Emirate of Jabal Shammar

The governors who took over

Drafted from Al-Rasheed, Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (1991)formation

The Shammar are a large camel-herding confederation of northern Arabia, and Jabal Shammar — the mountain country around the oasis of Ha'il — is their country. In 1836 Abdullah ibn Rashid, a Shammar chief who had been in Saudi service, took Ha'il and made himself its amir, with the second Saudi state's acquiescence and initially as its client.

A polity beginning with a subordinate who keeps what he was given to hold is the most ordinary opening there is. The Tulunids and Ikhshidids did it to the Abbasids in Egypt; the Rasulids did it to the Ayyubids in Yemen.

Al-Rasheed's book is an anthropologist's study as much as a political history, and its central question is the one to hold on to: why did a camel-herding confederation, which had existed for centuries without a state, become susceptible to political centralisation at that particular moment?

Her answer is about position and money rather than about a great man. Ha'il sat on the roads — the pilgrim route from Iraq and Persia to the holy cities, and the caravan traffic between the Gulf, the Najd and Syria — and an amir who could guarantee safe passage across Shammar territory had something to sell that no tribal chief had been able to sell before, because the routes had not been that valuable and the Ottomans had not been that interested in paying for them.

So the emirate was funded from outside: transit dues on what crossed its roads, and subsidies from an empire that wanted a client in the interior it did not have to garrison. It is the same arrangement the sharifs of Mecca lived on, in poorer country and for a smaller price.

We soldiers want no water

Drafted from Blunt, A Pilgrimage to Nejd, the Cradle of the Arab Race (1881)expansion

Two English travellers crossed the Nafud to Ha'il in the winter of 1878 and stayed as guests of Muhammad ibn Rashid. On the way, their Shammar guide told them how the emirate had got rid of its garrison.

Soldiers had occupied Ha'il in the time of the first Ibn Rashid and been left there afterwards as a garrison. Then either their government could not communicate with them or forgot them; men died; and the remaining five hundred or so were glad enough to agree to march home to Damascus under the escort of Ubayd, the emir's brother, who had already decided to destroy them.

They rode out of Ha'il and followed their Shammar guides into the sand. To every question about where the next wells were, the answer was a little further, a little further on. Then the guides left them.

They seem to have been brave men. The last that was heard of them was a chorus they sang as they struggled forward: nahnu askar ma nahnu atasha — we are soldiers, we are not thirsty, we soldiers want no water. By noon they had lost heart and lay down under the bushes for what shade there was, and that is how they were found afterwards, scattered through the hollows.

Some of their horses got back to Jubba on their own and became the property of whoever could catch them. They were sold for a few sheep or goats each.

It is a ghastly tale, the traveller wrote, and left it there.

What the emirate was built out of

That is the founding transaction of Rashidi independence, and it sets the terms for everything after it.

The family began as clients. Abdallah ibn Rashid, described to the Blunts as at that time a mere private individual of the Abda section of Shammar, took service with the Al Saud of the Najd and was appointed lieutenant of Jabal Shammar by the Wahhabi amir. He was a great warrior, and with his brother Ubayd he reduced the whole country to order.

So a Saudi appointee pacified a province for his employers, and his brother then arranged the deaths of the garrison the outside power had left. Nothing was declared. The next generation simply held Ha'il, and the one after that took Riyadh.

The reach

Blunt heard the sequence from people in Ha'il and set it down against what Palgrave had published fifteen years earlier, noting where they disagreed. Abdallah died in 1843. His son Talal took the title of amir and made himself nearly independent of the Wahhabi government. Talal's brother and successor Mit'ab conquered Jawf and Ithra to the north.

The names people at Ha'il actually talked about were not Talal's. It was Ubayd they told stories about — hospitality, generosity, courage, the three cardinal virtues, and the man who had counselled the destruction of the soldiers in the Nafud. He was never amir. After his brother's death he effectively ruled the country, and lived to a great age.

He left no property at all, having given everything away in his lifetime: nothing but his sword, his mare and his young wife. These he left to his nephew Muhammad, the reigning emir, with the request that the sword remain undrawn, the mare unridden and the wife unmarried for ever afterwards.

Two of the three wishes were respected. Muhammad took the wife into his own household.

Ha'il

Drafted from Al-Rasheed, Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (1991)peak

Muhammad ibn Rashid ruled from 1869 to 1897 and made Ha'il into something no central Arabian oasis had been: a court.

He built a palace and a great walled compound at the centre of the town; he kept a guest house where any traveller, tribesman or merchant was fed at the amir's expense, which is a traditional obligation performed at an untraditional scale and was a deliberate instrument of politics; he maintained the pilgrim road, guaranteed the caravans, and collected the dues. He acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty, took Ottoman titles and Ottoman subsidies, and governed as though neither existed.

