This is one of those historical reconstructions whose apparent simplicity is purchased only by suppressing precisely those portions of the sources which make the story difficult. Read Ibn Bishr and Mengin entire; then place beside them the early Makkan chronicle of Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr. Almost every proposition above requires either substantial qualification or outright correction. 1. “Sharīf Ghālib betrayed the peace agreement and attacked his son-in-law, ʿUthmān al-Muḍāyifī.” Even the kinship is wrong. Al-Muḍāyifī was not Ghālib’s son-in-law, but the husband of his sister, his brother-in-law. Al-Jabartī states the matter without ambiguity: “This al-Muḍāyifī was the husband of the Sharīf’s sister.” Al-Jabartī further describes him as having left Ghālib, joined the Wahhābī side, gathered tribes for them and directed military expeditions. Nor does Ibn Bishr say that Ghālib “betrayed the peace.” His actual expression is: وفي هذه السنة انتقض الصلح بين غالب الشريف وبين عبد العزيز بن محمد بن سعود “In this year the peace between Sharīf Ghālib and ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Muḥammad b. Saʿūd broke down.” The distinction is not pedantic. انتقض الصلح tells us that the treaty collapsed, it does not tell us, in that sentence, who first violated it. And here an early Makkan witness becomes indispensable. ʿAbd Allāh b. ʿAbd al-Shakūr al-Makkī al-Ḥanafī, d. 1257 AH/1841 CE, was a Makkan Ḥanafī historian and the author of Tārīkh Ashrāf wa-Umarāʾ Makkah al-Mukarramah. His work survives in several manuscripts; the catalogue of the Library of the Sacred Mosque records his name, his Ḥanafī affiliation, his death date and the work itself. Why is he relevant? Because the assertion that later Makkan accounts were inventions of Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān rests upon the assumption that no earlier local Ḥijāzī tradition existed. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr proves otherwise. And his account of the breakdown of the peace is the reverse of that given. He says Sālim b. Shakhbān began acting against: عربان الشريف الذي انعقد عليهم الصلح “the Sharīf’s tribes concerning whom the peace had been concluded,” and says Ghālib consequently wrote to the Saudi rulers: يطلب منهما الوفاء بالعهود “asking them to fulfil the covenants.” According to Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr, Ghālib did not immediately take up the sword. Complaints were exchanged; the Saudi side denied wrongdoing and proposed that Ghālib send a trustworthy man to investigate; an investigator was dispatched; and only thereafter did the dispute deepen. One need not canonise Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr’s every judgment to recognise what follows. “Ghālib betrayed the peace” is not a neutral datum furnished by Ibn Bishr. It is one interpretation of a disputed treaty rupture for which the contemporary Makkan tradition gives precisely the opposite account. The same chronological sleight of hand occurs with al-Muḍāyifī. By the time Ghālib personally moved against him at al-ʿUbaylāʾ, al-Muḍāyifī had not merely whispered a private bayʿah to Āl Saʿūd and then retired peaceably to his home. He had defected from Ghālib, accepted a rival political commission, established himself at a fortified base and gathered surrounding tribes. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr further records raids upon al-Zawrān and ʿAwf, an attack upon al-ʿArj in which houses were allegedly burned and livestock seized, and then says al-Muḍāyifī left his stronghold: قاصداً قتال الطائف “intending to fight al-Ṭāʾif.” Before Ghālib’s own great expedition against al-ʿUbaylāʾ, Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr already places an all-day battle between al-Muḍāyifī and the forces of ʿAbd al-Muʿīn. And, most inconveniently for the apologetic chronology, Mengin himself says much the same thing in principle. After al-Muḍāyifī decided not to return to Ghālib, he requested troops from ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz: pour aller faire la guerre à Ghaleb “to go and make war upon Ghālib.” Thus the very French authority invoked places an intention to wage war upon Ghālib before the later Ghālibian assault which is being made to bear the entire moral weight of the conflict. 2. “The Wahhābīs were once again acting in self-defence.” That conclusion is obtained only by commencing the narrative at the moment most advantageous to it. Certainly, Ghālib subsequently besieged al-Muḍāyifī at al-ʿUbaylāʾ. There is no reason to deny what all sides acknowledge. But history is not transformed into “self-defence” merely by beginning the clock immediately before one’s opponent strikes. By then al-Muḍāyifī had transferred allegiance, accepted rival authority in the Sharīf’s sphere, established an armed redoubt, recruited tribes and become the nucleus of a competing political-military order. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr additionally records actual campaigning before Ghālib’s personal attack; Mengin has al-Muḍāyifī requesting forces expressly “to make war upon Ghālib.” What emerges from the sources is therefore not the pristine moral tableau suggested, an innocent party suddenly assaulted and reluctantly defending itself, but an escalating contest of sovereignty: alleged treaty violations; competing tribal allegiances; al-Muḍāyifī’s defection; rival appointment; armed mobilisation; local fighting; Ghālib’s attack upon al-ʿUbaylāʾ; Saudi reinforcement; and finally the assault upon al-Ṭāʾif. To isolate one episode in the middle of this sequence and baptise the entire campaign “self-defence” is not source criticism. It is chronological excision. 