Faisal’s Second Reign

Abstract

The Imam Faisal’s return to the leadership of the Wahhabi state in 1845 ushered in a stable and prosperous period for Arabia. The fact that for the first time in thirty years Nejd was free from invasion or threat of invasion and the fact that Faisal, as a result of experience both at home and abroad, had developed a temperate skill in holding his fractious subjects together, mark his second reign as the most important in his House between the death of Saud ibn ‘Abd a-l’Aziz in 1814 and the accession of the late King ‘Abd al-’Aziz in 1902. Like the Soviet state today, Faisal’s state was one in which a hitherto newly proclaimed way of life was accepted and understood by those subject to it and recognised as a constant factor by those who opposed it. Philby has summed up Faisal’s reign well:

Faisal now entered upon an unchallenged reign of all but a quarter of a century, in which must be sought the real beginnings of the modern Wahhabi state … [He] ruled a territory considerably smaller in extent than that of his great ancestors, but perhaps more compact and better woven together on the loom of Wahhabism. A new generation had grown up whose oldest members knew not the Jacob of the old paganism, whose faded and perished remnants may yet be found in our day as patches on the new garment of dour dogmatism which passes for philosophy among the nomad tribes of the desert.