānids were Monophysite Christians and played an important part in the religious conflicts of the Byzantine church. Their influence spanned the 6th century ad ce, and their most prominent member, al-Ḥārith ibn Jabalah (Greek: Aretas), flourished in mid-century. The last three phylarchs fell out with Orthodox Byzantium because of their Monophysite creed; in 614 the power of Ghassān was destroyed by a Persian invasion.



Arabia since the 7th century
Arabian and Islamic expansion

In the 6th century Quraysh—the noble and holy house of the confederation of the Hejaz controlling the sacred enclave (ḥaram) of Mecca—contrived a chain of agreements with the northern and southern tribes that opened the highways of Arabia to commerce. Under Quraysh aegis, caravans moved freely from the southern Yemen coast to Mecca and thence northward to Byzantium or eastward to Iraq. Another agreement made trade with Axum (in what is now Ethiopia) and the African coast secure, as was also the Arabian coastal sea route. Furthermore, members of the Quraysh house of ʿAbd Manāf concluded pacts with Byzantium, Persia, and rulers of Yemen and Ethiopia, promoting commerce outside Arabia. The ʿAbd Manāf house could effect such agreements because of Quraysh’s superior position with the tribes. Quraysh had some sanctity as lords of the Meccan temple (the Kaʿbah) and were themselves known as the Protected Neighbours of Allah; the tribes on pilgrimage to Mecca were called the Guests of Allah.

In its ḥaram Quraysh was secure from attack; it arbitrated in tribal disputes, attaining thereby at least a local preeminence and seemingly a kind of loose hegemony over many Arabian tribes. Temple privileges held by Quṣayy, who established the rule of Quraysh, passed to his posterity, the ʿAbd Manāf house of which collected the tax to feed the pilgrims. The Kaʿbah, through the additions of other cults, developed into a pantheon, the cult of other gods perhaps being linked with political agreements between Quraysh—worshipers of Allah—and the tribes.

The life of Muhammad

Muhammad was born in 570 of the Hāshimite (Banū Hāshim) branch of the noble house of ʿAbd Manāf; though orphaned at an early age and, in consequence, with little influence, he never lacked protection by his clan. Marriage to a wealthy widow improved his position as a merchant, but he began to make his mark in Mecca by preaching the oneness of Allah. Rejected by the Quraysh lords, Muhammad sought affiliation with other tribes; he was unsuccessful until he managed to negotiate a pact with the tribal chiefs of Medina, whereby he obtained their protection and became theocratic head and arbiter of the Medinan tribal confederation (ummah). Those Quraysh who joined him there were known as muhājirūn (refugees or emigrants), while his Medinan allies were called anṣār (supporters). The Muslim era dates from the Hijrah (Hegira)—Muhammad’s move to Medina in ad 622 ce. (For more detail about the life of Muhammad and the rise of Islam, see Islam; and Islamic world.)

Muhammad’s men attacked a Quraysh caravan, thus breaking the vital security system established by the ʿAbd Manāf house, and hostilities broke out against his Meccan kinsmen. In Medina two problems confronted him—the necessity to enforce his role as arbiter and to raise supplies for his moves against Quraysh. He overcame internal opposition, removing in the process three Jewish tribes, whose properties he distributed among his followers. Externally, his ascendant power was demonstrated following Quraysh’s failure to overrun Medina, when he declared it his own sacred enclave. Muhammad foiled Quraysh offensives and marched back to Mecca. After taking Mecca he became lord of the two sacred enclaves (al-ḥaramayn); however. However, even though he broke the power of some Quraysh lords, his policy thenceforth was to conciliate his Quraysh kinsmen.

The rise of Islam

After Muhammad’s entry into Mecca the tribes linked with Quraysh came to negotiate with him and to accept Islam; this meant little more than giving up their local deities and worshiping Allah alone. They had to pay the tax, but this was not novel because the tribal chiefs had already been taxed to protect the Meccan ḥaram. Many tribesmen probably waited to join the winner. Doubtless they cared little for Islam—many tried to break away (the so-called apostasy) on Muhammad’s death.

