God's Terrorists

by Charles Allen

  Philby had at first been struck by Ibn Saud’s ‘consuming jealousy’ of Sharif Husayn, whose overriding concern at their early meetings had been to secure British funds and guns so that he could pursue his twin ambitions: to reclaim Hail, and to restore the kingdom won by his ancestor and namesake Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud a century earlier. But the longer Philby lingered in Riyadh the more he became transfixed by the manner in which Ibn Saud was transforming himself into the father of his country, in a literal as well as a figurative sense. He was in his physical prime and already well embarked on the traditional ruler’s strategy of alliance-and loyalty-building through marriage, although still short of the 235 wives and 660 concubines he is traditionally credited with. Marriage to the daughter of the then head of the Wahhab clan had recently produced a son, Prince Faisal, who later became a leading proponent of Wahhabism, initially as crown prince and prime minister of Saudi Arabia and subsequently as its king.

  For all Ibn Saud’s long exposure to the relatively liberal Islam practised in Kuwait and for all the pragmatism of his dealings with the British, he was a committed devotee of Al-Wahhab and determined that his people should follow suit. As Philby witnessed and recorded, Ibn Saud arranged in 1918 for a Wahhabi history and a number of Al-Wahhab’s original texts to be printed in Bombay for mass distribution throughout his land. While accepting the title of Imam of Nejd upon the death of his father, he ensured that it was the aal as-Sheikh who filled all the senior posts in the ulema, from that of Grand Mufti downwards. ‘Under their general direction,’ wrote Philby,

  the instruction and religious administration of the country was entrusted to a body of Ulama or Vicars . . . Besides their administrative functions these Vicars are responsible for the administration of the Sharia law, and their decisions are binding on the provincial Amirs, who merely sign and execute them . . . They are also responsible for the training and direction of the Mutawwa’in or Deacons, who enjoy no administrative or judicial functions but are entrusted with the religious instruction of the Badawain, among whom they are distributed apparently in the proportion of one for every fifty men. Beneath these again is a body of Talamidh or candidates for orders, who, under the guidance of the Mutawwa’in aspire one day to be enrolled among them, and so to take an active share in God’s handiwork among men.

  By these and other steps Ibn Saud institutionalised Wahhabism throughout his land, under the absolute religious authority of the aal as-Sheikh.

  Harry St John Philby’s initial response to the creed promoted so vigorously by these clerics was no less hostile than that of his British predecessors, from Palgrave to Shakespear. The Ikhwan, for their part, treated him with contempt, turning away their faces when he approached and refusing to return his salaams. One even hissed at him that God was the witness of his hatred for him. His response was to treat them with amused disdain. ‘Their souls sour with fanaticism’, he wrote in a note surviving from this early period. But with time and further exposure his views changed.

  In January 1918 Philby followed Palgrave’s example by crossing the Arabian desert from Riyadh to Jedda, keeping to the ancient trail of pilgrims’ camp-fires. In Jedda he presented himself to Sharif Husayn, whom he found ‘old, small, calm, and the pink of courtesy’ but also thoroughly put out by Philby’s unannounced arrival from the camp of his chief enemy. Like Shakespear before him, Philby went on to argue Ibn Saud’s case to the Arab Bureau, only to be told bluntly that, in Lord Curzon’s words, ‘British policy was a Hashemite policy’. He returned to Riyadh with the news that Britain would continue to provide Ibn Saud with a modest monthly stipend of gold, but would also continue to back Sharif Husayn. Philby then went home on leave, taking with him Ibn Saud’s gifts of a ceremonial sword and a white Arab stallion.

  Ibn Saud’s reponse to this rebuff was to unleash his Ikhwans on Sharif Husayn’s British-trained army at the oasis of Kurma, securing an overwhelming victory that drove the Sharif’s forces back to the outskirts of Mecca and had his second son Prince Abdullah fleeing in his nightshirt. Philby was asked to mediate, but before he could get back to Jedda a temporary peace had been patched up. From this time onward he became an outspoken critic of British policy in the Middle East and ever more passionate in his advocacy for Ibn Saud as the ‘only great and outstanding figure’ in Arabia.