3. “Ibn Bishr says fighting broke out in the marketplaces and homes, resulting in 200 deaths.” Here the source has not merely been abbreviated. Its grammatical structure has been altered. Ibn Bishr says: فدخله عثمان ومن معه من الجموع، وفتحه الله لهم عنوة بغير قتال “ʿUthmān and those with him entered it, and Allāh opened it to them by force, without fighting.” He then continues: وقتلوا من أهله في الأسواق والبيوت نحو مائتين “And they killed from among its inhabitants, in the markets and houses, about two hundred.” And then: وأخذوا من الأموال من البلد أثماناً وأمتاعاً وسلاحاً وقماشاً وشيئاً من الجواهر والسلع المثمنة ما لا يحيط به الحصر ولا يدركه العد They took from the town money, goods, weapons, cloth, jewels and precious merchandise “in quantities which enumeration could not encompass nor counting attain.” He then records the collection of the akhmās and their dispatch to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. Observe what has happened in the paraphrase. Ibn Bishr says: بغير قتال “without fighting.” The post says: “fighting broke out.” Ibn Bishr says: وقتلوا “they killed.” The post reduces this to: “resulting in deaths.” Ibn Bishr says: من أهله “from among its inhabitants.” The paraphrase subtly encourages the reader to imagine nothing but soldiers dying in combat. That is not a translation. It is an exculpatory recasting of the syntax. One should be scrupulous even here: ahl al-Ṭāʾif does not logically prove that every one of the approximately two hundred was wholly unarmed. Ibn Bishr does not supply individual biographies for the dead. But neither does he call them an army, nor say that they fell in “fighting in houses and markets.” He says that the final taking of the town occurred without fighting, and then says they killed inhabitants in the houses and markets. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr’s fuller narration provides the missing architecture of events. There had indeed been bitter fighting beforehand. The walls were assaulted; artillery was used; the defenders resisted. Then the Sharīfian coalition disintegrated. جميع عربان الشريف تفرقوا شذر مذر “All the Sharīf’s Bedouin auxiliaries dispersed in every direction.” A substantial body of men left. Ghālib, hearing that a movement upon Makkah was threatened, departed toward the Holy City. Thereafter, according to Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr, the defensive order of al-Ṭāʾif collapsed. Some fled over the walls in order to escape. Men, women and children fled from the city. Dukhayl Allāh b. Ḥurayb then reportedly overtook the Saudi-aligned army and informed it that al-Ṭāʾif had effectively been abandoned, whereupon the forces returned. Thus there is no contradiction whatever between the two narratives: ferocious siege combat beforehand; collapse of organised defence; final entry without a general battle; killing within the city thereafter. Indeed, Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr renders Ibn Bishr’s terse بغير قتال far more intelligible. What becomes untenable is the attempt to make Ibn Bishr say that the two hundred simply fell in an ordinary continuation of the siege. And notice another convergence which is rarely advertised. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr says that after the sack the accumulated property was carried outside, its fifth taken for the emir, and the remainder divided: كما تقسم الغنائم “as spoils of war are divided.” Ibn Bishr, from the opposite camp, likewise records the vast booty, the collection of the akhmās, and their dispatch to ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. The Makkan chronicler and the Najdī chronicler therefore converge upon the treatment of al-Ṭāʾif’s property as war-booty, even whilst they radically differ over the moral significance of what occurred. 4. “Félix Mengin says a general amnesty was declared after the town submitted.” Certainly. And the word after is precisely the difficulty. Mengin first says that when the attacking force entered al-Ṭāʾif it made short work of the Sharīf’s soldiers, adding: il y eut aussi des habitans de tués “there were also inhabitants who were killed.” Only then comes: Une amnistie générale suivit la soumission de la ville “A general amnesty followed the submission of the town.” His sequence is not obscure: soldiers killed; inhabitants also killed; submission; then amnesty. The amnesty is therefore perfectly compatible with earlier killing. One might reasonably infer that it marked the cessation or regularisation of violence after formal submission. What one cannot do is cite it as though it erased Mengin’s preceding clause. To deploy the amnesty against reports of inhabitants being killed while omitting Mengin’s explicit statement that inhabitants were killed is a singularly unfortunate use of one’s own witness. And Mengin, let us recall, is the same source who earlier says al-Muḍāyifī sought troops “to go and make war upon Ghālib.” Thus Mengin simultaneously complicates both central propositions of the original post: the immaculate “self-defence” chronology and the suggestion that the amnesty somehow excludes prior killing. 5. “The stories of people at prayer, Qurʾān students, women, infants and babies being breastfed are fabrications invented by Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān.” Here the argument encounters a chronological impossibility. Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān was born only in 1816/17 and died in 1886. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr, the Makkan Ḥanafī historian discussed above, died in 1841, and his chronicle already contains the very motifs which are being assigned to Daḥlān’s imagination. His authorship and manuscript tradition are independently catalogued. After narrating the entry into al-Ṭāʾif, Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr says: فقتلوهم قتلاً عاماً “They killed them with a general killing.” He speaks of: الكبير والصغير “the old and the young,” and then explicitly of: وعلى صدر أمه الطفل الرضيع “the nursing infant upon his mother’s breast.” He says the conquerors ascended into the houses searching for those concealed within them and: فيجدون كل جماعة يتدارسون كلام رب العزة … فيقتلونهم وفي أيديهم المصاحف “would find groups studying the Speech of the Lord of Might … and kill them while the muṣḥafs were in their hands.” He then says they went through shops and mosques: ويقتلون الرجل وهو راكع أو ساجد “and would kill a man while he was bowing or prostrating.” These are the very episodes now dismissed as “fabrications of Daḥlān.” Whatever else one wishes to say about them, Daḥlān cannot have invented a narrative which is already present in an earlier Makkan chronicle. That does not oblige the historian to treat every sentence of Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr as revelation. His hostility toward the Najdī movement is patent. He writes from within the wounded memory of the old Ḥijāzī order, just as Ibn Bishr writes from within the triumphal sacred history of the Saudi-Najdī cause. But the proper conclusion from partisanship is critical comparison, not selective annihilation of the witness one dislikes. And Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr’s narrative is considerably more discriminating than the caricature of an indiscriminate “massacre legend” suggests. After the general violence, he separately describes armed holdouts who fortified themselves in houses and continued fighting for several days. He therefore plainly distinguishes those engaged in continuing combat from the victims described immediately beforehand. He then narrates a formal offer of amān. Ibn Shakhbān allegedly assures one group that they are under his and ʿUthmān’s protection: وأنكم في وجه ابن شقبان وعثمان and binds himself to them: بالعهود والمواثيق “with covenants and solemn pledges.” The result, Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr says, was: فعند ذلك كفوا أيديهم عن القتال كافة “thereupon they all withheld their hands from fighting.” He then alleges that they were disarmed and that one surrendered group was subsequently taken out and executed at Daqāq al-Lawz. A separate body was treated differently: Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr says their guarantee extended to their lives but not their goods, whereupon they were stripped, dispossessed and expelled rather than executed. That distinction is historiographically significant. His account differentiates siege combat, flight, post-entry killing, armed resistance, negotiation, surrender, amān, alleged execution, survival and dispossession. This is not proof that every number and every scene is exact, but it is unmistakably an early, elaborate Makkan tradition. Daḥlān did not create it ex nihilo. Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr is rejected because he is partisan; yet Ibn Bishr’s plainly partisan chronicle is paraphrased so generously that “without fighting” becomes “fighting broke out,” “they killed inhabitants” becomes “200 people died,” and the enormous seizure of property disappears almost entirely. Mengin is invoked for his amnesty, while his statement that inhabitants were killed immediately beforehand is passed over. And then Daḥlān is accused of fabricating traditions which can be read, in substantially the same form, in an earlier Makkan Ḥanafī chronicle. The sober conclusion is therefore much less congenial to this apologetic reconstruction. Ghālib’s later attack upon al-Muḍāyifī is real; it is not the beginning of the conflict. The treaty broke down; Ibn Bishr does not tell us in the cited sentence that Ghālib betrayed it. Al-Muḍāyifī was Ghālib’s brother-in-law, not his son-in-law. Mengin himself has al-Muḍāyifī requesting troops to wage war upon Ghālib. Ibn Bishr says the final entry into al-Ṭāʾif occurred without fighting, after which the Wahhābīs killed approximately two hundred inhabitants in markets and houses and seized immense quantities of property. Mengin says inhabitants were also killed, and only thereafter records the general amnesty. And Ibn ʿAbd al-Shakūr demonstrates beyond dispute that the narratives of the nursing infant, Qurʾān readers and worshippers belong to an earlier Makkan historical tradition and were not creations originating in the pen of Aḥmad Zaynī Daḥlān. The legitimate historical controversy concerns the magnitude of the killing, the reliability of particular atrocity reports, and the reconciliation, or irreconcilability, of the rival Ḥijāzī and Najdī traditions. What the sources do not sustain is the immaculate modern fable in which Ghālib treacherously assaults his “son-in-law,” two hundred men merely fall in ordinary fighting, a universal amnesty follows, and the old Makkan memory of the sack is afterwards manufactured wholesale by Daḥlān.