Islam, however, was destined for a world role. Under Muhammad’s successors the expansionist urge of the tribes, temporarily united around the nucleus of the two sacred enclaves, coincided with the weakness of Byzantium and Sāsānian Persia. Tribes summoned to the banners of Islam launched a career of conquest that promised to satisfy the mandate of their new faith as well as the desire for booty and lands. With families and flocks, they left the peninsula. Population movements of such magnitude affected all of Arabia; in Hadhramaut they possibly caused neglect of irrigation works, resulting in erosion of fertile lands. In Oman, too, when Arab tribes evicted the Persian ruling class, its complex irrigation system seems to have suffered severely. Many Omani Arabs about the mid-7th century left for Basra (in Iraq) and formed the influential Azd group there. Arabian Islam replaced Persian influence in the Bahrain district and Al-Ḥasā province in the northeast, and in Yemen.

As the conquests far beyond Arabia poured loot into the Holy Cities (Mecca and Medina), they became wealthy centres of a sophisticated Arabian culture; Medina became a centre for Qurʾānic study, the evolution of Islamic law, and historical record. Under the caliphs—Muhammad’s successors—Islam began to assume its characteristic shape; paradoxically, outside the cities it made little difference to Arabian life for centuries. Sharīʿah (Islamic law), promoted often by the Prophet’s own descendants, developed in the urban centres; but outside them customary law persisted, sometimes diametrically opposed to Sharīʿah. In time the Hejaz and Yemen came to make notable contributions to Islamic culture, but Islam’s basically Arabian nature first shows in the early mosque, which resembles the pre-Islamic temple, and in the pilgrimage rites, little altered from paganism.

Struggle for leadership

In Arabia offices were generally hereditary and elective; , but on Muhammad’s death , Abū Bakr, the first caliph, aided by his own eventual successor, ʿUmar, gained the leadership that Quraysh might have lost to others. They were not of the house of Hāshim, which, from the outset, felt cheated of its rights. ʿAlī, Muhammad’s stepbrother and son-in-law, became the focus of legitimist claims to succeed the Prophet. ʿUthmān, however, the third caliph, was descended from both the Umayyah and Hāshim branches of ʿAbd Manāf. The latter half of ʿUthmān’s reign coincided with a slackening in the tide of conquest. ʿUthmān was censured for diverting property, revenues, and booty in Iraq and Egypt to his Quraysh relatives. Squabbles with the tribes resulted in ʿUthmān’s murder at Medina by opponents from Egypt. ʿAlī was proclaimed caliph by the anṣār, but he lost the political battle with ʿUthmān’s powerful relative Muʿāwiyah, governor of Syria, who demanded retaliation against the murderers. ʿAlī was later murdered by a Khārijite, a member of a dissident group. ʿAlī had quitted Medina for Iraq, and the political power centre of Islam left the peninsula, never to return. ʿAlī’s posterity, however, played a key role in subsequent Arabian history.

The Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid periods
Regional centres

Once Muʿāwiyah and the Umayyads had seized overlordship of the far-flung Islamic empire, which they ruled from Damascus, the Holy Cities remained only the spiritual capitals of Islam. The Umayyad caliphs appointed governors over the three crucial areas of the Hejaz, Yemen, and Oman; , but in Iraq occasional powerful governors managed to control the Persian Gulf provinces, the gulf being an important maritime trade route, especially under the ʿAbbāsids. Occasionally Bahrain, Al-Ḥasā, and Najd also became regional centres of power within Arabia.

The brief unity that Islam had imposed on the Arabian Peninsula was irrevocably broken as the main Islamic sects took shape—the “orthodox” Sunnites Sunnis and the “legitimist” Shīʿites (who were distinguished from the Sunnites Sunnis principally by their tenet that the imam of the Muslim community must be descended from ʿAlī by Muhammad’s daughter Fāṭimah).

Umayyad forces defeated a Quraysh pretender, ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Zubayr, who had been proclaimed caliph in the Hejaz. Medina was captured; Mecca was besieged, the ḥaram bombarded, and the Kaʿbah set on fire (the sacred Black Stone—an object of veneration probably appropriated from pre-Islamic religion—was split in three places). The harsh Umayyad general al-Ḥajjāj captured the city, and the pretender perished. The violation of the sacred enclaves by troops, including Arab Christians, was an act of sacrilege, but it broke any power remaining with the tribal “supporters” in Medina. The Prophet’s original simple mosque in Medina, already enlarged by the early caliphs, was rebuilt by the Umayyad al-Walīd (it has been much altered and restored since). The Umayyads spent lavishly on the Holy Cities and developed Hejaz irrigation.

