Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/280

260 ARABIA [HISTORY African coast, invaded Egypt; and Moezz-Allah their caliph, hav- iuc, 979-3 A D., driven the Abbaside governor from the shores ot the Nile, established his own throne in the city of Cairo, which his victorious general Jowher had founded the year previous. From this capital he and his descendants ruled for two centuries more, not only over Egypt, lower and upper, but, though at the price of frequent wars, over Syria to the east and Tripoli to the west, till the last of the Fatimite caliphs, Adhid-Billah, was, 1171 A.D., de throned by the Koordish conqueror Salah-ed-Deen, better known in history and romance as Saladin, the chivalrous opponent of our own Eichard I. But though no Arab prince has ever since reigned in Egypt, the Hejaz with its sacred cities remained annexed to that country, and Yemen in part followed suit. Turkish At last, 1517 A.u., the Turkish sultan, Selim L, conquered occupation. Egypt, and obtained from the last real or supposed surviving Abba- side kinsmen of the prophet a formal investiture of the Mahometan caliphate, which thus definitely changed the character of that office from national to politico-religious. On this occasion the shereef of Mecca presented the sultan with the keys of the city ; and the Arab tribes in general, those of the east excepted, proffered their allegi ance to the Ottoman government. This subjection, real in Hejaz and Yemen, nominal elsewhere, the country continued for half a century, till the shereef Muttahir, impatient of a foreign yoke, attacked and routed the Turkish force of occupation, then com manded by Murad Pasha, and for a short time re-established Arab independence. Selim II. sent fresh troops, who at first gained some advantages over the Arabs ; but in 1630 the Yemenite chief Khasim expelled the Turks from the whole of his native province, and restored a shadow of the old Himyarite throne at Sanaa. Here, 1761 A.D., the celebrated Danish traveller, Niebuhr, found the Kingdom of Imam, as he was styled, of Yemen, governing thirty provinces, six Yemen. on the coast and twenty-four inland, besides several smaller states ; and possessed of an income, chiefly derived from the custom-dues of Loheya, Mokha, and other seaports, equalling, it was thought, 1,000,000 sterling per annum. The standing army was reckoned at 5000 men, mostly infantry. Subsequently, Wahhabee encroach ments on the north, the British occupation of Aden to the south, and Egyptian invasion under Mehemet Ali and his successors, con siderably weakened the power of the Imam of Sanaa, till in 1871 a Turkish army, sent from Syria, took the capital, and put an end to the Arab dynasty of Khasim. At the present date Yemen is a province of the Ottoman empire, though with every prospect of not long remaining so. Between the Hejaz and the Ottoman government the yearly pil- frimage, with the accompanying largesses of the Ottoman sultans, )rmed a more enduring link ; one interrupted, indeed, from time to time by occasional rebellions, but as often renewed by Arab neediness, till the province, with its sacred cities, was definitely annexed, though only for a time, by the great Egyptian usurper Mehemet Ali. But in the rest of the peninsula, in Nejd, Oman, Mahrah, Had- ramaut, and the other adjoining districts, the Ottoman claims were from the beginning of the 17th century absolutely ignored, and no collision was possible, because no point of contact existed. This state of things was, however, at last modified by the Wahhabee movement, one of the most important in the history of Arabia, and the end of which we have not yet seen. Of this a brief account must now be given. Born at the town of Horeymelah, in the centre of N"ejd, 1691 A.D., Abd-el-Wahhab, or the "Servant of the Bountiful," had in early life travelled far in Mesopotamia and Syria, report even adds India, seeking knowledge in observation and the conversation of the learned, to whom his own superior intelligence gave him recom mendation everywhere. Keturning in mature life to the secluded quiet of his native land, he gave himself up to thought and study, mostly theological. Convinced by the comparison between what he read and what he had seen in his travels, and continued to sec around him in ISTejd itself, where hardly a vestige of Mahometanism remained, that the primitive faith of Islam had become consider ably corrupted in theory and totally so in practice, and that Turks, Persians, and Arabs, were all of them in fact, though after different fashions, no longer true Muslims, but mere idolaters and poly- theists, he determined himself to inaugurate a reform that should reassert the doctrine and practice of the Koran as they had been at the beginning. Wahhabee The invocation of saints, including Mahomet himself, a practice reform. borrowed by Mahometanism from foreign example ; the honours paid at the shrines and tombs of the dead ; the use of intoxicating liquors ; the wearing of silk and gold to sum up, every belief or practice directly or indirectly condemned by the Koran, or even not sanctioned by it with all these Abd-el-Wahhab declared open war. His special and notorious prohibition of tobacco, a prohibi tion rigorously observed by his followers, and which subsequently became in a manner their distinctive badge, must be attributed to an excess of sectarian puritanism ; nor can it be doubted that hatred of foreigners, and of the Turks in particular, had a large share in the zeal manifested by himself and his disciples for what they, not Hejaz. Other pro