Sharifate of Mecca

A qualification nobody could confer

formationDrafted from Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994)

Mecca has no agriculture, no industry, no strategic position and very little water. It has the Ka'ba, and once a year it has several tens of thousands of people who have travelled a very long way to be there. Everything about the polity that grew there follows from that combination.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: al-Sayyid 'Abd al-Ghaffar, for C. Snouck Hurgronje · CC0

From the tenth century the city was held by ashraf — descendants of the Prophet through his grandson Hasan — and from about 968 the office of amir or sharif of Mecca was hereditary in a Hasanid family, holding under the suzerainty of the Fatimids, who had just taken Egypt and who wanted the Friday sermon at Mecca read in their caliph's name.

Library of Congress · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

The genealogy is the whole institution. A governor can be dismissed and replaced with another governor; a sharif could not, because the qualification was descent from the Prophet and no sultan could confer it on somebody who lacked it. An overlord who wanted a different sharif had to choose a different Hasanid, and after 1201 that meant a different member of one family — which is why the Ottomans deposed sharifs constantly and never abolished the office.

Descent is doing all the work here, which is rare. Dynasties normally claim ancestry alongside conquest or a grant, and normally construct it: the Shirvanshahs became Sasanians, the Rasulids became Ghassanids, the Safavids became descendants of the seventh imam. At Mecca the ancestry was the office. It was genealogically documented, publicly contested between branches of the family, and there was nothing else on offer — no army, no revenue of its own, no territory anyone would fight to keep.

The other half of the arrangement is that the sharifs never had force worth mentioning. What they could put in the field was their own extended kin and allied Bedouin, and it could raid a caravan and could not hold a city against anyone serious. In nine and a half centuries the sharifate lost Mecca to an outside power repeatedly and got it back nearly every time, because the outside power always needed a Hasanid to run it.

Commander of the faithful for a season

formationDrafted from O'Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (1923)

The sharifate's early decades under Fatimid overlordship produced one episode dramatic enough to survive in detail: a Meccan sharif who briefly let himself be proclaimed rival caliph to his own Fatimid overlord, and lived to regret it.

A rebellion that needed a caliph of its own

Around 1010 a revolt broke out in Palestine against the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, led by the Bedouin chief Mufarraj and his son Hasan of the Jarrah family, after a Fatimid official close to the court had been put to death at a rival's request and fled to join them in fear for his own life. The rebels defeated and killed the Fatimid general sent to put them down, took Ramla, and - having gone this far against the caliph in Cairo - decided they needed a caliph of their own to legitimize the revolt. They sent for Husayn ibn Ja'far, the Sharif of Mecca, and invited him to assume the caliphate himself.

New York Public Library · O'Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (1923) · From Picturesque Palestine, 1881 · Public domain

A crown accepted, and then abandoned by the men who offered it

Husayn agreed readily. He left a deputy to govern Mecca in his absence, joined Mufarraj's rebel army, and was formally saluted as "Commander of the Faithful" - a Hasanid sharif, for a brief season, holding the same title as the Fatimid and Abbasid caliphs both. It did not last. Hakim wrote to Hasan and Mufarraj offering them estates and gifts to abandon the revolt, and they took the offer, breaking with the very sharif they had just proclaimed caliph. The dispute that followed between the rebels and their discarded figurehead was bitter enough that Husayn left them outright and returned to Mecca, his brief caliphate over almost as soon as it had been declared.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · O'Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (1923) · Photograph: Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey · CC0

A reconciliation bought with a name on the coinage

Hakim sent an army to expel Hasan and his followers from Ramla soon after, and eventually pardoned Hasan at his father's intercession, granting him an estate in Egypt - though Mufarraj himself was later poisoned on the caliph's own orders regardless. Husayn's own "anti-caliphate" at Mecca continued in a kind of suspended defiance for two more years before he asked to be reconciled with Hakim; once the reconciliation was granted, he put Hakim's name back on Mecca's coinage and had it restored to the Friday sermon - the same submission that had defined the sharifate since its founding, resumed exactly where it had briefly, ambitiously, and unsuccessfully been set aside.

British Museum · O'Leary, A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate (1923) · Photograph: PHGCOM · Public domain

One family for seven hundred years

expansionDrafted from Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994)

In 1201 a Hasanid chief from Yanbu on the Red Sea coast named Qatada ibn Idris took Mecca from the line then holding it. His descendants held the sharifate for the following seven hundred and twenty-four years.