The Umayyads collapsed before the ʿAbbāsids in 750, a fall to which rivalry between the tribes, aligned as northern and southern Arabs, contributed materially. The ʿAbbāsids claimed adherence of the Legitimists, since their ancestor, the Prophet’s uncle, was of the Hāshimite house. The ʿAbbāsids maintained a policy of strict adherence to religious observance, and they too devoted large sums to supporting and embellishing the Holy Cities, to which they sent annually a pilgrim caravan. Zubaydah, wife of the caliph Hārūn aral-Rashīd, celebrated for her public works, is said to have ordered the construction of the qanāt, a tunneled conduit that took water to Mecca. The threat of insurrection by Legitimist pretenders of the ʿAlīd branch of the Hāshimite house—who denied ʿAbbāsid claims to the caliphate as they had with the Umayyads—was a constant danger to the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. The ʿAlīd family developed both Sunnite Sunni and Shīʿite branches, but the latter split into a multiplicity of sects, of which the most important are the “Twelvers” (Ithnā ʿAsharīyahʿAshariyyah, or Imāmīs), who recognized 12 imams, and the Ismāʿīlite “Seveners” (IsmāʿīlīyahIsmāʿīliyyah, or Ismāʿīlīs, for Imam Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar), who acknowledged only seven.


To quell a rising in Yemen, the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Maʾmūn dispatched Ibn Ziyād, who refounded in 820 the southern city of Zabīd and became overlord of Yemen, Najrān, and Hadhramaut. About a century later , the Najāḥids—Ethiopian slaves or local Afro-Asians—supplanted the Ziyādids in Zabīd; however, though independent, neither dynasty renounced vague ʿAbbāsid suzerainty. The Banū Yaʿfur, lords north of Sanaa, expelled the Ziyādid governor and ruled independently from 861 to 997. Najāḥid rule ended when ʿAlī ibn Mahdī captured Zabīd in 1159.

The Qarmatians

A more serious loss to ʿAbbāsid power in Arabia was occasioned by the appearance of Ismāʿīlīte Ismāʿīlite propaganda in Yemen about 880, in eastern Arabia about 899, and even briefly in Oman. From Yemen, Ismāʿīlīs reached North Africa, where the Fāṭimid movement arose and conquered Egypt and for a time seriously threatened the ʿAbbāsids in Baghdad. The Qarmatians (Qarāmiṭah), an extremist offshoot of the Ismāʿīlīs, founded a state in Al-Ḥasā, in northeastern Arabia. They set out to subvert Sunnite Sunni Islam. They were alleged to oppose many of the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad, and they encouraged social equality for nomads, townspeople, and peasants. In 930 the Persian Gulf Qarmatians plundered Mecca, carrying off the Black Stone to Al-Ḥasā; they later returned it under Fāṭimid pressure. The Qarmatians were overthrown in 1077–78 by local Sunnite Sunni tribes, but Qarmatian influence persisted in Bahrain. From the 13th century, Twelver, or Imāmī, Shīʿism spread in Al-Ḥasā and Bahrain, while political power was held by the Shīʿite Sevener Jarwānid dynasty (1305 to about 1450).

In 1037 ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣulayḥī of Yemen proclaimed the Fāṭimid caliph al-Mustanṣir but set up a dynasty in Sanaa. The Ṣulayḥid dynasty ruled most of upper Yemen, warred with the pro-ʿAbbāsid Najāḥids, and gained control of Aden.


In the last decades of the 7th century, the Ibāḍites (IbāḍīyahIbāḍiyyah), regarded as a moderate Khārijite sect, conquered southern Arabia, established a Kindite imam in Hadhramaut, occupied Sanaa, and took Mecca and Medina, before the Umayyads drove them back to Hadhramaut. Oman had early become Khārijite; the first Ibāḍite imam, al-Julandā ibn Masʿūd, was elected at about the beginning of the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. After the Ibāḍite invasion of southern Arabia in 893, Oman wavered between independence and subjection to the ʿAbbāsids and their Būyid or Seljuq supporters. By the 12th century the Seljuq hold had become rather precarious and local imams existed. During periods when the Indian trade used the Persian Gulf, Omani ports flourished; however, revenues diminished wherever trade was switched to the Red Sea. From the mid-12th century until 1406, the Nabhānid dynasty controlled the interior of Oman, but Turkic Oğuz (Ghuzz), Persians, and others variously possessed the coastal flank of the mountains.

