The history of Hejaz, since the expansion of Islam established it in the world's eye, has been governed by the fact that it can neither finance nor feed itself.
David Hogarth, Arab Bureau, 1917Footnote 1It is by now axiomatic that historical inquiry is significantly shaped by the times of the inquirer.Footnote 2 This is a rather involuntary influence. On the other hand, irrespective of where the inquirer stands in time relative to the subject of their inquiry, they have a choice as to the time frame adopted. Adopting different time frames also influences the outcome of the historical inquiry.
A short time frame inquiry into Saudi–Egyptian or Hijazi–Egyptian relations, or the history of modern Saudi state formation, might lead one to concentrate on the Maḥmal incident of 1926 as the key to understanding these relations – indeed it is an important event. But such a courte durée, sometimes known as the événementielle (episode, or event-based) approach, leaves out much rich depth and understanding.
The Maḥmal incident refers to the June 1926 attack by members of the Wahhabi tribal Ikhwan movement on the Egyptian Maḥmal, or pilgrimage caravan. The caravan was named for an empty palanquin, in Arabic maḥmal, which it conveyed and which symbolized the ruler who sent it. The incident is often seen in histories of Saudi Arabia as a major turning point in Saudi state-formation. Per that perspective, the attack finally left Ibn Saud, the Saudi-Wahhabi leader, no choice but to suppress the tolerated and occasionally useful but disturbingly independent-minded Ikhwan; that suppression culminated in their defeat and disbandment following the battle of Sabila in 1930. Once the Ikhwan was brought to heel, Ibn Saud could turn his tribal chieftaincy into a state.Footnote 3 In this version of events, the relevant time frame within which to view the incident is a few decades, a courte durée, and the protagonists are the Ikhwan leaders and Ibn Saud, with various and sundry Egyptians functioning as props or a pretext.
But the same incident acquires a deeper meaning when placed within the wider time frame of the longue durée of relations between Egypt and the Hijaz, which is Arabia's western littoral region and home to the Ḥaramayn, Islam's holy cities of Mecca and Medina. In the longue durée, its historical significance becomes more about ending Egyptian claims of primacy in the Ḥaramayn than achieving internal Saudi state consolidation (which it also was). Here the relevant time frame is a few centuries, and the protagonists are Egypt and Arabia, with the Ikhwan functioning as prop or pretext.
Indeed, it is this second time frame, the longue durée, that should command attention, for the only way that Ibn Saud could refashion to his own favour the historical connections that defined Islamic legitimacy in a political form was to cut the Gordian knot between Egypt and the Hijaz, and tie the Haramayn instead to the Saudi heartland of Najd. Viewed this way, the incident is less a story about internal Saudi relations and more properly one of a tipping point in a process wherein Ibn Saud eliminated long-standing Egyptian influence from the Hijaz.Footnote 4 By doing so, Ibn Saud forever altered the status of the Red Sea littoral. At the Red Sea's expense, the Arabian Peninsula, dominated by Saudi Arabia, became the new geo-political feature of the region.
I
This approach, invigorated by the theory of the longue durée, necessarily focuses our attention on the Red Sea littoral. We begin by examining the historical connections between Egypt and Arabia – particularly the Hijaz, which faced Egypt across the Red Sea. The backbone of these connections was economic in nature.
The western Arabian Peninsula coast, comprising the entire Hijaz, and first and foremost the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, was unsustainable without trade from the sea. Food came mostly from Egypt. This was a chief ‘geo-bio-spatial feature’ of the region's longue durée and was given sacredness by the Qurʾan, where Abraham asks God, saying, ‘Our Lord, I have settled some of my descendants in an uncultivated valley near Your sacred House, our Lord, that they may establish prayer. So make hearts among the people incline toward them and provide for them from the fruits that they might be grateful.’ That the Red Sea was a significant cultural and economic space is further attested to by the numerous loan words in the Qurʾan from Red Sea languages and that the Prophet Muhammad's companions found shelter from Meccan persecution in Ethiopia.Footnote 5
Trade linked the two regions from even before the rise of Islam, and part of the reason was geo-climatic. Water was too scarce in the Hijaz to support much agriculture, and so Egypt, once known as ‘the breadbasket of Rome’,Footnote 6 served that function for the Hijaz at least from the rise of Islam into the twentieth century. Throughout Islamic times, Jeddah, the Hijazi Red Sea entrepôt, shared the littoral with the Egyptian town of Suez at the head of the Gulf of Suez, making for the relatively cheap transportation of grain.Footnote 7 This relationship created dense economic links between Egypt and the Hijaz, and political implications naturally followed.Footnote 8 Note that the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, and particularly Najd, in what would become the Saudi-controlled heartland far to the east across hostile terrain, was not part of this system.
Changes in empire from Roman to Byzantine to sundry Islamic imperia after the seventh century did not alter the basic pattern.Footnote 9 During Fatimid rule over Egypt and the Hijaz (969–1171), for example, attempts by the Meccan sharifate to assert its independence from the Fatimid caliph were thwarted at least once (976) and perhaps twice (1011) because of the region's dependence on food from Egypt.Footnote 10 The Ayyubids in the twelfth century and the Mamluks during their long rule (1250–1517) further developed the Egyptian–Hijazi economic relationship and institutionalized aspects of it. Thus, while the imperial Islamic state of the day probably subsidized the Hijaz through the bayt al-māl (treasury), the Mamluks established the pious endowments for the Holy Places (awqāf al-Ḥaramayn). These endowments were from Egyptian villages and produced mostly grain or its cash equivalent dedicated to the welfare of the residents of the Hijaz.Footnote 11 The endowments were especially critical during the pilgrimage period, when the population swelled.
The Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517 and the Hijaz too came under their dominion, ushering in a 400-year reign over the Ḥaramayn. This effectively ended extrinsic threats to the Egyptian–Hijazi connection, as had been manifest a few years earlier when the Portuguese entered the Red Sea, interrupting the flow of grain from Egypt and causing a sharp rise in prices. The Ottomans augmented the Egyptian pious endowments and the Egyptian financial connection under the Ottomans came to include payments to tribes and to the sharif of Mecca to secure a safe and hence successful pilgrimage. These payments, originating in the imperial Ottoman treasury of Egypt, were known as sürres, or purses.Footnote 12 The amounts involved from year to year were generally considerable.Footnote 13
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Egyptian relations with the Hijaz fell into flux as Mamluk beys displaced Ottomans as the true rulers of Egypt, the French invaded and were expelled from Egypt, and a burst of Wahhabi energies led to the Najdi Saudi occupation of Mecca in 1806. That occupation proved short-lived, but it presaged what was to occur more than a century later, in 1926, when the Wahhabis returned. The Najdis forbade the arrival of the Egyptian pilgrimage caravan, the Maḥmal, which seemed to them replete with heretical customs and intimations (of which more below).Footnote 14 With this and other indignities, the Ottomans determined to extirpate the Wahhabi menace in the Ḥaramayn; they delegated their pasha in Egypt, Muhammad ʿAli , to remove it. His forces occupied Mecca in 1812 and then proceeded, in 1818, to destroy the first Saudi state, centred then as now in Najd.
The importance of the Hijazi economic connection to Egypt throughout these historical perturbations endured. The pasha restored the sürre payments and pious endowment corn shipments, albeit in diminished plentitude. He also kept the Jeddah customs revenues for himself instead of splitting them with the sharif.Footnote 15 When the Ottomans restored direct rule over the Hijaz in 1840, their position in Egypt was still too weak to force Egypt to supply funds and grain at former levels. The Ottoman authorities thus made up the shortfall from central and Hijazi provincial revenues. All the same, mid-nineteenth-century Egypt continued to provide gifts to Hijazi notables, aid to charities in the Ḥaramayn, and some direct pensions.Footnote 16 While it is difficult to assess the relative weight of contributions to the Hijaz from Egypt and the Ottoman government in this period, Egyptian participation had clearly waned in relative terms, which represented a turning point in the Hijazi reliance on Egypt for finances.
The significance of trade and other transfers from Egypt to Hijaz diminished further in the twentieth century.Footnote 17 Money and grain continued to enter the Hijaz from Egypt, but the central Ottoman treasury, the budget of the Hijaz province, and pious endowments from other parts of the empire made up the shortfall.Footnote 18 Ottoman imperial finances in general, too, were straitened through the culmination of a long hollowing out process of the economy too extensive to be discussed here.Footnote 19 Britannia now ruled the waves, taking much trade away from Egypt and the Ottomans – a European insinuation into regional affairs no less monumental than da Gama's earlier circumnavigational disruption of the old Arabian caravan routes. This is why when Sharif Husayn bin ʿAli began his ‘Arab Revolt’ in 1916, he could rely only on a British subsidy to make up the loss of income from the Ottomans. For many years, it was the major source of Husayn's income.Footnote 20
Of course, beyond state support, Egyptian pilgrims themselves, although not as numerous as those from India or Indonesia, provided significant income to the Hijaz.Footnote 21
II
While the economic relationship linking the Hijaz and Egypt was constant and key, it was not the only constant. All Muslim rulers able to claim it desired an acknowledgement of their role in the Ḥaramayn, which led to a protracted competition shaped by the fact that the holiest places of Islam were never the site of imperial power. After its founding, the political centre of Islam quickly exited the Hijaz, first for Damascus, then Baghdad, Cairo, and Istanbul. Direct rule over the Hijaz was only rarely possible from these capitals, so Muslim potentates seeking legitimacy in the form of patronage for the hajj were forced to reach agreements with the actual rulers of Mecca, who were, from the tenth century until 1924, descendants of the Prophet Muhammad, the ashrāf (sing. sharīf). Those who lacked political influence sought to demonstrate their piety by supporting charity in Mecca and Medina. But those who could afford more, and could leverage their generosity politically, ensured that pilgrims knew who was in charge. For the rulers of Egypt, it was the Maḥmal that symbolized their joint political and religious role in the Ḥaramayn.
This patronage took several forms: an investiture of the sharif of Mecca; payment to tribes to ensure the security of the pilgrimage; payments to other residents for simply living in the Ḥaramayn; grain supplies; and commissioning the black-and-gold covering of the Kaʿba called the kiswa. In return, the Muslim suzerain insisted that his name be mentioned in the Friday khuṭba (sermon) in Mecca.
Beginning in the tenth century, the greatest weight of patronage in the Hijaz rested in Fatimid Egypt. The main function of the Maḥmal caravan during this period was to symbolize Egyptian influence based on its economic clout, and to transfer the means of patronage to the Hijaz. The Egyptian-based rulers who controlled the Ḥaramayn could little afford to station troops permanently in the Hijaz, and only rarely did so. But security for the pilgrimage from marauding tribes was essential if the Muslim ruler was to be worthy of the oft-claimed title servant of the two noble sanctuaries (Khādim al-Ḥaramayn al-Sharīfayn). For this, the ruler needed to activate the sharif of Mecca's complex management protocols with the local tribes, and this cost money. The Maḥmal often brought it, accompanied by heavy military guard. It was thus a seasonal projection of force, making the Maḥmal at one level essentially a military expedition commanded by a high-ranking officer known as the amīr al-ḥajj.
The Maḥmal bore also a religious pedigree redolent of early Muslim times. Hajj caravans, which eventually came to be called Maḥmal, were led by an amīr al-ḥajj from the time of the Prophet, who, per tradition, appointed Abu Bakr to this position in 631 to conduct the caravan to Mecca from Medina. During the Rashidun era (632–61), the caliph himself was the amīr al-ḥajj. During the Umayyad and Abbasid periods, the caliph either took it upon himself or delegated someone else, usually a member of the royal family, as his personal representative. The association of the caravan with Islamic suzerainty was thus clear from the beginning.Footnote 22
But beyond being a projection of force, the Egyptian Maḥmal was a vehicle for the symbolic projection of temporal sovereignty, since the actual palanquin itself, from which the entire caravan derived its name, symbolized the ruler of Egypt being conveyed to Mecca – although no actual persons were ensconced within. Of course, similar litters or sedan chairs often conveyed respected personages throughout history in Asia, Africa, and Europe, and religious relics often received the same treatment.Footnote 23 Textually, the term maḥmal was first used to refer to a vehicle for conveying respected figures to Mecca in the tenth century, and achieved regular usage in the eleventh.
