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‘Araby the Blest* 233

apart, Ibn Saud had no option but to accept whatever frontiers Cox laid down.
He had consented in the treaty of December 1915 to the delimitation of his
territorial possessions by the British government, he had placed the conduct of
his foreign affairs in British hands, and he was still in receipt of an annual
subsidy from the British exchequer, paid him on condition that he observed his

treaty obligations and heeded Britain’s counsel. On her side, Britain, as the
conqueror of the Ottoman empire, as the mandatory power in Iraq and as the
protecting power in Najd and Kuwait, had the inherent right as well as the legal
authority to apportion frontiers to these states as she saw fit.
Ibn Saud recovered with remarkable rapidity from his initial dismay at Cox’s
diktat. At the height of the summer of 1922 an ikhwan force, some 3,000-4,000
strong, had set out from Jabal Shammar, skirted the Great Nafud and
advanced up the Wadi Sirhan to within a dozen miles of Amman, the chief
town of Transjordan. It was stopped and virtually wiped out by aircraft and
armoured cars of the Royal Air Force stationed in the amirate. The setback did
not in the least deter Ibn Saud from his resolve to bring the whole of the Wadi
Sirhan, a great depression extending for nearly 200 miles from the Jauf oases in
the south-east to the Qaf oases in the north-west, under his authority, on the
grounds that it was the principal avenue of trade and communication between
Najd and Syria, and its people had already expressed their ardent desire to
submit to his rule. The first point was true, the second was not - although
Wahhabi mutawiyah were hard at work among the tribes of the Wadi Sirhan
trying to make it so. The British were prepared to concede control of the Jauf
oases and the southern half of the wadi to Ibn Saud, but not the northern half
and the Qaf oases. To do so, they thought, would be to create a permanent
threat to the stability of Transjordan. It would open up the possibility of
Wahhabi interference in Syria as well as driving a wedge between Transjordan
and Iraq, not only unsettling these two Hashimite principalities but also
disrupting Britain’s lines of communication between the Mediterranean and
the Gulf.
Ikhwan of the Mutair launched a savage raid upon shepherd tribes across the
Iraq frontier in the spring of 1924. The raid was made with the full knowledge
of Ibn Saud, who had clearly decided that the time had come to throw caution
to the winds and to stake all upon the swords and rifles of the ikhwan. Two

events in March 1924 had helped him to make up his mind. The first, at the
beginning of the month, was the action of the Turkish Grand National
Assembly in abolishing the Ottoman caliphate following the inauguration of
the Turkish republic in November 1922. Sharif Husain of the Hijaz, who had
already in January 1924 had himself proclaimed amir al-muminin (‘commander
of the faithful’), promptly assumed the caliphate himself, thereby outraging
not only the Wahhabi ulama but much of the Muslim world besides. The
second occurrence which swayed Ibn Saud was the termination at the end of
March of his annual subsidy from the British government. He was now free, he