“Barakat and I resolve on continuing our walk through the town. Ri’ad is divided into four quarters: one, the northeastern, to which the palaces of the royal family, the houses of the state officers, and the richer class of proprietors and government men belong. Here the dwellings are in general high, and the streets tolerably straight and not over-narrow; but the ground level is low, and it is perhaps the least healthy locality of all. Next the northwestern, where we are lodged; a large irregular mass of houses, varying in size and keeping from the best to the worst; here strangers, and often certain equivocal characters, never wanting in large towns, however strictly regulated, chiefly abide; here too are many noted for disaffection, and harboring other tenets than those of the son of ’Abdel-Wahab, men prone to old Arab ways and customs in ‘Church and State,’ to borrow our own analogous phrase; here are country chiefs, here Bedouins and natives of Zulphah and the outskirts find a lodging; here, if anywhere, is tobacco smoked or sold, and the Koran neglected in proportion. However, I would not have my readers to think our entire neighborhood so absolutely disreputable. “But we gladly turn away our eyes from so dreary a view to refresh them by a survey of the southwestern quarter, the chosen abode of formalism and orthodoxy. In this section of Ri’ad inhabit the most energetic Zelators, here are the most irreproachable five-prayers-a-day Nedjeans, and all the flower of Wahabee purity. Above all, here dwell the principal survivors of the family of the great religions Founder, the posterity of ’Abd-el-Wahab escaped from the Egyptian sword, and free from every stain of foreign contamination. Mosques of primitive simplicity and ample space, where the great dogma, not however confined to Ri’ad, that ‘we are exactly in the right, and everyone else is in the wrong,’ is daily inculcated to crowds of auditors, overjoyed to find Paradise all theirs and none’s but theirs; smaller oratories of Musallas, wells for ablution, and Kaabah-directed niches adorn every corner, and fill up every interval of house or orchard. The streets of this quarter are open, and the air healthy, so that the invisible blessing is seconded by sensible and visible privileges of Providence. Think not, gentle reader, that I am indulging in gratuitous or self-invented irony; I am only rendering expression for expression, and almost word for word, the talk of true Wahabees, when describing the model quarter of their model city. This section of the town is spacious and well-peopled, and flourishes, the citadel of national and religious intolerance, pious pride, and genuine Wahabeeism.