Page 237 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

234 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

believed, to act as he pleased towards Britain’s Hashimite proteges in the Hijaz
and Transjordan. At a conference of tribal chieftains, ikhwan leaders and
Wahhabi ulania convened at Riyad in the first week of June 1924 by Ibn Saud’s
father, the Imam Abdur Rahman ibn Faisal, the conquest of the Hijaz and the
overthrow of Sharif Husain, the soi-disant caliph, were decided upon.
Ibn Saud launched his campaign at the end of August. Three expeditionary
forces were despatched to the north-west and the north-east, to cut the Hijaz
railway north of Madina and to raid up the Wadi Sirhan and across the Iraq
frontier with the object of distracting Husain’s sons, Abdullah in Transjordan

and Faisal in Iraq, and so prevent them from coming to their father’s assist­
ance. The main attack was directed from Khurma and Turaba upon Taif, the
oasis town in the highlands some forty miles to the east of Mecca, where the
notables of that city were accustomed to spend the summer months. Taif fell in

the first week of September without a fight, and its townsfolk paid dearly for
their pusillanimity. 'Theikhwan ran amok, slaying hundreds of people before
they were brought under control. Panic followed in Mecca, its citizens fleeing
in their hundreds to find safety in Jiddah. Sharif Husain appealed to Britain for
help, harking back to his wartime sacrifices on Britain’s behalf. The appeal
went unanswered. It was judged out of the question for Britain, as a Christian
power, to send troops to the holy land of Islam to intervene in what was, as
much as anything, a Muslim religious war. To send Indian Muslim troops
would assuredly have provoked upheavals in India. Bowing to the inevitable,
Husain abdicated as King of the Hijaz at the beginning of October and went
into exile, leaving his son, Ali, to succeed him as so-called ‘constitutional
sovereign’.
Mecca was occupied by the Wahhabis in the second week of October. Ibn
Saud proclaimed that he had no intention of annexing or dominating the Hijaz.
Its future status would be determined by a congress of the whole Islamic world.
He had undertaken the campaign against the Hashimites, he asserted, because
Husain had neglected the holy places and debarred the people of Najd from
making the pilgrimage. There was no place in the Hijaz for the family of
Husain, and the war would continue until they had been expelled. Henceforth
he, Ibn Saud, would guarantee the security of the holy places, the pilgrimage
and the pilgrim routes. For all his confident assertions, however, he had to pick

his way with care in the next few months. The acts of savagery by some of his
soldiery, the destruction of shrines and sacred monuments by Wahhabi zea­
lots, and the forcible interdiction of the cult of saints, which was both wide­
spread and deeply rooted in the Hijaz, had all unsettled Muslim opinion abroad
and turned much of it against him. For the next twelve months, therefore, Ibn
Saud stayed his hand, declaring to the world at large that he wished to spare the
holy land any further strife. More to the point, he was counting upon the
respite to drain away what little support for the Hashimite dynasty remained
among the townsmen of the Hijaz, whose inconstancy was as notorious as was