Various traditions also associate this kind of maḥmal with the Prophet Muhammad's wife, ʿAʾisha, and with the wife of Harun al-Rashid, Queen Zubayda. These were among the more prominent cultural precedents for the use of the maḥmal as a religious and political symbol when Mamluk Sultan Baybars first employed it in 1266. In 1277, it is referred to for the first time in the context of escorting the kiswa.Footnote 24 Baybars may have adopted it from the Abbasids as a useful legitimation symbol of his position, since the Mamluks had re-established the Abbasid caliphate in Cairo after the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.Footnote 25
The Maḥmal's function as a representation of Egypt's special status regarding the pilgrimage – one of Islam's five pillars – was punctuated by the fact that the rulers had their names embroidered on the kiswa as well as mentioned in the khuṭba.Footnote 26 Jomier aptly describes the processional as it left Cairo and its symbology as constituting a ‘politique de triomphe’ highlighting Egypt's will to power, but those politics were decidedly personal, too.Footnote 27 The palanquin represented the sultan and was inscribed thusly. For example, a band embroidered around the palanquin of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Qansuh al-Ghuri (r. 1501–16) referred to Qansuh as ‘the Chosen one of God, the Splendor of the Resurrection, the Leader’, and the ‘Divinely Supported’.Footnote 28
Upon arrival in Mecca during Mamluk times, the spectacle continued as the sharif received the palanquin outside the city. He ‘would dismount, grasp the hoof the camel bearing the royal litter, and kiss it, an act perceived as an expression of the sharif's vassalage to the sultan’.Footnote 29 The Maḥmal caravan also conveyed the kiswa, which was embroidered at great expense in Egypt. As part of this political-religious spectacle, the name of the Mamluk sultan was embroidered on it.Footnote 30
On returning to Cairo from Mecca, a similar spectacle unfolded. The pasha called on the Prophet and kissed the Maḥmal's cover. The amīr al-ḥajj welcomed the pasha with military music, then rubbed his face against that of the pasha, and was presented with a sable robe. The people of Cairo then visited the Maḥmal to pay their respect.Footnote 31 From the seventeenth to the beginning of the twentieth century it was customary for crowds to try to touch the Maḥmal or the Maḥmal's camel for baraka (blessing). Some touched it with a handkerchief, then tucking it into their belts for later propitiatory use.Footnote 32 Of course, the Wahhabis viewed such practices as shirk, i.e., a polytheistic throwback involving forbidden material fetishism in the face of the Divine. This would have consequences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The entire enterprise – the palanquin itself, as well as the ceremonial departure, arrival in Mecca, and return to Cairo – was a ‘political spectacle’ in the way theorized by Edelman, where political goals are furthered and political reality is constructed through public symbolic manifestations.Footnote 33
The Ottomans, suffering from some of the same legitimacy problems as had the Mamluks, were keen to continue sending the Maḥmal from Egypt as a signifier of their Islamic legitimacy. But when the Maḥmal arrived in Wahhabi-occupied Mecca in 1806, it brought Egyptian officials (who knew not of the occupation) and the Wahhabis face to face for the first time. The Wahhabi leader termed the palanquin a ‘chunk of wood’ and a satanic invention.Footnote 34 The Egyptians were told that the Maḥmal was never to be sent again. They ignored the warning and sent it anyway in 1807, following a firman to that effect by the Sublime Porte. The 1807 Maḥmal was put to the torch by the Saudis well before it could enter Mecca, and was not sent again until Muhammad ʿAli had sent the Wahhabis packing half a decade later.Footnote 35
Muhammad ʿAli sent the Maḥmal into the Hijaz once again as a projection of his burgeoning power, for the Hijaz had become essentially an Egyptian appendage under his rule. He made the pilgrimage himself in 1813.Footnote 36 Sharif Muhammad bin ʿAwn, meanwhile, was taken to Egypt in 1836 and direct Egyptian rule was instituted in his absence.Footnote 37
During the Ottoman restoration in the Hijaz, which began in 1840, the Ottomans moved to increase their support of religious institutions in the region and overshadow the Egyptian contributions. The Ottomans also expanded their influence in the Red Sea and its littoral, where they competed with Egypt.Footnote 38
But Muhammad ʿAli's progeny continued their power projection in the Hijaz even during the Ottoman restoration there, and through the British occupation of Egypt (1882), as they assumed the title of khedive and then king of Egypt under Fuʾad I. As in the past, the covers of the Maḥmal bore both inscriptions and seals (tughras) of the sultan and ruler of Egypt.Footnote 39 This demonstration of Egyptian power, at once political, religious, and military, was often facilitated by the British after 1882, who could claim credit for conveying this very symbol of Egypt's primacy on the ships of the Royal Navy.Footnote 40
III
As already noted, all Islamic potentates over the centuries, whether ensconced in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo, or Istanbul, had to contend with the de facto sharifian ruler of the Hijaz to leverage the hajj for purposes of political legitimacy, and the Maḥmal was the yearly symbol of sovereignty sent by a distant ruler. Its arrival brought resources in return for an acknowledgement of imperial sovereignty, but as a practical matter this exchange had to be negotiated year by year – and the negotiation was never easy.
For the sharifs of Mecca, the distant connection to Arab capitals was a necessary evil. They bristled at the thought of it and many of them aspired to independence. From Sharif Abu al-Futuh (r. 994–1039) who declared himself an alternative to the Fatimid caliphate,Footnote 41 through Sharif Qatada (r. 1201–20), who revelled in his ‘splendid isolation’ and bucked the Abbasid Caliph al-Nasir by refusing to come to Baghdad,Footnote 42 all the way to Sharif Ghalib's (r. 1788–1813) skilful playing off of the French, Ottomans, English, French, and Egyptians at the turn of the nineteenth century, the Hashemite rulers of the Hijaz usually tried to carve out as much elbow room for themselves as circumstances allowed.Footnote 43
Sharif Husayn bin ʿAli proved no exception to the Hashemite rule. As early as February 1914, he asked the British to back his bid for independence.Footnote 44 The sharif, who aspired no less than to be caliph, had bucked the Egyptian connection all along. He considered that the Egyptians sent money and that he was an ally of the British and the beneficiary of a generous British subsidy.Footnote 45 But he made it his business to use the triangular relationship to trouble the Egyptians and challenge their status in the Hijaz.
