God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  At this critical juncture Ibn Saud turned for help to the members of two tribes, the Artaiba and Harb, who had isolated themselves from the rest of the Bedouin community in Nejd and had dedicated themselves to Wahhabism in its most austere form. It was here in the desert that the torch of Wahhabism had been kept burning, first during the dark days of Ottoman oppression and later under the Ibn Rashids of Hail – very much as the Hindustani Fanatics kept the message of Syed Ahmad’s Wahhabism alive in the Mahabun Mountain.

  These Wahhabi zealots had named themselves Al-Ikhwan or the Brotherhood. They had abandoned the traditional nomadic life of their forefathers and had retreated into closed settlements which they termed hujar. The word – hijra, in the singular – had its origins in the term used to describe the Prophet’s famous withdrawal from ungodly Mecca to Medina, and it was now used to denote the Ikhwan’s intention to live as true muwahhidun, or Unitarians, in a domain of Faith, as the Prophet had in Medina. To signal their abandonment of the nomadic way of life they had discarded the traditional Bedouin head-band, said to have come from the rope used to hobble camels, and wore their kaffiya (head-cloths) loose. To further distinguish themselves from polytheists and unbelievers, they wore their robes short to leave the ankle exposed and their beards with the moustache trimmed and the beard henna’d and worn long at the front – supposedly in accordance with the Prophet’s requirements as set down in the Hadith. In line with traditional custom reinforced by the founder of their movement, their womenfolk remained out of sight and out of mind.

  It was afterwards propagated by Harry St John Philby and others that the Ikhwan phenomenon was the brain-child of Ibn Saud, ‘the result not of accident but of a well-considered design, conceived with no less a purpose than that of remedying the shortcomings of the Arab race.’ According to Philby, the Emir set out deliberately to build an army that was both fanatical and disciplined ‘by laying at Artawiyyaa, an insignificant watering-place on the Kuwait–Qasim track, the foundation stone of a new Freemasonry, which, under the name of Ikhwan or the “Brothers” has in the course of a decade transformed the character of Badawin society.’ It would be more accurate to say that Ibn Saud recognised in the Ikhwan the most highly motivated element of the population apart from the Wahhabi ulema and then exploited these qualities to their mutual advantage. That Wahhabism was already undergoing a revival before Ibn Saud’s intervention can be deduced from the activities of Wahhabi missionaries in Central Asia. In Turkestan in 1871 a group of Wahhabi fighters had attacked a Russian outpost in Khokand, inspired by a Wahhabi preacher named Sudi Badal. Forty years later a Wahhabi named Sayed Shari Mohamed established a mission in Tashkent. Now, in Nejd, Ibn Saud’s genius as a nation-builder first revealed itself in his dealings with the Ikhwan zealots.

  The Saudi emirs had long claimed for themselves the authority of imamship, but young Ibn Saud’s position was unusual in that his father, after abdicating in his favour, had retained the title of Imam of Nejd. To get round this obstacle Ibn Saud presented himself to the Ikhwan specifically as their imam – and from this time onwards he was always spoken of among the Ikhwan as al- Imam and never as ‘the Emir’. By this means Ibn Saud gained the religious authority to declare jihad on their mutual enemy, the non-Wahhabis of Hail.

  It is unlikely that the Ikhwan had been mobilised in time to take part in the first great battle between the forces of the two emirs of Nejd and Hail fought in 1906, but the death of Abdul Aziz ibn Rashid of Hail in that encounter gave Ibn Saud the breathing space he needed to build up the Ikhwan into a force to be reckoned with. From about 1910 onwards the Imam of the Ikhwan embarked on an audacious programme to strengthen the existing Ikhwan communities and establish new ones. By supporting them with funds he induced other Bedouin tribes to follow the example of the Al-Ikhwan and to settle at desert oases, each in their own hujar, deliberately relocating families so that the old tribal loyalties began to break down. Along with agricultural equipment and training, Ibn Saud provided houses, mosques, religious schools and, most important of all, religious teachers: Wahhabi mullahs who were able to instruct the settlers in the doctrine of God’s oneness as enshrined in the teachings of Al-Wahhab and his descendants. To further reinforce the message, he required the local chieftain and all the elders in each hujar to attend courses of religious instruction in the central mosques at Riyadh and Uyainah. All this cost the Emir and Imam a great deal of money which he could ill afford, but it secured him an armed and loyal force that answered to him alone, spread out strategically in small bases all over the country. ‘His new colonies’, wrote St John Philby in 1920,

