The Wells Of Ibn Sa'ud

D. Van der Meulen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317847663
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2001. The dramatic rise to power of the Sa'udi family in Central Arabia and The emergence of the country from early Moslem ways into The modern materialism of The West are vividly described in this book by a Dutch official stationed in South Arabia from 1926 to 1931 and from 1941 to 1945. This is much more than a personal memoir. Through The account of his long service in Sa'udi Arabia, the author gives the reader a unique perspective on this feudal land. The personal glimpses of Arab life the authors acquaintance with Ibn Sa'ud and St. John Philby, and his affection for The pilgrim town of Jedda, are The more interesting because he is Dutch and thus in a position to compare impartially the impact upon Arabia of the British and the Americans. The story of Ibn Sa'ud whose story this book relates, is superficially, or materially, a success story. But spiritually, as Mr Van der Meulen views it. it has its bitter aspect, as The King began to realise before he died.

1
I Meet Wahhabi Arabia

THE decrepit mail steamer dropped her anchor in the inner harbour of Jedda and it rattled down through the blue water into a doubtless familiar resting-place in the dim coral world below. It was the beginning of February 1926 and I stood on the Captain’s bridge recovering from the welcome of the local pilot. He had stared for a moment at the Dutch Consul-to-be, the man whose favour he wanted to win because of the big pilgrim ships from Java that were a source of livelihood for him and his large family. Then, in a voice used to roaring orders above the noise of wind and waves, he welcomed me half in English, half in Arabic. His sinewy arms he flung around me and he pressed a kiss just below my astonished right shoulder. His short wiry beard pricked through my shirt and tickled me almost to laughter. But how good was that first Jeddawi welcome! Self-interest or not, how comforting, how reassuring that the first to greet me in an Arab land should be an Arab.

For the world I looked out on was new to me. It belonged neither to the noisy crowded world of the West, nor to the world I had got to know in the Far East, a damp, warm, lush green world, heavy with vegetation and swarming with animal life.

This world before me was older, much older than the two I came from. Here where the sea ended the desert began. Here there was no sign of life or motion, but a shimmering emptiness as of a land waiting for something to happen. Like the pilgrims who year after year follow the injunction of the Prophet of Mecca I had come to this Holy Land. This was the same land where to the north God had spoken to Abraham as a friend and Moses had led a people guided by the God of Israel. It was in Arabia that voices from Heaven had spoken to man, and in this part of the world guidance had been given to mankind. How barren and poor this desert and these rocky hills looked in the haze that enveloped them, yet this was the land where spiritual fountains had flowed to enrich the whole world. Here it was that prophets had lived and spoken, where men had eked out a hard existence in the sight of eternity, where no essential changes had taken place since Old Testament days.

A mile or so away from me stood the town called Jedda or ‘grandmother’. The town where ‘Ummina Hawa—our Mother Eve—had been buried, according to Muslim belief. Her tomb lay hidden behind a low wall in the desert to the north of the town wall. Behind it, in the distance, there arose blue rocky hills and to the south the town itself stood out like ivory in the heat of a scorching sun and the wind-blown desert dust. With her protecting walls around her Jedda looked like an old cameo in a gold and turquoise setting.

The spell was broken when I walked ashore. Seen at close quarters the town was neither serene, lifeless nor clean. It seemed to be crumbling into ruins and overhung by a penetrating odour. This smell, peculiar to Jedda, arose chiefly from the sewage which was allowed to seep through the walls of the houses. The streets, too, were dusty and unswept and used as a common latrine by both man and beast. Jedda had an age-old smell. Was it the dirt from the camping-grounds of generations and generations of pilgrims visiting the sanctuaries of Islam, for the greater part of whom Jedda was the port of entry and departure?

As I walked through the narrow lanes of the town and inhaled its odorous dust I looked admiringly at the decaying houses and my eyes feasted on the carving of its powdering, crumbling doors and its hundreds of wooden balconies, all different in style and most of them near to falling to pieces. Nowhere in the world, I felt, could one get so near to the sufferings and longings of the human heart as in this gate to salvation where hope and deception met, and where the unselfish and god-fearing rubbed shoulders with those whose shameless livelihood was to fleece pilgrims to the sanctuaries of Allah.