The Zaydīs and ʿAlawīs

In Yemen lasting movements were being shaped by the close of the 9th century; the imam al-Hādī, a theocratic arbiter-ruler of traditional type, founded the ʿAlīd Zaydī dynasty in Ṣaʿdah of northern Yemen. About the mid-12th century a Zaydī imam extended his rule northward to Khaybar and Yanbuʿ (Yenbo) and southward to Zabīd.

In the mid-10th century a refugee from disturbances in Iraq, Aḥmad ibn ʿĪsā al-Muhājir, arrived in Hadhramaut, then under Ibāḍite domination, and founded the ʿAlawite (ʿAlawī) Sayyid house, which was instrumental in spreading the Shāfiʿite (Shāfiʿī) school of Islamic law to India, Indonesia, and East Africa.

The Ayyūbids and Rasūlids

The Ayyūbids of Egypt, when they invaded Yemen in 1173, found it parceled out among several dynasties. Ayyūbid objectives were probably part political, to find themselves a haven and destroy the Ismāʿīlites, and part economic, to control the India trade route. They remained in power until about 1229, generally controlling Aden, Hadhramaut, the Tihāmah, and the districts south of Sanaa. They introduced an administrative centralization apparently adapted from Syro-Egyptian organization.

With the Ayyūbids arrived the emir ʿAlī ibn Rasūl, probably of Oğuz origin, whose descendants, at first Ayyūbid governors, grasped independence (c. 1229). The Rasūlid period is the most brilliant era of Islamic history in Yemen. These monarchs embellished their capital, Taʿizz, and other cities with fine buildings; several kings had a literary bent and, besides belles lettres, wrote treatises of some originality on various subjects. A fiscal survey still surviving provides an account of the trade through Al-Shiḥr, Aden, and the Tihāmah ports, with budgets for maintaining castles, troops, and hostages kept as surety of good tribal conduct. Aden served as an important trade centre in a flourishing period of Arab and Jewish commercial enterprise. The Rasūlids kept the southern coast under loose control up to Dhofar, even holding Hadhramaut to some extent and maintaining a squadron against pirates.

The sharifs of the Holy Cities

At Mecca in the mid-10th century commenced the 1,000-year ascendancy of the ʿAlīd sharifian families. Mecca now became capital of the Hejaz, replacing Medina, the centre from which it had been ruled since the Prophet’s days. The sharifs, though at times subject to such foreign overlords as the rulers of Egypt and of other parts of Arabia, exercised virtual independence. Throughout the ʿAbbāsid-Fāṭimid struggle, however, the sharifs took the opportunist line of supporting the side in ascendancy. When the Ayyūbid Saladin, after deposing the Fāṭimids in 1171, brought back orthodoxy, the sharifs again recognized the ʿAbbāsids and Ayyūbids and, and from being Zaydīs, turned Sunnite Sunni Shāfiʿī.

In 1181 the French crusader Crusader knight Reynaud de Châtillon raided Arabia. He intended to attack Medina but, switching his plan, raided in 1182 the Red Sea ports as far south as Bab El-Mandeb; Saladin destroyed Reynaud’s vessels and so ended the threat to Mecca.

By the early 13th century the sharifs had conquered the Hejaz, extending their power southward to Ḥalī; , but, when they sought support from Egypt, Syria, or Yemen, the Rasūlids managed temporarily to dispute the overlordship of Mecca with the Egyptians.

After Baghdad fell to the Mongols in 1258, the pilgrim caravan from Iraq lost all political significance for the Hejaz. As Iraq declined, Egyptian influence increased and the sharifs became steadily more dependent on the Mamlūks of Egypt.

Mamlūk and Ottoman influence

Although the Yemeni Rasūlids sometimes disputed with the Mamlūks the overlordship of the Holy Cities, the Mamlūks generally prevailed. Egyptians and Meccans attacked al-Mujāhid the Rasūlid on a pilgrimage in 1350, and he was held prisoner in Egypt though released later.

The Mamlūks

During the 14th and 15th centuries the Mamlūks became the dominant power, maintaining a political agent in the Hejaz and a body of cavalry in Mecca. Eventually they made or unmade the sharifian rulers, though the local Egyptian commander’s policy sometimes ran counter to that of Cairo. From the mid-15th century the Mamlūks took charge of the customs at Jiddah, Mecca’s port, allotting a portion of the revenue to the pasha of that port. Sharif Muḥammad ibn Barakāt (ruled 1425–53), however, received one-quarter of the value of all wrecked ships, one-quarter of all gifts arriving from abroad for the Meccans, and one-tenth of all imported goods. About half his income was distributed among the leading sharifian families.