  In March 1920 Lawrence’s man, Prince Feisal, was proclaimed ruler of Syria, only for France to take exception and force him out. In 1921 Feisal’s brother Prince Abdullah had better luck when Britain allowed him to set up the emirate of Trans-Jordan. But in that same summer the remnants of the Rashidi emirate of Hail finally fell to the Ikhwan, so restoring the kingdom of Nejd to its former size. Sharif Husayn was now left with only the emirship of Hijaz, but still expected Britain to honour its promise to secure his dynasty as rulers of Arabia.

  In 1924 secular rule was established in Turkey by Kemal Atatürk, and a liberal government was formed in Egypt, causing alarm in conservative Muslim circles. Sharif Husayn responded by claiming the title of Caliph of Islam for himself and his Hashemite dynasty, further alienating an Arab community disenchanted by his close links with the British. He then banned the Ikhwan from making the Hajj – a fatal provocation to Ibn Saud’s warriors and a perfect excuse to resume their war. The Ikhwan needed only to be given their marching orders. While a diversionary thrust menaced Jordan and Iraq their main army took the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and then closed on Jedda. In the iconoclasm that followed, the tombs of many Muslim saints were torn down, including that of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. But at the gates of Jedda Ibn Saud held back, waiting to see if the British Government would come to the aid of Sharif Husayn. Its response was to oversee his abdication and provide an escort into exile.

  Harry St John Philby, still nominally an officer of the Government of India’s Foreign and Political Service, was then on extended leave in England. He now resigned and returned to Arabia, meeting Ibn Saud in secret on the Red Sea coast and, by his own admission, providing details of Jedda’s weak defences. Three weeks later the Ikhwan took Jedda, and Ibn Saud proclaimed himself Emir of the Hijaz and keeper of the Holy Places. For his services the residence of the former representative of the Turkish Government in Jedda was bestowed on Philby, and became his home.

  Well aware of the concerns of both the European powers and the wider Muslim world, Ibn Saud now worked hard to keep the religious enthusiasm of his Ikhwan zealots and his Wahhabi kinsmen within bounds. In spite of occasional alarms – as when a reveille call sounded on a bugle by a group of unsuspecting pilgrims caused the Ikhwan to riot through the streets of Mecca – the holy places were left relatively undisturbed and pilgrims were allowed to make the Hajj, if under the stern gaze of the Wahhabi mutawihin. With Philby’s assistance Ibn Saud mounted a diplomatic offensive to persuade the British Government that he was a force for stability in the Middle East and had no ambitions regarding the caliphate, and that Wahhabism was an instrument for ‘true democracy’ in the region. One expression of this campaign was the remarkable lecture on Wahhabism given to the Central Asian Society in the summer of 1929 with Lord Allenby in the chair.

  The speaker was Sheikh HAFIZ WAHBA, described as ‘Counsellor to His Majesty the King of the Hedjaz and Minister for Education’. Despite the name, Hafiz Wahba was no Bedouin but an Egyptian intellectual who had concluded early in the 1920s that Arab independence would be best served by supporting Ibn Saud. He had made his way to Riyadh in 1922 and embraced Wahhabism, rising to become Ibn Saud’s most articulate spokesman overseas. In his lecture to the Central Asian Society Hafiz Wahba presented the theology of Al-Wahhab as an Arab version of Protestantism, and to show how eminently respectable it now was he assured his listeners that two of the most eminent figures in the ulema – the current Grand Mufti of Egypt and the head Imam of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Cairo – were preaching the teachings of Al-Wahhab and the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya. He further declared that ‘the enlightened class in every Muslim land is Wahhabi in practice, tho
ugh not in name and origin, because it is this class, as is duly recognised in all the Muslim world, that preaches the gospel of self-reliance’. Both claims went unchallenged.

  Sheikh Wahba’s lecture to the Central Asian Society was followed by an article for the Society’s Journal under the nom de plume ‘Phoenix’, almost certainly contributed by Philby, giving an outline of the Wahhabi movement and its doctrines. The Wahhabi interpretation of jihad was here defined simply as ‘the fostering of a martial and fanatical spirit to keep the law in force’.