Library of Congress · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

Seven hundred and twenty-four years in one office is a length of tenure with very few parallels anywhere, and it was accomplished through the Ayyubids, the Rasulids, the Mamluks, four centuries of Ottomans, a Wahhabi occupation, an Egyptian reconquest and a world war. Every sharif of Mecca between Qatada and the end was one of his descendants, including Husayn ibn Ali, who declared the Arab Revolt in 1916 — and the Hashemite kings of Jordan today are of the same line.

The method is visible in the thirteenth century and does not change afterwards. Qatada is reported to have declined an invitation to Baghdad on the grounds that he did not trust the caliph's safe-conduct, and to have written a poem about it; his successors dealt with the Ayyubids in Egypt and the Rasulids in Yemen at the same time, playing each against the other, and took presents from both. When Baybars made the pilgrimage in 1269 and asserted Mamluk suzerainty, the sharif accepted it and kept his position. When the Rasulids sent a kiswa first, the sharif hung it.

Museum of Islamic Art, Cairo · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

The internal politics were violent throughout. Qatada's family was large and the office was worth having, so the standard pattern is two or three cousins with rival claims, each with a patron in Cairo or Ta'izz or later Istanbul, and a sharifate that changed hands by assassination and by imperial decree in roughly equal proportions. Meloy's study of the later medieval period is largely an account of how those factions used the Egyptian connection, and how Cairo used them.

What the family understood, and what almost nobody in a comparable position ever understands, is that the object was never to win. A sharif who defeated his overlord would have had to defend the Hejaz, which cannot be done. A sharif who lost gracefully and remained necessary kept the office.

What a state with no economy lived on

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Meloy, Chicago Studies on the Middle East (2010)

The Hejaz grows almost nothing, and the sharifate of Mecca is the purest case anywhere of a state financed by other states.

What it had of its own was Jeddah, the port where Red Sea traffic for Mecca landed, and the sharifs took a share of its customs. That is why the Mamluk seizure of the revenue in the fifteenth century mattered so much, and why Cairo's capture of the Jeddah customs is the moment the Yemeni alternative closed.

Library of Congress · Meloy, Chicago Studies on the Middle East (2010) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

The rest was transfers. The surra, an annual purse sent from Cairo and later from Istanbul for the upkeep of the holy cities and the stipends of their inhabitants. Endowments established for Mecca and Medina by rulers and rich individuals from Morocco to Bengal, whose revenues flowed to the Hejaz in perpetuity. Grain shipments from Egypt, without which the city could not be fed. And direct gifts from any sovereign who wanted something.

Meloy, Chicago Studies on the Middle East (2010) · The Illustrated London News · Public domain

What they wanted

The sermon.

The khutba at Mecca names a sovereign, and it is heard by pilgrims from every part of the Muslim world in the one place they all come to. That makes it the single most valuable piece of publicity in Islam, and the sharifs were the people who decided whose name was in it.

Library of Congress · Meloy, Chicago Studies on the Middle East (2010) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

Once you know that, a great many transactions elsewhere resolve into the same one, seen from the other side of the table. A Hafsid claimant to the caliphate in Tunis could point to the sharif's acknowledgement and to little else. A Sulayhid client of Cairo controlled the appointment of the amir of Mecca, which is the high-water mark of the whole Fatimid claim. The Rasulids of Ta'izz and the Mamluks of Cairo competed over whose kiswa reached the Ka'ba first. And in 1517 the guardianship passed to Selim, which is a large part of what the Ottoman sultans were afterwards.

A small family in a barren valley, with no army and no crops, spent nine centuries auctioning the only thing it had, and was paid by whoever won.

Four hundred years of a distant sovereign

peakDrafted from Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994)

When Selim I took Cairo in 1517 the sharif Barakat did not wait to be approached. He sent his son to Egypt with the keys of the Ka'ba and his submission, before any Ottoman force came near the Hejaz, and was confirmed in his position. Looked at from Cairo it is a footnote to the fall of the Mamluk sultanate; looked at from Mecca it is the single most successful decision the sharifate ever made.

