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‘Araby the Blest* 237

Hasa coast. The blockade was not removed until the British made an issue of it
at the time of the treaty’s first renewal - it was subject to confirmation every
seven years-in October 1936. Towards the slave trade and its suppression Ibn
Saud consistently exhibited torpor and indifference, while towards the petty
shaikhs of the lower Gulf he displayed, as we have seen, both a contempt for
their independence and an unseemly hunger - all the more unseemly in view of
the large territorial acquisitions he had already ingested - for their few lands.
Yet in the face of this conduct the British government and its officials,
throughout the 1930s and the period of the Second World War and beyond,
continued to treat him with an exaggerated deference which was warranted
neither by his actual importance nor by his supposed attachment to their
interests.
At the height of his many triumphs Ibn Saud found himself confronted in
the winter of 1927-8 with a revolt of the most formidable ikhwan chieftains, led
by Faisal ibn Sultan al-Dawish of the Mutair, who had been growing restive
ever since their raids into Iraq and Transjordan had been blocked by British
treaties and British arms. Further irritation was caused by the curbing, after
the massacre of Taif, of their zeal to cleanse the Hijaz with fire and sword.
Many of the ikhwan leaders had shown their disgust with Ibn Saud for

accepting the title of ‘king of the Hijaz’ - a title which was, in their eyes, not
only a worldly indulgence abhorrent to religion but one besmirched by its

former possessors, the heretics of the house of Hashim - by refusing to attend
the congress at Riyad in January 1927, at which he was proclaimed ‘King of
Najd’. Even his assumption of the dignity of imam of the Wahhabiya on the
death of his father, Abdur Rahman ibn Faisal, in 1928 failed to mollify them.
Ibn Saud, in the view of the ikhwan, had had too much truck with infidels, and
with the British in particular. He was besotted with accursed innovations, like
the motorcar, the telephone, the telegraph and the railway. He had failed to
treat the idolaters and polytheists of the Hijaz as such mushrikun deserved to be
treated. He had been similarly remiss, the ikhwan zealots charged, in his
attitude to the Shii apostates of al-Hasa after its reconquest in 1913.
How the poor Hasawis could have been more harshly treated by their
Wahhabi overlords it is hard to imagine. From the time that Hasa fell under
Wahhabi domination in the last decade of the eighteenth century its inhabi­
tants had been treated as a subject people, inferior to the Najdis. On the few
occasions when they managed to throw off Wahhabi rule, they were made to
pay a heavy price for their boldness when the Wahhabis returned. More than
half the population of Hasa - most of whom resided in the town of Hufuf and its
satellite settlements in the Hasa oasis, or in the coastal towns of Qatif, Uqair,
Dammam and Jubail - was Shii Muslim, and the majority of the Sunnis
ollowed the Maliki rite. To the Wahhabis the Shia were objects of especial
atred, and they expressed this hatred in a number of oppressive ways,
including the levying upon them of the jizyah, or poll tax, which in Islamic law