Ha'il in this period is also, oddly, among the best-described places in Arabia, because Europeans went there. Georg Wallin, Carlo Guarmani, Charles Doughty — whose Arabia Deserta is one of the strangest books in English — and Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt, whose A Pilgrimage to Nejd describes the court and the amir's stables in detail, all reached it and wrote about it. They went because the Rashidis let them, which is the point: an amir whose business was safe passage had a reason to be hospitable to people who would say so in print.

The horses are part of the same account. The Rashidi stud was famous, the Blunts went partly to buy from it, and Arabian bloodstock in Europe descends substantially from animals bought at Ha'il in this period.

None of that shows up as territory or population or influence, and measuring this polity by any of those would miss it entirely. What it was is a town on a road that made itself worth stopping at.

Mulayda

Drafted from Al-Rasheed, Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (1991)peak

The second Saudi state destroyed itself in the war between Faysal's sons, and Muhammad ibn Rashid was the arbitrator both sides appealed to. He arbitrated in his own favour, by degrees, over fifteen years: taking the Qasim, installing governors, holding Saudi princes at Ha'il as guests who could not leave, and in 1887 taking Riyadh outright.

In 1891, at Mulayda in the Qasim, the last serious Saudi attempt to recover the position was beaten in the field. The Al Saud left central Arabia for Kuwait.

For about a decade after that Muhammad ibn Rashid was the paramount power in central Arabia — Ha'il, Jabal Shammar, the Qasim, Riyadh, and influence from the Syrian desert to the edge of the Empty Quarter. A family that had taken its oasis in 1836 as clients of the Al Saud held the Al Saud's capital and had driven them out of the country.

It is about as complete a reversal as an Arabian dynasty ever achieved: clients holding their patrons' capital, and the patrons in exile on the Gulf.

What Ha'il could not do was hold it. The emirate had no administration outside its own oasis, no revenue from Riyadh that did not require a garrison to collect, and no way of making the Qasim towns — which were commercial, settled and had their own quarrel with Shammar nomads — content to be governed from a Shammar capital. Muhammad ibn Rashid spent the last years of his reign campaigning against risings in territory he had already conquered.

He died in 1897 without a son, which brings us to the thing that finished them.

A guest of the amir

Drafted from Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta, Volume II (1888)peak

Doughty spent months at Ha'il in 1877 as the amir's guest, refusing to pretend he was anything but a Christian, and was eventually sent away. What he wrote down about the town is the best physical description of a central Arabian capital there is, and what he wrote down about being a guest is a description of how the Rashidi state worked.

The guest system first, because it is the state. Facing the castle across the open square stood nine makhzans, lodging-rooms with wooden locks and a small court, each with a dark guest-chamber behind it about fifteen feet by twelve. A guest lived there at the amir's expense. If he wanted firewood in the cold weather, he had to ask for it from the amir, sitting in the public mejlis.

That last detail is the whole arrangement in one sentence. Hospitality on this scale is a political instrument — feed every traveller, tribesman and merchant who comes, and the roads and the tribes have a reason to prefer you — and the instrument is administered face to face, in public, by the ruler in person, down to the level of a bundle of sticks.

The town Doughty describes is new and prospering. Eleven wards, one-storey houses built of thick clay layers bedded with sun-dried brick blocks set leaning, copes and window sills finished with a stepped pinnacle he thought resembled the carved cornices at Petra. No seeming of decay, he says, but rather of newness, and thriving, and spending. Over many doorways he noticed small closed frames like right-angled triangles, timbered above the entrance: shooting-down sconces, machicolations for the defence of a single household's door.

And then the administration, in a sentence that should be quoted whenever a state is called primitive. There are no dues at Ha'il for the upkeep of the ways or for public lighting — which, Doughty notes, is unknown even at Damascus — nor so much as for watchmen; and yet the streets are clean and the refuse is carried out to pits.

His own position was less comfortable. Called for after the mejlis one afternoon, he was roused out of his lodging with haste and violence by the prince's man, stopped to pick up his cloak and headcloth, and had that held against him: the slave told the amir that Khalil had not been willing to follow him. Muhammad ibn Rashid sat in another man's place in the coffee room with his light gold-hilted scimitar leaned against the wall beside him, in a cotton tunic with bare feet, his sandals set out in front of him. Doughty gave the greeting and got no answer. He greeted two other men he knew and they returned it cheerfully. Then the amir asked him where he had come from, and what he found to do all day, and what he had seen in his time at Ha'il — and was it well?

Doughty, worn out after a year of famine and hard travelling, did not use any of the honorifics a man is supposed to use when a prince says his name, and kept silent. The amir turned to the others and asked how it was that this man returned no word to somebody speaking to him.