  To T. E. Lawrence, Ibn Saud’s Arab empire was ‘a figment, built on sand’. He and most other observers were convinced that Ibn Saud’s kingdom must fall apart. The Wahhabi ulema were reacting with hostility to every attempt by Ibn Saud to introduce such modern developments as the telephone and the motor-car, on the grounds that there was no precedent for such innovation in the Quran or the Hadith. At the same time, the Ikhwan were increasingly defying their imam’s authority by carrying out unauthorised raids into infidel Iraq and Syria. It soon became clear to Ibn Saud that if the Ikhwan continued their raiding, Britain would intervene. His response was to dismiss three Ikhwan commanders, whose troops reacted by massacring some Nejdi merchants. An offer of reconciliation was made and rejected and in 1929 Saudi loyalists, supported by four British aircraft and some two hundred radio-equipped armoured cars and troop carriers, took on the Ikhwan cavalry with their ancient rifles, lances and swords. After ten months the revolt ended with the surrender of the remaining rebels to British forces on the Kuwait border.

  At the end of 1930 the chronic inter-tribal warfare that had bedevilled Arabia since before the days of the Prophet was finally brought to an end, giving way to the Islamic nation-state of Saudi Arabia. By a diplomatic mix of give and take Ibn Saud reconciled his Wahhabi ulema to innovations that posed no challenge to their authority. He ensured that they received the religious taxes that were their due and consulted them on such crucial issues as whether he as Imam had the final authority to order and suspend jihad. In return for their support the ulema, under the guidance of the aal as-Sheikh, was given absolute authority to impose Wahhabi sharia not only in the mosques and law courts but right across the land.

  For his efforts on Ibn Saud’s behalf Harry St John Philby was branded little short of a traitor by the British Government. ‘He has lost no opportunity’, minuted a Foreign Office official to the Cabinet, ‘of attacking & misrepresenting the Govt. & its policy in the Middle East. His methods have been as unscrupulous as they have been violent. He is a public nuisance & it is largely due to him & his intrigues that Ibn Saud – over whom he unfortunately exercises some influence – has given us so much trouble during the last few years.’ But in his new home in Jedda Philby was no less an object of suspicion. To the Dutch consul, Colonel van der Meulen, he cut a forlorn figure, ‘apparently determined to outrage English convention in dress, appearance and general social behaviour’, but also ‘always in conflict: with the Arabs of his caravan, with the government, with its policy, with his own personnel and, I think, most of all with himself.’ According to van der Meulen, a time came when the outcast came to him and remarked, ‘“We are not Christians, why should not we become Muslims?”’

  In August 1930 Philby wrote a formal letter to Ibn Saud informing him of his earnest desire ‘to become a Muslim and to abandon all other religions’. He went on to make the required public declaration, that ‘there is no God but Allah and that Mohammad is His Slave and Messenger’. He declared himself anxious to follow ‘all that is written in the books of the good ancestors and more especially the statements of Shaikh Ibn Taimia [Ibn Taymiyya, the medieval jurist], Ibn al Qaiyem aj-Jowziah [al-Qayyim al-Jawziyah, leading student of Ibn Taymiyya], and in the later ages those of Shaikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, may God have mercy on him’.

  Philby was soon afterwards summoned to join Ibn Saud in Mecca. At the outskirts of the holy city he stripped in a tent set up for him, performed the required ablutions, dressed in the white garments of the pilgrim, and was escorted into Mecca’s great square, where he kissed the black stone of the Kaaba and made the sevenfold circuit before going on to drink at the holy well of Zamzam. After morning prayers next day he was received by the Wahhabi Emir and Imam, kissed on both cheeks and given the name Abdullah, Servant of God.

  A British consular officer, Hope Gill, who met Philby that same summer was convinced that Philby’s conversion was simply a matter of expediency: ‘He made no pretence whatever that his conversion was spiritual.’ Yet there can be no doubt Philby believed that he was furthering the cause of Ibn Saud’s Arabia. At the Emir’s suggestion he wrote an article for the press explaining, to quote the title, ‘Why I turned Wahhabi?’ Part of it read: ‘I believe that the present Arabian puritan movement harbingers an epoch of future political greatness based on strong moral and political foundations . . . I consider an open declaration of my sympathy with Arabian religion and political ideals as the best methods of assisting the development of Arab greatness.’

  When asked by Philby soon after their first meeting to explain the basis of his leadership, Ibn Saud had replied: ‘We raise them not above us, nor do we place ourselves above them. We give them what we can . . . And if they go beyond their bounds we make them taste the sweetness of our discipline.’ What Philby omitted in his accounts of Ibn Saud’s rise to power was that this sweetness of discipline was harsh in the extreme, accounting for several hundred thousand violent deaths and mutilations. In taking over towns and cities the Ikhwan carried out wholesale massacres. The regional governments installed by Ibn Saud were ruthless in the suppression of opposition and the maintenance of Wahhabi sharia. The governors appointed by him were reported to have carried out forty thousand public beheadings and no fewer than three hundred and fifty thousand amputations by the sword, with Ibn Saud’s cousin Abdulla taking the lead in his zeal to extinguish every pocket of polytheism disfiguring the land.

