Page 241 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

238 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

is only to be exacted from Christians, Jews and other ‘people of scripture’ {ahi
al-kitabf When Ibn Saud regained Hasa in 1913 the Hasawis were again

subjected to persecution - though not enough, to be sure, to slake thcikhwan's
thirst for vengeance - a persecution which was not eased until many years later
when the discovery of oil in the Eastern Province (as Hasa came to be called
after 1950) made it the most valuable part of the Saudi realm. It was the
Hasawis’ misfortune that only a handful of outsiders knew of their sufferings
after 1913; whereas it was the Hijazis’ comparative good fortune that the world
was watching the conduct of the Wahhabis in the Hijaz in the 1920s.
The ikhwan took matters into their own hands towards the close of 1927,
raiding into southern Iraq in defiance of the treaties of Muhammarah, Uqair
and Bahra, and of the injunctions of Ibn Saud himself. Behind their fierce
insubordination lay their deep antipathy for the Shia of Iraq, who comprised

half that kingdom’s population, and their anger with Ibn Saud for refusing to
unleash them in another sack and massacre of Karbala and other odious Shii
shrines. When Ibn Saud summoned a congress of tribal chieftains at Riyad in
October 1928, the leading ikhwan commanders refused to attend. Insubordi­
nation had become rebellion, and Ibn Saud was faced with the most dangerous
challenge he had yet met, or was to meet, during his reign. He took the field
against the rebel chieftains in March 1929 and defeated them at Sahala, not far
from Artawiya. Those of the ikhwan leaders who did not die by the sword
ended their days in prison.

Between 1930 and 1934 Ibn Saud tidied up the south-western borders of his
dominions by annexing additional territory along the marches of the Yemen.
He then turned his gaze to the one area where he had so far neglected to press
his ancestral claims - Qatar and Trucial Oman. The story of his efforts in the
1930s (and later) to make good these claims has already been told. They were
inspired in equal measure by his obsession with planting the Saudi flag
wherever in the past, and however fleetingly, it may once have flown, and by
his determination, after his grant of an oil concession for the eastern portion of
his dominions to the Standard Oil Company of California in I933j t0 make
these dominions as far flung as possible. Oil was struck in Hasa in 1938, and the
first consignment was shipped from Ras Tanura a year later, on the eve of the
Second World W’ar. The onset of war delayed the development of the fields,
and it also drastically reduced the pilgrim traffic to the Hijaz, from which Ibn
Saud normally derived a not inconsiderable revenue. Britain came to his aid

with an annual subsidy, the payment of which was assumed later by the United
States. It did not require a great deal of perspicacity for Ibn Saud to grasp that
the United States was bound to exercise a preponderant influence in world
affairs after the war, and by the time of his death in November 1953 Saudi
Arabia was well on the way to forming that special relationship with the Unite
States which has reached full bloom in our day.