Arabs (36 page)

In 1913 Ibn Saud conquered the Hasa region of Eastern Arabia from the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans had attempted to integrate this isolated Arabian region (known today as the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia) to their empire in 1871 in a bid to extend their influence over the Persian Gulf—a bid the British were determined to stymie. By 1913 the Ottomans had all but abandoned their administration in the district. The Saudis took the main town of Hufuf unopposed and emerged as the dominant new power among the Arab Gulf states.

Faced with a powerful new Gulf ruler, the British concluded a treaty with Ibn Saud by the end of 1915. The treaty confirmed British recognition of Ibn Saud’s leadership and extended British protection over the central and eastern Arabian territories then under his control. In return, the Saudis pledged not to enter into agreement with, or
to sell any territory to, any other foreign power without prior British consent, and to refrain from all aggression against other Gulf states—in essence turning Ibn Saud’s lands into another Trucial State. In concluding the agreement, Britain gave Ibn Saud £20,000, a monthly stipend of £5,000, and a large number of rifles and machine guns, intended to be used against the Ottomans and their Arab allies, who had sided with Germany against Britain in World War I.

But Ibn Saud had no interest in fighting the Ottomans in Arabia. Instead, he used British guns and funds to advance his own objectives, which increasingly led westward toward the Red Sea province of the Hijaz, in which lay Mecca and Medina, the holy cities of Islam. Here Saudi ambitions confronted the claims of another British ally—Sharif Husayn of Mecca, with whom Britain had concluded a wartime alliance in autumn 1915. Sharif Husayn, like Ibn Saud, aspired to rule all of Arabia. By declaring the Arab Revolt against Ottoman rule in June 1916, Sharif Husayn hoped to realize his ambitions in Arabia, Syria, and Iraq with British support. Yet by fighting the Ottomans and extending his forces along a 1,300-kilometer (810-mile) stretch of desert, the sharif had left his home province of Hijaz vulnerable to Ibn Saud’s forces. The vast Arabian Peninsula was not big enough to accommodate the ambitions of both men. Between 1916 and 1918, the balance began to shift in Ibn Saud’s favor.

 

Conflict between the Saudis and the Hashemites became inevitable when Sharif Husayn declared himself “king of the Arab Countries” in October 1916, following the outbreak of the Arab Revolt. Even his British allies, who had promised him an “Arab kingdom,” were only willing to recognize him as “king of the Hijaz” in addition to sharif of Mecca. Ibn Saud was unlikely to let the self-proclaimed King Husayn’s claim stand.

Throughout World War I Britain tried to keep the peace between its two Arab allies and to focus their energies on fighting the Ottomans. However, the Saudi-Hashemite battle for ascendancy broke into open conflict just months before the collapse of the Ottoman war effort. A remarkable exchange of unpublished letters written by the two desert monarchs captures the rivalry just as tempers rose with the summer heat in 1918.

With his forces fully engaged against the Ottomans all along the Hijaz Railway line, King Husayn was growing increasingly concerned by reports that the Saudi ruler had been distributing weapons among tribes that had recently pledged allegiance to the Wahhabi cause. These were no doubt arms that the British had provided Ibn Saud, and the Hashemite ruler was increasingly concerned that British arms would be used against his own forces. In February 1918, Husayn wrote to admonish Ibn Saud: “Do the [Wahhabi] tribesmen believe God will find them innocent of hostilities against the people of Islam,” he wrote, “who trust in God to protect
their lives and property?” Husayn warned his rival that it was an act against God’s religion to arm Muslims to fight against fellow Muslims.
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Ibn Saud was outraged by Husayn’s letter. After all, what went on in the Najd was no business of the sharif of Mecca. Ibn Saud’s response provoked a fresh riposte from Husayn in May 1918. If Ibn Saud’s actions had been limited to the Central Arabian province of the Najd, the Hashemites might not be so concerned. However, the Saudi ruler had recently secured the allegiance of one of King Husayn’s own governors, a man named Khalid ibn Luway, in the oasis town of al-Khurma on the Najd-Hijaz frontier. “There is no cause for deceiving Khalid ibn Luway, or to use tricks and subterfuge on him,” the old king complained.
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The oasis town of Khurma was strategically located between the rival Arab rulers’ territories, and with a population of 5,000 it was an important settlement in its own right. Though he had been a subject of the sharif of Mecca, Khalid had declared his adherence to Wahhabi doctrine in 1918, placed his town under Ibn Saud’s rule, and diverted its taxes from Mecca to the Saudi treasury. In his memoirs, King Husayn’s son Amir Abdullah wrote that Khalid “killed innocent people, even putting his own brother to death because he did not share his religious convictions. He kept persecuting any of the Hashemite tribes who would not follow the Wahhabi movement.”
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King Husayn tried to persuade the wayward governor to return to the fold, but to no avail.

