Page 233 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

230 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

of the twentieth century with much the same moody apprehension as previous
sharifs of Mecca had felt at the rise of the Wahhabi confederacy a century or
more earlier. Any real trial of strength between the two contenders for
hegemony in Arabia was deferred by the war, which brought Husain a con­
siderable accession of influence and money, if not of actual political power.
While Husain was engaged in fighting the Turks, Ibn Saud stayed his hand. He
had little choice in the matter: not only was he incapable at this stage of
launching any kind of decisive offensive against the Hijaz but he was also
beholden, as was Husain, to his British paymasters, and they forbade any open
conflict between their two Arabian proteges. It also suited Ibn Saud’s book for
Husain to expend his resources upon the campaign against the Turks (at least
to the extent that the sharif was expending them); since Husain would then be
less capable of opposing the challenge from Najd, when in due course it was
made.

The goal that Ibn Saud had set himself from the night in January 1902 when he
scaled the walls of Riyad and expelled the Rashidi garrison was nothing less
than the re-establishment of the Wahhabi realm as it had been at the furthest
extent of its territorial expansion in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
The means by which he intended to attain this goal was the same as that
employed by his ancestors to achieve their conquests - the arousal of the latent
fanaticism of the Bedouin tribes, its harnessing to their predatory and warlike
instincts, and the launching of the resultant engine of destruction upon his
neighbours. To organize this religio-military brotherhood (fll-ikhwan) Ibn
Saud had begun sending out, perhaps as early as 1910, Wahhabi preachers
(mutawiyahj to the desert tribesmen to instruct them in their religious duties
and to kindle in them a zeal for the holy war. He had also resolved that the only
way to bring the Bedouin more firmly under control for the strategic purposes
he had in mind was to settle them in military colonies. The first of these
military settlements, to which was given the evocative name of hijar ihijra in the
singular), was established in 1912 at Artawiya, some 150 miles to the north of
Riyad, in the dirah of the Mutair tribe. A second hijra was started in the same
year at Ghatghat, in Ataiba country to the west of Riyad. Dozens of hijar were
founded in the next few years in Najd and Hasa and further north, as more and
more Bedouin enthusiastically embraced the ikhwan ideal, lured as much by
the vision of war and rapine in the name of Islam as they were by the arms,
money, dwellings, grants of land and agricultural help provided by the

authorities in Riyad.
From the very outset the ikhwan exhibited a self-righteousness about them­

selves and an intolerance towards others, whether Muslim or infidel, of exces­
sive proportions. To distinguish themselves from the unregenerate of their
fellows they abandoned the ordinary head-dress and head-rope of the Bedouin
and adopted a loosely wound white turban. They pronounced an anathema