ABSTRACT
Saudi Arabia is the largest country on the Arabian Peninsula. While human habitation of what is today Saudi Arabia dates back for maybe 15,000 years, there is little trace of these wanderers except for a few towns located along trade routes. Somewhere around 1450, the al-Saud family left the small village of al-Qatif on the Persian Gulf and moved to an oasis in the Najd, the central part of the Arabian Peninsula, founding the village of al-Diriyah. Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahab pledged to unify Arabia under a puritanical banner known as the al-Muwahiddun or "Unitarians," though often called Wahhabists. By 1908, Ibn Saud's alliance won control over the Najd, but his ambition to control the Hijaz, or western region of the Arabian Peninsula, gained him a new opponent, the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein ibn Ali al-Hashem, who claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