vinces. Rise of Wahhabus or Abd-el- Wahhab. altogether wrongly, considered as in a peculiar sense the national or Aral! religion ; it was a view that had the sanction of the Koran itself. Like Mahomet, Abd-el-Wahhab commenced his preaching when about forty years of age, and, like the prophet, soon drew clown on himself the persecution of those he failed to convert. Driven from Eyaneh, where he had established himself, by the hostility of its chiefs, themselves stirred up to persecution of the rigorous doctrines by the far-sighted Arav, governor of the neighbouring province of Hasa, he found refuge with the sheykh Mohammed Ebn Saood, the warlike chief of Dereyecyah, who put his sword and that of his clan at the disposal of the new apostle. The reform thus supported soon extended itself, partly by persuasion, partly by force ; and when Abd-el-Wahhab died in 1787, at the advanced age of ninety- six, he had already seen his doctrines dominant from the coast of Bahreyn to the confines of Mokha and Aden. His disciple and patron, Ebn Saood, after many victories gained Ebn Saood. over the governor of Hasa and other enemies or rivals, died in 1765, Conquest leaving the whole of Nejd, now consolidated into one government of Nejd. under one head, to his son and successor Abd-el-Aziz, who, on his ., , , accession, now assumed the titles of Imam and Sultan. Under this . . " e " chief the important provinces of Abu-Areesh, south of Mecca, and * IZ ... of Nejran, on the frontier of Yemen, were added to the Wahha- M, rri,v bee dominions. These conquests, or rather annexations, naturally ur Sl enough excited the alarm of Ghalib, the shereef or governor of Mecca, who by his representations succeeded in at last awakening the long negligent Turks to the danger which threatened their frontiers from the national and religious union of the Arab race. Orders were issued from Constantinople, and in 1797 an army of 5000 Turks, with an equal number of allied Arabs, advanced into Hasa, which had already become Wahhabee territory, and laid siege to Hofhoof, the capital of the province. But harassed by the Wahhabees and fearful of risking a general engagement, they retired without having effected anything except to provoke the bitter resent ment of an enemy who had now learned not only to hate but to despise them. The consequence was that the Wahhabees before Storming long took the initiative ; and in 1801 their collected armies invaded of Kerbela, the territory of Baghdad, and laid siege to Kerbela, a locality famous for the tomb of Hoseyn the martyr, son of Ali, and a centre of popular Mahometan superstition. The town was stormed, the inhabitants massacred, and spoils of immense value were transferred from its shrines to the Wahhabee treasury. Victorious on the east, the Wahhabee arms were next directed westward ; Taif, the well- known pleasure-ground of Mecca, was invaded and subdued with great bloodshed in 1802 ; and in the April of the following year Mecca Taking of itself, though not till after a brave resistance, came into Wahhabee Mecca, possession. Ghaleb fled to Jiddeh, the only place in Hejaz that held out against the invaders; and Saood, son of Abd-el-Aziz formally assumed the government of Mecca, whence he dictated to the Porte the terms on which alone he declared that lie would henceforth permit the observances of the yearly pilgrimage from all parts of the Mahometan world. Shortly afterwards he succeeded in person to the Wahhabee imamate, his father having been assassin ated by a Persian in the mosque at Dereyeeyah. Under Saood the Nejdee kingdom attained its greatest extension Saood s and prosperity. Internally its government was such as that of reign. Arabia had been under the first caliphs and their Ommiade suc cessors, namely, a despotism regulated by the prescriptions of the Koran ; and the revenues at Saood s disposal fluctuated between 200,000 and 300,000 yearly. This sum he expended chiefly for military purposes. In 1804 he conquered Medinah, plundering the rich offerings accumulated by the superstition of ages round the prophet s tomb, besides treating the inhabitants of the town with great severity. From this date till 1811, open war, in which the Wahhabees were generally successful, was waged between them and all their neigh bours on every side, but especially against the Turks, whose Syrian possessions were ravaged sometimes by Saood s best general Abu- Noktah, sometimes by his gigantic negro lieutenant Hark, up to Anah on the Euphrates, and within sight of the walls of Damascus. At this time, too, the inhabitants of Bahreyn and the adjoining coast having embraced Wahhabee doctrines, combined them with profitable piracy on the Persian Gulf, till the British expeditions sent from Bombay in 1810 and 1819 broke up the robber nest of Ras-el-Kheymah, and set bounds to the insolence of the piratical zealots. For during these events the customary pilgrimage of Mecca and Medinah had been interrupted, the Wahhabees allowing none but such as conformed to their own doctrines and habits to approach the sacred cities. Thus the whole extra- Arabian Mahometan world was roused to indignation against the new and exclusive reform ; and the Ottoman Porte, after some futile efforts of its own, con sented to entrust the chastisement of the Arabs to its doubtful and already over-powerful Egyptian vassal, Mehemet Ali. In 1811 this cruel and treacherous but highly talented man War with began the work, and, in spite of many difficulties and even reverses, Eeypt.

never faltered in it till it was fully accomplished. The details of