Women’s resistance during the Ottoman campaigns against Diriyah and other regions of the First Saudi State, and later the Second Saudi State, was a hard test of society’s capacity to endure.
The confrontation was not confined to the battlefield. It spread across the social fabric, where women played a decisive role in preserving cohesion and sustaining the community under siege and in the face of destruction.
Dr. Fatmah bint Hussein Al Fardan Alqhtani, professor of history at King Saud University, told Asharq Al-Awsat that recognizing women’s presence in the resistance does not mean casting them in stereotypical combat roles. It means acknowledging the practical responsibilities imposed by society and by the historical moment itself.
Daily resilience under siege
During the Ottoman siege, Diriyah was not merely a battlefield. It was a community under total pressure, and women stood at its center.
They ran households in the absence of men, shielded children and property, tended the wounded, secured what food they could and held the social fabric together at a decisive existential moment.
Ottoman reports, Alqhtani noted, treated Diriyah not as an isolated military force but as a full society. That helps explain the sweeping captivity and deportation measures imposed on women and children after the city’s fall, an implicit recognition that resistance was not only about weapons but about a community that believed in its cause and defended it to the end.
Foreign accounts add another layer. Harford Jones, tasked by the British Empire in the region, cited French historian Felix Mengin, who was then at the court of Muhammad Ali Pasha and had access to correspondence related to Ibrahim Pasha’s campaign.
According to that account, when Imam Abdullah bin Saud learned Ibrahim Pasha was absent from his camp, he ordered attacks on all Turkish lines. The battle raged for hours in searing heat, with sustained gunfire and fierce exchanges.
Amid the clash, women of the Saudi state were seen carrying water jars, moving through live fire to supply defending fighters. The image is stark: women not as distant symbols of morale, but as active participants in danger, embodying sacrifice and solidarity in defense of their state and identity. More