Musée du Louvre, MAO 3919 · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Marie-Lan Nguyen · Public domain

What it bought was the arrangement the family did best. The Ottomans took the title — Servant of the Two Noble Sanctuaries, which the sultans used in preference to almost everything else and which the Ottoman page records as the part of the 1517 inheritance they actually put at the centre of their self-description. The sharifs kept Mecca. Istanbul sent the surra, the grain, the annual caravan and a governor at Jeddah who collected the customs and shared them; the sharif governed the city and the Hejaz tribes, and the sovereign was two thousand kilometres away and disinclined to campaign in the desert.

Library of Congress · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

It was among the most autonomous provinces the Ottoman empire had, and it was autonomous because the alternative was expensive. An Ottoman army in the Hejaz would have had to be supplied from Egypt across the Red Sea in perpetuity, in order to govern a place whose entire product was prestige that a compliant sharif already delivered.

Istanbul's real instrument was the appointment. Sharifs were deposed and installed from the capital with great frequency — the office changed hands dozens of times over four centuries, usually between cousins of the same family, usually with a faction in Mecca and a patron in the Porte behind each.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: C. Snouck Hurgronje and al-Sayyid 'Abd al-Ghaffar · CC0

That is an odd way for an office to descend, and it is worth naming precisely. It was hereditary in a family and it was filled by a foreign sovereign. Neither half is optional: no appointment could make a non-Hasanid the sharif, and no Hasanid held Mecca without a sultan's confirmation. The sultan chose which cousin; the family determined the shortlist; and both sides preferred the arrangement to any clearer one, because a clearer one would have meant somebody losing.

It worked for both parties for the better part of three hundred years. Then somebody arrived who did not want the sermon.

People who did not want the sermon

contractionDrafted from Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994)

The first Saudi state took Mecca in 1803, and what arrived was not another overlord.

Every previous conqueror of the Hejaz had wanted the same thing: the khutba, the title, the pilgrimage running, and a sharif in place to make it lawful. The Wahhabi movement wanted none of it. It regarded the veneration of tombs as idolatry and demolished the domed shrines in Mecca and, later, at Medina. It regarded the endowments and the stipends as corruption. It regarded the Ottoman sultan's claim as worthless and stopped the Egyptian and Syrian pilgrim caravans from arriving at all, on the grounds that those who came with them were not Muslims in the relevant sense.

Diriyah, Saudi Arabia · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: xiquinhosilva · CC BY 2.0

For a polity whose entire revenue was other people's reverence, this was not a change of master. It was the removal of the market.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Auguste Couder · Public domain

The Ottomans could not answer it themselves and subcontracted the problem to Muhammad Ali of Egypt, whose son Ibrahim Pasha took the Hejaz back between 1811 and 1818 with an army equipped on European lines and destroyed the Saudi capital at Diriyah. The sharifate was restored, the caravans resumed, and the nineteenth century was spent under an Egyptian and then an Ottoman administration that was progressively less distant — the telegraph reached Mecca, a garrison was stationed, the Suez Canal made the Hejaz reachable in days, and the autonomy the sharifs had enjoyed because they were far away eroded with the travel time.

Library of Congress · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

The argument that began in 1803 was never settled in the sharifate's favour. It was suspended for a century, and when it resumed the sharifs had lost the empire that had suspended it.

What the sharif collected

contractionDrafted from Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829)

Burckhardt reached Mecca in 1814, passing as a Muslim, in the year the Egyptian army was taking the Hijaz back from the Wahhabis and the last sharif to govern it independently was about to be removed. He stayed for months and wrote down what the government had actually consisted of, which is not what the title suggests.

Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Etched by Angelica Clarke after Joseph Slater · Public domain

It consisted of customs. At Yanbu, which had been annexed to the sharifate, Ghalib kept a vizier and a guard of fifty or sixty men, and Burckhardt's summary of that officer's authority is that he appears to have had little beyond collecting the customs. The Arabs of the town were left to the government of their own shaikhs and enjoyed considerably more liberty than the people of Mecca and Jeddah. And when a man of Yanbu was unjustly treated, he went out to his relations in the desert — the Juhayna, a tribe Burckhardt says was not to be trifled with — who retaliated on the sharif's people and the sharif's caravans until the matter was compromised.

Imperial War Museums · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Photograph: Capt. Evan MacRury · Public domain

That is a state whose subjects have an appeal mechanism consisting of their cousins robbing the government until it settles.

