Until recent years, this remained the only occasion on which the tribal lands of Tirah were entered by an outside force. ‘The boast of the tribes’, declared General Lockhart in his closing despatch, ‘was that no foreign army – Moghal, Afghan, Persian or British – had ever penetrated, or could ever penetrate, their country; but after carrying three strong positions, and being for weeks subsequently engaged in daily skirmishes, the troops succeeded in visiting every portion of Tirah.’ What his despatch glossed over was that the final submission of the tribes took months to accomplish, accompanied by a bitter campaign of guerrilla warfare in the form of sniping by night and ambushing by day. Only by punitive measures that included the destruction of villages, the burning of crops and the confiscation of livestock did Lockhart’s Tirah Field Force finally reduce the Afridi and Orakzai to submission. By the end of the Tirah campaign the casualty figures had risen to 43 British officers killed and 90 wounded; 136 British NCOs and men killed and 415 wounded; 6 Indian Native Officers killed and 36 wounded; and 320 Indian and Gurkha NCOs and men killed and 871 wounded. Most of these casualties were incurred during the ‘pacification’ phase of the campaign.
This heavy-footed stamping-out of the frontier jihad came at a price. ‘Burning houses and destroying crops,’ wrote a critical ‘Bobs’ Roberts, who had left India in 1893 after forty-one years’ military service and was now Field Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, ‘unless followed up by some sort of authority and jurisdiction, mean… for us a rich harvest of hatred and revenge.’
Of the Mad Fakir, Mullah Sadulla, nothing more was ever heard.
10
The Brotherhood
Fortunately they did not succeed. We say fortunately, for if ever Egypt should cease to be ruled by a vigorous government, the Wahabees would raise their heads: they would overrun Arabia, being weakened neither in numbers nor in fanaticism, and Turkey would be unable to protect the holy towns. The consequences of such an event would produce discontent in the whole East.
In the autumn of 1863 two travellers set out from Damascus for the city of Hail, capital of what had formerly been northern Nejd but was now the Ottoman province of Jabal Shammar. They gave out that they were Syrian Christian doctors, and were dressed accordingly. In fact, neither man was a doctor and only one was a Syrian. The other, then aged thirty-seven, was a Jew by ancestry and a Christian by upbringing, an Englishman christened William Gifford Palgrave who also answered at different stages of his life to William Cohen and Michael Sohail. After distinguishing himself as a scholar at Oxford, Palgrave had gone out to India with a lieutenant’s commission in the 8th Bombay Native Infantry. But he was not cut out for a military career, and after two years he resigned his commission, converted to Roman Catholicism and became a Jesuit missionary. In 1855, drawn to the Arab world by his studies and discovering in himself a remarkable gift for languages, he joined the French Jesuit Mission in Syria. Within a few years he had become so accomplished an Arabic speaker and so at ease with local customs that he could pass himself off as a native of the region. He became a local agent of the French Government and worked to extend French interests in Egypt and the Middle East, and it seems to have been in this capacity that he undertook his remarkable journey to the heart of Arabia, though he afterwards declared that he had been driven by ‘a natural curiosity to know the yet unknown; and the restlessness of enterprise not rare in Englishmen’. He travelled as a Syrian doctor, Selim Abu Mahmoud al-Eis, and he took with him several camel-loads of pills, powders and potions bought with French money in Damascus.
When Palgrave and his Syrian companion Barakat reached the city of Hail, lying more or less midway between Basra and Medina, they were warmly welcomed by the Emir and treated as his guests. Indeed, so hospitable were the inhabitants of Hail that Palgrave came to regard it as the ideal state, a place where people of all races and religions mixed freely and as equals. However, Palgrave’s ultimate destination was not Hail but Riyadh, a place then considered so dangerous to outsiders that the inhabitants of Hail regarded it as ‘a sort of lion’s den, in which few venture and yet fewer return’. This was because Riyadh and the country surrounding it were, in Palgrave’s words, ‘the genuine Wahhabee country… the stronghold of fanatics, who consider everyone save themselves an infidel or a heretic, and who regard the slaughter of an infidel or a heretic as a duty, at least a merit… Nejd has become for all but her born sons doubly dangerous, and doubly hateful.’
Since the fatal outcome of Ali Pasha’s campaign in 1818 the Wahhabis had regrouped under FAISAL IBN SAUD, great-great-great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty. After establishing himself on the throne of Riyadh in 1842 he had restored something of the vigour and religious zeal that had characterised the first Saudi empire established by Muhammad ibn Saud. However, the Wahhabis had failed to recover Nejd’s northern territory, Jabal Shammar, which had become the seat of the Saudis’ main rivals, the Ibn Rashid dynasty. This rivalry helps to explain why William Palgrave found the Emir of Hail and his people so hostile towards the Wahhabis, and so concerned when he made it known that Riyadh was his real destination.
With the direst of warnings ringing in their ears, the two ‘Syrian doctors’ rode out of Hail in early September 1862 as part of a small camel caravan. It took them nine days to reach the borders of Jabal Shammar, the point at which their safe-conducts ran out. They pushed on, reaching the Wahhabi capital of Riyadh on 13 October unmolested and in good shape. To their relief, their supposed Syrian Christian identities aroused no obvious hostility even from the Wahhabi ulema, the explanation offered being that the Wahhabis’ real enemies were neither Christians nor Jews but those polytheists who purported to be followers of Islam. The fact that they came as doctors also helped to smooth their presence, for they found themselves in great demand, called upon to treat as many as fifty different maladies.
Palgrave and Barakat spent forty-two days in Riyadh, and between consultations found time to tour every quarter of the city, described by Palgrave as ‘large and square, crowned by high towers and strong walls of defence, a mass of roofs and terraces, where overtopping all frowned the huge but irregular pile of Faisal’s royal castle, and hard by it rose the scarce less conspicuous palace built and inhabited by his eldest son Abdullah… All round for full three miles over the surrounding plain, but more especially to the west and south, waved a sea of palm trees above green fields and well-watered gardens.’
To Palgrave’s further surprise, he was allowed into the city’s plain and unadorned mosques, where he made the acquaintance of a number of Wahhabi clerics, who left him in no doubt that it was the aal as-Sheikh, or the ‘Family of the Sheikh’, as the descendants of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab were known, who ran the ulema. ‘The whole family’, declared Palgrave, ‘has constantly held the highest judicial and religious posts in the Wahhabee empire, and has amassed considerable wealth, let us hope by none but honest means. Its members… exercise a predominant influence in the state, and, though never decorated with the official titles belonging to purely civil or military authority, do yet, in reality, rule the rulers of the land, and their own masters of the Sa’ood dynasty never venture to contradict them, even on matters of policy or war.’