My coming to Jedda marked a fresh stage in my official life. It was no chance appointment that brought me here but a move planned to advance me in Islamic studies and to lead me nearer to the Muslim, and especially the Muslim in Indonesia, in which country my career had hitherto been spent. My qualifications for the appointment were nearly eight years in the Civil Service of the Dutch East Indies and a period of study of Arabic and Islam under the guidance of Snouck Hurgronje in Leyden University. Snouck Hurgronje was famous the world over as an Arabic and Islamic scholar and as a young man he had rounded off his studies by embracing Islam, going to its holy city and collecting there material for his standard work, Mecca.

Up to the time of my arrival in Jedda my life had been occupied with the problems of Western administration of Eastern countries, in my case the Dutch East Indies. Independence was on its way to these Eastern nations but only few of us were then aware of, and possibly none prepared for, it. Jedda was not for me an escape from colonial problems. On the contrary it was an attempt to get me nearer to the heart of them. In Jedda the welfare of the pilgrims from Indonesia would be a chief responsibility. By daily contacts I might get a chance to fathom what was going on in the mysterious core of that faith which is not only a spiritual but also a political religion. Jedda meant for me an opportunity to get closer to understanding the riddle of Islam.

In 1926 the Hejaz, as the kingdom of which Jedda was the chief port was then called, was at a turning-point in its history. The first World War had brought Turkish domination to an end thanks to British policy as personified in the redoubtable Lawrence. The Grand Sherif of Mecca, Husain ibn ‘Ali al Hashimi, had become king of a liberated Hejaz but his newly-acquired subjects soon discovered that their conditions of life were not much improved by the change. King Husain was hungry for power and thirsty for wealth. When British policy denied him the first beyond the limits of the Holy Land of Islam and when his kingdom could not satisfy his greed for the second he became a morose and embittered old man and as narrow-minded politically as his forebears on that particular branch of the Prophet’s family tree. Had Lawrence and the British Arab Bureau in Cairo studied the first, that is the historical, part of Snouck Hurgronje’s Mecca, they might have learnt the lesson of history, not to look for political wisdom in the Qatada house, which was that of this Grand Sherif of Mecca.

The Jedda I first knew was heartily grateful for King Husain’s flight from the country. His son ‘Ah, who took over, had shown himself to be a kindly man of clean character but it was soon clear that he was not the man to push back the Sa‘udi invader and in fact he put up only a token resistance. Thus it was that the next disaster the men of Jedda were preparing for was the rule of Ibn Sa‘ud and his Wahhabi followers. The Jeddawis had no sympathy for Wahhabi puritanism. To them it seemed a most dangerous creed for a country whose sole source of income was the annual pilgrimage. What they wanted was a tolerant, liberal régime that would welcome pilgrims of every type who brought money into the country. Austerity, religious zeal and reform certainly would keep away many Muslims who had no taste for extreme orthodoxy. But the Jeddawis had no choice. Allah in His wisdom had allowed these fanatical wild men from the desert to conquer His Holy Places. Allahu a‘lam—God knew best! And closer acquaintance showed the Wahhabis to be less forbidding than had been feared.

I saw a Jedda that had just escaped the rigours of a siege that had meant starvation, disease and death for thousands of its normal inhabitants and of those Beduins who had fled before the invader to the protection of the town. By the time I arrived the population had thinned out considerably. Those who had survived were enfeebled. Fear had not yet left them and they spoke with hushed voices. On evening walks along the lagoon outside the town and in the neighbouring sand dunes one walked through newly-formed graveyards that remained as a record of recent sufferings. Soon these headstones would topple over in the loose sand, gently and noiselessly the desert wind would lay a mantle over them, dust would cover dust and all trace would be lost.

Face to face with their new rulers the Jeddawis wondered what life had in store for them. These Wahhabis from the desert did not laugh. They were deadly serious. Their law was the divine command, directly taken from Allah’s revelation to the Prophet. Strict obedience would be the only rule in the country singled out by God as His Holy Land. So life from now on was to be hard. The five daily prayers were to be strictly performed in the mosque. Smoking tobacco, drinking alcohol, dressing up in fine attire: all that would belong to the past. Music was banned. Men would no longer shave but have beards like the Prophet. Disobedience would be followed by the punishments laid down in the Prophet’s own book the Qur’an. Thus a new, and hitherto remote, fear lay on the town: the fear of the Wahhabi.