  Over two long spells of duty as consul in Jedda between 1926 and 1945 the Dutchman van der Meulen became a jaundiced observer of events in Arabia. His reports detailing the ruthless methods employed in the creation of Saudi Arabia were apparently seen by Ibn Saud and approved. The Emir expressed himself content that the Queen of the Netherlands should know the facts: ‘We have often acted severely, even mercilessly . . . It is good that you should know the truth about our creed and that of our brothers. We believe that Allah the Exalted One uses us as His instrument. As long as we serve Him we shall succeed, no power can check us and no enemy will be able to kill us.’

  The Dutchman was able to follow the civil war between Ibn Saud and his Ikhwan with greater objectivity than Philby. ‘The Ikhwan movement demonstrated the extreme to which Wahhabism could lead,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘If religion is used to encourage self-righteousness and feelings of superiority in primitive souls and if it then teaches the duty of holy war, the result is heroism, cruelty, narrowing of the mind and atrophy of what is humane and what is of true value, in a man and in a people.’

  In 1932, with the country of his ancestors consolidated, pacified and secure, Ibn Saud united his dual emirates of Nejd and Hijaz, and proclaimed his country the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Hajji Abdullah, formerly Harry St John Philby, played his part by helping to secure an exploration concession for the Standard Oil Company of California over a rival bid from the British Iraq Petroleum Company, thereby laying the foundations of the Aramco concession, of Saudi Arabia’s wealth, and of the kingdom’s future co-operation with the United States of America.

  In 1953 Saudi Arabia’s founding father died and the throne and Wahhabi imamship passed to the eldest of his many sons, first Saud and then Faisal. With the establishment of socialist governments in Muslim countries such as that of President Nasser in neighbouring Egypt, the need to counter the spread of irreligious forces now became a priority. The Founding Committee of the Muslim World League, the Supreme Committee for Islamic Propagation, the World Supreme Council for Mosques and other reli
gious bodies were set up specifically to promote Wahhabism. However, the relative poverty of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia initially prevented the ulema from promoting Wahhabism effectively beyond its borders – until 1973, when the price of crude oil went through the roof following the Arab–Israeli war and the formation of the OPEC oil cartel. Saudi Arabia was suddenly awash with petrodollars, and at last the Wahhabi authorities were able to commit massive sums to producing Wahhabi literature and funding mosques and madrassahs wherever there were Sunni communities. The Indian sub-continent became the leading beneficiary of this largesse.

  11

  The Coming Together

  To understand the spirit which might be evoked we must recall the state of feeling – the ignorance, bigotry, enthusiasm, hardihood, and universal agreement – amidst which the Crusades took their rise, and to which a parallel might be found amongst the excitable population beyond the border. There are fully developed ‘the implicit faith and ferocious energy’ in which the essence of original Mahomedanism has been said to consist, and which the propagation of the Wahabi Puritanism has done much to inflame.

  Extract from Government of Punjab Report, 1868

  In 1911 two very different outdoor gatherings took place in northern India. The grandest by far was the Imperial Assembly, popularly known as the Delhi Durbar, held to celebrate the accession of King George V as King-Emperor. Its site beside Delhi Ridge had been chosen deliberately, for it was here that the British had rallied prior to assaulting the rebel city in the summer of 1857. Across twenty-five square miles of the Delhi plain 233 tented encampments were laid out, linked by a specially built railway. At its heart was an open-sided pavilion, within which on 12 December the King-Emperor sat enthroned to receive the homage of the more important of his Indian subjects. The next day he and Queen Mary proceeded to the ramparts of the Red Fort of the Mughals to be presented to the Indian masses gathered on the open ground below. Here, according to an official Government booklet, ‘a vast troubled sea of humanity swept forward with banners waving and bands playing, a great concourse of Moslems, Sikhs and Hindoos to salute the Padshah.’ The entire spectacle was designed to evoke the splendours of the Mughals, and to demonstrate that the British, as their natural successors, were there to stay.