Egyptian primacy in the Hijaz manifested itself not only through the Maḥmal and the endowments, but also by a hospital often sent with the Maḥmal, as well as a tekke (Sufi gathering house) in Medina. Husayn bristled at these and lesser tokens of the Egyptian presence.Footnote 46 Paying for improvements in the Ḥaramayn or establishing buildings or monuments bespoke symbolically the primacy of Islamic rulers, and in 1920 Egypt wanted to improve Mecca's water supply, using endowment funds for the purpose. Husayn obstructed the effort.Footnote 47 Attempts by Egypt to move the tekke in Medina, after one of Husayn's ammunition depots had exploded and caused it damage, were met with derision.Footnote 48
Husayn often caused difficulty for the Maḥmal as well. In 1920, he delayed supplying the Maḥmal with water and other supplies and tried to extort the amīr al-ḥajj.Footnote 49 Much of this bad blood came to a head in 1923, when Husayn objected to the sending of two mobile hospitals to Mecca and Medina as an infringement of his sovereignty, and as an aspersion cast upon his competence. (The crisis had been foreshadowed in June, when the British representative reported that Husayn's officials were burning Egyptian newspapers as they arrived at the Jeddah post office.Footnote 50) He told the Egyptians that they must first settle some outstanding waqf questions, revenues from which then came to about £10,000. The Egyptians said the awqāf issue was unconnected, called his bluff, and sent the Maḥmal anyway; but they did not land it because Husayn refused the hospitals, and so the Maḥmal returned to Egypt.
The Egyptians then made clear that in reprisal they would withhold corn, oil, and an £E 8,000 subsidy. Egyptian public opinion was reportedly shaken by this attack on Egypt's ancient tradition.Footnote 51 Husayn was obviously trying to drive a bargain over the awqāf, but he failed. That was partly because his tactics included wild claims that Egypt intended to use the hospitals to infect the pilgrims.Footnote 52
The abortive Maḥmal effort left Husayn without a kiswa, but he demonstrated his independence by bringing one from Medina that had been sent by the Ottomans in 1916 but never used. And in 1923 he closed down the Egyptian-funded tekkes in Mecca and Medina.Footnote 53
Overall, matters were sufficiently smoothed over to allow the dispatch of the Maḥmal in 1924; Husayn now accepted Egyptian terms since the continued loss of grain and money proved too much to bear. Yet tensions remained and worsened when it was discovered that Husayn had caused the inscription of the name of King Fuʾad to be removed from the kiswa,Footnote 54 perhaps because Husayn had declared himself caliph earlier that year. The amīr al-ḥajj made matters worse still by playing the Egyptian national anthem and had his troops cheer for ‘King Fuad, the only independent Arab ruler’.Footnote 55 The amīr al-ḥajj also raised a sore point: the Egyptian occupation of the Hijaz. He made ‘slighting references to the Hijazis, who, he recalled, had been trounced by the forces of Mohammed Ali a century before’.Footnote 56 By demonstrating the tense state of relations between the Hashemites and the Egyptians, the Maḥmal imbroglios of 1923 and 1924 eerily foreshadowed the Maḥmal incident between the Saudis and the Egyptians in 1926.
Sharif Husayn was at pains to get as much money out of the Egyptians as possible, and often sought British assistance to that end. As negotiations developed in 1923 toward the Treaty of Lausanne, Husayn tried to place himself on the receiving end of the awqāf al-Ḥaramayn from towns located in other parts of the fallen Ottoman Empire.Footnote 57 As this effort flagged, and as the First World War's dust settled, the Wahhabis came knocking once again. King Fuʾad appears to have seen the tumult of war and aftermath as an opportunity to bring statutory authority to the age-old Egyptian desire to rule the Hijaz – a policy that went hand in hand with his ambitions to be caliph in the wake of the Ottoman collapse. He arranged for his assumption of the office to be promoted in the Egyptian press and by prominent figures.Footnote 58
An opportunity to advance Fuʾad's gambit presented itself when Mecca fell to the Wahhabis in October 1924. Sharif Husayn fled after abdicating in favour of his son ʿAli, who holed up in Jeddah under a Wahhabi siege. Surely conscious of hundreds of years of Egyptian primacy in the Hijaz, Fuʾad moved to exploit ʿAli's predicament to establish an Egyptian religious protectorate over the Hijaz. He had reason to hope for success.
In August 1924, ʿAli had approached the Egyptian consul in Jeddah, offering to recognize Fuʾad as caliph and praising the Egyptian royal family – in doing so expressing his hope that bountiful Egyptian funds would be delivered forthwith.Footnote 59
On the other hand, rumours surfaced that Fuʾad had promised to finance Ibn Saud's effort against Husayn, since the latter had claimed the caliphate, too.Footnote 60 Just as Mecca fell in late October, Archibald Kerr, counsellor to the high commission in Alexandria, wrote London that the president of the supreme religious court, Shaykh Mustafa al-Maraghi, had approached him to see if Britain would support putting the Hijaz under an international Muslim Council.Footnote 61 Al-Maraghi was a known supporter of the king's caliphate aspirations.
The Egyptians eventually proposed mediation between the Sharif and Ibn Saud, to which the British offered no objection. Fuʾad then dispatched al-Maraghi in September 1925 on a ‘mediation mission’ whose real purpose was to secure an Egyptian protectorate over the Hijaz and the caliphate for Fuʾad.
