Page 229 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

226 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

extension of Saudi power. Nothing tempts the Bedouin like the prospect of
plunder, especially if it is laced with an appeal to their innate fanaticism. The
desert tribesmen flocked to the war banners of the Al Saud as they advanced
through Najd and the Qasim, less out of an urge to open the eyes of the settled
inhabitants of these districts to the truth and beauty of the reformed faith than
to slit their purses. Nor was this motive by any means incidental to the spirit of
Wahhabism; for, as one knowledgeable student of the movement in the
nineteenth century has observed of it:

It may be defined as a politico-religious confederacy, which legalises the indiscriminate
plunder and thraldom of all peoples beyond its own pale .. . [as] is fully borne out by the
intolerant proceedings of its adherents, not only in Nejd, but wherever they succeeded
*
in establishing their ascendancy.
Even that most assiduous of Western apologists for the movement, Harry St
John Philby, has been forced to concede that the driving force behind it was
‘constant aggression and expansion at the expense of those who did not share
the great idea’.t Small wonder, then, that by the time of Ibn Abdul Wahhab’s
death in 1792, the town dwellers of Najd and the Qasim, whether out of
conviction or prudence, had all submitted to the Al Saud. From this time
forward they, and not the fickle Bedouin, were to be the backbone of the Saudi
state.

Most of central and eastern Arabia was, by the turn of the century, under
Saudi dominion. Al-Hasa in the east, along the Gulf coast, had fallen, the

shaikhs of the Bani Khalid, its former rulers, had been made to submit, and
the Shia dwelling in the Hasa oasis and the coastal settlements, who formed the
bulk of the indigenous population, had been brought into subjection. The next
few years saw the Wahhabis burst the bounds of Najd and Hasa, marauding
northwards into Turkish Iraq and Syria, south-eastwards into Oman and
westwards into the Hijaz. The holy Shii city of Karbala was devastated in the
spring of 1801, thousands of its inhabitants were put to the sword, and the
shrine of Husain, the grandson of the Prophet, was looted and desecrated. Two
years later the Wahhabis overran much of the Hijaz and captured Mecca.
Madina fell the following spring and, like Mecca before it, was scoured and
purged of all that the Wahhabis found offensive. Even the tomb of the Prophet
himself was broken open in 1810 on the orders of the Saudi imam and its jewels
and relics sold or distributed among the Wahhabi soldiery. This ultimate act of
desecration finally stirred the Ottoman sultan, the sovereign protector of the
holy places, to action. At his behest the vali of Egypt, Mehemet Ah Pasha,
landed an expeditionary force in the Hijaz in 1811, which drove the Wahhabis
from Mecca and Madina two years later and subsequently advanced into the
heart of Arabia to lay siege to and capture the Wahhabi capital of Dariya in the

• G P- Badger, History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman, London, 1871, p. Ixv.
t Arabia, London, I93°> P- 182•