By the mid-15th century the foundering of the Rasūlid dynasty in Yemen made way for the Ṭāhirids; about the same time the Kathīrī tribe of southeastern Arabia controlled Hadhramaut on behalf of the new dynasty.

The beginning of the 16th century witnessed Portuguese penetration of the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. Though they failed to capture Aden, the Portuguese blockaded the Indian trade routes to Europe via the Persian Gulf and Red Sea, eventually causing severe, lasting damage to the economy of Muslim Middle Eastern countries.

The Ottomans

In 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim I conquered Egypt and proclaimed the Hejaz part of the Ottoman dominions. Sharif Barakāt II of Mecca sent his son to negotiate at the Ottoman court and was confirmed as lord of the Holy Cities and Jiddah, subject to recognizing the Ottoman sultan as overlord. Selim’s successor, Süleyman I the Magnificent, at the zenith of Ottoman power, munificently subsidized the Holy Cities, devoting large sums to new building.

In Yemen the Mamlūks of Zabīd and Taʿizz acknowledged Ottoman authority, and Ottomans took over naval operations against the Portuguese in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. They seized Aden and forced the Yemenis into the mountains, capturing Sanaa and Shahārah; ultimately. Ultimately, however, the Yemenis drove them back into the Tihāmah. The Ottomans adopted Mocha (Al-Mukhā) in southern Yemen as their base, and Aden declined in importance. After conquering Iraq in 1534–36, the Ottomans could operate in the Persian Gulf against the Portuguese, who had taken Hormuz and Muscat in 1507 and Bahrain in 1521 and freely harried the Arabian coasts.

The Ottomans reached as far as Al-Ḥasā by 1550 as they sought to curb Portuguese expansion. With Ottoman help, local merchants partially revived the spice trade, especially in pepper, but the Sunnite Sunni Banū Khālid expelled Ottoman forces in 1670. The Portuguese maintained themselves in Muscat until 1649, although they could hold Bahrain only until 1602, when they were expelled by Ṣafavid Iran, which ruled there until 1717. Many Bahraini Shīʿite scholars in the 17th century moved to Iran, where they led in the development of Shīʿite theology.

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 Sunnite 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.

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 Sunnite 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-DirʿīyahDirʿiyyah, 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.

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.


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

The Ottoman Empire entered World War I holding all of western Arabia and supported in central northern Arabia by the Rashīdīs of Ḥāʾil. Earlier Ottoman attempts to extend the empire to eastern Arabia, however, had been countered by the British, who were then paramount in the gulf and in treaty relation with the Arab sheikhdoms there. Sharif Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī of Mecca, with assurance of British support, revolted against the Ottomans in June 1916, taking Mecca but failing to capture Medina. The British also supported the Idrīsī in Asir against the Ottomans. In Yemen Ottoman forces entered the Aden Protectorate, but the war subsequently settled down to a stalemate.

Two sons of Sharif Ḥusayn of Mecca, Fayṣal and Abdullah, stirred up the Hejazi tribes against the Ottomans and, assisted by British supplies and liaison officers, including the famous T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), moved northward to Transjordan along the right flank of the British armies and into Damascus (1918). Fayṣal set up an Arab government there, only to be dislodged by the French in 1920. In 1921 he was made king of Iraq, Abdullah emir of Transjordan.

Wahhābī-sharifian dispute

During the war, relations between Sharif Ḥusayn and Ibn Saʿūd worsened. In 1919 the dispute broke into an open clash. The Wahhābīs won so decisive a victory that they might have advanced unopposed into the Hejaz but for pressures on Ibn Saʿūd by the British. Instead, Ibn Saʿūd concentrated his forces against Ibn Rashīd, mastering all Shammar territory and capturing Ḥāʾil in 1921.

Meanwhile, the grand sharif refused the terms of a treaty with Britain, mainly because of the Balfour Declaration, which approved a national home in Palestine for the Jews. The Wahhābīs marched into the Hejaz in 1924, and by October Ḥusayn was ruler no longer.

Saudi Arabia

Ibn Saʿūd’s zealous Wahhābī followers, arriving in the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Hejaz society, were now exposed to the world of Islam at large. Ibn Saʿūd managed the resulting problems with firmness and tact. He had furthermore to enforce his rule over the tribes impatient with centralized government. His tough action with them won, and he set out to develop security, economic reform, and communications.