Al-Maraghi had reason to be hopeful, too. ʿAli was weak and desperate; under the circumstances all he wanted from the Egyptians was money, for which he was willing to promise the moon.Footnote 62 Although al-Maraghi feigned interest in mediation, his demands on ʿAli amounted to the latter's concession of an Egyptian protectorate. ʿAli was to agree to the sending of the Maḥmal with a military escort; Egypt could send the kiswa as it pleased; it could send medical missions and the like; it could establish religious and charitable institutions when and where it wanted; it could carry out water projects and any other project for the benefit of pilgrims; and it could deliver and expend the proceeds of the awqāf al-Ḥaramayn as it pleased. Moreover, the Hijaz would agree to follow the Egyptian lead in all religious matters and other matters of public policy. ʿAli agreed to these conditions as well as to Fuʾad's caliphate aspirations,Footnote 63 although he had little to lose in any case, given his tenuous position in Jeddah. The Hashemites understood the gist; Fuʾad al-Khatib, ʿAli's minister of foreign affairs, told the British acting consul that it was apparent from their behaviour that the Egyptians wished to occupy and even annex the Hijaz.Footnote 64
But it was the Saudis who were winning the war. The Egyptians, interested only in a protectorate, saw this development as propitious, since it made a weakened ʿAli more likely to accept Egyptian demands. Ibn Saud played along: to mollify the Egyptians, he proposed a conference to decide the fate of the Hijaz. Per al-Maraghi, the Saudi leader, opined out loud that ‘the caliphate must belong to a rich Islamic state able to bear the burdens', and that ‘[h]e saw the King of Egypt as the foremost’ such leader and was ‘ready to pledge his allegiance to him whenever the King of Egypt so desires’. Al-Maraghi concluded that ʿAli would lose and that Ibn Saud would allow Egypt to become primus inter pares in the Ḥaramayn over any Muslim state, including his own.Footnote 65
Jeddah finally fell in December 1925, and the Egyptians entertained high hopes for achieving their policy goals. But Ibn Saud declared himself king of the Hijaz in January 1926 and the Egyptians, realizing they had been played, were livid.Footnote 66 They summarily refused to recognize Ibn Saud as the ruler of the Hijaz, despite British attempts at mediation.Footnote 67
Though the Hijaz was now beyond his reach, Egypt's King Fuʾad still coveted the caliphate. For two years after the March 1924 abolition of the caliphate in Istanbul, he prepared the ground. ‘Caliphate committees’ arose all over Egypt, and he convened the ‘general Islamic congress for the caliphate’ in Cairo in May 1926; but could not get the approval he sought thanks mainly to the opposition of Ibn Saud.Footnote 68 The Saudis, now in control of Mecca and Medina, boycotted Fuʾad's conference.Footnote 69 Worse for Fuʾad, Ibn Saud convened his own ‘congress of the Islamic world’ in Mecca in June–July 1926, seeking legitimacy for his rule in the Hijaz and assuring others that Wahhabi fanaticism would not prevent the pilgrimage.Footnote 70
That assurance was necessary because it was well known that Ibn Saud relied on support from Wahhabi clerics (ʿulamaʾ) and his strike force, the Ikhwan, and that the Ikhwan had made their presence felt in the Hijaz by carrying out a massacre in Taʾif in 1924 and by destroying various objects of forbidden veneration (shirk). No one could have known it then, but the confrontation over the Egyptian Maḥmal at the pilgrimage of 1926 had been set in motion.
IV
Much signalling preceded the sending of the Egyptian Maḥmal for 1926 under the new Wahhabi regime. It was customary for the Maḥmal to be accompanied by Egyptian singers and musicians.Footnote 71 The British requested Egypt informally not to send the Maḥmal, since it was accompanied by a brass band and strict Wahhabis did not allow music.Footnote 72 Ibn Saud asked the Egyptians at least to hold the band at Jeddah, to refrain from tomb visitation, and not to allow smoking by the military escort.Footnote 73 In his communication to the British, Ibn Saud noted that he was trying to get the Egyptians to agree to his conditions, but he feared they wanted him to approve a Fuʾad caliphate as the price, which he could not do.Footnote 74 But on the heels of the failure of the al-Maraghi mission and Ibn Saud's declaration of his kingship of the Hijaz, Fuʾad was left with little to show of Egyptian prestige. The Maḥmal was now the last vestige of Egyptian influence in the Hijaz, and he could not bring himself to renounce it. On the very day Ibn Saud was proclaimed king of the Hijaz, the Egyptians announced that they would dispatch the Maḥmal.Footnote 75 The Saudis, for their part, understood that the Egyptians had agreed to their restrictions concerning caravan personnel behaviour.Footnote 76
Even so, the approaching Egyptian Maḥmal of 1926 posed problems for Ibn Saud. He needed to assert his authority and end Egyptian pretensions. But of course, as always, the Maḥmal was an armed military expedition. Ibn Saud did not wish either to forbid it entirely or start a small war over it, not least since Egyptian pilgrims were an important source of income for the new state and important monies came with the caravan.
But Ibn Saud nonetheless sought ways to downplay the Maḥmal as a symbol of Egyptian primacy in the Hijaz; hence, his array of demands that effectively curtailed Egyptian freedom of action. Neither leadership wanted a confrontation, so negotiations bore fruit. On 28 May, Egyptian clerics issued a fatwa, published in the Saudi Umm al-Qura, responding favourably to Ibn Saud's requests: it addressed the issues of grave visitation, smoking, and music, describing them as objectionable (makruh), but not forbidden (ḥarām). The upshot was an admission that Ibn Saud was not making unreasonable requests. While the Maḥmal itself is not mentioned in the fatwa, the accompanying Saudi editorial text placed it within the context of the Maḥmal and as support for Wahhabi mores.Footnote 77 The kinks worked out, a detailed itinerary for the Maḥmal's journey appeared in Umm al-Qura on 11 June.Footnote 78
The Maḥmal set sail for Jeddah on 8 June, left there for Mecca on the 13th, and headed to Mina on the way to Arafat on the 19th. The Egyptians, believing that they were abiding by their promise not to play music by dispensing with the band altogether, had not considered the implications of the solo bugle calls issued by the Maḥmal's military escort. Upon hearing those bugles sound, a group of Ikhwan camped nearby began to hurl handfuls of sand and small pebbles at the palanquin. The amīr al-ḥajj panicked and ordered the escort to open fire: they discharged some 3,000 rounds, killing about twenty-five people. The only Egyptians wounded were an officer hit by a stone and some pilgrims who fell off their camels. Ibn Saud, who was close by and heard the gunfire, sent his son Faysal to calm things down. Many frightened pilgrims fled back to Mecca, thus missing the standing (wuqūf) at Arafat, the sine qua non without which the hajj is ritually invalid.