The revenue was supposed to be shared with the Ottoman pasha of Jeddah. Ghalib put the whole of the Yanbu customs into his own treasury. When the town was walled after the first Wahhabi attack in 1802, the sharif ordered the work and made the townspeople pay the entire cost of it.

Then the Wahhabis took the Hijaz. Burckhardt sets out the sequence matter-of-factly: Saud reduced the two great Bedouin tribes of the north, which was made easy by the hatred between them; Yanbu al-Nakhl took a Wahhabi garrison; Mecca fell and Ghalib submitted; Yanbu held out some months more and then capitulated and adopted the creed. The Wahhabis did not garrison it. The sharif's governor stayed in place. What changed was that the Wahhabi tax-collectors arrived — and the inhabitants, who except for customs duties had never been subject to any imposts at all, found the new government pressed on them very heavily.

That sentence is the most damaging thing in the book about the old regime, and Burckhardt does not seem to intend it as praise. A sharifate that had governed the holy cities for eight hundred and fifty years had never established direct taxation over a town in its own province. It taxed goods passing through, and the pilgrimage, and it did not reach further because it could not.

British Library · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Engraved by Sidney Hall · Public domain

The other half of the picture is what that bought. At Arafat in 1814 Burckhardt watched the tents pitched: the two pashas' encampments, and beside them, rivalling them in beauty and far exceeding the tents of a sharif of the reigning house, the tents of a Mecca merchant named Jaylani. Anywhere else in the East, he remarks, a merchant would as soon buy a rope for his own neck as display his wealth in front of a pasha. The Meccans had not learned to be frightened, because under Sharif Ghalib extortion had seldom been applied to individuals — and they were now relying on Muhammad Ali's promise that he would respect their property.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam · Burckhardt, Travels in Arabia, Comprehending an Account of those Territories in Hedjaz which the Mohammedans Regard as Sacred (1829) · Photograph: al-Sayyid 'Abd al-Ghaffar, for C. Snouck Hurgronje · CC0

They should not have. But the observation stands as the best account there is of what the sharifate was for. It was not a strong government and had never tried to be one. It was a light, predatory, customs-collecting authority over a city whose business was pilgrims, which left the tribes alone because it had to and left the merchants alone because the merchants were the revenue — and which lasted nearly a millennium on exactly that, until two neighbouring powers with real armies arrived within a decade of each other and neither of them could see the point of it.

The nine years of being a king

endDrafted from Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994)

Husayn ibn Ali became sharif in 1908, appointed from Istanbul in the ordinary way, into an empire that had just had a constitutional revolution and a government that intended to centralise. The Hejaz railway had reached Medina the same year. Both facts pointed the same direction: the distance the sharifate had lived on was closing.

Library of Congress · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: Bernhard Moritz · Public domain

In June 1916, with British money, British arms and an undertaking about Arab independence whose terms are still argued about, he declared a revolt against the Ottoman empire. The campaign that followed is the one Western readers know through T. E. Lawrence, and its military significance was modest and its political significance was not. Husayn took the title king of the Hejaz.

Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Husayn ibn Ali · Public domain

That is the break. For nine hundred and forty-eight years the sharifate's method had been to serve whoever was strongest, take the subsidy, keep the office and outlast the sovereign. Husayn stopped being a client and became a principal, and in 1924, after the Turkish republic abolished the caliphate, he claimed that too.

Imperial War Museums, Q 58815 · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photograph: T. E. Lawrence · Public domain

The nine years went badly. The British subsidy stopped after the war and the promises were not what he had understood them to be; the caliphate claim was rejected almost everywhere and cost him support in India and Egypt; and in the Najd the second Saudi state's successor under Abd al-Aziz ibn Saud had spent twenty years taking central Arabia. In 1924 Ibn Saud invaded the Hejaz. Ta'if fell, then Mecca, then Jeddah after a siege. Husayn abdicated in favour of his son Ali, who abdicated in 1925 and left.

Royal Hashemite Documentation Centre · Peters, Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land (1994) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

The office was not filled again. Ibn Saud took the title of king of the Hejaz himself and, in 1932, made it part of a state named after his family — which answers the question the whole nine centuries had been putting, about whether the qualification could be conferred on somebody who lacked it. It could not. So it was abolished instead.