  are but cantonments of his standing army of 30,000 men or more, and every man-child born therein is a recruit to his forces from the day of his birth. He found the Badawin homeless, poor, without religion, and cursed with a tribal organisation which made united action impossible and strife inevitable. In the new colonies he has settled them on the land with the fear of God and the hope of Paradise in their hearts, substituting the brotherhood of a common faith for that of a common ancestry, and thus uniting in common allegiance to himself as the viceregent of God elements hitherto incapable of fusion. At the same time he has made war unsparingly on the old tribal practices, the old game of raid and counter-raid is forbidden in his territories, and many a tribe has felt the crushing weight of his wrath for transgression of his laws; peace reigns where peace was known not before.

  Within the space of a decade Ibn Saud succeeded in repeating what it had taken his ancestors more than half a century to accomplish: the unification under the conjoined banners of Al-Saud and Al-Wahhab of a number of disparate tribes who now thought and acted almost as one. But the unification of the Nejdi tribes was only the start, for as even Harry St John Philby had to acknowledge, the Wahhabis’ ‘most remarkable characteristic’ was their ‘uncompromising hatred of their Muslim neighbours . . . The Shias are frankly condemned as infidels or polytheists, but it is for the orthodox congregation of the four Sunni churches – Turks, Egyptians, Hijazis, Syrians, Mesopotamians, Indians and the like – that the Wahhabis reserve the undiluted venom of their hatred.’ The hostility that the tribes had traditionally directed towards each other was now redirected at the outside world.

  For the first decade of Ibn Saud’s rise to power the British were content to watch from the side-lines, their chief concern being to preserve the status quo as represented by the authority of the Ottomans, reflected in the Anglo-Turkish accord of 1901 by which Britain agreed to remain neutral in the affairs of Arabia. Through their Political Agency in Kuwait, set up by the Government of India in 1904, they maintained good relations with the Emir of Kuwait and viewed the family of Ibn Saud as ‘merely notable as hereditary amirs of the Wahhabis’. But by degrees their views changed, a change initiated by the arrival in Kuwait in 1909 of a new Political Agent, a thirty-one-year-old Indian Army captain with the unlikely name of William Shakespear.

  Born in the Punjab of a well-known Anglo-Indian military family, fluent in Arabic and a keen traveller, Shakespear first established himself in the region with a number of forays into the desert along Kuwait’s western border. Then in April 1910 he had his first opportunity to meet the Emir of Nejd when Ibn Saud and his brothers rode into Kuwait to make a courtesy call on their old patron and ally. ‘Abdul Aziz,’ reported Shakespear, ‘now in his 31st year, is fair, handsome and considerably above average Arab height . . . He has a frank, open face, and after initial reserve, is of genial and courteous manner.’ Shakespear was surprised to find the Emir ‘broad-minded and straight’, even if those about him were ‘dour and taciturn’.

  A year later a more informal meeting led Shakespear to conclude that here was an Arab leader whose intelligence and strength of character matched his ambition. Ibn Saud told him of his family’s struggles and made no bones of his wish to form an alliance with the British against the Ottomans: ‘We Wahhabis hate the Turks only less than we hate the Persians for the infidel practices which they have imported into the
true and pure faith revealed to us in the Koran.’ In his subsequent report Shakespear noted that ‘hatred of the Turk seems to be the one idea common to all the tribes and the only one for which they would sink their differences’, adding that ‘a revolt is not only probable but would be welcomed by every tribe throughout the peninsula’.

