Wahhabis and the Consequences of their Empowerment and Presence on the Coasts and Hinterlands of the Persian Gulf (First Period:1745-1818)

The Persian Gulf and its coasts and hinterlands have been the scenes of several political- military conflicts. Since the second half of the 18th century, this region was the cradle of a number of new political-religious changes which provoked the reaction of some of the regional and trans-regional rulers and governments. One of these changes was the rise of a new power, the Wahhabi House of Saud, in the center of the present dayArabian Peninsula. It gradually expanded its domain of power to the coasts and hinterlands of the Persian Gulf and, in a way, established its hegemony in the southern parts of this waterway. Following a descriptive analytic approach and a documentary-library method, the present study has dealt with this problem. The findings demonstrate that, through exploiting the existing conditions, this ruling power initially managed to change the balance of power and political equations in the region to its own advantage to a relatively large extent. As a result, for more than half a century, it overpowered its weakened neighboring ruling systems in the Persian Gulf, including the Qajar Iran and the Ottoman Empire, and introduced itself as the new authority in the region. Nevertheless, after some time, the first period of the empowerment of the House of Saud came to an end.