The Early Twentieth Century
1925–1933
The five accounts in this section are all by Western converts to Islam. They overlap the crucial years between Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud’s conquest of Mecca (1924) and the establishment of the Saudi state in 1932. By chance, these pieces also alternate between those with a special interest in regional politics and others of a less public nature. Of the three men of action, Eldon Rutter (1925) wrote well-observed passages about Ibn Saʿud while Muhammad Asad (1927) and St. John Philby (1931) were the king’s intimates. Two other travelers left more private memoirs—one highborn, wealthy, and well educated (Lady Evelyn Cobbold, 1933), the other a hard knocks cameleer from the Australian outback (Winifred Stegar, 1927).
Each of the authors in this section had different reasons for becoming Muslim. Winifred Stegar married an Indian who swept her off her feet, then off to Mecca. Muhammad Asad embraced Islam as an alternative to bourgeois Occidental values. Philby, a Christian agnostic, converted to live more fully in Arabia, while Lady Cobbold, a landed Briton, had no other religion than Islam. All five wrote at a time when relations between Europe and the Muslim lands were close and when Europe might almost be called post-Christian. In addition, since at least 1900, Muslims had been immigrating to Europe in large numbers, first to fill a low-wage labor vacuum and, after 1914, to help fight World War I.205 By 1925, Islam was not the stranger it once had been in western Europe. Western converts, while still distinctly odd, no longer carried the stigma of apostasy that had haunted Joseph Pitts in the eighteenth century. Letters from Philby’s friends in 1930, when he became a Muslim, imply that the more surprising side of his decision lay simply in being concerned enough with one’s religion to want to change it.
Readers may wonder, How reliable a reporter can a convert be? The assumption, in Richard Burton’s time in Europe, was that nonbelievers were more credible. Today as well, disinterest seems to guarantee a more scientific view on any subject. This may apply in the field of particle physics, but it does not hold true with regard to Mecca. Both Ibn Jubayr and the Begum of Bhopal, while deeply devout, could be scathing about the Hajj when it was called for. Faith did not automatically reduce their capacity to be objective; it may have increased it. Western observers, on the other hand, were sometimes more involved with their disguises than with the Hajj. Almost invariably, they inflated the risks of the journey, while their access to local information was badly compromised by fears of discovery. An unspoken question, What are you doing here? hovers over these interlopers’ texts, whether by Burckhardt (1814) or Wavell (1908). With few exceptions, the observers were neither very impartial nor more complete in their accounts than the converts who followed them a few years later. They were often fair writers, but in any real sense they were not pilgrims. They shed light on a unique experience, yet it was an experience only a Muslim could have. Even when they performed the tawaf, they literally were going through the motions. Burton, who remained a kind of Muslim all his life, had the grace to admit this. Contrasting himself to other hajjis circuiting the Kaʿba, he wrote:
I may truly say that, of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a deeper emotion than the hajji from the far north . . . but to confess the humbling truth, theirs was the high feeling of religious enthusiasm, mine was the ecstasy of gratified pride.
Contrast the remarks of the Austrian convert, Muhammad Asad:
And there I stood before the temple of Abraham and gazed at the marvel without thinking . . . and out of some hidden, smiling kernel within me there slowly grew an elation like a song.
The disappearance of non-Muslims from these pages coincides with the completion of Europe’s colonization of the world. So long as that process continued, from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, Mecca remained one of a few forbidden cities Western travelers made it their business to “discover.” (Tibetan Lhasa, Moroccan Smara, Malian Timbuktu, Beijing’s Forbidden City, and Ethiopian Harrar were others.) By 1925, however, the frontiers of exploration lay elsewhere. After four centuries, Mecca returned to being an exclusively Islamic subject. For Muslims, of course, it always was.
Historical Background
THE MANDATE PERIOD Most of the authors in this section were concerned with Middle Eastern politics and the impact of European strategy on the region. After all, World War I and its treaties altered the shape of the Middle East forever. And they changed the Hajj as well.
After the Ottomans joined the war on the German side in 1914, the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia entered into numerous veiled accords concerning the future division of the Ottoman Empire. The Constantinople (1915) and Sykes-Picot (1916) Agreements and the 1917 Balfour Declaration promised prospective chunks of Ottoman land to each ally once the war ended. In addition to these advance bookings east of the Bosporus, France and Britain took steps to exploit some very real ethnic divisions between the Turkish Porte and its Armenian, Kurdish, and Arab territories. They not only encouraged regional leaders to rebel against the Turks; they plied them with arms, money, and promised independence.
