A History of the Middle East (31 page)

The boundaries between Nejd and both Kuwait and Iraq were still not properly defined. Ibn Saud regarded border demarcation as ludicrous in an area where the nomad inhabitants lacked any sense of nationality and were accustomed to wander over huge stretches of desert to find pasturage for their flocks. But the British protectors of Iraq and Kuwait were determined to establish a frontier beyond which Wahhabi power would not be allowed to expand. At Uqair, the sea-port of al-Hasa on the Gulf, Sir Percy Cox, high commissioner of Iraq, reached an agreement with Ibn Saud whereby a large slice of territory claimed by Iraq was allocated to the new kingdom of Iraq. In order to placate Ibn Saud, some two-thirds of the land that had been considered to belong to Kuwait at the time of the 1913 agreement with the Ottoman government became part of Nejd. An embarrassed Cox later explained to the emir of Kuwait that nothing could be done to prevent Ibn Saud from taking the territories if he wished.

Britain was less successful in arranging an accommodation between Ibn Saud and his old rival and enemy King Hussein of the Hejaz, to which all Wahhabi ambitions were now directed. The embittered old king refused to sign the 1921 draft treaty, which would have meant accepting the accomplished fact that Syria, Lebanon and Palestine were all lost to the rule of his family. His annual subsidy from Britain had been discontinued. However, he still aimed to assert himself. He demonstrated his authority over his family by
making a state visit to Aqaba, where he was received with due deference by his son Abdullah, the new emir of Transjordan. He then made a fatal error. Since Mustafa Kemal of the new Turkish Republic had just abolished the institution of the Islamic caliphate, Hussein declared himself to have assumed the title of ‘Prince of the Faithful and Successor of the Prophet’.

Early in the war Britain had supported the idea of a restored Arab caliphate, but now it was no longer interested. In the Muslim world as a whole, apart from some Hashemite loyalists in Palestine and Syria, reaction to Hussein’s declaration ranged from indifference to anger. Among Ibn Saud’s Wahhabi warriors there was rage. It was at this moment that Britain decided to end the £60,000 subsidy it had been paying Ibn Saud since 1915. He therefore no longer had any motive for restraining his warriors, who at once fell upon the Hejaz. Hussein, who, whatever his faults, remained dignified and courageous to the last, wanted to fight to the end, but the Hejazis persuaded him to abdicate in favour of his eldest son, Ali, who had retreated to barricade himself with his forces in Jedda and might be able to sue for better terms from the Wahhabis. Hussein sailed away to an embittered exile in Cyprus, taking with him what remained of his treasures.

Ali held out in Jedda for a year until he surrendered and abdicated. Ibn Saud’s forces soon overran the rest of the Hejaz, but he took care to restrain his Ikhwan warriors, reports of whose excesses terrified the local population. Ibn Saud gave priority to security. He reopened the Islamic pilgrimage route and set out to demonstrate that he could ensure the security of the holy places after centuries of disorder. An English Muslim who made the
hajj
(pilgrimage) in 1925 wrote of Ibn Saud, ‘He is probably the best ruler that Arabia has known since the days of the four Khalifas.’

With Ali’s abdication in December 1924, Ibn Saud became ruler of the whole Hejaz, except that in the extreme north-west the British authorities in Palestine retained some territory by sending troops and armoured cars to occupy the strip of land between Maan and Aqaba, on the grounds that, as part of the former Ottoman
vilayet of Damascus, it should now be included in the British mandate for Palestine. The reality was that it was considered essential for Emir Abdullah’s emirate of Transjordan to have an outlet to the sea. Ibn Saud never accepted the
fait accompli
, but he was unable to prevent it.

Ibn Saud now controlled the holy places of Islam. The question was, how would the Muslim world respond? The great majority of Muslims, who were not Arabs, were likely to be sceptical that a tribal leader from central Arabia should succeed in protecting and securing the holy places when the sharifian rulers and Ottoman Turks had so manifestly failed. Already they were alarmed by the Wahhabi destruction of the tombs of Muslim saints.

