God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Dargai Heights had to be retaken before the expedition could advance deeper into the Tirah country, and its retaking became, in the words of Woosnam Mills, the ‘high water-mark of British courage before the foe’. It also gave rise to a great deal of bitterness among the troops: ‘Not only were grave charges preferred of blundering and causing unnecessary loss of life, but a spirit of ill-feeling, created by invidious comparisons, was aroused in the breasts of the troops who fought that day.’

  On the afternoon of 20 October a series of frontal assaults was launched, each preceded by as fierce a barrage as General Lockhart’s nineteen mountain guns could muster. ‘What appeared to the observer,’ wrote Mills, ‘was an inaccessible cliff whose top rose five hundred yards away in front . . . The enemy had constructed tiers of stone galleries, some of them four feet thick and proof against the seven-pounder shell from the mountain batteries. Any advance being attempted, the whole side of the cliff for a width of three hundred yards smoked and vomited forth a terrific storm of bullets.’ Four assaults were launched, the first two by riflemen of the 1st battalion of the 2nd Gurkha Rifles. Each wave was caught by concentrated fire as it tried to cross the open ground below the cliffs, to be beaten back or broken into small groups of men pinned down behind whatever scant cover they could find. Those who followed could do no better: ‘There was an indescribable confusion . . .Two companies of the Dorsets and Derbyshires attempted to cross and were also torn apart, then the 3rd Sikhs, who made more magnificently courageous but per-fectly useless attempts to cross the zone of fire . . . Nothing but a wonderful effort could save the situation.’

  The Gordon Highlanders, held in reserve, were now called up to repeat their exercise of two days earlier. Once they were in position their commanding officer, Colonel Mathias, stepped forward, ordered his men to charge magazines and fix bayonets, and then addressed them in a ‘loud, clear voice: “Men of the Gordon Highlanders, listen to me. The General says this position must be taken at all hazards, and we will take it in front of the whole division.”’ After a four-minute barrage the field guns stopped firing and there was a moment of silence: ‘“Are you ready?” again rang the voice of Colonel Mathias, and a mad, wild cheer, bred of the courage which lies deep in the hearts of men, was the response. “Come on,” shouted the Colonel. Then the pipers skirled the regimental war song, “and with the lilt of a big parade” the gay Gordons stepped forth.’

  The Gordons advanced to the sound of the Haughs o’ Cromdale, memorably played by Piper Findlater, who earned one of the two Victoria Crosses awarded for this action by playing on with both his legs shot through. Those who survived the first hundred yards of open ground now found themselves crammed behind a low wall of rock with survivors from the earlier charges. Colonel Mathias then waved his cork helmet and again called his men forward:

  The effect was magical: as if by resurrection the whole space seemed alive, and a great wave of men – Highlanders, Gurkhas, Dorsets, Sikhs, and Derbyshires – came headlong over the crest. From this moment the fire of the enemy, which had been intense, slackened . . . A mere breathing space under the last cover – just time to brace up the muscles anew – and the mixed band of warriors again moved out to the final assault.

  The battle of Dargai Heights occupies a special place in the annals of the scores of North-West Frontier campaigns that took place between 1846, when the Guides were formed, and 1947, when the British finally left India. It reversed the usual norms, by which it was the tribesmen who charged and who took the heaviest casualties. In this instance the Afridi defenders withdrew along the ridge during the last phase of the attack, taking their few dead and wounded with them. By contrast, their attackers suffered more than two hundred casualties, including four British officers, fifteen British NCOs and private soldiers, and twenty Gurkhas killed. Dargai also cemented an ‘auld alliance’ between the Gurkhas and the Highlanders stretching back to Delhi Ridge and the Second Afghan War: the men of the Gordons helping the Gurkhas bring down their dead and wounded and the Gurkhas reciprocating by putting up the Gordons’ tents when they returned late to camp. As Rudyard Kipling’s Mulvaney puts it, ‘Scotchies and the Gurkys are twins’.

