Emirate of Nejd

The Emirate of Nejd was the second Saudi state from 1824 to 1891, the restoration built on the first state's ruins. Six years after Ibrahim Pasha razed Diriyah, Turki bin Abdullah, a fugitive grandson of the founder, slipped back, retook Riyadh in 1824 and made it his mud walled capital instead of haunted Diriyah. The new state was smaller and cooler in faith than the first: the same Wahhabi scholars served, but expansion yielded to survival between Ottoman Egypt, the British Gulf and the rising Rashidis of Hail. Faisal, Turki's son, was carried to Cairo a prisoner in 1838, escaped, returned, was exiled again and returned again, reigning in all some twenty six years and giving Nejd its steadiest decades. After him his sons tore the house apart: Abdullah against Saud, Saud against Abdullah, while Hail's Muhammad ibn Rashid watched and waited. In January 1891 the Rashidis crushed the Saudis at Mulayda; Riyadh fell, the family fled to Kuwait, and a boy among the exiles, Abdulaziz, would return eleven years later to begin the third state that became Saudi Arabia.