On Ibn Saʿūd’s southern border the Idrīsī sayyids of Asir had risen to power in the first decade of the 20th century. When in 1926 and 1930 Ibn Saʿūd concluded agreements with the Idrīsī, rendering Asir a virtual dependency of Saudi Arabia, Imam Yaḥyā of Yemen took Al-Ḥudaydah and southern Asir. Saudi troops swept into the Yemeni Tihāmah, but they withdrew after the Treaty of Al-Ṭāʾif in 1934, which acknowledged Saudi rule over Asir.

In the postwar years Britain and Saudi Arabia concluded agreements defining the frontiers with the British mandates of Jordan and Iraq (though most Saudi borders remained uncertain), and by treaty in 1927 Ibn Saʿūd was recognized as a sovereign, independent ruler.


Imam Yaḥyā had to virtually conquer Yemen, in the Zaydī interest, after the Ottoman departure; by stern measures he established security. He refused to recognize the British-backed border between the Aden protectorates and Yemen. The British in the later 1930s pacified and, to a limited degree, developed their protectorates.

Postwar Arabia, to 1962

The post-World War I settlement and centralization of power in the hands of Yaḥyā, Ibn Saʿūd, and the British gave Arabia a large measure of internal peace and external security, which endured until 1962. A new factor in the 1930s was the discovery of immense quantities of petroleum in the deserts. In Bahrain oil was struck in June 1932. The American-owned Arabian Standard Oil Company (later Saudi Aramco) discovered oil in the Dhahran area of Saudi Arabia, and the first shipments left in September 1938. The Kuwait Oil Company, a joint Anglo-American enterprise, began production in June 1946. Thereafter oil was discovered in many other places, mostly in the Persian Gulf. Vast petroleum revenues brought enormous changes to Saudi Arabia and transformed the gulf states. The market for labour brought migrants from Yemen and other Arab countries.

Egypt, and later Syria and Iraq, utilized resentment of Israel and the appeal of Pan-Arab nationalism in the 1950s and ’60s to try to undermine “feudal” Arab kingdoms and to remove British and American influence from Arabia.

Arabia since 1962

Political changes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia during the early 1960s epitomized a vast transformation of the Arabian Peninsula that affected the lives of most of its inhabitants. In 1962 Egyptian-trained Yemeni officers led a coup d’état and invited Egypt to send troops to support the republic. The imam’s forces, although backed by Saudi Arabia during five years of war against large Egyptian armies, ultimately lost, and the republic was triumphant. Following the death of King Ibn Saʿūd of Saudi Arabia in 1953, his ineffective heir, Saʿūd, was replaced in a royal family coup d’état in 1964 by another son, Fayṣal, who initiated a number of modernizing changes.

The power of governments increased in all the countries of the peninsula as oil production provided most ruling elites with unprecedented wealth. Religion and dynasty, the two pillars of most earlier regimes, were increasingly supplemented by the distribution to the people of oil revenues; individual national identities also began slowly to develop. Governments whose effective jurisdiction had often been limited to the coast now expanded their powers into the interior, while commercial, social, cultural, and diplomatic interactions with the rest of the world played a larger role in determining local matters.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt applied political pressure to remove the British from Aden, and Britain left Aden and South Yemen in 1967. A violently leftist group, the National Liberation Front (NLF), proclaimed the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (Yemen [Aden]), which became communist and formed links with the Soviet Union.

After a compromise between royalists and republicans, northern Yemen, with its capital at Sanaa, was ruled by relatively liberal military governments, with army officers as presidents, including the long-lasting ʿAlī ʿAbd Allāh Ṣāliḥ, who first took office in 1978. North Yemen gained considerable income from the hundreds of thousands of Yemenis who worked in oil-rich Saudi Arabia; in the 1980s both Yemens discovered oil fields of their own.

Over several years a struggle for control of Yemen (Aden) waged within the ruling political party resulted in a brief civil war in 1986. The collapse of communism in Europe and the yearning of Yemenis for the union of the two parts of Yemen in the north and south, despite the great differences between them, resulted in the proclamation of their unification on May 22, 1990.