  Until recent years, this remained the only occasion on which the tribal lands of Tirah were entered by an outside force. ‘The boast of the tribes’, declared General Lockhart in his closing despatch, ‘was that no foreign army – Moghal, Afghan, Persian or British – had ever penetrated, or could ever penetrate, their country; but after carrying three strong positions, and being for weeks subsequently engaged in daily skirmishes, the troops succeeded in visiting every portion of Tirah.’ What his despatch glossed over was that the final submission of the tribes took months to accomplish, accompanied by a bitter campaign of guerrilla warfare in the form of sniping by night and ambushing by day. Only by punitive measures that included the destruction of villages, the burning of crops and the confiscation of livestock did Lockhart’s Tirah Field Force finally reduce the Afridi and Orakzai to submission. By the end of the Tirah campaign the casualty figures had risen to 43 British officers killed and 90 wounded; 136 British NCOs and men killed and 415 wounded; 6 Indian Native Officers killed and 36 wounded; and 320 Indian and Gurkha NCOs and men killed and 871 wounded. Most of these casualties were incurred during the ‘pacification’ phase of the campaign.

  This heavy-footed stamping-out of the frontier jihad came at a price. ‘Burning houses and destroying crops,’ wrote a critical ‘Bobs’ Roberts, who had left India in 1893 after forty-one years’ military service and was now Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, ‘unless followed up by some sort of authority and jurisdiction, mean . . . for us a rich harvest of hatred and revenge.’

  Of the Mad Fakir, Mullah Sadulla, nothing more was ever heard.

  10

  The Brotherhood

  Fortunately they did not succeed. We say fortunately, for if ever Egypt should cease to be ruled by a vigorous government, the Wahabees would raise their heads: they would overrun Arabia, being weakened neither in numbers nor in fanaticism, and Turkey would be unable to protect the holy towns. The consequences of such an event would produce discontent in the whole East.

  T. E. Ravenshaw,

  Memorandum on the Sect of the Wahabees, 1864

  In the autumn of 1863 two travellers set out from Damascus for the city of Hail, capital of what had formerly been northern Nejd but was now the Ottoman province of Jabal Shammar. They gave out that they were Syrian Christian doctors, and were dressed accordingly. In fact, neither man was a doctor and only one was a Syrian. The other, then aged thirty-seven, was a Jew by ancestry and a Christian by upbringing, an Englishman christened William Gifford Palgrave who also answered at different stages of his life to William Cohen and Michael Sohail. After distinguishing himself as a scholar at Oxford, Palgrave had gone out to India with a lieutenant’s commission in the 8th Bombay Native Infantry. But he was not cut out for a military career, and after two years he resigned his commission, converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit missionary. In 1855, drawn to the Arab world by his studies and discovering in himself a remarkable gift for languages, he joined the French Jesuit Mission in Syria. Within a few years he had become so accomplished an Arabic speaker and so at ease with local customs that he could pass himself off as a native of the region. He became a local agent of the French Government and worked to extend French interests in Egypt and the Middle East, and it seems to have been in this capacity that he undertook his remarkable journey to the heart of Arabia, though he afterwards declared that he had been driven by ‘a natural curiosity to know the yet unknown; and the restlessness of enterprise not rare in Englishmen’. He travelled as a Syrian doctor, Selim Abu Mahmoud al-Eis, and he took with him several camel-loads of pills, powders and potions bought with French money in Damascus.

  When Palgrave and his Syrian companion Barakat reached the city of Hail, lying more or less midway between Basra and Medina, they were warmly welcomed by the Emir and treated as his
guests. Indeed, so hospitable were the inhabitants of Hail that Palgrave came to regard it as the ideal state, a place where people of all races and religions mixed freely and as equals. However, Palgrave’s ultimate destination was not Hail but Riyadh, a place then considered so dangerous to outsiders that the inhabitants of Hail regarded it as ‘a sort of lion’s den, in which few venture and yet fewer return’. This was because Riyadh and the country surrounding it were, in Palgrave’s words, ‘the genuine Wahhabee country . . . the stronghold of fanatics, who consider everyone save themselves an infidel or a heretic, and who regard the slaughter of an infidel or a heretic as a duty, at least a merit . . . Nejd has become for all but her born sons doubly dangerous, and doubly hateful.’

  Since the fatal outcome of Ali Pasha’s campaign in 1818 the Wahhabis had regrouped under FAISAL IBN SAUD, great-great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty. After establishing himself on the throne of Riyadh in 1842 he had restored something of the vigour and religious zeal that had characterised the first Saudi empire established by Muhammad ibn Saud. However, the Wahhabis had failed to recover Nejd’s northern territory, Jabal Shammar, which had become the seat of the Saudis’ main rivals, the Ibn Rashid dynasty. This rivalry helps to explain why William Palgrave found the Emir of Hail and his people so hostile towards the Wahhabis, and so concerned when he made it known that Riyadh was his real destination.