The dispute over Khurma led to the first armed conflict between the Hashemites and the Saudis. King Husayn dispatched a force of over 2,600 infantry and horsemen in June 1918 to retake Khurma but found the town reinforced by Ibn Saud’s Ikhwan fighters.
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The Hashemite troops were decimated by the Saudis in two separate engagements. The British, concerned lest their Arab allies succumb to internecine fighting before the Ottomans had been defeated, put pressure on Ibn Saud to seek peace with King Husayn.

Buoyed by his fighters’ victories in Khurma, Ibn Saud drafted a condescending letter to Husayn in August 1918. The Saudi leader deployed titles as a way of asserting geographic sway. Whereas Ibn Saud claimed to be “amir of Najd, Hasa, Qatif and their dependencies,” he only recognized Sharif Husayn as “amir of Mecca”—not “king of the Arab Lands,” as Sharif Husayn wished, nor even king of the Hijaz, as the British acknowledged. He pointedly avoided making any reference to the Hijaz at all, as though the sovereignty of that vast Red Sea province had yet to be decided.

Ibn Saud acknowledged receipt of King Husayn’s letter of May 7 with the reservation that “some of the things expressed in your letter were not appropriate.” He also acknowledged British pressure to reconcile their differences, for the campaign against the Ottomans was reaching a critical stage and “the dispute is harmful to all,” he explained. Yet Ibn Saud could not let prior Hashemite provocations go unchallenged.
“Your Eminence will undoubtedly have suspicions that I played a role in the matter of the people of al-Khurma,” he wrote. However, he argued that the Hashemites themselves were to blame for the governor’s defection and the townspeople’s adherence to the Wahhabi cause. “I kept them in check as far as I could,” he continued, “until your forces marched over them twice”—referring to the two Hashemite engagements at al-Khurma—“and that which God had ordained happened,” a smug reference to the defeat the Saudis dealt the Hashemite forces.
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Looking to the future, Ibn Saud proposed a truce with the Hashemites based on the status quo. Khurma would stay under Saudi rule, and King Husayn would write to the governor of the oasis town to reassure him that there were no differences between the Saudis and the Hashemites. Ibn Saud and King Husayn would preserve the peace between their followers, guaranteeing the compliance of the tribes of Najd and Hijaz to the truce. In hindsight, it was the best offer Husayn would ever get from the Saudis—mutual recognition of borders and territories with the Hashemites left in control of the Hijaz.

King Husayn did not even consider Ibn Saud’s offer; he returned the letter unopened, telling the messenger: “Ibn Saud has no claim on us and we have no claim on him.” Instead of pursuing a truce, King Husayn dispatched another force to al-Khurma in August 1918 in a bid to restore his authority over the oasis. He assigned one of his most trusted commanders, Sharif Shakir bin Zayd, to command the expedition. The king reassured his commander that he had dispatched sufficient camels and supplies “for you to do great things with.”
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Shakir’s expedition, however, was easily repelled by Saudi forces before even reaching the contested oasis.

Infuriated and humiliated by his repeated defeats to Ibn Saud’s forces, King Husayn ordered his son Amir Abdullah to lead a new campaign against Khurma. Abdullah had no stomach for such a fight. He and his soldiers had maintained the siege of the Ottoman garrison in Medina until their commander finally surrendered in January 1919. Abdullah’s troops were battle-weary after years of fighting the Ottomans. He also recognized that the Wahhabi soldiers were zealous warriors. “The Wahhabi fighter,” he wrote, “is anxious to attain Paradise which, according to his faith, he will enter if he be killed.”
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But Abdullah could not defy his father, and in May 1919 he took up his commission and led his force to battle with the Wahhabis.

The Hashemite army met with initial success in its final campaign against the Saudis. In May 1919, on the way to Khurma, Amir Abdullah captured the oasis of Turaba, which had also pledged allegiance to Ibn Saud. Rather than seek the goodwill of the 3,000 inhabitants of the oasis, Abdullah allowed his troops to plunder the rebellious town. No doubt he intended to make an example of Turaba, to discourage other frontier oases from siding with the Saudis. However, the behavior of Abdullah’s troops only served to increase Turaba’s loyalty to Ibn Saud. While Amir Abdullah was still in Turaba, some of the townspeople must have sent word to Ibn
Saud to come to their assistance. Abdullah himself drafted a letter to the Saudi leader from Turaba in an attempt to leverage his conquest of the oasis to secure a peace agreement with Ibn Saud on terms more favorable to the Hashemites.