By the middle of World War I, Britain’s chief Arab rebel leader was none other than Sharif Husayn ibn Ali of Mecca (1908–24). In March 1916, Husayn inaugurated a revolt against the Turks by firing a rifle at their garrison from his palace window near the Haram Mosque. The subsequent uprising spread through the Hijaz and continued during the war with British backing. While not much more than a sideshow in the Allies’ eastern war, the Sharif’s revolt remained strategically important to British policy, for it linked the ruler of Mecca to the Allied cause, and so won approval from millions of Muslims despite the fact that the Ottoman Porte had sided with Germany. Here we see the only viable government in the Hijaz being made increasingly a pawn in the strategic diplomatic games of Great Britain and the Ottomans. Any local political unity in Arabia was thereby compromised as greater powers sought new allies for their struggle. As for the Hajj, Husayn’s Arab Revolt affected it most directly in 1916, when his troops, assisted by British arms and T. E. Lawrence’s flair for explosives, blew up the railroad lines as far north as Ma’an. The train’s disappearance rocked the new economy of the Hijaz and stunted the growth of Medina, as we shall see. It did not, however, permanently reduce Hajj attendance in Mecca. Once the war ended, a renewed flow of pilgrims reverted to sea and land travel. Even interior camel routes enjoyed a new lease on life in the 1920s. Such were the deep attractions of the Hajj.
THE MANDATE SYSTEM At the end of the war, Allied promises of Arab independence were brushed aside at the treaty tables. Instead, the core of the Ottoman Empire was diced into six new political entities called mandates. (See Figs. 14 and 15 to compare the region’s political boundaries before and after World War I.) The mandates were colonies with a sunset clause— undeveloped, fledgling states to be placed under the tutelage of more “advanced” nations until they were “able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.”
The paternalistic mandate system put a League of Nations face on naked colonialism. Behind its façade, France and Britain were able to guard their own strategic interests (oil, trade, communications with India) simply by bankrolling and administering the region for an infinitely extendable “preparatory period.” By 1923, new borders had appeared on the map; Transjordan, Iraq, and Syria acquired names; and Arab “regents” from the Meccan sharifate were imported as figureheads to rule them.206 Egypt and Palestine did not require the full charade: they were directly administered by British commissioners, but it hardly mattered. Policy in either case was soon being set by Europeans, using a network of high commissions taking orders from London or Paris. One of our authors, St. John Philby, was Britain’s chief representative in Iraq (1921–24).
SAUDI RESURGENCE Meanwhile in Arabia, a second crucial chapter of the story was unfolding. In the years before World War I, deep in the northeastern Nejd Desert, Abd al-Aziz ibn Saʿud, inheritor of the Saʿud-Wahhabi alliance, had begun reconquering ancestral territory. Ibn Saʿud was a tall, decisive tactician with sufficient charisma to carry out his plan—the complete unification of Arabia under one banner. His chief adversaries were Amir Muhammad ibn Rashid, a local Nejdi lord and a Turkish ally, and the British-backed ruler of Mecca, Sharif Husayn. Whereas Ibn Rashid and Husayn were already allied with non-Arab powers, Ibn Saʿud drew to his side an indigenous band of resurgent Wahhabi tribesmen who had begun, around 1912, to sell their belongings and settle together in farm-based spiritual communes throughout the Nejd. Ibn Saʿud, their hereditary leader, placed himself at their head almost at once. By judicious gifts of land, he acquired an army.
The first goal of these Brothers, or Ikhwan, was to restore Islam to as many Bedouin as possible, to fix the people’s attention on Muslim values, and to break their allegiance to local chiefs and shaykhs. In this way, with surprising speed, thousands of semi-nomads developed a loyalty beyond their tribes. They also acquired a livelihood that, for the first time in these records, excluded looting pilgrim caravans. Rather, they pledged their rifles to Ibn Saʿud, who used them to consolidate a kingdom. In return, the Ikhwan communes received farm tools, arms, mosques, books, livestock, and stables. The communes with their strong social emphasis on unitarian Islam broke down clan jealousies, providing the people a new identity, and put a brake on intertribal warfare. By 1917, a quarter of a million Bedouin men, women, and children had moved from desert tents to several hundred mud-brick settlements around the Nejd. Among them were sixty thousand men of fighting age, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. They overwhelmed Amir Ibn Rashid, and the Saudis claimed his lands.