Trouble beset the Maḥmal again back at Mecca. The usual practice was to place the palanquin inside the Ḥaram. This placement brought a severe protest from the Ikhwan, and it was removed. It then travelled to Jeddah where it received orders to leave for Suez, arriving there on 4 July. Of the approximately £60,000 that had been brought for distribution to charitable causes, over £40,000 returned with the palanquin.Footnote 79
The Saudis and the Egyptians offered competing accounts of the incident, but the real point here was the revelation that Ibn Saud was no longer in full control of the Ikhwan. Indeed, they operated mostly on their own, the Maḥmal incident being only the latest in a series of confrontations between Ibn Saud and the Ikhwan over the nature of the emerging state.Footnote 80 But whatever its implications internally, the incident broke the back of Egyptian–Saudi relations and aided Ibn Saud in eliminating Egyptian influence in the Hijaz.
Ibn Saud moved quickly, however, to repair overall relations with Egypt after his achievement. Egypt also wanted to minimize the incident to save face. It invited Ibn Saud's son and heir apparent, Saʿud, to Cairo in July for an eye operation, where he was the guest of the king. Yet despite the niceties, the core disagreement endured. Ibn Saud's adviser, Hafiz Wahba, was told to persuade Fuʾad to recognize Ibn Saud as king, but Fuʾad stood his ground, telling the British that he had ‘no belief in the permanence of the present regime in the Hejaz’. The only solution, he averred delusionally, was an Egyptian governor in the Ḥaramayn, akin to the situation in the Sudan. He could afford to send two army battalions to Jeddah to maintain order.Footnote 81 Saʿud received a warm reception in Cairo anyway, and this was played up in the press.Footnote 82
This was the context within which the two protagonists sized each other up over the prospective 1927 Maḥmal. A fatwa issued by Wahhabi clerics in February 1927 dealt, inter alia, with the Maḥmal, and in effect supported Ibn Saud's aim of asserting his primacy over Egypt in the Hijaz. The clerics counselled Ibn Saud to prevent the entrance of the palanquin, with its ‘display of forbidden fetishism [shirk] and with its abominations [munkarāt]’.Footnote 83 As had his Hashemite predecessor, Ibn Saud viewed the whole procession, with its armed escort, as an infringement on his sovereignty as well as a religious affront to Wahhabi sensibilities.
The Egyptians were unwilling to send the palanquin without its symbols of Egyptian power, and they had leverage they knew Ibn Saud recognized. Ibn Saud needed Egyptians pilgrims, since before the development of the oil industry the pilgrimage was his lifeblood, and Egypt was second only to India in the number of overseas pilgrims who made the hajj.Footnote 84 He needed the endowments, too. So Egypt again insisted on an armed guard for the procession, but this Ibn Saud refused.Footnote 85 He was willing to negotiate; indeed, the general vector of his policy was toward an improvement in relations, but not to settle on terms that undermined the sovereignty of his new state. In the end, no agreement could be reached and, as it turned out, the Maḥmal was never again to reach Mecca.
V
As can be inferred from the 1926 incident and what followed in its wake, Saudi–Egyptian relations in the late 1920s were poor. Cairo refused to recognize Ibn Saud as king of the Hijaz and the waqf funds were held up along with the Maḥmal. Diplomatic spats were the rule as each state treated the local representative of the other with disdain. The Hijazi economy suffered.Footnote 86
In the 1930s, Egyptian governments wished to improve relations with Ibn Saud, but King Fuʾad proved difficult. To him, it seemed that both the caliphate and Egyptian primacy in the Hijaz had once been close enough to taste, but for the manoeuvring of Ibn Saud. During the 1930 hajj, Ibn Saud tried to mollify the Egyptians by allowing their flag to fly over the medical mission in Mecca, but matters deteriorated quickly when Egyptian quarantine authorities declared the pilgrimage infected with cholera after Saudi authorities had declared it clean.Footnote 87
The possibility of reinstituting the Maḥmal remained within the Egyptian imagination for several more years. Egyptian Prime Minister Ismaʿil Sidqi addressed the chamber of deputies in July 1932 about the benefits of resuming good relations with Ibn Saud and the prospect of resuming the supply of corn and alms to the Hijaz; perhaps he thought that eventually the Maḥmal could be reinstated under agreed terms if relations improved.Footnote 88 But Ibn Saud faced domestic challenges that militated against it; in the summer of 1931, for example, having just put down the Ikhwan rebellion, the clerics of Najd complimented him for doing away with the Maḥmal.Footnote 89
Ibn Saud was nevertheless anxious to obtain Egyptian recognition. After all, Egypt was the most important Arab country. Recognition would also put to rest lingering Hashemite claims to the Hijaz, which came to the fore once again in the rebellion of Hamid bin Rifada, a chief of the Billi tribe, in 1932. Although it is difficult to prove, the Egyptians may have played some role in the revolt; what is certain is that the Saudis believed it so. Once the revolt was put down, Ibn Saud made another push at recognition, and asked the British to intervene, promising that he was willing to make a deal with the Egyptians.Footnote 90
For its part, the Egyptian government was ready to do business even if the king's personal enmity for Ibn Saud limited its political ambit. It enlisted Muhammad Talʿat Harb as the point man for this purpose.Footnote 91 Harb, the founder of Egypt's Banque Misr and Misr Airwork, arrived in Jeddah in late 1933 by airplane, and ‘Jeddah turned out en masse to witness the spectacle.’ This time Egypt had sent a technological spectacle instead of the religious spectacle of the Maḥmal. While prominent residents were invited for short rides in the De Havilland Dragon, Harb distributed Egyptian textiles and other largesse, discussed transportation for Egyptian pilgrims, and mooted establishing a Hijazi agency for Banque Misr. The visit was an occasion for great cordiality on both sides.Footnote 92
Over the next couple of years, Harb returned to the Hijaz with charity, loans, and high energy. His efforts bore fruit in many areas: an impressive increase in the number of Egyptian pilgrims, the opening of hotels, the repair of roads, the improvement of flood control in Mecca, and more.Footnote 93
Although Fuʾad still refused to extend recognition to Ibn Saud, by 1935 his government was taking a milder attitude toward Ibn Saud. Even without the Maḥmal, the government sent over 100,000 bushels of wheat for the poor of Medina – although Ibn Saud insisted on joint distribution. The Saudi agent in Cairo, too, was extended a customs exemption.Footnote 94
All this was leading somewhere, and 1936 turned out to be the year of reckoning. Harb landed in Mecca in January on the first commercial flight. He outlined fourteen new projects for the Hijaz,Footnote 95 demonstrating that Egypt was ready to assume a non-religious, neighbourly role – at least the government was, if not yet the palace.