  With the direst of warnings ringing in their ears, the two ‘Syrian doctors’ rode out of Hail in early September 1862 as part of a small camel caravan. It took them nine days to reach the borders of Jabal Shammar, the point at which their safe-conducts ran out. They pushed on, reaching the Wahhabi capital of Riyadh on 13 October unmolested and in good shape. To their relief, their supposed Syrian Christian identities aroused no obvious hostility even from the Wahhabi ulema, the explanation offered being that the Wahhabis’ real enemies were neither Christians nor Jews but those polytheists who purported to be followers of Islam. The fact that they came as doctors also helped to smooth their presence, for they found themselves in great demand, called upon to treat as many as fifty different maladies.

  Palgrave and Barakat spent forty-two days in Riyadh, and between consultations found time to tour every quarter of the city, described by Palgrave as ‘large and square, crowned by high towers and strong walls of defence, a mass of roofs and terraces, where overtopping all frowned the huge but irregular pile of Faisal’s royal castle, and hard by it rose the scarce less conspicuous palace built and inhabited by his eldest son Abdullah . . . All round for full three miles over the surrounding plain, but more especially to the west and south, waved a sea of palm trees above green fields and well-watered gardens.’

  To Palgrave’s further surprise, he was allowed into the city’s plain and unadorned mosques, where he made the acquaintance of a number of Wahhabi clerics, who left him in no doubt that it was the aal as-Sheikh, or the ‘Family of the Sheikh’, as the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab were known, who ran the ulema. ‘The whole family’, declared Palgrave, ‘has constantly held the highest judicial and religious posts in the Wahhabee empire, and has amassed considerable wealth, let us hope by none but honest means. Its members . . . exercise a predominant influence in the state, and, though never decorated with the official titles belonging to purely civil or military authority, do yet, in reality, rule the rulers of the land, and their own masters of the Sa’ood dynasty never venture to contradict them, even on matters of policy or war.’

  Although Palgrave never met the ailing Emir, Faisal ibn Saud, he got to know his two eldest sons, who were squaring up to each other in preparation for the struggle for succession that would follow upon the death of their father. The younger son, Saud, Palgrave found to be affable and warm-hearted, but his elder half-brother ABDULLAH IBN SAUD, the heir-apparent, was a more duplicitous figure, who after several consultations asked Palgrave point-blank for a supply of strychnine. This led Palgrave to accuse him to his face of seeking to poison his father the Emir, a charge that so angered Abdullah that he threatened to expose the ‘Syrian’ as an Englishman and have him killed. Palgrave kept his nerve, but that same night he and his companion slipped out of Riyadh and, after hiding up for several days outside the city, made for the coast. A shipwreck off Bahrain followed in which all Palgrave’s notes were lost, and it was not until late in 1863 that he was able to get back to Europe to stake his claim as the first Westerner to visit the Wahhabi capital.

  Palgrave’s travels have been overshadowed by the Arabian journeys of Burton, Blunt and Doughty – and by the charge of fakery laid against him by the third Westerner to reach Riyadh, Harry St John Philby. But his description of Wahhabi rule deserves to be remembered. In Nejd he saw much to admire and applaud: ‘The Wahhabee empire is a compact and well organised government, where centralisation is well understood and effectually carried out.’ And yet, ‘how much misdirected zeal; what concentrated though ill-applied courage and perseverance.’ Wahhabi rule rested on ‘force and fanaticism’ and, in his view, it was bound to fail: ‘Incapable of true internal progress, hostile to commerce, unfavourable to arts and even to agriculture, and in the highest degree intolerant and aggressive, it can neither better itself nor benefit others; while the order and calm which it sometimes spreads over the lands of its conquest, are described in the oft-cited ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant [where they make a desert they call it peace] of the Roman annalist [Tacitus].’

  Isolated though Nejd’s Wahhabi culture was, to Palgrave it represented ‘a new well-head to the bitter wars of Islam’ and a threat to the wider world:

  This empire is capable of frontier extension, and hence is dangerous to its neighbours, some of whom it is even now swallowing up, and will certainly swallow more, if not otherwise prevented . . . We may add that its weakest point lies in family rivalries and feuds of succession, which, joined to the anti-Wahhabee reaction existing far and wide throughout Arabia, may one day much disintegrate and shatter the Nejdean empire, yet not destroy it altogether . . . But so long as Wahhabeeism shall prevail in the centre and uplands of Arabia, small indeed are the hopes of civilisation, advancement, and national prosperity for the Arab race.