World War I had freed the Hijaz from Turkish control. Now, Ibn Saʿud set out to solve his family’s other problem, control of the two Holy Cities by the sharifs. To most outside observers, Sharif Husayn’s postwar position appeared secure. Hopeful British and French diplomats had placed his sons on the thrones of three mandates,207 and his claims to kingship of the Hijaz were being honored. In reality, however, he was bottled up in Mecca, and Ibn Saʿud’s armies were entering the Hijaz. In September 1924, three thousand Wahhabi warriors swept down on Taʾif (overlooking Mecca) and sent a clear message: The centuries-long cold war between Arabia’s two most influential families, the sharifs and the Saudis, was about to be decisively concluded. Husayn abdicated a few days later, and Ibn Saʿud’s army entered Mecca without firing a shot. The next year he became King of the Hijaz.
Ibn Saʿud was crowned near Mount Safa in 1925. With the recent abdication of Sharif Husayn and the collapse of the Ottoman caliphate the year before, Muslims were left without a symbolic world representative for the first time in memory. Lacking this powerful organizing symbol, the Middle East was ripe for the tide of nationalism then sweeping through it. Pan-Islam, the vision of a larger community beyond one’s region, had fueled a millennium of major bids for a single sovereign to whom all Muslims would look. In 1925, that long tradition was left without a reasonable figure to represent it. Although the timing of Ibn Saʿud’s victory gave it added resonance around the Muslim world, he was never a likely candidate for caliph. The world accepted his revolution because he won, but his puritan-style Islam was too strict for most Muslims.
THE SAUDI REFORMATION OF THE HAJJ Under Husayn’s long, venal rule, the Hajj service system reached new extremes of unbridled profiteering. With Ibn Saʿud’s appearance, it faced a regime bent on ending corruption. Particularly in Mecca, the headstrong, doctrinaire Wahhabi army demanded adherence to Quranic law. It is as if these Nejdi reformers had taken a page from the wish list of the Begum of Bhopal. Determined to curtail excess in every form, they ended public graft and exorbitant duties, lowered prices on food and pilgrim lodgings, and secured the roads from Jidda and Medina. But their uncompromising approach offended many. Again and again in the following excerpts, we see the Wahhabis enforcing a stricter, remoralized Islam, stamping out Ottoman excess, pulling down saints’ shrines, banning tobacco, music, alcohol, dancing. Ibn Jubayr’s old demand that the Hijaz be cleansed by the sword was not too extreme for the average Wahhabi soldier.
The mass of pilgrims endured these extreme measures in exchange for fair prices and safety on the roads. The Muslim world as a whole, however, abhorred their violence and strictness. Even after 1929, when Ibn Saʿud demobilized the Wahhabis, he was some years repairing the damage done to his name outside the country. A strong alliance with Britain, the discovery of oil in his kingdom, and continued, scrupulous attention to the management of the Hajj are reasons often given for the accommodation by neighboring Arab governments of Saudi rule. One might, however, ask, What neighboring Arab governments? Thanks to the mandate system and World War II, only Saudi Arabia among the ten core sites of the Middle East emerged after 1945 with a durable, indigenous regime. Severe, conservative, and inward looking, it nonetheless functioned and benefited its people. It was about to be enriched beyond their dreams.
Our image today of Saudi Arabia as a wealthy, modernizing state does not apply to the interwar period. Ibn Saʿud’s new country was impoverished. It had no roads, no national currency, and no communications system. The modest receipts of the Hajj remained its chief source of revenues through the 1930s. During the Great Depression, Britain augmented this income with small annual subsidies of sixty thousand pounds. Not until the 1950s would large amounts of capital be dedicated to modernization. Meanwhile, reforming the Hajj was a slow process accomplished in many stages over decades. The groundwork, however, was laid almost at once. In November 1926, Ibn Saʿud issued a decree setting out the first comprehensive Hajj regulations. Its forty articles granted his regime the right to license and oversee all pilgrim guilds. The duties of guides, water bearers, greeters, and camel brokers were thus defined, and boards and committees set up to supervise their activities. Fixed rates for services were published and distributed abroad. Step by step, the pilgrim service system would be reshaped along these lines into a public utility industry. Despite a hiatus during the Great Depression, the Hajj under Ibn Saʿud grew and prospered rather than falling to putative French or English protection in the 1930s. Ironically enough, it was the French and British Empires, not the Hajj, that were on their way to virtual extinction. Meanwhile, European consuls and representatives remained confined to Jidda, on the coast.
205 During WWI, in France alone, two hundred thousand Algerians were “requisitioned” for war-related labor.
206 This use of Meccan rulers was a veiled Allied ploy to garner Muslim support around the world for the new mandates; it also gave members of the Hashimite line new job opportunities after the fall of their sharifate in 1925.
207 It is a curious fact that during this period not only regional sovereigns but Western nations, too, were desperate for partnership and recognition in Mecca.