Negotiations on a treaty began in early April and terms were largely completed when King Fuʾad died suddenly on 28 April. It was fortuitous, since the Wafd Party-led Egyptian government bristled under Fuʾad's efforts to increase his Islamic prestige at home and abroad. They thus quickly signed the treaty with Saudi Arabia on 7 May. The most important provision therein stipulated that Egypt recognized Saudi Arabia as a sovereign and independent state (including, of course, over the Hijaz), while Egypt was granted the opportunity to undertake works in the Hijaz for the benefit of the pilgrims.Footnote 96 The Egyptians foreswore any demand for a special political role, but could invest in the Hijaz as Islamic rulers had done for centuries. Some of the more difficult issues, like the lingering issue of the Maḥmal, were tabled for later discussion.Footnote 97
In November, Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa al-Nahhas and Fuʾad Hamza, Saudi undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, exchanged notes in Cairo. It was agreed that the Maḥmal would again be sent after a lapse of now many years, but it would go only as far as Jeddah. Since the Hijaz was now secure, argued the Saudis, a military escort for the kiswa to Mecca was no longer needed. The kiswa would once again be dispatched from Egypt ‘and placed on the Kaʿba with ceremony appropriate to the dignity of the place and to the majesty of the Occupant of the Throne in the Hejaz’. It would bear the inscription, ‘Presented to the Holy Kaʿba in the reign of His Majesty King ʿAbd al-ʿAziz Al Saʿud, King of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom’. But a preceding sentence was to state that the making of the kiswa was done on the order of His Majesty King Faruq I.Footnote 98 Alms and awqāf Ḥaramayn would again be distributed. While the Saudis proved unable to reclaim awqāf funds that had been withheld in the past and lay in a kind of escrow account, they were successful in severely limiting the political emanations of the Maḥmal.Footnote 99
By manoeuvring the Maḥmal issue so that the palanquin only reached Jeddah, Ibn Saud saw to it that the procession no longer furnished a spectacle in the Hijaz, and was therefore no longer a projection of Egyptian religious and political influence into the Hijaz. And it was also no longer a provocation to Wahhabi sensibilities.
Like his father, however, Faruq had caliphate aspirations, and he hoped with this illustrious title to improve his position in Egypt's rancorous politics. He was active in this regard as late as 1946.Footnote 100 Although Ibn Saud needed no other motivation to continue downplaying the Egyptian role in the Hijaz and in the Islamic world generally, Faruq's caliphate presumptions probably contributed to the Saudis' determination to limit and eventually eliminate the Maḥmal altogether.
With the resumption of the Maḥmal in 1937, the palace made the best of a bad situation by playing up the Cairo portion of the spectacle. The palanquin graced the parade ground in ʿAbbasiya ‘in the presence of five battalions of infantry, two regiments of cavalry, and pack battery of artillery’, The Times reported. Bands played and guns fired. The first regent, Prince Muhammad ʿAli, took the reins of the camel, and placed them in the hands of Mahmud Basyuni, president of the senate, who was appointed amīr al-ḥajj – obviously, by this time, a purely symbolic post. In contrast, a low-level Saudi official and a few police greeted its arrival in Jeddah, and the event garnered but modest notice in the Saudi press. Umm al-Qura reported only that a ‘mission of honour’ had been received from Egypt – the word Maḥmal was not used. The kiswa reached Mecca and was turned over to Shaykh Muhammad al-Shaybi, whose family kept the keys to the Kaʿba.Footnote 101
By the 1938 hajj, the Maḥmal only went as far as Suez, although the kiswa continued to Mecca. Still, in Cairo the pageantry and spectacle remained and the palanquin was paraded about as usual with the associated military accompaniments. It thus continued to perform a certain function in Cairo even as its role in the Hijaz was virtually extirpated.Footnote 102
As the 1940s dawned, Egyptian–Saudi relations became normal – sometimes good, sometimes not so good, but largely pragmatic and bereft of the religious symbology epitomized by the Maḥmal. Once Egyptian claims to the Hijaz had been put to rest, Saudi Arabia availed itself of much of what Egypt had to offer.Footnote 103
Meanwhile, hard feelings in Egypt ebbed. The Egyptian monarchy's general loss of prestige and the growth of salafist trends augmented the growing distaste among the Egyptian clerics for the Maḥmal proceedings. As early as 1950, the Egyptian religious establishment began to speak ill of the Maḥmal. The grand mufti, Hasanayn Makhluf, led a campaign against some of the practices associated with the Maḥmal, such as kissing the camel's lead (as was commonly done), calling them heretical innovation (bidʿa), after the amīr al-ḥajj was photographed doing so.
