Page 90 - A Hand book of Arabia Vol 1 (iii) Ch 4,5

140 ASIR

for some 40 miles to the foot of the ‘Aqabah, or scarp of the
highlands, and about 80 miles long from north to south.
Before Mohammed ‘Ali cast covetous eyes on Asir the whole
country from Dhahran almost to Ta’if was in the hands of the ruling
family of Beni Mugheid, whose capital was Manadhir, or Ibha as
it is now called. The Emir at the time of the Egyptian expedition
in 1834 was ‘A’idh ibn Mura'i who, with the help of his sturdy
hillmen, succeeded in defeating the invaders. The country then
had rest from foreign aggression until 1869 when, the Suez Canal
having been opened, the Porte sent troops under Ra‘uf Pasha
to deal with the Yemen and Asir in earnest. In 1871 Mohammed,
son of ‘A’idh, attacked Hodeidah, but was repulsed with great loss,
i
and in the next year Mukhtar Pasha, who had succeeded Ra'uf
I
Pasha, invaded and subdued Asir. He'was helped by the Rijal
el-M‘a, who had unsuccessfully rebelled against the Emir and were
burning to avenge their defeat. The Turks administered most
of the country until the revolt of_ Idrisi reduced their power to
its present limits. The house of ‘A’idh, though deprived of much
of its former glory, is still important, and Hasan ibn ‘Ali, the
present head, is Vali or Turkish Civil Governor of Asir.
There is in Mikhlaf el-Yemen a very old tradition of independence
which has been maintained against both the Turks and the Yemenite
tribes on the one hand, and the tribes of the inland mountains on
the other. Between 1830 and 1840 Abu ‘Arish was ruled by a certain
Sherif ‘Ali, who made terms with the Egyptians in order to free
himself from the Emir ‘A’idh ibn Mura'i. During his reign one
Seyyid Ahmed el-Idrisi, a native of Fez, and head of a religious
fraternity school (tarlqah) which he had preached in a school at Mecca
since 1799, acquired land at Sabia, settled there, and died (1837)
in the odour of sanctity. He had been the teacher of the original
i
Senussi (see p. 33), who took the covenant in his tariqah in 1823.
The Idrisi family increased in wealth during the lifetime of Seyyid
Ahmed’s son and grandson; and appears, after the defeat of
Sherif Husein of Abu ‘Arish, to have supplanted the Sherifial
family. It intermarried with the Senussi house, settled in
Cyrenaica, and had branches at Zeinia near Luxor in Egypt and in
the Sudan at Argo. But the expansion of its political power to
include not only all Mikhlaf el-Yemen, but the Tihamah and
‘Aqabah north and south, and a suzerainty over several tribes
outside those limits (e. g. in the Sa‘dah district) is the work of Seyyid
Ahmed’s great-grandson, Seyyid Mohammed, the present Idrisi.

Born at Sabia in 1876, educated partly in Egypt (at Zeinia and
at El-Azhar, Cairo) and partly by the Senussi at Kiifra, after residence