The only ones that laughed and ventured to speak aloud and show good-humoured interest in this new fate of the country were the foreigners, the Christians who were free from Wahhabi interference provided their behaviour in public was seemly. For them it was a relief to be able, at long last, to venture outside the town walls that had been their prison for more than a year and the men competed, sportingly, in growing beards. But the Jeddawis silenced their music and stopped their dances to the beating of drums for fear they might be overheard by passing Wahhabi patrols or by untrustworthy neighbours. At the hours of prayer shops were shut, the streets emptied into the mosques and silence, except for the loud murmur from the crowded mosques, fell on the town. Jedda had at last been gathered into the great Wahhabi fold. The rhythm of its public life slowed down to that of the nomads of the desert and religion governed it again as in the early days of Islam.

Who was the man who had done this, who had been able to force a nation into this total, this political and spiritual surrender? It was Ibn Sa‘ud, the undisputed leader of the second Wahhabi movement, and it was my good fortune to become an eyewitness of this second attempted puritanical reform of Islam by the Wahhabis. I was not unfamiliar with the later problems of the world of Islam. Who indeed in the present century could fail to be impressed by the leaven that has clearly been working in Muslim minds? Political freedom was one aim they had but by itself that was not enough. What answer had their faith to give to the pressing problems of the modern age? Could Islam adjust itself to the passage of time? That is the great Moslem problem. The Al Azhar University of Cairo had sought an answer in its Modernist Movement. In India the Ahmadiyya had presented a typically Indian if unorthodox Muslim way of escape. Mustafa Kemal Pasha had roused great expectations, but in his modern Turkey he soon showed that though he had a genius for building a state he had no conception of what religion meant to a nation.

Ibn Sa‘ud’s solution was to point the way back to the original sources of Islam. Could he do more than point? Would he be able to give a lead that would avoid the errors of the past and restore the faith of Islam as a living inspiration for its adherents? It seemed possible. In Arabia, amid these bare rocky hills and deserts, Islam was born. When the Arabs had first accepted the faith they had conquered and led the world. Could not this rebirth at least redeem its own world?

I could not help thinking that Ibn Sa‘ud stood a fair chance of success. Even more did I think so after I met the man and heard the personal message he gave to me as representative of my Queen then ruler of the second greatest Muslim nation, that of the Dutch East Indies. Ibn Sa‘ud immediately struck me as an exceptional man in appearance, in his actions, and even more in his word. He had then, at the beginning of 1926, reached the summit of his career, He had rounded off his conquests and, except for ‘Asir which was added later, ruled over the greatest indigenous state built in the Arabian Peninsula since the time of the Prophet.

Would this prove enough for him and be his limit? Or was there a chance that this second Wahhabi surge would not stop here but be an inspiration for the outside world of Islam? That is what I was to see and hope to tell.

2
The Town of the Consuls

I BEGAN this Arabian interlude in my career hoping to gain from it a deeper understanding of Indonesian spiritual life and so return to the Colonial Service better prepared for the nationalist movement that was then dawning in the Dutch East Indies. But I was also attracted to the spiritual and geographical centre of Islam as a proud rival of Christianity in its claim to provide the remedy for the ailments of this world. To be in Jedda meant to me not only meeting the real Arab, but it also meant contact with Muslims from all over the Muslim world. It meant especially contact with Indonesians and peoples I had never seen before and would never see again as a Colonial Civil Servant. Last, but not least, it meant contact with colleagues representing nations quite unfamiliar to me. The Western colonial powers had attached to their staffs Vice-Consuls and Pilgrim Officers from the important Muslim countries of their dominions. I think that my European colleagues—with whom my wife and I had such happy relations—will forgive me if I say that it was in their Pilgrim Officers, rather than in themselves, and in the colleagues of non-European powers that I was particularly interested.

