An Ottoman-Egyptian invasion of Arabia had ended the First Saudi State in 1818.

After a rebuilding period, the House of Saud, in the person of Amir Turki ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad, had in 1824 returned to power in the Second Saudi State, establishing himself as ruler of Dir'iyyah, which had been largely destroyed and set afire by the invaders.

The town's original inhabitants had left Diriyah after 1818, with the bulk of them moving to Riyadh.

Turki, now the legitimate Imam, has adopted Riyadh as the new capital of the state.

His son Faisal escapes from Egypt in 1828 to rejoin his father and to play a prominent part in the reestablishment of the Wahhabi regime.

Wahhabism, or Wahabism, is a conservative reformist call of Sunni Islam attributed to Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, an eighteenth century scholar from what is today known as Saudi Arabia, who had advocated a return to the practices of the first three generations of Islamic history.