y, Abdullah, the eldest son of the Hashemite leader and Sharif of Mecca Husayn ibn Ali, was sent with seventy men to Tā'if. Whilst his activities in the area aroused the suspicion of Ahmed Bey, Ghalib Pasha was unconcerned by so small a force. Abdullah secretly built up his army to 5,000 men. He then cut the telegraph wires to the city and then went on the attack. All Hashemite assaults on the city were repelled by the mountain guns, and both sides settled down to an uneasy siege. However, Hashemite guns were slowly brought up to Tā'if, and then the city held out a little longer; it finally surrendered on 22 September. The city thus later became a part of the self-proclaimed HashemiteKingdom of Hejaz.
1924 – present: Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
1924: Conquest by the Ikhwan under Abdulaziz al-Saud
Ta'if did not remain in Hashemite hands for very long however. Tensions between the King of the Hejaz, Husayn ibn Ali, and Abdulaziz al-Saud, Sultan of Nejd, soon broke out into violence. Although hostilities were temporarily patched up in 1919, by September 1924 the then Saudi-sponsored Ikhwan under the leadership of Sultan bin Bajad and Khaled bin Luwai was ready to attack Ta'if. The city was supposed to have been defended by the king’s son, Ali, but he fled in panic with his troops. 300 of them were slain by the Ikhwan. In 1926 Abdulaziz al-Saud was officially recognized as the new king of Hejaz. Ta'if remained a part of the Kingdom of Hejaz until Abdulaziz al-Saud unified his two kingdoms into one under the title of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932. The king himself was later to die in the city on 9 November 1953.
1940s: Modernization under the Saudis
Ta'if was still little more than a medieval city when the Saudis took control of it. However, they later embarked on a project of modernizing the city. Saudi Arabia’s first public power generator was set up in Ta'if in the late 1940s. In terms of building roads to
