A year later a more informal meeting led Shakespear to conclude that here was an Arab leader whose intelligence and strength of character matched his ambition. Ibn Saud told him of his family’s struggles and made no bones of his wish to form an alliance with the British against the Ottomans: ‘We Wahhabis hate the Turks only less than we hate the Persians for the infidel practices which they have imported into the true and pure faith revealed to us in the Koran.’ In his subsequent report Shakespear noted that ‘hatred of the Turk seems to be the one idea common to all the tribes and the only one for which they would sink their differences’, adding that ‘a revolt is not only probable but would be welcomed by every tribe throughout the peninsula’.
Shakespear’s enthusiastic promotion of the notion of an ‘Arab revolt’ against the Ottomans was not well received in Whitehall, in part because the Foreign Office took the view that this was meddling by the Government of India. Nevertheless, Shakespear was given permission to mount a private expedition that took him from Kuwait to Riyadh and then westwards right across the great Arabian desert to the Hijaz. At Riyadh he talked to Ibn Saud in private and at length, and was again told that the future of Arabia rested on an alliance between the Arabs and Great Britain. Towards the end of May 1914 Shakespear and his travel-worn party emerged from the desert at Suez after a journey of some eighteen hundred miles on foot and on camel-back, much of it through regions previously unmapped and unrecorded. He reported to the British Residency in Cairo, where he found Lord Kitchener and others unimpressed by his advocacy of Ibn Saud. In the eyes of the British Government there was only one Arab leader – SHARIF HUSAYN ibn Ali, Emir of the Hijaz, whose Hashimite dynasty was widely (if incorrectly) regarded as hereditary holder of the most sacred office in the Muslim world: guardianship of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina and protectors of the Hajj.
Following the outbreak of war in Europe in August 1914 the Ottoman government made the fateful decision to throw in their lot with Germany and Austria-Hungary and proclaim jihad against Britain, France and Russia in the name of the caliph. For the Triple Entente it now became a matter of urgency to find a Muslim leader who would join with them against the Ottoman Empire, the obvious man being Sharif Husayn. Colonel T. E. Lawrence’s masterly report for the British Cabinet, written after the war and entitled Reconstruction of Arabia, says it alclass="underline"
When war broke out an urgent need to divide Islam was added, and we became reconciled to seek for allies rather than subjects. We therefore took advantage of the dissatisfaction felt by the Arabic-speaking peoples with their alien rulers, and of the tendency, each day more visible, of the subject Eastern peoples to demand a share of the dangers of government. We hoped by the creation of a ring of client states, themselves insisting on our patronage, to turn the present and future flank of any foreign power with designs on the three rivers [Iraq]. The greatest obstacle, from the war standpoint, to any Arab movement, was its greatest virtue in peace-time – the lack of solidarity between the various Arab movements… The Sherif [Husayn] was ultimately chosen because of the rift he would create in Islam.
Shakespear was ordered to bring Ibn Saud and his Bedouin tribes in on the side of Britain. After some ‘hard trekking’ he met the emir in December 1914 as he rode northwards from Riyadh with his Ikhwan army to continue his own private war against his old enemy, the pro-Turkish Emir of Hail. While on the march the two men worked on a draft treaty of friendship by which Britain would acknowledge Ibn Saud’s independence and guarantee him against external aggression by his enemies. With his work done and despite the entreaties of Ibn Saud that he should leave before the coming battle, Shakespear chose to stay on. According to Ibn Saud, he refused to leave, declaring that to do so would be ‘a blemish on my honour, and the honour of my country’. On 14 January he wrote to his brother to tell him that Ibn Saud’s ghazu (war party), consisting of several thousand horsemen armed with rifles and an equal number of camel-riders armed with scimitars and spears, was on the move ‘for a biggish battle’, and that he was going with them. He closed his letter with the remark that ‘Bin Saud wants me to clear out but I want to see the show and I don’t think it will be very unsafe really’. All might have been well had Shakespear but discarded his khaki uniform and eye-catching cork sun helmet for Arab dress, as he was asked.
On 24 January 1915 the two armies closed on each other in the desert near an oasis called Jarab. As Shakespear had feared might happen, one of Ibn Saud’s allies changed sides at a critical moment, turning what would have been a decisive victory for the Emir of Nejd into a bloody draw. During the mêlée, a party of the Emir of Hail’s horsemen broke away from the main battle to charge the sand-dunes where Shakespear stood observing the battle. The Saudi riflemen with him scattered, leaving Captain Shakespear alone on the summit of a dune armed only with a revolver. According to his cook, who was briefly taken prisoner but escaped, he afterwards found Shakespear’s naked body lying where it had fallen, with ‘the marks of three bullets on him’.
The Foreign Office had now set up the Arab Bureau in Cairo, staffed by such exotics as Miss Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence, its main brief being to bring about the Arab revolt against the Ottomans through the persons of Sharif Husayn and his four sons. After protracted bargaining Husayn agreed to lead the revolt in return for Britain’s support for him after the war as ruler of Arabia and Britain’s recognition of ‘the independence of the Arabs in all the regions lying within the frontiers proposed by the Sharif of Mecca’. In June 1916, as his own tribal forces attacked the Ottoman garrison in Mecca, Sharif Husayn called on all Muslims to join him in liberating their caliph from the atheistic regime in power in Turkey – a call seen in many quarters of the Muslim world as treason against the caliphate. The Emir of Nejd, Ibn Saud, also took offence, but chiefly because Husayn had taken to styling himself ‘King of the Arabs’.
It was at this time that Miss Gertrude Bell penned her iconic portrayal of the nation-builder to be: ‘Ibn Saud is now barely forty,’ she wrote, ‘a man of splendid physique, standing well over six feet, and carrying himself with the air of one accustomed to command… He has the characteristics of the well-bred Arab: a strongly marked aquiline profile, full-flesh nostrils, prominent lips and a long narrow chin accentuated by a pointed beard.’ Miss Bell saw in Ibn Saud the ‘weariness of an ancient people, which has made heavy drafts on its vital forces, and borrowed little from beyond its own forbidding frontiers’. Yet she was also conscious of the man’s formidable reputation: ‘Among men bred in the camel-saddle he is said to have few rivals as a tireless leader. As a leader of irregular forces he is of proved daring, and he combines with his qualities as a soldier that grasp of statecraft which is yet more highly prized by the tribesmen.’ He had ‘drawn the loose mesh of tribal organisation into a centralised administration and imposed on wandering confederacies an authority which, though fluctuat-ing, is recognised as a political factor’. Given these qualities, it was doubly important that Ibn Saud should be reined in and encouraged to ‘come to a full understanding with the Sharif’.