When asked by Philby soon after their first meeting to explain the basis of his leadership, Ibn Saud had replied: ‘We raise them not above us, nor do we place ourselves above them. We give them what we can… And if they go beyond their bounds we make them taste the sweetness of our discipline.’ What Philby omitted in his accounts of Ibn Saud’s rise to power was that this sweetness of discipline was harsh in the extreme, accounting for several hundred thousand violent deaths and mutilations. In taking over towns and cities the Ikhwan carried out wholesale massacres. The regional governments installed by Ibn Saud were ruthless in the suppression of opposition and the maintenance of Wahhabi sharia. The governors appointed by him were reported to have carried out forty thousand public beheadings and no fewer than three hundred and fifty thousand amputations by the sword, with Ibn Saud’s cousin Abdulla taking the lead in his zeal to extinguish every pocket of polytheism disfiguring the land.
Over two long spells of duty as consul in Jedda between 1926 and 1945 the Dutchman van der Meulen became a jaundiced observer of events in Arabia. His reports detailing the ruthless methods employed in the creation of Saudi Arabia were apparently seen by Ibn Saud and approved. The Emir expressed himself content that the Queen of the Netherlands should know the facts: ‘We have often acted severely, even mercilessly… It is good that you should know the truth about our creed and that of our brothers. We believe that Allah the Exalted One uses us as His instrument. As long as we serve Him we shall succeed, no power can check us and no enemy will be able to kill us.’
The Dutchman was able to follow the civil war between Ibn Saud and his Ikhwan with greater objectivity than Philby. ‘The Ikhwan movement demonstrated the extreme to which Wahhabism could lead,’ he afterwards wrote. ‘If religion is used to encourage self-righteousness and feelings of superiority in primitive souls and if it then teaches the duty of holy war, the result is heroism, cruelty, narrowing of the mind and atrophy of what is humane and what is of true value, in a man and in a people.’
In 1932, with the country of his ancestors consolidated, pacified and secure, Ibn Saud united his dual emirates of Nejd and Hijaz, and proclaimed his country the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Hajji Abdullah, formerly Harry St John Philby, played his part by helping to secure an exploration concession for the Standard Oil Company of California over a rival bid from the British Iraq Petroleum Company, thereby laying the foundations of the Aramco concession, of Saudi Arabia’s wealth, and of the kingdom’s future co-operation with the United States of America.
In 1953 Saudi Arabia’s founding father died and the throne and Wahhabi imamship passed to the eldest of his many sons, first Saud and then Faisal. With the establishment of socialist governments in Muslim countries such as that of President Nasser in neighbouring Egypt, the need to counter the spread of irreligious forces now became a priority. The Founding Committee of the Muslim World League, the Supreme Committee for Islamic Propagation, the World Supreme Council for Mosques and other religious bodies were set up specifically to promote Wahhabism. However, the relative poverty of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia initially prevented the ulema from promoting Wahhabism effectively beyond its borders – until 1973, when the price of crude oil went through the roof following the Arab–Israeli war and the formation of the OPEC oil cartel. Saudi Arabia was suddenly awash with petrodollars, and at last the Wahhabi authorities were able to commit massive sums to producing Wahhabi literature and funding mosques and madrassahs wherever there were Sunni communities. The Indian sub-continent became the leading beneficiary of this largesse.
11
The Coming Together
To understand the spirit which might be evoked we must recall the state of feeling – the ignorance, bigotry, enthusiasm, hardihood, and universal agreement – amidst which the Crusades took their rise, and to which a parallel might be found amongst the excitable population beyond the border. There are fully developed ‘the implicit faith and ferocious energy’ in which the essence of original Mahomedanism has been said to consist, and which the propagation of the Wahabi Puritanism has done much to inflame.
In 1911 two very different outdoor gatherings took place in northern India. The grandest by far was the Imperial Assembly, popularly known as the Delhi Durbar, held to celebrate the accession of King George V as King-Emperor. Its site beside Delhi Ridge had been chosen deliberately, for it was here that the British had rallied prior to assaulting the rebel city in the summer of 1857. Across twenty-five square miles of the Delhi plain 233 tented encampments were laid out, linked by a specially built railway. At its heart was an open-sided pavilion, within which on 12 December the King-Emperor sat enthroned to receive the homage of the more important of his Indian subjects. The next day he and Queen Mary proceeded to the ramparts of the Red Fort of the Mughals to be presented to the Indian masses gathered on the open ground below. Here, according to an official Government booklet, ‘a vast troubled sea of humanity swept forward with banners waving and bands playing, a great concourse of Moslems, Sikhs and Hindoos to salute the Padshah.’ The entire spectacle was designed to evoke the splendours of the Mughals, and to demonstrate that the British, as their natural successors, were there to stay.
Eight months earlier a very different gathering had taken place, a deliberate riposte to the costly propaganda exercise then being prepared outside Delhi. It was staged eighty miles to the north, on the by then extensive campus grounds of the Dar ul-Ulum Deoband Madrassah. Billed as a reunion, it was more in the nature of a conference, attended by some thirty thousand teachers and former students, and presided over by the madrassah’s rector, sixty-year-old Maulana MAHMOOD UL-HASAN, widely regarded as the most influential Muslim cleric in India and on whom the title of Shaikh-ul-Hind had been bestowed by his admirers.
Mahmood ul-Hasan’s rise to religious authority mirrored that of the religious institution to which he had dedicated his life since joining Deoband Madrassah as its first student in 1866. After graduating in 1877 Mahmood ul-Hasan had gone on, with the full support of Deoband’s founder Muhammad Qasim, to set up his own organisation which he called Samaratut Tarbiyat (Results of the Training). This was a quasi-military body in which volunteers known as fedayeen, or ‘men of sacrifice’, were taught to prepare themselves for armed jihad against the British – although in practice this preparation was limited to marching and drilling in khaki uniforms, for weapons carrying nothing more lethal than staves. To the British authorities this body was about as menacing as a cadet corps, and Mahmood ul-Hasan’s fedayeen were allowed to parade about freely. With the death of Muhammad Qasim in 1880 the leadership of the Deoband organisation passed first to its co-founder Rashid Ahmad and then, after his death in 1905, to Deoband’s first graduate.