The Saudi fighters had no interest in coming to terms with the Hashemites. Having defeated every Hashemite army they had encountered, they were confident of carrying the day against Amir Abdullah’s force. Some 4,000 Ikhwan fighters surrounded Turaba from three sides. They struck Abdullah’s positions at dawn and nearly wiped out his forces. By his own account, Abdullah claimed that only 153 men from his detachment of 1,350 troops survived. “I personally escaped through a miracle,” he later recalled. Abdullah and his cousin, Sharif Shakir bin Zayd, cut through the back of their tent and sustained wounds as they fled the fighting.
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The repercussions of the battle reached far beyond the carnage at the oasis. Turaba demonstrated that the Wahhabis were the dominant force in the Arabian Peninsula and that the Hashemites’ days in the Hijaz were numbered. Amir Abdullah recalled: “After the battle there began a period of unrest and anxiety as to the fate of our movement, our country and the person of our King.” Indeed, his father, King Husayn, seemed to be suffering from a mental breakdown. “On returning to headquarters I found my father ill and nervous,” Abdullah wrote. “He was now bad tempered, forgetful and suspicious. He had lost his quick grasp and sound judgment.”
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The result of the battle came as a surprise to the British too, many of whom had underestimated the fighting power of Ibn Saud’s forces. They did not wish to see their Saudi ally overwhelm their Hashemite ally, upsetting the balance of power they had carefully established in Arabia. The British resident (or chief colonial administrator under the Political Service of British India) in Jidda sent a message to Ibn Saud in July 1918 demanding he withdraw from the oasis towns immediately, leaving Turaba and Khurma as neutral zones until both sides had agreed on their frontiers. “If you fail to retreat after receiving my letter,” the resident warned, “the Government of His Majesty will consider the treaty they have concluded with you null and void and take all necessary steps to hinder your hostile action.”
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Ibn Saud complied with the request and ordered his troops to withdraw to Riyadh.

To restore the balance of forces in Arabia, the British also needed to conclude a formal treaty with the Hashemites in the Hijaz. The exchange of correspondence between the then Sharif Husayn and Sir Henry McMahon had established a wartime alliance, but this did not constitute the sort of treaty such as Britain had concluded with the Persian Gulf rulers, including Ibn Saud. Without a formal treaty, Britain would have no grounds to preserve its Hashemite allies from the Saudis. And Britain preferred to see many states balancing each other in Arabia to having a single dominant power emerge that straddled both the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. It was thus convenient for British imperial interests to preserve the Hashemites as a buffer against the growing power of the Saudi state.

As World War I drew to an end, the British government was anxious to conclude a formal alliance with King Husayn and his Hashemite family. They sent Colonel T. E. Lawrence, the famous “Lawrence of Arabia,” who had served as British liaison with the Hashemites during the Arab Revolt, to open negotiations with Husayn.

Between July and September 1921, Lawrence tried in vain to persuade King Husayn to sign a treaty that recognized the new realities of the postwar settlement. Husayn rejected nearly every feature of the postwar Middle East as a betrayal of Britain’s promises to him: he refused to limit his kingdom to the Hijaz; he objected to the expulsion of his son, King Faysal, from Damascus and the establishment of a French mandate in Syria; he rejected Britain’s mandates over Iraq and Palestine (which then included Transjordan); and he objected to the policy of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The British ventured one last attempt to reach a treaty in 1923, but the bitter old king refused to sign. As a result, he forfeited British protection just as Ibn Saud began to mount his campaign to conquer the Hijaz.

In July 1924, Ibn Saud gathered his commanders in Riyadh to plan the conquest of the Hijaz. They began with an attack on Taif, a mountain town near Mecca, to test Britain’s reaction. In September 1924 the Ikhwan seized the town and plundered it for three days. The townspeople of Taif resisted the Wahhabis, who responded with great violence. An estimated 400 people were killed, and many others fled. The fall of Taif sent a shock wave through the Hijaz. The notables of the province gathered in Jidda and forced King Husayn to resign his throne. They believed Ibn Saud was attacking the Hijaz because of his antagonism toward King Husayn, and that a change in monarch might change Saudi policy. On October 6, 1924, the old king complied with his people’s wishes, declared his son Ali king, and went into exile. However, these measures did not halt Ibn Saud’s advance.