  Shakespear’s enthusiastic promotion of the notion of an ‘Arab revolt’ against the Ottomans was not well received in Whitehall, in part because the Foreign Office took the view that this was meddling by the Government of India. Nevertheless, Shakespear was given permission to mount a private expedition that took him from Kuwait to Riyadh and then westwards right across the great Arabian desert to the Hijaz. At Riyadh he talked to Ibn Saud in private and at length, and was again told that the future of Arabia rested on an alliance between the Arabs and Great Britain. Towards the end of May 1914 Shakespear and his travel-worn party emerged from the desert at Suez after a journey of some eighteen hundred miles on foot and on camel-back, much of it through regions previously unmapped and unrecorded. He reported to the British Residency in Cairo, where he found Lord Kitchener and others unimpressed by his advocacy of Ibn Saud. In the eyes of the British Government there was only one Arab leader – SHARIF HUSAYN ibn Ali, Emir of the Hijaz, whose Hashimite dynasty was widely (if incorrectly) regarded as hereditary holder of the most sacred office in the Muslim world: guardianship of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and protectors of the Hajj.

  Following the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 the Ottoman government made the fateful decision to throw in their lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary and proclaim jihad against Britain, France and Russia in the name of the caliph. For the Triple Entente it now became a matter of urgency to find a Muslim leader who would join with them against the Ottoman Empire, the obvious man being Sharif Husayn. Colonel T. E. Lawrence’s masterly report for the British Cabinet, written after the war and entitled Reconstruction of Arabia, says it all:

  When war broke out an urgent need to divide Islam was added, and we became reconciled to seek for allies rather than subjects. We therefore took advantage of the dissatisfaction felt by the Arabic-speaking peoples with their alien rulers, and of the tendency, each day more visible, of the subject Eastern peoples to demand a share of the dangers of government. We hoped by the creation of a ring of client states, themselves insisting on our patronage, to turn the present and future flank of any foreign power with designs on the three rivers [Iraq]. The greatest obstacle, from the war standpoint, to any Arab movement, was its greatest virtue in peace-time – the lack of solidarity between the various Arab movements . . . The Sherif [Husayn] was ultimately chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam.

  Shakespear was ordered to bring Ibn Saud and his Bedouin tribes in on the side of Britain. After some ‘hard trekking’ he met the emir in December 1914 as he rode northwards from Riyadh with his Ikhwan army to continue his own private war against his old enemy, the pro-Turkish Emir of Hail. While on the march the two men worked on a draft treaty of friendship by which Britain would acknowledge Ibn Saud’s independence and guarantee him against external aggression by his enemies. With his work done and despite the entreaties of Ibn Saud that he should leave before the coming battle, Shakespear chose to stay on. According to Ibn Saud, he refused to leave, declaring that to do so would be ‘a blemish on my honour, and the honour of my country’. On 14 January he wrote to his brother to tell him that Ibn Saud’s ghazu (war party), consisting of several thousand horsemen armed with rifles and an equal number of camel-riders armed with scimitars and spears, was on the move ‘for a biggish battle’, and that he was going with them. He closed his letter with the remark that ‘Bin Saud wants me to clear out but I want to see the show and I don’t think it will be very unsafe really’. All might have been well had Shakespear but discarded his khaki uniform and eye-catching cork sun helmet for Arab dress, as he was asked.

  On 24 January 1915 the two armies closed on each other in the desert near an oasis called Jarab. As Shakespear had feared might happen, one of Ibn Saud’s allies changed sides at a critical moment, turning what would have been a decisive victory for the Emir of Nejd into a bloody draw. During the mêlée, a party of the Emir of Hail’s horsemen broke away from the main battle to charge the sand-dunes where Shakespear stood observing the battle. The Saudi riflemen with him scattered, leaving Captain Shakespear alone on the summit of a dune armed only with a revolver. According to his cook, who was briefly taken prisoner but escaped, he afterwards found Shakespear’s naked body lying where it had fallen, with ‘the marks of three bullets on him’.