Ibn Saud acted with skill and caution. He appointed his second son, Emir Feisal, as his viceroy of the Hejaz and Abdullah Damluji, an experienced Iraqi in his service, as director of foreign affairs. Delegates of eminent Persian and Indian Muslims visited the Hejaz and reported favourably. The people of the Hejaz were also impressed by Ibn Saud’s ability to maintain security and by his willingness to adjust to their more sophisticated urban ways. On 8 January 1926 the Hejaz notables approached him with a formal request to accept their loyalty as King of the Hejaz, and he agreed to rule, with God’s help, through the holy
sharia
.

As well as being their king, Ibn Saud was the people’s imam, which meant that he led them in prayers and set them an example in religious devotion. But he went no further than this – unlike Sharif Hussein, or King Farouk of Egypt at a later date, Ibn Saud never aspired to the title of caliph; he was only resolutely opposed to anyone else taking the title.

The Soviet Union was the first of the powers to recognize the new Saudi regime, followed rapidly by Britain, France and the other European powers. The United States was to wait another decade before it showed any interest in Arabia. The Soviet Union saw Ibn Saud as an independent anti-imperialist force and hoped to use his new state as a channel for political and commercial penetration of the Middle East, which was otherwise under British or French
control. By 1938 the Soviets realized their error and the Soviet legation in Jedda was closed. Most of the staff were liquidated in the Stalinist purges.

Problems with Britain remained, as Ibn Saud refused to recognize the British mandates in Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan until his claim to the Maan–Aqaba territory was accepted. Under the 1927 Treaty of Jedda this matter was shelved, but Britain recognized ‘the complete and absolute independence of the dominions’ of Ibn Saud, who in return agreed to respect all the British treaties of protection with Arab Gulf shaikhdoms.

He was still faced with the task of unifying and administering his vast but thinly populated territories – some two-thirds the size of India. He had appointed his eldest son, Saud, viceroy of Nejd with Feisal as viceroy of the Hejaz, but he also needed outside help and this he confined to Muslim Arabs – Iraqis, Syrians and Egyptians. His policy was to make each tribal chief responsible for security in his own area and accountable to him, while the Wahhabi army remained in the background as the ultimate sanction. He also contracted several dynastic marriages with the daughters of the leaders of important tribal confederations, which partially explains why forty-four sons survived him and today there are some four or five thousand Saudi princes in direct line of descent from the king.

He showed wisdom in many respects. Although he remained the supreme ruler, with overwhelming prestige, he never ignored public opinion. He was determined that his kingdom should have those Western inventions which would make life easier for his people, provided these did not undermine their way of life. He did not try to force the pace but used persuasion where possible. A gathering of religious shaikhs was convinced that the telephone was not the instrument of the devil when they heard on it a voice reciting the Holy Koran. (A generation later his son, King Feisal, used the same methods to overcome objections to television and to girls’ education.)

Despite his tact and political skill, in 1929–30 Ibn Saud was faced by a full-scale revolt among some of his Ikhwan warriors, who
denounced his Western innovations and demanded the right to raid across the borders into Transjordan and Iraq, whose people they regarded as infidels. Eventually Ibn Saud took the field against them and put down the rebellion. His authority was now unchallenged throughout his territories, and on 8 September 1932 the kingdom of the Hejaz and the sultanate of Nejd were officially united as the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

The desert boundaries of the new kingdom with the Arab Gulf shaikhdoms remained unsettled, but this would only present problems later, in the oil era. On the other hand, a dispute with the Imam Yahya, ruler of the ancient kingdom of Yemen, concerning the Asir coastal region on the Red Sea, led to a brief Saudi–Yemeni war in 1934. After a Saudi force under Emir Feisal had occupied the Yemeni port of Hodeida, Ibn Saud ordered a halt. In the peace negotiations he behaved with generosity and magnanimity, abstaining from any demands on Yemeni territory. A treaty of ‘Muslim Friendship and Arab Fraternity’ was the basis of untroubled relations between the two countries for the next thirty years.