The sharifate succeeded nobody and nobody succeeded it, which for an office that dealt with nearly every Islamic state of the last nine hundred years is a peculiar result and an accurate one. It was continuously somebody's client and never anybody's heir.

Husayn's sons were made kings of Iraq and Transjordan by the British. The Iraqi branch was killed in 1958. The Jordanian one is still there, and its head is still a descendant of Qatada ibn Idris, who took Mecca in 1201.

A thing nobody wanted to want

afterlifeDrafted from Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928)

In the summer of 1918 a British political officer sat in a house in central Arabia, in weather his thermometer put at over ninety, and listened to Ibn Sa'ud's court discuss the sharif of Mecca. He wrote it down that evening. Eight years later the man he was travelling with was crowned in the Great Mosque at Mecca as king of the Hejaz.

Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

The conversation is the best surviving statement of the case against the sharifate, made by the people who were shortly going to end it, before they knew they would.

The argument

A kinsman of Ibn Sa'ud's led it — a man whose own hereditary claim to the Wahhabi throne was, as the officer noted drily, at least as good as the one he was attacking — and he made two points.

The first was dynastic. Husayn belonged to the 'Abadila clan, which owed its present position to the Turks; the Dhawi Zayd, his relatives, were the senior branch. On that reckoning Husayn was not even the rightful sharif, let alone king of anything.

The second was about blood, and it is ugly, and it should be quoted rather than paraphrased because it is what was actually said. The Ashraf, he argued, were of much-mixed blood — through their negress, Circassian, Turkish and other mothers — and could not claim to be pure Arabs like the people of Najd. How, then, could Husayn claim to be king of the Arabs?

Nine centuries of the sharifate's own strategy is embedded in that accusation. The office had survived by marrying into every power that came through the Hejaz, taking the subsidy of every sovereign who wanted his name in the sermon, and being useful to Egypt and to Istanbul in turn. The households of Mecca were cosmopolitan because Mecca was. And in 1918, in a room in central Arabia, that was the charge: not that they had failed, but that they had been in contact with everybody.

What the British thought they were doing

The officer answered, and his answer is the other half of the epitaph.

Britain, he explained, had not made Husayn king of the Arabs and could not stop him calling himself whatever he liked. British recognition of his kingship of the Hejaz had a specific cause: when the Ottoman sultan declared war and proclaimed a jihad, Britain needed — for the satisfaction of millions of Indian Muslim subjects — a recognised Muslim leader to raise a revolt in its favour against the Turks.

That is the sharifate's last transaction, described by the buyer. What was purchased in 1916 was exactly what had been purchased since the tenth century: a Hasanid at Mecca whose recognition made a claim look lawful to Muslims elsewhere. The only novelty is the elsewhere. Previous customers had wanted the sermon read for the benefit of Cairo or Istanbul; this one wanted it for the benefit of Lucknow and Lahore.

National Photo Collection of Israel · Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Photograph: Eric Matson · Public domain

The disclaimer

Then Ibn Sa'ud spoke, and said he coveted no title and no territory outside Najd. As for Mecca he had no desire whatever to be its master. All that interested him there was the House of God, and only in that he was obliged as a Muslim to visit it once in his life, for ten days at the most. The forts and palaces his ancestors had built at Mecca, Medina and Ta'if merely reminded him of an episode in the past history of Najd, and he had no wish to reoccupy them.

He was crowned in the Great Mosque on the eighth of January, 1926.

Philby, Arabia of the Wahhabis (1928) · Photograph: Capt. William Shakespear · Public domain

There is no reason to read the 1918 statement as a lie. It reads like a man declining a burden he had no use for, in a year when taking it was not available. What changed was not his appetite but the position: the sharif overreached, the subsidies stopped, the caliphate claim failed, and the Hejaz turned out to be there for the taking.

What was abolished

The office was not transferred. It was ended.

Nine and a half centuries of sharifate had rested on a qualification nobody could confer — descent from the Prophet through Hasan — which is precisely why every overlord from the Fatimids to the Ottomans had appointed sharifs rather than governors. The new king of the Hejaz was not a Hasanid and did not pretend to be. He did not need to be: his claim to the holy cities was custodial and doctrinal rather than genealogical, and a state built on that argument has no use for a family whose whole standing is its ancestry.

So the sharifate ends without a successor in the office, and that is not an accident of the record. It is what happens when the thing being replaced was never a job in the first place.