  The second British visitor to Riyadh has, if anything, been even more neglected than Palgrave. Lieutenant-Colonel Lewis Pelly was British Resident in the Gulf for a decade from the mid-1860s. Concerned and perhaps a little put out by Palgrave’s French-sponsored journey, Pelly wrote to Emir Faisal and was invited to call on him in his capital in 1865. He found the Emir blind and enfeebled, but still every inch the ruler. He spoke of himself in the royal plural and considered the entire Arabian peninsula to be rightfully ‘ours’ – and he used for himself the dual title of emir and imam. ‘It is not uncommon to hear the Bedouins speak of the Ameer Fysul as Ben Sood [Ibn Saud],’ wrote Pelly in his official report. ‘But the title which is current among his own immediate dependants at the capital is that of Imam, implying spiritual leadership . . . The Imam takes precedence of all Moolahs, and is mentioned in public prayers in terms almost equivalent with those that are lavished on the prophet [Prophet Muhammad] himself.’ The precedent first established by Faisal’s forebear Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud in 1773 was evidently still going strong, and with it the cult status afforded the Wahhabi state’s joint emir and imam. The family alliance between the aal as-Sheikh and the Al-Saud was also being maintained through the marriage of Al-Wahhab’s granddaughter to the son of the Emir’s heir apparent, Abdullah. Nevertheless, it seemed to Pelly that the Saudis rather than the Wahhabis were in charge.

  Like Palgrave before him, Pelly left Riyadh troubled by the ideology of Wahhabism: ‘I came to the conclusion that while the Imam himself was a sensible and experienced man, yet he was surrounded by the most excitable, unscrupulous, dangerous and fanatical people that one could well come across.’ A decade later the traveller Charles Doughty came to the same conclusion after his more famous crossing of the Arabian desert: ‘I passed one good day in Arabia: and all t
he rest were evil because of the people’s fanaticism.’

  With the passing of Emir Faisal in 1865 the sibling rivalry Palgrave had seen developing in Riyadh in 1863 became open warfare. In his determination to overcome his younger brother Abdullah ibn Saud turned for help to his father’s enemy Muhammad ibn Rashid, Emir of Hail and ruler of Jebel Shammar. In the ensuing struggle Saud was killed and Abdullah imprisoned by his supposed ally, and subsequently exiled. Ibn Rashid then took over southern Nejd in the name of the Ottomans and set about removing all traces of opposition and heresy as far as his tenuous hold over the region would allow. The surviving sons and grandsons of Faisal were driven into exile, the heir presumptive, ABDUL-RAHMAN IBN SAUD, fleeing first to the Empty Quarter and then to Kuwait, taking with him his eldest son Abdul Aziz bin Abdul-Rahman ibn Saud. Accounts differ as to when this exile began or how old the boy was, but it is said that for eleven years he ate ‘the bread of adversity’. The upper hierarchy of the Wahhabi ulema, the aal as-Sheikh, accompanied the Ibn Sauds into exile, but the remainder appear to have found shelter among the desert tribes of Nejd.

  In 1901 – the same year in which Amir Abdur Rahman, creator of the nation state of Afghanistan, died in Kabul, and Abdullah Ali, amir of the Hindustani Fanatics, died in Buner – Abdul-Rahman ibn Saud stepped down as head of the house of Saud in favour of his eldest son, although he retained the title of Imam of Nejd. Official accounts give the new Emir’s age as twenty-one. With the help of his host, Mubarak the Great, Sheikh of Kuwait, the young exile then set about reclaiming his kingdom.

  The manner in which IBN SAUD (as he afterwards became known to the outside world) achieved this is the stuff of legend in Arabia: how with a force of eighty – or was it twenty? – camel-men lent him by his protector the young warrior crossed the desert and made his way into Riyadh undetected; how he and fifteen – or perhaps eight – picked men slipped into the Rashidi governor’s palace by night and hid in the harem; how, when the governor and his men arrived next morning from the nearby fortress in which they slept at night, they were ambushed and killed; and how the young Emir then took over Riyadh and announced the restoration of the House of Saud. The legend continues with the Bedouin tribes of southern Nejd responding enthusiastically to his call to arms, although rather less is said about the guns and trained marksmen supplied by Kuwait. Within two years Ibn Saud felt strong enough to attempt to reclaim the lost northern territories still held by Emir Abdul Aziz ibn Rashid of Hail. In June 1904 he took on a modern Turkish army sent in response to his rival’s appeal for aid, and was soundly defeated. This setback forced him to rethink his tactics.