In the first three decades following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, Saudi Arabia and Yemen were the only states of the Mashreq or Arab East which were fully independent. Under its imam Yahya, who ruled from 1904 to 1948, mountainous Yemen kept itself virtually impenetrable to the outside world and hardly impinged on the politics of the region. Saudi Arabia, because it included the holy places of Islam and had in Ibn Saud a ruler of unique prestige, exerted more influence. However, it remained the least developed part of the region – proud but intensely poor. The improved administration of the
hajj
pilgrimage increased revenues in the 1920s, as the number of pilgrims increased to 100,000 a year and each pilgrim paid a fee of £5 in gold. However, the number of pilgrims declined drastically in the 1930s as a consequence of the Great Depression, falling to only 20,000 in 1933. In 1931 Ibn Saud’s finance minister was forced to declare a moratorium on all the kingdom’s debts and to commandeer for ready cash the gasoline stocks of two private companies in Jedda. With some reluctance, in 1933 Ibn Saud granted
an oil concession for the kingdom’s eastern territories to Standard Oil of California. Oil was discovered in commercial quantities in 1938, in what was to prove to be one of the largest oilfields in the world, but, because the Second World War intervened, it was only in the 1950s that the kingdom became the major producer in the region and began to acquire vast wealth.

The Inter-war Years

(a) Egypt

Britain’s unilateral declaration of Egypt’s independence in 1922, with significant reservations protecting British imperial interests, gave Egypt an unstable and anomalous political framework. The British residency was no longer the only real centre of power in the country but one of three, alongside the palace and the Wafd. As long as British troops remained in occupation, British power could always be exerted, but it was exercised with increasing difficulty and diminishing effectiveness.

The same pattern of events was repeated several times. The king, who had considerable powers under the constitution but wished that they were greater, would dissolve parliament and try to rule without it. When he could do so no longer, an election would be held in which, provided the elections were substantially free, the Wafdists always won a sweeping victory. In later years the Wafd was seen to have lost its cohesion and sense of purpose as it became riddled with faction and corruption, but in the 1930s it was undoubtedly the political expression of Egypt – comparable to the Congress Party in India during the years of struggle for independence from British rule.

In 1925 Britain’s Conservative government replaced Allenby as high commissioner with Lord Lloyd, a close friend of Winston Churchill who, like Churchill, refused to acknowledge that the empire was in decline. Lloyd accepted the constitutional position
in Egypt and used his influence to prevent King Fuad from attempting to exclude the Wafd from power. But he was adamant on maintaining Britain’s reservations to Egypt’s independence, and for this he considered it necessary that the numbers and authority of both civilian and military Anglo-Egyptian officials should not be reduced beyond the point which he considered to be the essential minimum. In particular he resisted Wafdist efforts to expand the armed forces and replace the British high command with Egyptian officers. Fearing a repeat of the Arab Revolt, Lloyd was always prepared to summon a British warship to Alexandria in times of crisis.

In general Lloyd had his way, but he felt angrily frustrated. As he wrote to a friend,

Lloyd’s analysis of the anomalies of the British position in Egypt was correct. The British government’s aim remained to secure an Anglo-Egyptian treaty of alliance in which, in return for some concessions, Egypt would accept the limitations to Egyptian independence which Britain considered essential – including the abandonment of the Egyptian claim to sovereignty over Sudan. When King Fuad paid a state visit to London in 1927, the British Foreign Office attempted to initiate negotiations for a treaty with the Egyptian prime minister, Sarwat Pasha, without Lloyd’s knowledge. Lloyd had the satisfaction of seeing his prediction vindicated that any Egyptian prime minister would be either unwilling or unable to sell such a treaty to the Egyptian parliament. When Zaghloul Pasha died later in the year, Nahas, his
successor as leader of the Wafd, was anxious to show that he was as fervent a champion of unfettered Egyptian independence as his predecessor. After weeks of aimless political manoeuvres, the Egyptian parliament rejected the proposed treaty.

When Ramsay MacDonald came to power in Britain at the head of a Labour government, Lloyd was replaced. His romantic right-wing brand of Toryism had been too much even for Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government. Another attempt was made to reach a treaty agreement, and this time success seemed in sight as Britain was even prepared to withdraw its troops from the Suez Canal zone, but – not for the last time – negotiations broke down over Egypt’s demand for the revision of the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian condominium agreement on the Sudan. The Sudan was a question which was capable of arousing the whole country, as even the illiterate
fellahin
were aware of the importance of the Nile flood on which their lives depended.