In the real world the British played no part in these affairs until two Wahhabi dhows attacked and boarded the sloop HMS Sylph in the Persian Gulf in November 1818, cutting the throats of all the non-Muslims on board. This threatened the East India Company’s profitable sea trade with Persia and Iraq: the Governor of Bombay reacted by forming an alliance with the rulers of Oman and Muscat and despatching a squadron of armed frigates to sweep the shipping lanes. After a few Wahhabi dhows had been blown out of the water and a seaport shelled the Wahhabis turned their attentions elsewhere, and the EICo’s political agents stationed at Bushire in the Persian Gulf reverted to the role of interested observers.
For the rulers of the Ottoman Empire, however, the Wahhabis posed a far more direct challenge. Under Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn-Saud Wahhabism was now questioning the ancient suzerainty of the Caliphate over all Muslims.
‘If there was one point of the Wahauby faith which was more prominently odious to the Ottoman government than another,’ wrote the British diplomat Sir Harford Brydges, ‘it was that which divested the grand signor of the sacred character of visible Imamm, or spiritual head of the followers of Islam.’ Furthermore, the closing down of the Hajj by the Wahhabis had removed an important source of revenue for the Sultan of Turkey in the form of pilgrim tax, besides denting his claim to be the protector of the holy places of Islam.
After the failure of a succession of half-hearted military campaigns directed from Baghdad, Egypt’s Muhammad Ali Pasha was given the responsibility of reclaiming the Hijaz for the Caliph and reopening the pilgrimage routes to all Muslims. Ali Pasha too began by underestimating the strength and mobility of his opponents, entrusting his army to his eighteen-year-old son. In 1811 an eight-thousand-strong Egyptian force was defeated by a united force of Bedouin tribes led by a hard core of Wahhabi fighters from Nejd. A year later the Egyptians returned with a larger force and recaptured Medina, forcing the Wahhabis back to Mecca. The Egyptians then made the mistake of looting Jedda, alienating the local Arab chieftains and causing them to pledge allegiance to the Wahhabis once more.
In 1806 Emir and Imam Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud died at the hand of a vengeful Shia from Karbala while saying his prayers. His capable son Saud ibn Saud assumed his father’s twin titles and continued to apply his aggressive policies until his own death from fever in 1814, when he was succeeded by his son Abdullah ibn Saud. But Abdullah lacked the fighting qualities of his paternal line, and in February 1815 the combined forces of the Wahhabis and their allies were crushed by the Egyptians in a decisive battle fought seven days’ march west of Riyadh. Among those present on the battlefield was an Italian adventurer named Giovanni Finati, who had joined Mahomet Ali Pasha’s army as an officer by claiming to be a convert to Islam and taking the name of Mahomet. At this engagement Fanati noted what increasingly became a characteristic feature of the Wahhabi phenomenon: that the majority of the Arabs fighting alongside them were at best lukewarm supporters of the Wahhabi creed but had joined because they saw the Egyptians and Ottomans as invaders of their land. Initially the battle went their way, but a well-executed withdrawal of their own centre by the more disciplined Egyptians drew their opponents down from their strong position and exposed them to the Egyptian cavalry. Many of their allies turned and ran, leaving the Wahhabis to fight on alone. ‘Courage’, noted Finati, ‘was all that the Wahabees had to oppose us; but it did not forsake them to the last, the fight being protracted, even in that desperate condition… The slaughter made of the enemy was prodigious, the whole field remaining strewed over with their headless bodies.’
The Egyptian Pasha had offered six silver coins for every head brought to him, with the result that the ground before his headquarters was soon covered in pyramids of human heads. The lives of three hundred prisoners were deliberately spared, but only so that they could be impaled in batches before the gates of Mecca and Jedda and at the ten staging-posts in between.
In 1818 the Egyptians laid siege to the surviving Wahhabis under Emir-cum-Imam Abdullah ibn Saud at Dariyah. The defenders held out for several months before starvation forced them to surrender. Ibrahim Pasha rounded up all the Wahhabi ulema he could find, some five hundred in all, and herded them into the main mosque, where for three days he presided over a theological debate in which he sought to convince them of their errors. By the end of the fourth day his patience had worn out and he ordered his guards to fall on them and kill them, so that the mosque at Dariyah became, in the words of the traveller William Palgrave, ‘the bloody tomb of Wahhabee theology’. Abdullah ibn Saud and five male members of the family were sent as prisoners first to Cairo and then on to Constantinople where, ‘after having been paraded through the streets for three days, they were beheaded and their bodies were exposed to the outrages of the mob’. Other members of the family were sent to Medina and placed under house arrest. A year later the Wahhabi stronghold at Riyadh was taken and the fortress built there by the great Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud razed to the ground.
The destruction of the Wahhabi empire was greeted with satisfaction and relief by their Muslim contemporaries. The celebrated early nineteenth-century Hanafi scholar Muhammad Amin ibn Abidin had only harsh words for the founder of Wahhabism and his theology: ‘He claimed to be a Hanbali, but his thinking was such that only he alone was a Muslim, and everyone else was a mushriq [polytheist]. Under this guise, he said that killing the Ahl as-Sunnah [those who follow Sunni tradition] was permissible, until Allah destroyed his [people] in the year 1233 AH [AD 1818] through the Muslim army.’
Lieutenant Burden and other members of the British mission at Bushire took a more practical line. With the destruction of the Wahhabi empire the main threat to stability in the Gulf had been removed. ‘Thus’, concluded Burden in the closing paragraph of his Report, ‘rose and fell – it is to be hoped never to rise again – the extraordinary sect of the Wahabees.’
3
The False Dawn of the Imam-Mahdi
From 1820 some Moulvees of India declaring themselves to be disciples of Syud Ahmed of Bareilly, whom they styled Ameerul Momeneen and Iman Homan (chief and leader of the faithful), began to preach the Wahabee creed in this country… They preached to the common people that Hindustan is now a Darool Harab (or country of the infidels): therefore it behoved all the good Mehomedans to wage war against the infidels.