Page 68 - A Hand book of Arabia Vol 1 (iii) Ch 1,2

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POLITICS 33

v i ill the rest of Asir, however, is included in the principate,
is at Sabia (Sablyah) in the Abu ‘Arlsh district of the
I, the Yemen border. The eastern part of Asir, being the
- i
ni.er and lower valleys of streams flowing inland towards the
" it li-cast till lost in the steppe-desert of Central Arabia, is autono-
n*»
,n.uTs territory of tribes, of which some recognize, in a measure, the
'oilIiority of the Grand Sherif of Mecca, others no authority but
I heir own. They are, in fact, the true Asiris who gave so much
trouble to, and finally baffled, Mohammed ‘Ali’s generals in the
first pa ft of the nineteenth century.
As for what*remains, the Prince of Sabia either administers or
federates it—that is to say, all the Tihamah and ‘Aqabah lands from
no rth of Loljcia (Lahlyah) in Yemen to the confines of Qunfudah—
a strip of about 250 miles from north to south, by, roughly, seventy
mih'S west to east, Its home-land is the Abu ‘Arlsh district, whose
ports are Jeizan and Midi. * This is a rather broad section of the
Tihamah, sloping up for some forty miles to the foot of the ‘Aqabah,
or scarp of the highlands, and about 80 miles long from north to
south. There is here a very old tradition of independence which
has been lyaintained, on the one hand, against both the Turks and
the Yemenite Imam, on the other against the tribes of the inland
mountains.
Between 1830 and 1S40 Abu ‘Arlsh was ruled by a certain Sherif
'Ali, who made terms with the Egyptians. During his reign, one
Scyyid Ahmed el-Idrisi, a native of Fez, and head of a religious
fraternity school (tariqah), whose tenets he had been preaching at
Mecca since 1799, acquired land at Sabia; he settled there and
died (1837) in the odour of sanctity. He had been the teacher of the
original Senussi sheikh, who took the covenant in his tariqah at
Mecca in 1S23. The Idrlsi family increased in wealth during the
lifetime of Ahmed’s son and grandson, and appears, after the renun­
ciation of Asir by the Egyptians, in 1841, to have supplanted the
Sherifial family of Abu ‘Arlsh. It intermarried with the Senussi
house, which was now' settled in Cyrenaica, and, through branches
at Zeinia, near Luxor, in Egypt, and in the Sudan at Argo (Arju),
it extended its influence. But the expansion of its temporal power
at home to include not only all Abu ‘Arlsh, but the Tihamah and
Aqabah north and south and a suzerainty over several tribes
outside those limits (e.g. in the Saklah District of North Yemen,
and even among the Qahtan tribes) is the work of Seyyid Ahmed’s
great-grandson.
Seyyid Mohammed, the present Idrlsi, who returned from a
kmg absence, during which lie had been educated at the Azhar and
ARABIA. I
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