After the July 1952 revolution and its promise of reform, Prime Minister ʿAli Mahir requested an official fatwa from the rector of al-Azhar and the grand mufti about the Maḥmal, which they perceived to be an anachronistic and retrograde institution. In response, the clerics condemned all the practices associated with it, such as kissing, music, circumambulation, and various Sufi demonstrations. They implied that the winds of change associated with the revolution would end these practices, although they did not at that point call explicitly for the halting of the entire production.Footnote 104
The August 1952 pilgrimage, the first after the revolution, witnessed the limitation of most of these practices and the reduction of official participation. In November, the interior ministry announced that the Maḥmal's camel had died – conveniently, it seems, for the ministry was intent on doing away with the Maḥmal entirely. Finally, in May 1953, following another official fatwa, the ministry announced the demise of the Maḥmal procession, although the kiswa would still be displayed. The cover of the palanquin was shipped to Cairo's Museum of Islamic Art, where it was put on display with the other ‘remnants of days gone by’.Footnote 105
The kiswa continued to be made in Egypt from 1937 until 1962. When it arrived in Jeddah that year, as Egypt and Saudi Arabia squared off against one another in Yemen, the Saudis sent it back. It remained in Egypt; when, in 1972, President Anwar Sadat offered it once again, it was refused.Footnote 106
VI
Asserting Saudi control over the Hijaz brought hundreds of years of Egyptian attempts at control to an end, further atomizing the Red Sea littoral ambit. It was also key to integrating the Hijaz into Saudi Arabia and creating the modern Saudi state. Ibn Saud had enough difficulties integrating conservative Najd with the more cosmopolitan Hijaz without competition from Egypt. Neutralizing Egyptian claims to political and religious suzerainty in the Ḥaramayn allowed him to concentrate on this integrative, state-building process.Footnote 107
Ending Egyptians influence in the Hijaz symbolized by the Maḥmal, and with it the Red Sea littoral system, also contributed to the formation of an Arab state system that developed to replace the vacuum left by the collapse of the Ottoman system after the First World War. All cross-border Islamic claims to overlordship, suzerainty, or protectorate status over the Hijaz had now ended, leaving the Saudis the last men standing. In the case of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the gradual settling of the Maḥmal issue – with the 1926 incident being the watershed between the old nexus of religious and political themes and the new – helped seal their joint opposition to the Greater Syria plan of Jordan's King ʿAbdullah and the Fertile Crescent Plan of Iraq's Nuri al-Saʿid. Even the formation of the Arab League in 1945 was made possible, to an extent, by the termination of Egyptian claims to a protectorate in the Hijaz. Ending Egyptian political and religious pretensions in the Hijaz paved the way, as oil wealth slowly came on line in the 1940s, for Riyadh to position the kingdom as bearer of the new Islamic orthodoxy. Ejecting Egypt from the Ḥaramayn was key to these developments.
Relations between Saudi Arabia and Egypt fluctuated throughout what Malcolm Kerr called the ‘Arab Cold War’ of the 1950s to the 1970s. In 1986, King Fahd of Saudi Arabia declared himself, in the manner of a caliph, ‘servant of the two noble sanctuaries’ – the Egyptians did not object. The Arab uprisings of 2011 brought the two states together again as defenders of the status quo as Saudi funds poured in once ʿAbd al-Fattah al-Sisi ousted the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated President Muhammad Mursi in a 2013 coup d’état. After a tragic stampede killed many Iranians during the pilgrimage of 2015, President al-Sisi came to Saudi Arabia's defence, stressing that ‘[w]e all have absolute faith in the procedures carried out by Saudi Arabia to organize the Hajj…if anyone thinks that any country other than Saudi Arabia could accomplish this task then they are not being impartial’.Footnote 108 Egypt threw its full support behind Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states in an alliance to isolate Qatar, accused of supporting terrorism, in June 2017.
And even here, at least a minor role was played by the Red Sea. As status quo allies, the Egyptians looked to the Saudis for financial aid, but the Egyptians had little to offer the Saudis in return until some clever diplomat remembered that a friendly dispute over two Red Sea islands, Tiran and Sanafir, had never been settled. So in April 2016, President ʿAbd al-Fattaḥ al-Sisi handed them to Riyadh. And while there was no mention of the Maḥmal, it was still a sign that there were no lingering Egyptian designs on the other side of the Red Sea.
While we have concentrated our narrative on the longue durée relations between Egypt and western Arabia, beginning before the Saudi occupation, we should not forget that the Maḥmal incident of 1926 was a turning point in these relations. And beyond that, internally, it gave Ibn Saud the justification he needed finally to move against the Ikhwan and their centrifugal tendencies, putting Saudi Arabia on the path to a centralized, modern state.
VII
A deeper understanding of the issues of sovereignty, pilgrimage, and commerce in the relations between Egypt and the Holy Places, and the rulers of both locations, is achieved when we go the longue durée route. It becomes apparent that the Red Sea and not the Arabian Peninsula was the primary geo-political arena in the region. For most of history, the Hijaz, the home of the Holy Places and the eastern Red Sea littoral region, was more closely linked to Egypt than to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula. Commercially and religiously, Egypt jealously tried to guard its primacy there, and the Maḥmal was a key symbol in this effort. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the Saudis of Najd in central Arabia sought to break this bond by eliminating Egyptian influence. This led to conflict, which was not ameliorated until a treaty was signed in 1936 and Egypt gave up claims to influence in the Holy Places. The Holy Places firmly in their hands, both physically and symbolically, the Saudis were now free to concentrate on unifying most of the Arabian Peninsula under their banner, with the Holy Places as the crowning glory of a state founded on Islamic legitimacy. The settling of the differences with Egypt was also key to establishing the principle of territorial sovereignty in the new post-First World War states. Transnational, pan-Islamic claims, which in the past had emanated from Egypt or the Ottoman Empire, were relegated to the past – halted at the borders of the new territorial states.
In concluding, we return to the theory of the longue durée. Braudel reminds us that all ‘historical writing periodizes the past’ into what he terms ‘historical temporalities’.Footnote 109 Periodization helps make sense of the past. And while post-modernists might criticize periodization as a facile totalization, changes in periodization can add new and important insights.Footnote 110 Brief time spans have a ‘precipitate, dramatic, and breathless’ quality.Footnote 111 This is the short term, or the dismissively termed histoire événementielle. For Braudel, ‘[t]he short term is the most capricious, the most deceptive of time periods’.Footnote 112 But while favouring the longue durée, Braudel still cautions against using only one method. ‘Throughout, one must distinguish between long-term movements and momentary pressures, finding the immediate sources of the latter and the long-term thrust of the former.’Footnote 113 In effect, both contribute to our understanding of the past, but the former often offers a greater contextualization of the latter. In this article, we have given both their due: the ‘immediate sources’ of the Maḥmal incident have been elucidated, but the incident has been placed within the ‘long-term thrust’ of the Red Sea's history.
