The Setting

Abstract

The story of Ibn Saud’s life cannot be properly understood without knowledge of the environment in which he operated. The alarming picture painted by Gibbon is an example of the idea of the Arabian Peninsula in the outside world until almost exactly the year of Ibn Saud’s birth in 1876. Just before that date a bestselling travel book in London was a two-volume account of a journey through Nejd to the Gulf coast by William Palgrave,¹ an English Jew, temporarily become a Jesuit priest. The Suez Canal, which was conceived by the French and for long opposed by the British, was opened six years later and it may be that Palgrave was acting for the Emperor Napoleon III in exploring for strategic purposes what was still a vast terra incognita between Africa and India.

In the dreary waste of Arabia a boundless level of sand is intersected by sharp and naked mountains and the face of the desert without shade or shelter is scorched by the direct and intense rays of a tropical sun. Instead of refreshing breezes the winds, particularly from the south-west, diffuse a noxious and even deadly vapour … whole caravans, whole armies have been lost and buried in the whirlwind.

Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, single-volume edn, London 1830, p. 903

In no part of the world, of Asia at least, does a stranger meet with a kinder, more liberal or even a politer reception than in Upper Nejd.

W. G. Palgrave, Journal of the Royal Geographical Society, no. 34, p. 135