Harry St John Philby, still nominally an officer of the Government of India’s Foreign and Political Service, was then on extended leave in England. He now resigned and returned to Arabia, meeting Ibn Saud in secret on the Red Sea coast and, by his own admission, providing details of Jedda’s weak defences. Three weeks later the Ikhwan took Jedda, and Ibn Saud proclaimed himself Emir of the Hijaz and keeper of the Holy Places. For his services the residence of the former representative of the Turkish Government in Jedda was bestowed on Philby, and became his home.
Well aware of the concerns of both the European powers and the wider Muslim world, Ibn Saud now worked hard to keep the religious enthusiasm of his Ikhwan zealots and his Wahhabi kinsmen within bounds. In spite of occasional alarms – as when a reveille call sounded on a bugle by a group of unsuspecting pilgrims caused the Ikhwan to riot through the streets of Mecca – the holy places were left relatively undisturbed and pilgrims were allowed to make the Hajj, if under the stern gaze of the Wahhabi mutawihin. With Philby’s assistance Ibn Saud mounted a diplomatic offensive to persuade the British Government that he was a force for stability in the Middle East and had no ambitions regarding the caliphate, and that Wahhabism was an instrument for ‘true democracy’ in the region. One expression of this campaign was the remarkable lecture on Wahhabism given to the Central Asian Society in the summer of 1929 with Lord Allenby in the chair.
The speaker was Sheikh HAFIZ WAHBA, described as ‘Counsellor to His Majesty the King of the Hedjaz and Minister for Education’. Despite the name, Hafiz Wahba was no Bedouin but an Egyptian intellectual who had concluded early in the 1920s that Arab independence would be best served by supporting Ibn Saud. He had made his way to Riyadh in 1922 and embraced Wahhabism, rising to become Ibn Saud’s most articulate spokesman overseas. In his lecture to the Central Asian Society Hafiz Wahba presented the theology of Al-Wahhab as an Arab version of Protestantism, and to show how eminently respectable it now was he assured his listeners that two of the most eminent figures in the ulema – the current Grand Mufti of Egypt and the head Imam of the Al-Aqsa mosque in Cairo – were preaching the teachings of Al-Wahhab and the medieval jurist Ibn Taymiyya. He further declared that ‘the enlightened class in every Muslim land is Wahhabi in practice, though not in name and origin, because it is this class, as is duly recognised in all the Muslim world, that preaches the gospel of self-reliance’. Both claims went unchallenged.
Sheikh Wahba’s lecture to the Central Asian Society was followed by an article for the Society’s Journal under the nom de plume ‘Phoenix’, almost certainly contributed by Philby, giving an outline of the Wahhabi movement and its doctrines. The Wahhabi interpretation of jihad was here defined simply as ‘the fostering of a martial and fanatical spirit to keep the law in force’.
To T. E. Lawrence, Ibn Saud’s Arab empire was ‘a figment, built on sand’. He and most other observers were convinced that Ibn Saud’s kingdom must fall apart. The Wahhabi ulema were reacting with hostility to every attempt by Ibn Saud to introduce such modern developments as the telephone and the motor-car, on the grounds that there was no precedent for such innovation in the Quran or the Hadith. At the same time, the Ikhwan were increasingly defying their imam’s authority by carrying out unauthorised raids into infidel Iraq and Syria. It soon became clear to Ibn Saud that if the Ikhwan continued their raiding, Britain would intervene. His response was to dismiss three Ikhwan commanders, whose troops reacted by massacring some Nejdi merchants. An offer of reconciliation was made and rejected and in 1929 Saudi loyalists, supported by four British aircraft and some two hundred radio-equipped armoured cars and troop carriers, took on the Ikhwan cavalry with their ancient rifles, lances and swords. After ten months the revolt ended with the surrender of the remaining rebels to British forces on the Kuwait border.
At the end of 1930 the chronic inter-tribal warfare that had bedevilled Arabia since before the days of the Prophet was finally brought to an end, giving way to the Islamic nation-state of Saudi Arabia. By a diplomatic mix of give and take Ibn Saud reconciled his Wahhabi ulema to innovations that posed no challenge to their authority. He ensured that they received the religious taxes that were their due and consulted them on such crucial issues as whether he as Imam had the final authority to order and suspend jihad. In return for their support the ulema, under the guidance of the aal as-Sheikh, was given absolute authority to impose Wahhabi sharia not only in the mosques and law courts but right across the land.
For his efforts on Ibn Saud’s behalf Harry St John Philby was branded little short of a traitor by the British Government. ‘He has lost no opportunity’, minuted a Foreign Office official to the Cabinet, ‘of attacking & misrepresenting the Govt. & its policy in the Middle East. His methods have been as unscrupulous as they have been violent. He is a public nuisance & it is largely due to him & his intrigues that Ibn Saud – over whom he unfortunately exercises some influence – has given us so much trouble during the last few years.’ But in his new home in Jedda Philby was no less an object of suspicion. To the Dutch consul, Colonel van der Meulen, he cut a forlorn figure, ‘apparently determined to outrage English convention in dress, appearance and general social behaviour’, but also ‘always in conflict: with the Arabs of his caravan, with the government, with its policy, with his own personnel and, I think, most of all with himself.’ According to van der Meulen, a time came when the outcast came to him and remarked, ‘“We are not Christians, why should not we become Muslims?”’
In August 1930 Philby wrote a formal letter to Ibn Saud informing him of his earnest desire ‘to become a Muslim and to abandon all other religions’. He went on to make the required public declaration, that ‘there is no God but Allah and that Mohammad is His Slave and Messenger’. He declared himself anxious to follow ‘all that is written in the books of the good ancestors and more especially the statements of Shaikh Ibn Taimia [Ibn Taymiyya, the medieval jurist], Ibn al Qaiyem aj-Jowziah [al-Qayyim al-Jawziyah, leading student of Ibn Taymiyya], and in the later ages those of Shaikh Mohammed Ibn Abdul Wahhab, may God have mercy on him’.
Philby was soon afterwards summoned to join Ibn Saud in Mecca. At the outskirts of the holy city he stripped in a tent set up for him, performed the required ablutions, dressed in the white garments of the pilgrim, and was escorted into Mecca’s great square, where he kissed the black stone of the Kaaba and made the sevenfold circuit before going on to drink at the holy well of Zamzam. After morning prayers next day he was received by the Wahhabi Emir and Imam, kissed on both cheeks and given the name Abdullah, Servant of God.
A British consular officer, Hope Gill, who met Philby that same summer was convinced that Philby’s conversion was simply a matter of expediency: ‘He made no pretence whatever that his conversion was spiritual.’ Yet there can be no doubt Philby believed that he was furthering the cause of Ibn Saud’s Arabia. At the Emir’s suggestion he wrote an article for the press explaining, to quote the title, ‘Why I turned Wahhabi?’ Part of it read: ‘I believe that the present Arabian puritan movement harbingers an epoch of future political greatness based on strong moral and political foundations… I consider an open declaration of my sympathy with Arabian religion and political ideals as the best methods of assisting the development of Arab greatness.’