An amir whose entire business was safe passage had every reason to be hospitable to Europeans who would write about him, and generally was. He also required, in his own coffee hall, the forms. Doughty was fed, housed, protected on the roads, and put out of the country, and he recorded all four without deciding which of them was the real one.

A Gilbertian situation

Drafted from Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928)contraction

By 1918 the emirate at Ha'il was being kept alive by the allies of the men trying to destroy it, and starved by nobody in particular. The British officer sitting in Riyadh trying to make sense of it called the whole arrangement, in a phrase he plainly enjoyed, a regular Gilbertian situation.

His own instructions were the first absurdity. He was in the middle of Arabia, twelve to fifteen days from any source of accurate information, charged with preventing Ibn Sa'ud from attacking the neighbours who were Britain's allies — the sharif of Mecca, the Ajman, Kuwait — and with inducing him to attack the Shammar of Ha'il, who were allied to the Turks.

The neighbours he was to protect were the ones supplying the enemy.

The blockade that leaked

Ha'il's lifeline ran east to the Gulf. The shaikh of Kuwait, consistently hostile to Ibn Sa'ud, and the Ajman tribes, were conniving at the passage of provisions and other necessaries up to Ha'il; a large caravan had recently gone on from there to Damascus. The Ajman also raided into Ibn Sa'ud's territory whenever a reasonable opportunity offered.

When the blockade restrictions at Kuwait were lifted, the port received the news with joy. In the Najd it was taken for granted that the British, for some strange reason, positively wished the Turks to get what they needed. And the conclusion drawn there was immediate and correct: Ha'il would live again, and could face the coming Wahhabi attack with equanimity, now that its enemy could no longer use the economic weapon.

Ibn Sa'ud declined all further responsibility for the leakage and demanded that everything intended for the Najd be landed at Bahrain instead.

The other war

Meanwhile the sharif of Mecca's son was negotiating a treaty of peace and friendship with Ibn Rashid — the Turks' ally — while his brothers prosecuted the war against the Turks in the north, and while he himself prepared an expedition against the Najd with arms and ammunition supplied by the British.

His agents turned up in the Qasim buying camels for that campaign and were sent about their business. Circulars arrived announcing the peace with Ibn Rashid, an impending meeting to settle the affairs of north and south, and directions for the tribes to rally to the sharifian standard, with some offensive remarks about Ibn Sa'ud included.

Every one of the parties in this was a British ally.

What it tells you about Ha'il

Strip out the farce and a hard fact is left underneath.

The Rashidi emirate at this date could not feed itself from its own country. It had been built on the caravan and pilgrim roads and on Ottoman subsidies, and by 1918 the roads were a war zone and the subsidising empire was losing. What kept it going was the calculation of third parties — a Gulf shaikh who feared Ibn Sa'ud more than he disliked Ha'il, tribes who profited from the traffic, and a British government weighing the Najd against Mecca and finding for Mecca.

A state whose survival depends on which way other people's interests happen to point is not, at that moment, a power. Ha'il had been the paramount power in central Arabia twenty-five years earlier and had held Riyadh itself. By 1918 it was an object in other people's arithmetic, and the arithmetic was about to change.

1921

Drafted from Al-Rasheed, Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (1991)end

In January 1902 Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saud crossed the desert from Kuwait with about forty men, went over the wall of Riyadh at night, waited outside the Rashidi governor's house until morning, and killed him as he came out. The town was his by the end of the day.

The twenty years that followed are the contest between the two families, and the Rashidis lost it in stages. In 1906 at Rawdat Muhanna the amir Abd al-Aziz ibn Mut'ib was killed in the field, and after that the emirate never had a ruler who held it steadily long enough to fight a war. The Qasim went. The Ottomans, who had been the Rashidi patron, were increasingly unable to subsidise anybody and then, after 1918, did not exist. Ibn Saud had a British subsidy and, from 1912, the Ikhwan — settled bedouin organised in agricultural colonies around the doctrine, which gave him something none of his predecessors in this region had ever had, which was infantry that did not go home.

Ha'il fell in 1921 after a siege. The Rashidi family was taken to Riyadh, where its surviving members were treated well and married into the Al Saud, which is the customary end for a defeated Arabian house and is more than the second Saudi state's imam received from Ibrahim Pasha.

The state that took Ha'il took the Hejaz in 1925, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was proclaimed in 1932. Central Arabia had spent two centuries producing states that rose out of one oasis, took a great deal of country, and were destroyed by somebody who could afford a longer war. The one that came out of Riyadh in 1902 was the first that nobody finished — the Al Bu Sa'id dynasty in Oman is the only other Arabian house from this same long pattern still on its own throne, still without an ending to write.