  The Foreign Office had now set up the Arab Bureau in Cairo, staffed by such exotics as Miss Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, its main brief being to bring about the Arab revolt against the Ottomans through the persons of Sharif Husayn and his four sons. After protracted bargaining Husayn agreed to lead the revolt in return for Britain’s support for him after the war as ruler of Arabia and Britain’s recognition of ‘the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca’. In June 1916, as his own tribal forces attacked the Ottoman garrison in Mecca, Sharif Husayn called on all Muslims to join him in liberating their caliph from the atheistic regime in power in Turkey – a call seen in many quarters of the Muslim world as treason against the caliphate. The Emir of Nejd, Ibn Saud, also took offence, but chiefly because Husayn had taken to styling himself ‘King of the Arabs’.

  It was at this time that Miss Gertrude Bell penned her iconic portrayal of the nation-builder to be: ‘Ibn Saud is now barely forty,’ she wrote, ‘a man of splendid physique, standing well over six feet, and carrying himself with the air of one accustomed to command . . . He has the characteristics of the well-bred Arab: a strongly marked aquiline profile, full-flesh nostrils, prominent lips and a long narrow chin accentuated by a pointed beard.’ Miss Bell saw in Ibn Saud the ‘weariness of an ancient people, which has made heavy drafts on its vital forces, and borrowed little from beyond its own forbidding frontiers’. Yet she was also conscious of the man’s formidable reputation: ‘Among men bred in the camel-saddle he is said to have few rivals as a tireless leader. As a leader of irregular forces he is of proved daring, and he combines with his qualities as a soldier that grasp of statecraft which is yet more highly prized by the tribesmen.’ He had ‘drawn the loose mesh of tribal organisation into a centralised administration and imposed on wandering confederacies an authority which, though fluctuat-ing, is recognised as a political factor’. Given these qualities, it was doubly important that Ibn Saud should be reined in and encouraged to ‘come to a full understanding with the Sharif’.

  A replacement for Shakespear had now arrived in Kuwait in the colourful person of thirty-year-old Harry St John Philby. Like his predecessor, Philby was colonial-born – Ceylon, in his case – and he had links with India on his mother’s side, but in appearance, temperament and intellect he was in a class of his own: a big, bulky man, arrogantly self-assured, with a brilliant record of scholarship at Winchester and Trinity College, Cambridge behind him. He had gone out to the Punjab in December 1908 as a member of the imperial élite, the Indian Civil Service, but had failed to impress. Indeed, he had gained a reputation as a rough diamond and a radical, and he had cocked a snook at convention by marrying too soon and below his class. In 1915 Philby was languishing in the counter-sedition section of the Indian Police’s Special Branch when he was selected – purely on the strength of his linguistic skills – to join Sir Percy Cox’s Political Mission in Mesopotamia. Here he at last began to show his worth, leading to his instruction in October 1917 to establish a British political agency in Riyadh and to draw Ibn Saud into the fold. Before the end of November Philby was presenting himself to the Emir of Nejd – complete with new-grown beard and Arab dress, down to sandals and kaffiya. After ten days of talks, Philby’s two British colleagues departed for the coast, leaving Philby to continue his dealings with Ibn Saud alone. Initially Philby t
oed the British line, but in the months that followed there grew within him an admiration for the Emir, coupled with a growing affinity for the culture to which he belonged, that developed into a state bordering on infatuation, and eventually led to a transfer of loyalties.

  The story of the Arab Revolt, culminating in the occupation of Damascus by Sharif Husayn’s eldest son Emir Feisal in October 1918, is well known. The part played by the Saudis can be judged by the fact that the name of Ibn Saud crops up just once in Lawrence’s classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and then only in passing.

  But the fact is that Lawrence got it wrong and Philby got it right when these two brilliant, driven, flawed men each picked a champion of the Arabs. For all his fine words, Lawrence’s romanticising of Prince Feisal – ‘the pure and very brave spirit . . . a prophet who, if veiled, would give cogent form to the idea behind the activity of the Arab revolt’ – was always that of the Orientalist and manipulator. St John Philby’s relationship with Ibn Saud was altogether more whole-hearted, however heartless he himself appeared in his personal life.