European colleagues, if I may say so without offence, tend to run to a type and I had met the type many times before in the deadly monotony of hotel life, in the boring confinement of passenger liners and in those places where Westerners out in the East inevitably meet. Jedda gave me the opportunity of meeting the others, the men who had a humbler, a secondary sphere of action in a world still ruled by the white men from Europe. In Jedda I met men who resented the nations to which they belonged being rated as second class. They were proud of their nationality, convinced that the future could not fail to do them justice and restore them and their spiritual assets to former glory and influence. The men of India, Afghanistan, Indonesia and Malaya felt attracted to the representatives of Persia, Iraq and Egypt and all of them realized that Islam and the bar between white and coloured were the cause of conflicts and prejudices. The largely Muslim nations belonging to the coloured, and at the same time underdeveloped, part of the world, were represented in Jedda by men differing from those of the West, who often felt that difference a painful thing. In their contacts with the local authorities they felt equal and free. I realized that in the colourful pattern of Jedda I had, as never before, a chance of contacts with that part of humanity I was most interested in, and that I might never have it again.

In those days not only was Jedda going through an historical change which gave promise of great consequences, but many of the visitors that passed through its gates lived in a mood of suspense. There was unrest in the atmosphere of the town, rising with the influx of pilgrims from countries in conflict with their Western overlords, and ebbing away when this excited type of visitor went home again. The tension between East and West, between Muslim and Christian, was to be felt, as it had always been felt, in the immediate proximity of Islam’s holy places. It was less than a hundred years before that this latent sentiment had exploded in the murder of Christians in Jedda and the desecration of the graves in the Christian cemetery there. There still persisted the feeling that Jedda belonged to the holy territory which should be forbidden to all non-Muslim believers. As it was, these latter were denied the right to own real estate and their cemetery had been placed near the town’s refuse dump. The Prophet had not ordered this. He had proclaimed Mecca a holy city and a place from which only polytheists should be expelled and never admitted again. It was later practice that extended the ban to all non-Muslims, although the educated Muslim of our day knows that the Prophet did not exclude believers in the one God from the Holy Land of Islam.

I remember that about a year after my arrival I had a private conversation with Ibn Sa‘ud and asked him his opinion on the question of the exclusion of Christians from Mecca and Medina. The King said to me: “Real Christians were allowed by the Prophet to be in Mecca.”

I was very astonished to hear so moderate a statement from the Wahhabi leader. Seizing my chance I said: “So Your Majesty would allow me to go to Mecca?”

“I said real Christians. You don’t pretend that you are one?”

“I do try to be one.”

“Do you mean that you are doing what is written in your Book?”

“I earnestly try to.”

“But you drink whisky, you play at cards, you dance with the wives of your colleagues?”

“No, Your Majesty. I have no taste for those things.”

“Then I would have to allow you to come to Mecca.”

“That is what I hoped you would do.”

“But I am not going to give you my permission. If your colleagues heard that you had gone, they would insist on being given equal rights, and I would never want to have them in Mecca. Besides, my beduin followers are unlearned fanatics. You would get into trouble with them and before I could help you, you might be killed.”

No Muslim, and certainly no Muslim leader, had ever before spoken to me like that.

Ibn Sa‘ud’s strong right arm was stretched protectingly over the foreigners in Jedda. But the town, as such, even in those days was not free from its feeling of superiority over Christians. Foreign consular representatives had been admitted into the town by the lax Turkish authorities and the Western powers had strong reasons for being there. They wanted to be represented where thousands of their subjects went and were known to suffer from dangers and hardships. The ubiquitous Greek merchant and a few Jews succeeded in slipping in under the protection of some of the consulates and Western trading firms and shipping agencies followed. Together these elements formed the small non-Muslim group that lived in the land of Islam. But it was only Jedda that suffered this foreign intrusion. This gave her the name Bilad al Kanasil—the Town of the Consuls—and every inhabitant of the Hejaz understood it meant the unclean town in a pure land.

Where people are allowed to live they have to be allowed to die, and so Jedda got its Christian cemetery. Inside it I found several rows of tombs, some covered with an inscribed stone sent from Europe by loving relatives. The tombs had been damaged by roving fanatics or robbers during the century of its existence. There lay the mortal remains of Huber, the French explorer who had been killed by beduins while he and his German companion Euting were making for the coast after having discovered the famous stone of Taima with its three inscriptions that gave the key to ancient Arabic. The writing on his gravestone said that the Fr...