Central Arabia's rulers across two and a half thousand years run from an incense kingdom that built a dam to a camel confederation that lost an oasis, and almost none of them succeeded one another in any real sense. Most of these states had no successor and no predecessor at all. They are a peninsula's worth of separate answers to the question of how to hold ground that nobody else can be bothered to hold, and the answers have almost nothing to do with each other.

The gauntlet

Drafted from Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928)afterlife

The attack on Ha'il in September 1918 failed. The man who had spent that summer pressing for it wrote later that it was a failure if not a fiasco.

Then he wrote the sentence that is the emirate's real epitaph. The failure committed Ibn Sa'ud to a policy of imperial expansion. He had thrown down the gauntlet to the most dangerous of his rivals, and the issue lay on the knees of the gods; probably at no point in his long career was he more distracted with doubts and fears about the wisdom of what he had done. And yet no single act of that career led so inevitably to the final glory.

The final glory was the coronation in the Great Mosque at Mecca on the eighth of January, 1926.

What Ha'il did to its conqueror

That is a strange thing for a state to bequeath, and it is worth stating plainly because it is the most consequential thing the Rashidis ever did.

Before 1918 Ibn Sa'ud was the ruler of the Najd with a claim to eastern Arabia, occupied with the recovery of his family's old position. Ha'il was the obstacle to that and nothing more. The decision to go for it, and the fact that the first attempt did not work, turned a regional recovery into a campaign that could only end with one power holding the peninsula. Ha'il fell in 1921. The Hejaz followed within five years.

So the emirate that had beaten the Saudis in 1891, driven them into exile in Kuwait and held Riyadh for eleven years was, in the end, the thing that made their third state into a kingdom. Had Ha'il been weaker, it would have been absorbed as a province and forgotten. Being formidable enough to need a real war is what committed the other side to fighting one.

The prince at the rival's court

There is a scene from that summer that says the rest of it.

At Riyadh, in Ibn Sa'ud's entourage, was Faysal ibn Rashid — a man of the ruling family of Ha'il, well over forty, living at the court of the power that would take his relatives' capital three years later. The Englishman happened to mention that he had been reading Doughty's account of Ha'il, written forty years before, when Faysal had been an infant and may well have been one of the unnamed children in the story.

Faysal was very interested, and asked one question.

Was he the vaccinator, of whom we used to hear tell?

That is what remained. The great traveller's book, which fixed the emirate's image in English for a century, had reached Ha'il as a family rumour about a foreigner who gave inoculations — and the man asking was a prince of a house about to be dispossessed, sitting in the household of the man who would do it, trying to place a European he had been too young to remember.

Afterwards

What happened to the family is prefigured in that scene. Faysal ibn Rashid was already living at Riyadh, in the rival's household, three years before Ha'il fell — which is what absorption looks like when it starts before the conquest does.

What was extinguished was not the family but the position. For eighty-five years there had been two powers in central Arabia, one in the north at Ha'il and one in the south, and each had at different times held the other's capital. After 1921 there was one.

The murders

Drafted from Al-Rasheed, Society and Culture in the Modern Middle East (1991)aside?What aside means

Between Muhammad ibn Rashid's death in 1897 and the fall of Ha'il in 1921 the emirate had roughly eight rulers. Most of them were killed.

They were killed by cousins, by nephews, by brothers, in the palace and on campaign, in a sequence that al-Rasheed traces in detail and that reads, set out end to end, less like a succession crisis than like a mechanism.

Why

Her explanation is structural, and it is why her book is a study of tribal politics rather than a chronicle.

The Rashidi state was a lineage that had acquired the resources of a state — subsidies, transit dues, a palace, a treasury — without acquiring any of the things that ordinarily determine who gets them. In a tribal confederation, leadership is contingent and negotiated and can be withheld: the position is not property. Once it became property, and a very valuable piece of it, every member of the lineage with a plausible claim had both a motive and a right to press it, and there was no institution standing above them to decide between them.

Three answers to one problem

The Arabian peninsula has three versions of this side by side, and Ha'il is the one with nothing to fall back on.

The Zaydi imams of Yemen had a doctrine that made the office elective, watched it become hereditary in the Qasimid family, and revised the doctrine to suit. The Ibadi imams of Oman had much the same doctrine, watched the Al Bu Sa'id quietly stop calling themselves imams, and the interior then spent two centuries reconstituting the office in protest. Both had something to argue from.

The Rashidis had no doctrine at all. A lineage, a town and an income, and no account of who was entitled to them.

It is worth distinguishing that from the Mamluk arrangement, which also had no rule of succession and is often described the same way. The Mamluks had decided they had no rule. Everybody knew it, the system was built around it, and it worked on that basis for two and a half centuries. Ha'il had not decided anything. It simply had not occurred to anyone that a rule would be needed, until the amir who had never needed one was dead.