During the mid-Holocene (MH, 6,000 years BP), precessional forcing drove enhanced monsoon rainfall, expanded vegetation cover, and reduced dust emissions throughout the African Sahara. The orbital forcing and feedback of vegetation albedo have been widely studied with climate models, but are found to be insufficient to explain the magnitude and location of rainfall anomalies suggested from proxy reconstructions. The feedback of reduced Saharan dust loading has been less-studied because Paleoclimate Modelling Intercomparison Project (PMIP) Phase 2/3 models did not incorporate the decreased MH Saharan dust emissions. Several recent modeling studies investigated the MH Saharan hydroclimate response to reduced dust loading; however, their models only resolved the direct effect from dust aerosols (i.e. direct radiative forcing), which leaves the contribution from indirect dust aerosol effects (i.e. dust aerosol-cloud interactions) largely unknown. Here we investigate the hydroclimate response due to Saharan dust using CESM CAM5-chem, which includes both the direct and indirect dust aerosol effects. In the simulations, reduced Saharan dust directly increases monsoon season (JJAS) net shortwave radiative flux at the surface, which drives continental warming. Convective clouds and convective precipitation are subsequently enhanced and, due to the overwhelming convective nature of this monsoonal region, total Saharan (20–31°N, 20°W–30°E) precipitation increases by 11.9%. However, indirect dust aerosol effects counteract the increase from convection precipitation. A reduction in Saharan dust decreases cloud nuclei number concentration and increases cloud droplet size, which in turn reduces stratus cloud cover and large-scale stable rainfall. Overall, the decrease in large-scale stable rainfall due to indirect dust effects reduces total precipitation by 12.5%. The total rainfall increase of 0.27 mm/day from reduced dust is significant but smaller than the response to changes in vegetation cover (1.19 mm/day). While these results indicate that less Saharan dust during the MH likely enhanced Saharan rainfall, they also suggest that a reduction in the indirect effects of dust likely dampened the overall response of rainfall to the MH dust forcing.