In Oman, after a palace revolution in 1970, the new sultan, Qābūs, opened a program of modernization, welfare, and reform. Much oil revenue initially had to be devoted to repelling rebel attacks, supported from Yemen (Aden), but the rebels were defeated in 1975. A mutual accord was signed in 1982.

At the entrance to the Persian Gulf, the Trucial States had acquired world importance from their vast oil riches. In the new alignments following Britain’s withdrawal, the former Trucial States—Abu Dhabi, Dubayy, Ash-Shāriqah, ʿAjmān, Al-Fujayrah, and Umm al-Qaywayn—proclaimed themselves the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 1971. They were joined by Raʾs Al-Khaymah in 1972.

Kuwait saw the British withdraw in 1961, but Iraq claimed the country, and it was deterred only by British and later by Arab armed forces. In 1970–71 Bahrain and Qatar became independent and subsequently acquired control of Western oil concerns operating in their territories. Their way of life was transformed as oil revenues and the service sector of the economy grew.

The Iran-Iraq War

A fresh threat to the rich oil states of the gulf arose with the revolution in Iran in 1978–79 and with the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War in 1980. Islamic fundamentalism in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran struck an answering chord with Shīʿites and Iranian workers in the Arabian states, which gave financial support to Iraq. U.S. President Jimmy Carter and his successor in 1981, Ronald Reagan, pledged American support to keep open the Strait of Hormuz, through which some 60 percent of the industrial world’s oil supply was being transported.

In response to the tensions of the Iran-Iraq War, Saudi Arabia and other gulf Arab states expanded their military power, but the small size of their populations limited their military effectiveness. In 1979 Saudi religious extremists seized the Al-Ḥaram mosque (Great Mosque) of Mecca and revolted against the Saʿūdi dynasty. They were forcibly repressed, and few changes were made in the Saudi government.

In March 1981 Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates formed the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to promote stability and cooperation in the gulf region; the GCC coordinated their economic and defensive efforts. Expected economic growth in the entire region was slowed by the fall in oil prices in the mid-1980s, and the countries of Arabia made plans to diversify their economies and to institute austerity measures in the face of falling prices.

The 1991 Persian Gulf War

Following the end of the Iran-Iraq War in 1988, President Saddam Hussein Ṣaddām Ḥussein of Iraq faced massive economic problems, including debts owed to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The Iraqi president also viewed himself as the leader of Pan-Arab nationalism and socialism, two ideologies firmly opposed by the conservative monarchies that controlled most of the Arabian Peninsula outside of Yemen.

Claiming that Kuwait had historically been part of Iraq and that Kuwaiti oil policy had robbed Iraq of much-needed revenue, Saddam Hussein Ṣaddām Ḥussein ordered an invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990. Kuwait itself fell quickly to the Iraqis, but the Kuwaiti royal family established a government-in-exile in Saudi Arabia, while hundreds of thousands of Kuwaitis fled to several gulf countries. Many Kuwaiti citizens remaining in the emirate engaged in guerrilla warfare against the invaders.

Initially, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC countries reacted cautiously, but, when the United States suggested that Iraq might next invade Saudi Arabia, most Arabian Peninsula countries took a firm stand against the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers and many warships and aircraft from a wide variety of countries acted under the authority of United Nations resolutions as they assembled in Saudi Arabia.

Since Yemen held a seat on the United Nations Security Council, its reluctance to authorize force to oust Iraq from Kuwait was particularly noteworthy; Saudi Arabia in retribution compelled hundreds of thousands of Yemeni workers to leave the kingdom. The GCC countries provided military facilities for the coalition armed forces. The military contingents coming from the various Islamic countries acted together under the command of Saudi generals; troops from Western nations ultimately coordinated their activities under U.S. command.

Iraq attempted to link a solution of the Kuwait question to the resolution of the Palestinian Arab issue, but the coalition countries insisted on unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. After Iraq rejected this demand, the coalition launched an air war against Iraq and Iraqi-occupied Kuwait on January 16–17, 1991. A ground campaign that began on February 24 lasted only four days and secured the eviction of Iraq from Kuwait. Iraqi military and civilian casualties were heavy, but the coalition armed forces suffered fewer than 1,500 killed or wounded in action.

The Arabian Peninsula countries had not seen such a far-reaching external military intervention in their affairs since the days of Muḥammad ʿAlī and the first Saʾūdī kingdom. As a result, the diplomatic, military, and political structures and patterns created after the withdrawal of the British imperial presence in the early 1960s were placed in question.